The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  Gardner appeared not to notice her reflective silence. “I imagine people see me as a harmless eccentric for that, and I can’t argue with them. But at this point in my life, I want what I want, and I don’t much care what other people think.”

  “Present company excepted.”

  Gardner laughed, a riotous, rolling laugh that seemed to come through him from somewhere underground and burst into the air like half-near thunder. “Yes,” he said between laughs, “Present company excepted. I care very much what you think.”

  His amusement fueled Charlotte’s, and they were still chuckling a minute later when Adam came down the road, an intent expression on his face. “Have you seen Anton?” he said to Charlotte, ignoring Gardner entirely.

  “No,” she said. “Why?”

  “He went off this morning and I haven’t seen him since,” Adam said. “I don’t know whether to worry or get ready to holler at him.”

  “Both,” Charlotte said.

  “I saw the boy this afternoon,” Gardner said. “He’s fine.”

  “You did?” Adam said, turning to Gardner. “How’s that?”

  “He was riding along with Charley Pettibone, heading toward town. I met them on the road about three miles up.”

  “Toward town, you say?” Adam rubbed his chin. “What was Charley doing taking him to town?”

  “I didn’t get the impression that he was taking him. Charley had a prisoner in the back of his wagon. I had the sense that your youngster ran across him somewhere and jumped in for the novelty.”

  “Oh, you did, did you?” Adam said. “You’re a mind reader, now? And here I thought you were just out on the tramp looking for a free meal.”

  “Adam!” Charlotte burst out. “What’s got into you?”

  “Don’t think we haven’t noticed,” Adam continued, glaring at Gardner. “All this attention, all this charming talk. I don’t know what you think you can get out of this, but you are being watched.”

  Charlotte stood up. “Mr. Gardner, I want to apologize for my son,” she said. “He’s a grown man, but it seems he’s forgotten how to talk to a guest of mine.”

  “No need to apologize.” Gardner got to his feet. “I’m hard to offend, Mrs. Turner. But I believe I’ll take my leave now as I’ve still a few miles to travel today.” He tipped his hat in Adam’s direction. “Sir.”

  Charlotte laid a hand on Gardner’s arm. “Please stay, Mr. Gardner. I’ll not have you leave under such disparagement.”

  “I’ll let you know if I ever feel disparaged,” Gardner said. “For now, I need to return to my plantation. I am indeed on the tramp.”

  “Plantation!” Adam snorted. “What do you grow on your plantation, pray tell?”

  “Ticks and chiggers,” said Gardner. “Mrs. Turner, your porch is a fine place to sit, but now I depart. Save me that spot right there for when I come back through again.”

  “Count on it,” she said.

  He turned and was gone in an instant, his long stride taking him out of sight before Charlotte could say another word, leaving her frustrated at their failure to finish their conversation and furious at her son.

  Adam held up his hand to stay her reproach. “I know, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t know a blessed thing,” Charlotte said. “You only think you do.”

  “We just want to protect you.”

  Charlotte could tell by his shamefaced expression that he hadn’t given any thought to his words. “And by ‘we’ you mean—”

  “Myself. I shouldn’t have been rude, but I don’t like that old mooch hanging around.”

  “Well, I do, so you might as well accommodate yourself.” She stepped inside and closed her door, unwilling to talk about it any further.

  There was much that Charlotte had wanted to ask Ambrose Gardner. His casual remark about the war, for one thing. She would have liked to have heard more about that, if he were willing to speak. When James had come home from the war, he had refused to speak in anything other than the most broad generalities, and then only when pressed. A few times in the night he had talked about specific moments, but those moments had been a jumble of fragmentary impressions, incidents and isolated names with no sense of what had been going on or what it all meant. The great event of their generation, and nobody understood it. Certainly those G.A.R. men, with their flags and parades, acted as if they possessed the true history of the war, and the Confederate veterans and claimed-to-be veterans who had slipped back into power after the war acted as if they had the full story, but their burnished reminiscences didn’t square with Charlotte’s memory. What she recalled was deprivation and worry, never-ending worry, every morning bearing the prospect of dreaded news from afar or mortal danger close at hand. Ambrose Gardner’s removal from the world didn’t seem eccentric at all after such an experience. The eccentricity would be in returning to it as if nothing had happened, as if the world could ever be put right again.

