The Trees Read online

  “They kain’t be much wrong with me or it’d a fell out,” Jary told them, gaunt and jandered. “If I just had some wheat bread, I know I’d pick up.”

  Sayward had been shaving Worth to go to the Shawaneetown trading post. He sat a stool with his head thrown back against the trencher, the sides of his face yellow with soft soap made from game fat and white hickory ashes. Not a word did Worth say, but when Jary cast up twice that they had no bread, Sayward could feel his face settle into sharp grooves as if the lye had stung him. When he came in from renching off the soap at the run, his naked cheeks were flat as a man’s who has had enough of a woman’s complaining for a while and is glad to be off to the woods.

  The young ones watched him pull his spring furs from trees and stretchers and work them in a pack with his knee. Jary came shuffling out.

  “I wa’n’t a sayin’ that at you, Worth,” she said apologetically. “You got your faults but nobody can make you out a poor provider. Few has better meat than us. Most times we have venison a hangin’ up. Then you give us special treats like gadd or duck. But a body that’s losin’ flesh is like one that’s a luggin a young’un. It hankers for queer victuals.”

  Worth strapped up his pack with whang leather thongs.

  “I mought be off five or six nights,” he told Sayward.

  It took no more than a long day, the girl knew, to tramp to Shawaneetown where Hough had a log house, a squaw wife and goods for the Shawanee and Delaware trade. Where Worth aimed to go with his pack of skins that would keep him five or six nights she couldn’t make out, unless it might be Bannock’s Mill on the Ohio. It came to her the Shawanees once said it took three days to go and three to come.

  The same notion must have crossed Genny’s mind, for she bent down and whispered to the younger ones who licked their chops and pushed up around their father, their eyes bright on him as young coons’, their lips shut tight so he wouldn’t see their mouths water.

  “Well, what do you want?” Worth demanded of them.

  They nudged little Sulie, for she was his favorite.

  “We don’t want nothin’, Pap,” she said, pleased as all get out, but before opening her lips she had to swallow a mouthful of spit.

  “Git off now before I take a gad to you!” he stormed at them. They scattered like a covey of Conestoga field quail, but not very far. Worth came in the cabin and fooled around like there was something he wanted to do or say before he went. Seemed like he couldn’t fetch it out, for he looked beat as he went outside where the hound leaped up and tongued at the sight of powderhorn and rifle.

  “You git back and stay back!” he ordered harshly.

  Young ones, older ones and sad-eyed hound stood together on the log step or by it and watched him go down the path. After a little the spice bushes cut off his legs, and he seemed to be just head and shoulders swimming through the brush. Slowly the great butts of the woods swallowed him up. But for a long while Wyitt held on to the loose neck of the hound so he wouldn’t go after.

  “Now nary me nor Mam nor any of you’uns knows where he’s a goin’,” Sayward told her sisters and brother. “Maybe he don’t know right hisself yit.”

  But that evening when they were all in bed, she thought she could see her father lying out in the forest with no more than the shelving back of a rotten log to keep him warm and the pack of furs under his head for a pillow. And next morning when gray showed through the oiled paper window light, she had the notion he was up this long time, hunched forward on the trace, making tracks for whatever place he was going. A night or two afterwards she dreamt she saw him sleeping under some strange roof, snug as a mouse in a mill, while a soft dust powdered his buckskins like fine, dry snow.

  Till it was over, she wished he had gone only to Shawaneetown. The third evening Jary coughed like it was spittle in her windpipe, and when she fetched it out, it was heart’s blood. Sayward reckoned it would have filled a wooden cup but she had no chance to measure. Her mother went to the door and spat it outside and next morning it looked as if a hunter had cut the throat of a buck there. When the others got up, Jary said she expected she’d lie abed that day. She made as though nothing had happened, but the face on the pallet was white and waxy as the corpse plants that come up under the beech trees. You could tell by looking at her that, had she tried to stand on her feet today, her legs would have buckled under her like wild cherry whips.

