by Pete Beatty
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For Anna
A Note from the Publisher
There are elements in the print book that could not be reproduced in the electronic version.
Stories will go to rot without puttingup. You must salt them into Egyptian mummies, or drown them in lying sugar. Bury them in winter and freeze their blood.
But you would hide the honest stink, the moschito bites, the wounds, the living glory.
Let you and me do without salt and sugar. Taste matters true – even if the truth is half rotten.
Winter.
A tidy house, under bedclothes of snow, every window dark. The night is empty. No moon, no dogs, no drunks. No night pigs wondering after food. Not even a hungry hoofprint.
The eye is the lamp of the body and yours shows on The city of Ohio at the third hour of the year 1837. A lamp is no use without more to look at. Go ahead and enter the house. I will watch for constables walking bundled against the cold. It is fine – we go as haints. Haints cannot be criminals.
Inside is no mansion but there are modest riches. You see a young mother abed, a cherub child tucked in a cradle at mother’s feet, a house-cat the size of a hog, a family Bible, brass candlesticks, clean swept floors, quilts, stick furniture – nothing fancy but good for sitting. This feels a home. A respite on the long flight from Eden.
Your lamp beams brighter and soon you see the absences between comforts. No axe or man’s britches hung by the door. Perhaps this is a widow’s home. You think a widow must always be tragic. But look at the cheerful aspect of this place. Even the bedpots have a pleasant look.
As you haint around, the light of your lamp-eye keeps to growing. Such that it beams brighter than day, and the air breathes warmer, stifling even. The woman abed begins to stir. You turn nervous at being seen.
Crap. This is poor luck. Look behind you. We have started a fire. Flames is lapping up the wall. How has this—Did your burglar eyes spill their blaze? Have you done this? You set the domestic tenderness to burning. With your eye. I do not know how.
Douse it in blankets – hurry.
Not that one – that is too fine a quilt.
Have they got any water?
Get out of the damned house.
* * *
Back to the snow-shrouded lane. You are agitated and scorched. You are safe. But we have not done the courtesy of rousting the home. Through the cackle of flames come the cries of widow and beautiful child and plump cat. Even as the devil’s laughter rolls and the wailing sharpens you hear a sudden thwock. It must be timbers snapping at the heat – or the family Bible ignited, shocked by the blaspheming fire. And another thwock.
As alarms spread to the neighbor houses you hear calls for buckets. Folks yell FIRE as if to shame the blaze, but it only cackles back. The widow is hollering for the Lord to take the household up quick, but only the thwock answers.
The fire has roused the whole town. We are no longer alone – the sounds of tragedy is joined by hoots of alarm and barking church bells. Every soul for a mile around is singing out for Buckets buckets buckets Thwock thwock thwock the house says back.
Nothing draws folks out like a house in flames – soon enough there is chatter and snowball tossing mixed in with the Buckets! and widow’s wails and thwocks. Do not think the neighbors unchristian. Some are still whiskey-drunk from greeting the New Year. Thwock. In the absence of a sing or a nut-gathering there is nothing like a house afire to stir us up. I do not propose the burning of widows and babes for sport. Only that a house afire is a credible substitute for the sun. Especially at winter. Preserves carry the ghost of summer. You yourself are transported some by the blaze – I can see so by your face.
Thwock.
Your clumsiness has set all this going. Folks seem to drop from trees to gawp. Boys fool, men mutter, women pray. Thwock. The call for buckets dies down and so do the wails from inside. There is only the rough breath of flame and the thwock. But even the thwock ceases.
Just as you are certain the house must fall – must make a grave of itself – the flaming front door bursts open. Out of the smoke steps the charred shape of a man. Stooped, staggering, he stumbles but does not fall. He carries with him the young widow. Does she still draw breath?
This roasted rescuer heaves the widow onto a snowbank and falls to his knees. Steam rolls from his back and the winter white melts in a circle around him. A sooted arm goes into the breast of his blouse and comes out with the baby, who screams with wonder at being rescued. At this cry the mother awakens – she lives! Our hero reaches into his shirt again and produces the halfhog cat, its furs singed some. As the cat runs off – dignity busted into a thousand pieces – the angel of the fire breathes heavy. The crowd takes a reverent quiet.
You are a shambles to know who this man is. His shoulders wide as ox yokes. A waist trim as a sleek lake schooner. Muscles curlicued like rich man’s furniture. Chestnut hair shining in the orange light of the blaze. A cheerful red cloth knotted at his neck. His small bright eyes look up and he drinks another great breath, which comes out as a laugh. A church organ full of the sacrament wine. And he says Who has brought refreshment?
Now you have met my brother Big Son.
In the stories you are used to, a stranger arrives at the castle, or the king is gnawed by crisis. Swords bang together. Ghosts trouble a pale hero. Lovers’ hearts boiling. We drink down such wild stories to drown our worries. They are whiskey to wash out our brains.
