The Trees

by Conrad Richter

  She had his wet britches over her shoulder. His eyes flashed her a hard look out of his briery young beard but she went on redding off her table and making a long ado of washing his knife and noggin. Once or twice she couldn’t help looking after she heard him splash, and found him gaunt as a gutted deer. His haunches were all ham bone.

  He had done with washing and stood drying himself with his front side to the fire when she took her bedgown from its pin and went to the door.

  “Now I want to tell you something, Portius,” she said. “You don’t need to run off from me. Any time you want to go, just you say so. I’ll see your clothes are mended and your belly full of fresh cooked meat for you to travel on.”

  Then she went out and when she came in, she saw he had pulled on Worth’s frock again and crawled between the blankets of the bed she had made. She didn’t know as she liked this so much, his going ahead and getting in first. For her to get in now would be the bride running after the bridegroom. He should have waited and let the bride in first. Then if he had enough grit to come after, that would be no more than befitting a bridegroom.

  She made to fix the fire for the night but what she was doing was making up her mind. No, he had left her no other way now but to lay a pallet for herself where her and Genny’s old bed used to be. Never, since he ran off from her, would she run a foot after him.

  Then she saw he was holding back the top blanket so she could get in, and his eyes had a gentle look toward her as to a lady. She had heard how sometimes men of the gentry did mortal polite things such as this or helping their woman over a log like she was a helpless young one.

  “Sayward,” he spoke in his deep Bay State voice, “ ‘let’s not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.’ ”

  Now what, Sayward thought, did he mean by that jawbreaking mouthful? Then he smiled and she judged it must be fine words out of one of his books, and it pleased her. She didn’t know for sure whether or not she liked the way he spoke her name, Say-ward. Making two words of it like that seemed too high-toned and big-sounding for her. But if he wanted to say it that way, she expected he could. Like as not she’d get used to it in time, should he stay that long.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BLACK LAND

  WHAT she had ahead wasn’t woman’s work, Sayward told herself, but she could do it. No, it wouldn’t be the light chore of grubbing sprouts out of cleared ground. An axe in a woman’s hand was a scant tool against wild butts thick as oxen and hard as skull bone. A woman would have to whack at one till the ground lay white with chips, and still the big butt would stand there, hardly more than flitched right. But give her time and she could fetch it down.

  She ground both axes over at Covenhovens’ the afternoon Portius went out for his casson. She had Wyitt turn till he’d liked to drop in his tracks. The spittle she blobbed on the stone ran red with rusty steel. That round stone had made Worth laugh the first time he saw it. It had tickled him that the Covenhovens had lugged a rock in a withe creel on the back of a horse all the way from York State when the woods out here lay full of rocks. But Sayward would take it any time to one of Worth’s spit-and-rub stones. A long while she stood over it, grinding out all the nicks that had been clubbed in since away back yonder. She had to keep a close tab on Wyitt or he would have skinned off to the woods.

  When she came home, Portius had been out and back with his chest of books and small fixings. His eye fell on those two axes shiny from the stone as new hard money in her hand, and he cast a keen inquiring glance at her. But Sayward only asked if he had found all his plunder and went about getting supper, saying nothing of the axes she set in a cabin corner.

  How could she tell him what was on her mind? She didn’t dare come out to herself right that what she aimed for was a little cabin patch planted with tame seeds that had in them the strange power to grow and bear their kind as the wild ones did theirs. Her people on both sides as far back as she knew had always been hunters and gunsmiths to hunters. She couldn’t look at these dark woods growing up to her doorstep and ever reckon potato vines, roasting ears and flax growing there in the sun. The great butts stood thick one against the other so that in places a yoke of oxen would have a hard time getting through. Worth had cut only the little fellows here and yonder for cabin logs. The big ones he had no use for and let stand.

  No, Sayward would say nothing, for he didn’t have to help if he didn’t hanker to. She wouldn’t want her neighbors to say she had lost no time putting her bridegroom to work, unless it wasn’t true. Then she didn’t care how many said it. No, Sayward would rather tell Portius nothing unless he asked her. And hardly would he do that. He was no dolt to ask what he could figure out for himself.

