The Sound of the Trees (23 page)

John Frank watched him. The lights in the cantina flickered dully from above the counter and fell pale and weak upon the table where they sat.

Yeah, he said at last. I guess I do.

But you don't even know her, John Frank pleaded. Not even her name. How you think you could tell something like that?

The boy fumbled with the remains of his cigarette then looked at it with annoyance and pushed it out in the ashtray.

I don't know. I ain't never known it before. I know how it's said. Warm feelings and dizzy in the head. Some kind of calm comin over you, but I ain't seen it. But the dreams. He spun the ashtray beneath his fingers. In the dreams, he said. Well. I seen her dyin, and I feared it. The boy let off the ashtray and made fists of his hands, then opened them again. Every time there's this great light pourin out of her, he said quietly. Then all of a sudden it just bleeds out. And I was scared for it. I guess that's how I know. I guess you know you love someone when you're afraid of them dyin.

The boy drew out another cigarette and lit it but did not take his eyes from the window. He looked out at the empty road as if it were something he had seen a thousand times and was condemned to look upon for a thousand more.

Well, John Frank said, I don't know nothin about that. What I do know is that I'd be damn sorry if you got put up. I know you're alone, and I know it may not seem it, but I ain't got that many myself.

I know it.

Well, just don't forget it, John Frank said. That's all I'm askin.

The boy turned from the window and a small sad grin drew across his face. His cheek shuddered and a long tear ran down from his bad eye. Forget your sack-of-shit person? he said. Never.

F
OURTEEN

UNDER THE FIRST full moon of autumn the boy packed his saddlebag by the river. He packed the cotton rags the old man had given him to dampen the sound when he cracked the locks on the refectory door and he packed the two-foot iron bar he had pulled from the wreckage of an abandoned bridge downstream. He packed his bedroll up high on the mare's rump. He strapped a lantern at the concha of the saddle and tied it on with his mother's old lead rope. His hair which had grown long enough to sting his neck when he rode was now drawn back with a frayed piece of cottonweave he had cut from the same rope. The hat he still thought of as new was dirt-crusted and side-clefted from his constant fingering and it sat upon his head like a crushed bird.

At the door of the cabin the old man looked on quietly and without protest. He stood knobby-kneed and drunken with his hands working back and forth over his arms.

Once the boy had mounted Triften he walked her to the door and sat looking down at the old man. The old man asked the boy why he was prepared to give so much to someone he didn't even know and he asked him half seriously what it was that he himself got for putting the boy up. The boy worked the reins in his hands and the light from the moon was bright upon them and he said that for once he would get to see some justice in that town. Maybe not the kind writ in books, he said, but justice just the same.

When he got to the outskirts of town he dismounted by a thick cedarwood that stood alone in the scrub. He laid out his bedroll and pinned it down with some loose rocks. For a while he sat under the tree and turned the equipment over in his hands, gripping the iron bar in his fist.

Before he got up to his feet, two men came riding horseback on the road beneath him. As they came nearer he could hear them talking and saw that both stared ahead at the road. At first the boy thought they were arguing about a woman but then it was clear that it was a horse they spoke of and that one or the other had misplaced or wrongly sold her. When they came abreast of the boy he could see their heads bobbing sharply up and down, with their eyes still looking ahead and one man pointing and poking his cigarette toward the sky, and then they were gone down the road.

He walked into town with his horse trailing on her lead rope and quickly stepped into an alleyway that led back toward the refectory. He passed the squat adobe houses and he passed dimly lit rooms where shadows fell out of the windows and onto the road. Each sound caused the boy to stop and listen. A tick or rap or clutter of bush froze him and by the time he had arrived at the records building he was exhausted.

The refectory was long and low and without moonlight upon it, the red clay bricks of the door dull and dark as a stall gate. He walked the horse down the road a little farther, then came back and leaned against the wall and got his breath and let the saddlebag off his shoulder. He set it on the road. After a moment of looking out and listening with his hat cupped in his hand and held at his chest, the boy squatted down and untied the saddlebag.

