The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “Enjoy your job while you have it,” Mason said to the telegrapher as they waited for Bridges to finish. “They’ve got a machine back in New York, you just talk into it and the man at the other end can hear.”

  “I read about that,” the operator said. “How many of them have they got now? Five? Ten?”

  “Give it time,” Mason said. “You’ll be as useless as a steamboat pilot soon enough.”

  Or a saddlemaker, thought Bridges, remembering his conversation with Mr. Crecelius about his father. He handed the note to the operator. He wasn’t in a mood to talk about men’s obsolescence right now. “Just send the message,” he said. “Let me know when you hear anything back.” He turned to leave, but Mason touched his arm.

  “I’ve got someone I want you to meet,” he said in a low voice, glancing at the telegraph operator. “Walk with me.”

  They picked their way down the track, over stray crossties and lumber scraps, to a siding where a line of flatcars and boxcars sat. Mason rapped sharply on the end boxcar, and there was a rustling from inside.

  Mason pulled open the door and stepped back. In a moment, a young man emerged from the car and stood in the doorway, wiping his face with his hand. He hopped down from the car in an easy jump, landing softly on the balls of his feet.

  He was a head taller than Bridges and easily fifty pounds heavier. His hair was short sandy brown, cropped close to the point of being nearly shaved, with a stubble of beard about the same length. His face was rounded and puffy, his eyes set deeply into narrow recesses.

  “One moment,” said the man. He turned away from them, unbuttoned his fly, and pissed at great length onto the rails beneath the boxcar.

  “J. M., this is Lon Yancey,” Mason said once the man had finished his business and turned toward them again. They nodded to each other. “I’ve asked around, and I think Lon here can help us with some of our thornier issues.”

  “Looking for work?” Bridges said.

  “Not really,” said Yancey.

  “Lon’s more of an independent operator,” Mason interjected. “I see him as a help with some of these hard cases we’re trying to buy timber from. He knows how to talk to people around here.”

  “I’m a persuader,” Yancey said.

  Bridges took another look at the man—his size, his strength, the appraising look on his wide face—and understood their meaning. He also realized that Mason had already hired him, regardless of what he might say.

  “Whatever you think best,” he said to Mason. “Don’t get us all arrested.” Mason chuckled. “No worries.”

  “And leave the Daybreak land to me,” he added. “I can deal with those folks. They won’t respond to Mr. Yancey’s methods.”

  “That, and there’s the girl,” Mason said. “I figured you’d want a return visit.”

  “The girl from Daybreak?” Yancey said. “Good luck there. She’s known over three counties. I saw her myself in Fredericktown one time. Not my type.”

  Their casual talk irritated Bridges, who had not spoken of his admiration for the country beauty. He had not realized how obvious he had been.

  “Let’s leave this conversation where it is,” he said. He turned from them and headed back to his quarters.

  The telegraph operator intercepted him. “Your man in New York has already answered,” he said, handing him a folded sheet of paper. “Want to reply?”

  “No,” Bridges said. “One wire a week, that’s our rule. You can go on home.”

  The telegrapher was clearly disappointed but said nothing. Bridges waited until he was a few yards away before opening the paper.

  PAY THE WIVES AND MOTHERS, it said. PAY WOMEN NOT MEN. BUILD A TOWN.

  Later in the day, Bridges showed the message to Mason, who nodded in approval.

  “The men’ll hate it, but by God we’ll see them working on Monday morning,” he said. “Women won’t put up with their men drinking all their earnings. I’ll pull a crew to start building more houses.”

  That night, Bridges left a note for Mason that he was headed to Daybreak to talk to the committee they had appointed. If he was going to be an object of fun, he might as well embrace it. He flagged the dawn train north and led his horse onto a boxcar, standing beside it with his arm around its neck until they reached the Ironton junction. From there, he could ride east a few miles and then cut south through the woods. He had one saddlebag full of food and the other stuffed with maps and papers. They had bought a few square miles of scrubland north of Daybreak, nothing like the good timber he coveted, but enough for a few wagonloads. He reflected that it would do the loggers some good to have a surprise visit from their boss.

  He forded the St. Francis and struck toward the south. For a city man, he was growing familiar with trees, recognizing more and more of them now. The yellow pines, the greatest prizes, swaying tall on the ridgetops like gathered elders, were easy to spot. Three feet thick at the base, some even four, and knot-free up to fifty. On the slopes below, the pines gave way to a mix of hardwoods, hickories, oaks, maples, and others he couldn’t identify. The locals put great stock in the properties of each one—hickory for firewood, oak for tool handles—but to Bridges they all just looked like pest trees, choking the path out for the dimension lumber. The maples had started to turn color now, in the first cool days of fall, and he had to admit that they added beauty to the landscape despite their lack of value.

  Once Bridges reached company land, he admired the thoroughness of the work. Whatever else he might say about these rustics, they certainly knew how to cut timber. The stumps were all even and low to the ground, not an inch of wood wasted, and the tops gathered into great heaps to get them out of the way. He followed the drag scars south a mile till he reached a piece of cleared level ground. A teamster napped in his wagon while half a dozen staked mules nibbled at the underbrush. Bridges could hear a couple of crosscut saws in the distance, their singsong drone echoing across the valleys like the calls of exotic birds.

