The Trees (17 page)

It was old Hugh McFall and Hen Giddings whooping before they got to the cabin so the women and young ones wouldn’t be scared. They had come back to see if the women folk were all right and the stock tended. They would take back some meal to the woods tomorrow. Sayward threw wood on the fire for light and got them rations. After their bellies were filled, they told what they knew.

No, they hadn’t come on the young one yet. But that Louie Scurrah had a lynx eye in the woods. You needn’t be out long to know he’d been raised by the Delawares. Between him and Worth they had no need of Billy Harbison’s hounds. The first day Louie found spicewood chewed by some other creature than a deer, for it had teeth marks on the
upper side of the twig. And Worth picked up a red thread torn off by a black haw.

Oh, those two could follow where you could see nothing. And every sign they came on, the young one was further and further from home. They found where she ate wild cherries and whortleberries and where she crossed the runs. You could see her foot plain as could be in the sand. The third day they came on a nest of old leaves where she spent the night. She must have camped here more than one day, for her little feet had beaten a path in a heavy stand of timber. Now what do you reckon she had in there?

Old Hugh, who was telling it, settled himself. He blinked solemn as an owl.

You’d never guess it, he said. Louie Scurrah found it himself and had Buckman Tull blow his horn. When they all came up, he took them in and asked did they see anything. So help him, if there wasn’t a little bitty play house made of sticks in that big timber! It had bark on the roof and a doorway in the middle. Inside it had a bed of leaves and a block of wood for a trencher with a scrap off a young one’s dress for a fancy trencher cloth. It even had a nosegay of flowers. Anybody could see right off a mite of a girl had done this. Away back here in the wilderness, far from any human’s cabin, she had made herself a little house just like her
pappy’s. You might reckon a big bearded fellow like Jake Tench wouldn’t mind looking at such. But when Worth raised up and called out to the woods, “Sulie! Sulie! Be you still alive?” Jake had to walk himself off in the bush.

Genny couldn’t listen any more. She buried her head in the bed clothing. Achsa’s brown face twisted up in cruel lumps. Sayward turned hard to the fire because like Jake she couldn’t stop her eyes. “Sulie! Sulie! Be you still alive?” she called out in her mind with her father. Out there in the great woods, further than any of them had ever been except maybe one or two, their little Sulie had built a play house to recollect how she and Wyitt and Genny and Achsa had run and played together by this cabin. Wasn’t it just like her? Who but little Sulie would put a nosegay in a play house or make up a trencher with a fine red cloth? She was ever saying grand things that no one dared think of but she and her Granmam Powelly who lived in a story-and-a-half chipped-log house across the road from Granpappy’s gunsmith shop along the Conestoga.

Sayward wished she could see for herself that little play house Sulie had made. She’d give all she had if Hugh McFall and Hen Giddings would take her back with them when they went. Those men would need a woman if ever they found Sulie. God
knows that after all these days she would be a poor little bag of bones. She would need special waiting on. Men would not know how.

But old Hugh McFall and Hen Giddings went back to the woods without saying a word, no not a word. They went alone at daylight, and that was the last the women saw of them for a week.

Once upon a time Sayward wished she had a clock. Mrs. Covenhoven had one, and Portius Wheeler, the bound boy said, carried a pocket clock that struck the hours though it was no bigger around than his fist. A clock, Sayward reckoned, was almost human, for it had face, hands and sense to tell the time. No doubt it was a friendly face to have around and to hear it ticking sociably through the day and night. But a human could tell time the best, for some hours were fast and some were slow. Now you could tell nothing from Sayward’s face, but the hours of this last week were the longest in all her born days. This was a time in her life, she thought, she would never want to go back to and live again.

You would expect, Genny said, that since they found Sulie’s play house, it wouldn’t take long till they found the little tyke herself. But it didn’t work out that way. No, it seemed the deil had done it like this just to work up their hopes and then let them fall through. The men said there was a plain track of Sulie going into that place but none
going out. Like a pack of hounds trying to find the lost scent, they made bigger and bigger circles around, but the one cold track was all they could find. It was almost like an eagle had swooped down by her play house and carried her off, leaving never a sign on the ground.

In worn-out bunches the men and boys straggled back. They said they had done all mortal man could do. They had tramped the woods from Dan to Bersheba. They had tramped it further than any young one could travel on its own shanks. They had raked it with a fine tooth comb. All they had found were horse tracks and a place where some strange Indians had made fire for the night.

“The young’un’s a gone Josie,” Jude MacWhirter shook his shaggy head. “They ain’t no use a huntin’ what ain’t thar.”

Now little Sulie’s bed up in the loft lay empty and lonesome again. Only Worth and Louie Scurrah had not come back. No, they had stuck to the woods like stubborn hounds that can’t be clubbed into giving up the scent. There wasn’t a fresh bone or dust of meal left in the cabin, but Sayward reckoned they could make out by their selves. The young ones could pick berries and fish the river with whang leather outlines. Wyitt could snare rabbits, and she could cut out the summer worms. Maybe, too, a body could take a rock and keep still long enough in the woods to call a turkey or kill a
cock pheasant when he came strutting to his log.

But the hungry young ones were glad enough to lay eyes on Louie Scurrah at the cabin door one morning. Flowers sprang out on Genny’s white cheeks though it would be an hour before she should taste the venison slung in a red summer hide on his back. No meat ever came in handier but Sayward begrudged him sorely that it wasn’t their Sulie he had fetched back. Never would she forgive him that.

He said he and Worth had followed the tracks of the horseback Indians till they separated and petered out. Back on the Miami River he had to give up, but Worth wouldn’t come home. No, he said he couldn’t look at his cabin now with his littlest gone. Now that he was out this far, he would keep on beating the woods for her till he reached the grandaddy of rivers. Always had Worth wanted to lay eyes on that long river frozen in winter at one end while the other end has flowers and palm trees on either bank.