My brother’s stories are more apple cider. They are good to drink but you will not forget yourself entirely. Wholesome tales, without too many fricasseed widows. True mostly – I will not lie any more than is wanted for decency. Simple and moral, easy to grab, the better to encourage someone over the head with. Not too quiet – you must not fall asleep. Let us have commerce and racing horses. Progress and the mastery of nature. Swap swords for axes and plows. Let us have tenderness but also a dash of cussedness and tragedy. All in the manner native to Ohio.
In this story lovers’ hearts do not boil but go slowly like stew. The crisis has got square cow’s teeth instead of fangs. There is not a king to be seen. Only my brother as hero.
And we will have a stranger at the castle.
I will take that good part.
My name is Medium Son.
We are no longer strangers any – folks call me Meed.
My brother were democratic in his feats. He done them in a hundred different patterns like calico. Big – he is mostly called Big – rastled bears and every other creature ten at a time. Drank a barrel of whiskey and belched fire. Hung church bells one-handed. Hunted one hundred rabbits in a day. Ate a thousand pan cakes and asked for seconds. Drained swamps and cut roads et c. More feats than I have got numbers to count up.
I thrilled most at his brawling with the world itself. At his domesticating Lake Erie and several rivers besides. At his strength turned against soil and stone. There is nothing like the making of a place. To bust up creation. To write your name in the very earth. My brother was a professor of such work.
You have heard of Daniel Boone – Colonel Crockett – Mike Fink – other American Herculeses. My brother shown the same appetites.
You ask Why is this Big Son not the hero of every child? What feats of his do I know?
Do not burn houses every day. But when you do bur
n them look for my brother. You cannot keep him away from any fire greater than a lucifer match. There is a song inside burning wood and my brother hears it keener than anyone. This taste comes from his first feat nine years ago when he whipped ten thousand trees.
* * *
I imagine you are customed to meek and mild trees that do not want correcting. This is a story of the west so it has got western trees. You do not know the manners of our trees. I have told you that my brother and I dwell in the city of Ohio, which sits on the western bluff at the mouth of the Cuyahoga, looking across that crooked river at the city of Cleveland on the eastern bluff. Put this map in your mind.
In 1796 Connecticut surveyors come through and said that there ought to be a town called Cleveland. They did not bother any with making the town, only with drawing it on their maps. The first settlers found the place full of discouragements, such as moschitos, ague, and poorly behaved wildlife wanting chastisement.
A mule’s character were evident in the population from the first. The settlers kept on past the discouraging and their infant town Cleveland had grown up to one thousand souls by the year 1828.
Your true mule westerner does not prefer one thousand neighbors. As Cleveland grown, handfuls of folks spilled across the river looking for an emptiness more to their liking. My brother and I – orphans in the care of Mr Job and Mrs Tabitha Stiles – went among these handfuls.
In order to make a good emptiness you have got to clear land. The trees on the western bluff, having seen the demise of their eastern kin, was wary. But we only nibbled out our few acres and kept a glass-thin peace with the woods.
The trouble come when the nibbling spread out into eating-up.
As winter of 1828 cleared out, the handfuls coming across the river become sackfuls, every man among them taking his bite out of the woods. The western trees – oaks and elms and plump sycamores by the dozen thousand – whispered by breezes as their buds came in. They said We must get shut of these fleas.
Soon folks found trees sprouting up where they had just cleared ground. Plots vanished. Dead timber fell onto homesteads without any storm blowing them over. Firewood piles took to disappearing.
We fleas fought back. I were barely ten years and too young to swing an axe to any use but I remember spring air felt as warm as summer on account of all the chopping. Every man’s axe has got a voice to it nock chsnk gntk dnnk A hundred different words saying the same meaning.
All the axe talk had romance in it but the trees was not enamored any. They only grew back faster and thicker than before. Thieved back plots already cleared. Branches were seen to bust into windows and doors and carry off animals and merchandise. Have you ever felt the breath of an angry tree? It has a cold carelessness.
After a week of this awful spring, a fear settled on us. A worry that we had found the limits of the republic. That we should stop at the eastern side of the Cuyahoga. That we had gotten to the bottom of the west. That the continent would revolt and fling us back into the ocean.
* * *
You have already heard the pure and pretty thwock of my brother’s axefall as he cut his way into the widow’s house. You ask why it were not heard among the choir. Is not the merest smell of Big Son enough to scare trees worse than one thousand beavers? At the year 1828 Big were not yet the hero you have met. His hair hardly shone. He had not yet learned to thwock.
When the half-child Big announced at the second Sunday of spring that he would clear the timber in two days and a night, the men fleas could only laugh. A mean type of laugh. They said they would like to see it. They said such comedy would lift their spirits. They said Go ahead and even borrowed my brother a good axe.
Before a jug could be fetched, my brother smashed into the trees, his borrowed blade curling back the edges of the air. Trees and fleas alike kept at laughter, but before any too long the comedy gone out. The timber saw that Big were no regular flea, and us regular fleas stared in wonder. Even my young eyes knew it right away. Even curious squirrels and birds and ground hogs known to stop and watch. All creation likes a miracle.
