The Sound of the Trees (40 page)

He came down from his horse twenty yards from the camp and walked to the fire. When he was nearly on top of them a woman looked up, her eyes like green moons in the firelight. She stood slowly but smoothly, an odd elegance to her movement which betrayed her shabby dress. She came toward the boy with her hands upraised.

Come on over, she said easily. You look mighty tired.

Her hair was wound up by a bright orange scarf and her smile seemed involuntary. Some of the others who sat around the fire, men and women both, looked up and smiled at the boy with similar smiles. He studied them all for a moment, then went around the fire and sat with the woman.

She gave the names of all the people who sat at the fire and he gave his own, and all leaned forward still smiling and taking his hard callused hand in the soft warmth of their own.

I'm Rosemary, not least of all, the woman said when the introductions were through. She put a hand on the boy's leg. Are you hungry?

No, the boy said, though he was very much so, I reckon I'm alright.

For a while they asked him questions. Who he was. Where he was going. Why he was going there. He answered them briefly, their faces warm and red and intent on his words and the slow way in which he put them forth.

When the questions waned Rosemary produced a pipe from the folds of her skirt and offered it to the boy but he waved it away. I don't guess I need that, he said.

The keepers of the campfire smiled among themselves. They smoked and sat and kept the fire going long into the night. The boy talked a little more but mostly he sat listening, until at last the laughter subsided and the fire drew down and they one by one laid back their heads.

When all was quiet the boy pulled off his hat and leaned back against the log he had been sitting on. He folded his hands over his stomach and closed his eyes, and that night he dreamed once more his dream of childhood. Yet in his dream he stood on a road, and in this dream the very same bear he had hunted in the mountains lumbered toward him out of the distant forest. Only when the bear was inches from the boy's chest did it stop. They stood in the road looking at each other. Then all at once the boy walked to the bear's side and put his hand upon its neck.

The white field they walked through was a blinding white. It covered everything. Only the snow and the approaching forest and both sun and moon all but gone and all the sky fading around them. The pines rose in a majestic white only slightly discernible from the rest of the world. The boy held fast to the bear's neck. They went and went, deeper into the white trees, deeper into the snow. The white sun and trees and the white earth drawing back, receding into deeper whites and thicker trees, the bear silent and leading the boy into the scorching white of the world where he now slept, would always sleep.

*   *   *

In the morning he woke to the smell of coffee and chicory and the heat of a new fire. He sat up and tugged on his boots. Everyone was gone from the fire's circle save the woman Rosemary who came by and handed him a ceramic mug. He leaned forward from the log he had slept on and coughed into his hand and rubbed his head and sipped the coffee. It tasted sweet and he was very thirsty and drank it quickly. The woman smiled down at him and after a moment she sat beside him. She asked him if he had a cigarette and he said he did. He took two from the battered pack in his breast pocket and lit them both and handed one to Rosemary.

She took it and thanked him and both looked out at the land. The sunlight was reddening behind the snowcapped mountains and it sparkled on the thin white dusting that had fallen to settle around them during the night.

They smoked. After some time Rosemary got up and returned with a plate of potatoes seasoned with pepper and blackened by wood smoke. She handed it to him and sat again.

Will you have much farther to go? she asked.

A week. Maybe two.

You can stay here as long as you want.

Well, he said, picking at the potatoes, thank you. But I best get on.

He put down the plate and pulled out his new billfold and leafed through the bills. The woman stopped him with her hand.

Other things are sold here, she said, the least of which is food. You won't make it without your money. Not on that horse. Keep it.

I'll make it, he said. He held the money out to her. I've got plenty.

She took her hand from his and put it on his raw face. I hope you always do, she said.

He rode out that morning in an unseasonal heat, passing through low rolling hills with the green stems of grass still glistening through the mist of snow. The mare's feet kicked up the white powder like moondust and the boy slackened his jacket collar from his neck and yaed her into the rising sun. Later in the morning he reached a downslope at the edge of the field he had been traveling in. He whoaed the horse and came down.

He sat on a rock that was kept bare of snow by the sprawling aspen it rested under. A creek ran along the base of the coming Tularosa Mountains and he gazed across it to where a pack of wolves slick with snow nosed the ground, lingered by the water, then ran away.

He considered what a man in Cibola County had told him about the country up there while they had sat eating at a roadside diner. He had told him that much of it was still wild beyond what he could probably imagine and that it was a place even the government had not yet attempted to rule. He said up there was where whoever put the world together went shithouse crazy. He said he'd find plenty of ranch work up there. That it was all that Colorado was good for. That and mining. He said also that he had gone to work in the town of Grand Junction a few years back but the winters had been too much for him. He told the boy one day he'd sat up from his tick and thought upon it, and that he'd left that very day. He said that a man's got to follow what's in his mind. That if ever there was a tough question put to him, a man should count on his mind to put things right.

To that the boy had smiled and nodded. He lifted the mug of coffee he had been drinking and told the man that he wished it was that way but in truth it was not.

For a long time the boy tilted his head up at the sky and smoked and looked out at the land. He turned and watched Triften foot the earth, still trying to reclaim her knowledge of that terrain. Then he turned back and leaned on his elbows. He took off his hat. His hair was growing long again and he put a hand through it to let the rare winter heat bear down upon his face. He rubbed his eyes and gazed back at the creek, putting his eye to one strand of water. He followed it until its path crashed and blended with a greater rope, watching it all tumble past and glinting in the sheaves of light, the only thing fit to mark it.

Soon he would be in that Colorado country the man had spoken of. And soon the sun would rise up from behind the mountains to stay with him the length of the day.

Acknowledgments

FOR THEIR FAITH and friendship, thanks to Bob Reiss, Tom Bissell, Sloan Harris, Jennifer Barth, Dennis Sampson, Eric Vrooman, Mike O'Sullivan, Mimi Dow, and Robert Cording. For the company of their song, thanks to Lucinda and Merle. A special thanks to my traveling partner Thad Weitz for his sharp eye and unreasonable sense of humor, and to Cassie Gainer for all the time and light she has given to me.

Finally and above all thanks to my parents Robert and Cathy, my brother Brian Gatewood, my sister Germaine Gatewood, and all my Gatewood family; Cristina McGinniss; Johnny, Al, and all the Germains, especially, and always, Nancy Germain.

THE SOUND OF THE TREES
. Copyright © 2002 by Robert Payne Gatewood III. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

First Picador Edition: June 2003

eISBN 9781466865969

First eBook edition: January 2014