  Afterward she reckoned he knew all the time as good as she did what she was after. Maybe he had a bone to pick with the woods. Maybe he had lain around so long he was glad enough for something to turn a hand to. Next morning she took one axe and went out. After a while when he heard the chopping, she saw him coming with the other.

  Oh, she hated to do this to him, for he was soft as a buck fawn. The hickories stood like iron and the oaks so hard their bark looked like the flaking off of the stubborn, gritty old wood itself. Thirty, forty, fifty feet off the ground the heavy butts went, holding their thickness like hogsheads. Even some of the grapevines were a couple feet through. The working side of Portius’s hands broke out with blisters. His fine lawyer forehead strained like this was the hardest case he ever took. You could have wrung water out of him like he tripped in the run. More than once when he went for a drink, Sayward expected this was the last she’d see of him. But not for good looks, she reckoned, did a young Bay Stater like he have a beard on him tangled and spunky as a brier patch. Give him time to callous up those burning hands of his, and he’d get there, so he would, if he didn’t run off.

  Oh, she and Portius knew when it came Sunday now. They were turning their hands together to it better, too. One would sink his bit deep in the flesh of the butt and the other clip the chip off like clockwork. Sometimes they hardly spoke for half a day, unless you’d call axe grunts speaking. A doe could bleat out that the wolves had it. Pretty soon that bleating would stop, and it was hardly likely that with their axes going they would have heard the last pitiful call for help of that wild thing. Here was plenty chance for Sayward to lean on her axe and find out about that Bay State woman and the letter that never came. But Sayward and Portius could live together till both their heads silvered, and never would she ask him that. What he kept in the back of his mind was his own business.

  The chips spun like square tops. The smell of fresh sap and leaves curing on the felled stems hung in the woods like Conestoga hay. It took Sayward back to the time her father set up this cabin. Sometimes she had the notion little Sulie still played around somewhere in this bush and that Jary would come puttering to yon door any minute. But when one of the big butts came thumping down near the white oak, then she knew plain enough where Jary was and hoped her mother didn’t rest uneasy with all this shaking and bouncing around her bury hole.

  It took a long while to make a clearing in these bottoms. She and Portius would leave off work in the dark and go in to supper and bed a little pleased with themselves. And next morning when they went out, it seemed like all the big butts had stood themselves up again and had to be hacked through another time. For meat a man need only take his rifle and wander through the woods where it pleased him. But he had to stay in one place and work like an ox for a year or two to get a patch of roasting ears or a little ground bursting with potatoes.

  One time Buckman Tull came up from the trace.

  “Why don’t you ring those trees and let them die their own selves?” he said. “That’s the way Billy Harbison got his patch.”

  Sayward nodded gravely at his unasked advice and went on chopping, softly at first not to insult him and then hard as usual. And after a little, Portius, not to stand by while his woman chored, fell in, too. Sayward had nothing to say against Billy
Harbison. No, Buckman Tull could have a fine sunny field of grain among his low-cut stumps, but she and Portius could have a scrubby corn patch like Billy Harbison’s with the ugly skeletons of trees standing over and the sun shining down pale and scrimpy through all the dead bones.

  “You kin go look at Billy Harbison’s patch,” she told Portius when Buckman Tull had gone, “and see how you like it.”

  She thought his gray-green eyes glinted at her but all he said was short and pleasant.

  “ ‘I’m with you in any plot against those aristocrats.’ ”

  Now where, she wondered, did he pick up that saying? She had a notion she knew where the glint in his eye came from. That was for her having her own way without ever saying a word of what she wanted. Oh, she had vowed to the squire never to lead her man around by the nose or tell him what to do. And never would she break it. But if he was sharp enough to read in her mind what she didn’t say, that wasn’t breaking her vows.

