The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  The Language of Trees

  STEVE WIEGENSTEIN

  Blank Slate Press

  Blank Slate Press is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC

  Saint Louis, MO 63116

  Copyright © 2017 Steve Wiegenstein

  Book 3 of the Daybreak Series

  All rights reserved.

  For information, contact

  Blank Slate Press at 4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116

  Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cover Graphics: Shutterstock, iStock (Getty Images)

  Set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Americanus Pro

  Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  ISBN-9781943075386

  For my brother

  and all my family near and far

  We have traveled over many a trackless desert, and uninhabited plain. We have crossed that boundary in our lands, within which virtue prompts, wisdom teaches, and law restrains; we are beyond the pale of civilized society, with all its endearments, inquietudes, and attractions; but we are not beyond the influence of money, which is not confined by geographical boundaries, or located in its operation upon any particular class of society, or degree of civilization.

  —Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansaw (1821)

  Under the Ozarks, domed by Iron Mountain,

  The old gods of the rain lie wrapped in pools

  Where eyeless fish curvet a sunken fountain

  And re-descend with corn from querulous crows.

  Such pilferings make up their timeless eatage,

  Propitiate them for their timber torn

  By iron, iron—always the iron dealt cleavage!

  They doze now, below axe and powder horn.

  —Hart Crane, from The River

  Chapter 1

  August 1887

  Charlotte Turner fidgeted on the dais as her son’s speech entered its twentieth minute. The crown of flowers on her head itched, and she longed to take it off. But the children of the community had made crowns for all the original settlers as a school project, so on it would stay, grapevines and ivy and a strand of bittersweet.

  She glanced down the row at the other originals. John Wesley Wickman, upright and pugnacious, fiercer in old age than he’d ever been as a younger man, his glassy gaze reflecting an inner confusion that accounted for his fits of vehemence. Marie Mercadier, similarly afflicted with an inward absence, but from an old head injury, not the erosion of time. And Charley Pettibone, a few years younger than the rest of them, placid as a plow ox, tamed by twenty years of good meals, no longer the rambunctious lad who showed up at the colony with nothing more than a sack of borrowed clothing.

  Was that all of them? Just the four? So it was. All the rest gone, lost to time, age, war. So many never came back from the war, and those who did were not the same. Her late husband, for one. So now the next generation had to carry the torch, or so Newton was saying as she refocused her attention on his speech.

  Thirty years ago they came in wagons and on horseback, and on flatboats up the river. A hundred people—two score families—to break the soil and subdue the forest. And more important, to establish a new way of living, one in which the artificial divide between wealthy and poor is swept away through common ownership, common purpose, and universal suffrage. Radical ideas then, and radical ideas now. But now the mantle is ours—

  Not bad, Charlotte thought, but not delivered with the verve of his father. Now there was a man who could bind a crowd. The first time she’d seen him speak, springing across a makeshift stage made of wagon beds in an open field filled with rapt listeners, her heart had pounded at his galvanism. Newton had inherited his looks, but not his charm. Just as well. James’s charm had led him into places—

  No. She had made a rule long ago not to revisit the past. The past was where nostalgia and resentment lived, and she had no use for either. Yet here she was, sitting on the dais in the Temple of Community during their anniversary celebration like the figure of Nostalgia herself, a living reminder of once-upon-a-time.

  As the waters of the St. Francis flow from a multitude of sources, seen and unseen—springs and brooks, freshets and fountains, so too our community grew from all over the nation and indeed the world, and continues to take on new springs of inspiration every year.

  Charlotte let her gaze wander over the crowd. The second generation now, and the third. When they came out to this valley, they had no notion they would still be here thirty years later. They were idealists, or perhaps fools was the better word, swept away by the grand experiment of communal living and astonished at their good fortune in obtaining a grant of land from an adherent. So what if none of them knew anything about farming, or Missouri? A thousand acres of river bottom land would put them all in high clover. Little did they know.

  Adam, her younger son, sat front and center with his wife, Penelope. That was a good match, John Wesley’s daughter and her son. Penelope’s straightforward practicality tempered Adam’s dreamy, almost mystical tendencies, and the two of them made an odd-looking but well matched team, like old man Sebastian’s mule and walking horse. They might look ungainly, but they plowed a straight furrow. Penelope’s twin sister Sarah sat beside her, not as bright as Penelope but more tenacious, and if Charlotte could wave her hand and make a wish Sarah would be her other daughter-in-law. But if wishes were fishes . . .

  And what is the best way to honor that heritage? By carrying it on, not only into the next decade, but the next century.

  Down the row, Marie Mercadier began to fidget, poor thing. Newton shouldn’t have included her on the dais, not with her damaged faculties, although Charlotte appreciated his impulse. Since the day years ago when Marie’s poorly chosen husband smashed her across the head with the barrel of his shotgun in a fit of anger, Marie’s mind had flickered like a poorly trimmed lamp, bright one day and thick with smoke the next. Marie spent most of her time sitting at home, on her porch on pleasant days and by the front window on bad ones, tended by her daughter Josephine. On rare occasions she would flash her old wit and willfulness, but mostly she sat wrapped in a fog of silence broken only by soft requests to Josephine for food or assistance.