The locks were three in number and he wedged the iron stake through the lock cuff and with his other hand held the rags over it. He leaned down with all his weight and when the lock finally cracked open he spun around and pressed his back to the door and sat on the road. He pulled his hat lower as though it would better conceal him. He sat still and listened. Nothing came. When he'd broken the last lock he slid the cuffs off and set them in his saddlebag and sat against the door for a long while.

When he finally rose and pushed the door into the room he brought forth a single match from his breast pocket and lit it on his zipper. He put the match to the lantern and closed the door behind him. There before him stood a mountain of boxes and crates. Along the walls stacks of paper were packed into the shelving just as John Frank had told him. There were no light fixtures he could see and only one barred window, high in the back corner of the room, out of which the moonlight spilled so mildly it seemed only a different shade of dark.

He held the lantern by his neck and carefully stepped over the boxes and into the middle of the room. He turned and circled slowly round, each direction out of which he could not see any type of order. He took down his hat and wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead and wiped his hand across the leg of his trousers. He set the lantern on one of the high crates and got onto his knees and began to thumb through the papers in the box closest to him. With only one working eye it all seemed almost another language, tiny scribblings of red ink faded by the years and without clear notation as to what history they meant to keep. He worked quickly through the first row of boxes, most of which he could not decipher. He had allowed himself a half hour until he would have to leave for fear of being discovered and now that time had passed and he had not searched a third of the boxes on the floor.

He took up the lantern and straddled the row that stood in front of the shelves and began to flip through the papers. He went so fast now he barely made an effort to read them. A voice spun in from the plaza and the boy stood still. He listened as the voice grew harsh and he heard the Spanish inflections of it though he could not hear the words, and he waited a long time until it had fallen away. Then he went on furiously, his hands brought to such shaking he could not separate one page from the next. He let the papers he looked at fall to the floor and his arm swept others which he had not studied off the shelf. At last he came to a thick folder across which a great smearing of black ink spelled out the name Delilah. He stopped and squared it before him and held out the lantern and set it on the highest shelf and opened the folder.

There before him she lay. In bold letters at the top of the first page he read, Delilah Jones. Black girl. Brought to county July 7 on one count of theft. Rendered guilty and incarcerated. Held in #12 of county prison. Sentence pending.

He flipped the page. The same indecipherable scribblings appeared again and beneath them in typed letters were her height and weight and age and birth state but before he saw any of those things he was up and out the door with the lantern held up to his eyes as if to burn from them the words he had read.

He shut the door and stood with his back pressed to the wall. His breath pounded in his chest. He listened as it faded off, listening long and long into the black until all he heard was the sound of his feet clapping down the road and the rustling of the branches from the distant treetops which the moon held captive, bright like candles on the brown and barren hills.

*   *   *

Morning wind blew the boy awake at dawn. Triften stood tethered to the cedar tree with the lead rope twisted about the trunk. The boy looked up and saw her rubbing her nose in agitation against the bark and he shucked off the bedroll and sprang up and led her around the tree, speaking softly to her. When he had her standing free he stepped over the rocks and pulled on his boots and pushed his pant legs down, gripping his hands together to take away the trembling that had not stopped since he first read her name.

At Garrets he sat in a booth near the back, nodding to the barstools where sat the cigar smokers with Thomas Trewitt who held a wet rag to his head. No one else was in the cantina save Miss Jane who brought him coffee and an ashtray. The boy studied the old men at the bar to see if they knew anything of the night before. If they did, they did not show it but only smirked and nodded dully as Trewitt mumbled some fable of debauchery across the counter.

Early start this mornin, Miss Jane said.

Yes ma'am. He made a glancing gesture toward the bar. Looks like they found another to suit them, he said.

The waitress looked over at the bar and shook her head.

