The Choiring Of The Trees Read online

  Every April, Nail Chism rented from Willis Ingledew’s livery a wagon, which he loaded with fleece to the sky, or at least to the lowest tree branches, and drove to Harrison, a week’s journey there and back, where he got the best dollar for his “crop.” Some folks wondered why Nail Chism even needed to join his brothers in the manufacture of illicit vernacular bourbon (those weren’t their words for the stuff) if he made a downright good living year in and year out from what he got at Harrison for his fleece. The answer, if you troubled to ask him, was simply that the Chisms had been making the best drinking-whiskey in the Ozarks ever since Nail’s grandaddy had come from Tennessee back in 18 and 39.

  It was a family tradition, which Seth Chism had elevated to just about the acme of quality and repute and had instilled in his sons from the earliest they’d been able to plow the corn or fire the biler. Nail, Seth’s middle boy, had been made superintendent of the biler at the age of fourteen and had become a professional moonshiner long before the day he became a captive audience for a traveling peddler, name of Eli Willard, who was trying to unload a pair of Cotswold lambs he’d been swapped for out of something in Kentucky.

  In those days the village reached its top size, the closest Stay More ever came to being a real town, with the Ingledews running a big three-floor general store as well as the post office and the gristmill, and getting competition from no fewer than three other general stores; there was almost a genuine Main Street of the kind associated with the motion picture called a western (although the surrounding countryside looked nothing at all like the stark badlands of the westerns: it was too green, had too many shades of green, was too lush and too uplifting, the hills rising steep and pastured and forested and bluffed), and along this Main Street there were two doctors’ offices and two dentists as well as Jim Tom Duckworth’s law office and at least three blacksmiths with the latest tripod gear-driven quickblast forges, and even, by the time this story really gets going good, a bonafide bank waiting to be robbed, and around the corner you’d find such things as Murrison’s sawmill and William Dill’s wagon factory, making some of the best horse-drawn vehicles still competing with the just-arrived automobile.

  Eli Willard hadn’t yet discovered the automobile when he arrived in the thriving village with two Cotswolds in the back end of his wagon (a William Dill spring-platform model he’d bought at the factory his last trip to town, and reputedly driven to Connecticut and back without a broken wheel). Everyone in the Ozarks who did have sheep had a breed called American Merino, but the Cotswold, unbeknownst to Nail, who knew nothing about sheep at that point, is superior to the Merino for the production of wool.

  The peddler Eli Willard was not in the business of purveying livestock; he just happened to have the two lambs this trip around, which actually was devoted to the selling of musical instruments, everything from parlor organs to Jew’s harps. For thirty-five cents Nail also bought from him a harmonica, a fitting accompaniment to sheep-raising. It was an M. Hohner Marine Band Tremolo Echo, and Nail taught himself how to make it tremble and to make it echo, when he wasn’t too busy teaching himself how to keep Cotswolds happy and healthy and reproductive. The trials and errors of this operation, had they been known to the other people of Stay More, would have made for all the jokes anyone would ever want to tell on Nail Chism, but he suffered his self-education in absolute privacy, and he practiced “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and “Billy in the Low Ground” and “Sook Pied, Sook Pied, Come an’ Git Yore Nubbins,” in complete seclusion from any ears except those of his sheep, who seemed to appreciate him and would sometimes blaat along.

  What did he look like? He was very tall, the loftiest of the Chism brothers, at six feet three inches, and muscular without seeming strong, with a shock of very light brown hair, not quite blond as the newspapers would describe it, stuck up in what folks chose to call his sheeplick. He had blue eyes. The Arkansas Gazette’s drawing of him in December of 1914, by their staff artist Viridis Monday, does not fairly represent him, with that head shaved of its prematurely whitening locks (he was not yet twenty-eight) and that splendid physique looking frail beneath its prison clothes. Only the eyes in the Monday drawing seem to be the Nail Chism that most of us remembered: pale, gentle, comical, inquisitive, curious, and brighter-than-you’d-like-to-think: certainly not the eyes of a man on his way to the electric chair. Nail Chism was nobody’s fool. And yet there were those who liked to think that he was everybody’s fool.

