The Trees (21 page)

He daren’t as much as scratch his head at the table any more. A wild buck could rub his head against a tree whenever he had a mind to, but the minute Wyitt lifted a hand to his, he saw Sayward and Achsa watching him.

“He’s a growin’ hisself horns agin,” Achsa jeered.

“Come over here by the fire and let me look at you,” Sayward said.

“It’s only the bed leaves,” he flared up at her. “That fine dust itches my scalp.”

“I’ll tell you if its bed leaves,” Sayward promised him.

But Wyitt wouldn’t trust her. He moved himself handy to the door. Only when she paid him no
more attention did he go back to his bench at the table. He’d wait till Sayward and Achsa went to their beds. They must be mighty tired, for they had worked all day cleaning out brush with the grubbing hoe in the Covenhoven corn patches. It was lucky the Covenhovens had no more heavy tools as these or they might have asked him. He wouldn’t like to be caught working at such foolishness. Fast as you grubbed them out one place, the sprouts came up some place else. They wouldn’t grow much any more this fall but early next spring they’d be up again all over the cleared land thicker than hair on a dog. If Worth was home, he’d bust his sides laughing at these settlers chopping down trees, burning them up, shovel-ploughing around the stumps and fighting the roots from spring to fall just to raise wheat and corn. All the wheat they got was sick wheat. The black ground was too rich. And the sick wheat made you vomit.

The only good part of it was the wages. Now they had Indian meal again. He could hug his belly tonight filled with hot mush and maple sweetening. He’d go to bed himself if he had a brother. It was lonesome for just one up in that loft. He had slept betwixt Achsa and Sulie too long. Sometimes he got awake in the night with the feeling that Sulie was still there. Not till he reached out his hand in the dark and found her bed empty would he give in that she had never come back with the cows.

He would stay down by the fire a while tonight. My, but he was gappy. He would lay his head on the table only for a minute. In a shake he thought that Jary was back. She looked a little like Mrs. Covenhoven but her hair and ways were Jary’s. She was bent over tucking pine splints between the fire logs for light. Now she came puttering over and pulled his hair apart to peer down short-sighted at what she could find. She pulled so hard that it hurt.

He woke up and found pine splints burning between the fire logs and Sayward jerking the haw comb through his tangled hair.

“Look at ’em a tumblin’ out!” she called angrily. The back of the comb dabbed fast here and there on the table, making fine cracks like the splitting of tiny hazel shells.

Wyitt was mad as a hawk to get found out.

“You let my hair alone!” he bawled although the quiet, righteous way Sayward turned her back on him for the clapboard shelves struck fear in his soul.

“I seed all I want to,” she told him. “Now some body got to burn your bed leaves and lay out your bed clothes so the wild things kin eat off the varment.”

She lifted down a gut of bear’s lard and dished some out in a cracked gourd with a small paddle.

“What’s that fur?” he demanded, bristling.

“Before you go to bed tonight,” she said shortly, “you kin lard up your head.”

Wyitt stared at the cold, greasy stuff. Always had he liked lean meat, never the fat. One lip stuck out over the other. She couldn’t play off such a mean trick on him! Never would he slop that fat on his fine stand of hair till it lay down flat and bedraggled as a wolf sneaking out of the river.

When Sayward went out, he climbed up to the loft.

“He’s abed without lardin’ hisself!” Achsa sang out the door.

“You’re a liar and don’t know a bee from a bull’s foot,” Wyitt told her angrily, climbing down. His bed clothing was trailing on his arm. “If you want to tattle, I’ll give you something to tattle about. If my hair and bed clothes don’t suit, you kin tell Saird I’ll sleep outside till they do.”

Although the night was fresh, he dragged off to sleep on the ground under the leaning elm where he could shin up quick in the dark if there was reason. It felt like a frost till morning. More than once he wished himself back in his loft with his bare feet on the warm chimney. But he told himself oxen couldn’t drag him back now.

Before daylight came right, he was up with the axe, making himself a half-faced cabin like hunters put up in the woods. Oh, he would build himself a house to fetch their eyes out! High enough in
front it would be to sit up in and at the back down snug to an old beech log.