I prayed those two would be somehow split apart, but it looks like they've multiplied.

He ordered huevos machaca and two glasses of buttermilk and a stack of blue corn tortillas. The waitress penciled it down. She shook her head at the bar again, smiling back at the boy, then went away. The boy smoked and watched the men talking from the corner of his eye.

He ate very slowly. He moved the tortillas in his thick jaw and drank his coffee and out of his good eye watched the daylight streaming pale and cold and wintry across the hills, and he watched it intently as he had once done but had not for a very long time.

The sight he saw when he looked up again as Trewitt twisted in his stool and turned away from the bar made him put down his fork and stop chewing. High up on the lapel of his coat Thomas Trewitt wore the same golden chevron the boy had seen pinned to the shirt inside the lawyer's house. He swallowed hard. When Trewitt made to stand the boy set his money on the table and turned his head away until he heard the doorbell chime. When the door rang closed he rose and went out and followed him down the street.

Trewitt walked with his hands in his pockets and he whistled and bowed his head to the people he passed. The boy stayed at a distance until Trewitt turned down an alleyway and into the morning shadows. When he caught up to him the boy was in a full run, and before Trewitt could turn to see what was coming the boy had his shirt gripped at the throat. He spun him around by the shoulder and pushed him up against the west wall of the general store. Something like a shriek came out of Trewitt and the boy closed his hand over his mouth and stood up close to his face.

Who are you?

Trewitt's eyes were frantic, rolling back and forth like a wild horse's at its first sight of a rope. Newsman, he mumbled.

Where'd you get that pin?

Where'd I get what?

The boy gripped him tighter by the collar. The flab of his neck rolled out over the boy's finger. The goddamn pin, he said.

The mayor. The mayor gave it to me.

Trewitt's mouth was hot and wet under the boy's hand. The boy shook him violently. Trewitt's eyes welled up.

Are you the lawyer?

At this Trewitt's eyes blinked in confusion and he raised his head as much as he could from the wall. Who? he cried. What lawyer?

The mayor's lawyer.

Trewitt shook his head more emphatically now. The boy moved his hand from Trewitt's mouth to his throat.

I ain't afraid to do it, he said.

Trewitt's eyes were wild. His breath got caught in his throat and his neck fell limp in the boy's hand and he whined something about going home.

Oh Christ.

The boy dropped his hand and stepped back. Trewitt moaned and ran a hand over his reddened throat. Why the hell did you do that? he said.

You say the mayor gave you that pin?

Yes. Yes, that's what I said.

Why?

Trewitt shook his head and clenched at his throat. I don't know, he said. It's just an honorary thing. Part of the establishment, I suppose. He pulled the collar of his shirt down his chest and fanned it up and down. Look at me, he said. I'm supposed to meet the mayor in ten minutes. He looked up at the boy. You know what I could do?

The boy stepped closer to him again. What could you do? Kill me? Go on then.

You're crazy.

Tell me what the pin says.

It's Latin.

For what?

United we stand, Trewitt rasped.

Divided we fall, ain't that it?

No. Yes. That's it. But it just says the first part. Jesus, look at me. He swathed a hand across the sweat on his chest. What do you care about it to make you like this?

The boy looked down the road and shook his head. He pressed his fingers to his eyes. Then he looked off down the road again.

Trewitt peered up from his chest at the boy. You're in suspicion of something, he said.

The boy kept his back turned away. Forget it, he said.

Wait. Wait a minute, Trewitt called out. I know what you're after.

The boy stopped and came back and collared him again.

Hold on now, Trewitt said. Just hold on. I'm looking for the same thing you are.

Oh yeah? And what's that?

Well, you know. News.

The boy turned and started off again. Stories, he said. Stories is all you're lookin for.

Thomas Trewitt watched the boy walking away. Then he said, She shouldn't die.

Once more the boy stopped and turned. He looked at Trewitt. Then he made a jump step forward and took him by the neck.