“I got what I could find. The river swallowed the rest. What I got, I cached by the split oak. I’ll bring it when I can.”
“Good boy,” Duvall replied.
Lucas was unsure if Duvall spoke to the boy or the dog. Duvall clapped his hand lightly upon the boy’s left shoulder. “Take it up to the cabin. Lucas and I will bring the rest.”
The boy nodded and turned on his way. Lucas returned the nod, although it hadn’t been directed at him, discomforted by the boy’s bold gaze. His flesh trembled at the memory of the boy’s sleeping touch.
“I’d have more luck talking to a tree than the two of you.”
“He’s a fine boy. He’ll make you proud.”
“Pride is a sin,” Duvall said with a grin. “So why haven’t you and that Tamsen of yours dropped any spratlings yet?”
Lucas’s face stiffened. “She is barren,” he answered with another lie. He wished he could take it back.
Duvall blanched, as the blood ran from his features. He sagged and leaned against the trunk of a sturdy sapling.
“You’re certain?”
His voice seemed strange, almost strained.
Lucas’s control snapped.
“Of course I’m certain, damn it. We’ve been married for over three years and God hasn’t blessed us. He’s spit on us.”
Duvall looked to the wood.
“It’s not always God you should be concerned with.”
Lucas nodded, as if he understood. He hadn’t mentioned the physical problems that developed since his sea ordeal He didn’t feel like discussing his physical shortcomings with Duvall.
For a time the two men stood framed by the nodding trees.
It was Duvall who broke the silence.
“Come. There is a tree that you must see.”
5
The cold woman crouched over the fireplace as if it were an altar, draining comfort from its cruel, flickering heart.
The cold woman’s name was Tamsen. She was sure it was. She remembered Duvall and Jezebel and even the boy but the other man was a mystery. She should know him. He had been something to her once.
The crate lay open before her. Dried fruit, coffee beans, a small black cauldron, flour and sugar and a bag of salt which Jezebel quickly appropriated. Tamsen didn’t ask her why the older woman took the bag. She simply accepted as she’d come to accept so much else in this valley.
Tamsen found a small sewing basket and a wooden box with a large black book within it. The book bore a tarnished gold cross embossed upon the front cover. She opened the book but the words meant nothing. What was in the back of the book was of more interest to her. Hidden in a hollow carved out of the last third of the book was a dried ear, attached to a blackened leather thong.
She turned the ear over in her hands. Had it heard some secret that she should know? Like the book, the ear meant nothing but because it looked like something that should be hidden she closed the book on the ear and replaced them both in the wooden casket. She slapped her hands about herself, kneading the flesh of her inner arms. She would never be warm again.
Jezebel went outside for the second time. Tamsen hoped for more of the sweet milk she’d been given earlier. She stared, covetous of the jug upon the table. Jezebel had brought the jug in earlier and gave Tamsen a cupful. The mile was warm, sweet and creamier than the cow’s milk she drank as a child.
A rhyme rang like a soft bell in the hidden shadows of Tamsen’s memory.
Come butter come, come butter come, Peter standing at the gate, a’waiting for a butter cake, come butter come.
She remembered it strangely, an old rhyme, sung by an old woman. In a moment of surprising insight, like a bit of tinder sparked in darkness, Tamsen saw the memory of an old black woman sitting upon a faded white porch working away at a butter churn, singing the little rhyme to make the time pass.
Old Delta, that’s they used to call her, Old Delta singing on the front porch and sweet while Jacob waited out back.
The memory vanished as Jezebel returned. She staggered inside, bent over a slopping bucket of river water gripped tightly in both hands. Her buckskin dress bore a darkened, spilled water stain as if she’d lost control of her bladder.
Jezebel paused for a moment in the doorway. She lurched, sagged and her features paled. She inhaled sharply, sank to her knees, half dropping, half lowering the too-heavy bucket to the floor. More water spilled, transforming the earth to mud and further soiling her garb. Her right hand flew to her swollen abdomen. She let slip a small moan.