  One of those was his brother-in-law Sewell Jerram, of Jasper, the county seat, some ten miles north of Stay More. Sewell, or Sull as everybody but his mother pronounced it, had been born in Stay More but thought of himself as a town boy, although Jasper back then was already what it still is: the smallest county seat in the state of Arkansas, with just a few hundred people, and being a town boy in a small village didn’t leave Sull Jerram conspicuously different from a country boy; an outsider from, say, Little Rock wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. But Sull Jerram didn’t know anything about farming, and the three brothers of Irene Chism, when Sull was courting her, got considerable amusement out of observing Sull’s ignorance of country ways and customs.

  Irene Chism was but a half-sister to Nail and his two brothers. Her mother, and senior by only fifteen years, was Nancy Nail Coe, whose father Jethro Nail, one of the first settlers of Newton County, had married a Choctaw Indian girl, making Nancy Nail a half-breed, and thus Irene and her brothers Waymon, Nail, and Luther were quarter-breed Indian, although the only thing about Viridis Monday’s portrait of Nail to indicate such Indian ancestry is his somewhat long nose and his intense but blue eyes beneath their heavy, crowding eyebrows.

  Nancy Nail had been taken to wife at the age of just fourteen by a Stay Moron named Columbus Coe, but she had been widowed at the age of sixteen, when Irene was an infant, and had inherited a homestead of eighty acres northeast of Stay More, which she was determined to manage on her own and succeeded in running—cornpatch, pigpen, cowlot, and orchard—for nearly a year before asking her neighbor, Seth Chism, for a little help with the heavy lifting. Seth was covetous of that cornpatch, a few acres to supplement his own, which all went to the making of his whiskey, and he proposed marriage to the young widow Nancy Nail Coe not so much out of desire for her as need of her cornpatch and her help running the still.

  Waymon Chism was born just under two years after Irene, and they grew up together until Nail joined them. The three were in their teens, and had been joined by Seth and Nancy’s last-born, little Luther, before their parents explained to them how it had come about that Irene was only a half-sister, not a full sister. That made no difference to Waymon, and the only difference it made to Nail was to explain to him how Irene was sexually different from the three brothers: she had only half, or less than half, of whatever between-the-legs equipment the boys possessed. But then Irene began to acquire more than twice as much above-the-waist equipment, and Nail began to watch as his sister was courted by the town boy Sull Jerram.

  Nail was Irene’s favorite half-brother, the one she had given most of her attention and care in his upbringing, the one she (lacking a sister or a girlfriend) trusted with her secrets, and the one she chose to chaperone her whenever Sull Jerram came to call. In those days a girl never ever went off anywhere alone with a boy, not even walking together from the schoolhouse to home, not even walking together from Willis Ingledew’s store to Jerram’s store (owned by Sull’s brother) down the road. It just wasn’t done. A girl had to have someone else with her, even (lacking a sister or a girlfriend) her kid brother.

  Country boys understood this, and nobody expected to get a girl alone by herself, or to find a girl alone by herself, much less, finding such a one, to speak to her. You had to be content to spark her as best you could with somebody eavesdropping, or at least with her sister or someone in the same room, or sitting on the next log, or walking a few paces behind. Maybe eventually, after you’d proposed to her and she had accepted and the date had been set for the w
edding, you might get a chance to sit with her out on the porch or in the dogtrot for an hour or so without anybody else in sight, because the others would stay politely behind the door.

  Maybe town boys didn’t understand this. Sull Jerram always seemed annoyed when Nail tagged along on what passed for dates between Sull and Irene. Of course Sull was a good bit older: he was already twenty-five, they said, when he first came to Stay More to call on Irene when she was just sixteen, and presumably he’d had some experience with some of the town girls who didn’t have the sense to keep from finding themselves alone with him. Lord knows what those town girls did. The stories were enough to turn your ears pink. It’s very doubtful a person from Little Rock could see a bit of difference between a Jasper girl and a Stay More girl, except the former might be wearing shoes, but probably not. People wondered why Sull Jerram didn’t just stay in Jasper.

