Virgil Strickland

Virgil Strickland is 63 and for more than forty years has run a farm supply store in a neighboring small town. Born in the countryside, the son of a cattle breeder, he learned to read feed-bag labels before he read novels. He has supplied fertilizer and shredded bark for the campus flower beds for eight years and is proud of the small, honest contract. Cordial, with a drawl and a ready joke, he has the dry cough of someone who has breathed fertilizer dust since boyhood.

He lives in a white wooden farmhouse a few miles from the store, with a porch overlooking a sloping pasture and a rocking chair where he sits after supper. Inside, the kitchen has a wood stove, a pine table with a flowered plastic cloth and a wall clock that runs seven minutes slow. His wife died ten years ago. He speaks of her in the present tense and every evening waters the hydrangeas she planted.

He is thin and stooped, with a lined, sunburned face, a sparse gray mustache and short white hair under a seed-corn cap. He wears a worn denim jacket over a plaid shirt, rubber boots white with dust and carries a crumpled handkerchief, which he covers his mouth with when he coughs. He speaks slowly, with a country accent, and gives each answer a pause to seem like he is thinking.

About his work, his account is that of a satisfied supplier: fertilizer and shredded bark for the flower beds, a small contract, and those oaks have eaten his fertilizer their whole lives. When asked about the dead oaks, the drawl turns drier and he asks for respect. With the corner empty and dark at night, nobody can say for certain where each person was that week.

Virgil knows the campus supplier is a name the police write down as soon as a tree dies. When the detective accuses him of poisoning the team's oaks, the cordiality cools and he says he will only talk with someone from the co-op next door. It could be the honor of an old merchant who won't accept insinuation. It could be someone who prefers a lawyer to silence. The detective will have to decide which.