  Sayward didn’t look for her father till the sixth day. She was down in the cabin alone with Jary tonight, for Genny couldn’t stand the sight of blood and Sayward had sent her up in the loft. The fifth night she heard Sarge get up. His nails rattled across the hard dirt floor to the door where he growled. Settlement folks claimed the night air was poison and night swamp air gave you the shakes, but Sayward had left the puncheon door open a crack in the hope that Jary could catch her breath. The girl reckoned some beast was around, drawn by the firelight shining out in the forest, for it couldn’t be Worth. A man would have to own lynx eyes to hold to the trace through the pitch-black woods night. Every step it had branches lying in wait to gouge the eyes out.

  Then Sarge pushed the door open with his nose, wormed out and bawled like a bell. Sayward lighted a pine splint from the fire and went to the step. Holding the fire above her head, she waited. Up the path something formed itself slowly out of the gloom, and when it floated closer, it was the face of her father.

  “You all right?” he put to her, meaning the fire at this time of night.

  “Oh, we’re just a middlin’ fair,” she said in a low tone.

  Holding the light well off so Worth wouldn’t see too much at once, she moved ahead to the bed and tucked the cover high over Jary’s neck. Her father could run his knife into any forest beast and watch the red sap run. His hunting shirt was black from the veins of quartered deer he had fetched home on his back. But he wouldn’t take it easy to see the dark blots on Jary’s bed gown from what had spilled up out the last days before one of them could catch it.

  Worth took the candle wood out of her hand and held it over the bed. Always, Sayward reflected, her mother seemed better after she bled. Tonight her face was gentle and the skin fair. Oh, an old body couldn’t go back to the cradle again. And yet tonight she had something fresh and mortal sweet about her as a young girl.

  Many a time had she looked like this when Sayward was just a little tyke. She would sit genteel as a settlement lady on her homemade rocker, listening to Worth, her face slanted down a little, her eyes on the doorsill and a faint smile on her lips. She was that way now, propped up on her pallet. You wouldn’t hardly expect that for two days and nights she had to be waited on hand and foot.

  Worth threw the candle wood with a shower of sparks in the fire. His pack of furs was gone but he let to the floor a tightly-woven grain bag that bulged with a soft fat look. From out of his hunting frock he took a bladder that had a thong around his neck.

  “The miller woman sent Jary some risin’,” he said to Sayward. “Next time, you kin raise with sour dough. Now you better git some on the fire — if you know how.” A rattle of chinking boards made him glance up at the hungry faces by the loft hole. “You young’uns git back to bed,” he told them shortly.

  Sayward lifted the bag up to the trencher. It felt mighty heavy. Here was not just a cupful for her mother to taste but plenty for all. It would last weeks if the Shawanees didn’t come around smelling it out. She spilled the gray white meal soundlessly in the little kettle, hoarding every pinch, feeling of it between her fingers. Not even the fur on the belly of a mink or beaver was soft and velvety as this. They must have run it through a deerskin sifter. Never had she baked wheat bread before but she well knew how, for the day after her father went she had wormed out of Jary the way it was done, just in case he came home with meal. Now the girl’s firm hands mixed the flour and some water together, working in a little precious salt and maple sugar with the miller woman’s yeasty stuff. By the time she set it by the fire to rise, her father had taken off
his buckskin leggins that were wet from the fording of streams and had lain across her and Genny’s bed, some of the quilt over his bare legs, dead as a log from his long tramp.

  Twice during the night the girl lifted Jary to ease her sluggish coughing, but Worth did not wake up. Sayward thought her mother felt cooler, as if the fever she had not been free of since the girl could remember, had let up. A while before daylight she expected the dough had risen enough. Anyhow, it would have to do. She worked it into small loaves to bake the quicker and set them deep in the hearth, covering them on top and sides with hot ashes and sitting by to keep a slow fire.

  It was time for daylight when she roused herself from a half doze. A pleasing smell filled the cabin like a cloud. She scraped the ashes aside. Her small loaves lay round and brown under their grime. She brushed them with a turkey feather and wiped them clean with a greasy rag. When she looked up, her father was standing there clad only in his deerskin hunting frock that came halfway to his knees. He was sniffing hungrily.

