The Choiring Of The Trees Part 2

The next time I saw Dorinda was not at our playhouse (we never went there again, at least not together) but on the front porch of my house, one afternoon when she came over, bringing with her the 1914 Sears, Roebuck and Company Consumer's Guide, which had been loaned to her by somebody in Jasper. She said she wanted my help in picking out a couple of dresses and a pair of shoes. It wasn't play-like picking either, not the kind of wis.h.i.+ng I did whenever I could see one of those catalogs. She had ten dollars actual cash money. I'd never seen that much real money in my entire life.

"Where did you git it, Rindy?" I inquired.

"They gave it to me," she said.

"Uh-huh," I said, and I waited a long time for her to elaborate. She began to leaf through the pages of the catalog, sighing and cooing at the pictures of dresses, and sometimes asking me to read for her what it said under the picture. After doing this for a while, I said, "They who?"

"Mr. Snow and them," she said.

"The sheriff gave you ten dollars?" I asked. "What for?"

"To pay for my dresses and shoes, silly," she said. "Don't ye know, I've got to go to that there trial, come August? What does it say under this yere one?"

"'Made of finest quality white lawn.' How's the knot on your head?"

She raised her hand and felt the top of her head. "It's gone, I reckon. What's 'lawn'?"

"Sheer linen. Did you really git raped, Rindy?"

"Yep, I did. What does this one say?"

"'A handsome white India lawn wrapper.' You don't want that one, it'd be too hot for August. Was it really Nail?"

"Then what about this one?"

"That's taffeta silk and would make you look like a wh.o.r.e. Honest, did Nail really rape you?"

"Latha, ladybird lollypop, we swore we'd never ever tell a story to each other. Didn't we? So don't you git me to tell ye a story."

In July most of Nail Chism's sheep took sick and began to die. He was in that stone jail at Jasper, and although Waymon and Luther visited him and described to him the sheep's symptoms, their diarrhea or scours, their choking and catarrh, their pining and staggers, Nail was helpless to do aught but instruct Waymon and Luther in comforts and solaces that didn't even cure the sheep of whatever was ailing them, and it takes a shepherd to comfort and solace. But the best shepherd can't produce rainfall, which is what we desperately needed. The sheep were thirsting to death, and so was the gra.s.s.

In August the men who sat on Willis Ingledew's storeporch complained of the drought, and the heat, and they spent some time speculating about the upcoming trial, and they devoted only a small bit of discussion to what was happening far across the sea: some duke had been murdered in Austria, and the Russians and Germans were starting a fracas, and the English and French were getting into it too. The Jasper newspaper carried very little national news, let alone international news, and throughout that month of August, as the Germans invaded Belgium and the French invaded Lorraine, n.o.body in Stay More knew that the whole world was starting the Great War to End All Wars.

On a Monday in August the men on the Ingledew storeporch rode their horses or their mules, or drove their spring wagons if they had them, sometimes with families in them, to Jasper for the trial, to watch if not to partic.i.p.ate. Jim Tom had explained to them it wouldn't be any use for all of the storeporch crowd to keep saying the same thing over and over, that Nail was there at his usual time; three or four repet.i.tions of that testimony were all that the court would tolerate.

I rode in with Jim Tom again, and this time my father and mother came along too, although it turned out they couldn't get into the courthouse, it was so crowded. My father had been impressed that the county sheriff himself had paid us a visit the night before. Duster Snow had even had supper with us, unexpectedly, because he arrived at suppertime and Momma had to be polite. After my father and Duster had eaten (in those days the custom was always that the women and girls would wait until after the menfolk had finished before having their own supper), the sheriff said he wanted to talk to me while I ate; maybe he figured I couldn't talk back to him with my mouth full.

Before I was separated from my parents at the courthouse, my father squeezed my arm very hard and said, "Gal, don't you go and bring no embarra.s.sment upon us. You do what the sheriff tole ye to do, hear me?"

I knew I would be punished for it (and I was, later), but I disobeyed my father and the sheriff: I refused to tell the court that Nail Chism was the man I had seen looking at our playhouse. Judge Villines himself started in to asking me questions, helping out the prosecutor, but I swore the man I saw looking at our playhouse was not Nail Chism.