Achsa came out to watch a while and devil him with fool questions. But Sayward walked by only when her business took her. She gave it no more than a short glance. You could trust Sayward to keep her mouth shut except when he came in for his meals. And then all she said was to leave his fur cap off the pegs where her and Achsa’s clothing hung. He could hang it on a bush outside. Every day he could see his cracked gourd of bear’s lard waiting. Sayward would not give in about that, no not if the stars fell and the world came to its end.

The front of his half-faced cabin was done from the first, for that side was left open to the weather. His side logs weren’t very big. He could lift them up and notch them in himself. The cracks between he stuffed with moss. The roof poles he laid thick with bark to run the rain and snow water back over the beech log. In one of the side logs he set two pins. He could lay a clapboard on these if ever he had need of a shelf. A third pin he whittled out and set in its augur hole for a fine hat rack. He could tell you right now that never in his own house would his cap have to hang outside. Fresh green leaves he stripped and carried in till the place was snug with creature comforts as a wild thing’s den. Now he could sit at home and scratch his head all he pleased, and no one around to hinder.

He wondered that he had not done this before. Lying here of an evening with his own roof overhead, with the beech log snug behind him and the light from his own fire shining in warm and red from in front, he could feel the woods like he never could shut up in the dark cubbyhole of the loft. Even at night something in him knew the woods and the woods knew him. Away out yonder where the forest was deep and wild, where it hadn’t a path a white man had made, he could hear it calling to him.

“Come away!” it sounded like. “Come on away!”

It wasn’t the loons and it wasn’t the river. It wasn’t the wind and it wasn’t the hill hooters coasting silent as a sled of gray feathers over the soft moonlit tips of the forest. No, the trees stood quiet as if they heard something, too. Now they would listen. And now they would talk softly together like a flock of turkeys talk when settling down for the night, feather to feather and wattles to wattles, up in some wild roost.

From the time the first poplar leaf turned yellow back in the dog days, he could hear that horn although it was mighty faint then. It came a little plainer when the wind blew cool down the river. Away up on the far side of the English Lakes where that wind hailed from, it must be cold already for he could smell fall on the air. Soon it wouldn’t
need a wind to fetch fall from somewhere else, for fall would be here.

Now snakes were traveling across the path. The spotted rattler and coppersnake were the first to hole up and the last to come out in the spring. The water in the river was getting mighty chilly. You needn’t wash yourself all over any more till next May. Ringtail coons ran heavy with fat. Wild pigeons feasted on the acorn trees. Fox grapes turned blue along the runs and skunks smelled fine and sweet on the evening air.

Now it was cold and wet, and the rainy spell hung on. Around the change of the seasons you could look for bad weather in the full of the moon. And now one fine morning the gums by the river were red as blood, the hickory ridges yellow. Directly the whole woods were burning up. The young beeches on the north side of the hills were the only thing left green among the hardwoods. Colored leaves floated in the spring and run. You had to fish them out of the kettle when you dipped water. All through the night you could hear nuts and acorns come rattling down.

Hardly could Wyitt stand any more lying in his half-faced cabin night after night, smelling the turned leaves and waiting for Louie. Oh, he and Louie had a secret between them. When he went out to Genny’s, she told him Louie said it wouldn’t be long now. Then one day he didn’t go out and
that evening when he fetched the cows, Mrs. Covenhoven told him Louie had left word for him to come.

That night on his pallet he lay first on one side and then on the other. He kept twisting like one of those horsehairs that get alive when they fall in the spring. Long before daybreak he was up but it was plenty light till he reached the cabin in the sumach. Louie and Genny still lay abed. It was good, Wyitt told himself, Sayward didn’t know about this. Genny unbarred the door and the boy came in slowly, his eyes ransacking the room. There was Louie’s brassbound, curly-maple, sporting rifle in a corner and that’s all. There wasn’t any more. He could see the whole cabin.

“You was warm when you come in and never knowed it,” Genny told him.

He fetched himself around. On two pins over the door stretched a long rifle, its wood and metal the same rusty color. A patched powder horn hung over it. The rifle was tied together at one place with tow, and the stock had a dent like it had been clubbed over the head of a bear. Or it might have been where a wolf chewed it.

He stood on a stool and lifted it down. It was two heads taller than he. Never had he lifted anything so heavy.

“I kin handle it,” he said quickly before they might take it away.

