The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “Melvin, I need to come in and talk to you,” he called. “We need to sort this out.”

  He tried the latch. Locked.

  “I’m coming over to the window to see if you’re all right. Don’t shoot at me, ok?”

  In the silence of the porch he walked to the front window but stopped before showing himself. No sense in taking unnecessary chances. He steadied himself on a porch post and leaned one eye in. No sign of Melvin Gill.

  Charley lifted the window and stepped inside. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark. Melvin Gill sat on the floor, his back against the front door, dandling a pistol in his hand as if it were a toy. He craned his neck at Charley, his look as mournful as an old hound’s.

  “Hey, Melvin.” Charley said softly. He lowered himself to the floor, a couple of feet away from the young man.

  Melvin didn’t answer. A whiskey bottle, three-quarters empty, stood on the floor between them. Melvin picked it up, took a swallow, and handed it to Charley.

  “No, thanks,” Charley said. He swirled it a little. “Whiskey don’t agree with me anymore. Don’t know why. But I can feel it burn all the way down, even before I swallow.” He put the bottle on the floor.

  Melvin sighed, a deep sigh that came from somewhere down low. “I’m sorry,” he moaned, and then began to cry.

  Charley patted his shoulder. “Don’t take it too hard, son,” he said. “He said I wasn’t a fit man to see her,” Melvin choked out between sobs. “Guess I proved him right, too.”

  “Well, the good news is, he looks to be all right, so you won’t have a murder charge to answer to,” said Charley. “But we’ll have to go up to the courthouse to get everything squared away.”

  “Will Marcelina have to come? I don’t want her to see me like this.”

  “Marcelina, that’s the girl?” Melvin nodded. “That’s a pretty name. I can’t say I’ve ever heard that name before.”

  “Pretty name, pretty girl,” Melvin said, and for the first time they both smiled.

  “Did she witness anything?”

  Melvin leaned back and banged his head on the door. “Yessir. She was right there. Goddamn it, what a fool I am!”

  “Since she’s a witness, we won’t want her to see you,” Charley said. “So we’ll go up ahead of everybody else and send for them later. She won’t see you today.”

  Charley got to one knee and took Melvin’s hand. This was the tricky moment. “Let me help you up,” he said.

  Melvin set the pistol on the floor and allowed himself to be pulled up, his muscles limp. They faced the door.

  “Your brothers are out here,” Charley said. “Nobody else. I gotta ask you, are they going to cause trouble?”

  “Them?” Melvin snorted. “Hell.”

  “All right,” Charley said. “I only ask because when feelings get high, and family is involved, people do things.” With a swift move he took his handcuffs from his back pocket and snapped them on Melvin’s wrists. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but it’s the law.” Melvin’s arms flinched, but by then the cuffs were tight and Charley had the chain gripped firmly in one hand. With the other hand he unlatched the door and nudged Melvin out into the sunlight. “Can you walk all right?”

  “Yeah,” Melvin said. “I ain’t that drunk.”

  Together they walked toward Charley’s wagon, but Melvin’s brothers moved to block their path.

  “You ain’t taking him to jail,” Tommy growled.

  “Today, I am. Long term, that’s for the jury, not you or me.”

  Tommy reached out to grab his brother’s arm. “I can’t let them send you to the pen, Melvin.”

  Melvin pulled his arm away and shook his head in defeat. “Just do what the man says.”

  “You boys come up to town tomorrow and visit your brother,” Charley said. “Today, just do his chores and stay away from the folks down the road.”

  The brothers hesitated, exchanged glances, and then both moved aside. “Do his chores?” Tommy scoffed. “Shit, he don’t do any chores that I ever seen.”

  When they reached the wagon, Charley lowered the gate. “Scoot on in. There’s a bag of wheat up front to lay your head on.” A trick he’d learned from Harley Willingham, to keep a bag of grain and a stack of wool blankets in his wagon for these types of trips, as most tended to follow the same path this one was taking—belligerent bravado followed by shivering remorse.

  Melvin turned his back and cuffed wrists toward Charley. “Can’t you let me out of these things?”