  At the sound of Bridges’ approach, the teamster bolted upright in the wagon and snatched his hat from his head.

  “Everybody’s out cutting,” he said. “I help ’em load when they get here.”

  “I know that,” Bridges said. “You don’t have to explain your job to me.”

  The teamster peered behind Bridges. “Is your—your—friend—?”

  “No, Mr. Mason isn’t with me on this trip,” Bridges said, testy. “So tell me about the lay of the land here.”

  The teamster was obviously relieved at the change of subject. He stood up in the wagon and faced south. “Off this a way, the river comes back in and piles up through a bundle of rocks as big as your house,” he said, gesturing with his left hand. “No trees that way but cedars and blackjack oaks. But due south, and off west—” gesturing with his other hand— “damn fine lumber all the way down to them people’s land.”

  “The Daybreak land, you mean.”

  “Yeah. They’ve got their boundaries marked with paint.”

  Bridges followed his gaze south past the flat land in front of them to the line of hills in the distance. Rough country, and dragging out logs had made it rougher, ruts as deep as the wagon axles themselves in places. If they could push past that jammed-up place in the river, they could float the logs out instead of relying on the laborious process of loading them into wagons and hauling them to a rail line. No more wagoners sleeping through the day.

  “Well, thanks,” he said, and nudged his horse without a backward look. The sight of the teamster settling back into the wagon bed would only irritate him, so he chose not to see. He had other things to think about, anyway.

  He knew he was a fool to ride all this distance just to catch a glimpse of the girl. And it would be seen as a sign of weakness, too. He had told the Daybreak folks to form a committee and come to him. He had no excuse to be out here. Now their committee would see him in a different light, a supplicant rather than an opportunity. But here he was, and thankfully with no one t
o explain his motives to, even if he had understood them. Just a man on a horse on a fine autumn day.

  He could hear the sawyers off in the distance to his left as he rode, and he could tell by their drag marks they had already brought out a good harvest of logs. He kept his course straight south; from the sound of their saws it was clear that they were working steadily. Soon he was in the uncut woods, cool and dark under the canopy.

  One mile, another mile, fine timber all the way and easy riding where the shade of the trees tamed the undergrowth. Then he reached a line of trees all painted with white D’s on their north sides and knew he had reached the Daybreak line. Too bad. From where he sat in his saddle he could count forty harvestable trees, none smaller than two feet at the base. He envisioned this tract stretching to left and right, miles in each direction, and he could almost count the railcars of finished lumber heading north.

  Then the ridge dropped abruptly into a steep ravine. Bridges snapped out of his reverie and picked his way down the shoulder as the traversable ground grew narrower, rocky plunges on each side. He would end either at a valley or a bluff face but couldn’t see far enough ahead to tell which.

  It was neither. His horse broke through a wall of buckbrush and he found himself at the high end of a cemetery, seventy or eighty graves, cascading down an unexpectedly broad slope, and of all things the community building of Daybreak directly below him. What was it they called it? The Temple of Community. And the whole village spread out below that, two rows of houses lining the road for half a mile, the river glinting through trees beyond, the whole thing like a Currier and Ives lithograph. He had to admire it. Primitive though it was, it was nothing if not picturesque. These villagers knew how to pick a spot.

  “Descending like Zeus.” He jumped at the voice. Two women sat on a polished wooden bench in the shade at the edge of the woods: an older woman with streaming black-and-gray hair, her face smooth and tranquil, and beside her the one who had spoken, her expression far less welcoming, the young beauty. She was the reason he had come all this way. She was the person he was least prepared to stumble upon.

  “I—hello!” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” He felt foolish sitting on his horse while they remained on their bench, so he hopped down, tied its reins to a branch, and removed his hat. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “Of course you didn’t.” The beauty’s frank gaze flummoxed him. “If you had wanted to be noticed you would have come in by the road, like normal folks.”

  He was about to protest further, but stopped himself. He would only sound foolish, and besides, he didn’t have a good answer.

  “I apologize again,” he said, tapping his hat against his thigh.

  The older woman turned to him, her voice soft. “That’s all right.” She returned her gaze to the valley below and said nothing more.

  In the silence that followed, Bridges looked out over the cemetery. Limestone slabs, local stone from the look of it, a few wooden markers mingled in, with the names either roughly chiseled or painted on the flattest places.

  “Sic transit gloria mundi,” he murmured.

  The young woman gave no sign that she had heard. “Since there’s no one to introduce us, I suppose we might as well introduce ourselves,” she said. “This is my mother, Marie Mercadier, and I am Josephine Mercadier.”

  Bridges bowed toward them. “John Bridges, Mrs. Mercadier.”

  “I’m not a missus, I’m a miss,” Josephine said. “My mother is a widow, so I suppose she’s a missus.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Josephine replied, her voice brisk and businesslike. “He was a brute, and the only thing to be sorry about is that he didn’t die sooner and cause less harm than he did.”

