“I saw you when you first came,” she said after she got close to him.
“I saw you first,” he told her, for he couldn’t let a girl get ahead of him.
“I saw something else just now,” she told him. “I’d show it to you, if you didn’t have to go back where the others are.”
“I don’t have to go back,” he said quickly, and took her hand like he always took his sisters’ or his father’s hand, and they started off together.
“Don’t you want to be with your father?” she asked him.
“He’s not my real father.”
Her eyes widened, then flashed as if what he said had struck hidden fire.
“Why isn’t he?”
“Because he isn’t. My mother isn’t my real mother either. My real mother’s a lady with gold rings and white hands. She wears fine dresses and lives in a place far away from here. She and my real father only gave me out to raise. It’s a secret but some day they’ll come for me and then I’m going back.”
Now what made Rosa give him such a blinding and understanding look as if he had done something wonderful for her. For a moment it seemed he could look through her eyes down a long illumined passageway in her mind. She made him tell her more, pressing him with questions. Only when he remembered that all this time they had been walking, did he stop. Why, he couldn’t walk, he told himself. He got heart palpitation and flipflops. They would shake his whole body and he was liable to die. For a second he listened. He couldn’t even hear his heart or feel it. It seemed like he didn’t have a heart, or else it had stopped and this was what it felt like to be dead.
“What makes you so white just now?” Rosa asked him.
And now he knew he was still alive, because that old heart came back, pounding and flopping. Just for a moment. Rosa paid it no attention. She held up her finger for him to be still, and helped him down stones that looked like steps and he found himself in the strangest place. What was it like? he asked himself, looking around. Then he knew. It was like a church in the woods for gnomes. The floor was sunken and flat and covered with logs like pews, while up in front one rock stood on another like a pulpit. Green mould and moss were over everything, over floors and pews and pulpit. Even the light in this little church was green as if it came through green glass windows.
“Did you see anything just now?” Rosa whispered.
“No, but I thought I did,” Chancey whispered back. He felt sure somebody or something had just left as they came. He could still feel a presence here like he could Aunt Genny’s when they went in her house and she wasn’t at home.
As they left, Rosa kept looking back over her shoulder. He could hear something behind them in the woods, and running ahead of them, too. Now it came and now it went, and now it talked to itself in the tops of the giant trees. Then it stayed quiet listening. Not far ahead a bush moved. But when they got there, what moved it had gone. All hung still. Rosa squeezed his hand to look. Something was there along the little run where it came out of a leafy tunnel and dripped over the wet stones and into the dark little pool beyond where the yellow sand grains went round and round as if a hand lay in there stirring them. But you couldn’t see any hand, only a strange reflection in the water. Farther on a leaf trembled when no one touched it. Now it stopped and fled, but not very far. Just ahead of them it kept, so you couldn’t quite ever find it or dared look at it if you did. All you could see was the curious mark it left in the wet black ground and what looked like a three-toed footprint worn deep in the round stone.
“Sh!” Rosa said when he hadn’t made a sound.
How small they felt standing there or moving hand in hand through the giant woods. Up and up rose the big butts. On and on ran the trackless reaches of the forest. All the time whatever it was they felt still led or pursued them. Never would it let them see it, Rosa told him. And never would they know what it looked like, save from the light bellies of the leaves, from the shape of the snake and the way the partridge vine ran over the ground. It was heathen and didn’t care for human folk, Rosa said. It came only to lead them wrong, to lose them in the swamp or quicksands. It knew every step of the woods, all the beautiful hidden places they could never hope to find because they couldn’t put their heads inside a teaberry blossom or slide up and down the long, colored spider threads from the tall trees. If only they could make themselves wild for a moment. Then, oh then, Rosa felt sure they’d see it for even now it lay under the dogwood. In a moment it would come out and show itself. The squirrel had seen it. They could tell by his chatter. But now it changed its mind and was drawing back again. All they could hear was something high in the treetops making fine sounds like tiny gold sovereigns dropped into the hanging nest of a golden robin.
