The Choiring Of The Trees

Arkansas, 1914: A 13-year-old girl is raped in the backwoods of the Ozarks. On her testimony, a young mountaineer is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair.
Nail Chism, strangest and most solitary of the Chism clan that populates all of Donald Harington's novels about Stay More, Arkansas appears doomed to execution - until his innocence is championed by the staff artist of the state's leading newspaper. Viridis Monday could have become a painter in Paris during the era of Cubism and the Fauves, but instead she returned home to Little Rock. Will she succeed in saving Nail? Or will the singing - "choiring" - of the trees that Nail hears while strapped into the chair be the last earthly sound he will ever hear?