The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  Chapter 26

  October 1888

  Charley had planned to take the day and go fishing. The morning had dawned crisp and bright, not ideal for fishing, perhaps, as the fish seemed to prefer days when the air above resembled the water below, wet and murky. But a good day for the fisherman, when a light coat would suffice against the morning chill, and he could set a few lines, find a good spot along the bank, and settle in for a nap under the warm sun. But as soon as he saw Newton Turner on his step, wearing a look of the most profound discomfort, he knew that fishing would no longer be in his day’s plans.

  “My roomer didn’t come home last night,” Newton said with no other greeting.

  “Is that all? You had me worried for a minute. From what I hear, that boy’s a bit of a hound dog anyway. He probably just got drunk in town, or at the camp.”

  Newton’s expression grew even more glum, something Charley had not thought possible. “On a work night? Charley, those boys are usually too tired to walk straight by the time they finish a day, much less go into town. And you know there’s no drinking allowed in the camp.”

  “Maybe he just lit out then.”

  “Not without his grip, which is sitting in the corner of my house.”

  Charley sighed. “All right. Let’s see if we can track him. You have any thought he might have met with foul play?”

  Newton shuffled his feet. “Possibly.”

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “I promised the man I wouldn’t say. So if it’s all right with you, I’ll hold off on that unless we find out this isn’t my imagination at work.”

  Charley nodded and took his hat off its peg. They walked through the village, wordless.

  The footpath leading to the mine was rough and steep, and as far as Charley knew only Pierce used it. No one else from Daybreak worked there, and the miners had no call to come south. Newton and Charley ascended the hill in single file, picking their way over outcrops and fallen logs.

  Once they reached the ridgetop the walking grew easier, and though the ridge wound in a serpentine route it was still a far better path to the mine than a straight line. They crossed the colony’s property line into company land, still marked by the tracks of the dragged-out trees. For a while they lost sight of the river, although Charley knew they would pick it up again once their path circled east.

  “See anything?” Newton called.

  “Nope,” Charley called back.

  In the distance ahead he could hear the rhythmic throb of the ore crusher. Instinctively they slowed their pace as the hill sloped downward and the river came into view.

  Charley stopped to reconnoiter. From where they stood, the dam was below them and the mine and mill just upstream from that. The headquarters and the miners’ lodgings sat on the far hilltop, and although they could be reached by staying on the high ground and following yet another broad fold in the landscape, Charley guessed that a man going to or from his job would walk straight to the dam and climb the steep slope to here rather than take the long way around. From this point, though, no clear path led down.

  “Wish I’d brought a walking stick,” he murmured. “I’m getting too fat for this mountain-goating.”

  They picked their way from level spot to level spot. Halfway down, when Charley stopped to catch his breath, he glimpsed what looked like Pierce’s coat on the rocks downstream from the dam and pointed it out to Newton.

  “We better go down there,” he said. Newton sucked in his breath and followed.

  At the river’s edge they could see it more clearly. Pierce’s big wool coat, the one he went everywhere in, rocked gently in the water, half in, half out, the tail draped over a granite boulder, the collar sunk into a scour pool. The rocks were too slippery with rushing water to wade out for the coat, so Charley hunted around until he found a long stick to pull it in.

  They held the coat up between them. No bullet holes, no rips, just a sop-ping wool coat that looked as if it had wafted down from the heavens. “Here’s the coat, but where’s the owner?” Charley muttered. “Not likely that he’d walk off and leave it.”

  They looked upriver. It was conceivable, Charley supposed, that the man could have lost the coat in a gust of wind while crossing the dam, perhaps, carrying it over his arm, and then returned to the camp to spend the night, not wanting to walk home in the dark without his coat. But if that were the case, wouldn’t Pierce have been down here by daylight hunting for it? The man treated that coat as if it was the robe of royalty.

  He clambered onto a boulder to get a better look around. This stretch of river had always been a shut-in, with cascades running helter-skelter through rocks in every direction, and the construction of the mine dam had only added to the confused welter of passages and pileups. A man who slipped on these rocks and broke a bone could sit unseen for a long time in one of these crevices.

  Charley tried to think systematically as he surveyed the scene. If a man’s coat was to be found here, at the water’s edge, where would the man be standing when he lost it? Above or upstream seemed logical. “Walk up toward the dam and tell me if you see anything,” he called to Newton. He swiveled in place, scanning for any sign of the missing man. Five minutes of this, and they’d need to walk up to the mine to inquire, a prospect Charley did not look forward to given their difficult history.

