Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  The man Nathaniel sat at the kitchen table, and as he had done a few nights before, he picked up his little stick of wood and began to make marks on what looked like a very thin piece of dead tree skin.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Making a list,” he replied. “I have to go down to Gatlinburg tomorrow to take care of some business. It’s a long way, so I’ll spend the night and be back the following day.”

  “Will you be taking the path where we saw the footprints of the loggers?”

  “Not that one, but one similar that goes down the mountain toward town,” he said.

  “You will need to be careful,” she said, and he nodded in quiet agreement.

  Willa didn’t know what Gatlinburg was, other than a swarm of humans at the edge of the world, and she didn’t completely understand what he had told her or how it related to the symbols he was marking on the tree skin, but she nodded her head and pretended she did. She didn’t know why she said she understood when she didn’t, other than that she wanted him to think that she did.

  She wanted to belong, to know things, to be part of things. She wanted all of this: the dog’s soft ears, the crackling embers in the fireplace, the washing up after dinner, and the man sitting at the kitchen table.

  “Listen,” he said softly as he turned toward her. “All these nights, you’ve been sleeping in the tree in the yard. I was thinking you might want to come into the house, maybe sleep inside here with us, if that’s something you would want to do.”

  Willa looked at him. She knew what he was asking.

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” she said and walked out of the house.

  She went down to the river, gathered cane stalks and willow twigs, and started weaving them together into a fine, soft mesh until she had made a cocoon.

  When she returned to the house and the man Nathaniel saw what she had made, he got up from the kitchen table.

  “Come on,” he said softly. “I have just the spot for it.”

  He took the cocoon upstairs, and she watched as he hung it from the ceiling in his room near the open window where she’d be close to the leaves and branches of the trees, and be able to look out across the canopy of the forest toward the rise and fall of the distant mountains.

  Later that night, as they were lying there in the darkness, he in his bed with his dog Scout on one side and his killing-stick on the other, and she hanging from the ceiling in her cocoon, the moonlight shone through the window the same way it had the first night she had come here.

  Just when she was about to fall into a deep and welcomed sleep, he spoke in the darkness.

  “Willa of the Wood,” he said softly, the sound of mystery in his voice, as if there were things in the universe that he just didn’t understand. “That’s who you are,” he said. “You’re my Willa of the Wood.”

  “Willa of the Wood,” she whispered to herself, smiling. She liked the sound of that, and she liked the sound of Nathaniel saying it.

  Her life as a thieving jaetter seemed so far behind her now, like a cold, murky season with few rays of light.

  Through all their days and nights together, they had talked of many things, but she knew there was far more that they hadn’t spoken of.

  She had told him of her life in the forest, of climbing the mountain high and seeing the blue ghost fireflies, of the sounds of the birds in the morning and the thrill of rescuing a wounded panther. But she hadn’t told him of her life as a jaetter in the Dead Hollow clan, or of the death of her beloved mamaw, or of all the things she had done in the past. The past was pain, seemingly for the both of them, and it was a dark winter she had no want to return to.

  And about him, too, there were thoughts she knew she shouldn’t think. There were questions she knew she shouldn’t ask. Why did he journey up and down the river every day? Why were the other bedrooms of the house so empty? What was the agony that lay behind his eyes?

  Willa woke early the next morning when it was still dark and went downstairs. Outside, the sounds of the night had died down hours before, but the sound of the morning birds had not yet begun. An eerie silence held sway.

  Standing in the kitchen, she watched Nathaniel in silence as he packed supplies into his leather knapsack for his long journey through the forest down to Gatlinburg.

  “I’ll see you when I get back,” he told her gently.

  She nodded quietly.

  “I know you know how to take care of yourself in these woods,” he said, “but if those loggers come around here causing trouble when I’m gone, then you do that thing you do, make yourself scarce.”

  “I will,” she agreed. Making herself scarce, as he called it, was just about the only thing she was good at.

  She watched Nathaniel grab his rifle and head out the door with Scout at his side, the dog content to go wherever he was going.

  She followed them out and then stood in the yard. Seeing them fade into the thickness of the forest, she felt a peculiar pang in her heart that she’d never felt before, and she prayed they’d be safe.

  She’d never been to Gatlinburg, but she’d seen it from a distance. Why would he go to there?

  As she went back into the house and walked through it alone, she was struck by how different it seemed, so quiet and lifeless now. It felt like a hollow wooden cave, long abandoned by those who had once lived there.

  She didn’t want to stay in the house without Nathaniel and Scout there, so she went back outside. One by one, the birds began to sing and chirp and whistle in the darkness, each one making itself known to the others around it, until the morning light began to fill the sky above the trees.

  She felt an unusual restlessness. She wasn’t sure what to do or where to go. She fed the goats and chickens, and then made her way to the river. She gazed at the water flowing among the large boulders, then walked along the river’s path. She traveled downstream, staying close to the river’s edge.

