“It’s downhill. Once you get the log rolling it isn’t hard at all.”
“Near the water would be easier,” she insisted.
“I don’t like the water.”
She could understand why.
“You may lose this nail,” she said. “I think you’ve done enough damage for today. Come inside and rest.”
She tore fabric from the hem of her tattered dress. The sudden growl of ripping cloth seemed loud in the wood’s stillness. A crow exploded from the forest with a gunshot flap of wings.
“I don’t like the water, either,” she confided, wrapping the cloth about the thumb.
“Come inside,” she repeated.
“I’ll be fine. There’s work to do.”
“You should rest.”
“The raft won’t build herself.”
“The raft will wait. You’re weary and careless.”
“I’ll rest on the Sabbath.”
“You aren’t God.”
“I’ll rest when I want to. The sooner we take our leave of this hellish valley, the goddamn better.”
“You’re beginning to sound like him again.”
“I’m sure that makes you happy.”
“Lucas!”
“Don’t think me a fool. I know his sort of man. I knew them on the Kronos. The laughers, the drunkards, the despoilers…” he paused, at a loss for words.
“And would you blame me if I chose to know him?” she quietly asked. “How long is it since we have been together, in that way?”
Lucas refused to meet her gaze.
“Lucas, look at me.”
He wouldn’t budge.
“Lucas, I’ve been faithful to you.”
He heaved a very small sigh and nothing else.
“There’s much work yet to be done,” he said.
He walked away, headed for the shadows of the welcoming valley.
2
“Damn it!”
The rabbit darted past Duvall, too quickly for a decent shot. He must have been daydreaming.
Never mind, he told himself. Something else will come along. The wood will provide. Although it provided little as of late, he wryly reflected. They were nearly out of venison and he’d spent too many days crouched fruitlessly, cursing bad luck.
He caressed the walnut stock of the musket, worn smooth from years of usage. He chewed thoughtfully upon a succulent rose hip, but it proved sour. He should have known better, it was too early in the year to taste such fruit. He spat its crimsoned pulp into the grasses at his feet.
He thought of Jezebel. She would have known better. She knew the ways of herbs and the weeds. He shifted his weight, seeking comfort where little could be found.
Never mind, he told himself yet again, the wood will provide. He tried to envision a deer or a fat old bear waddling by.
He continued to wait.
The rabbit returned after a short spell. He heard it coming and was ready for its approach. He squeezed the trigger. He knew the shot to be true before he saw the result. The ball caught the rabbit in mid-leap, turning it neatly end over end. It died where it fell, kicking in silent spasms. Even in death its spirit was determined to run free.
Was this how it had been for the boy? Had he kicked against Death’s measured steps? Had he said anything before dying? Whatever happened had affected Lucas as much as it had Duvall.
Perhaps he would never know.
His ignorance was his own fault. He’d run pell-mell for the cabin, running towards the woman who screamed his name from the heart of the fire.
He should have let the valley burn.
He twisted a bit of sinew about the rabbit’s hind legs, hanging it head downwards from his belt. Let it burn, let it all burn, the valley and that damned tree with it and then sow the ground about it with salt.
Had Jezebel known of the boy’s death? Surely she must have suspected something would happen. Who would have dreamed the boy had built himself a nest atop that goddamned tree? Even so, she should have known that something would have happened.
The tree would not be cheated.
He arose with an uneasy grunt. His legs were stiff as deadwood, the cords of his muscles bound from disuse. He’d sat long enough. The blood taint and the blackened fouling of the gunpowder would spoil the hunting spot.
He’d go home, brew a bit of tea and clean himself up. Tonight he’d ask Tamsen to come to him, husband or no. She’d denied his needs long enough. He smiled at the thought, anticipating release.
He walked slowly, easing the cramps from his weary muscles, stretching into the gentle rhythms of the trail. The dead rabbit was a comforting weight upon his hip, the promise of fresh killed meat and future life. It bounced against his thigh, darkening an already blackened patch upon the bloodstained fabric.
