The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “I’m the end and the only,” he said. “There’s a few families live up the other way, but I don’t see them much. They go out to the north mostly.”

  And then the spot arrived where the pines had not been cut, where Gardner’s daubs of paint marched across the forest on trunk after trunk like a row of sentinels. “Here’s my section, all the way to the river,” he said. Ahead of her, Charlotte could see nothing but a winding path covered in pine needles, although in the distance she sensed a gradual opening-out of the sky, where the ridge dropped into the river valley.

  A few minutes later a blue-speckled hound charged up to greet them, wagging its tail so fiercely that its entire body shook. “There you are!” Gardner cried, kneeling to scratch its ears. “Charlotte, meet George. You thought I’d forgot about you, didn’t you, George.” From a pocket he produced a chicken leg from Mrs. Bone’s table, which the dog seized with slobbering enthusiasm.

  “George?” Charlotte said. At the sound of his name, George raised his head, sniffed the hem of her skirt for a long minute, the resumed gobbling the drumstick. “I would have guessed you’d give him a grander name.”

  “After the Father of Our Country,” Gardner protested, his familiar sly smile reappearing. “General Lafayette gave George Washington seven of these beauties. The Gascony Blue is a noble dog, and George is a noble name.”

  Charlotte laughed. “I’ll accept that. Still, a hound dog is a hound dog, French lineage or not.” She urged her horse forward at a slow walk. George dashed ahead gleefully, tongue flopping. “I don’t know about the noble part, but that’s a happy dog you’ve got there for sure,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “George is a boon companion.”

  At the end of the lane stood a small cabin, logs covered with planks, with a door in the center, a window on each side of the door, and oddly enough, no porch. A lean-to shed stood about twenty yards before it, with a picket stake, water, hay, and a trough of oats; she stepped down from her horse as Gardner tied the picket rope to its foreleg. She felt as if she was approaching the back of the house, not the front, and as she walked toward it, she realized that in a way she was, for the cabin was perched near the edge of a bluff that dropped a hundred feet or more to the river, and the porch was on that side of the house.

  “Looks like you’ve turned your back on the world,” she said.

  “You could say that.”

  Charlotte stepped onto the porch. A ladderback chair rested against the wall of the house; she pulled it out and sat down. Below her, a river, its shallows twinkling in the afternoon sun, flowed toward her from the northwest down a long riffle, curved in a great bend beneath her, and then swept southwest for nearly a mile before it disappeared behind a row of sycamore trees. The valley across the river, broad and thickly forested, stretched away from her to a line of distant hills. The great height from which she viewed the scene made her feel godlike, as if she could command the clouds and winds from her perch. The color in most of the trees was still their deep summer green, although the sycamores had already gone yellow-brown and there were clumps of bright red and orange along the forest edges. Sassafras, sumac, creeper vines, she guessed, although she couldn’t tell from that distance. She sat for a while and let the breeze caress her face.

  “I’m surprised nobody’s farmed that valley yet,” she murmured.

  “No roads in to speak of,” Gardner said. “Not to mention, when there’s a big rain it all floods. I’ve seen it ten feet deep over there.”

  She nodded, not wishing to talk too much. The vista made her feel reverent, and she wanted to let that feeling persist as long as possible. Above her a hawk screeched.

  “So,” she said after a while.

  “So.”

  “Tell me about your life up to this point.”

  He sat on the porch and leaned his back again a corner post. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. But most of all, what brought you to this place at this moment.”

  “How the Great Chain of Being culminated in precious me.” He drew a breath. “I’ve told you about my boyhood, which was nothing consequential. An ordinary boy, perhaps more bookish and solitary than most.”

  The sun had sunk to where it shone directly on Charlotte’s face, but she didn’t mind the glare. The warmth on her cheeks felt good. She closed her eyes to hear to him talk.

  “The war marked me, as it marked us all,” he said. “Who can say they were untouched, victor or loser?”

