The Trees (16 page)

Before Wyitt got up from the table, big John Covenhoven came stooping in the door. His wife sent him over to see if Sulie had shown up. He said he better go along. Sayward dropped some dry candlewood and pine knots in her greasy leather apron. Wyitt lit a stick at the fireplace and went ahead. Sometimes he whirled around a pine knot or a sliver of candlewood and sometimes a bunch of shellbark torn off on the way.

More than once he stopped to make sure he wasn’t turned around again. Sayward told herself that never had she seen any of this strange black woods before tonight. They went over runs and wet places, up hill and down and up again till Wyitt said this was the knoll he and Sulie had heard the bells from. He was sure as could be and if they couldn’t find his and Sulie’s barefoot tracks in the soft ground, it must be the deil had his foot over them.

They built a fire there atop the hill and kept it
going to guide Sulie’s little feet through the night. One time or another they would go to the end of the firelight.

“Whoooo-hoooo!” Sayward would send her strong call into the black woods.

“Suuuu-lieeee!” Wyitt would yell as if splitting his throat would fetch her in.

All that answered were echoes, and that, they knew, was the woods mocking them. Out in the darkness they could hear the night birds and beasts going about their business like nothing had happened. The big-eared owl some called the Hill Hooter bit off his hoots calm and steady as always and his barred relation dragged out the last of his arrogantly. Now and then wolves howled far off and once came a distant wail through the woods like a panther or catamount. Or it might have been only the red fox that Worth said could give you the worst scare of any beast in the woods when it wanted. Oh, the wild creatures gave no notice at all that they saw the red light of the fire up on this hill. They went prowling their rounds as if no little tyke had been lost in the woods and didn’t know the way home in the dark to her pappy’s.

It started to rain and in her mind Sayward could see little Sulie, a bedraggled mite somewhere out in this wide bush. Where was she at, she would be asking herself, and would ever she see sisters and brother again? She couldn’t take her sopping wet
clothes off her little body tonight and snuggle down safe and dry in her loft bed under the roof her pappy had made with his axe, frow and augur. No, she must crawl in a dead, hollow tree like a bear or up a live one like a marten. Up a tree she might be safe enough, should she but recollect she is no young gabby bird that can hold on to a limb with its toes while it sleeps. If she as much as half-dozed, down she might come. And if her young legs snapped like kindling, she would have to sit on a rock and wait till they came and fetched her.

John Covenhoven said hadn’t they better go home on account of the rain?

“I ain’t sugar and salt. I won’t melt,” Sayward told him.

She was all for pushing further on, but the rain put out their torches. They had to wait for daylight to look for the place Sulie and Wyitt had parted, and then Wyitt couldn’t find the gat brush where the cows had stood off from the flies. When they got home to the cabin, no tuckered-out and brier-scratched little tyke was waiting for them, but Genny and Achsa hadn’t lacked someone to talk to. When her man didn’t come, Mrs. Covenhoven had bridled a horse and ridden over. And when he wasn’t back by early dawn, she had ridden on to the Tulls and Harbisons to sound the alarm.

The settlers answered the summons like the blowing of a great hunting horn. No church bell could
have drawn them as hard as such a heartbreak thing. Jake Tench and the bound boy, almost the last to hear, were the first to come. Billy Harbison fetched his hounds and tied them to a young dogwood from where they made it ring around the cabin. Tod Wylder rode his dun ox over with his wife on behind. A gaunt Kentucky woman came on foot with her man and her fourth baby. She was nursing it as she stepped dark as an Indian woman across the doorway, her breast white as milk beside the brown face, her eyes deep in their hollow sockets. Little Mathias and his boy came. The MacWhirters and the McFalls tramped together through the woods with all their five or six boys. And there were some the Lucketts had only heard about and never seen before.

It made you feel better with so many around, Sayward thought. The littlest ones didn’t know what it was all about and ripped and tore like they were at a frolic. But the older ones stood here and yonder, quiet as could be, the boys with their pappies, the girls with their mams in the cabin. The women had lots to ask about this thing. Each time a fresh one came, they listened to the story over again, and their eyes kept stirred up and glowing.