Tamsen stared at the fallen woman, her clouded mind not grasping the full situation. A spark kindled in the darkness of her mind. She rose from the fire and hurried to where Jezebel slumped. She placed a gentle hand upon the suffering woman’s shoulder, draping her own blanket across the Indian woman’s back. Her other hand clasped Jezebel’s. Their fingers spliced into a love knot rested upon the woman’s child heavy gut.
The two knelt in the mud, linked in pain and a bond incomprehensible to either. Tamsen crooned tunelessly, slipping into the butter chant, rocking gently as if Jezebel were a small child needing comfort. The older woman’s eyes grew wide in wonderment. Tamsen wanted to offer to suckle as the boy had, to ease the woman’s pain and share in her heavy fertility, but she dared not ask so unseemly a favor.
It was Jezebel who broke the contact, rising slowly to her feet, her right hand still cupped gently over her belly.
“Jo-nah will be home soon,” she said.
Tamsen returned dutifully to the fire.
The spell was broken.
6
It was a huge tree, a pillar larger than any Lucas ever saw.
“It is old,” Lucas had said.
Perhaps it had once towered over Eden, Lucas thought. Its mighty limbs hung heavy with sin, bowed beneath the weight of the old crafty serpent. He closed his eyes and listened to the dark whisperings of its clustered needles, like the warning hisses of an unearthed bundle of vipers.
Ancient.
Lucas stared at the roughened trunk, furrowed with age and studded with platters of yellow-white fungus and dusty clumps of moss that hung like dirty green scales. He heard the gnashing needles like an army of sharpened hungry fangs. It was easy to imagine how one could stand beneath a moonless sky, spellbound by the whispers of soft seductive lies and countless secrets.
Beneath the tree Duvall capered like a mad pagan of old, swinging his axe in wide, wild circles. Lucas approached cautiously, fearful lest this moonstruck devil should turn on him.
Duvall had run on ahead after their encounter with Cord, calling to Lucas as a small boy, as if this dark journey was a lark. Lucas feared the man’s step might snag some evil root but Duvall proved as surefooted as a goat and twice as nimble.
Lucas wasn’t half so lucky, stumbling twice and nearly falling upon his borrowed axe. His fear of losing his way goaded him to hectic pursuit of the fleet-footed madman.
“Come on, Lucas,” Duvall called and continued to run.
They came to the heart of the valley, a natural clearing dominated by a single enormous jack pine. Everything in the valley seemed tainted with the blighted gray of winterkill, save for the jack pine which reared up in eternal fertile emerald vivacity.
“By God just look at it, Lucas.”
The tree loomed over the valley, shrouding the light with an aureole of outflung limbs. It looked like some bizarre form of arboreal cuttlefish; a monolithic spider god brooding within a parlous stranded domain. The clearing added to the illusion, filled as it was with an abundance of scruffy underbrush and numerous small, stunted pines, all dead and dying, choked by the overbearing magnitude of their parent tree. Tiny dead memories clustered within the jack pine’s surly umbrage like insect carcasses dangling within an ancient web.
“Have you ever seen its like? What a tree. It’s mine,” Duvall said, emphasizing his last words with another wild swing of the axe, nearly throwing himself off balance. “All mine.”
Lucas
stood quietly, unsure of what was expected.
“It’s big,” Lucas agreed, uncertain of what else he could safely say.
“By God man, it’s the biggest thing in this valley. It’s stood for a thousand years waiting for me.”
Lucas’s breath quickened, caught up in a strange growing spell. He hefted the axe restlessly, without thought. He felt as if he were back in the river again, in deep and over his head. The blood pounded in his temples, rising like an oncoming tide.
“Waiting for us,” Lucas whispered.
He became aware of an insect of some sort, buzzing about his ears. It was early in the season for vermin. He swatted it against the bark. He glanced at his palm, surprised at the amount of blood it held. A bit of sunlight filtered through the branch work, glinting off his axe blade. He let the light play across his eyes, the dancing slices of light holding him spellbound.
“We should cut it down,” Lucas said, not knowing why he’d spoke.
Duvall suddenly seemed afraid.
“Next winter,” Duvall agreed. “We shall girdle it next winter. Cut its bark a circle round and when it starves and dies we’ll burn it where it stands.”