  For a long while they couldn’t see they were getting anywhere. The more they cut, the thicker the woods closed around them. Then one Sabbath afternoon she and Portius walked up on Bar’s Hill and stopped to look down from the devil’s rocks. Already, she thought, the settlement looked like Lancaster town, with twelve or fourteen houses, not counting barns and outhouses. All had paths or at least a line of flitched trees running between so women and young ones wouldn’t get lost visiting a neighbor.

  But what gave Sayward pause was their own cabin down there like a Noah’s ark in a small sea of logs and brush, with blue smoke rising from the chimney and the sun shining on the wet clapboard roof like quicksilver.

  “A clearin’ sets a cabin off, don’t you think, Portius?” she asked him.

  He nodded keenly and broke from their view a tremendous oaken branch with no more than the arms that had helped perform that piece of miracle below.

  “Never could you even tell it had folks down there before,” Sayward murmured.

  All that fall the big butts lay round curing in the sun. They lay every-which-way, with the river and crossways to it, sidelong and slopewise, atop one another and bedded like giant brothers side by side. They straddled the run and choked off the path. Sayward and Portius axed off the limbs and light top logs, but they could see no sense hacking the big butts through a second time to clear the path. Something could eat through them handier than axes. Meanwhile she and her man weren’t so old and stiff they couldn’t go around or climb over.

  The butts that lay against each other they niggered themselves, building fires beneath and between as soon as the sun had sucked the sap out of the brush and limbs they fired with. All winter the air around the cabin was dyed a fine color with hardwood smoke. Day after day they lived in a blue world so that on a rainy morning with the fires out, the clear colorless air looked thin and strange. Lying in bed most any night they could peek through a crack and see a lick of red flames in the dark, working while they slept. So long as two butts touched each other with fire between, they smouldered night and day, green though they might be. But once they burned off from each other, they turned cold and the fire at their hearts went out.

  By the Pawwawing Days in late February they had burned and niggered off into lengths all that two bodies could, and still the ground lay thick with the giant carcasses. Most of them had been straight as a handspike, some thirty feet without a knot and so almighty thick you couldn’t look over them at the butt. Black walnut, white ash, three kinds of oak and plenty more, all worthless, good for nothing, cluttering up the black land. Now how could you raise anything to keep body and soul together with all these no account wild butts in the way?

  Soon as it froze up again, Sayward and Portius named the day for their log rolling. It was a true March day when it came, with a high wind blowing across the river, chasing white clouds in a blue sky. Shadow and sunlight raced after each other across the clearing. So fast did they go and so close on each other’s heels that it was gloomy, blinding bright and gloomy again before you could say Jeems’s cousin. Mrs. McFall complained it made her lightheaded on the trace.

  John Covenhoven fetched his two-horse team with bright worn chain dragging behind. Others that had them fetched oxen. Jake Tench claimed the keg of brandy he fetched on his back would move more logs than all the beasts. Most every man came shouldering his own axe and handspike. Oh, Sayward knew these men had plenty trees of their own to fell and burn so their scanty fields could nose a short ways further into these woods that had no ending. But they all had a day for Portius and Sayward, they said.

  All except Buckman Tull. He sent word he was ailing and Idy had to stay and tend him. That was as good excuse as any other, for Idy and Sayward never hit it off together. No, they were better some distance apart. All they saw of the Tulls that day was Buckman’s half-wild boar, savage for mast he could not root up out of the frozen ground and smelling cooking a long ways off.

  “Buckman didn’t want to strain his back so he sent his deputy,” Jake Tench said, running off the hog from the meat with a handspike.

  Jake said it was too bad Sayward had meat for all hands, for he surely hated not to butcher that hog. Oh, Wyitt had turned the woods inside out for a month, and she had most everything except the meat of bears which still slept off winter in a hollow tree with a paw in their mouths so they could suck out their stored-up fat. At such times panther roasts were good living, white and tasty as a woods hen’s breast. But it was hard roasting any kind of meat outside today. The wind blew the ashes up over the flesh lying on green poles across the fire. It blew cold on the top side while it roasted on the bottom. Even inside the cabin where the turkeys hung over the hearth, the wind nearly sucked the live coals up the chimney.

