Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  Willa listened carefully to everything he said.

  By the flickering light of a candle made from the wax of the bees, they talked long into the night, of letters, and sounds, and stories told.

  Later, she sat in front of the fireplace with Scout lying across her lap as he usually did and gazed into the glowing embers of the sleeping fire. As Nathaniel roasted chestnuts in a black iron skillet over the simmering coals, he reminisced that he had learned how to farm vegetables and plant trees from his father, how to cook meals and roast chestnuts from his mother, and how to read and write from his grandmamma. Many years ago, when he was growing up, they had all lived in the house together.

  The following morning, when Nathaniel grabbed his rifle and headed out on his daily journey down the river, she wanted to tell him that she had gone down the river after him while he was gone. But she didn’t.

  She wanted to say, What are we looking for out there? I’ve been down that river. There is nothing to find there.

  But she didn’t. She didn’t question him or push him. She didn’t want to upset him or anger him. There were no more logs to split.

  But she knew there was one thing she needed to tell him before he left.

  “I heard the loggers in the distance yesterday,” she said.

  “You heard them?” he asked.

  “Far off, but getting closer,” she said.

  “I understand,” he said, nodding gravely.

  “So be careful,” she said, looking at him as steadily as she could.

  “I will,” he said, and then turned and began his journey. The threat of the loggers had clearly disturbed him, but he still had to go.

  She watched Nathaniel disappear into the forest.

  When she was sure he was gone, she went outside and walked over to the meadow.

  The morning mist was rising from the dew-covered grass, and bright yellow swallowtail butterflies were fluttering over the field of purple fringed orchids.

  She stepped into the rectangle of stones, careful not to disturb them, then sat down in front of the first cross. She studied the letters that had been carved into the plaque.

  The first letter she recognized.

  “Apple,” she said.

  The second letter looked like two vertical pine trees with a horizontal branch in between them. She was pretty sure that was the “hh” sound Nathaniel had told her about.

  The third looked like a two-twig sapling sprouting from the ground.

  The fourth looked like the moon.

  The fifth was a kitten.

  And the sixth was another apple.

  She tried to sound out each letter one at a time, and then she tried to blend them together. It came out sounding like a garbled mess.

  But as she sat beside the grave in the rectangle of stones and studied the letters on the cross, she knew that she could not give up.

  The name was the path she must follow.

  That evening, when the man Nathaniel returned from his trek down the river, he looked bitterly defeated, his eyes cast down and his teeth clenched, like he’d been walking all day up and down the river, searching and searching but never finding. As he came out of the forest his left hand gripped his rifle, and his right hand opened and closed repeatedly into a pumping fist.

  He’s angry, she thought. He’s going to clank around the mill or go cut down a tree with his ax or commit some other act of violence. I’m sure of it.

  But then, as he walked across the grass toward the house, he lifted his eyes and saw her standing there on the front porch.

  The frustration and the fury lifted from the lines of his face.

  The change in his mood was like the passing of a storm from the rocky heights of the Great Mountain. He looked at her with his bright blue eyes—suddenly filled with something that was not anger, and not rage, and not sadness—and he said, “I’m glad to be home.”

  The next morning, when Nathaniel was gone, Willa sat cross-legged on the ground beside the mound of dirt and the four wooden crosses.

  She had learned from her reading lessons with Nathaniel that the sapling with the two leaves sticking out made the sound at the beginning of the word yearling. And the moon sounded like the middle of the word hope. So she thought she finally had the letters she needed to decipher the first plaque. She stared at it for a long time:

  A H Y O K A

  She sounded out the letters one by one. “Ah - ha - ya - o - k - ah,” she said, but it didn’t sound right. She had never heard of any kind of word or name that sounded like that. She tried it again and again, but it was still nonsense.

  Frowning in frustration at the confusing mess of letters, she studied the next plaque hoping that it would be easier:

  I N A L I

  She thought she had learned the sound of the little stick at the beginning and end of this string of letters, and the gorge with the mountain slope in between, and the apple, and the sound of the bent branch in the fourth position. But she thought she must be getting the letters and sounds mixed up, because this didn’t look like any kind of name or word she’d ever heard either.

  Then she came to the longest of the names on the four plaques. It appeared to be made up of the same sounds as the other two words, but they were in a different order.

  H I A L E A H

  “Ha - i - a - la - ee - a - ha,” she stuttered slowly through the sounds.

  “Ha - i - a - lee - a,” she said again, this time blending some of the sounds. It was beginning to sound familiar to her ear.

  “Hi - a - lee - a,” she said slowly, but gaining more confidence.

  Then she said it again, more quickly this time time. “Hi - a - lee - a.”

  She said it again, “Hi - a - lee - a.”

  And then she understood.

  This wasn’t an Eng-lish word or name.

  And it wasn’t Faeran, either.

  It was Cherokee.

  She looked at the plaque on the first grave.

  A H Y O K A

  “Ah - yo - ka,” she said in the Cherokee way. She couldn’t help but smile a little at the sound of it. It sounded right. These could definitely be Cherokee names.