Oh, Chancey never felt so close to anybody as he did today to the shy girl by his side. They understood the very thoughts of each other. Things spoke to them with the same words. What a long ways off his family and hers seemed here in the deep woods. He had to push his mind even to remember. Only Rosa was contemporary. Only she and he were real, and they were going through this wild and beautiful time together. Once in a deep shadowy place they stood and watched a tiny gold leaf come fluttering down as from another world. And once they came to an old giant of a log that had caught in the split fork of its own butt when it fell. The top layer of that hollow log had cracked off long ago and the deep bed filled up with mould. And now it looked like a monster flower box green with fern and white with strange woods flowers. Chancey wanted to pick some from the lower end where he could reach, but Rosa said he daren’t. It belonged to the Wild Thing.
Once when they got tired they sat on a green log to rest and felt the soft slow rain of the deep woods falling about them, not a wet rain but the fine drippings from the high and ancient roof of branches, leaves, needles, twigs and bark. If you listened sharp you could hear it, a dry drop on a green leaf, then a drop on a dead leaf, and now a faint drop on your shoulder. Rosa wished they could sleep here, and have it drizzle on them all night, and in the morning when they woke they would find themselves covered with a light skift of gray snow.
But they went on, sinking in leaf mould to their ankles. They tramped on flecks of pale sunlight falling through the great roof, never still but moving, dancing like ghost leaves on the dark forest floor. And once in the most deserted place of all, they heard a strange cracked voice.
“Jack!” it said, “J-a-c-k!”
“What’s that?” Chancey called out terrified.
They stood holding each other and listening a while.
“It’s just a tree saying ‘Jack,’ ” Rosa said at last.
“You’re sure it doesn’t say Chancey?” he begged.
It relieved him it was just an old tree creaking in the wind and that it said only Jack. He would not like to hear his name called by a tree in the deep woods and never know what it wanted. As they went on, they could hear it croaking after them, “Jack! J-a-c-k-k-k-k-k!”
The only thing Chancey hated was to miss the pigeons’ nesting ground. They had one in Fowler’s Grove, Rosa said, if only they could find it. Her father had seen it. He claimed nesting grounds were always laid out either round or square. This one was in a circle. You would think surveyors had done it, so round it was. You couldn’t find a tree with a nest in it outside the line, and if the line passed through the tree, there were nests on one side of the tree and none on the other. Oh, that was something to see, Rosa said, especially in nesting time when everything was blue with pigeons all talking to each other like people. You could hear them a long ways off. “Ooh-coo-ooh,” they said. Rosa wished she could just see a flock feeding in the beech woods. When they came toward you, her father said, they were like a long blue sea wave four or five feet high rolling along the ground. That wave was boiling with pigeons flying from in back to the front. Chancey wished he could see that blue wave boiling with pigeons. But he wouldn’t like to see when you shot them. Then Rosa’s father said, they always fell on their red breasts.
<
br /> Chancey hated to see the woods come to an end. First white sky shone through the trees, and when they came out of the woods, there was a creek and open field beyond, all in the blinding sunlight. He felt a little shaky. But he hadn’t died. His heart only flopped a little. Now wasn’t it strange that over here away from his mother and sisters he could walk? It showed they weren’t his real mother and sisters. And now just thinking about them, he could hear calling far away in the woods, only these were the deep disturbing calls of men.
“Rosey!” a voice like a distant hound’s baying rang through the trees.
“It’s you-know-who. I must go,” Rosa whispered.
“Then I’ll have to, too,” Chancey told her.
They stood looking at each other. The spell they had found together must soon be broken, Chancey knew, and he held desperately to the last few minutes. They had been free as the birds. Now they must go back to separate prison houses and jailers.
“Don’t forget me!” Rosa begged.
“I could never forget,” Chancey told her.
Her eyes searched his.
“I’ll give you something to remember me by,” she promised. “Just wait. I’ll show you.”
Swiftly she led him across stepping stones in the shallow summer creek. On the other bank she found a thin whitewood slab. Smoothly she slipped off her shoes and stockings, then, keeping her back toward him her dress. For a moment she stood there in her shift. Chancey waited silent. He thought this was what she wanted to show him to remember her by, but she went into the creek, wading to the deeper part where it almost reached her knees.