“He said one man could keep his cabin in meat till he got back,” Louie told her.

Sayward’s face was tight-lipped and cruel. She had not a word to say as she got a roast ready, for what could you say to a man who had beat the woods for your littlest sister that was likely dead, then fetched meat home for your living sisters and brother to eat. Oh, she would feed their empty
bellies with smoking, hot flesh till their cheeks stuck out again, but it would be bitter enough meat to her. Dinner done she scrubbed what little she had to scrub and took herself off by her lonesome to the woods where she could work this thing off with her legs.

Everywhere she went the trees stood around her like a great herd of dark beasts. Up and up shot the heavy butts of the live ones. Down and down every which way on the forest floor lay the thick rotting butts of the dead ones. Alive or dead, they were mostly grown over with moss. The light that came down here was dim and green. All day even in the cabin you lived in a green light. At night that changed. By day you looked paler than you really were. By night the fire gave you a ruddy glow. She always waited for night time when little Sulie had looked to be ailing. Likely it was only the woods light. By firelight she would be well again.

Oh, it was a cruel thing for the trees to do this to a little girl who had never harmed them more than to shinny up their branches or swing on a creeper. Some claimed the trees were softhearted as humans. They said the pole of the cross had been cut from pine and that’s why the pine was always bleeding. The crosspiece, they claimed, was from quaking ash. The quaking ash has shook ever since, and never can it live now more than the thirty-three years of the Lord.

Likely as not, Sayward told herself, a tree might tremble and bleed for the son of the Almighty who could heave it out by its roots with His breath or smack it down with His thunder. But neither pine nor quaking ash would give a hait for a poor little girl body wandering around lost in the woods crying for her sisters and pappy who never came to answer. And the birds and beasts would be as bad. Oh, she heard Genny sing a catch once where the birds and beasts covered up the lost Babes in the Woods with leaves. But that was just a pretty song. Any woodsy knew that the corbies would sit around in a ring waiting to pick out the poor little Babes in the Woods’s eyes. And if any beast covered them up with leaves it would be the panther so he could come back and munch at their starved little hams another day.

Back along the Conestoga the trees seemed tame enough. Out here they were wild trees. Even in the daytime you could feel something was watching you. When you went through the woods it followed sly as a fox and stealthy as a Shawanee. Leave your cabin for a season and it would choke it around with brush. Likely you would find trees growing out of your bed when you got back.

Once Sayward thought she heard voices, but it was only beetles in the air. The sound came stronger when she got to the riffles. Far off she swore she could hear Sulie calling. “Sairdy!
Pappy!” her little voice came. Sayward knew it was no more than river water slopping and gargling over logs and stones, but it sounded real enough to make the sweat come and her knees to tremble.

She let her legs go till she reckoned she had tramped far enough. First thing she knew she’d be lost like Sulie. Back along the river she couldn’t shut out those voices. Even the place was such as a little tyke like Sulie would hanker to play in. Fern grew like a garden all over the ground. You couldn’t walk without it feeling soft and smelling sweet against your leg. Yonder was a row of fat pines you didn’t often lay eyes on in this hardwood country.

Then she stood stock still.

It wasn’t water voices she heard. A path wound here, worn by somebody’s feet. It led straight under the dark of the pines. Out at the other end where the sun shone golden on the river, somebody was lying on the brown pine needles. Now she saw it was a girl and a man.

Still as a deer she stood there watching. Then sober and silent-footed she went back to the cabin.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GENNY’S WIDE, WIDE WORLD

S
AYWARD’S
bare toes gripped the sill log as she stood in the doorway. The cabin looked to be empty. Wyitt must have gone after the cows. But she knew Achsa lay in her bed. She could see the loft boards, that never would lay quite flat, rocking a little on their joists.

“You a ailin’?” she called calmly, blowing up the ashes and laying on a stick or two so she wouldn’t have to make fresh fire.

Achsa didn’t give her an answer. She didn’t need to, for Sayward knew she was sulling. Achsa didn’t like it that Genny and Louie had gone off by themselves in the woods. Well, she would have to learn that two’s company and three’s a crowd.

Sayward let her body down on the wall bench. Once Mrs. Covenhoven had asked her if she wasn’t tired, and Sayward had puzzled over it a long time afterward. If ever she was tired, she never knew it. Sometimes it felt good to sit down. It did today. She told herself she must have tramped further than she thought. But all the time she knew what it was. They had run from the wolf into the bear, and now the wolf had caught up to them again.

You could easy tell, she told herself harshly, that God Almighty was a man. He had favored man plenty when He made him up out of a fistful of dust and spittle. A man had no apron strings for things to get tied to. No, a man could gander around and have his pleasure and then wander off free as a hawk wherever he had a mind to. He could forget it by tomorrow and deny it a few months hence. But never could a woman deny it. She had to stay at home and take what came of it. She couldn’t hope to outsmart God Almighty. No, it was the man who was usually “a willin’ ” and the woman “a sorryin’.”

“What day have you sot to git married?” she asked the pair when they came in later.

There was a quick sound from the loft as Achsa came down the ladder, and Louie shot a sharp look at Sayward with his blue eyes that could blaze up like a sheet of wildfire. Sayward looked back at him so steady he went for a coal to light his pipe
though anybody with eyes could see it was smoking.

“I hain’t give it a thought,” he said, flushing up. “It hasn’t a squire or missionary nigher than the Ohio.”

“You mought boat Ginny down,” Sayward reckoned. “I don’t allow she would mind.”