The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “Once it fills up we’ll raise the gate,” Bridges said. “It’ll be back to normal by tomorrow morning.”

  On their side of the river, the dam widened out to a large flat area about fifteen feet square, topped by another wooden hut. “Come on down,” Bridges said. “This is the most beautiful part of the whole thing.”

  They picked their way down a narrow trail to the dam. Bridges opened the door to the hut and gestured inside.

  Newton stepped in first, curious, then held back. “Careful, ladies,” he said. “There’s a big hole in the middle here.”

  They edged inside one by one and peered down into the hole, ten feet square, which appeared to go all the way to the bottom of the dam. From the center of the hole emerged a large steel shaft, topped by an enormous beveled gear and shackled into an equally large steel collar. The gear at the top of the shaft sat eight feet above the cabin floor.

  “Well, I’m damned,” Charley said. “Excuse me, ladies.”

  “Ain’t it a beautiful thing?” Bridges said, his face joyful. “I drew up the sketches myself, and the engineers in New York worked out the details.”

  “What’s the point of all this, Mr. Bridges?” Charlotte said. “It looks like the thigh bone of a dead factory here.”

  Bridges turned to Newton, grinning. “Care to guess, Mr. Turner?”

  Newton didn’t like being put on the spot, but felt sure enough of himself to answer without looking into the hole. “Turbine at the bottom, I’d guess.”

  “Exactly!” said Bridges. “I pegged you for a man of knowledge.”

  “Same principle as the water wheel my grandfather had us set out in the river years ago,” Newton said. “Except—”

  “Except vastly more powerful,” Bridges cut in. “Instead of some little paddles dipped into the river while most of them are out of the water, you have the entire river itself, driven through this gate, running the turbine with the force of the entire stream. We had to send all the way to France for this mechanism, but it was worth it.”

  He stepped out into the open, the rest of the group following, and gestured toward the hill they had just descended. “From this gear will run a driveshaft, and that driveshaft will turn a dozen machines.” Along the riverbank downstream from the dam, they could see a group of men lined up along a sluice, shoveling ore into the sluice while another group sifted through the watery mixture with screens. “Backbreaking work, and we will mechanize it all,” he said. “The separation, the conveyance.” He pointed toward an opening in the hillside, from which a muddy trail emerged. “As we dug out the mineshaft, we saved the rock to build the dam. Native rock, a constant supply of water, and all we had to do was bring in the cement.”

  “We thought about building a rail spur to bring in the machinery and take out the ore, but it seemed too expensive,” Mason added. “We may yet. You should have seen the oxcarts and teams we used to bring in this turbine, piece by piece.”

  “What do you think, Dr. Kessler?” Charlotte turned to the geologist. “You’re a man of science. Does this look like a working scheme to you?”

  Kessler laughed nervously. “My knowledge is in crystalline structures and the identification of strata, madam,” he said. His voice was a thick whisper, nearly lost in the open air. “I leave the application to others.”

  Charlotte sniffed. “And what of the scoured landscape we just came through? More testimony to the joys of progress?”

  Bridges’ face lost its luster. “Mrs. Turner, you’ve been out here in the bosom of Mother Nature a long time, have you not?”

  “Thirty years.”

  “Then you know more than any that the earth has a power to heal itself, far beyond our imagining. Come springtime, that scoured landscape will start to green up, and in a couple of years we’ll see saplings as tall as you. A logged tract never looks pretty at first.”

  “And how many years have you lived here?”

  Bridges blushed. “I take your point, ma’am.”

  She led them up the hillside in silence.

  “I haven’t shown you the best part yet,” Bridges said, hastening to keep up with her. “But I have to warn you, we cannot approach too near.” He took them toward the second shed, a three-sided lean-to sheltering a large black mass of iron and steel, rows of bars and coils in a circular arrangement that made it look like the weaving loom of a titan.

  “I’ll not venture a guess on this,” Newton said.

  “It’s a magneto!” Bridges exclaimed. “Came over on the same boat as the turbine.”