  Decades had passed, but Charlotte still remembered the day a couple of months after the crime, when it became clear to all in Daybreak that Marie was carrying another child inside her, a child whose condition no one could know inside her damaged body, and the thought of Marie’s battered brain trying to deal with the birth of that man’s child was too much for any of them to bear. The women of the village gathered wordlessly at Charlotte’s cabin that morning. She sent them to gather pennyroyal and primrose, which she brewed into a strong tea, saving the dregs to mash into a pungent cake to cook on the griddle. They brought the tea and herb cake to Marie in the afternoon, like a deputation from the Ladies’ Aid Society, but with somber intent.

  “Here,” Charlotte said to her, and there was an instant of recognition. Marie’s look was frank and knowing. She swallowed the cake in three bites, the tea in four long grimacing gulps.

  “Bitter,” Marie said. “Bitter.”

  Charlotte nodded and said nothing. By the end of the next day it was over. Now she looked out over the crowd and found Josephin
e, sitting in a back corner as usual, but with her gaze locked on her mother from that distance as if nothing and no one were in the room. The girl never missed a stitch, that was sure. Not a girl any more, although Charlotte’s habit of thinking of her as one persisted despite her grownup figure and razor tongue, capable of skinning a goat when she took a mind. Newton carried on, oblivious to the woman in difficulty behind him.

  The omens are propitious. The cattle rest in the shade, the river murmurs its approval, and the citizens of Daybreak sing as they march out to plow and harvest. Years ago, we came to this valley as strangers, with little more than willing hands and enormous dreams. Today—

  Marie stood up abruptly. “I have to pee,” she announced.

  In an instant, Josephine was at her side, guiding her off the platform and out a side door toward the privies, while Newton fumbled to regain his place in his notes amid a growing rumble of chuckles and low conversation. He’s losing them, she thought, and for a moment considered standing up to reclaim the audience. She’d been a fine speaker herself, in her day, and knew how to corral a rowdy crowd. But he wouldn’t appreciate that. What son would, especially one who already wrestled with the legacy of his father the founder and his mother the longtime leader? Better to let him work through it on his own, and if he didn’t, the wounds he would lick afterward would only be his self-inflicted ones.

  “Citizens!” Newton cried, a little too loud. He sounded almost desperate, but his shout stopped the murmur. “Citizens, let’s honor our heritage by reciting—”

  She sensed where he was going. The anthem. She glanced at Charley Pettibone, sitting next to her, and he nodded in recognition. They stood up and linked hands. Charley reached across the empty chair and took John Wesley Wickman’s hand. They waited for Newton’s cue as the hall quieted and others joined hands.

  Where there is inequality, let us bring balance.

  Where there is suspicion, let us bring trust.

  Where there is exclusion, let us bring openness.

  Where there is division, let us bring harmony.

  Where there is darkness, let us bring Daybreak.

  “Again,” Newton said. And this time John Wesley’s quavering voice rose above the rest. The old man may have lost most of his memory, but thirty years of weekly repetition had left their print.

  It was a fine moment, redeeming all of the unconvincing, borrowed rhetoric of Newton’s speech, and even better that during the second recitation Marie and Josephine returned to the room and quietly joined hands with others in the front row. Charley Pettibone’s crown of flowers, strung over the top of his deputy sheriff’s hat, looked absurd and askew, but the simple comfort of the familiar words redeemed that absurdity as well, and all of a sudden Charlotte felt proud to be wearing her itchy crown, to be the living embodiment of Heritage or Old Times or whatever it was, her hand warm in the clasp of Charley’s wood-hard palm.

  The two men who had slipped in the main door during the anthem were strangers to her. Easterners by the cut of their over-fancy suits, a handsome young man in his late twenties and a narrow-eyed older one, bald as a bullet. They stood in the back, uncertain, while the meeting broke up, then sifted through the crowd to introduce themselves to Newton. The young one was the talker. The older one, lips pressed, occasionally nodded, half listening to the conversation while his eyes darted to take in everything around them.

  Newton gestured Charlotte and Charley over. “Here are a couple of our founding members,” Newton said to the men. As sudden as it had appeared, Charlotte’s feeling of well-being vanished, replaced by self-consciousness at her rustic dress and flowered crown and a vague dread despite the men’s broad smiles.

  “Madam,” the young man said, bowing slightly. Charlotte extended her hand. “I am J. M. Bridges, and this is my associate Clarence Mason. We represent the American Lumber and Minerals Corporation.”

  Although the older man extended his hand to shake as well, his eyes never rested, moving from face to face in the hall. Looking for easy marks and weak links, Charlotte suspected, the eyes of a dealmaker and money man. But young Bridges’ bright eyes had been fixed on a spot to her right, and without even looking Charlotte knew what had drawn his gaze—the perfect, beautiful, hard face of Josephine Mercadier.

