The Sound of the Trees (7 page)

The man lit a pipe with his delicate hands, his pinky finger extended as though he was holding a cup of tea.

Must have taken some amount of money to buy them.

It did, the man said between draws on the pipe, but his voice allowed no emotion, neither pride nor arrogance nor sorrow.

You alone?

The man looked up from behind the smoke of his pipe. He nodded his head very slowly.

Yes, he said. I am alone.

His hand went down to his side and rested itself upon the rifle again. The boy's eyes went away from the fire and back to the man.

His coat had buttons of ivory the size of half dollars and he wore gold chains at the collar of his shirt. His hat was of some strange rounded felt the boy did not recognize and his pants were wide and straight without a flare at the bottom. To the boy he looked more alien than any beast he had seen in all his days in that land, and he knew no such man would travel alone.

I ain't never seen an English saddle like that around here, he said.

The man did not reply. His face darkened and he puffed on the pipe with his thin blue lips.

You from England?

Again the man made no response nor did he look at the boy. He pressed back his short oiled hair above his ears with his fingertips and leaned back and pitched his head back as if to listen behind him, at the tent.

Where you headed? the boy said at length.

There was now suspicion in the boy's voice, though he could not have said exactly why. The Englishman stared at him a moment longer, then outstretched one of his fleshy fingers and waved it about the general north. Over there, he said.

Over that mountain peak?

Yes. Over that mountain peak.

There a town over there?

But of course. What else? More mountains? I don't think so. The Englishman leaned over the fire, puffing steadily on the pipe and lifting the rifle into his lap. And you? he said.

The boy looked in the direction the man had pointed, forking his hat between his fingers and lifting it slightly off his head. He gazed out at the moon, the wide north starless sky appearing to him as if for the first time.

Same, he said.

The constant hum of the valley crosswinds was uprooted by a voice that came low and mournful from the tent. It was the voice of a girl. Her words were distorted by the ripple and snap of the tent flaps. The Englishman, whose face had fallen blank on the fire, jerked upright and uncrossed his legs. He set the pipe on the ground and squared the rifle on his shoulder again and aimed it at the boy. His eyes across the fire and on the boy were like dull green pebbles even the leaping flames could not give sparkle to.

The sound came louder now. Then the voice seemed to give up altogether on words and became a deep and breathy sob. The Englishman tilted the rifle up in the air to signal the boy to rise. I'm alone, he repeated. He let up the hammer. He looked above the sighting in question of what the boy was waiting for.

Yeah, the boy said, rising stiffly and walking backward from the fire with his eyes on the ground. You're alone.

The girl cried out again, a resounding guttural moan, and the Englishman wheeled around to the tent then turned back as quickly, clicking the hammer down again and setting his finger to the trigger, but all that remained of the boy were a few muddy boot prints and the low pound of his breath which drifted off and faded into the blue valley winds.

*   *   *

The tune he hummed to himself between bouts of coughing had played on the dusty old Victrola that had once occupied the parlor where his mother entertained the wives of the neighboring ranchers. It was a steady ascension of notes not unlike the grandstand music that rumbled from the aluminum horns at the rodeo grounds, and it reminded the boy not of any particular day or place but rather it gave him some distant sense of continuity in which all seemed good and warm and unbidden by time.

The illness had come with swift resolve after sleeping restlessly the night he met with the Englishman. He had kicked off his bedroll in the early morning hours, wet and sweating before the fire. He woke with a clot of blood in his throat and could only rise to kindle the fire before he was overcome by weakness.

Two days passed and all he could do was watch the fire and the trees that leaned in the soft earth around the stone border of his camp, and he watched them constantly, separate and in tandem, as if they shared some news of his demise.