Outside the men stood in a hard knot, making men’s talk, chewing off tobacco, telling of bodies they knew had been lost. Their eyes were alive in their sober faces, and now and then when one of
them rubbed over his mouth with his hand, rumpling his beard if he had any and spitting copiously, he would cast around to see if his own youngest was all right, making like a grimace to cover it up, but there was no humor in it.

Jake Tench put a brighter face on them after the MacWhirters and the McFalls came.

“Never you mind, Saird,” he called in at the door. “Jude MacWhirter kin find a young’un for you. Now John Covenhoven couldn’t find one behind his own choppin’ block.”

The men’s mouths opened round to laugh at this joke on the childless Covenhovens. Judah MacWhirter had six or seven living and only God knew how many dead back in Kentucky. The women in the house laughed, too, pulling down their faces at each other, for behind the chopping log was where they told their youngest that babies came from. For a while now it was more like usual in the Luckett cabin and out. The men told lighter stories and slapped their legs. But the woods closed around this place too thick and dark to last. It hadn’t a field here nor tame bush, not a clearing or patch of sky a human could call his own. No, this cabin was owned soul and body by the great woods that ran on and on to the prairies by the English Lakes and to the Spanish Settlements on the Illinois.

Buckman Tull was the first to hear and the last to come. Billy Harbison loosed his hounds and
they were ready to start. It didn’t seem they cared if Wyitt went along or not to show them the way. They would go out in the woods and find out for themselves what happened to this young one that she didn’t come home. The women crowded out of the door to watch them go. They looked like Sinclair’s army, men and boys, with rifles and clubs, in boots and bare feet, shoepacks and moccasins. Buckman Tull had on his soldier coat with his horn slung over one shoulder, and it was he who took charge.

“They’ll fetch your young’un back,” Ellen MacWhirter comforted Sayward. “If she hain’t been killed by some wild creater.”

But all they fetched back next day was news of a barefoot young one’s track by a run. It might have been Sulie’s toes in the black mud, and it might have been the youngest MacWhirter boy’s. At the blast of the horn they had all run up and tramped it out before they could measure. The day after that they found nothing.

Oh where, Sayward cried in her mind, was her father? Why did he have to be off now when they needed him most? They were out of fresh meat with all these mouths to feed. And Sulie’s bed in the loft was slept in by strangers. Didn’t he know his favorite young one was lost out in the woods while he wandered around digging in the dirt for roots for the pigtail people!

When he did come home, she pitied him hard. The second evening little Hughie McFall ran in that a strange man was outside. Sayward thought one of the other women could talk to him. Then she looked up and Worth stood in the doorway, his bag of sang roots weighting his back, his rifle in his hand.

“What fetches all these folks?” he asked sternly of Genny who was nearest him in the crowded cabin.

When she shrank back and wouldn’t answer, his eyes moved on past Wyitt and Achsa till he found Sayward at the fire.

“Whar’s Sulie?” he asked louder.

“She never came home with the cows,” Sayward told him.

He gave a start like a beast in a trap when it gets the first lick with the club.

“When was this?” And when Sayward told him, “She ain’t out in the woods yit?”

The neighbor folks all watched him, pitying him as Sayward told the story. She had told it so often, the words were worn to her tongue like Worth’s pipestem to his teeth. Several times he groaned, and Sayward guessed he was thinking how it might have been different if he had stayed to home. She and John Covenhoven and Wyitt had done what they could that first night, but Worth could find his way through the woods like a lynx in the dark.
That first night little Sulie couldn’t have been far off. Now only God knew where she had wandered and to what end she had come.

When she finished, he looked like he had been dram drinking.

“Whar’s Louie?” he wanted to know.

She didn’t answer.

“You’d better git him.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Louie mought know. He mought a seed her.”

Louie Scurrah came early next morning. He wore a buck tail like it was some kind of frolic.

“So you wouldn’t git me before!” the hard look he gave Sayward said.

Oh, you could see he knew he had been slighted and now they’d had to send for him. It made him cocky as all get out. He set himself in charge and told the men why they hadn’t got anywhere. It was plain Buckman Tull didn’t like this. Today, Louie said, they would stretch a line with every man and boy six poles apart. They would whoop at each other to keep the line straight and when some body found a sign, Buckman Tull would blow his horn. Buckman Tull sat up and nodded. That, you could tell, satisfied him. And if they fired off their rifles, Louie went on, that would mean they had found the young one.