  “Sorry. It’s nothing personal, but people sometimes get crazy-acting. I have to guard against that.”

  After his brothers helped Melvin settle in, Charley covered him with a blanket and patted him on the shoulder. “Get some rest now. It’s a long trip.” Charley climbed up and gathered the reins, then turned back to the Gill brothers. “Hand me my pistol, will you?” Tommy passed the gun to up to Charley. “The sheriff’s wife will feed him good,” Charley said, “but a jail cell is a lonesome place. You make sure you visit tomorrow. He’ll need some company.”

  “Are they going to send him to the pen?” the youngest Gill asked.

  Charley sighed. “I really can’t say. Best as I recall, he’s never been in serious trouble.”

  “He’s just rambunctious,” Tommy assured his little brother. “They won’t send him to the pen for being rambunctious.”

  They all looked into the wagon bed where Melvin was already asleep, snoring softly. Charley chucked the reins again and headed north. It would be nice to swing by Daybreak for supper, spend a little time with Jenny and the children, he thought, but he couldn’t trust this Melvin to behave himself once he sobered up and found himself handcuffed in the back of a deputy’s wagon. The children would be upset if he started cussing and trying to break loose. Better to take him straight to town and be done with him. He thought about fastening a leg ring on him as well; he had attached some eye bolts to the wagon bed for that purpose a few years ago, and used them once or twice. But he decided against it. If the man wanted to run off through the woods with his hands cuffed behind his back, let him. See how far he got.

  The miles passed pleasantly, with Melvin sleeping in the back and a soft breeze tickling his face. Through the long stretches of empty road between farmhouses, the creak of the wagon and the swish of his horse’s tail lulled him into drowsiness. He thought about the first time he came to this country, a lad of fifteen with nowhere else to go, all his possessions in a little poke hardly bigger than his hand. How hungry he had been in those days! He remembered the great cloud of passenger pigeons that had passed overhead, their wings clattering, each one a meal, big and plump, and how he had wished for a long rifle, a shotgun, anything to bring one down. Now here he was thirty years later; he hadn’t gone to bed hungry in twenty years, and he was plump and sassy while the pigeons were all gone. Hadn’t seen a single one in two or three years. No telling if they’d ever come back.

  Ahead of him on the road he saw a small figure walking down the middle, heading toward town as well, and as the wagon overtook it Charley recognized the walker to be the boy Adam and Penelope Turner had taken in, Anton Kaminski. He slowed his horse to match the boy’s pace.

  “What you doing out here, son?”

  The boy looked at him out of the side of his eye and did not stop walking. “Minding my own business.”

  Charley laughed. “You got me there, all right. Natural curiosity, since you’re so far from home.”

  “My home is Chicago, Illinois,” the boy said with a snort. “I don’t belong in your backwoods empire.”

  “So that’s where you’re headed, Chicago?”

  Anton gave him a suspicious look. “Maybe.”

  He stopped the wagon. “Well, climb on up and I’ll give you a ride as far as Fredericktown.”

  Charley figured the boy had walked four miles, more or less, from Daybreak, unless he had cut through the woods, which would have been harder walking. Not so far as to wear a lad out, b
ut far enough that a wagon ride would be welcome.

  Sure enough, Anton scrambled onto the seat beside him. “You ain’t going to try to take me back, are you?”

  “No,” Charley said. “I was an orphan boy like you, once upon a time.”

  “You were?”

  “Yep. Boy of fifteen, me and my daddy were riverboatmen, back in the riverboat days. We used to ferry cargo up and down all the rivers. Then one night he got run over by a steamboat, and I was on my own.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Came up here. We’d brought a load up the St. Francis for Mr. Turner, Adam Turner’s daddy, and he seemed like good folks. So I took my chances and legged it up to Daybreak. They took me in.”

  “And that was it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You never went off on your own? Never went seeking your fortune? Man, that’s what I want to do. I want to find adventure.”

  “I was off to the war for four years. Adventure enough for me.”

  Charley could tell that the boy wanted to ask him more about the war but held his tongue out of politeness. That was a mark in his favor.

