That was the way to look at it, Sayward told herself. Sulie might have had a hard life, but it was better than if she had died that time in the woods and been put under ground. She had grown up and tasted life. She knew what it meant to give birth to young ones, to nurse and watch them a growing. She had a cabin, a man and family of her own. It mightn’t look like much of a life to white folks, but you had to take life as it was and not as you wished you had it.
Just the same, all the way to the canal and to Ohio on the boat, something kept coming back to Sayward’s mind. Grandmam MacWhirter, long dead and buried, had said it, the time that poor little Sulie was lost. “Sometimes it’s a good thing if you don’t find a lost young ’un,” she had said. “I’d as soon see them dead and buried.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE TREES
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
REVELATION
NOW what was the matter with her, Sayward asked herself when she got back home. She hadn’t felt so bad since Portius ran around with that other woman. Even then she didn’t know as she was so short-tempered, sharp-spoken and mean. Nothing suited her any more. She should have thanked the Lord every night for getting her back safe and sound and having a decent home to come to. On the whole trip she hadn’t seen a house she’d want to trade for hers. What was that old saying, “Travel north, south, east, west—home’s best.” That was a true saying.
And yet here she was, fretting, grumbling about everything around home, especially about higher taxes. Americus was getting too big for its britches, she complained. Why, the numbered streets ran high as Fourteenth already, and some were talking of them going to twenty. The town wasn’t satisfied with milling, blacksmithing and wheel-wrighting any more but had to brag now about its new soap works that packed pork and beef, its looking-glass works that made combs out of cows’ horns, and a cotton factory with a thousand spindles and looms. There were so many different mills and works that the race couldn’t turn all the wheels. The Centinel came around every day but Sunday. Nobody but an idle person had time to read it any more. Down on Water Street the Grand Central Hotel had fixed itself up like Babylon with carpets all through, and the Mechanics Society had started telling plant and shop owners what they could do and couldn’t.
“Don’t mind her,” she heard Genny tell Dezia. “It’s finding your Ant Sulie that way that done it. It’s eating at her heart, and she don’t know it.”
Sayward never let on that she heard. It wasn’t Sulie, she felt, but the pride and greed and great shakes of these town bodies that bothered her. Nothing was good enough for them any more. Twice had her own church been rebuilt during her life time and still they had to make it bigger, with a new steeple so high no workman for less than four dollars a day would risk his neck on it. The selectmen weren’t satisfied any more with fire ladders in the market house and fire buckets of harness leather with the householders’ names painted on them. No, they had to send for a Philadelphia fire engine and fetch it all the way around by New Orleans. This engine had a water tank you filled with buckets and a crank to pump it out. Oh, fighting Demon Fire was a good thing, and Sayward stood high on the subscription list for both ladders and engine. But even this grand new engine didn’t suit them long, and now they had to have one that sucked up water from a well or cistern. They called it the Neptune, and another company was starting the Vigilance.
That wasn’t half of it. Merchants were spoiling the Square, buying up houses and making them over into shops. They even tried to buy the old cemetery and put up a new bank and hardware store on the graves. Nothing could stop progress, they said, not even “Mrs. Wheeler’s mother’s bones.” Sayward bowed up her back at that. She told what she thought to Portius who let fly a speech about disturbing the last resting place of the pioneers, and that put an end to it. But some of the business men were so mad at her, they complained bitterly about her holding on to her lots for raising truck. Land so close in was needed for business to give men a chance to work, they said.
“Why don’t they say it to my face?” she complained to Portius. “Then I could give them a piece of my mind. Their houses and mills shut in all my land now. I can’t see the country any more. Every way you look, you’re stopped by their sawed boards or else their brick and stone.”
The old order had changed, she told herself. The world she knew was going. About the only thing left around town was the ancient sugar maple half way across the square. It wasn’t much of a tree any more and hadn’t been for a good while. Once it had given copiously of syrup. Sayward herself had pounded spiles in the butt. Of late years it had been going down hill. The butt had a hollow place big enough for a good-sized bear to hide in. Every winter more limbs had broken off. The crown was dead, and the only green part left was its middle. But that tree had seen her pappy when first he came to this country, and the rest of them as well.
Then one night in October it stormed, and when she got up in the morning, the old tree was done. The butt had broken off at the hollow place, and what leaves it had lay yellow and mud-spattered on the ground.
“The great god, Pan, is dead!” Portius said when he got up and saw it.
Well, it was about time that it came down, Sayward told herself. Before it fell on somebody. She wouldn’t want to see it maim one of those young ones always playing around it. Funny how they seemed drawn to that old tree.
Just the same she didn’t sleep so good that night. When she woke up from a nap at daylight, she had the strange notion she lacked something. Now how could you miss something that you never did have? She lay there listening but couldn’t hear anything. When she got up, she looked around the room. Now how could you expect to see or hear anything when you didn’t know what it was you looked and listened for? The only thing missing when she went to the window was that sugar maple she used to see half way across the Square. Already it had been half cut up by Cherry Alley householders.