The clots of blood became bigger and ran down from his lips with each cough, and lying as he was now on the cold mud floor of his roofless home, he recalled snaking beneath the blue flannel covers of his bed and reading tales of the Indian wars. He recalled the stack of them he kept beneath his bed to hide from his mother, all written on slick yellow paper bound by raw leather spines and illustrated with explosions of gunpowder and thick-necked men whose faces were drawn with heroic intensity, always crouched behind stone walls and always lighted by a dusky red serenity as if each battle were the last. He remembered pulling the quilt up under his arms and piling the pillows behind his head, placing the book on his stomach and tilting it up with his fingers and half listening to the rusty sound of the needle pulling along the record. He remembered the murmurs of the women downstairs and his mother's light laughter coming now and again, up the stairs and muted through the walls like a balm swept across his forehead to assure him that the world as it was now was as it would be forever.

In the evening of the third day he rekindled the fire and climbed into his bedroll and shimmied closer to the flames until the heat of them wore on his face. Still and quiet as he was, the sounds that came to him from the woodland were haunting and unfamiliar. Even his horse and mule would not shift or stammer to relieve him of the night's anonymity. He rolled again with his arms still pinned inside the bedroll and let his nose turn under the slop of mud he lay upon.

For a while he thought about the girl's voice that had come from the tent. It was a voice he would not have recognized if he had not remembered the cry from his mother when the snake found the artery that lay beside her ankle. It was as if they shared a common voice, as if their bodies had resigned themselves to another time and place where their calls were calls come forth from the throat of their spirits.

Later in the night the sound of the Victrola came back to him from beyond the fire and the voice of the girl beyond that. He wrestled from the blanket and placed his hands on his head. The music and cries commingled until they were together and steady, a melody so unlikely as not to have been music at all but instead some old telling wrought from the bones of his painted heroes whose bodies lay scattered on the empty hillsides, their tongues black and the cores of their eyes spilled out of their heads.

At last it was his mother's voice that rose above all, without music or cries but simply calling his name as she had that dawn when they left their ranch behind. It was a sound so pure and lost, like the warble of a bird from a far-off tree, and even when he pushed down the bedroll and sat upright with his elbows on his knees it remained with him. It came and went, pausing in attendance for another wind to carry its sound, then came again. The fire was spent to embers and only a low shadow of his own body wavered beside him in the mud.

Dawn began red from the bosom of the mountains and his tears were the first since his mother's passing, and once they began they would not cease. He gripped his face full in his hands and rocked up and over his ribcage to lay his head between his knees. The voice of his mother went away and the woods were quiet but for a brisk morning wind that moaned in the treetops. Yet he went on that way, and before him passed the vision of his mother not yet of her thirty-sixth year, driven away by the violence of her man and the brazenness of her son and now calling out to the dim and vacant woodlands which were no more to the boy than his own dark image.

He woke again to a heavy sun. He sat up slowly and wiped away the salt and dried blood from his face with the back of his hand. He looked up at his horse. She had moved closer to him during the night and now stood stamping her foot in the ash at the edge of the fire's waste. He studied her chest, rippled lean with muscle and covered with a hard shell of mud. He leaned over himself and put a hand on her leg and coughed violently but the blood did not come.

Later in the morning he got up and kicked out the surviving embers of the fire. He sharpened his knife with the tune of the Victrola still upon his lips, humming to himself like he imagined the warriors of the old Americas had done when their tribe had been slaughtered and they prepared for the last battle they would ever fight beneath the wide spirit of the sky.

*   *   *

His knife glowed pale among the white trees. In a patch of weed and scrub he bent with his hands on his knees to study some fresh markings on a fir tree.

He had stripped down to his boots and overalls, the bib folded at his waist and cinched by a belt he had fashioned out of one of his mother's old lead ropes. About his neck was the silver chain, the lusterless silver amulet that kept his mother's name. He was thinner now than he had ever been and his whitened chest looked nothing more than a sheet of paper bound around a pole.

When he lowered himself down beneath the overhang of tree branches he heard the sound of a riverbed washing against the rocks. He followed the bark peelings closer to the river. Among the scrub a blackberry bush stood crippled in the dripping weeds. He picked one of the berries and tasted it, pinching it with his teeth like a barterer testing a coin. When he had eaten all he could he leaned back against a pine and closed his eyes.