  “You better give her a piece of the crust first,” he said, and Sayward saw it fall away white and beautiful under the whetted edge of his hunting knife.

  Up on the loft the young ones had crawled to the hole and were watching greedily.

  “It’s bread!” Worth said, holding the crust under Jary’s nose to smell.

  Her lips held that faint smile as if he had said, “Here I got two fisher fox skins for you.” Jary had always wanted a cape of those mahogany black skins. Never could you get anything finer to prank yourself out in. If a man wanted favor in a girl’s eyes, that’s what he would try to get for her. But one prime fisher skin was worth seven buckskins and a cape of skins would be worth a whole year’s kill of deer.

  “Jary!” Worth said louder. “You said you hankered after wheat bread. Here ’tis.”

  She nodded faintly but made no move to take it. He broke off a piece and put it between her lips.

  “Chew it. Swaller it down,” he coaxed at her, making his own jaws and throat move. He might have been showing how to a babe that had known naught but its mother’s milk.

  Her mouth smiled a little now as if she understood. Faintly she went through the motions, pressing with her lips and tongue and gulping, but it would not go down. Under her chest bone she started to cough and while they looked, the white of the bread stained a bright red in her mouth like somebody had dipped it in wine.

  Worth’s long buckskin-clad arms helped Sayward raise her to let the blood run where it would not choke her again. Under the scraggle of fresh beard his face was bleak as an old wagoners’ trace when black frost has hardened the ruts and hoof marks. The grooves across his cheeks had deepened and his eyes drawn nearly shut as if here was something they did not want to see. Her father, Sayward thought, could face a bear, even an old she-bear with cubs. He could tramp the woods three days going and three coming to give his woman a taste of wheat bread. But this was something it took a woman to stand.

  When they let her back to the bed, Jary was light as a pack of dried and brittle fox skins. Through the folds of homespun Sayward thought she could feel a coldness like stone. After this last bleeding her mother looked different. Her eyes stared at Worth like he was a stranger in her cabin and she had never shared her bed with him or given him four hearty girls and a lusty boy, not counting the babe back in Pennsylvania.

  He turned and went to the open door and looked out at the black forest where gray daylight was just beginning to come. No use turning your back on this, Sayward wanted to tell him. Whether you looked or no, death would come and life would go. Up in the loft all signs of the young ones had vanished. Sayward reckoned they were lying face down on their beds.

  A whole cabin couldn’t go to pieces this way, she told herself. No, if her mother couldn’t take hold of things now and her father wouldn’t, some person had to. Her voice came out hard to hide her feelings.

  “Don’t you want to come down and see your mam die, Ginny?” she called up to the loft.

  Like a slow wraith with her white legs and whiter face, Genny moved down the ladder. Behind her pushed Achsa, dark and mask-faced as a young squaw in coarse black pigtails and dove-gray bedgown. Last and slowest, holding on to each other when they could as if it would help, came the two youngest, Wyitt who fumbled and Sulie who held back now like the baby of the family she was.

  She was the only one her mother recognized. A tender look came in the worn out face.

  “Little Ursula,” her lips spelled out. “Don’t be afeard. I ain’t a goin’ to hurt you now.”

  Their father did not turn from the door. The dying fire flickered on the clumps of herbs Jary’s hands had gathered and hung to the joists with leatherwood withes for string. There were boneset for fever and dittany for supper tea and pennyroyal to purify the blood. They were all dried up and withered now. Never would they stand and wave their leaves in the wind again. For a little while they had bloomed. They had seen a mite of this world. Then their day was done.

  If Death was heading for this cabin, Sayward asked herself, where was Death now? Could they see or hear it when it came? Some claimed the wolves and corbies knew death. Once, Sayward recollected, they had sat in this cabin cracking walnuts and hickory nuts while the night dogs howled. All evening they had been bad. Jary had raised her head. Her mouth was ropy and her eyes like when one of them had done wrong.

  “Must be some Injun a dyin’ in the woods,” she said. “Them varmints kin smell death furder than a she-creater in heat.”