  “What’s it for?” said Charley.

  “To light the mine!” Bridges’ enthusiasm was practically uncontained. “No more carbide lights and pine-knot torches fouling the air. Just clean, bright, incandescent lamps. Once we figure out how to get it down the hill safely, we’ll slide it into place around that shaft and start generating electricity. Can’t use cables or metal tools. They stick to it.”

  Newton knew that the other members of his party had come to complain, but he found himself fascinated by Bridges and his magneto. He’d seen pictures of them in American Farmer, but only small, hand-cranked ones for powering a single light.

  Newton had no memory of his grandfather, but had heard the stories, how he was a civil engineer for the Army, a man who had come out to Daybreak after the death of his wife and thrown himself into the building of things—the great stone barn against the hillside; the Temple of Community, also stone and massive, yet somehow snug in the way it felt inside. And the water wheel. The water wheel had been destroyed in a flood years ago, but Newton carried the memory of how when he was a child of nine, crossing the river in a johnboat too big for him to handle alone, he had gotten drawn in under the water wheel and had to climb onto its piling, calling for help, until Dathan had paddled out to rescue him in his canoe. From that moment he had been aware of the deep power of flowing water, the power of earth itself, the need of water to find its level and to push down anything in its path. Now all of it was gone except the remains of the wheel, a skeleton of iron lying on its side in the river, the wood rotted away, visible only in low water when the children of Daybreak used it as a jumping platform.

  Would his grandfather have put a turbine in the river if he’d had the opportunity and a narrow gorge to dam? Of course he would have. There was no good or ill to the machinery, only to the ends for which it was used. Dam the river, excavate the hillside, turn the great wheel. But for what? To make another million dollars for a man who already had a hundred million. To feed and clothe the children of the miners. Base ends, noble ends, twined and intermingling like bindweed in the corn. And like the bindweed and the corn, it was impossible to pull them apart without harming the crop.

  “Ties,” he murmured.

  “What?” said Bridges.

  “Railroad ties,” Newton said. “You have them at hand. There’s nothing stouter than a six-by-six oak tie. Build a framework, mortise and tenon the joints so they won’t come apart, then you can slide your magneto down the hillside with block-and-tackles. You’ll need half a dozen at the least, and if you hadn’t cut down all the trees I’d tell you to anchor them to the trunks. But as it is, use wagonloads of stones to anchor the pulleys, and men with guide ropes on the hillside across the river. Because you won’t be able to guide it from above.”

  Bridges’ eyes narrowed, and he whistled a low tune. “By jim,” he said after a moment. “I think you’re onto something.”

  “You’ll need to have skids ready once you get it down to the dam. As it gets closer to that shaft, it’ll pull toward it and you will only be able to guide it, not stop it.”

  “Yes, I’d thought of that. We’re building the platform it will sit on.” Bridges gave him an appreciative look. “You should come watch when we do this job.”

  “Or supervise,” added Mason. “The world needs more sharp men.”

  “I just might,” Newton said, aware of his companions’ impatience but pleased at the recognition. “Watch, I mean
. I’d rather you boys supervise. The man who supervises is the man who has to answer if things go wrong.”

  “That’s the truth,” Bridges said.

  Josephine spoke up. “Well, I think we got what we came for. As long as we have your assurances that the river will be back to normal by tomorrow, we’ll head home.”

  “Oh, stay for lunch!” Bridges cried. “It’s not fancy fare, but it’s filling. Stew and crackers, most likely.” As if on cue, a man emerged from one of the tents a few yards away and began to bang on an iron triangle suspended from a tripod.

  “You’re kind to offer, but we packed food,” Charlotte said. “The days are short now, and we’d like to be safely home in good daylight.”

  They turned to depart. Newton noticed Bridges make a furtive gesture to Josephine to stay a moment longer. Without quite knowing why, Newton knelt down with his back to them and pretended to tighten his bootlaces so he could eavesdrop.

  “I hope you conveyed to your mother my regrets at missing the Sunday dinner she invited me to,” Bridges told her.