  But then she drew more serious again, realizing what it meant. Why? Why were there Cherokee names here? Most of the Cherokee lived on the other side of the Great Mountain. Why would there be Cherokee names in Nathaniel’s meadow?

  She turned to the last of the four plaques and studied it.

  The stick.

  The snake.

  The kitten.

  The apple.

  She began to sound out the letters one by one.

  And then she stopped, halfway through the name.

  She did not need to go further.

  She already knew what it said.

  Her mind filled with a dark and cloudy fear. A feeling as cold as death poured into her chest.

  She had made a terrible mistake.

  Willa studied the letters on the fourth plaque one by one:

  I S K A G U A

  It was a long name, and she didn’t know the sounds for all of the letters. But she knew the first four.

  “Iska…”

  When she said the name out loud, it broke her heart.

  It was the name of the Cherokee boy that she’d met in the Dead Hollow prison. And it was too unusual of a name for it to be a coincidence. It was him.

  The cookies, she thought. That’s all I did for him. I fed him cookies!

  She had been frightened to see a human boy imprisoned in a hole. She had run away from him. She hadn’t wanted to see him. She hadn’t wanted to think about him. She hadn’t understood why he was there, why they had captured him, and she still didn’t. But she’d been able to put it out of her mind. He was a human, nothing she was allowed to concern herself with, nothing she was allowed to help. That was what she had told herself.

  But now, she knew so much more than she had before. She had experienced so much since then.

  Her palms began to sweat
and her stomach churned. Her mind clouded with shame and confusion. He was a living person. How could she have done what she did? She had left the boy lying in a prison cell in the lair of the night-spirits. How could she abandon him in that place? How could she let him suffer like that? How could she let him die? She’d been taught all her life that humans were her enemy, killers of the forest, murderers of her people. But how could she let anyone suffer like that?

  As children, she and Alliw had saved the sparrows that had fallen from the tree. And she had healed Luthien from the wound of a hunter’s gun. And she helped the panther. What kind of fear and hatred had lived so deep in her heart that she could abandon a human boy to rot in a dark, wet prison?

  She couldn’t move her body. And her mind went numb. All she could do was stare at the boy’s name on the plaque above the grave. Iska, she thought. His name was Iska. She knew he had probably died in the prison cell where she had left him. He had probably died because of what she did.

  But her brows furrowed and she rubbed her eyes, her mind filled with intense confusion.

  How did Iska and those other children end up in the prison of the Dead Hollow lair?

  She thought about the woodpecker she had disentangled from the fragments of a net, and the band of Cherokee searching for their children near the devastation of the loggers, and the net-traps she’d seen in the forest on the other side of the river.

  She knew the padaran was sending his jaetters out to hunt and trap the animals of the forest for bounty. Had he sent his guards down into the valleys to hunt for human children as well? But why?

  And if that was what happened, if Iska was captured by the night-spirits and then died in that prison, how did his body get back here to this grave? Did his body come floating down the river? Why were these Cherokee people buried in Nathaniel’s meadow?

  Her mind swirled back into the past. When she saw Iska in the prison cell, could she have saved him? Could she have gotten him out? She’d barely been able to get herself out of the Dead Hollow lair. But she hadn’t even tried to save him, she thought in shame.

  She rubbed her face in agony. But she couldn’t let her mind get pulled into the painful, twisting darkness of everything she’d done and hadn’t done, all the terrible mistakes she’d made. She had to think about what she was going to do now. What did all this mean?

  One thing was certain. She couldn’t pretend any longer that she didn’t know anything, that there was no connection between the past and the present, between the life she had led before and the life she was leading now. She couldn’t hide behind the rocks of unknowing. She had to talk to Nathaniel.

  She wiped her eyes, got up onto her feet, and ran toward the house.

  When Willa arrived, Nathaniel wasn’t there. His rifle was leaning by the door, so she knew he must be nearby. She looked for him in the mill house and the barn, but he was nowhere to be found. Noticing that his beekeeping equipment was gone, she headed out to the clover field.

  On her way there, a bee buzzed past her face.

  “Hey! What’s the hurry?” she shouted to the speeding bee.

  Then three more bees started buzzing around her, angry and agitated. One landed on her arm and immediately stung her.

  “Ow!” she complained, pushing it away. “What’d you do that for? That’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurt me!”

  As she approached the hives, the loud buzzing noise of the bees seemed to be filled with an intense, all-consuming malevolence. The vibration of the enraged insects ran up and down her spine as they swarmed all around.

  Nathaniel, in his bee suit, worked over the hives, clearly trying to figure out what was happening. He had taken several of the structures apart and was looking inside them.

  When Willa gazed in, she gasped.

  Once there had been order—with every worker bee performing her job to collect pollen, feed the brood, care for the queen, and protect the hive—but now it had descended into pandemonium. Hundreds of bees were attacking one another, their mandibles chomping in violence and their legs entangling in fierce battles.

  “Can you make them stop, Willa?” Nathaniel asked her, his voice filled with desperation.