  “It marked my husband. No doubt of that. But I could never get him to make me understand how. Of course, it marked me too, and perhaps I never explained that to him as well.”

  “There wasn’t just one war. There were many wars, millions of wars. Each of us had our own. That’s why it’s so hard to convey.”

  “My war was mainly deprivation. Doing without things that one is unaccustomed to doing without. Not just food. Doing without the simple certainty that one could ride to Fredericktown and return alive. Doing without knowledge, without a sense of the future.”

  She had nothing further to say at the moment so sat silent. Gardner let the silence remain as well, while George snuffled at his feet.

  “My war,” he said finally. “My war. I was twenty-four when it broke out. I enrolled for three years, but like everybody else, I figured it wouldn’t last more than three months. ‘Home by harvest,’ that was the cry. You know how that worked out. When my enrollment was up, it felt wrong to go home while my brother soldiers were still fighting, so I re-enlisted. My wife thought I was a fool, and I expect I was.”

  “Tell me about your wife.”

  “Oh, she was a sweet thing, married me when she was seventeen. It didn’t do her any good to have me march off so soon after we married, and we never got right afterward.”

  “What became of her?”

  “Lost her to the yellow fever in ‘69. I tried to stay in Indiana, but after a few years I couldn’t do it. I had to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “Still had the war in me. I roamed around for a while and then I came here. I’ve been trying to get the war out of me ever since.”

  “Have you succeeded?”

  Gardner stood up and walked to the edge of the bluff. A twisted cedar, rooted in a cleft in the rocks a few feet below, rose over the edge, and he plucked a few blue berries from its branches. “At least once a week, the regimental band would play,” he said. “When we were encamped, anyway. And every so often another regiment’s band would come over. Those were fine evenings, the fires burning and the men singing along where there were words to sing. Much marching, except when I had the piles too bad to march, and then I rode in the wagon. And seven times we went into battle.” He flicked the berries into the void. “Sometimes you know a battle is coming. For a few days the armies get close and test each other, like prizefighters. There’s such excitement in the camp. Every morning you think, ‘Could this be the morning? Is this the day?’ And then it comes, and you feel ready. Other times you’re not ready. The enemy has outsmarted you, and you’re sitting around mending your britches when you hear the sound of gunfire. At first you think it’s just the pickets, but it’s too many and too fast to be pickets. And then a cannonball lands among you, and you realize they’re on you before you can even form a line. That’s a different kind of battle.”

  He walked toward her. “That’s the part of war I can’t quite get out of me. But if I get that completely out of me, perhaps the band concerts and the marching companions are gone, too. And maybe I don’t want that.”

  She stood up from her chair and met him at the edge of the porch, resting her hands on his shoulders. “I don’t think anything is ever lost, Ambrose. We overlay, we rearrange, we point ourselves in different directions, but we never lose. Even forgetting is not losing. The forgotten makes itself felt more than the remembered, sometimes.”

  Gardner’s face beamed. “Charlotte Turner, you make more sense than a person has any right to. How�
��d you get so smart?”

  “Mrs. Bone’s Sunday meals,” she said with a chuckle. “They feed my brain. Now show me the rest of your place.”

  Gardner lifted her to the ground and led her around the cabin. “I’ll have you come in front, like the quality.” He opened the door to let her inside.

  The front room was austere, two chairs on the left side near the window with a large bookshelf against the wall, and on the other side chairs around a table where a pitcher of water rested. In the corner were a pair of kitchen cabinets and a woodstove that vented through the roof. The floor was smooth pine, swept clean, and two lanterns hung from the rafters.

  “Quite tidy for a bachelor’s quarters,” Charlotte said.

  “Clutter draws mice, and mice draw snakes,” Gardner declared. “When I first came here I had trouble with the rattlesnakes that had been living in crevices in the bluff from time immemorial. It took a while before I realized that if I kept my food locked up and my floors swept, and raked out all the leaf litter for ten or twenty yards around, that the snakes would have no cause to visit my abode and we could live in peace. But I still watch my step when I go down to my spring, and never go at night.”