  That old wind made the men and teams step lively. The beasts snaked away and the men prodded their handspikes under the heavy logs to roll them in piles. The lighter logs they carried with many a handspike under and a man on each handspike end. That’s when you found out who was a man and who wasn’t. By the middle of the afternoon the patch was clean except for the stamps and log heaps. The wind had gone halfway down. Fires were started. The brush crackled in the heat. The men went around with begrimed hands, holding their faces toward the ground when they got close to pile on more. Portius was a sight with his face streaked and his eyes red from smoke as some old cinnamon bear’s. You could smell singed beard and hair on him or any other man that came close.

  When all was done for now, the men started acting the fool. Somebody ran John Covenhoven’s horses over Jake’s whiskey keg, smashing it up, and Jake had to go for more. It came out afterward that George Roebuck had nothing but barrels when Jake got there, so Jake went back where he had seen Buckman Tull’s hog and killed it, skinning it whole, tying together the few broken pieces and taking the bone from the root of the tail for the neck of his hairy bottle. But George Roebuck guessed whose hog that was when he saw it and would give him no wet goods to fill it. Oh, George didn’t want to get mixed up in any trouble. He knew Buckman would eat fire when he found out what happened to his boar.

  Back at the burning bee they never missed the whiskey. Those that were begrimed went around blacking the other faces. The women screeched and the boys ran after the yelping girls. They blacked the white spots on the oxen and even the faces of the littlest ones lying in a row on Sayward’s and Portius’s bed, though some of the mothers got mad as hops. As soon as one body got blacked, the others gathered around to laugh and rally him on how he looked. Then one would grab and hold somebody else for the rest to work on. Sayward didn’t know half her neighbors any more unless she looked close. Before they got done, she felt she was a blackamoor and this was a blackamoors’ frolic.

  “You won’t have no soap left till they git through, Saird,” Mary Harbison felt for her.

  But most of the men went home black-faced and black-handed. They said they’d go while it was still daylight and scare the insides out of any Shawanee they met on the trace. It was too mighty cold and windy anyhow
to sit around the fires and swap tales tonight. Sayward and Portius would have to keep rolling the leavings together as they burned apart.

  Portius said much obliged to each family as it left. Sayward felt beholden to them as much as he did to see all their logs piled up and the long rows of fire eating at them. But she hadn’t the gift of gab to say it. Portius was the one for that. Not many could make words talk like he could when he wanted to. You could see they all liked Portius. Their faces would light up at him.

  “Good night to you!” he would call what she couldn’t, for wishing a body good night would be too much putting-on coming from a woodsy.

  “Don’t burn yerselves up, Portius!” Jude MacWhirter, who had the biggest family in the woods, yelled back. “But we got room for ye if ye do.”

  Sayward and Portius stayed up that night, taking turns tending the fires. For a long time those log piles burned. Sayward boiled lye from the ashes and black salts from the lye, and Portius took them to Roebuck’s to trade for silver which he would trade later on for seed and blacksmith-made grubbing hoe irons. He himself would make the handles. By the time it thawed and set in raining, all that was left of their summer fallow were plenty stumps, a few charred butts too big to burn up in one winter and gray patches on the ground where the fires had been.

  Next time John Covenhoven came over, Portius told him how a man named Vergil gave a rule in a book for testing your ground. All you need do was dig a hole. If the dirt you took out went back in with room to spare, your ground would grow most anything. And Big John, not to be outdone, told Portius the rule that when a man could go out in his fields and put down his britches and the air would not feel cold on his bare parts, then it was time to seed corn. He said as soon as it dried off a little now, he better plough and drag their patch for them. He would fetch his team over next week. It took a pile of geeing and hawing to sidle around the stumps and charred butts with his shovel plough. But when it was done and the seed put in, the ground lay quiet and waiting around the cabin.