  From the wagon bed, Melvin Gill gave a long, low moan, the sound of a soul in hell. Anton Kaminski jumped to his feet and looked into the bed for the first time.

  “Who is that?”

  Charley took his time. He glanced calmly over his shoulder. “Outlaw. Taking him to town for lockup.”

  Anton leaned close. “What’d he do?” he whispered.

  “Shot a fella.”

  They rode another mile, Anton quivering with curiosity. “And you caught him?” he finally asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Single-handed?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Did you have to shoot him?”

  “No, he didn’t put up no resistance.”

  Charley let the boy’s mind work a while longer, then said, “I may need your help getting him out of the wagon and into his cell when we get to town. He was quiet going in, but he may be feisty coming out. Think you can do that?”

  “Yessir.” He looked back at Gill more boldly. “My old man used to get this way after a bender. You didn’t want to mess with him either.”

  Charley decided to let that story come out at its own pace. “I got into deputying after the war,” he said. “I had put myself into trouble and the old sheriff fished me out. I learned a lot from him.”

  He stopped the wagon and looked directly at Anton. “You come back to Daybreak with me, and I’ll teach you what I know about enforcing the law. You can help me out from time to time. I’ll work it out with Mr. Turner.”

  Anton’s shoulders slumped, a mixture of relief and disappointment. “You won’t tell him I was running away?”

  “No, I’ll just say I found you out looking for mushrooms. And if you decide to go adventuring later on, well, good luck to you.”

  “All right.” The boy’s voice perked up. “You think they really found silver in that mine north of us?”

  Charley shrugged. “I expect so. They wouldn’t have twenty men working in it if they didn’t.”

  “That’s what I’d really like to do. Mine for gold and silver. But not here. Out west.”

  “Well, if it’s mining you want to learn about, your—” He almost said ‘father.’ “Your guardian, Mr. Turner, is the man.”

  “Yeah,” Anton said. “He goes out prospecting all the time.”

  They had nearly reached the town limits when they saw another figure on the road, walking south toward them. As he neared, Charley saw it was Ambrose Gardner. He stopped the wagon again.

  “Mr. Pettibone!” Gardner called out. “Never fear, I am here without legal impediment. In fact, I just finished a pleasant conversation with your boss about the right of the people to peaceably petition the government for redress of grievances.”

  Charley smiled. He liked Gardner in spite of himself. “Glad to hear that.”

  “And who is this?” Gardner said.

  “This here’s Anton Kaminski. He’s been taken in by Adam Turner and his wife.”

  “Pleased to meet you, young man.” He extended his hand to Anton, who shook with an air of great formality. “Mr. Pettibone and I go back a little.”

  “Where you headed, Gardner?” Charley said.

  “Home.” Gardner cocked his head toward the path “My work in town is accomplished, but I thought I’d stop by Daybreak on my way to pay a call on my friend Mrs. Turner, the mother of your benefactor, Adam. I’m hoping to pick a nosegay along the way.”

  “What’s a nosegay?” Anton asked, and Charley was glad he did, as he had no idea either.

  “It’s a small bouquet, given as a token of affection, lad,” Gardner said with an air of solemnity. “The ladies love flowers. Remember this when you are old enough to go a-courting.”

  “You’re courting Mrs. Turner?” Anton exclaimed, eyes wide as if Gardner had suddenly sprouted another head. “She’s an old lady!”

  “And I’m an old man,” Gardner replied with a wink toward Charley. “Ask Mr. Pettibone here if his capacity for affection has diminished with age.”

  Charley blushed. “That’s something I don’t like to talk about.”

  Gardner gave Charley an appreciative nod. “You are a man of the old school, and I admire that.” He turned to the boy. “Anton, you may learn a lot from him. We are both old warriors, eh, Charley.”

  “You were in the great war, too?” Anton said.

