The Trees
Page 21
It was no ordinary day when the wild ground gave birth to its first tame crop. The wind stood off. The clouds hung like summer. The tender sky came right down in the clearing, softening everything with a veil finer than spider skeins. A little ways there in the woods, Sayward knew the air still hung chill and dim. But here in the clearing, the four sides of the forest held summer in like the banks of a pond. Flies and beetles hummed in the bright warmth. The soil breathed up a sweet rank smell of sprouting and growing. And here and yonder the first tiny green shoots of the baby corn had pushed overnight through the black ground. You could just make out the faint, mortal young rows bending around the stumps.
Sayward and Portius could see now to grub out the wild sprouts without hurting the tame crop they planted. Before they got far, Jake Tench came out of the woods. He took a paper from his hat and said Buckman Tull had left it at the post for him. You knew he’d had George Roebuck read it to him but now Portius had to read it to him all over. It said that Jacob Tench had with malice aforethought killed and skinned Buckman Tull’s boar, and now he had to answer for it Saturday evening in front of Squire Chew.
You might expect that Jake would be in an ugly mood, but Sayward never saw him more pleased with himself. Here he was in the middle of a lawsuit where he would have to brag under oath to all who came to hear him how quick and slick he had skinned that hog.
“I want you to lawyer me, Portius,” he said.
Portius stood there straight and telling in his buckskin britches as a Bay State lawyer in brown velvet small clothes.
“Come in the house and we’ll talk it over,” he said with grave restraint.
When they had gone, Sayward chored on by herself. Her grubbing hoe kept cutting off the woody sprouts. You could look back now and see the corn rows plain, with nothing to hide or choke them. Oh, those corn grains had been drops of crinkled gold that could make more of themselves just by lying and rotting in the ground. She had made Wyitt take his rifle and watch that the squirrels and other vermin hadn’t dug them up. Early next fall when the ears were pushing, he’d have to sleep here in the patch with his hound pup to keep off the coons and foxes.
She grubbed deftly, moving among the dismembered carcasses of the trees, a strong woman’s figure with a single garment on, her feet bare, her calm face bent over the sweet-smelling earth. This was a mighty different world than a woodsy like her knew. Folks of this world didn’t need to wander off to the woods for wild crops and beasts. No, they had their own tame crops and beasts at home. Give her and Portius time, and they would have their tame beasts, too, to give them milk and hides and a sweet kind of tamed meat they called beef.
She found she was singing tunelessly to herself far back in her throat like some of the married women did when their hearts and hands were at peace. Her voice fitted in with the humming of the flies and the droning of the woods beetles. Oh, it was hard beating back the woods. You had to fight the wild trees and their sprouts tooth and nail. But life was sweet sometimes, too.
Only yesterday she had seen a golden fly at the dogberry flowers. Portius said that was a good sign. Where the honey bee went, the white man’s fields and orchards weren’t far behind. Soon the small singing birds would find their way to these corn and wheat patches. They would wake up some fine morning and hear a robin redbreast in the dogberry.
Let the good come, Sayward thought, for the bad would come of its own self. Never again would they see the face of their little Sulie, for if she wasn’t dead, some Indians far off in this vasty Northwest country had her. But a young one of her own was on the way, and if it came a girl, they could call her Sulie and look on her face. That’s how life was, death and birth, grub and harvest, rain and clearing, winter and summer. You had to take one with the other, for that’s the way it ran.
The characters and situations in this work are wholly fictional and imaginary, and do not portray and are not intended to portray any actual persons or parties.