It couldn’t be that old tree lying on the ground that bothered her, she told herself. Why, all her life she had hugged herself to see a tree come down. It meant you could see the sun and stars a little better. A mite more light and air could come in. A few more stalks of corn could grow and give meal to hungry young mouths. Why, back in the woods, she and every other settler woman hated the trees like poison. They were your mortal enemy. All your life you had to fight them, chop, split, nigger them off till nothing was left. And then their wild sprouts kept coming up to plague you. Even now long after the trees were gone, the big butts still lived on in your joints. Heavy lifting and rolling had thickened them till you sometimes felt like an old tree walking.
That afternoon from the third floor she looked out of a front window, and later out of the back. Over the whole city hardly a tree could her eyes find. She knew it had some lilac, apple and peach trees tucked away here and yonder in side and back yards, but they were puny, of no account, could hide behind outhouses. Hardly one could she see from here. The city looked all red brick and wood. Now where had she seen such a city before? Then she knew. This was the city she had dreamt about that time long ago in the wilderness, a city of red brick and white wooden church steeples and never a tree in sight. She had thought it then a wonderful sight to see, a place free of the lonesome gloom of the deep woods, and nary a big butt to have to cut down and burn up. But she didn’t know how much she liked it now. It minded her a little today of one of those desert places her father told them about, of red rocks and sand and far as you could see not a single tree raising itself toward heaven.
She couldn’t help thinking of some of the trees they had seen on the trip to Indiana. Not the kind she had known in the woods, standing thick as thieves with their heads together plotting against humans. No, these big butts of the countryside seemed of a different and kindlier breed, standing in open places, free to spread out on all sides, a whole woods of leaves and limbs hanging on a single trunk.
One big basswood she recollected especially.
They had seen it first a long ways off across the fields. As they approached it grew taller and broader like the daddy of all the big butts, rising half way to the sky and spreading out like a monster umbrella over canal, tow path and locktender’s house. It was a hot day in the sun but when the boat came under the shade, it felt cool, fresh and green like when she was a girl in the deep woods, only this wasn’t something fierce but tame and beneficent to man. She noticed it again when they came back. It was a warm early September evening. All were on deck to see the sun going down and the moon coming up. They had to wait for another boat to pass through the locks, and then one of the gates had to be patched up. All the time she sat there listening to the soft wind in the big basswood. It stirred like something alive. It was immense and powerful, yet gentle as a woman holding its great arms over water and land, boats and locks, the locktender’s cottage and his children.
Now why did she think all her life that trees were savage and cruel? Or were they wild in the woods when she was young, and now in the peaceful countryside did they grow tame and sweeter-natured? Or did she make up all this in her mind? Could the leopard change his spots? Maybe she was just homesick for when she was young.
All winter she looked at the naked city and square. When the ground first thawed in the early spring, she put a mattox, shovel and old axe in the chariot and had Chancey drive with her into the country. They crossed the canal on the Sixth Street bridge and drove up the hill. They had to go a long ways before they found what she was after. Once all this country had been thick woods where she and Mageel MacMahon would walk their bounds. Now there were so many houses she couldn’t tell any more where her land had ended and Mageel’s began. She couldn’t even see Mageel’s house and barn. Far out beyond where Guerdon lost his finger, they came on a patch of brush and second-growth. The farmer said he wouldn’t mind her digging out a few whips. He was going to clear it for corn anyhow as soon as he was able.
She picked out three young maples, a buckeye, a basswood and a whitewood poplar. She wished she could bring home a pair of young oak trees, a white oak and a red, but hardly would they stir their stumps during the rest of her lifetime. She also wished she could find an elm like the one that used to lean by the old cabin, but she couldn’t tell a young one for sure, its leaves not yet sprouted. Every tree she and Chancey dug out stood higher and stouter than she did. They had to work a long time to get the roots whole and free, and to do them up in burlap sacks with some of their home soil for company in their new lodging place.
They drove back to Americus with the long whips sticking out of the back of the chariot. She had no trouble with the farmer, but she had plenty with Chancey once she got to town. About all he was good for was holding up the tree while she spread the roots tenderly around and tromped the ground down. The basswood, the whitewood poplar and one of the maples she planted in her side yard, the buckeye and the other maples in front of her house. Until she finished, a small crowd of folk had gathered to watch. Where did she get them? Did she think they would grow in the city? Where did she get the idea—from her home town back East? Why didn’t she have the city council do it for her? Wouldn’t horses and young ones break them down? Well, she intended to have Clem Reeser build a cribbing about these two on the square.
Small news traveled fast as big in Americus. It was too dark for Portius to have seen much of anything when he came home, but she could tell the minute he came in that he knew all about it.
