The Sound of the Trees (28 page)

The wind stirred up and rustled in the outcropping trees and he felt it acute on his face as he had the first time he had seen her wide soft eyes, and he suddenly sat on the damp ground and put his hands over his face. For a moment his mouth opened wide but no sound came and he lowered his head until he was as still as she. When he rose to his feet again he looked up almost timidly at her. She was smiling down at him, and her smile seemed to the boy wider than all the dark folding sky and deeper than it too.

I'll be right down, she whispered.

She tried to laugh but for the boy there was no laughter to be had. He knew that when a man is reduced to all but nothing he cannot laugh at it for there is no laughter in worship and worship is all there is when there is but one thing that remains.

They talked past the night and into the first hours of morning. This time she did not try to make him go and for a long time she told him about her home in Ansley, Mississippi.

I was born in the water, she told him. She laughed sadly. The ocean ran right up to our house and my mother would take her bath in it. Purest thing in God's whole world, she'd say. When I started comin out she didn't have the strength to get back up to the house. My daddy's brother came running down and brought me swimming into the world. He laughed about that all the time. You came swimming right into life, Delilah, he liked to say. To this day I still love that water. She paused with her eyes down and then she said, I wish you could see it.

I never been to the ocean, the boy said. I don't even know if I've ever seen it. Not even in books. He smiled up at her. Where I come from everything's dry. Even the rain. He smiled slightly again, then lowered his head and frowned at his boots. But I will, he said. I will see it. And it'll be you that shows it to me.

The girl made her grip tighter on the bars and pressed her head against her hands. She looked down at him for a long time. Trude, she said.

Then she told him about her mother and the Englishman her family had worked for and whom she named Roland James, and how he had taken their poverty beyond money. How he had raped her mother and then later how he had raped her. How it came to pass that her father found out and one night gone with knife in hand to the main house where Roland lived, and never returned. And she told him how soon after her mother too was gone, the only thing left of her a photograph of the ocean she found in the weeds on the side of the road. She told him how she was then left alone with the man who raped her before she had ever bled down there and who had also probably killed her mother and father. No one stood up for her save a few old women from down the road but their hands were as empty and black as her own.

Later on with the moon high and the boy sitting again she told him of better days, of the ripe fields and the slow summer nights. The way the dirt road warmed her bare feet. How the ocean went on and on for miles and how on days when there weren't any clouds the whole world ran on like one big sky. She told him about the kindness of her father and how he never took to beating or cussing but was always tender to her. She said for a long time she had asked why others were not the same way but now she did not.

The boy took off his hat again and placed it on his lap. The wind went away and the trees behind them stood silent as fence posts and she began to speak more slowly to him. She told him of the first time she had seen him and how crazy she had been and how she had hoped that he was a god come down from above to save her baby. Something in his eyes had told her if she could bring him close enough she would never again need fear or suffer the company of men. She said that she had seen his eyes very clearly even from that great distance and they had appeared like tiny bits of sky held in his face and then she remembered the blood suddenly across his shoulder. She remembered for him with her dark face pressed earnestly to the bars how her heart had sunk so deep and how she had believed he was going to die.

She watched his serious face below her and told him what her father had always said to her. That only the best things and the worst things that happen in the world are the ones you can never explain. She paused at this and smiled, so pure and pretty to him upon her tearstained face, saying finally that it was not, of course, the worst of things she imagined in him.

He listened silently and he waited until she stopped crying and then he told her about his own family. He spoke with an uncommon swiftness and at great lengths, passing his hand across his chest from time to time as if to wipe chalk from the slate of his heart. Telling her about what had been, what was now.

When the first full light came she told him he had to go. He rose slowly and told her once again that he would return. You're not forgotten, he said. Then he set his hat on his head and looked up at the lightening sky and before he turned away he told her that she would be free yet and he told her quietly, just above the shrill of the returning winds, that he loved her.

By the edge of town he caught up his horse and turned her out toward the upcountry. They stepped into the bramble with the light pooling over the hills. The boy leaned down into the neck of the horse and as they went he told her about the girl. With the mare he used words he never had in the open world, and in the cold quiet of the coming morning he told her the ways of his heart.

IV

S
EVENTEEN

WHEN THE BOY opened his eyes he glimpsed a tall luminous shadow clinging to the cabin wall. Out in the frosted dawn the shadow sparkled almost white on the earth. He reached for his pistol and collected it with a slow hand as he watched the door. He could hear a hushed voice from the empty window frames and could see in the bobbing lantern light the shape of his horse in the distance.

The boy eased his chin over carefully to find the old man in the darkness. He had climbed off the mattress and was down on his haunches with his back against the wall and he held the boy's rifle aloft in his wizened arms. The boy made a quick low hissing sound and the old man peered across the room at him with surprisingly calm eyes. The old man tilted his head minutely, then both turned back to the door.

There was silence for a moment and then they could hear boots shifting in the yard. Then they heard the mule bawling from the darkened trees. When the door came open the boy and the old man set their guns. A lone figure stepped into the cabin and pressed up against the wall. All the boy could see was the man's belt. He rode the hammer back with his thumb and took aim. Before his finger was around the trigger the warped floorboards whined and creaked and when the lanterns came up from the raised hands both the boy and the old man saw that it was already over. The men at the door numbered six, all slightly crouched with rifles cocked in the pits of their arms, all wearing the distinct mustaches of the Ralstons.

The men found the two hunched figures at the back of the room, their eyes squinted against the flickering lantern light and their hands cupped against their brows. The Ralstons split silently into threes and approached. The old man let down the boy's rifle like he'd been crestfallen by some distant truth he had long tried to forget. He looked across the room at the boy. The boy set his pistol on one of the chairs and when the Ralstons saw their weapons down they came forward.