  Bridges was stumped at what to say to that, but Josephine spared him the need for comment. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Mr. Bridges,” she went on. “I’ve lost my patience with polite falsehoods.”

  “I imagine that brings you a good bit of trouble sometimes.”

  “Not that I’ve noticed. Mama, Mr. Bridges here is the man who wants to buy all our forestland.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “To cut down all the trees.”

  Josephine’s hair was black, straight, and long, pulled into a tight braid that ran halfway down her back. Bridges supposed she kept it pulled back out of practicality, but the effect on him was only to imagine how it would look when she unpinned it, how it would cascade around her pale face. He forced his mind to return to their conversation.

  “Cutting down the trees is not how I see it. To me, my goal is building houses, shops, and cities, and harvesting the timber is only the necessary first step to that.”

  “Well and good. You can build your cities, but that doesn’t mean you have to use our trees.”

  “That’s very true, Miss Mercadier, and something that our company can’t decide for you. But we’re willing to buy if you’re willing to sell.”

  She stood up abruptly. “That reminds me. Our committee hasn’t even met to discuss this yet. It’s not proper for me to be discussing this on my own with you. Please feel free to visit with my mother as long as you like before doing whatever it is you came to do, but I must take my leave. Mother, I’ll see you at home.”

  And with that she was off, striding down the hill through the graves toward the village, her braid bouncing from side to side as she walked. With her mother sitting right there, Bridges tried to keep himself from watching her figure as she departed, but it wasn’t easy. He could understand why she was the talk of three counties. Her form was slender but not spare, her skin smooth and unblemished, and her features—well, he could think about her features later, when he had the time to go over them one by one. He had them memorized.

  “Come sit down, Mr. Bridges,” Marie said. “Where are you from?”

  He was grateful for her welcome and took a place on the bench. “Delaware, ma’am.”

  “And what did she?”

  Bridges was plunged into confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

  Marie giggled. “What did Della wear? She wore her new jersey.”

  The absurdity of it all, of him being out in this remote forest, being drawn to an impossibly beautiful, impossibly difficult girl, being stuck on a hillside graveyard with that girl’s mother, and falling for the oldest Delaware joke on earth, one that every citizen of Delaware had heard a hundred times, burst over him like a firework, and he began to laugh. He laughed until tears came from his eyes, and then the tears changed from amusement to sorrow as the absurdity made him think of how alone he was, alone and over his head, a stranger in this country and likely the butt of every joke behind his back. He was embarrassed but couldn’t stop himself, and after a minute he quit trying to stop and let the tears flow. It was a few more minutes before he could draw breath again.

  “Are your parents still with us?” Marie said softly, ignoring his unexpected outburst.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “Mother and father both.”

  “That’s a comfort.”

  “I don’t see them enough,” he said. “I live in the city, and it’s a day’s ride on the train. I haven’t seen them since Christmas.”

  She didn’t answer. Bridges found himself going on, filling her welcoming silence with his thoughts. He told her about his mother, how kind she was, how she would read to him in the evenings, and how his father would come home from his day with the smell of leather on him, such a sweet and pungent odor, that even today whenever he smelled a new saddle or walked into a tack room, he thought of his father. After dinner he would clean and sharpen his tools, unrolling the canvas pouch he carried them in and removing them one by one, holding them to the light to check their edge.

  Before he knew it he had spent half an hour talking about his childhood, his aspirations, how he had come to work for Mr. Crecelius, and Marie Mercadier had said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve talked the ears r
ight off your head.”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘ma’am,’” she said. “Marie is my name. The children call me ‘Aunt Marie,’ and I like that.” She patted his arm. “I like the sound of your voice. It reminds me a little of Josephine’s father.”

  “Was Mr. Mercadier from the East, then?”

  “No.” She waved toward a grave farther down the hill. “His name was Turner. And it’s not your accent, but more the tone of your speech.”

  Bridges couldn’t fathom the relationship. Why was Josephine’s name Mercadier if her father was a Turner? He understood the community’s founder was a Turner, the community president was a Turner, and there was a formidable mother he had heard about as well. Was this a second branch? Had there been a widowing, a divorce? He was certainly curious, but he didn’t pursue it.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Is your daughter always this hard on people?”

  Marie turned a sweet smile on him. “She’s never hard on me. Stay for supper and you’ll see. She’s sweet as sugar and good as bread.”

  Supper with Josephine Mercadier? The thought made his heart skip a beat and sent him straight to his feet. “I’m sorry to say your daughter is right. It wouldn’t be proper for me to socialize with her while this business venture is still in the offing, and I haven’t had a chance to hear from or talk with your committee. And I have workers to check. Your company has been most delightful, though, and I want to thank you.”

  “Then come for supper on Sunday when you have no workers to watch. And it’s my invitation, not hers.”

  “Sunday.” He imagined sitting across from Miss Mercadier for a whole meal. “But your committee still may not have decided by then.”

  “Then we will not talk about trees,” she said with a sigh. Although she had spoken little the entire time he had been there, the effort seemed to tire her. Bridges could tell by the way she spoke that something was wrong with her, something damaged, through what he couldn’t say. Her face went blank, and she gazed into the distance.