He remembered the boy’s first rabbit. Cord had been excited to snare the thing. Although Duvall preferred to let rabbit hang for a day or two to ripen its flavor with age, the boy would not hear of such a strategy. He gutted and skinned it on the spot, forgetting everything Duvall taught him. He hacked the pitiful carcass into so many bits that there had been precious little left for the stew. Still, it tasted sweet, and the boy was happy, and in the end Duvall was pleased.
The memory curdled his pleasure.
He wanted to turn while he had the chance. He wanted to try again to leave this valley to the little fool who ran from his god.
It was no use. The tree would never let him go. His fate was carved in the darkest of woods, a very long time ago. It would be better to tell those two to leave while they could. He could help them build a raft. Then, once they had passed away to safety, he could deal with the tree on his own.
He shivered slightly, despite the closeness of the summer heat.
He trudged up the winding path towards Tamsen and Lucas’s cabin.
I will speak with peace and purpose, he decided.
I will make them see reason.
3
What started as a simple negotiation quickly escalated into a full-blown battle.
“You’re not welcome in my valley, godsman!” Duvall shouted.
Lucas arose from his stool, unafraid of Duvall’s musket.
“Godsman is it Duvall?” Lucas asked quietly. “Have you forgotten? It’s been a long time since I’ve stood on the right hand of our Lord.”
“A sheep may choose to lay with the goats but it’ll be a damned long time before you can expect it to change its coat, grow horns and bleat.”
Lucas struggled to control his temper.
“Oh my God,” he swore.
“Your god, our god, all the same,” Duvall shouted. “He stands in the valley, below us, and you serve him as well as I do.”
Lucas’s eyes grew steely. He took a step towards Duvall, until the hollow eye of Duvall’s musket barrel bore steadily into the other man’s chest.
Duvall cocked his piece.
“Lucas!” Tamsen said.
“Your house?” Duvall asked. “The house I built, you mean.”
“We built,” Lucas corrected.
“Jonah please, for the love of…” pleaded Tamsen.
“Jonah, is it now?” Lucas said, in a harsh suggestive tone.
Duvall shot a worried glance towards Tamsen. He wished he were anywhere else but here. He should have thought this out before barging into the cabin demanding that Lucas leave the valley.
“Jo-nah,” Lucas said, stretching the word and accenting it horribly. “Jonah, Jonah, Jonah.”
“Lucas, I think that the two of you should…” began Tamsen.
“Jonah, Jonah, Jonah,” Lucas continued, chanting and repeating the name like a lunatic schoolboy.
“And I think,” interrupted Duvall, truly uncertain of what he thought, but feeling the need to say something.
Anything.
“You think? You think?” Lucas said with a bitter laugh. “Since when did either of you think? You witless strumpet and you damned godless heathen.”
&nb
sp; Good intentions scattered. Duvall’s temper abruptly snapped. He brought the musket barrel up, intending to catch it smartly across Lucas’s jaw line. Lucas blocked the attack with surprising swiftness.
The two men struggled over the musket in silence.
The musket went off accidentally, thundering like the voice of an angered god. Tamsen screamed in stark harmony. Duvall snarled as he felt the musket ball whistle past his whiskers.
The musket ball blasted into the cabin’s ceiling, dislodging dirt and bits of dead bark. As the black powder cloud settled the two men stared at each other, their tempers cooled by the impartial shot.
Duvall turned and ran, carrying his empty musket.
4
The devil’s paintbrush gleamed from the shadows like candles scattered about the forest floor. Tamsen cut a few with her knife, along with great bunches of sweetgrass to burn in the fire. She hoped their combined fragrance would exorcise the powder black spirit that had filled the cabin since yesterday.
Lucas was out by the river. She worried about him out there alone with Duvall haunting the woods but there was no holding the man.