  And this notion of Adam’s, that she needed protection! She would need to set that straight. Charlotte had been watching over Adam for twenty-five years and wasn’t about to let the tables turn. They’d have plenty of opportunity to fuss over her if she ever became enfeebled. No reason to start early.

  It was time to walk to the Temple and start the dinner preparations. Charlotte peeked out her front window. Adam had left. Just as well, though she didn’t anticipate another confrontation. He was a thoughtless young man but not ill-spirited, and she guessed that he was already regretting his outburst.

  She had forgotten the ox-eye daisies in their crock on the porch. As she started for the Temple, Charlotte looked them over. Surprisingly fresh, not the least bit wilted, despite having been carried from who knows where. Some of these wildflowers were tougher than they looked.

  After dinner, Charley and Anton showed up. Charley looked weary from the long day’s travels but Anton wore the expression of a young man who had been on the adventure of his life. She watched Charley stop his wagon at Adam and Penelope’s house and take the boy inside. If anyone could smooth out the ruffles of the day, it would be slow-talking Charley, who would probably take the blame for the boy’s excursion on himself.

  The next morning, Charlotte took a wagon and rode north to Oak Grove. A man named Nichols lived there, a foul-mouthed old reprobate she had known since before the war, who had somehow survived despite his penchant for raining condemnations onto whatever troop of men passed by. Nichols lived on whiskey and beans, but he built the best ladderback chairs anyone in the county had ever seen.

  She tied the reins to Nichols’ porch rail and stepped onto the porch. She didn’t knock, since Nichols was frequently hung over and didn’t appreciate loud noises, but she knew he was aware of her arrival. After a long minute he came to the door.

  “Good morning, Mr. Nichols,” she said.

  “Well, if it ain’t the communist lady,” Nichols said. “Come to proselytize?”

  “We don’t proselytize, Mr. Nichols. You know that.”

  “Figured you might have changed your ways.”

  “No, sir. Don’t suppose you’ve changed yours, either.”

  “No, ma’am. I like my ways just fine.”

  “Then we’re in agreement. You live your life and I’ll live mine.”

  “You came all this way to tell me that?”

  Charlotte smiled. They both knew why she had come, but Nichols didn’t like people who went too straight to business. He would turn down a cash-paying customer who rubbed him the wrong way, and Charlotte suspected that he enjoyed doing it. So the conversational dance was part of the transaction.

  “Actually, Mr. Nichols, I came hoping you might have a chair I could buy. I need a good rocking chair for my front porch.”

  “I thought you had a chair out there, some old twistedy-looking thing made out of grapevines or something.”

  “I do,” she said. “That chair was made for me by one of my townsmen as a gift, so naturally I use it. But I don’t have a chair fo
r company, and that’s why I thought of you. I need a good comfortable chair, one for long sits on the porch in the evening. One that will last.”

  Nichols tugged at his ear. “Your porch have a good roof? I ain’t going to build a chair just to have it set out in the rain.”

  “Solid roof, cedar shakes. Faces east. I sit out there of a rainy evening and never feel a drop.”

  “Let me look,” Nichols said. He led the way to a shed in the back, where oak and walnut chairs were stacked to the ceiling. “Most of these are promised to somebody or another, but I may have one to part with.”

  He picked his way to the back of the shed around tubs filled with thin split-oak slats, soaking in water to render them pliable. “Here we go,” Nichols said. He pulled an oak rocker from the corner and dusted it off with a rag. The chair glistened with linseed oil.

  “That’s a beautiful piece of work,” Charlotte said.

  “Ain’t it though?” said Nichols. I cut that tree myself, split out the outer layer for the seat and used the core for the back and posts. Takes a long time to bend that wood for the runners.”