Fat lot of good it did. Dorinda Whitter sat there in her purewhite Sears, Roebuck lawn dress and told her story again as if she had been rehearsing it every spare minute of July, with somebody helping her rehea.r.s.e; as if she had been practicing how to cry, and she did a real good job of crying. There was a lot of crying in the audience when she cried. And a lot of gasping. And more than one of the jurors had spittle dribbling down his chin. There were just twelve men this time, and none of them were sleeping or drunk, at least not while testimony was given and the summations were made, all in one afternoon. Juries in those days were never sequestered overnight, and a rumor went around that Sull J. held a quiet little party that night at his house, two blocks from the courthouse, with plenty of Chism's Dew, ironically, I thought, and that certain of the jurymen had been present and had imbibed freely and had made up their minds then and there before they returned the next morning and required only forty-five minutes of deliberation to find Nail Chism guilty.

When Nail was asked by Judge Villines if he had anything to say before sentence was pa.s.sed upon him, he said, "I jist want to ask one question: is there ary man, woman, or child in this here courtroom who honestly believes I raped that girl? If so, stand up and look me in the eye."

For a full minute not one person stood, except Nail, who was already standing, towering over every man. Then, finally, the prosecutor and Sull Jerram nodded at each other and seemed to agree to rise up together, and those two stood. Then the foreman of the jury stood up. Three other jurymen rose, that's all. After a few moments Judge Villines himself stood.

Maybe she was too dumb, but Dorinda herself never did think to stand up.

Judge Villines, still standing, along with those half-dozen others, said, "Nail Chism, it is the sentence of this yere court that you be committed to the custody of the Arkansas State Penitentiary in Little Rock and that there you be put to death according to law. May Gawd have mercy on yore soul."

On the storeporch at Ingledew's, in the days following, the men talked of the drought, and that ruckus in Europe, and not so much the guilt or innocence of Nail Chism as the exceptional speed of the trial ("Like them courthouse critters had made up their minds in advance," one said) and the exceptional severity of the sentence. n.o.body from Newton County had ever gone to the electric chair. It was an awesome fate, and not fully understood, since there was no electricity in Newton County-Jasper itself was still several years away from the first primitive attempts at electrification. The closest anybody could conceive of a lesson to explain it was getting lightningstruck, like old Haskins Duckworth, who couldn't move one side of his face and was bald on that one side but was still alive, they thought. The only time anybody had been convicted of rape, not in my lifetime but back in the last century, they'd simply cut off his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and let him choose whether to sing soprano or stop going to church, and he chose the latter.

August is an awful month in the best of years, but that August the trees stopped singing, or they murmured dirges. Only the weeds and wildflowers throve: there was still yellow in the sneezeweed, coneflower, and goldenrod, the penstemons and great mulleins still held their heads high, and the wild bergamot and verbena must have found moisture in the air, but there was little green, just dusty shades of olive, drab shades of terreverte, faded shades of green ocher.

But the day they took Nail Chism off to Little Rock, it rained. Not a real toadstrangling pourdown but enough to settle the dust and sprinkle the dirt on the hogs' backs. Not enough to save Nail's sheep, who all died before he was scheduled to. In a bad drought, when people have a hard enough time feeding themselves, they tend to stop feeding their pets, and all the dogs of Stay More, hungry, began to run down the last of Nail's lambs and to fight over the remains.

For the rest of the summer until school started I was confined to the house for disobedience ("grounded" in those days meant only what happened to you when you'd overdosed on Chism's Dew). I didn't see Dorinda again until school started, and we had a new teacher, Mr. Perry, who insisted we sit by grade, not by friends.h.i.+p, and I wouldn't have sat with her by either.

Once at recess she tried to talk to me. "Latha, how come everbody acts like I done somethin wrong? How come it's my fault I got raped?"

I just looked her in the eye for a while before I asked, "Did you get yourself raped?"

"Yes!" she yelled, and the other pupils stopped what they were playing to look at us. "Honest! I did! It hurt! It hurt me real bad!" She burst into tears. Whether or not she had faked her crying in the courtroom, she wasn't pretending now.

"What's the trouble here?" Mr. Perry said. He was new, and no one had ever told him.

"She hurts," I said, and that's all I said.

On.