Lucas stared, surprised at the man’s obvious nervousness.
“Why not now?”
A strange light played within Duvall’s eyes. He wrestled with the decision like a Jacob wrestling with a dark angel. Twice Duvall tried to speak. Twice his mouth opened and twice it closed.
“We should cut it now,” Lucas suggested. “Cut it and burn it this winter, when the fire won’t spread.”
Lucas wasn’t certain why he thought the idea sensible. The tree didn’t need cutting. What spell had overtaken him?
“Yes,” Duvall agreed. “We should do this now.”
The two men took their stance, each upon opposite sides of the tree.
This is foolishness, Lucas thought. Madness. Even with two men, it would take a week of steady chopping to bring this monster down. He stared into the furrowed bark, attempting to read the path of the grain. It seemed to spiral up the trunk, promising a path so twisted it was impossible to conceive of any amount of usable timber being born of such a trunk.
“Are you ready?” Duvall asked, licking his lips.
There is something here, Lucas thought. Something more than what we can see. He stared at Duvall, hunched behind the tree as if in fear.
Duvall’s muscles bunched and quivered all out of proportion with the simple task at hand. The man’s eyes gleamed like a slave promised freedom. His breath grew taut and hasty. The sweat upon his brow and cheek glistened. Then Duvall swung, perfunctorily, checking his effort before he struck the tree. It was the first awkward movement Lucas could recall seeing the man make.
“Ready,” Lucas agreed with a nod.
Lucas swung first, knowing where he’d place the cut. He envisioned a clean blow, deep and downwards, placed so a second upward swing would send a plate sized chip spinning towards the ground. The axe handle quivered as he struck, but the blade thudded impotently upon the bark, not raising a splinter.
Lucas’s palm smarted from the blow. Raw power sang through the blade to his arm. His teeth chattered from the impact. He drew back for a second swing. A sound like a crack of summer thunder rang from above.
His head snapped back, knowing what he’d see - a deadfall, a heavy rotted limb, shaken loose by the force of the axe blow, plummeting towards him. There’d been no sign of such a danger before his swing.
For a heartbeat he watched it fall.
And then he jumped.
“Look out,” Duvall called.
As Lucas jumped he heard Duvall’s late warning. From the corner of his eye he saw Duvall fling his axe to the ground as if it scorched his palms.
Lucas leaped like a deer in flight; his shadow stretched across the forest floor. He flattened and rolled in hope of evading the branch. A twisted knee of tree root caught his legs as he rolled. The deadfall struck his legs like a spar crossing a mast. The left leg was sheltered by the crook of the root but the right chanced to fall upon solid wood.
The mass of the falling branch struck Lucas’s right leg hard. He heard a second crack, as loud as rifle shot. He felt half a heartbeat of terror as the bone shattered. The pain washed over him, drowning thought in a bright crimson flood.
At the last he heard Duvall scream in strange sympathy as if he himself lay stretched upon the forest staring at the surprised white of his bone uprooted through the broken shell of his flesh.
He lay there watching his own blood soak into the gulping roots of the great and thirsty pine.
7
Far above the valley the women in the cabin heard the screams.
Tamsen jerked up from her fireside vigil, as if she were shot.
Jezebel shook her head wearily, in disgust or resignation, or simple acknowledgement of the inevitability of the thing.
And then the two of them slowly started down the valley trail.
8
Jezebel sat a lonely vigil over the cabin’s inhabitants.
The man, Lucas, lay fitfully wrapped in dreams of pain. His leg was shattered. The cold woman knelt beside him, one hand on his brow. At last she lay beside him and joined him in tortured oblivion. Duvall dropped earlier, asleep like a dead thing on his bedroll. The boy stayed in the valley, preferring the embrace of darkness.
Her first husband had been this way as well, preferring the cool of the woods to their tent’s warmth. He fasted and dreamwalked, running from her until one day he simply didn’t come home. He’d always been a good man, kind to her in many ways, but he’d been a man without appetite.
The boy had been a fluke.
