The Trees

by Conrad Richter

  Sayward saw a faint light break on her mother’s face here in this shadowy, shut-in place.

  “I heerd,” she said, “it’s fine livin’ in the open prairie by the English seas.”

  “It’s too fur for you, Jary,” Worth told her.

  “I’m stout,” she said, straightening. “I kin walk a long ways.”

  “The game’s cleaned out up there.”

  “You mought git wild bulls in the open prairies,” she told him.

  But Worth didn’t hold much to that. How could he swap talk with any of the foreign Indians up there? Now Delaware was second nature to him for wasn’t he part Delaware himself? And Shawanee he could get along with.

  In the end they took the lefthand fork, and the light faded from Jary’s face. All that day and the next the forest continued to thicken. None but Worth had ever laid eyes on such trees. A black walnut stood along the trace and three of them couldn’t reach around it. No, they had to get a fourth to span it. Still bigger buttonwoods stood rooted on a creek’s bank. Worth reckoned the heaviest close to fifteen feet through. He bragged he could drive two yoke of oxen past each other and never get off that stump.

  Jary’s face had gone cruelly bleak at the talk of oxen in this wild place. She peered dully at the nameless stream. The giant trees reached over and covered it from either side. Even in the middle the water looked dark as old Virginia tobacco.

  “Ain’t it got sun in these woods, Worth?” she complained, her eyes hard on him like her enemy. And when he had shed his pack and gone nosing downstream with his gun and Sarge, “If anything happens me, Saird, don’t let him always have his way. You’ll never git the chance to see Pennsylvany again.”

  “I mought never want to go back,” Sayward encouraged her.

  “Don’t talk about the old state thataway.” Jary sat the log, her face slanted down, her head giving at every beat of the blood in her gaunt neck. “I knowed it that day on the ferry I made all your beds wrong for you. Now you’ll have to sleep in ’em as best you kin.”

  A long time afterward they heard Worth faintly hallooing down the stream.

  “What kin he see in here?” Jary muttered.

  “He mought have found some riffles we kin cross without gittin’ wet to our middles,” Sayward said. Together she and Achsa managed their father’s heavy pack between them. When they reached him, far off the trace, the stream was still deep and slow with flecks of brown foam.

  “Hain’t you got eyes in your heads?” Worth put at them, puffing on his clay, his own eyes sharp and knowing in his beard.

  Sayward expected at first the black soil where he stood was scattered with small gray stone. Then she saw they were the shed horns of deer. Most of them were broken up. Porcupines, squirrels and other woods creatures had eaten them through. And yet so many pieces lay around that at one place they made a thin drift like the gray leavings of last year’s snow. It was plain even to little Sulie’s wide eyes that herds of deer had been coming here for many winters to shed. Most every tree you looked at was rubbed smooth in places as their old axe handle.

  Worth said little but the smoke came fast from his bearded lips. He showed them what he called a shovel horn and a blue horn and one on which he counted thirteen points. In the crotch of a tree where some Indian must have hung them he fetched out two unbroken gray moose horns. When he set them on the ground and put their tips together, all the young ones save Sayward could walk under.

  “By the tarnal!” he kept saying.

  He took them where the dark stream emptied in a log-choked river. Down the river path he fetched them to a small run and up that run to a strong spring cradled in the knees of an old beech. The ground hereabouts was black as charcoal and the timber the densest stand Sayward had yet seen. God Almighty, she expected, would have to take an axe here if He wanted to look up and see the firmament He made. The big butts stood shoulder to shoulder, and something came in Jary’s sunken eyes as if she had found herself in a herd of those great foreign elephant beasts she had told her young ones a hundred times she had once seen splashing through the mud of a Lancaster street fair.

  She looked around her in a sort of terror.

  “You don’t aim to stay here, Worth! Where’d you git sticks for a cabin? It’d take you all winter a-maulin’ those big butts.”

  “Oh, it’s got light timber here and yonder,” Worth said. He looked up tolerantly at the wild grape and other creepers roping tree to tree with sloping leafy thatches that shut out every wandering speck of God’s free air.