“Dead or alive,” he said, looking hard at Sayward.

Wouldn’t they need every human they could get, Achsa put to him. You could see she hankered to go along. Every last man and boy, Louie told her. But not women and girls. They were no good in the woods. They only made it harder. If women found a sign, they would run ahead and screech for the young one till it would hide, if it were around. No, the place for a girl was women’s work at home.

Achsa’s black eyes burned back at him. You could tell she reckoned it easy enough to be a man and go out in the woods whooping to keep in line and beating the bushes for a little tyke in a red dress that by this time the brush must have whipped halfways off her back. You did no whooping at women’s work. No, you stooped by the fire till your face singed and your leg muscles ached so folks got enough to eat. And you heard no horn. All you listened to was women’s talk from daylight to dark.

The women hardly stirred foot outside the cabin, yet it hadn’t one who didn’t have her own notion why they hadn’t found little Sulie. Tod Wylder’s woman told about a boy called Chris that had been lost in the woods back in York state. This was in the olden times. When they found him, a panther had scratched leaves over what was left of him till it would get back that way again, and that’s why it took so long to find him. Then Sally Harbison was acquainted with a lost girl it took four years
to find down in Virginia. An Indian had shot her for a deer and buried her so the whites wouldn’t find out. But her grave fell in and when they dug it up, they found the bullet in her breast bone.

God help you, getting lost in the woods was a fearsome thing, old Granny MacWhirter said. She had toothless gums and on the back of her head a white knit cap that was all yellow with age and hair grease. She was lost once herself for forty-eight hours.

“They’s only one word for it,” she bobbed her head, “and that’s lostness. Even a growed woman keeps a runnin’ and stumblin’ till she’s wore out. The smartest man gits fogged. He kain’t see straight any more. He goes crazy with bein’ lost, that’s what he does. If he comes on a trace he tromped every day, he don’t know it any more. Let him take it, and his craziness takes the wrong end. He thinks his own tracks an hour past are the tracks of some man he never seed or knowed. Let him hear man, woman or young’un a comin’, and he runs and hides. He ain’t a human no more. He’s nothin’ but a wild creater. Git him home and the whole world’s turned around end for end. The sun’s in the wrong place. It rises in the west and sets in the east. The North Star’s away down yonder.”

She knew a case once in Kentucky pitiful to tell. A young boy was lost seventeen days. They found
him digging up acorns like a squirrel with its paws and wilder than anything in the woods. He tried to bite the thumb off his own pappy and run off. Once he was home, they reckoned he would come back to his old life, but he never owned his own sister or mother. He wouldn’t sleep in a bed, and he dirtied the house like a hound. What end he came to she didn’t hear, but the doctors knew nothing to do for a case like that.

“Sometimes,” Granny MacWhirter bobbed her cap and worked her lips and drew down her face at you, “it’s a good thing if you don’t find a lost young’un!”

“Once they’re out too long,” Mrs. McFall said, wiping her eyes, “I’d as soon see them dead and buried. That’s easier to stand than this waitin’ around and never knowin’.”

But Sayward reckoned different. She wouldn’t mind if their little Sulie snapped at them like a pet fox for a while, just so they found her alive. She always snapped some anyhow. A little more would be of no account. And sooner never find her than see her dead and buried. So long as you never knew, you could keep on hoping, if it was a score of years. Once you saw a body put underground, that was an end to it and to a little part inside of you that died, too.

How many times the horn blew that day they didn’t know, for it was too far to hear. The men
must have camped out somewhere in the woods that night. You could see this wasn’t going to be over and done with easy like Louie Scurrah thought. In the morning Achsa, Cora MacWhirter and some of the other big girls made the rounds of the improvements that had stock to tend. They fetched back food and bedding. The men did not come back that night either. But a few nights following, when they were all down on pallets on the floor like so many logs jammed side by each at a rolling, they heard a whooping. Genny’s hands trembled so she could hardly pull on her shortgown. She thought they had Sulie.