  “I expect it does,” Charlotte said. “I can see the care it takes.” They looked at the chair for a moment.

  “I almost hate to part with it,” Nichols said.

  “Mr. Nichols, if you’ll sell me this chair I’ll take good care of it. And you may come and sit in it whenever you please. It’ll be my company chair.”

  “I might just take you up on that,” he said. “All right. I know you communists ain’t got any money, so a dollar ought to make us good.”

  “I’ll do no such thing.” To his surprised look, she added, “A dollar wouldn’t honor the work. You’ll take two and no less.”

  “Well, ain’t you the hard bargainer,” he said with a grin. “All right, two it is.”

  She had brought the bills with her and handed them over with a flourish. Nichols helped her load the chair in the wagon, and by noon she was home, with the chair on the porch beside her old rocker, and a little table brought out and placed between them. She set the flowers on the table. There they would stay, she thought, until they either wilted or were replaced by a new bunch, and if she had to she would replace them herself. In the evenings she would sit in her old chair with the new chair empty and waiting, and she would see what happened.

  Chapter 17

  August 1888

  Mr. Crecelius arrived with one day’s notice, although Mason’s blank look when the news came made Bridges wonder if he hadn’t known about it beforehand. No time to worry about that, though, and when Mr. Crecelius’ private railcar was unhitched from the three o’clock freight and eased against the blocks at the end of the siding, Bridges was glad he’d had the men clean up the millyard and hang a welcome banner.

  “I have two days,” Mr. Crecelius said when Bridges called on him. “Then I’m going to Montana to hunt elk. Line up the men for an inspection after dinner, and we’ll leave for the mine in the morning.”

  “It’s half a day’s trip,” Bridges said.

  “I know that. You think I don’t read your letters?”

  Bridges thought about telling him that his sawmill workers were not the type to show well when lined up for an inspection, but decided that he probably knew that already.

  “You’re a sorry lot,” Mr. Crecelius said to the group of sweat-stained, uncomfortable-looking men that evening, lined up along the track. “Didn’t your mothers teach you how to button your shirts?”

  No one answered. Mr. Crecelius paced before them like a make-believe general. “This is a great enterprise we’re engaged in here,” he said. “We are building the nation for the next century. It’s something to take pride in.”

  Then from up the hollow came the lonesome sound of a fiddle, lining out an unrecognizable air. Mr. Crecelius turned to Bridges. “I told you to instruct every man in the place to report for inspection.”

  “I did, sir.”

  “Then find the insubordinate son-of-a-bitch who’s out there playing the fiddle. I’ll not tolerate disobedience in any organization of mine. I want him fired on the spot and cleared out before nightfall.”

  Bridges followed the trail of music up the slope to one of the unmarried workers’ barracks, where the fiddler sat on the front steps. It was a man named Bodark Wilfong, a solid but unremarkable millhand, who had appeared at the mill toward the end of February.

  “Bodark, you were supposed to come down to the siding for inspection after supper,” Bridges said.

  Wilfong shrugged. “Didn’t feel like it,” he said. “‘Inspected’ sounds like something you do to a side of beef.”

  “Well, now you’re in a mess, because my boss is fired up about it, and you’re going to have to go.”

  He shrugged again. “Okay. I was getting ready to leave anyway. It’s berry-picking time.”

  Wilfong put down his fiddle but made no move to go inside. He gazed calmly at Bridges as if awaiting further instructions. Bridges pulled three dollar bills out of his cash pouch and handed them to him.

  “That’s for the days you’ve worked this week,” he said.

  “All right,” Wilfong said, tucking the bills into his shirt pocket but still making no move.

  “Where you from, Bodark?”

  “Des Arc. Down below Des Arc.”

  “Bodark from Des Arc. That’s a hell of a name. You rhyme.”

  “Yeah, my daddy was quite the larkster.”

  “Well. Good luck with the berries.”

  Wilfong finally stood up, and they shook hands. “Oh, I’ll do all right,” he said. “I know a few spots.”