  Then he glimpsed something. “Hold on a minute,” he said. He climbed down from his vantage point and walked toward the far bank, Newton following.

  At the spot in the dam where water from Bridges’ prized turbine flowed out, the river bubbled and churned. And a few feet under the surface, the clenched body of Reuben Pierce bobbed in the cross-currents like a water-logged stave bolt, rising and sinking with the buffets of the water.

  “Well, hell,” Charley said. He looked around. “We are going to need something to fish him out with. Maybe you can go find us a rope or a pole.”

  Newton dashed off while Charley squatted at the water’s edge, watching the body. It didn’t look as though it was going to float away or sink out of sight, but one never knew. The last thing he wanted was to have to fish after a body in a deep hole of water. The agitation of the water where it came out of the turbines made it murky, but he hoped to keep Pierce in sight until Newton returned.

  As he waited, he thought about the drowned man and his coat. It wouldn’t be hard to slip while crossing the dam and end up down here, especially in dim light. But how would his coat have gotten where they found it? Perhaps he took it off, laid it on a rock, and then came over here. But why?

  In a few minutes Newton returned with two men, some long tamping poles from the mine, and a length of rope. “This should do,” Charley said. He tied a loop of rope to the end of the pole, and with the aid of the other men guided it around Pierce’s leg. Together they pulled the body onto the rocks.

  “Now what?” one of the men said.

  “We take him up to your headquarters and send for the sheriff,” Charley said. “We’ll need a coroner’s jury.”

  At the mine headquarters, Mason greeted them with an expression of disgust as they laid out the body on the floor. “Where’d you find him?” he said.

  “In that deep pool just below your dam,” said Charley.

  “Dumb son of a bitch.” Mason stood over the corpse. “We told him he should stay in the miners’ camp instead of trying to walk back and forth every day. But no, this birdbrain had some sort of point to prove.”

  “And what point was that?”

  Mason shrugged. “Independent, beholden to no one, that sort of thing. We hear it all the time. Then the workers figure out that it makes more sense for them to stay on site.”

  “You’re the man in charge here?”

  “Yes. The superintendent is over at the sawmill. Mr. Bridges, I think you know him.”

  Charley nodded. “So who would be the last people to see him before he left?”

  “The men on his shift, I guess. Why?”

  “I want to ta
lk to them, see if they noticed anything.”

  Mason’s look changed to a suspicious squint. “You think somebody might have done him harm?”

  “Can’t say till we get a clear idea of what he did and where he went,” Charley said. “He ever get into any quarrels or anything?” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Newton Turner squirming from the effort not to speak.

  “No idea,” said Mason. He turned to a clerk standing nearby. “Go tell the foreman we need all the men from yesterday’s shift of ore diggers. Chop-chop, let’s not drag this out. We’ve got a mine to run.”

  The clerk hastened off, and a few minutes later a dozen grimy men assembled outside the door. Charley stepped outside and pointed to the soggy body of Pierce.

  “Which of you saw this man before he left last night?” he said.

  The men stirred nervously at the sight of the body but said nothing. One of them, who Charley took to be the foreman by his slightly more formal dress, stepped forward. “I talk,” he said. He turned to the men. “Který z vás ho viděl naposledy?”

  After a moment, one man cleared his throat. “Viděl jsem ho.”

  “He sees this man,” the foreman said.

  “Where? Was he with anyone?”

  “Kde?”

  ““Nevím nic.”

  The foreman turned to Charley. “He don’t know anything.”

  “But where was he? Was he alone?”

  “Chce vám říci, kde jste ho viděla,” the foreman told the worker.

  “Nevim nic,” the man repeated.

  The foreman nodded. “He says he don’t know.” “What does he mean he don’t know? The man was either alone or he wasn’t.” But the blank looks on the faces of the workmen told him that he had reached the end of useful questioning. He dismissed them with a wave of his hand and turned inside. “It’ll be a couple of hours at least before the sheriff gets here. Newton, you might as well head back and let the people in Daybreak know what’s happened. Don’t let anyone touch his things till I get there.”

  “Wait a minute,” Mason said. “You mean I’m going to have to work here for half the day with a dead body on my floor?”

  “He won’t bite,” Charley said. “And we can move him out onto your porch if you like.”

  “No,” Mason said glumly. “It’d just attract the gawkers.” He heaved a sigh and turned to his account books.