  “You have a spring?”

  “I do indeed. Down the hill to the north, runs year-round, too.”

  Charlotte walked to the bookshelf. Dickens, Gibbon, Longfellow. A volume of Shakespeare. A stack of magazines lay on the top shelf.

  “My brother back East is my revolving librarian,” Gardner said. “He supplements my own books with ones he thinks I’ll like.”

  “How does he do?”

  “Not far off, most times. I can always tell what’s on his mind by what he sends.”

  An interior door led to the bedroom. Charlotte looked around. A wardrobe, a dresser, and a narrow bedframe made of three-by-three oak lumber with tightly stretched ropes to hold the mattress. The inner blanket of checkered flannel and the outer blanket of blue wool were tucked under in crisp, square corners at the foot and turned down at the head.

  “Are you always this tidy?” she said.

  “I keep the inessentials at a minimum so I can focus on the essentials.”

  The back wall of the cabin mirrored the front—a door in the center flanked by a window on each side. The lowering sun filled the room with amber light.

  “No curtains?”

  “Who’s going to peek?”

  She laughed. “Squirrels and deer, I suppose.” A thought struck her. “I thought you said your bed was made of pine.”

  A mischievous smile crossed his face. “Ah, that bed. I was saving that for last. The crown jewel of my holdings.”

  He led her out the back door and up a gentle slope to the top of the ridge, where a stand of pine trees rustled. From one of the tallest trees, several ropes dangled.

  “Are you afraid of heights?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Gardner reached up to a peg in the tree, where the ropes had been gathered into a knot. He pulled them loose and shook them untangled. A bosun’s chair was fastened to the bottom of two of the ropes.

  “Climb on, and I’ll tie you in,” he said. “When you get up there, roll out and settle yourself before you untie the cinch. Then there’s a lever on the pulley that releases the pawl to let the chair down again.”

  She settled into the chair, and Gardner tied her in with a short cinch rope. He began hauling her up. Rising through the branches, she could hear the pawl click on the pulley over her head.

  Charlotte indeed felt unafraid of heights, but her stomach fluttered as she ascended in spasms of two and three feet as Gardner pulled the rope. She looked above her.

  A network of ropes stretched between four tree trunks like an enormous spiderweb ten feet across. Above it, the pulley creaked, dangling from a large crossbranch. She gripped the ropes and hung on.

  Finally she was at a level with the structure, such as it was. She pulled herself over it and untied the rope around her waist, sliding out uncertainly. The web sagged and stretched around her as she settled down, but felt firm and secure. She flicked the lever on the pawl, letting the chair descend.

  The netting was made of tightly woven ropes, knotted every couple of inches, stretched between the four big pines. Even at this height, the trunks were two feet thick or more. And the entire web of ropes was covered with heaps of animal hides. She ran her hand over the top one. Buffalo? She’d heard of buffalo robes but had never actually felt one. They were surprisingly soft and supple. She’d always imagined that the hair would be rough, but instead it felt pleasant under her palm.

  She moved around a little, experimenting, and found that the whole structure shifted and adjusted along with her. It was like an oversized hammock, but more tightly strung and with less sway because of the extra anchor points. She sat still for a minute, getting used to the constant slow rocking of the entire structure moving in harmony with the trees. It was relaxing, as long as she didn’t think of the distance to the ground.

  A long time passed before she heard the creaking of the pulley as Gardner lifted himself up in the bosun’s chair. The sun had reached the horizon and cast streaks of orange light onto the mottled clouds above the far hills.

  “Sorry it took me so long,” he said, rolling out of the chair into the sling. “Checked on your horse.”