  But Irene Chism was a very pretty gal, and her above-the-waist fixtures were full and high and firm, and, as Nail would have been the first to tell you, she had a voice that could have beguiled the Devil himself: sweet and musical and colorful. Her voice was almost as if she were touching you and patting you and stroking you and sliding herself all over you. Possibly Sull Jerram didn’t care about her voice, but he sure cared enough about all the rest of her to spend every minute of his free time trying to get Nail to wander off and leave them alone for half an hour.

  And Sull Jerram seemed to have an awful lot of free time. Nobody knew for sure what he did for a living. Nobody asked him. People who visited Jasper from time to time reported that “he’s jist one of them fellers who hangs out at the courthouse”: not the old men who sit on benches in the shade of the courthouse yard all day long telling lies, and not the lawyers who seem to hurry from room to room telling bigger lies, but the men who are just loitering in the lobby or the hallways, leaning up against the wall talking to one another in hushed voices as if they were cooking up lies that could be translated into money.

  “Yeah, I reckon ye could say Sull’s cookin up mischief,” Jim Tom Duckworth told Seth Chism when Jim Tom dropped by to get his demijohn refilled. Jim Tom was Stay More’s own native-born lawyer, our representative to the courthouse, our spokesman and champion before the bar of justice. “But jist whut-all mischief he’s into, I couldn’t tell ye. I do know that he’s aimin to see if he caint git hisself elected ass-essor, and I tell ye, once a man gits to be ass-essor, next thing you know he’s runnin fer treasurer, and then watch out if he don’t run fer sherf, or even jedge.”

  Whatever Sull Jerram was running for, it didn’t claim any of the attention he devoted to pursuing Irene Chism, or to trying to get Nail to leave them alone for a little bit. Nail couldn’t be bribed. He couldn’t be threatened. He could be cajoled, that is, he would politely listen to cajolery, but he wouldn’t necessarily respond to it.

  The first words Sull Jerram ever spoke to Nail Chism were: “Go tell yore momma she’s a-lookin fer ye.”

  And young, green Nail actually took several steps in the direction of carrying out this request before it dawned on him that it was a trick, a foolery of words; Sull and Irene were laughing at him. Some time later Nail was wary when Sull told him he’d seen a man just back up the road a little ways giving away puppies. “Hurry, and you’d catch him,” Sull suggested, and Nail was almost out of sight, this time, before he realized it was just another trick.

  Once, eventually, Sull Jerram told Nail that he and Irene and Nail, just the three of them, were going to walk up to a glade on the side of Ledbetter Mountain where there were a lot of snipes. A snipe is a kind of bird, Sull explained, although Nail wondered why a town boy would claim to know more ornithology than he himself knew, and he knew there weren’t any snipes, not of the sandpiper sort, in the vicinity of Ledbetter Mountain. Sull explained that these snipes only migrated through at certain seasons, and there was this glade up yonder where them snipes liked to visit. Sull gave Nail a towsack made of burlap. “Now what we’re gonna do is,” Sull explained when they got to the glade, “is me and Irene are gonna go over thar in that bresh and wave our arms about and flush ’em out of thar, and you stand over yere with this yere sack, and when they come a-runnin, you jist herd ’em into the sack. See?”

  “Birds don’t run,” Nail said. “They fly.”

  “Not these yere snipes,” Sull said. “Now you jist do like I tell ye, and we’ll have us a mess of good eatin fer supper tonight.”

  Nail watched them disappear, or almost. It is very bad luck to watch someone walk all the way out of sight. He had never seen anybody walk out of sight, least of all his sister Irene, who had rarely ever been out of his sight before, except when she’d gone out to the bushes on a call of nature. Maybe, he thought, waiting and turning aside so as not to watch them disappear, she’s on another call of nature, kind of.