Big knocked down a dozen trees in the first quarter of an hour, before the forest took him serious. After that brave beginning, the match turned some. A long mean locust grabbed Big up in a branch and flung him deep into the wood – where the trees stood so close you could not see the doings. Only the sounds of Big gasping and thwocking, leaves shaking, branches snapping. Here and there a flash of his blade or his hair catching the sideways afternoon sun. A tree top sinking down in defeat. A startled deer bolting.
Such commotion gone for hours on end. A rastle will make a crowd but it cannot keep one without enough pummeling. Boredom come on. The fleas drifted off to supper, the creatures went off to a more peaceful corner of the woods, and finally the sun itself made to wander off, tired of lighting an unwatched match. Only two spectators remained – myself and Mr Job Stiles.
You will meet Mr Job better in the course of matters, but let me draw him quick. He were spare and stretched out, made of knitting sticks. He wore a thin brown fringe of beard on his pointed chin and a preacherly straw hat tilted back on the crown of his head. He always spoke like he were sorry at the situation. In this case it were called for. The sounds of Big’s fight gone down to a mutter and then nothing at all. Surely he had been pummeled to surrender. Mr Job said we ought to get home for dinner, and that I ought to fetch my brother.
I will not lie – I did not care to do what Mr Job asked. I were afraid of the dark and of creatures and of finding my brother busted past mending. But I trusted and still do trust in Mr Job. I known he would not put me to work I could not stand. There were enough of the sun dripping down through leaf and branch that I could see.
That light thinned as I made my way deep and deeper into the wood. After a half mile I got to a clear and saw the very last of the light glinting off something at the bottom of a great ironwood. An axe blade. As I come closer the spring air went out of my blood and the winter ice come back in. For the second time in my life – you will know the first later on – I were looking at my brother’s dead self. The axe were tucked into his arms just like a burying Bible, with the last bit of dusk as a shroud.
Yet! As I inched toward him in despair I seen that the dusk did not shine in my brother’s hair. I seen at close examine that this were not hair at all but a clutch of twigs arranged as a wig. His skin were not skin at all but birchbark. But these were surely the britches and blouse of my brother – he had been turned to wood – this were too much – this were witches.
Just as I ran a finger over the bark of his cheek, sleep came over me like I were thrust into a sack. I slumbered hot and itching. I dreamt that I seen my brother, alive and naked as a babe, moving in and out of the timber, the blue moonlight on his rear.
* * *
From the light I known it were the middle of morning. What I did not know was where I were. The air stunk of sawdust and smoke. My skin and clothes were painted all over with ashes. All around me was a town I did not know, with a wide-eyed look to everything. Like it were only just born. Houses and stores and barns, all naked yellow wood. What was this place? I met our neighbors and friends – Mr Dennes and Mr Philo and Mr Ozias – straggling through, smacked dumb. I were in the same way. I could only blink and turn my head around in wonder. I would still be there stumped except I heard another MEED. This time not a whisper but a lusty holler from beyond the new buildings. Before long a scorched and still-naked Big came out of the alien lanes, dragging his axe and a wild tale.
Meed, those trees wore me to tatters I were tossed back and forth for hours even as I cussed bad as I knew All the time I flew across the sky my brains kept kicking At night’s coming, the trees tired of sport and set me down but left a sentry A great grandpa ironwood minded me while the forest went to its evening chores He waved the axe toward the stump what marked the ironwood. And I made a pantomime that the scrap had put me to sleep Soon through a
cracked eye I seen that the ironwood was abed too and—
I knew right then what he had done. I have always had a head for understanding Big. His pride were spilling out of him in nervous talk. Let me make you a present of the trimmed and tidy account.
* * *
The trees gave my brother a thrashing and expected he would sleep politely. This faith were their undoing. Once Big saw his guard-tree were dozing he slipped from liar-sleep and made a liar-self from sticks and bark. He left the false Big into the arms of the ironwood, along with his axe – the thwocking of which would have woken up all the forest. Around this time I shown up and he panicked I would spoil his sneaking – so he gently knocked me over the head and laid me down next to his doll. All night he peeled and scotched and girdled, gathered up kindling. Just before the sun stirred from rest, he ran naked through the arbor and lit one hundred fires.
The trees awoke to the dawn of their own burning, with the true sun hid behind the blue smoke. They panicked to find themselves trussed up by Big’s night-work. My brother did not make any deathbed sacraments for his rivals. Instead he grabbed up his axe from the hands of his false self and went wild with progress. He butchered the trees in a dozen ways. Pulling one up and swinging it as a club into another. Busting one over his knee. Sending one tumbling into its cousins like tenpins. Smiling as he went – leaving stumps and holes and busted tree-bones all over. His work were never tidy.
Dawn stirred into day and Big kept toward chewing up the whole western forest. Before too long the fleas was awake and watching – eyes following the shining hair even as the boy underneath looked more a man with every smasher. Finally he felt those flea eyes and ceased his work – huffed some – looked around at his mess – turned to the fleas – spread out his arms like an actor and said Go ahead