The Sound of the Trees (5 page)

You was always so quiet around your daddy.

Yeah. I guess I was.

His mother knitted her fingers together and looked down at them.

I guess I should have learned something by that. I always felt you was smarter than both of us, even without regular schoolin.

If I'm smart in any way, it's on account of you.

His mother unlinked her fingers, then closed them again.

Out in the pastures, though, she said. She looked up at him. Out there you all seemed right together. Before the drinkin, of course. I don't know if you all talked out there or not, but your face was different out there. Both of your all faces. I remember watchin you two from the kitchen window. Could make me forget about the dishwater my hands was sunk in.

She told him in great detail one such story of his father taking him to work cattle in the morning and how the boy jumped on his back and fell back in the saddle, and she told him that that picture of the boy out there laughing with his father was once enough for her to live on. Then she paused and looked vanquished of emotion and said sadly now it was not.

The boy watched his mother pass through those stories and he watched the changes on her face that were seasons as complicated and heartbreaking as the world's own. He listened quietly and he smiled when she smiled and he looked down at the mist-risen creek when she paused to hold her quavering lip. But mostly she laughed and the boy smiled wide and the smile felt strange and warm upon his face, but it was late and they still had miles to go until they reached the mountain forests.

We ought get movin, he said.

Yet his mother went on with an intense fluidity now, as if the world's fragility and transience had suddenly struck her, and she told him finally of the time when he was a young boy and studying the Bible and his father came home violent from the fields after she found one of his bottles and smashed it on a fence post. She told him how she knew he was special and would grow to be strong and fine when his father raised a fist to her and the boy shot up and waved the good book in the air and exclaimed defiantly,
Muzzle not the ox that treads the corn.
And she told him how his father froze where he was standing and began to weep and went back out the door and into town and did not return for a week. She said it was the only time she'd ever seen him cry.

For the smallest of moments the story of his father's appearance in Silver City almost escaped his lips. After a long silence, both gazing glassily at the water, the boy looked up at his mother. Then with a siege of grief and love he told her that she was the finest woman he had ever known and he suspected there were not many ever made in her likeness, and if God played a part in anyone's life it was hers.

*   *   *

The day was long and patient. The boy's mother spoke no more. Upon leaving the creek she seemed to fall again into the deep grueling reflection that had claimed her and which she could not shake. Her hands worked the reins just enough to guide the horse, and her head fell into a loose slow rocking between her sculpted shoulders.

They rode for hours without stop or speech. A bobcat loped from the trees and mulled about in the horses' path as if in deep consideration of their shapes. The air began to thin in the early evening and their passage was made even slower by the darkening terrain and the forthcoming mountain chill, the boy's mother swaddled sheepishly in her son's blanket looking to be not merely in travel but in exodus.

At dusk they regained the creekbed. Its water was blacker and colder than where they had fetched from it before, and that night the boy made a tremendous fire. He made mesquite charcoals and cooked the elk meat high above it. He left his Colt bagged on the mule and now kept his grandfather's Winchester rifle under his free arm to ward off any unwelcome in their camp.

The creek ran on without repose and in the light of the fire the boy watched it move black and thick down the mountain. Both the boy and his mother stopped eating to watch silently as a white-tailed deer stepped furtively into the ring of fire.

Its coat was pure white and looked so soft to the boy he imagined if he touched it it would melt. It held itself with such grace though its ribs were exposed in the firelight and its eyes were awash with hunger. It turned its head and did not move away. For a moment it peered directly at the boy, its back arched like a cat's. The boy's rifle was pressed under his leg and he would have snatched it up but for that deep lost look in the deer's eyes. A look he could neither name nor betray. A moment later the deer sprung, a white flame among them, bouncing down the mountain slope and into the red moon which clung to the mountain ledge like a leaf on fire.

The boy looked across the flames at his mother. He shook his head. Lord have mercy, he said.

In the morning the boy awoke to his mother sitting beside the fire she had already rekindled. When he sat up she handed him a cup of coffee she had boiled. She watched him sip at the rim of the cup a moment, then held her arms tight to her chest. She looked up at the sky.

Trude, she said after some time. Now listen here. I believe it now. I believe you. When we get up there we can find us a new ranch.

He turned from the fire and she leaned forward and touched him under the chin.

Yes we can Mama, he said. Yes we can.

That morning they rode into the first mountain. They camped at noon and again before the moon came up. On those initial nights they camped in widemouthed caves and they camped in a gully one night and one night they passed a high desolate crag and they camped upon a band of quartzite with no shelter whatsoever. Around them plume agate stood ancient and treelike. They were rocks the boy had never seen before, and at times it seemed to him that they had left the world altogether. Higher and higher they rose, where the watermelon snow on the red rock gave way to a purer white, which in places covered the forest floor though it was only the first days of winter.

In the forenoon of their first Sunday out, they came trotting into a high mountain meadow. There before them appeared dozens of elk and the sun broke free and the boy and his mother sat the horses. They watched the elk gallop and mull about like a new texture being laid, and their presence against the mountains in that high sweet grass was a trellis alive and for a moment it seemed as if the world was reinventing itself and the boy was filled with an inexplicable hope.

See Mama, he said, tipping his hat back. He shook his head. Will you look at this, he said. We ain't got nothin to worry about. I'll take care of you just fine.

I know you will, his mother said, but her face was turned away and her eyes closed against the cold burning sun.

*   *   *

ON THE FIFTH
day of mountain riding the boy and his mother footed their way through the snow to follow up the side of a silt stream. The icy water crashed upon the black shale walls with abandon, and there a western diamondback slid with imperceptible quiet into the boy's mother's boot and gathered her flesh in its fangs.