  “I did,” said Josephine.

  “The silver find has—well, as you can see, it’s made my life a bit mad lately.” “You don’t need to justify yourself to me, Mr. Bridges. Mother said her invitation is a standing one.”

  “I am relieved. Please tell her that I will avail myself of it this coming Sunday, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Why should it need to be all right with me?” Newton recognized the bristly tone in Josephine’s voice. “It’s my mother’s invitation.”

  “I might hope—” Newton realized his pretense had gone on as long as it could. He stood up and brushed off his pants. “I might hope that my presence might not be unwelcome to you as well.”

  There was a pause. “You are welcome in our home, Mr. Bridges,” Josephine said. “Both my mother and I will be happy to see you.” There was a rustle of skirts as Josephine passed by Newton, with her determined stride, toward the south, toward Daybreak.

  Bridges came up behind Newton and clapped him on the shoulder. “Well done, old man,” he said. “I think you solved our problem with the magneto.”

  “Glad you think so,” Newton said. They shook hands.

  Charlotte, ahead of the group, turned around with a quizzical look. “By the way, Mr. Bridges,” she said. “What happens when the spring rains come? Won’t they overflow your dam? That floodgate of yours is only large enough for the normal flow of water.”

  “Spillway,” Bridges said triumphantly, pointing to the far side of the dam. On closer scrutiny, Newton realized that end of the dam was three or four feet lower than the side with the turbine. “We’ve been dumping boulders on the downstream side to prevent any back-cutting when the water flows over the top. When your spring rains come, the excess water will run over the top and down the boulders to rejoin the streambed down there a hundred feet. It should make quite a pretty cascade, like the rapids of the Niagara. I’ll invite you all up, and we’ll have a picnic by the rapids.”

  “You do that,” said Charlotte, turning away.

  As Newton walked to join the group, all of them walking in silence with their own thoughts, the unpleasant taste of jealousy filled his mouth. Josephine was his half-sister, he knew that, but despite that knowledge he felt the same way toward her that every man felt. It was to his everlasting shame, but by God! as he watched her form ahead of him, swaying and dipping among the underbrush, he craved her. He would not dignify it with the name of love, for he was not sure that he had ever felt love, but he wanted her. He wanted her, to make her his in all ways holy and unholy, wanted no other man to have her, and the painful power of that desire was matched only by his agony at its obvious impossibility.

  Chapter 9

  Josephine didn’t dislike J. M. Bridges. In fact, she found him interesting and amusing, with his odd mixture of naiveté and enthusiasm. Still, she couldn’t help but resent him as well. His easy assumption of expert knowledge, the idea that a man from the East could sashay in and lecture them all on the uses of the river—it might have seemed comical if it hadn’t been so stupid. But she had dealt with condescending ignoramuses all her life, so there was nothing surprising about it.

  As for his obvious infatuation—another unsurprising bit of nonsense. She didn’t know how many Walter Scott novels he’d been reading, but she had no intention of playing the rustic maiden to his wandering knight.

  Still his impending arrival for Sunday dinner made her uneasy. For as long as she could remember, Sundays were days of freedom in Daybreak, no common meals, no community meetings, just quiet time for individual pursuits. Some villagers rode into town for church; some stayed home and rested. For Josephine, it was a day to take walks if weather permitted, to read and mend. With Christmas approaching, she had hoped to spend some time making gifts for the children of the town. But instead she would be sweeping, cooking, and thinking up conversation topics to keep this visitor amused. Of all the adjectives in the language, “amusing” was the one to which she least aspired.

  Memories of her stepfather, Michael Flynn, had faded through the years, and she was no longer sure which were actual memories and which were imaginings and retellings. She had been in the room when he struck her mother; she remembered that well enough. And she remembered slashing him with a kitchen knife when he had refused to let someone go for help. The memory made her smile despite its grimness. Seven years old, and already one of the toughs.