  Jary opened her mouth no more except to swoop in what breath she could in this choked-up place. She had had her say and what good did it do her? The time to have set herself against this place was away back in the old state when Worth claimed the squirrels were leaving the country. Now she and her young ones were here and here likely they would stay.

  The sun must have been straight overhead, for at one place a shaft of light filtered through. It was pale and thin but it looked golden as a guinea. For a hundred feet it fell straight to the ground. Woods flies were rising and falling in it. Jary watched them. When they dropped, they seemed to be falling down some deep, dark well. And she and her young ones, she told herself, were on the bottom.

  CHAPTER THREE

  RIDGEPOLE

  THE YOUNG ones hailed the end of their journey like the start of a frolic. They threw off the packs they never need carry again and swarmed over the ground like young foxes or wolves at play, racing and tagging and yelping at each other. Genny was the swiftest. None of them could catch her. She’d tear around with her thin white legs, her torn shortgown and hair flying behind her. But Achsa could keep going when the others played out. Long after you couldn’t see them any more, their shrill cries came like bird calls from the forest. Wyitt hid in a hollow log and it was a good while till they found him, though now and then you could hear a muffled bark like it came from the ground.

  Little Sulie climbed a young tree, holding on to the ropy creepers.

  “I’m up higher’n a chimly!” she yelled. “I’m up so high I kain’t even see you.”

  Worth’s square axe rang in the woods and small trees here and there began raising dust and twigs as they came toppling down. After the first few fell, Sayward saw her mother piddle over to peer up where they had stood as if they must have left a hole where she could see the sky. But the high roof of leaves stayed unbroken.

  When he had the notion, Worth could be a handy man with tools, and now the white chips spun from sunup to early forest dark. He wanted to finish this stint of a cabin and get at the more important chore of game. He hadn’t even time to answer the questions of his favorite young one. Every so often during the day Sulie would come trotting over and stand by him until he stopped to wipe his forehead of sweat.

  “Pappy!” she would begin.

  “Wha-a?” he would encourage her in the patient tone that always came out of his beard when he spoke to her. As she started to talk, he would nod understandingly and sympathetically and go on chopping, softly at first, then more strongly until the sound of the axe would gradually drown out the small earnest voice and off she would trot, halfways satisfied till the next time.

  Oh, you would think Worth was the hardworking home body to see him. But once he winded a fox or the young ones came running in with news of a fresh bear track before Sayward could stop them, he would change right in front of your eyes. A sharp look would come in his eyes. He couldn’t wait now till he got this out of his system. The axe handle slipped from his hand and the powder horn over his head, and likely they wouldn’t see him again till the shadows were so mighty thick you couldn’t tell if that thing coming through the big butts was a white man or an Indian. Most always he had on his back a skin or two wrapped around the choicest parts of the carcass.

  The first time he had gone off without saying anything and left the cabin stand all day, Sayward expected her mother to sull and lay for him when he got back. But Jary took no more interest in the ca
bin than a squirrel hole in a tree. She went about like she didn’t know it was standing there logged up no higher than Sulie’s head with its top open to every gust of rain and wind and flying jaybird. This crib of saddled logs under these dark trees was no place she would ever live in. Daytimes she dallied around the cooking kettles and evenings she lay in their little half-faced leanto with the deep hollows of her eyes closed. She said she couldn’t look at the young ones around the night fire. Here under the big butts they looked like little people. The black arches were mighty far overhead. Even when you threw bark on the fire, its light was swallowed up before it went a dozen poles down these dark forest aisles that ran on and on only God knew how many miles to the English Seas and the New Orleans river.

  Now that the hunting was good, Worth ran balls at night and wandered with his rifle all day. Pegged skins multiplied on the trees. The cabin had blown out of his mind light as a green gabby bird feather.

  “You kin smell the fall,” Sayward one day reminded her mother.

  “I don’t keep track of the days no more,” Jary said.

  “It’s a gittin’ late,” Sayward went on. “Just goin’ to the spring you can see a long ways under the trees.”