The boy was thrown against the moonshine tub. His head hit the porcelain rim and blood ran down his face. He heard voices distantly and his eyes dimmed and relit to find the old man curled up on his tick and calling down the gods. He felt metal upon his wrists and he felt the clamp of handcuffs run tight to the bone. The blood ran over his eyes and upon his lips. He heard cussing and laughing and he heard some remote announcement of his arrest for breaking into the records building.

The hands upon him one by one recoiled and his head slumped against the side of the tub. Then the hands gripped him by the shoulders. As he was lifted to his feet his eyes opened again and through the blood he saw the old man being slapped. He appeared to be unconscious. The boy's rage came out in no more than a limp flailing of his arms. His head swung down against one of the men's chests as they dragged him out the door. Next to his eye he saw a blurred golden chevron on the collar of one of the assailant's jacket.

They walked him to the edge of the river. The voices around him grew silent. One of the brothers was directing the others. He was pointing at the boy's camp. The men who were carrying him set the boy against the tree trunk from which his horse had fled. He watched as three of the Ralstons kicked through his belongings. One of them held up his dirk knife and laughed and lunged at another. The leader told them to stop fucking around and bring the kid to the river.

He could see the blisters of dawn's light on the river as they hauled him down the bank, and across the water he could see the trees shivering in the breeze. The same trees he had woken to and slept with he did not recognize now. They seemed strangely thin and small. He tried to raise his hands over his head but one of the men slapped them down and told him not to move.

The leader came around with his arms folded over his jacket and stepped in front of the boy with his back to the river. He smiled at him. The boy closed his eyes. The leader spread his arms out and held them forth. Mornin, he said.

The boy opened his eyes and tried to lift his head from his chest but could not. The man leaned down and took him under the jaw and raised him up.

Better? he said.

He kept smiling. The boy made to spit a clot of blood from his mouth but it only bubbled and dripped down his chin.

Look us here, boys. Got ourselves the lonesome outlaw. Little pisspot he is.

The leader leaned down again and put a hand against the boy's chest and pushed him backward. His knees buckled and he tumbled back into the shallows of the river.

Cool as the breeze, the leader said.

He regarded the boy a moment longer, still smiling at him, then stepped aside and nodded to his brothers. Then all five came forward and walked the boy out into the water. He could feel the cold currents rushing around his ankles. The chill of it pricked his mind and for an instant his eyes widened to see the river and the grass bending on the opposite bank. The wind moving through them both felt like liquid metal across his face and everything around his eyes thick and heavy.

Suddenly he was on his back again with the water at his chin and the blood unfurling from his head like a flag. He tried to brace himself with his bound hands but they could not manage his weight. The leader followed in behind them and pulled up his trousers disapprovingly and straddled the boy's chest. He leaned over him and whispered close to his face while the others converged around them.

You broke the mayor's locks, didn't ya, boy?

Before he could answer the leader closed a fist around one of the bloody ropes of the boy's hair and sunk his face into the water. He held him under for several seconds and then jerked him out.

Didn't ya, ya squirrelly son of a bitch.

He pressed the boy's head down again. Under the water the boy felt the silt and rocks grinding against the laceration in his skull. When he reemerged his mouth gasped open. He drooled and sucked at the air. The leader held the boy by his shirt collar and leaned his head up to look at his brothers, nodding with a fierce ambivalence.

Boy, he said facing him again, you most lucky the mayor wants you alive. He let go of his shirt and the boy fell back into the water. Now confess.

The boy's eyes slid open and locked as well as they could upon the leader but he did not speak to him. He watched the man's teeth move across the bristling mustache.

You think you can stonewall me? You got the saddle on the wrong goddamn horse, kid.

The leader stepped back and booted the boy in the side. Two others stepped forward and did the same. The boy lowered his forearms over his ribs. A rib had cracked and he tried to cover it with his hands.

Confess to huntin the fuckin nigger girl thief. Confess to crossin the mayor in his own goddamn town.

They kicked him again. Then the leader stepped back and commanded the others away with outstretched hands and huffed for his breath. Confess it, he sputtered, wiping his mouth with the back of his jacket sleeve.

The boy looked up at him once again but all he could take in now were the trees and the sky, silent and brightening above him, and the last thing he remembered until they hit the thoroughfare of the town was his own voice lifted out of the last of his consciousness.

It was me, he kept calling. You damn right it was me.

He was led through town the same way in which the girl had been. People stood in small circles in the blousy morning light, watching the Ralstons pull the boy along with fifths of whiskey rocking in their pockets. On the faces of the townspeople they passed there were no clear expressions. Some crossed their hands behind their backs and spat and nodded or merely shook their heads. One of the Ralstons went before them waving his hands vigorously and exclaiming Justice over and over.

When they came into the plaza the boy's eyes rolled open again. What he saw was what he saw in his dreams. Dark colors and long slow sweeping motions. He could taste the blood in his mouth and each step seemed to further split open his side. He held his ribs as they went. The feet beneath him could only walk a few steps at a time before they could only be dragged on behind him. He saw a wash of faces and upon them he saw the mouths of the townspeople moving vague and deliberate.

In the hallway of the town hall the boy made out the Italian through the trembling slit of his eye, and though the blood now blocked most of his vision he saw clearly the terror laid upon his face. John Frank made to raise a hand but it stopped at his waist and dropped again to his side and he watched as the Ralstons led him away.

When they reached the mayor's door the men stopped and huddled around him and held him up under the arms. Before the knock was given, the brother who had been chanting Justice slurred out again at the boy, raising a finger to his nose and saying, Damn lucky, and hit him square in the jaw with the black stock of his rifle.