  What she remembered most vividly about him, though, was not any particular incident, but the smug, proprietary air with which he ordered them around, and the cold dread that she carried inside, morning through night, like a block of ice under her breastbone. No doubt her mother had her reasons for marrying him, but Josephine would be damned if she’d ever allow a man to act the owner with her.

  On Saturday her unease would not let her rest. She walked the village a while, aimless, ending up at Pettibone’s house at the far south end of town. Pettibone’s boy Jeff sat on the front step, eking out a tune on a cut-down banjo. Josephine sat beside him.

  “What’s the song?” she said.

  “‘Arkansas Traveler.’ You know it?” He was his father’s boy, a tangle of blonde hair that pointed in all directions of the compass, and a splatter of freckles over his face.

  “Oh, sure.” A limberjack was lying on the porch a couple of feet away. Josephine picked it up and straightened out its tangled strings. “This your sister’s?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “She’s going to catch it if her mother sees her toys scattered all around.”

  Jeff Pettibone grinned. “Already has. She’s out doing my chores today.” “Well, you play, and I’ll sing, and I’ll see if I can make this little guy dance. Does he have a name?”

  “Susie calls him Jumping Jimmy.”

  “All right, Jumping Jimmy, do a jig for us.”

  The boy’s playing was painfully slow, and he missed as many notes as he hit. But Josephine sang along, trying her best to make the puppet dance by rhythmic slapping of the flexible stick beneath its feet. But it had been a long time since she’d played with a limberjack, and she couldn’t quite keep him jumping.

  “Once upon a time in – Ar-kan – saw . . . “

  Jeff reached for a note.

  “An old man sat in his little cabin door . . . “

  “Fetch the doctor!” Jeff cried in mock alarm. “Jumping Jimmy’s havin’ a fit!”

  “You just play,” Josephine said with a laugh. “I’ll take care of Jimmy.” Jeff clenched his tongue between his teeth and stared at the neck of his banjo as if to tame it.

  “And fiddled up a tune that he played by ear, a jolly little tune that we’ve heard . . . be . . . fore.”

  At the end of the verse Jeff collapsed over his banjo in exhaustion. “This is hard!”

  “Nothing worthwhile ever comes without effort,” Josephine said. “I expect your folks have told you that.”

  “Every day,” he
said wearily.

  Pettibone’s wife Jenny came to the door, wiping her hands on her apron. “Hello,” she said. “If I had known you were out here I would have asked you in.”

  She wasn’t that much older than Josephine, nine or ten years, but she carried an air of age and fatigue as if she were from an entirely different generation. The life of marriage and child rearing, Josephine supposed. She liked Jenny, but always sensed in her the instinctive mistrust of the married for the unmarried.

  “That’s all right,” Josephine said. “I was just roaming around.”

  “Wish I had the time to go roaming around,” Jenny said. “But with this lot there’s always something to tend.”

  Josephine wanted to leap to her own defense—didn’t she do enough for the colony? Wasn’t caring for her mother its own kind of labor? But she held her tongue. “Charley said you told ’em good up at the silver mine,” Jenny said, as if in apology for her tone.

  “I said what I could,” Josephine replied. “I doubt if it will have much long-lasting effect.”

  “You did your bit,” Jenny said. “That’s all any of us can do.” She turned her attention to Jeff. “Come on, you. There’s plenty to do.”

  Josephine suddenly felt infantile, sitting on the porch with a toy in her hand. She handed it to Jeff and stood up. “Give that to Susie when her mother says it’s all right to.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll be along now.”

  “Won’t you stay a little longer?” Jenny said. “Coffee’s on the stove.” And now Josephine heard something else in her voice, not the reflexive semi-hostility of a moment before, but something almost desperate, the desire to talk about something other than chores or cleaning, about bigger things, the life of the community and the world beyond the community. Josephine didn’t think of herself as someone worthy of envy, but she was envied nonetheless.

  And yet—

  And yet there was no satisfaction in being the object of someone’s misplaced envy. What Jenny saw as her freedom, she saw as merely a different-shaped box.