Lady, that's enough now," Warden Burdell said, and he held out his hand toward her as if asking her for the next dance. She stared at his hand, a chubby, gnarled, k.n.o.bby, and hairy paw with dirt beneath each of the fingernails. It required a moment for her to realize that he was holding out his hand to be given the sheet of paper on which she was making her drawing, but she was in no hurry to hand it over to him. She had enjoyed these minutes of reprieve that her art had procured. Not that she had any wish to delay the execution of a convicted rapist, especially not one who had brutally abused and raped a child, but that this man's last request, to see her drawing, had been an acknowledgment of the existence of her art. n.o.body commented on her art-well, scarcely anybody other than her sister and Mr. Fletcher, the managing editor, who gave her these a.s.signments and felt, doubtless, duty-bound to make some remarks about her work: "Good likeness," "Clever lines," "Fancy," "Shows feeling," or "It'll do."

She wanted to give her drawing of Nail Chism a final glance before handing it over to Warden Harris Burdell. Something wasn't right. The ears perhaps; they really did stick out that much, but the shaved head seemed to exaggerate the protuberance of the ears into almost a caricature, and she did not want to seem to be making any sort of mockery. Actually, Nail Chism had been an exceptionally good-looking man when first she'd seen him, sitting beside her at the execution of the Negro Skipper Thomas. Chism had had his full head of hair then, although its yellow was already prematurely frosting white in places, and he'd worn some red bruises on his cheeks and temples as if he'd been in a fight...or been beaten.

Too, his heavy eyebrows, a darker blond than his hair had been, grew thicker as they met each other above the bridge of his nose, and this seemed to give him a coa.r.s.e look, and to accentuate the effect of the shaved head. She had been especially careful with the skull, not to strain the shading of its b.u.mps and general shape, because it was a fine cranium, almost Grecian. But what difference did such subtle shading make? The printed picture, on page 5 or 6 of tomorrow's Gazette, wouldn't retain the subtleties of her chiaroscuro.

She tore the sheet from its pad and handed it over to Warden Burdell. He took it and stared at it with a frown, as if seeing a Cezanne for the first time. Then he grinned his penitentiary smirk and said, "Hey, Chism, I caint show you this. It'll give you the swell-head." But he turned the drawing around and held it up by the corners so that Nail Chism could see it, held it as if Mr. Chism's eyesight might be poor. "How 'bout that?" the warden asked. "Don't that make you look like Miss Monday has done went and fell in love with you?" The doomed man squinted his eyes as if indeed his eyesight were bad, and focused on the drawing, and the trace of a smile gave sfumato to the edges of his mouth. He said nothing, however. "Are you satisfied?" the warden asked, expecting an answer, and waited.

"I reckon I look pretty awful," the convict said. "I aint seen a mirror in a month. But leastways I don't have to worry about my hair shootin out ever which way, like it always done." He grinned.

"What do you say to the lady?" the warden prompted.

"Thank you, ma'am," Nail Chism said, looking her right in the eye again, the way he had throughout his sitting, or standing, rather. It had disconcerted her, and perhaps even slowed down the progress of the drawing, the fixedness of his stare, his eyes trying to tell her his whole life's story in these last minutes of it. "I'm much obliged to ye," he said.

She spoke, for the first time, not knowing exactly what to say: "You're welcome."

That should have been the end of the exchange, but Nail Chism continued it: "You gave me a few more minutes of life, ma'am. I hope you'll remember that. I hope it'll be some comfort to ye."

What could she say? He seemed to be expecting some response from her. The warden too was looking at her, waiting for her remark on that. She couldn't think of anything to say. "I'm just doing my job," she said modestly.

"HAW! I'M JUST DOIN MY JOB!" said Irvin Bobo, the executioner, and, in his bad idea of a joke, gave the switch a couple of practice jolts, which darkened the one green-shaded overhead light and made everyone except Bobo jump.

"Cut the s.h.i.+t, Bobo!" Warden Burdell said. Then he apologized to Viridis: "Pardon me, ma'am. He's drunk, as usual. I reckon I'd git drunk too, I had to throw that switch on a feller. But Bobo's impatient, and I don't blame him, we're all standin around talkin like it's a G.o.dd.a.m.n tea party. Come on, boys, let's get him to sit."

