Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

She knew she didn’t want to hear the story, but she held on to his arm, and said, “Tell me what happened to your wife…”

  Nathaniel stopped walking and turned slowly toward her. She thought he was going to look at her, but his head stayed down.

  “A whole gang of them came into the house in the middle of the night,” he said, his voice low and struggling. “There must have been twenty or thirty of them…” As he was talking, he just stared at the ground and shook his head, as if he was living through it all again in his mind. “Ahyoka and I tried to fight them. I got off several shots. I think I killed at least two of them, then tore into them with my fists. Scout got hold of one them, too. I’ve never seen him fight so hard…But it was so dark, and then four of them grabbed hold of me…”

  When his words faltered and dwindled down to silence, Willa slowly touched his arm to let him know that she was still there for him, still listening.

  He raised his eyes and looked at her. “I tried to fight back,” he told her. “I tried to save Ahyoka. I tried to save my children! But one of the attackers stabbed me with some sort of pike or spear, and the other hit me in the head with a club and I went down hard…”

  He pressed his lips together and stared back down at the ground, pulling air in through his nose. Finally, he said, “Then I was out…”

  “Your children…” Willa said, her voice catching in her throat. That was what she had heard: He had said, I tried to save my children.

  “I’ve gone through it in my mind a thousand times,” he continued, “but I don’t know what happened next. When I came to, it was morning, and my wife and children were gone.”

  A sickening feeling welled in Willa’s stomach. She had to make sure that she truly understood what had happened. She had to hear the words in her ears, not just see the Eng-lish letters scratched on plaques of wood in the meadow.

  “What were your children’s names, Nathaniel?” she asked him. “Tell me their names.”

  “My daughter Hialeah was twelve years old, so strong and brave. I remember hearing her screaming in the other room, fighting to protect her little brothers.”

  Nathaniel paused, unable to continue for a moment. Willa felt her heart pumping pulses of blood through her body as she waited for the name she knew would come.

  “My little baby boy, Inali, was just five years old. And my oldest boy was ten. We named him in honor of his great-great-grandfather. His name was Iskagua.”

  Willa knew he was going to say the name before he said it, but her stomach still tightened at the sound of it.

  “Iska…” Willa whispered in despair.

  She closed her eyes against the tears, just trying to breathe as intense heat filled her face with pain. She wanted to cry, to turn away and hide. It seemed so long ago, like a different world, like a different her. But she had left Nathaniel’s son in the prison. She had left him there with the spear-stabbing guards and the teeth-chattering jaetters. Iska had been Nathaniel’s son, and she had just left him there to die!

  “Why did you say his name like that?” Nathaniel asked her. “That’s what we called him. We called him Iska.”

  “I know…” she said, her heart breaking.

  How could she tell him that she’d seen his son alive, that she had actually talked to him, but that she had abandoned him in a dark, vile prison to die alone? Her mind swam with confusion and guilt and fear. There were still so many things she didn’t understand.

  “Tell me what happened next,” she said, looking up at Nathaniel. “What happened when you discovered your wife and children were gone?”

  “I looked all over the house for them. I thought maybe they had escaped or hid someplace. I knew that Ahyoka would never give up fighting for the children. And Hialeah was a very resourceful girl. But Scout kept barking and pulling on me, telling me he was onto something.”

  “Onto what?” she asked.

  “He could smell them,” he said. “When he ran out the front door, I followed close. We tracked their scent across the yard and down to the river. And then, when we reached the bank, I saw…”

  Nathaniel choked on his words so hard that he had to stop midway through his sentence.

  He pressed his face into his hands, pulled in a long, deep breath, and then exhaled.

  “I’ve never felt pain like that in all my life…” he said so softly that she almost couldn’t hear it. “I remember I collapsed onto my knees…”

  “Tell me, Nathaniel…” Willa urged him.

  “The stones of the riverbank were spattered with blood, and my children’s clothing lay all over the ground. That’s when I realized what the attackers had done…”

  “What?” Willa asked in dismay. “What did they do?”