  She had intended to walk just a little ways, but once she started, she couldn’t stop. She just kept walking, pushing herself hard. She went hour after hour, the cold water of the river soaking her feet and legs when she crossed through its shallow pools, and the rough surface of the jagged rocks abrading the bare skin of her hands as she climbed over them.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for. But Nathaniel had done it every day, and it felt right to be doing it in his stead, taking the same course he had taken.

  As she journeyed down the river, she kept a sharp eye out for whatever Nathaniel might have been looking for. She was determined to figure it out.

  She saw a family of raccoons, a mother and three little ones, foraging for crawfish in the shallows with their tiny hands. Another time, she spotted a fox staring at her from the undergrowth. She often heard the rapping of the woodpeckers, which always brought a smile to her face.

  But then she heard a different kind of sound in the distance.

  She stopped and listened, tilting her head.

  It was coming from across the river, a dull, repetitive, thudding sound echoing ominously through the forest.

  Her stomach wrenched into a twisting knot. It was the sound of axes cutting into the living bodies of trees.

  She sucked in a quick breath and pulled back from the river into the underbrush of the forest.

  The loggers were getting closer every day. Nathaniel had warned her to stay clear of them, and she’d seen their destruction with her own eyes. She had no want to see it again.

  She turned and fled through the forest for home, glancing back over her shoulder as she ran. Sometimes she paused near a tree, blended into the bark, and waited just long enough to listen, then continued on.

  As she made her way, she wondered if Nathaniel had been journeying down the river every day to guard and protect his land from the loggers, but she didn’t think so. He always went downstream and always stayed close to the water, but she knew much of his property was upstream as well.

  By the time she got back
home, she was wet and exhausted, with no more understanding than when she ventured out. Her journey down the river had been a failure.

  When she came to the grove of sourwood trees that grew near the house, she finally slowed to a walk and caught her breath, relieved to be back. As she made her way across the open grass toward the porch, she glanced over to the meadow where she sometimes saw Nathaniel standing by himself. And there she stopped.

  She gazed through the opening in the trees toward the field, wondering.

  Why did he go there?

  Why that particular meadow?

  If he was reluctant for her to see him crying, then why didn’t he go into the barn or the mill where she could not see him?

  What refuge did the meadow provide his weeping soul?

  Curious, she turned and walked toward the opening in the trees.

  To her surprise, the hair on her arms began to rise up.

  Her temples began to pound.

  Something was telling her to stop, to not go into the meadow.

  She paused, debating whether she should listen to the warnings, but she didn’t want to stop.

  She wanted to know.

  She walked into the center of the meadow, a small green field dotted with purple fringed orchids. A lively flock of chirping goldfinches and shimmering-blue buntings feasted on the coneflowers that drooped in the long rays of the setting sun.

  Then she noticed something on the ground at the far end of the meadow.

  As she walked toward it, her heart beat slow and steady.

  At first she could not make it out, for it lay in the shade of an old, gnarled black cherry tree with long limbs that hung low over the grass. But then she began to see.

  Someone had laid stones on the ground in the shape of a large rectangle. Inside the rectangle, there was a single mound of dirt. The mound had been swept clean of sticks and other debris, and it appeared as if someone had carefully smoothed the dirt with their bare hands. Periwinkle and ivy had been planted all around, and bunches of flowers from the meadow and the nearby forest had been laid alongside. At the end of the mound stood a cross made of wood. And beside that cross there were three other crosses, side by side in the grass, one after the other.

  She swallowed.

  Suddenly she felt very small, like a leaf floating in the wind, without will or destiny, other than to just fall to the ground.

  These are human graves, she thought.

  Each of the four crosses had a small wooden plaque carved with day-folk markings. She stared at the markings for a long time. But she could not read them. Suddenly, there was a part of her that felt as separated from Nathaniel’s world as she had ever been. But there was another part of her, deeper down, that felt their connection, and knew that at this moment in the flow of time there wasn’t another person in the world who was closer to him than her. They had become twins of the soul.

  As she walked slowly back to the house, lost in her thoughts, she knew she shouldn’t ask Nathaniel about the graves.

  She shouldn’t ask about the names that were on them.

  She shouldn’t ask about what happened before she arrived.

  It would destroy everything.

  The next afternoon, when Nathaniel and Scout finally returned from Gatlinburg, Scout dashed across the grass and ran up to her, his tail wagging excitedly.

  “Hello, Scout!” she said cheerfully as she knelt, put her arms around him, and hugged him. “Welcome home!”

  Her heart swelling, she glanced up to Nathaniel, but his face was more worn and haggard than she had ever seen it. She expected bright news of his journey, but when their eyes met, he just shook his head in discouragement, and walked on toward the house.

  After putting his rifle and supplies away, he trudged into the mill and went to work, clanking and banging, as if he were smashing thoughts from his brain.

  When he came out of the mill, he went to the woodpile and split logs with his ax in a fit of violence, slamming his blade down harder and harder with each chop until there were no more logs to split.