  “I’d tell you to come back in a week, but I think word would get back to New York and then I’d be out berry-picking too.”

  “That’s all right. It was time for me to leave. Much longer and I would have got into a fistfight with somebody. I ain’t a bunkhouse kind of fellow.” He paused at the door. “You shouldn’t have built these shacks out of green lumber. They got cracks between the floorboards you could drop a cat through.”

  “What can I say? We were in a hurry.”

  “Hurry don’t do you no good, though. Cracks in your wall siding, too. These places won’t be fit to live in come winter. The other night, we were all in here at bedtime and we heard the awfullest bumping and thumping in the wall you ever did hear. We pried off a couple of clapboards from the inside and two blacksnakes fell out! They were twined in the embrace of love, so to speak.”

  Bridges chuckled in amazement. “That must have been quite a scene.”

  “It was indeed. Fellows a-jumping and hollering, going after them snakes with shovel handles and everything else they could lay hands on. At least they died happy. Now there’s a story from the mill to tell my kids.”

  “You have kids?”

  Wilfong seemed surprised at the question. “Sure. Four of ’em.”

  Bridges couldn’t fathom how a man with four children could leave a steady job to go berry-picking, but didn’t pursue it. He waved goodbye and headed back toward the mill.

  “I’ll bring you some berries if I find plenty,” Wilfong called after him.

  “I’d like that.” He knew by now it was bad manners to ask about the price.

  The next morning, they started for the mine at dawn, in Mr. Crecelius’ railcar pulled by a little switch engine stationed at Pilot Knob, then changing to a deep green rockaway that the Ironton liveryman kept for rental. “Don’t let anybody inside my car,” Mr. Crecelius instructed the men in the railyard. “That thing cost me fifteen thousand dollars, and it’s not for idle gawkers.”

  In the carriage they sat knee to knee, Mr. Crecelius and his man Ramsey on the bench facing forward, Bridges and Mason on the backward-facing bench. From time to time Bridges caught Ramsey giving him a look of mixed distaste and envy as he filled them in on the situation at the mill and mine, and he realized to his surprise that he felt like a man to be envied, a man who was making his mark at last, a significant figure in a g
reat enterprise. Strange that it took someone else’s jealousy to make him aware of his own value, but so it was. The ways of man, he supposed.

  “Bring me that rock man as soon as we arrive,” Mr. Crecelius told Bridges. “I want to understand the science behind all this.”

  The ride grew more difficult as they left the main road and followed the ever-narrower ridgeline as it descended toward the river and the mine site. The brushy treetops left from last year’s timber harvest sagged and rotted among the underbrush that had begun to grow up on the scalped ground. When he wasn’t watching Bridges out of the corner of his eye, Ramsey surveyed the landscape through the carriage window as if he were expecting an Osage war party to leap out from behind a pile of branches.

  Bridges had known that Mr. Crecelius would want to see the geologist and had arranged to have him waiting at the mine office. But if Mr. Crecelius was pleased with this foresight he gave no sign.

  “All right, Kessler, let’s have a look,” he said, not stopping to sit down or shake Kessler’s hands. Kessler nervously tugged at his upper lip and pointed toward the table, where he had laid out a grid of rocks over an enlarged, hand-drawn map of the area.

  “Indeed, sir,” Kessler said. “I have gathered some excellent samples, very representative and illustrative—”

  Mr. Crecelius barely glanced at the display. “No,” he said. “I want to see this all in the field. Lead the way.”

  Kessler cast a desperate look toward Bridges, who kept his expression blank. Kessler’s discomfort was not his problem. The geologist sighed and put on his hat.

  They picked their way down the trail to the mine entrance. “Igneous, igneous, igneous, all through here,” Kessler said, pointing to the outcrops they passed. “Intrusive in its formation, probably a laccolith or dike. And here,” he said as they neared the river, “Here is where the sedimentary layers begin.”

  “Plain English, please,” Mr. Crecelius said with a note of irritation.

  They stopped at a level place and looked back at the hillside. Kessler pointed to their feet.