  “They killed them all and threw their bodies into the river,” he said.

  “I…” she began to say, but her words faltered. She was too shocked to speak.

  “They killed them all,” he said again, as if it was necessary for him to feel the full pain of it.

  “The night I broke into your house…” she said.

  “I wasn’t in my right mind,” he said. “And I haven’t been since.”

  “Down the river…” she said. “That’s where you’ve been going every day.”

  “That first morning, I started searching for them. I found my wife downstream, her body pinned against a rock under the water. I had to use a rope and pulley to get her out. I nearly drowned in the process. There was a point when the river was trying to pull me under that I wanted it to win. I wanted to let the river take me like it took her. I wanted to get out of this world.”

  “But you didn’t,” she said softly, trying to find some hope in that.

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “I hadn’t found my children’s bodies, so I couldn’t go. Not yet. I couldn’t stand the idea of my children in that cold water. When I finally got Ahyoka out of the river, I carried her home, dug a grave in the meadow, and buried her. I kept her wedding ring because I knew she’d want me to have that, for us to be together.”

  “Tell me what happened to your children…” Willa said.

  “I was exhausted after digging Ahyoka’s grave, but I went back out and continued the search for my children’s bodies. I’ve been looking for them every day since, scouring the banks of the river and the whirlpools and the deepest holes, but it feels like every day I don’t find them they slip farther away from me.”

  Nathaniel slowly shook his head. “I’m at a point where nothing has any meaning anymore, where it’s time for me to leave this world, but I can’t. I can’t think straight. I can’t do anything. I’ll find no peace in my life, or in my death, until I find their bodies and can bury them beside their mother.”

  “But there are four crosses…” she said.

  “I couldn’t let them go, couldn’t accept a world without them. It just didn’t feel real. So I had a memorial service for them, just Scout and me, trying to come to terms with what had happened. I put the crosses next to Ahyoka’s and I prayed for their souls like I had found their bodies, like it was a real funeral. I thought that might help me to accept that they were gone, but it didn’t…”

  Willa held his hands in hers as she listened to the words pouring out of him.

  “It just makes me angry,” he said. “Those loggers are still out there, still slashing down trees. I heard their infernal machines on the other side of the river this morning. Their scouting crews are getting closer every day. I haven’t been able to stop them legally, but if they come anywhere near my land, I’m gonna raise a living hell like they’ve never seen. I went down to Gatlinburg looking for justice for my wife and children, but when I accused the railroaders and the loggers, the sheriff turned stone cold. He didn’t believe a word of what I told him. He looked at me like I was crazy. Most of those men down there are bought and paid for, too many people making good wages with the railroad and the lumber company to let anything get in the way of it. Their enforcers have started spreading rumors that they saw
me beating my wife and hurting my children. Now the sheriff is investigating me for the crime of what happened to my family.”

  As she listened to his story, a thick and heavy feeling caught deep in Willa’s throat. In this one moment, it felt as if she could see all the broken pieces of the world in a way that no one else could. And one of those broken pieces was her.

  She knew that what Nathaniel thought happened hadn’t happened. The loggers hadn’t been the ones who attacked his family. And what the detectives thought happened hadn’t happened, either. Like the two men arguing whether the earth was flat or round, they were both wrong. The world was mountains.

  But how could she tell Nathaniel that her own people had attacked his family? How could she tell him that she had seen Iska in a night-spirit prison and left him to die? If she told him what really happened, he’d go through the cruel pain of Iska’s death all over again. It would destroy what little was left of his clinging soul. And it would shatter the life that she and Nathaniel had shared together for these last few weeks.

  She racked her mind trying to figure out if it was in any way possible that Iska could still be alive, that he could have somehow survived in the prison all this time. Why were the night-spirits capturing and killing human beings? What use did the padaran have for children?