For a second there Viridis thought he was referring to Irvin Bobo, as the one to sit. But then the two guards flanking Nail Chism, Gabriel "Fat Gabe" McChristian and James "Short Leg" Fancher, took the prisoner's arms and led him to the electric chair and backed him up to it, and sat him down in it. From the moment he had first come into the room, the prisoner had amazed Viridis Monday by his composure and poise, and now in his last moments he was not struggling at all. Mr. McChristian took a small key from a chain on his belt and inserted it into the handcuffs that bound the prisoner's wrists, and he unlocked and removed the handcuffs.

Only then did the prisoner begin to struggle. He seemed to reach for his heart to still it, he seemed to be trying to thrust his hand inside his jacket, but Mr. Francher grabbed the hand and slammed it down on the armrest of the electric chair and began strapping it. Mr. McChristian quickly strapped the other hand. Then they strapped his ankles to the lower parts of the chair. Nail Chism went on twisting and struggling for just another moment before seeming to realize that he was trapped and could not get loose, and then he remained absolutely still, with his eyes closed, while they lowered the metal cap to the top of his head.

This was the third time Viridis had been through this ordeal, and she had asked herself which of the many long moments in the execution process was the worst. Someone else would doubtless have chosen the instant of the first jolt of electricity. Someone with imagination might have chosen the moment when the convict first catches sight of the waiting chair. But for Viridis, trying to empathize, it was the instant that the black hemisphere of the metal cap, cold as the room was terribly cold, touched the raw, bare scalp of the man. She noticed Nail Chism s.h.i.+ver.

"Our Father Which Art in Heaven," the Reverend James S. McPhee began to intone. "Jimmie Mac," as they called him, was not actually a minister of any particular church, or an ordained minister at all, but a railroad conductor who, with his wife Estelle, made a hobby of "bringing religion" to The Walls. Viridis had surrept.i.tiously drawn his portrait more than once, not that she intended to publish it, but that McPhee was a character study in pious asceticism.

They never let Estelle McPhee join her husband to witness these executions, much as she agitated to be allowed to witness. She was a woman and women were not allowed. Oh, she hollered and screamed that they would allow Viridis to attend but wouldn't let her, who was like a sister to these poor doomed sinners. They'd had some trouble explaining to Estelle that Viridis was a "newspaperwoman" and thus exempt from the restriction.

Actually, it had been Tom Fletcher, the managing editor, who'd arranged for Viridis to attend. Warden Burdell was in Mr. Fletcher's debt for a few favors regarding privacy of information, and Tom had used the privilege to get Viridis under the ban, and consequently to get some exclusive pictures of the condemned men in their last moments. Photographs were strictly forbidden, there was no getting around that.

Viridis wasn't actually a "newspaperwoman." Her reportage was graphic, not verbal, although she was not above, on occasion, such as now, doing double duty as reporter and ill.u.s.trator, careful to get the correct names of all the witnesses and to record such things as the exact time, and what the prisoner said, and so forth. For an important execution, for a murderer such as that heinous Clarence Smead, who had butchered his parents, the Gazette sent an actual reporter along with Viridis (and her drawing of Smead weeping like a baby in his last moments had made the front page), but for some reason known only to the men whose fraternity the new science of "journalism" consecrated, the crime of rape was considered a lesser offense, perhaps excusable, even if it had been perpetrated upon a thirteen-year-old hillbilly girl of subnormal intelligence by a tall, brutal moons.h.i.+ner. "He's all yours, Very," Tom Fletcher had said to her, informing her that the Gazette would not send a regular reporter to the electrocution of Nail Chism.

The two guards, McChristian and Fancher, moved to the side of the room where the witnesses sat. Warden Burdell moved to the wall where Irvin Bobo stood beside the switch. The prisoner was alone in his chair in a small room that suddenly seemed much larger because of his isolation, as if the walls and ceiling had expanded to make him smaller and lonelier. Viridis snapped her charcoal pencil in two, between her clenched fingers, and abruptly realized it was the only sound in the silence, and was embarra.s.sed, as if she had broken wind.

"Ready, Bobo?" the warden said, and raised one hand.

Bobo nodded.