  That evening, as they sat across from each other at the kitchen table and ate their dinner, she watched him warily, wondering if his dark mood had passed.

  He ate his venison piled high with a relish of mashed-up squash, apples, and honey, and shoveled heaps of sweet corn succotash into his mouth, but he made no comments and asked no questions.

  “The other day,” she said tentatively, “you were making marks with a stick on the skin of a tree…”

  “I was using a pencil to write letters on a piece of paper,” he explained, and she could tell by his tone of voice that he didn’t mind talking.

  “What do the letters represent?” she asked. “Does each one have a meaning?”

  “No, not exactly,” he said as he cut another piece of meat and put it in his mouth. “Each letter is a sound.”

  “How can that be, when the skin of the tree is dead and the letters are silent?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said as he left the table and went upstairs. She heard his boots as he walked down the length of the hallway. He returned a few minutes later with a set of wooden blocks.

  “This is called an A,” he said, holding up one of the letters. “It represents the sound ‘ah,’ like the word apple. Each letter represents a sound that we write on the paper so that people can understand what we’re saying to them.”

  “Even though they are not there…” she said, amazed by the magic of it.

  Nathaniel nodded, pleased with her reaction, and picked up another letter. “This one here is an H. It makes a ‘hh’ sound, like at the beginning of the word home.”

  “What is that one?” she asked, pointing to a letter that looked like one she’d seen on the plaques by the graves. It appeared to be a jumble of three sticks.

  “That’s a K, like at the beginning of the word kitten. You see, the alphabet contains all the different sounds.”

  Willa paused, trying to understand. “So…any word can be made from these letters?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Faeran words?”

  “Yes, I reckon so.”

  “What about the name Willa, how do you spell that?”

  “W-I-L-L-A,” he said, then wrote the letters on the paper so she could see what they looked like.

  “And what about ‘Alliw’?”

  He looked at her uncertainly. “Did you say, ‘Alley Ew’?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Alliw.”

  “Is that a name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the beginning of the name might be spelled A-L-L-E-Y or A-L-L-I,” he said. “But I’m not sure about the ending. Maybe an E-W or just a W. So it might be A-L-L-I-W.”

  She watched as he carefully wrote the letters out with his pencil for her to see.

  She looked at the two names side by side.

  W I L L A and A L L I W.

  Twins, she thought. My sister and I were twins, even in our sounds, in our letters, like the left hand and the right hand painted on the wall in the cave.

  “So how do you spell ‘Nea’?” she asked next.

  “I would imagine that would probably be N-E-A,” he said, and wrote the letters down for her. “You see, you’ve seen the A before, but the E and the N sounds are new. The N is ‘nn, nn.’ Do you hear it?”

  “I hear it,” she nodded, mystified and satisfied at the same time.

  “Is this Nea a friend of yours?” he asked. “Maybe a bumblebee or a squirrel?”

  “No,” she said with a smile, knowing that he was joking with her. “Nea was my mother. And Alliw was my sister.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I see,” he said. “They’re beautiful names, Willa.”

  He looked at her for several seconds, as if he wasn’t sure if he should ask her more questions. “And they passed away six years ago, is that right?” he asked tentatively.

  “My parents and my sister died when I was six,” she said, but did not say the rest, that it had been
his people, human beings, who had killed them.

  “I’m so sorry, Willa,” he said, saying it with such sympathy it was almost like he knew the truth of it.

  Sometimes she wondered how they had been killed, why they had been killed. Had it been the metal-clanging newcomers with their saws and their axes? Had it been a homesteader like him with a killing-stick? Whenever she tried to think about her parents and her sister, she kept seeing images of them running through the forest, and then the darkness of the underworld of Dead Hollow.

  Frightened, she tried to change the subject. “What about the sound a bear makes when it’s happy because it’s found a log full of honey or the voice of a tree when it whispers in the wind? Can the Eng-lish letters make those sounds as well?”

  “Ah…” he said uncertainly. “I think you got me on those. But most other sounds, you know, that folk like us might make.”

  Willa nodded, smiling.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “ ‘Folk like us,’ ” she repeated. “I like that.”

  He smiled in return, understanding. “So why all the questions about letters all of a sudden? Do you want me to teach you how to read?”

  “As long as I can hear your voice, why would I need to read?” she asked.

  “It would let you hear other people’s voices, their stories,” he said.

  “Like who?”

  “People who are no longer living or who live outside the mountains.”

  Willa tried to understand what Nathaniel was saying to her. Could these letters of the Eng-lish truly bring voices from outside the world? Could they truly bring back the voices of people who had died?

  “I’m not explaining it very well,” he said. “Let me try again. People write things down, and then later other people can read them. I might write down the story of what has happened in my life. Or I might write down a story that I imagine in my head. Or I might write a letter to someone who lives in a different place, or a message to tell you how I feel about something.”