Sometime later the boy awoke to the sun still hovering lazily above the mountains and he woke to the rushing river, but what he sensed first were the human sounds that came from the precipice shouldered above the river water. As he leaned up on his elbows there came a scream. It came again. He rose to his haunches. He listened. Again it came, and he knew it was the same voice he had heard coming from the Englishman's tent days before. It seemed to the boy a pleading, and from her crushed voice came some wild testimonies he could not piece together.

He rose against the aspen trunk. Through the low branches and creosote bush he made out the figure of the Englishman. He wore a brown frock coat and from the broadcloth at his neck hung a knot of silk. He was belted with an ivory-handled bowie knife and he stood unmoving. The boy crept closer. Against the light that dished off the water he saw in the arms of the Englishman a small package. It was wrapped in white linen and the Englishman held it closely to his chest. The boy squinted hard at the purple stain on its underside. The wailing from the girl would not cease, but the boy could not see her. He waited to see what the Englishman would do.

At length, the girl's cries subsided. Then the Englishman hoisted the package above his head very slowly, as if in offering, and held it out over the water. The cloth fluttered gently in the warm breeze. He let it go. It tumbled end over end and hit the frothing water where it bobbed and flowed for a moment, then sunk into the rapids and was gone.

The girl was suddenly crumpled against the Englishman's legs. Behind the Englishman all the boy could see of the girl were her raised fists. The man watched her for a few moments, almost with a look of playfulness, then shook her grip loose from his legs and walked out of sight.

When he saw the Englishman had gone the boy sprang up and went running back for his knife which he'd left beside the tree. The suspender branches of his overalls swung up and snapped against his stomach. He caught the knife up from behind the brush and turned and squinted against the sun and ran until he glimpsed her standing by the river's edge and stopped all at once.

In the fading light he saw her. She was dark. Her skin was like ebony afire. Her hair too was dark and it fell past her shoulders like nests of stone. Beneath the paper-thin cotton shift and the blue shawl gathered around her throat she was very thin. For that moment in which he first saw her she did not move at all. She was kneeling up with her hands pressed against her thighs. Then the girl brought her hands to her face and her eyes were terribly dark, like fire-scorched crystal, and she held her thick tangle of hair over them and began quietly to weep.

The boy's first thought was one of sadness, yet he thought other things about her in that single moment. He fumbled around the trees. He ran up to the edge of the gorge and looked around for the Englishman. Then he called out for her.

She did not seem surprised by his voice. She slowly raised her head as though she had only been patiently in waiting. He called out again. Stay there, he called. Stay right there.

The girl did not move. Even from that distance her beauty seemed a thing inexplicable to him. She was so very dark, and yet all he could see in her aspect was a clean and wheeling light. It was the kind of light he'd seen only once before, when his mother had smiled at him that morning long ago when they'd left the ranch to begin their lives again.

I'm comin, he called once more. But before he took three steps, as if summoned from the netherworld, a great paw came crashing across his shoulder.

It came so fast there was no time for thought. The boy fell to the ground and lifted his knife in the air. It crossed in front of the bear pitifully small. He rolled over. His shoulder swept up the earth's floor with its wet blood. When it rose before him on its hind legs the wake of its shadow brought out its face clearly and the boy saw that it was not the bear at all but the Englishman. The man held his ivory-handled bowie knife in front of his belt. He stood in a crouch, sawing the air with the knife. He said nothing to the boy. The boy climbed to his knees. He took his knife into the hand of his working arm and rose to his feet. The Englishman sneered at the boy just as he had at the girl. The boy lunged for him but the man stepped to the side and took the boy's arm with his free hand and struck the boy again in the shoulder. The boy fell back to the ground. His knife shook weakly before him. This time the Englishman did not wait for the boy to rise. He came down with the blade aimed at the boy's stomach, but at the last moment the boy slid from beneath him and sunk the knife in the Englishman's back.