  Willa tried to speak to them in the old language, tried to soothe them with her voice, but the bees wouldn’t listen. They were swarming in a mindless riot of killing.

  “There’s the queen!” Nathaniel said, pointing toward the bee that had a much longer abdomen than the others.

  “Get out of there, queen!” Willa called to her.

  Normally the worker bees gave deference to the queen, moved out of her way whenever she was crawling, and turned to face her when she stopped. They pampered her, fed her, and cared for her in every way. But now Willa and Nathaniel watched in grotesque fascination as the worker bees surrounded and murdered their queen.

  All five of the hives fell into chaos. Hundreds of bees swarmed in wild, erratic circles all around. A worker bee stung Willa, and then two more attacked as well. Others flew off into the forest alone where they would soon die without the rest of their hive. All order had broken down, and for the bees that meant death. They could only survive by working together.

  Nathaniel stood helplessly over the hives, his arms hanging uselessly at his side, his head hanging down, and his expression a tight grimace.

  “What caused them to turn on their queen?” Willa asked him, her mind filled with confusion, not just about the bees, but about the names on the graves in the distant meadow.

  “I don’t know. Maybe some sort of putrefaction in the honey or a corruption of the hive,” he said as he watched the last of the bees crawling across the killing field of the honeycomb, murdered bodies strewn all around them. “It’s a total loss. They’re almost all dead, and those few who survive won’t last long.”

  As Willa and Nathaniel trudged glumly back to the house, Nathaniel didn’t say a word. She was anxious to talk to him about the graves in the meadow, but he stared at the ground as he walked, dispirited like she’d never seen him. She didn’t know why, or what to say to him, but she put her hand in his to let him know that she was there.

  When he gripped her hand in return, she felt the urgency of it, the gratefulness that she was there with him, and a rush of emotion poured through her.

  In that moment, as they walked back toward the house, she began to feel in her heart the answers to the puzzles that her mind could not work out. As she realized what was happening, it felt like her chest was expanding with air.

  “You weren’t the one who started those beehives…” she said slowly.

  “No,” he said glumly.

  “You were taking care of them for someone else…”

  He nodded slowly as they walked, but he did not speak.

  “Did the bees belong to Ahyoka?” she asked gently, using the name for the first time.

  The name, saying it out loud between them, with respect and care, was like a bridge over a dark and turbulent river.

  He sighed, as if he knew the time had finally come. “Yes,” he said. “The bees were Ahyoka’s.”

  “And she was Cherokee…”

  Nathaniel nodded again. “Ahyoka was a respected member of the Paint clan, the great-great-granddaughter of a famous chief.”

  Here he paused, as if he was uncertain whether he could continue through the emotion roiling through him. “And Ahyoka was the love of my life,” he said finally, his voice cracking.

  “The love of your life…” Willa repeated in a whisper of amazement. They were not words that she had ever heard in the Dead Hollow lair, but she knew in her soul what they meant.

  “Ahyoka and I were married for fifteen years,” Nathaniel said.

  As Willa gazed at him, all the connections came together in her mind like the water of the three rivers becoming one. Suddenly she could see all the pieces of the broken world.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked, seeing the troubled expression on her face.

  “How did Ahyoka die?
” she asked, her voice trembling.

  Nathaniel shook his head in discouragement. The wrinkled lines around his mouth and the pain in his eyes seemed to be filled with anger, sadness, and guilt all at once.

  “I’ve been fighting the railroad and the loggers in every way I can,” he said, “filing complaints with the county sheriff, disrupting town meetings, and trying to organize the other homesteaders to make a stand against them.”

  “And your land…” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “The loggers have come to hate me, but to make matters worse, my land here on the river blocks their path upstream, so they’re unable to take their railroad farther up the mountain. They’ve been sending their enforcers up here, threatening me and my family, scaring off my livestock, sabotaging my mill, doing everything they can to shut me up or drive me out.”

  “But why? Why have they come here into our mountains?” Willa asked in dismay.

  “They’re enterprisers, businessmen,” Nathaniel said. “They’ve cut down all the forests up in the north, so now they’re moving through the Southern mountains. They’re meaning to come up here to Clingmans Dome and cut these trees, too.”

  “Which trees?”

  “All of them,” he said in disgust. “They’re clear cutters. They don’t believe in picking and choosing, letting some grow and harvesting others. They take them all.”

  Willa swallowed hard, remembering the destruction. “I’ve seen it,” she said.

  “Then you know what I’m talking about,” he said. “That’s where all this began.”

  He shook his head again, holding his lips tightly together and breathing through his nose, as if he was trying to find the strength to continue.

  “I started a fight I couldn’t win,” he said, his voice grave and laced with regret. She could see that he was berating himself, racked with not just sadness but guilt.

  There were so many questions swirling through her mind, and so many things she wanted to tell him, but through all that, all she could feel in her heart was a deep and abiding sorrow for what Nathaniel had been through. She could see that it had been bad. It had been unbearable to him.