  “I hain’t noticed,” Jary complained. “My eyes kain’t see so good in here.”

  “It’ll give ice on the river one of these fine mornin’s.”

  “Like as not,” Jary sighed. “That’s the way it runs.”

  Sayward went about her business. If her mother and father didn’t care how soon the snow flew and them living in a half-faced leanto, it was nothing to her. The gums along the river flew their colored rags. Sassafras mittens hung a kind of red-yellow and the dogwoods flushed up like the wattles of wild turkey gobblers. Of a morning the pinch of frost nipped your legs, and acorns in the deer paths were mighty hard on bare feet. The woods air smelled fermented as cider. And the hill hooters of a night tried to raise the dead.

  Not that the young ones minded it. They were drunk on fall. It was hardly daylight till they piled out of the leanto to hunt chestnuts and drag in shellbarks and look first at their snares for small game. Piles of walnut hulls rose by the big rock and their hands were stained darker than Shawanees. They hung to scarlet creepers and swung back and forward over logs that would have broken their backs had they ever let go. At deep dusk when they came in, they ate, yawned and lay down together in the shelter like a pile of wolf puppies for warmth till it was time to be up and rip and tear again.

  When they wanted anything, they came to Sayward now rather than their mother. It took too long to get their meaning over to this slow woman sucked of her blood who lay abed or dallied around like a crone, though she was still in her thirties. No, they were too full of go for the likes of her.

  It meant small shakes to them that the cabin wasn’t done. They were tickled the leaves were coming down. They ran through them like it was the first snowfall, kicking them with their bare feet to stir up that tanyard smell. The gum leaves were about the first to drop. The maples, ash and poplars shed not long after. You couldn’t open your eyes without seeing the air full of leaves. They had no mind where they wanted to land. Some turned head over tincup till it made a body dizzy to watch. All night long you could hear them whisper when they lit. By morning the sleepers in the shelter were stitched with a hap of red, brown and gold.

  Sulie spread her fingers like a fork and scratched herself a great pile to burrow in.

  “I’m a white-footed mouse!” she yelled, sticking her head through. “And I’m not a comin’ out till I come with young’uns a hangin’ to my dugs.”

  “You’re a young’un yourself still a hangin’ to your mam’s dugs!” Achsa mocked at her, jumping over and kicking at her pile of leaves.

  “Don’t you tech my house or I’ll git a club and knock your noggin off!” Wyitt threatened.

  Genny ran after Achsa and yanked her by the hair so she swore like a man.

  “Kain’t ketch a terrypin! Kain’t ketch a terrypin!” she dared her and sailed off with Achsa hard after.

  It was all over, Sayward knew, the morning it started to rain.

  “Rain afore breakfast, quit afore noon,” Genny said.

  But Sayward reckoned they had a mortal late breakfast this morning. The cabin looked forlorn standing there roofless and only half raised in the rain and darkest day they had seen as yet in these parts. It put Sayward in mind of the deserted places Worth used to tell he saw in the Pennsylvania woods. Jary had always felt for those poor people, wondering had they died of a fever or was their hair lifted by the Mingos?

  And yet, their own lonesome cabin Jary did not care a hoot about. No, she wouldn’t even look at it. Not a word would she say to get Worth at roofing it. That night the rain kept on and the wind came up. Now the wind held its breath and now it tried to fetch down the trees. The logs in the half-raised cabin creaked and groaned. A cold, wet Sarge came in among them deep as he could squirm to shut out the hullabaloo from his thin-skinned hound ears.

  All night the wind rose. Now it came and now it went. This was a lull. You could hear the trees dripping. Then far off you could catch the next wave coming for you through the woods. You knew that all the coons in their nests were lying there listening and waiting for it like you. And when it came, you could feel the tall butts bending over you like fishpoles. Limbs cracked off like rifle shots. The wind, Sayward thought, dragged a long splint broom. First it passed over the tops of the trees, thrashing the branches. After while the splints reached down on the ground, rattling the leaves, twigs and sticks, and sweeping them in the leanto.

  The wind and rain let up about dawn. None of the Lucketts had more than catnapped all night. Now they lay back in the quiet after the storm and slept.