  They did not return, nor were there any snipes or other birds, except a pair of prothonotary warblers. After half an hour Nail began to look for Irene and Sull, and then to call for his sister, but he got no answer. That night she apologized for the trick Sull had played on him.

  “Where did you’uns go?” Nail asked. “What didje do?”

  “Oh, honey,” she said in her musical voice, “sometimes I jist need to git away from you.” She asked him not to tell anybody else what had happened.

  He was careful not to let her out of his sight again, and he was within earshot when he heard his mother start in to faulting Irene for being “knocked up,” whatever that was. He listened. His mother began hollering. Then she called for him, and he came, and she said, “Nail, chile, you was sposed to keep a eye on her and Sull, and watch ’em, and pick gooseberries, and take keer of her.”

  “I did,” Nail lied.

  His mother slapped him. It was the first time she had ever hit him in the face. His pappy had clobbered him frequently, but never before had she slapped his face. Irene protested in tears that it wasn’t Nail’s fault, that Sull had pulled one on him, that there wasn’t no call to hit Nail for what Sull had done. But Nail didn’t hang around to listen to the rest of it. He fled up the mountainside to a cavern by a waterfall and stayed there, meditating on the injustices of life in this world.

  He didn’t go to the wedding. It wasn’t much of a thing anyhow, although his brothers told him of all the food he’d missed out on, pies you’d never heard of before. Nor did he join the shivaree that was thrown to tease the newlyweds. He couldn’t stand the sight of Sull Jerram, and any man with any sense at all should have been able to tell from Nail’s eyes that he couldn’t stand the sight of him and wanted him off the earth, but Sull was a town boy and all he saw in Nail’s eyes was a dumb, sullen kid.

  Irene Chism Jerram miscarried her baby and never had any children after that. The years went by. Sull was elected assessor, and folks said the only thing that kept him from running for sheriff was he was too trigger-happy. Irene lived in Jasper but would come home about twice a year for a long visit until Sull came to get her. One of the times he came to get her, or tried to, was in an automobile, the first car to get that far. Eli Willard had driven the first automobile to appear in Stay More, but he hadn’t been able to drive up Right Prong, because there wasn’t any road, just a trail; when Sull Jerram tried it, there wasn’t any road either, but he was mad to get Irene back and he drove over some boulders and plowed down some saplings to get up to the Chism place and spooked the livestock and, according to Seth Chism, spoiled a whole batch of sour mash a-brewing at the hooch plant. Irene wouldn’t go with him. He stayed for a few days, arguing with her, trying to persuade Nancy or Seth to talk some sense into her, and, finally, appealing to Nail himself.

  “You’re the only one she listens to,” Sull told Nail. “She don’t listen to me nor nobody. You tell her that she caint spend the rest of her life up here on this mountain.”

  “Why caint she?” Nail asked. He wasn’t a kid anymore and was half a head higher than Sull Jerram and still remembered as if it were yesterday the tricks Sull us
ed to pull on him.

  “Why, because, she’s, don’t you see? she’s my wife, and if she wants to be my wife she’s got to live in Jasper.” Sull paused and studied Nail’s eyes. “Don’t that make no sense to ye? Do you want me to say it again?”

  “If I was you,” Nail said, “I’d git that piece of machinery back down the mountain while it will still roll. Come tomorrow, you might not find any wheels left on it.”

  But Sull Jerram did not go back to Jasper. Someone said he’d spent the night down at the Whitter place, and folks laughed and said the Whitters was probably the only ones who’d give him a bed, he was that low, they was that low, the Whitters. Some years before, not long after the turn of the century, the only criminal Stay More ever had, in its peaceful history, had come from that family. Ike Whitter had killed a man and terrorized the sheriff himself before a lynch mob led by John Ingledew ganged up on him and stopped him and lynched him. But Ike’s father Simon Whitter still ran the farm and kept his head high and apologized to no man for having sired the only bully, felon, and cutthroat in the history of the village, and some of Ike’s younger brothers threatened to become as wayward as he had been, while his baby sister Dorinda was growing up into a turtledove who, it was said, would drive men to rash deeds and early graves.