She looked at her armload of grasses. The sweetgrass helped, but the cabin had a long memory. She supposed pine boughs would be more practical but she hated the pine’s resinous stink.
Back home she could have used lazy willow or sweet oak or even chestnut. Back home the hills were thick with the crawling of deep purple huckleberry. Violets lurked within small dark shadows, lending color and cheer to their gloomy surroundings.
By now the wild rose would be in full thorny bloom, drawing bees and the promise of thick, sweet honey. She and Jacob would dine daily on old Delta’s fresh backed huckleberry pie and afterwards would purple kisses across each other’s lips, laughing in joy over their tabooed love.
Only Jacob was dead.
And so was Delta.
She thought of Delta sitting on her porch rocker while Jacob and Tamsen talked in the back room.
Delta knew a lot more than she ever told. Was that why Tamsen called the old woman a witch? Was that why she’d told the men old Delta charmed her into bedding Jacob in hope of producing a white baby for some ju-ju sacrifice?
The men had dragged Delta down to the river, even though they didn’t need to. She was old. She would have come peacefully.
“Water’s the cure,” one man said. “Back in England my granny told me the surest test for a witch was dunking.”
So they dragged her to the dunking stool.
“Let’s give her a bath,” one ribald said.
“What if she taints the water?”
“Shit floats, don’t it?”
They dunked her. She squalled like a scalded cat. This goaded the men to further dunking, up and down, holding her suspended high above the river, legs kicking, gasping for breath.
“Come on, confess,” they’d urged.
They dropped her again and again into the icy cold river until they wearied of the game. They tossed a coin, cross or pile, and decided to leave her under. Tamsen counted the bubbles as they slipped between Delta’s loosening lips, until there was nothing left to count.
She was still thinking of old Delta when Duvall stepped quietly out of the forest’s shadows.
5
“Hey girl,” Duvall called.
Tamsen turned, dropping her armload of sweetgrass. She was frightened. She had never seen Duvall look quite so angry and determined.
“You have to go,” she said. “If Lucas finds you here there’ll be trouble.”
“If Lucas finds me he’ll have to come at me down the barrel of my musket,” Duvall said. “He is at the river, mooning for his lost leg.”
“He could return.”
“What of it. He lost more than one leg, hasn’t he?”
Tamsen looked away.
“Come on girl,” Duvall said. “I want you.”
He reached for her.
“Get back,” she said, brandishing her knife.
He grinned. It wasn’t a nice grin. She could see that now. Duvall was bad to the core. He would never be anything else.
“You didn’t welcome me like this before,” he said.
“That was before.”
“Nothing has changed,” he took a step towards her. “I want you.”
“Like you wanted Jezebel?”
“The bitch is dead,” he said. “Besides, that was different.”
“You killed her.”
“She killed herself,” Duvall said. “I tried to save her.”
“You drove her to it. You and that damned tree of yours. It cost you your wife and your son and even your dog. Now you come around here and want me. Besides, your jiggery-poking would only hurt my child.”
“So you’ve thought of it?”
“I’ve thought of the river as well,” Tamsen said. “That doesn’t mean I want to drown again.”
He laughed. It wasn’t a very nice laugh.
“Have no fear,” he said. “Man-milk is the best fodder for spratlings.”
“So you say.”
“And if I happen to bruise one of their tender heads what would it matter?”
He took a slow step towards her.
She held the knife like she meant to use it.
“Take one more step and I’ll gut you,” she said.
“I believe you would,” he said, with a nasty laugh.
He stepped back.
“It doesn’t matter. I can wait. Your man is nothing more than a ghost. I’ll lay him and then I’ll lay with you. Your babies will go to the devil tree. I swear it.”
He turned and walked back into the woods.
She stood there, knife at the ready, not willing to lower her guard until she was certain he was gone.
Why couldn’t he leave her be?
And then she paused.
Babies.
Dear God, Duvall had said babies.
Not baby. Not child.
Babies.