“You kin be glad it ain’t curly maple like mine,” Louie said when he had pulled on his leggins. “I got to keep a takin’ my bor’l off. It rusts from the acid. Now walnut has nothin’ in it to rust a bor’l.”

Wyitt nodded. Louie needn’t talk up the gun to him. Walnut might be the commonest tree in the woods but it was plenty good enough for him, just so he had a rifle. The flint on this one was set in buckskin and somebody must have hunted a long time in the woods to find a hickory whip for such a long, straight ramrod.

“I’ll show you somethin’ you never seed,” Louie said. He loosed the tow, unbreeched the gun and took a stained, brown paper from between barrel and walnut. It had faded writing on it.

“What’s that fur?” Wyitt wanted to know.

“ ’Wait till I tell you,” Louie said testily. “George Roebuck hisself couldn’t read it. He said it was Dutch so I took it to Mrs. Covenhoven.”

“Tell him what it says,” Genny urged.

Louie held up the paper and made as though he could spell it out.

“ ’Who hunts with this gun will be lucky,’ ” he read off.

Wyitt stared.

“A witch master wrote that,” Louie told him. “You’re lucky, for a witch kin never spoil your aim now.”

Wyitt raised up understandingly. He recollected
how his father never would let a strange woman lay hands on his rifle. Louie put the paper back.

“I paid two buckskins down. You’ll have to fix the rest with the skins you git.”

Wyitt nodded. Oh, he’d soon have all the trees around his place curing with hides! George Roebuck had better put up a new shed room, for he and his rifle would fill that old hide cabin from dirt to rafters.

“You said nothin’ to home?” Louie wouldn’t mention Sayward’s name but you could tell by the sudden, hard look on his face whom he meant. “Well, you want to do like I said now. If you git meat with it, you kin take it home. If you don’t, you want to hide it out somewheres till you do, or she’ll make you take it back.”

Genny told her brother to wait for breakfast. She’d start fire and have meat frying in three shakes. But Wyitt wasn’t hungry. No, he couldn’t eat a bite, not if it was spiced with pepper. He had to go now. Oh, he knew how to load that rifle. Hadn’t he watched his pappy load his since he was knee high to a coon! The old powder horn patched with buckskin he slung over his shoulder. The seven balls Louie passed him he counted and kept knotted in the rag Genny said he better take along. He said she wouldn’t need to have done that. He could have cut off some of his shirt if he couldn’t find
some old hornets’ nest in the woods for patching.

“I’ll tell you what I git,” he nodded and, staggering under the rifle, went forth from the cabin.

That was a time he’d always recollect, when Genny’s door closed behind him and the boy found himself alone outside with his rifle in his hands. All around him, still as a burning secret, lay the great woods making not a move and yet beckoning him on. Just to see the tangled colored leaves, the oak rusty as a deer’s coat, the gum red as its heart-blood, the hickories yellow as pelts’ gold and all the creeper coverts where wild fowl and beasts could hide, went through and over him like nothing else could. Near and clear now and sweeter than a hound dog after a fox blew that old hunting horn in his ears. Every leaf sailing down set him off like a squirrel’s barking rattle. He was drunk on powder, that’s what he was. Any old log today might hide a bear behind it. Any splash of rusty leaves near the ground might be a fox in hiding.

Up in a little grove of white walnuts he pulled his first trigger. Snap went the flint down on the steel frizzen. Pish went the blinding white flash of powder from the pan. Then the whole woods to the English Lakes roared to his thunder. It threw him back like a rag. Before he was down right he had picked himself up and run to the foot of the tree. No stump-ear squirrel could he find lying in the leaves though he scratched the black ground
bare with his moccasins like a turkey after mast. No, he guessed at last, he’d have to wait till next time to lift his game up by the tail and feel it soft inside his hunting shirt with the red blood trickling warm against his belly.

He tramped the woods all day through that golden haze but it wasn’t as easy as he had reckoned. One after the other, those seven precious balls lost themselves yonder in the woods, all except the last that cut off a runbush limb and buried itself in a poplar, just missing a black squirrel spread-eagled upside down with head and tail jerking. Oh, he reckoned he’d have to wait a while before he could bark squirrels like his father, breaking the high branch they sat on so it knocked them stunned to the ground and not a mark on them from ears to vent.