  She tried to think back to what she’d seen in the lair. Who was the bronze-faced/gray-faced padaran, the god of the clan? How was he able to hold such terrible power over those who had once been such a good and honorable people?

  She was so deep in the convolution of her own thoughts that when the dog burst into a fit of wild barking she jumped in surprise.

  “What is it, boy?” Nathaniel asked Scout as the dog carried on barking, staring out into the forest.

  Willa’s ear twitched. “Wait,” she said, touching Nathaniel’s arm to hold him still. “I hear it now, too.”

  It was faint, but she could definitely hear the sound in the distance.

  Thud. Thud. Thud…

  “What are you hearing?” Nathaniel said, the tension rising in his voice.

  The incessant pattern of the sound seeped into Willa’s chest like black leeches. Thud. Thud. Thud…

  “I hear axes…” she whispered.

  Nathaniel’s face filled with anger. “It’s those godforsaken loggers!”

  He started walking fast toward the house, more upset than she’d ever seen him.

  “What are you going to do?” Willa asked in a panic as she hurried to catch up with him. He was in no condition to confront the loggers.

  Nathaniel stormed into the house, threw down his beekeeping equipment, and grabbed his gun.

  “Come on, Willa,” he said as he charged out of the house and headed into the forest. “We’re going after them.”

  Nathaniel stormed out of the trees, gripping his loaded rifle in his hands, and bore down on the loggers. Scout charged with him, growling viciously. But Willa stayed in the undergrowth. She wasn’t a fighter or a killer. She couldn’t threaten or shout or intimidate. She’d be lucky if they could even see her.

  A crew of twenty stubble-faced, hard-bitten lumbermen had come with horses and a wagon full of saws, mauls, chains, and axes. They had already felled one beautiful black cherry tree. Half a dozen axmen were chopping off its limbs as the teamsters harnessed the horses. Two men with a six-foot-long, jagged-tooth saw had already cut halfway through the trunk of a second tree, an old oak that looked as if it had stood for more than 150 years.

  “Stop!” Nathaniel shouted. “This is my land! You have no right to cut these trees!”

  One of the men, gripping his ax, walked up to Nathaniel, and shouted, “It’s a free country, ain’t it!” into his face.

  “We can do anything we feel like,” another man said as he chopped the limbs of the tree. “Isn’t that what freedom means?”

  “You don’t have a permit to cut here,” Nathaniel said.

  An older man, grizzled and one-eyed, spat out a dark brown stream of chewing tobacco onto the ground. “We don’t need no stinking permit.”

  “I’m Nathaniel Steadman,” he said, facing off with the boss of the crew. “I own this land.”

  “It’s forest,” the boss said. “No one owns the forest. It’s public land. Free for taking.”

  Willa’s muscles tensed as several of the other lumbermen walked up to stand in front of Nathaniel beside the boss. They weren’t going to back down.

  “Ain’t Nathaniel Steadman the name of the man who done beat his wife and killed her?” one of the lumbermen said.

  “Is that true?” the boss asked, squinting at Nathaniel’s face. “That you? You kill your wife?”

  “No, I didn’t kill my wife!” Nathaniel said. “You can’t just come in here and start cutting!”

  “Who says I can’t?” the boss said. “You? How you gonna stop me?”

  “I’ve got a God-given right to protect my land,” Nathaniel said, brandishing his rifle.

  The man standing next to the boss slammed the butt of his ax into Nathaniel’s face.

  Willa’s whole body jolted with the shock of it. She lurched forward to help Nathaniel, as he toppled to the ground.

  Scout charged in and bit the attacker, but the man kicked the dog in the head and swung his ax at him. Scout leapt back and dodged the blade, then sprang forward and clamped onto the man’s wrist, snarling and biting.

  Nathaniel tried to scramble back up onto his feet, but three of the men rushed in. They kicked him in the sides and punched him with their tightened fists. They struck him with the handles of their tools.

  Willa cried out and tried to block their blows, but there was nothing she could do. They beat him, one punch after another. She felt every blow against Nathaniel’s head like it was against her own. Every kick to his side struck her ribs.