  Sayward dreamed she saw her mother standing outside.

  “God help me!” Jary said.

  When the girl opened her eyes, a bright light shone in her face. She sat up and saw her mother standing where she had seen her in her dream, her tousled hair down her rounded back. Then the girl saw that last night’s storm had stripped the leaves from half the trees. Her mother looked like a half-blinded human that had lived all summer in a cave. She stood there peering up through the bare branches of an ash at sky so blue it hurt just to look at it.

  “I never thought I’d live to see this day,” she muttered to Sayward.

  For the first time in days she had the girl comb out her matted hair, all the time warming herself in the sun, her wrinkled face held up to light and sky. Then she washed herself a little at the run. When Worth got up and fetched out his rifle from under the pressed leaves to see if it was dry, she was sitting on a wet log, and her mouth that could be so gentle was hard like a mussel shell.

  “You started a cabin or hain’t you, Worth?” she came out at him, her eyes cruel as death. “Or maybe you take us for woodchucks with a hole in the ground?”

  It was good to hear the old Jary. Worth flushed up through his beard. No more of the cabin was said between them. Worth ran a tallowed rag through his rifle and laid it carefully away. All day his axe hacked and slashed, hewed and chipped in the woods. It grew dark early this time of year. Sayward kept fires going for light. She and Achsa helped him lift the logs into place, locking saddle to notch and notch to saddle. After them came the rafters.

  The days now were gray and cold. Sayward wedged in poles for chinking. The young ones carried white clay from the river bank for Genny to daub it. Jary helped. Worth was laying the rib poles now, turning the bows to the sky, for the weight of the roof would settle them straight. Soon as he got done at one end, the young ones scuttled up like piney squirrels, thatching it with shell bark that with the help of hides had to do till the black ash bark would run in the spring. If it turned out that they would stay, he would split out clapboards. Long top rib poles held the bark and hides down. They jutted out from the roof like steer horns, lashed to the under ribpoles with leatherwood and hickory withes.

  “You better move in the
shanty tonight,” Worth said late that afternoon.

  All day a gray light like frost mist had hung and driven through the black butts and branchwork of the woods. Oh, this was winter now, anybody with half an eye could tell. As long as daylight lasted, the young ones fetched in fresh leaves from where the wind had raked them in windrows behind some bush or stump. Chips and log leavings they piled in the chimney corner. The chimney wasn’t topped off yet with sticks and clay, but it drew fire. It still seemed the middle of the afternoon when dusk moved over the forest and settled down.

  “It’s snowin’,” Achsa called out when she came back in that evening.

  “Snowin’?” Jary quavered pleasantly.

  Sayward watched her mother’s eyes take a turn around the cabin. The firelight played sociable fingers on roof and rafters. The logs smelled clean, and the beds of new leaves made you sleepy. Everything was spick and fine as a newborn babe in a fresh log cradle. Piles of knobby hickory nuts and black and white walnuts lay hulled in a corner. Tomorrow or the next day Worth would take his old frow and split chinking boards for loft and shelves and puncheons for a trencher. Already he had an old windblown poplar log picked out.

  The girl felt her mother’s loving eyes rest on each one of them. All, except that little brother back in Pennsylvania, were here together. They had a roof over their heads and a bag of meal hanging from the rafters. A buckskin door weighted with a short green log shut out the dark and snow.

  Her mother’s eyes were mortal young and warm tonight in their deep sockets. So they must have looked, Sayward reckoned, when she had moved in their first cabin along the Juniata. Three of her young ones were to get born in the world there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE SQUARE AXE

  ONCE they were in the cabin, they had creature comforts again. Worth set his gun up in a dark corner where he wouldn’t see it unless he had to and set to work splitting out three-inch puncheons and hewing them smooth with the axe. With these he made a trencher to eat off of, a bench to sit down on and a door with hickory hinges to keep out forest beasts. The bench wouldn’t set even on the rolling dirt floor and he bedded it in the tamped earth. But his stools were fine and steady any place you put them, for they had only three legs.