  As Gardner settled into the netting, the weight of his body drew hers toward it, and they rested snug together in the center of the web. This was about as scandalous as it got, she thought, riding out alone to a man’s house, and in his bed, or what could be called a bed anyway, and for a moment she wondered whether she had gone mad. But no, she had not taken leave of her senses, in fact she felt in full command of her senses, more in command than she had been in quite some time, and she liked the feeling quite well. Shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, leg to leg. “How on earth did you come up with the idea for this treehouse, anyway?”

  “Read it in a book,” Gardner said. “Man named Muir, climbed a tree out in California and spent the night in it. I thought, if that fellow can sleep in a tree on the spur of a moment, I can do it better with some planning. Took me a month to get this webbing all fixed up, and then I tried it for a while a few feet off the ground. But I really wanted to be up here, to see what it felt like.”

  “What if it rains?”

  “If it’s just a little rain, I pull a buffalo robe over my head. These things shed water like duck feathers. More than that, I climb down.”

  “And birds?”

  “Hawks and eagles are all you get up this high, mostly. Sometimes a flock of crows. Squirrels don’t even like to climb this high. Nothing up here for ’em.”

  She laughed. “Ambrose Gardner, you are a wonder. Never in my life did I think that I would be up a tree higher than the squirrels.”

  “And now you are.”

  “I am indeed, and it’s a fine place.” She burrowed between the buffalo skins. “So what do you like about being up here?”

  He didn’t answer at first, gazing across the valley. “When I spoke about getting the war out of me,” he said at last, then paused again. “When I spoke about getting the war out of me, I was thinking of this. A sense that the world is in order. Oh, there’s killing and dying. I’ve laid here and watched a hawk devour a chickadee on that branch right over there. But it’s killing for need, not for wantonness, and up here among the wind and the trees and the sight of the river below, I think that life flows on as it should, despite our efforts to strangle it. So I come up here.”

  “And you spike the trees to keep out the lumbermen from your own little patch of Eden.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  She couldn’t quite say why, but Gardner’s words made her sad. But the sun had dipped below the hills now, and the orange reflected off the clouds deepened toward red. She couldn’t be sad in the face of such beauty as the color spread over the dome of the sky, and the river picked it up and glowed orange beneath them. The breeze in the trees wa
s like the murmur of faraway voices. “Eden is always a fragile place, you know.”

  “I know.” He pointed to the hilltops across the river. “Used to be pines over there as big as these. All cleaned off now.”

  “And that order in the world that you’re seeking—it’s rare and fleeting.”

  “I know that, too. And so do you.”

  “I suppose I do.” They watched the colors darken as the breeze died down.

  “I can lower you down whenever you want.”

  Charlotte took his hand. “Do you think it’s going to rain tonight?”

  “No,” he said, a little confused.

  “Then I don’t want to go down. But thank you for giving me the opportunity to save my virtue at the last minute.”

  He pulled two buffalo skins over them. They were warm and musky-smelling, the smell of wild animals on the distant plains, and she inhaled the aroma deeply. In the cocooning warmth, she thought for a moment how long it had been since she had held a man in her arms—decades, decades—but quickly stopped thinking about that as their bodies pressed together. His hands roamed her body, and soon she had joined the play, finding unexpected ridges and hollows in Gardner’s human landscape. Within minutes they were both naked. They drew together, lips to lips.

  “I am blessed beyond measure,” he whispered.

  She tilted her hips to meet him, a little surprised at how swiftly she was ready. He was ready as well and groaned deeply as they merged.

  How long it went on she could not tell. All she knew was that the sky grew dark, and somewhere along the way she lost track of whose movement was propelling them, or whether neither of them were moving but rather being rocked together by the slow, immemorial rhythm of the trees on the circling planet.

  At some point in the night he stirred against her, and she woke for a moment, the stars bright above her. “You know I could never live out here,” she said, uncertain whether he was awake. “I have family, I have lives to tend.”

  His voice was soft in the darkness. “I know.”

  They were quiet again, and she felt the rise and fall of his breathing. Then she was asleep.