“Now watch!” she called back guardedly and clapped the water with her whitewood slab. “Are you watching? Do you see it? Look and tell me! Can you see it?”
Chancey looked hard. He saw her shift, her bare shoulders and her thighs when she bent. But what was so wonderful about that?
“The rainbow!” she called back anxiously. “Can’t you see it?”
Not till then did Chancey know what she meant. The spray from her whitewood slab flew high above her head, and so fast did she ply it that the fine drops hung constantly in the air. Behind them was the falling sun, before them the forest. Against the dark trees the drops took on the bright colors of the bow in the sky. But this wasn’t like any bow he had seen before, and it wasn’t in the sky. It hung right here in the creek around Rosa. She seemed to be standing in it. It played on her, bathed her. The drops as they came down flashed colored fire, and the reds, greens, yellows and violets dyed her scantily clad body.
Her face glistened with water and pleasure as she turned it over her shoulder.
“Did you see it? Wasn’t that pretty? Do you know what it means? It means we don’t have to wait for a rainbow. We can make our own. Now turn your back till I come out and dress. Then we’ll go so nobody sees us.”
The Boatmen’s Frolic was over. Chancey’s father smelled like a stale old whiskey cask as he took him on the flatboat back to town. The boy’s blouse felt wet and cold with sweat, and his legs twitched and trembled. But a great peace and wonder was on his soul.
They were pushing out into the main current when shouts rang from boat to boat.
“Here they come!”
Chancey’s father held him up so he could see. What looked like a long streamer of cloud was blowing up from the south. It blew very fast and when it came to Fowler’s Woods, the front of that cloud began to settle, dropping to the tops of the trees in a blue wave. Only then did Chancey know they were pigeons. One of the men on a boat near the grove fired his gun, and the birds rose again. They came up like wadding fired in the air, swarmed together and circled around. Their graceful sweeps and dips made him dizzy with pleasure. All the time fresh flocks were arriving and still the column came from the south till the sky above Fowler’s Woods was a great whirlpool of circling pigeons, now rising, now falling, now almost settling and then swooping up again with a sound like rumbling thunder until the boy’s head swam with the spectacle and he wished he was up there with them in God’s free sky.
As far down the river as he could see in the failing light, he looked back at Fowler’s Grove. Oh, the woods, he whispered to himself, the terribly beautiful deep woods! How bitter he felt toward his mother for hating it and wanting to cut it down.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SUMMER SWEETING
Oh, yellow’s forsaken,
And green is forsworn.
But blue is the sweetest
Color that’s worn.
OLD VERSE
SHE should have caught on sooner, Sayward told herself afterward, by the way Sooth was singing around the house all the time, and still more by the bloom on her face. Why hardly was she halfway through sixteen years old, and yet she looked like a tender white peony in full flower. But then, ever since she was a little tyke, Sooth had been a master hand for singing. And all Sayward’s children were well formed and sightly, Huldah especially, though never could she match Sooth.
Sayward reckoned it just excitement coming out on Sooth. They were giving a singing play in Mechanics’ Hall. An operetta, the handbill called it, “with music on the ancient Jewish cymbals and other instruments.” Leah Morrison had got it up. The Thespians, they named themselves, and their show, A PLAY AT THE FAIR. Huldah and Sooth were both in it, but Sooth the most, and all day you heard her singing pieces from it. She didn’t hold to her own pieces. Her voice was treble and Huldah’s deep alto, but that didn’t keep her from singing what Huldah had to sing, too. And she didn’t stop there. No, she sang what the men had to sing, the high tenors and the low tenors, the baritones and the basses. Sometimes it sounded like she started at the beginning and sang the whole play clean through.
“Hush up, for God’s sake!” Huldah would bawl at her. “I hear that most every night. Now I have to hear it all day.”
Sooth’s singing would shut up then. You’d think a song choked off like that would die, but it must have stayed alive bottled up inside of her. As long as she kept holding it in, you wouldn’t hear anything. But the minute she forgot, the song came out of its own self and just about where she left off.