She rested her hand against her swollen belly, feeling what was inside squirm.
Babies.
Dear sweet Jesus on the cross, how much could the man know?
6
Lucas sat on barren ground, his back braced against a pine trunk, stretching his leg to ease its weariness. He’d sat for an hour, sorting through his precious bag of seed corn, searching for dry rot or signs of water damage, not knowing why he even bothered.
Was he doing anything wrong?
“The object of life is to pass time,” his grandfather once told him. “Men play cards to pass time. Men smoked cigars to pass time. Men work with wood and build ships and houses and cathedrals to pass time and mark it.”
“Why?” he’d asked.
“To keep their minds off of what waits for them on the other side of the tree,” his grandfather answered.
He’d been twelve years old when his grandfather told him this. It took him this long to finally understand what the old man meant.
Lucas sifted the corn to pass the time. It took his mind off his injured thumb which throbbed beneath the shroud of Tamsen’s makeshift bandage. He feared blood poisoning, in spite of Tamsen’s carefully applied poultice.
The wound was black beneath the bandage. He was certain of it. Black as sin, black as death, black as a leper’s rotting flesh. Unclean, unclean, perhaps he ought to make himself a bell. This whole valley was unclean. There was no room for God in this valley. He had told Tamsen that they would leave but who was he kidding?
That was the true reason he sat with the unspoken thought of planting, taking root within his brain. Tamsen was right in saying they had all they needed here in this valley. They had land, food, and shelter. Winter wasn’t far away. It wasn’t the time to be thinking of packing up and starting afresh.
He feared the water. He could admit that to himself at least. The greatest evils were done to him and by him upon its murky mirror-like surface. He didn’t relish the idea of another river run. Their first try had nearly done
them in.
He had to face facts. He was settling, like a wreck upon the ocean floor. The task of building a raft seemed insurmountable. He possessed the necessary carpentry skills. It ought to be a simple task. He’d built the first raft well enough but that was a different man.
A whole man.
A whole half-a-man.
What was he now? A quarterman? Some obscure crossbreed of man and jellyfish, incapable of even the simple task of pleasuring his wife? For Duvall it would be a simple matter. Everything was simple and easy – building, pleasing a woman – it was all so easy.
Duvall had offered his help, before the argument, but Lucas hadn’t heard him. He’d been too insanely proud. Why had he argued, instead of listening? The man seemed reasonable enough. He offered what Lucas wanted.
Instead he’d started an argument and now he must reckon with Duvall, a most dangerous man to antagonize. Lucas wasn’t worried about Tamsen’s faithfulness. He trusted her. But the longer Duvall lived without a woman, the more likely his dirty, greedy little mind would stray towards the unspeakable.
Lucas shuddered at the possibility.
Perhaps Duvall could be persuaded to leave the valley but why should he want to? He’d lived here longer. He had everything he needed. He seemed content in his lean-to and had little problem providing for himself. He could easily barter with the savages for another bedmate.
Or else take one.
Lucas thought of the musket. It gave Duvall his power. If only his own hadn’t been lost in the river.
He had to get the musket for himself.
Did Duvall sleep with it?
The germ of an idea took root in his soul.
He stared at the seeds. They cared little where they lay and less where they were buried. They could sleep for as many years as a man had seasons, and still sprout fruitfully.
The thought roared within Lucas’s mind.
He rummaged through the carpet of dead pine needles that covered the valley’s floor. The ground would need to be broken. The dried out needles took forever to decay.
Even in death they found a kind of immortality.
“The pine is an evil tree,” his grandfather told him. “Crops fail to survive upon the poor soil such trees thrived in.”
Lucas dug deeper. His fingers pierced the soil hidden beneath the pine-fall. The dirt stuck beneath his fingernails, filling the lines and cracks of his palm. He studied the dirt. With no decay to nourish it, no death to give it life, the soil was dry and chunked out. Bringing life from this soil would be no easy task.
Devil Tree Page 11