“I hear you’ve been improving the property,” he mentioned.
“Well, I don’t know if you’d call it that,” she disallowed.
“I was always under the distinct impression that you hated trees,” he said.
Sayward went on silently with her work getting supper on the table. Now how could she explain to him the reason why she had done this. She didn’t altogether know it herself yet, except that once a woodsy, always a woodsy. That might explain it. She saw him watching her all through the meal, and when they were nearly done, she came around to it.
“I was just sitting here thinking what Mrs. Kramer told me,” she said. “This was last summer the last time she came around with her berries. Their church out in Longswamp Valley burned down and old Miley Hoffman wanted to know when they were going to build it. You know old Miley, the one that’s such an infidel. They asked him, what did he care when they built it. He said he had a good reason. When he looked over from his fields he missed seeing the steeple. The valley didn’t look right to him any more without a church. I guess I’m like old Miley. The town doesn’t look right to me without any trees, especially not the square.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DOCK STREET
This house is mine,
And yet not mine.
Another comes,
And yet it is not his.
OLD ILLUMINATION
THIS year the Tenches had to move. Their house, the Clocker house on one side and the Singleton house on the other were all going to be torn down and cleaned out for a row of brick houses, they said.
Rosa stood very still when she heard the news. Never had she known their dark little box of a house to look golden as now that it had to die. Why, she had been born in that house. All her seventeen years had she lived in it. Of course six days a week she went to Mrs. Doan’s, trimming hats with ribbons and bird wings, sometimes taking finished bonnets to the houses of the ladies they were made for. But all the time, the little house by the river was home in her mind, and what would she have done without it and without her mother sitting in the dim room waiting to ask her what had gone on at Mrs. Doan’s today.
And now the house was going to be pulled down. Already it belonged to a strange man who cared nothing more about it than to destroy it. It gave her the same strange feeling as when her baby sister had died. It was the only sister she ever had. Rosa was just a little tyke at the time, and many a night after that she would wake up in a cold sweat over the dead baby. Nothing then would satisfy her save getting up and taking little Boicey out of the same cradle the baby had died in, making sure he was alive, and then rocking him soft, warm and living in her arms. Now evenings after work she hurried home decently as she might to spend all the time she could in the house while she still had it with its roof spreading over her and the four walls standing around her. She was small for her age and could run all the way home if she wanted to. Nobody save her mother would say aught against it.
But her father swore he was glad to get out of “Higgins’s old house.”
“It’s too far from the waterfront,” he said. He meant the new waterfront, the canal. “I have another place rented. It’s bigger than this with two rooms and a goin’ business in the front. Turkey kin tend it when I’m off.”
The first day of April was moving day. Rosa stayed home from work to help. Her mother was of small use. Ever since the news came, her mind seemed stopped like a clock. She sat like one, too, and you could tell no time from her face. Only the pendulum tassel on her old dress moved, and that faster than Rosa remembered. Sometimes the mat of hair she never let Rosa touch kept in time with the tassel, giving little tremors as if struck by an unseen hammer. On moving day morning she went helplessly from one thing to another. She’d pick up this and couldn’t make up her mind what to do with it. So she’d set it down and pick up something else. That’s the way it went. Rosa and the boys had to do everything.
The wagon came right after noon to load their stuff. Her father, the driver and the boys carried out the things. The inside of the house grew bare as a nut. Rosa had never seen it look so ugly.
“We have to go now, Mama,” she said.
Across the street she could see a knot of folks waiting. Oh, she knew what they waited for. They wanted to get a look at her mother. Here’s where they’d get to see Mrs. Tench at last. She had never come out of her house since her first child was born, but she’d have to come out now.
“Come on, Mama,” Rosa said and went out.
But her mother didn’t come
, and her father and the boys made like they weren’t ready to go anyway, rearranging the things in the wagon. Still she didn’t come.
“Go in and get her,” Rosa’s father told her.
“She says she’ll come right away,” Rosa said when she came out.
But “right away” passed and Jake went in. You could hear his loud voice outside. In the end he came out without her.
“Kin you wait a little?” he said to the driver. “We’d go and leave her to hell behind, but she kain’t walk that fur.”
The driver settled down on his haunches by the front wheel. His face, Rosa thought, didn’t seem to have any expression. It was as if this whole business was something that happened long ago and had nothing to do with today. It was time out of mind, out of man’s control. The minutes went by as if they pulled hard against the grain. It seemed to Rosa they’d never get away now, and here they’d forever have to stay, out of the old house but still not in the new. The loafers licked their lips watching. The horses stood sleepy and willing. Rosa listened for the tick of the clock laid some place in the wagon, but it must have stopped, like everything else.
The driver got up.
“Well, I got to go, Jake,” he said and climbed up on the seat. His rough hairy hand picked up the lines. Boicey ran to the door.
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