  Now while they waited, Sarge began to growl deep in his old throat. He got to his feet and stood in the middle of the floor. He looked at nothing, but the hair kept raising on the back of his neck. Sayward would give no sign that she saw or heard, but she felt the sweat chill on her body like she stood in a winter wind.

  CHAPTER SIX

  RIDDLEDY ME

  As I was walking down the lane

  Out of the dead the living came.

  Four there were and five to be

  Now tell me this riddle or set me free.

  — Old Riddle

  DAYLIGHT was running through the trees when Sayward took Jary’s bedgown and shortgown out to wash. You hadn’t dare wait too long, she told herself, to do something for a body you loved. Here, Worth had tramped that long ways after a bag of meal for Jary, and it turned out that all he could have fetched her was a length of domestic for a lonesome winding sheet. Oh, they could make out without it, she expected, ripping these and stitching them together in one piece. But it would not be as pleasing as bought goods. She beat the gowns with a paddle and scrubbed them with soap and sand. Never would her mother rest easy in her bury hole with her bedgown fit to turn the stomach from lying abed these days.

  When she came back from the run, Wyitt and Sulie were off somewheres. Only Genny and Achsa stayed in the cabin, going about their chores with cruel young faces. The bed was covered over. What lay there might have been no more than a long hump under the quilt. But you couldn’t mistake the taint that hung in the cabin and outside, too, if you had a nose sharp as a beast to tell it. Jary used to tell how back in Pennsylvania they would lay out the dead in a room without a fire and with the window open to keep that taint from getting any worse till men could ride far as they could with news of the burying. One time Jary was in such a house when they heard a fearsome screech at night in the room where nobody but the dead was. The men pushed in with candles and found that snow had drifted in over the box set on saw horses under the window and it showed tracks where a bobcat had come in and tramped over the corpse.

  She shook out the two wrung knots and hung the washed gowns by the fire. They would have to drip and dry before you could rip them. A living person might put on either one and its body would warm and dry it by its own self, but never would Jary as much as warm her bed again. The girl dipped hot water from the big kettle in the little trough Worth had hollowed out from a poplar log. Then telling Achsa and Genny they could help, she hardened her heart and la
id back the cover.

  Genny and Achsa came slow enough. This was no easy stint for young girls to lay out their mother’s body for the bury hole. But whether you liked it or not, Death was something you had to go through life with. Plenty times you would meet up with it if you lived long enough, and you might as well get used to it as you could. Not often did Achsa open her mouth but today she talked to hide her feelings. She had run the black haw comb through her mother’s matted hair and it reared up like Jary was still alive. Did they mind, she said in her low, heavy, boy’s voice, that Conestoga girl they heard of, who had her hair sheared close against the fever, and when they took her up to move her grave, her hair was grown long and shaggy again as a winter wolf’s? Sayward talked, too, but mostly under her breath to guard her face from showing to her sisters the pity she felt. It was no use sopping her soapy rag so easy, she told herself harshly. This wasn’t little Sulie she was washing. There would be no complaining, “Not so all-fired hard!” from the body she had to wash all over today.

  Out in the woods they could hear Worth’s homemade mallet whamming the rusty iron head of his frow. He was splitting out chinking boards for a box. That was likely where Wyitt and Sulie were, watching him make this thing they hadn’t seen before. Down in the settlements men yoked boards together with pegs the blacksmiths hammered out of iron. But Worth needed only to whittle out oval wooden pins and drive them with the grain in round augur holes, where they would hold a box together so long as the wood lasted.

  When noon came, they took a long time coming in, for there was Jary’s bread staring them in the face. The way a thing turned out, Sayward thought, was seldom the way you reckoned. Here, less than a week back the young ones’ mouths watered for wheat bread. They couldn’t sleep for fear Worth wouldn’t fetch meal for it. And now that it was on the table in front of them, they could hardly swallow it down. Mighty soon Worth went back to his mauling and Genny to the pillow she was sewing out of fine calico leavings. She would stuff it with feathers so her mother’s head need rest against no hard and splintery chinking boards.