  “Oh, yes, although Mr. Pettibone and I fought for opposite sides. But that’s all behind us now, in our present age of peace and prosperity. Nowadays Charley and I lead the simple country life while the rest of humanity chases the Great Dollar Bill.” Gardner waved his hand in the air as if grasping an invisible dollar just out of reach. “But that’s a conversation for an evening by the fire. I must away if I want to pay my call and still reach home by nightfall.” He paused, a mischievous smile crossing his face. “Or perhaps I should dawdle so I reach Mrs. Turner’s around bedtime, as in the old songs.”

  “Mr. Gardner—” Charley began.

  “Just making fun,” Gardner said. “I respect the proprieties.”

  He loped away in his casual stride, faster than it appeared, leaving Charley to wonder about his courtship of Charlotte Turner. It wasn’t Gardner’s amorousness that surprised him; Charley knew what he meant about not losing affection with age. Even after twenty years, he still felt the power of attraction to Jenny, in the night when the children had all fallen asleep and they were lying close, and he couldn’t imagine not feeling it. But he had always supposed that womenfolk lost that sensation over time, and that was where the mystery lay. Could Charlotte really be returning this man’s desires? At her age, and with marriage and grown boys and widowhood behind her? It didn’t seem possible. But it gave him hope that maybe Jenny would still feel affection for him when she was Charlotte Turner’s age. And that made him smile. He flipped the reins. “Get up,” he said. As they lurched forward, the jolt of the wagon woke up Melvin Gill, who began to curse.

  “Just another mile to town,” Charley said to quiet him. Melvin continued cursing, which Charley didn’t blame him for, as he knew the handcuffs were a gall. So to drown out the cursing as they came through town Charley began to sing.

  Oh, the farmer comes to town with his wagon broken down,

  Oh, the farmer is the man who feeds them all.

  If you’ll only look and see, then I think that you’ll agree,

  That the farmer is the man who feeds them all.

  The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man,

  Lives on credit till the fall . . .

  Chapter 16

  Charlotte smiled when she saw Gardner approaching with a fistful of oxeye daisies, although experience told her wildflowers wilted almost as soon as they were picked and were better left in the forest. Still, small gestures were not to be disrespected. She thanked him and fetched an earthenware crock in which to arr
ange the small bouquet.

  Soon she would need to walk to the Temple to begin preparing the community dinner, but the better part of an hour remained so she invited Gardner to join her on the porch, and placed the crock on the step where they could both admire the arrangement. Since she only had one chair—a bent-wood rocker John Wesley Wickman had made for her years ago—Gardner perched on the steps sideways so he could look up to see her as they talked.

  “You’re quite the swain today,” she said.

  “I’m glad you noticed.”

  “Do you really still walk everywhere you go?”

  “I do indeed.” “And you refuse to own a horse?”

  Gardner grinned. “No horse means no additional labor to build a barn, nor grow hay or oats, nor buy saddles and tack. Simplify, simplify, as Mr. Thoreau tells us.” His grin took on a sly cast. “Besides, haven’t you heard? Property is theft.”

  Charlotte laughed at his sally. “Mr. Gardner, you are an original.”

  “Originality is not my goal,” Gardner replied. “I hope you understand that. My goal is to be consistent with my principles, and if that makes me an original, so be it.”

  Surprised at his sudden seriousness, Charlotte nodded. “I understand. I’ve tried to do the same in my life, albeit with mixed success.”

  They sat quiet for a moment in the cool evening. “Will you stay and eat with us?” Charlotte said.

  Gardner shook his head. “Gatherings that size make me touchy,” he said. “I don’t know if it was the war or if it’s just my life in the woods, but I’m getting to be like Daniel Boone. Don’t want anybody within a mile of me.” He reached out to tap the toe of her shoe, lightly, twice. “Present company excepted, of course.”

  The familiarity of his gesture—at once perfectly decorous and yet strangely intimate—startled her. When was the last time a man had touched her foot? Had James ever? She couldn’t remember. Charlotte realized she needed to think more seriously about Ambrose Gardner and his attentions. Up to now, she had enjoyed his gallantry for the flattering sensation of a man’s notice, but with this simple gesture she understood he was in earnest. She would have to seriously consider whether she really wished to entertain his suit or not. And she would have to be clear about it either way.