After she was sure they were all asleep she went to the cache of supplies the boy had retrieved. She looked at the sack of salt. Tomorrow Duvall would tell her to throw it into the river. She sat on the ground thinking about that, resting a hand upon her belly while thoughtfully sifting through the pure white crystals.
Then she bound the sack and carried it to the back of the cabin. She turned away from the valley cradling the salt sack in her arms like a newborn child. She found a stone and hid the sack beneath it, covering it in dirt to hide it. Tomorrow she’d tell Duvall she’d already done what he wished.
She crept back around to the cabin door, shivering as if she felt a cold gaze. For a moment she saw a great black deer staring from out of the darkness.
And then, it was gone.
She stood, gazing wide eyed into the valley. Afterwards she crept inside to fall into a tortured fitful sleep.
Chapter Four
Lucas lay in a pine bough bed battling a raging fever, his wounds pussing and refusing to scab in spite of Jezebel’s poultice. He wouldn’t eat. He drank very little. He complained the pine branch splint chaffed him. He slept fitfully, awakening only to shout at the shadows in the cabin.
Jezebel had seen many warriors pass over this way with the fever-devil eating into their bones, gnawing at their spirit and swallowing their thoughts until nothing was left for Grandfather Death save a burnt-out husk. She had to break the fever or kill it. She and Cord built a sweat lodge out of pine boughs. It made her heart happy, watching her son work alongside her.
Duvall kept a vigilant watch.
Jezebel heated rocks in the fire. Cord carried them to the sweat lodge with a pair of makeshift wooden tongs. She laid a small fire to smolder beneath the stones while Cord and Duvall carried Lucas inside.
Even Tamsen had a role to play.
The cold woman would sit inside with a bucket of water and a dipper, to soak the rocks and sweat with her husband. It was bad luck for men and women to sweat together but she craved the heat.
The plan was simple. Jezebel would make Lucas sweat until the water and salt of his sweat purified him. The fever-devil hated the taste of salt and water as all devils did. It would leave the man’s body to come out and enjoy the heat of the lodge. They’d bring Lucas out and seal the lodge and burn it, releasing the fever
-devil’s spirit to the four winds who would blow the fever-devil far from the valley.
That afternoon they placed Lucas inside the dark heat. The cold woman followed eagerly, hoping to steal heat from the lodge. Jezebel considered asking the cold woman to lay with the man so her river-chilled flesh might drain his heat but she didn’t think the woman would understand. Besides, the fever-devil might slip between the cold woman’s legs during the act.
As a precautionary measure, Jezebel slipped a few grains of salt beneath the cold woman’s tongue. The woman might possess the strength to defeat the fever-devil but Jezebel didn’t want to risk it. The woman had been kind to her and that counted for something in Jezebel’s book. The man was nothing more than a sack of spoiled seed.
“He may die,” she said to Duvall in her own tongue, after the man and woman entered the lodge.
“He will not die,” Duvall answered. “My tree will not let him. My tree is stronger than any of your devils.”
“Your tree is what did this to him in the first place.”
“He shouldn’t have struck it,” Duvall answered.
“You warned him of this, did you?”
He glared at her, raising his open hand to strike her. She matched his glare, her eyes narrow and hard, lifting her chin in defiance. He quivered in pure frustration. Twice he raised the hand to strike; twice he drew it back. He let the hand fall limply to his side, hissing in exasperation.
Jezebel just laughed. She caught him in her arms, squeezed a gentle bear hug until he laughed as well.
2
There was always a trail if you knew the woods and Cord knew every trail in the valley.
It had rained the night before last and the forest remembered. Cord tasted the rot in the air. The hound loved the stink, burrowing his snout into a mound of funk and debris, sneezed, and shook his ears. Cord laughed out loud and the dog wagged its tail in return.
Duvall had named the hound Satin for its color but called it “dog” or “hound” or “goddamn jughead.” Cord thought of it as wolf, although he didn’t use the white man’s name for this purpose.
It was good to be alone. By Cord’s figuring he’d done enough work today. The lodge was built and the strangers sealed within. Let them bake if they wished. He preferred the coolness of the woods.
Devil Tree Page 4