"...for Thine is the Power and the Glory, Forever and Ever..." intoned Jimmie Mac, in hardly more than a whisper, but it was booming.

Viridis Monday had an uncanny sensation of hearing a kind of singing, a choir of voices, but they were not human voices. The sound seemed to be-and remembering it later, she couldn't account for the strange thought-the sound seemed as if the trees themselves (but there were no trees!) were singing. Later she would remember two questions occurring to her at that moment: Can trees sing? and What trees?

She could not answer either question.

The swelling sound of the song, or cantata, was punctuated by tympana, a drumroll, and in the instant that the warden's hand fell she realized that the drumroll was somebody knocking on a door and the warden was lowering his hand not to signal Bobo to pull the switch but to point at the door and say, "Somebody get that!"

Gabriel McChristian opened the door, which had been latched. Standing in the door was Michael O. Shoptaw, the turnkey, who said, "Scuse me, Warden, sir, but Governor Hays is calling up on the telephone."

"Who?" demanded Mr. Burdell. "Which telephone?"

"The governor, sir. That telephone in your office."

"Don't he know we're doing a execution?" Mr. Burdell said. "What's he want at a time like this?"

"Wants to talk to you, is all I know, sir," said Mr. Shoptaw.

"Caint it wait till we're done?"

"Sir, I'm just tellin you what Williams come and tole me. He says the telephone is ringin in your office and he answers it like he's sposed to, aint he? and it's the secretary of the governor, and says the governor wants to talk to you right now."

"Right now, huh?" said Mr. Burdell, and seemed to be deliberating. "Governor Hays himself, huh?" He looked around at the others in the room, waiting for someone to advise him. No one spoke. "Well, I reckon I better go see what he wants." No one objected. The warden turned to Bobo. "Bobo, you just cook him real slow till I git back, and make sure he aint done before I git here." Several people failed to laugh at the warden's wit, and he realized his joke had fallen flat, and retracted it. "Aw, I'm just kiddin you, Bobo. Stand back from that switch till I tell you. I'll be right back."

The warden marched out of the room. The turnkey followed. The condemned man opened his eyes, which had been closed as though in meditation. He stared right at her, at Viridis. She didn't know what to do or say. She smiled slightly, and wanted to say, See, you get a few more minutes of life, not just from me. The trees she had been hearing singing, perhaps just in her head, had changed their tune: it was not a mournful carol but a hymn of joy. If it was the trees. If it was only inside her head. She wished Nail Chism would stop looking at her. Was he going to look at her the whole time they waited for the warden to return?

The others did not seem to know what to do. Gabriel McChristian and Short Leg Fancher chatted, too quietly for her to hear. Jimmie Mac was rubbing his hands together as if he had a bar of soap inside them and was was.h.i.+ng them. Irvin Bobo reached inside his coat and produced a flat gla.s.s bottle, which he unscrewed and tilted up to his lips.

"Now, I wonder," said Jimmie Mac, "what-all that is about. Could be something important. Could be, even," he looked down at the convict and spoke the rest of the sentence to him, "could be the governor has granted you a stay, or something."

Nail Chism did not appear to hear him. He continued to stare at Viridis, seeming to see her for the first time. His eyes, she realized, were not as dark as she had rendered them. She put the drawing back on top of the pad and used a kneaded eraser to lighten the pupils of his eyes. His eyes were a kind of hazel-tinged blue. She wasn't too uncomfortable staring into them as long as she was examining them for the purpose of her drawing.

Suddenly his eyes grew enormously large, and his whole body jumped, and the green-shaded overhead light dimmed. Bobo had thrown the switch! She heard a frantic screech, and realized it was herself. She had thrown down the sketchpad and jumped up from her chair and lunged toward Bobo and the switch, and she found herself clawing at Bobo and the switch and protesting as fast as she could talk, too fast to be understood.

McChristian and Fancher were restraining her. "Take it easy, lady," the obese McChristian was saying to her. "The switch aint on. It aint on. Bobo was jist foolin! He jist give it a teensy little spark, jist fer a joke." To the executioner McChristian said, "Okay, Bobo, enough's enough, you better jist wait for the warden and don't be foolin around."

Viridis shook herself loose from the hands of McChristian and Fancher and looked at both of them indignantly, then gave Bobo her most scornful glower and asked, "What kind of monster are you?"