  Chapter 2

  Of course the bright-eyed bastard from New York was looking at her. They all looked at her, the men, even the harmless ones, as though she was a prize pig. And she was not supposed to notice their gawking, or worse yet, she was expected to find it flattering. Only last month on the plank sidewalks of Fredericktown, a passerby had cried out, “By God, what a beauty!” to his friends, then tipped his hat, and she had to restrain herself from shouting back, “By God, what a wretch!” But that would have been playing the same game as he, and if there was one thing she knew, it was that a woman playing a man’s game always came out the loser. So she had ignored this one too, despite his doe-brown eyes and over-grand bow, and walked home without speaking.

  Mama had settled into her usual place by the window. She would be there until dark, and perhaps past, if the moon rose pretty or the whippoorwills called. The blow that had struck her down so many years ago had left a permanent crease in her forehead, and when she had emerged from her deep gone-ness after the attack, she had lost the ability to speak coherently for more than a few sentences at a time, and her movements were halting and jerky. But she never seemed fearful, only expectant. Whenever Josephine returned from an absence, she would be waiting at the window, still as a stone, as though an inner quiet had come to compensate for her losses of mind and body. Josephine wished she could possess such calmness, though not at such a price.

  She remembered the morning it had happened, cowering in the corner, her stepfather in a fit of rage and her mother not exactly stepping in to take the blow, not inviting it, but not shrinking from it either. As if she had always known it was coming. The crack of the barrel on bone rang out in the room and for a moment she was certain the gun had gone off.

  Now Josephine pulled in the latchstring of the door and took off her shoes. They needed actual knobs for their doors, like regular folks. She would bring it up at next week’s meeting. They had framed over the logs of their cabins a few years ago, so the village no longer looked like a cluster of huts in the wilderness, but the doors had remained the same, heavy planks lapped and bolted together, with a string and an inside beam for closing. All right, so they didn’t have to buy fine brass doorknobs like the houses in town. But surely they could have a blacksmith make them some wrought-iron latches so the doors wouldn’t look like they came from pioneer days.

  Mama didn’t stir. “Here’s Mr. Turner,” she said softly.

  Josephine frowned and leaned over her shoulder to look. Sure enough, Newton Turner paced up the street, his lips pursed and a look of intense concentration on his face.

  “Saying his prayers,” Mama said, and as usual she didn’t seem to be making a joke.

  Josephine stepped to the door and opened it in front of him, surprising him on the step with upraised knuckles.

  “I was about to knock,” he said.

  “I can see that.” She didn’t step aside to invite him in. Something about Newton annoyed her, despite all the years they’d spent growing up in Daybreak together. He seemed to trade on being the heir to his father’s legacy, as if the community were a hereditary monarchy rather than a radical democracy. Which made her—what? The bastard child, pretender to the throne?

  He stayed on the step and pretended not to notice the lack of invitation. “These men,” he said.

  They’d all heard the rumors, passed from farm to farm all along the road from St. Louis to Little Rock, that a big lumber company, a combine from the East, was setting up somewhere in the area and paying top dollar for timber-land. “What about them?”

  “They want to talk to us. I’d like you to serve on the committee.”

  “All right.”

  “You’re smarter than the rest of
us, and you won’t be buffaloed by these New York boys.”

  “I already said yes. You don’t have to persuade me.”

  Newton clearly had prepared a longer speech and was reluctant to swallow it. He turned his hat round and round in his hands, his eyes unwilling to meet hers for more than a moment. “I thought I would appoint Charley Pettibone, too, and of course myself.”

  “All right. You’d better add your mother as well. People will go to her for guidance.”

  He puckered his lips and gripped his hat. “I see your point.”

  “And you’ll need a fifth person to break a tie.”

  “That’s not the Daybreak way. If we can’t all agree, we don’t move forward.”

  “Suit yourself.” She turned away and shut the door, out of sorts, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of a parting word. What did she care about the trees on the mountain, anyway? They were trees. The mountain itself, that was another thing. She had lived beneath its shoulder all her life and had come to rely on its looming presence. In the summer the long marker of its shadow crept across their fields, cooling them early, and in the spring she could swear that she saw storm clouds break and part over its crest. And the springs that flowed from it—the cold, clear one that sprang from halfway up the mountain and fed the springhouse in the middle of the village, and the intermittent one, cloudy and odorous, that trickled out from the cave at the south end, behind the Pettibones’ house. Only fools would sell off their sources of water.

  Mama was still sitting by the window. “Full dark soon,” Josephine said. “Better tuck in.”

  Marie rose, obedient, and shuffled into her bedroom, her face as bland and innocent as a child’s. Josephine pulled the shutters, darkening the house, but she wasn’t ready to sleep. Restless and filled with aimless energy she didn’t know how to burn, she took her shawl from its peg and stepped into the night.