She didn’t sing too much around the house for her mother. Sayward liked singing, though not all that passed for it. Once she was invited down to the Morrisons’ to hear a lady singer from Cincinnati. Some must have liked it, for they clapped her over and over. But Sayward went home as soon as she decently could. She never liked screaming, not even if you had hurt yourself, and this lady hadn’t. Now Sooth sang to please herself. For all she let on, nobody else heard her. It made no difference was she sweeping or hanging up clothes or taking them down or sprinkling them. Sayward held that nothing sounded so at peace with life as a woman singing to herself while she worked.
Tonight when a man called to take Sooth to practise, Sayward gave it no second thought. It would be strange if Sooth wouldn’t get to know some men folks. Play practise had been going on for a long time. But that didn’t mean such a man was sweet on her or that she would have him if he was. You could never tell the way it would go with a man and woman before marriage, and sometimes not afterward. There was Huldah and George Holcomb. Folks said the young iron master would surely have enough of a young girl who tried to get him by coming stark naked to his furnace house, claiming robbers left her that way. They said he’d be mighty careful after that to pick him some decent homebody to be mistress of his iron plantation. Yet all this time never had he taken a wife but had come courting Huldah instead. And still she wouldn’t have him.
“Huldah, your beau’s a riding up the lane!” Massey or Sooth would run in to tell her, but hardly would Huldah get giddy about it. No, let him come if he wanted to, she’d say, or let him stay away. Not too much notice would she take of him when he was there save to scorn or devil him in her heavy voice while her younger sisters sat around with bleeding eyes that she would treat a fine and handsome lover so.
Take tonight. All day Huldah knew he was coming this evening to ta
ke her to practise, that he drove four miles and crossed the river to get here, and would have to do the same going back. But do you think Huldah would get her flax work done so she could get off in time? No, all day she kept putting it off for one reason or another, for all Sayward knew, on purpose to hold them up tonight and make him cool his heels. She was only in the last act anyway.
Now she sat on the bench in the kitchen, a carding the broken flax into rolls to spin on the big wheel. It was hot and tiring work and when George sat down alongside and tried to help, it didn’t suit her. Closer he got and too close, for Huldah snapped like a bean. She took the candle and touched off the tow on the bench between them, and he had to jump from there in a hurry, for you can only work flax when it is powder dry. Up it went like gunpowder on Independence Day! Oh, how Dezia and Libby called out against her! She might have burned him and the house down besides. What’s more, she burned up the tow. Sayward only smiled to herself. It was a good sign between them, she thought, and some day it would turn out all right, for never would George Holcomb give Huldah up when she was pert as she acted tonight.
It was late enough when Sooth got home. “Huldah still a practisin’?” Sayward was ready to say for greeting but Sooth stood in the door too long, letting in the cold, holding back in her own mam’s house, mighty pretty in her long wrap that had been Huldah’s, her white cheeks flushed. Then she moved in but she left the door open and Sayward saw somebody was a stepping in behind her. It was Captain Bernd, that eat-frog fellow who played the trumpet in the play piece.
“Mama!” Sooth asked her, and her eyes sparkled like outlights. Now what did that mean, Sayward wondered, and had it anything to do with this outlander from the coasts of Frenchland?
She turned to look at him. He had closed the door and stood by it, very stiff, his eyes polite, his boots blacked like his hair. She had to admit he cut a figure, especially for such a thick-set feller, in his dark green overcoat with a cape. She could ready see how a young girl might think it a lark to let such a one fetch her home. Especially when folks said he had been a soldier of Napoleon. He had been to Egypt and Russia with the great Bonaparte, they told. Now Portius hardly thought him old enough for that, and if he was, why wouldn’t he talk on being there? It was because his emperor was beaten and disgraced, Sooth said, standing up for him. All the blood and dying, the ruin and exile, lay too heavy on his mind. Oh, that was something to move a young girl’s pity to let him walk home with her on a cold November night, Sayward thought. But that was just as far as it should go.
The Town Page 14