"Hey, lady, I was jist givin him a little sample," Bobo said. "He hardly felt it. But if ole Burdell don't git back here soon, I might jist let my hand slip and give him the full dose." Bobo fished out his bottle and took another swig, then offered it to Viridis. "Here. You act like a man, so be a man. You're the only wo-man that ever watched me. Kind of guts it takes to do that can sh.o.r.e stand a swaller of this stuff. Drink it."

Viridis shook her head and returned to her seat, picking up the sketchpad from the floor. The drawing was smudged. She'd have to do one side of the face again. Her charcoal pencil was broken in half; she had another in her purse, but they hadn't let her bring her purse into the execution chamber. She would use half the pencil as best she could, sharpening it with her fingernails. But first she took a sc.r.a.p of newsprint out of her pocket and carefully wrote down exactly what Irvin Bobo had done and said. She intended to put it into the story if Tom Fletcher would let her write it.

The subject was still staring at her, but this time, when her eyes met his, Nail Chism smiled and said, "Thank you." Then he said, "You're very brave. You could have got yourself hurt."

"There's some things I can't stand," she said. It was the first almost conversational remark she had made in a long while.

Warden Harris Burdell returned and, forgetting there was a woman present, began to speak coa.r.s.e profanity. He swore obscenely, and then he announced, "The G.o.dd.a.m.n governor has done gone and granted Chism a stay. Git the f.u.c.ker out of the chair, boys, and throw him back in his f.u.c.kin cell." He turned and saw her. "Oh, shee-it, Miss Monday, I forgot you was here."

Off.

The last time I was in Little Rock, just a few years ago, for my sister Mandy's funeral, I took some time off to go out Arch Street and look for the house where Viridis Monday had spent all of her childhood and adolescence. My granddaughter Sharon drove me, at my request; she'll know why when she reads this. The house is still there, and the present owners have lovingly restored it to what must have been its original appearance, when the architect Charles L. Thompson designed it for bank vice-president Cyril J. Monday. I would guess that the original two colors of the house were a sort of tarragon with a trim of sage, and the present owners have taken pains to duplicate these colors exactly, giving the house its Victorian feeling of elegance relieved by fanciness and playfulness. It is a storybook house. Sixteen rooms, seven porches, two turrets (one with a domed cupola), a steeple, lots of wrought-iron trim and jigsaw decoration, fishscale s.h.i.+ngles, miles of turned bal.u.s.ters and spindles, and maybe (I didn't count) two dozen roof pitches, no two of them alike. I learned that this is called Queen Anne-inappropriately, because it had nothing to do with the era or the personality of Queen Anne-and that its dominant characteristic is an avoidance of symmetry. The rooms shoot off and up in every direction, and one of them up there was Viridis' aerie: her studio and her bower.

Most such urban houses, on huge high lots with leaf-dappled lawns, were intended for large families at a time when large families were desirable, but Cyril and Elsie Monday had only five children; they would have had more, but Elsie's health was not good after the birth of Viridis, who was the first girl, fourth child. The last-born, also a girl, Cyrilla, was frail from infancy, although she outlived them all.

The house is a short, brisk hike from downtown Little Rock, not far from the governor's mansion. All its neighbors are distinctively individual but large and rambling houses of the 1890s and early 1900s. Although the Mondays had servants, a black couple who handled the yard work and kitchen work, Viridis told me, years later when she was filling in the pieces of her life for me, "I remember at an early age being placed in charge of them, in charge of the household, since my mother was either too ill or too indisposed to give orders to the servants. The black couple, a man named Samuel and his wife Ruby, called me Missy V, and they did not seem to mind taking orders from me, and I was careful never to give orders in a demanding or supercilious fas.h.i.+on."

Cyril Monday had originated in Malvern, Arkansas, and so had Elsie. Malvern was in the flat timberlands southwest of the capital, and Cyril, although he liked to claim that he was a "self-made" man, was the son of a prosperous lumber baron, who, however, had insisted that each of his sons attend "the College of Hard Knocks." So Cyril at seventeen became a driver for the stagecoach that ran from the depot to the resort spa at Hot Springs. One of his regular pa.s.sengers was the Little Rock banker Henry T. Worthen, who took young Cyril under his wing, persuaded him to move to Little Rock, and gave him a job in his bank. Within five years Cyril had risen from clerk to teller to vice-president. "But never more than that," Viridis told me. "All of my growing-up years I had to listen to my father complain that he was not ever going to realize his ambition to become president of the bank. He was a very frustrated man."