  With tears smeared across her face and anger welling up inside her, she threw herself to the ground on all fours and gripped the thick roots of the nearby trees.

  “If you want to live, then you must help us!” she shouted in the old language. There was no kindness in her voice, no compassion. She was demanding this, screaming at the trees. “I know you can help him! Do it now or you’re all going to die from the cuts of their axes!”

  Driven by sheer desperation, Willa focused her mind down into the ground beneath her. She drew upon everything her mamaw had taught her of the forest and the trees and the flow of the world. She intertwined all that she had learned on her own of the tendrils of growth and the bend of limbs. And she reached deep into her woodland spirit, weaving the most powerful woodcraft she could imagine in her mind. The earth, the water, the root. The trunk, the branch, the leaf. It was all hers. She called out a string of old Faeran words that had never had a meaning in the Eng-lish and never would. They were the ancient phrases of her people, the summons of her ancestors to rouse the ire of the trees, to bring movement to roots that hadn’t moved in a hundred years.

  The tree roots that ran along the ground all around her and beneath the feet of the lumbermen began to vibrate in agitation. The roots creaked and bent, pushing against the ground around them. Then the roots broke up through the earth like long, quivering, clutching fingers. Willa sucked in a startled breath, astonished by what she had done. She pushed into her fear and carried on. The roots of the trees were moving to her command, like slithering snakes from the ground, twisting and grasping, trying to touch everything around them. They were the mireroots, the primeval spirits of the trees, coming to life.

  As the earth itself erupted around them, the eyes of the lumbermen went wide with terror. Their faces filled with expressions of shock. The writhing roots coiled around their legs, clamping onto knees and calves. The branches of the forest trees thrashed back and forth above their heads as if angered by a violent storm.

  One of the men tripped backward and fell. The mireroots intertwined his arms, his legs, his throat, sucking the life and nutrients out of him like he was the earth itself. His skin withered and
cracked, his fingers shriveled into broken twigs, and his eyes turned into black seeds of what they had been.

  The other men shouted and screamed, and tried to flee. In a fit of wild panic, one lumberman swung at a mireroot with an ax, but the blade ricocheted away and struck deep into the shin bone of his companion. The man shrieked in agonizing pain and collapsed into the clutching death of the mireroots as the other men backed away in horror.

  Several of the men leapt onto horses and galloped away. Others just ran. But the one-eyed boss pulled the rifle from his horse’s saddle and aimed at Nathaniel, thinking he was the cause of all that was happening. Scout charged forward and leapt at the man just as he pulled the trigger.

  Willa watched in relief as the terrified loggers fled in panic, tearing away by foot and by horse.

  When they were finally gone, she let go of the tree roots and collapsed to the ground in exhaustion.

  She lay in the dirt, shaking and gasping for breath, just holding on to the steadiness of the earth.

  The branches of the trees stopped thrashing.

  The roots retreated slowly back into the ground.

  The screaming storm of violence that had filled the world just moments before faded into an eerie silence.

  The badly wounded Nathaniel lay on the ground a few feet away, cradling his dog’s limp body in his arms.

  “No, not you, Scout,” Nathaniel cried as he hugged his dog to his chest.

  There was blood and bruises all over Nathaniel’s face and head, and she knew he must be in terrible pain, but he wrapped his arms around his dog and held him.

  “Not you, boy, not you!” he wept as he stroked Scout’s head.

  And then Nathaniel looked over at her and met her eyes. “We’ve got to help him, Willa. We’ve got to help him…”

  But Willa knew it was too late.

  The logger’s gun had done its damage.

  Scout’s spirit was gone.

  The last living member of Nathaniel’s family was dead, taken from him by the forces of the world.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as she wrapped her arms around Nathaniel. “I can’t save him.” And Nathaniel wrapped his arms around her in return, holding her like she had never been held—holding her as if she were the very last being on earth he could hold on to.