She had only just climbed abreast her horse again when she felt the strike of the snake's teeth. The reins fell from her hands. The bitten leg kicked out from the stirrup. Her mouth shuddered then went slack without word, until the boy turned and looked at her.

He dismounted in unison with his mother's moan. Snake, she finally cried, pointing weakly and without precision.

The boy stomped the ground and shook her leg, jumping back when snake shot out of her boot and slithered into the dark trees.

He struggled the dirk knife from his bib and took his mother over his shoulder. He set her on the ground and cut back the boot leg, finding the two blood eyes just above her anklebone. He pressed his lips against her ankle and sucked the flesh of it. He spat out a long rope of the yellow poison juice while his mother braced herself, leaning up and knocking the boy's hat off and clenching her fingers on the crown of his head.

When he had spat out the last of the wormy milk he took her under the arms roughly, in the manner of someone grown impatient, and propped her up against a rock. She moaned while he dressed the wound with a strip of his shirt he ripped off from his waist.

Shit, Mama. Hold still. Why'd you have to. Shit. Look at this. It's alright. Shit, it's alright Mama.

But it was not. His hands trembled and he could barely keep his eyes upon the flesh that was already gone black where the snake's teeth had been. After a while his mother went mute. She leaned back on the rock. She pitched her head back and watched the sky. Still gripping the boy's hair she told him it was alright, though her voice was altered and distant. As though she spoke to him from the bottom of a well.

That night by the fire she told the boy she felt better, but he had stopped listening to her for many of her words had become garbled and trailed off to nothing. He made her sit very close to the fire and draped his extra clothes around her. He listened in vain for life in the woodlands, some other presence to soothe him, but nothing came.

All night he sat and smoked and watched his mother's eyes flicker and wane. From time to time he felt her head. When he touched her she mumbled incoherently, though several times he thought he heard his father's name among her blind pleadings. Once he got up and rummaged around in his saddlebag, and when he opened his eyes at dawn the amulet was still pressed in his lap.

In the late morning the boy hefted his mother onto her roan and he handed up the reins to her and asked her several times if she wanted to rest more but she said that she did not. She said that she was feeling much better. The fever's gone down, she said.

But Mama.

We've made it this far, haven't we? Ain't no little snake goin to stop us now.

*   *   *

She rode before him in the morning's gray domain with the wilderness heights almost attached to the clouds as if a great hem had stitched earth to sky. The boy rode abreast of his mother and watched her with slatted eyes and would not look full upon her for fear that closer inspection would reveal too much. She was slouched horribly in the shoulders. Her feet repeatedly slipped from the stirrups, and after a while she just let them flop against the horse's flanks. She patted down her hair with a pale hand as though in fear that someone would see her looking so unattended to.

The boy could not help but think of Eve expelled from the garden, and he thought his mother worse off for she gained nothing from the serpent but went riding as though there was never any knowledge of past or future, only that riding on and on.

Let's get a rest, he said when he could watch her no more.

No, no. We've got to get on. Before the cold comes, remember?

It's goin to be fine Mama, he said with his face still averted. In a few days we'll hit another town. We'll get you fixed up proper there and well rested. I didn't tell you before. I got some money of my own saved up, he lied, so when we get north it won't take long to start our own ranch. I can sign on with another outfit for a year and then we should have enough with my wages to start up on our own. Mama?

The boy's mother had ridden well ahead of him, her eyes all over the trees and sky.

Yes?

It won't be long now.

She turned to him at last. A green pallor had crept into the skin around her eyes and mouth. She smiled weakly. I know it, she said.

They rode very slowly that day. The landscape was unvaried in shape or color and they rode the horses through a deep snow. The boy's mother made no sound. Under the horse's feet the snow ran dark and almost black in the afternoon shadows, shaped like heaps of shawls cast over a land unreal.

In the early evening the wind ceased almost entirely. Silence fell in the forest except for the distant songbirds and a remote river and the trill of its water pass. In this quarter of the forest the boy's mother drew up on the reins and whoaed her horse with a whisper. The boy pulled up behind her. She was listening to the songbirds rising there, rising among them in that mysterious forest. She listened to the river and asked the boy if he heard it and he said he did and then she looked back at the boy and her face looked serene and the boy moved closer to her horse and spoke to her but she was already dead.

*   *   *

He sat with the horses' breathing. By and by he dismounted, taking a long time to hobble Triften and the mule. He slid his mother's body down from her saddle, holding her by the waist with one hand and stroking her hair with the other. Her hands were the cold white of the snow and her breasts sagged and pooled beneath her armpits. He walked her body to a grove of snow-laden aspen and came back and sat at his horse's feet.

Late in the night he made camp by the aspens. From the fire he looked into the dark grove but could not see his mother there. Once he walked over to be sure she hadn't fallen into a fever fit and risen again, but there was her body limp and ragged among the pine duff. Her eyes were wide and chalky under the black lids. He bent down and pulled off his glove and closed her eyes with his fingers and went back to the fire.

He rose before dawn. He fed the animals.

All morning the boy thought about what he should do, what there was left to do for his dead mother. He knew he couldn't bury her in that rocky terrain. He didn't have a spade or even a place where he could use his hands.

At last he went into the grove where her body had slouched over during the night, as if to inspect more closely that raised gnarl of tree roots. He stood over her and worked his chafed hands together. He closed his eyes. Then he hefted her in his arms and put her horseback, stroking the roan and quieting her until she was still.

The saddle creaked under the weight of her body. He used cotton twine to tie her arms and legs to the fenders of the saddle. He tied another lead rope to the roan and fitted the headstall on Triften and took up the reins and called to the mule and rode out. He rode out this way into the deeper mountains with his mother in tow, all of his belongings in a ramshackle congregation of horse and leather.