Cyril Monday may have remained only a frustrated vice-president for all of his working life, but he was a very wealthy one, and he and his family were "comfortable"-a word then meaning without a care in this world, except that Elsie was often in poor health, and when she wasn't spending long periods in Hot Springs taking one "cure" or another, sometimes for addiction to drink, she was convalescing at home, not bedridden but spending most of the time in her garden, which covered nearly half an acre behind the Monday mansion. "In good weather, if I wanted to speak to my mother," Viridis told me, "I tried the garden first. If my mother wasn't there, she was in Hot Springs. I was seventeen and in college before it suddenly dawned on me that my mother had never had any friends."

Henry Worthen once suggested to Cyril Monday that he would never become president, of the bank or of any of the civic and fraternal organizations to which he belonged, unless and until his wife Elsie began to "entertain." Cyril Monday did not apologize for Elsie. Some women, he felt, were not cut out to entertain, and he himself was not fond of large dinner parties at which a fortune was spent on food that remained unappreciated because the eater was too busy either trying to keep stains off his or her clothing or else carrying on a conversation to pay any attention to what was being eaten.

Nor did the girls, Viridis and Cyrilla, do any entertaining in the form of inviting friends to come to the Monday mansion for food or play or casual conversation. Cyrilla was almost as delicate as her mother, and in fact she began at the age of twelve to accompany her mother on the regular cures to Hot Springs. What social life existed at all within the confines of the Queen Anne house was that of the three sons Matthew, Dallas, and Henry, who frequently invited their cla.s.smates to come and visit, to explore the countless cupboards and crannies of the endless house, to play croquet or badminton on the lawns, to shoot billiards on the third floor, to climb even higher into the fifth floor of the domed turret and shoot pigeons on the roof.

"I remember the house as being overrun by males," Viridis said to me. "When my mother and sister were gone to Hot Springs for long stretches, and my three brothers had three or more of their friends spending the night or longer, I had no one to talk to except my father, and he had very little time to listen to me, although we did spend much time together, evenings especially."

(It is hard for me to get out of the habit of thinking of "evening" as meaning "afternoon," as it always did in Stay More and the Ozarks. Evening was the time before supper, night was the time after supper, but to say that Viridis and her father spent their nights together is misleading...somewhat.) Days, when she had any time free from managing the household, from meeting with the tutors who came regularly to give private lessons in voice, piano, French, and Spanish to her and her sister, from planning the lunches for her brothers and their friends, from dusting the spots that Ruby had missed, from shopping in the markets along lower Main, Viridis would climb the smaller north turret, not the south one the boys used as a pigeon blind, to the room that was her studio, which she had created at the age of eleven when one of the books she'd got from her Grandmother Monday at Christmas was The Young People's Concise Doorway to the Fine Arts, wherein she had learned what an easel is, a palette, a mahlstick, and the names of such colors as madder, alizarin, ocher, umber, sienna, and, her delightful discovery, viridian. "Neither my father nor my mother, who hadn't known it themselves, had ever told me the meaning of my given name, which had been bestowed upon me, my mother had said, because she had 'found it in a novel' and had thought it 'was pretty and unusual.' My mother had not been able to remember which novel, and once I searched their library without finding it. My father couldn't even p.r.o.nounce the name, or, if he could, he chose to misp.r.o.nounce it roguishly to rhyme with 'paradise.'" She was destined to endure from other people its misp.r.o.nunciations and misspellings (Viridas, Viredes, Vyradis, Veredis, etc.) all of her life.

She spelled it for me, and she told me it was p.r.o.nounced properly Vera Dis, although she didn't mind that I had been saying it Verdus, which was the way Nail Chism had p.r.o.nounced it too.

"I have too many eyes," I thought she said, but she was saying that she had a surplus of the letter i in her name, three of them, and I jokingly called her Three-Eyes when I was irritated with her, which was not often: she was fourteen years older than I, and I loved her dearly.