  Charley walked Newton out the door and took him by the elbow. “I mean what I said,” he whispered. “Don’t let anybody go through his belongings, and don’t speculate about what happened here. And when I get back—” He patted Newton’s shoulder. “When I get back you can tell me what you meant by your thought that this man might have met with foul play. When we have the time to talk quiet, in private. And pick up that coat as you go, and mark the place where we found it. We may want to look that over again.”

  Newton nodded in understanding and turned away, tight-lipped.

  “Tell Jenny to make me a plate for when I get home, would you?” Charley called after him. “I need to wait here until the sheriff arrives, so it may be late.”

  Mason’s clerk had gone off somewhere and returned with a large square of canvas. He handed it to Charley. “Thought you might want to cover the body.”

  Charley held it up. “What’s this off of?”

  “Nothing. We use them to cover the ore wagons. But this one was just in the stack. It’s clean.”

  Charley took the canvas inside. It was coarse and stained, but it would have to do. Rough material for a rough place.

  Mason ignored him, devoting himself to his books with a dedication real or feigned, so Charley spread out the canvas to cover Pierce’s body himself. He studied the man’s waxen face. The cheeks and forehead bore scrapes, but he couldn’t see any way of knowing whether they had happened before or after Pierce went into the river.

  Strange, how a face in death took on a look of mystery and wisdom, no matter how brutish it had been in life. Charley hadn’t known this man Pierce, other than to greet him in the street and wonder about his reasons for coming to Daybreak, but he hadn’t seemed the kind of man to get into a deadly quarrel. But the close-mouthed evasiveness of those Bohemians, or whatever they were, suggested they had something to hide. Good luck to anyone who needed to pry anything out of them.

  He had closed Pierce’s eyes when they pulled him out of the water, but knew they would start to creep open soon. He stepped outside, found a couple of flat pebbles, and brought them in to rest on the man’s eyelids. A couple of hours should be enough to set them.

  Kneeling by the dead man’s head, he leaned close, as if to hear a whisper from the great beyond. But of course there was nothing to hear, and the eternal quiet of Reuben Pierce would not be disturbed by questions from him or anyone else.

  Chapter 27

  Newton hurried through the woods, Pierce’s overcoat folded across his arm, and no idea what he should do. He would need to make an announcement, and tonight was the vote on selling the land. But first he should secure Pierce’s belongings as Charley had asked. He hoped he could make it home undisturbed to collect his thoughts.

  No such luck, as he saw Adam striding toward him as soon as he reached the village. Newton stopped to meet him in the fields, away from prying eyes.

  But Adam, true to form, didn’t even notice the overcoat. A smile wreathed his face as he wrung Newton’s hand. “Good news, brother!” he cried. “Wonderful news.”

  His ebullience was so unexpected that Newton hardly knew how to respond. “All right,” he finally managed. “Enlighten me.”

  Adam couldn’t keep the grin off his face. “You’re going to be an uncle!”

  His joy was so genuine that Newton shed his worries for the moment and hugged him. “Wonderful news indeed!” he said. “When’s the joyous event?”

  “Springtime, she said. I’m not sure exactly when.”

  “Have you told Mama?”

  “Just came from there. She’s delighted, as you can imagine. Penelope stayed behind for some woman talk.”

  Newton waved his hand toward his house. “Let me put some things away, and then I’ll join you there. We need to celebrate.”

  He hurried away, sensing Adam’s surprise at his haste, but feeling the need to have a few minutes to himself even more urgently. Lucky that Adam was so oblivious. He might have overlooked the sopping overcoat, clearly not his own; his observant mother never would. Newton couldn’t say whether God’s eye was truly on the sparrow, but he knew it was true of Charlotte Turner.

  Inside, he gathered Pierce’s things and piled them in a corner. He considered going through them but decided to wait for Charley. And finally, alone and indoors, he was able to sit down, put his head in his hands, and try to regain control over his racing thoughts.

  Some years had passed since he’d been in close contact with a dead body, and then it was the peaceful passing of Frances Wickman, not this disturbing event. How did Charley manage to stay so calm? He was still trembling three hours after they found the man. His vacant eyes, with half-drooped lids as if he was about to tell a dirty joke. The raw but strangely bloodless scrapes on his face. All images that he would like to forget but knew he never would.

  And the thought that if this man had indeed come to harm at the hand of another, J.M. Bridges would be mixed up in it. He had no affection for Bridges, but it was Josephine he worried about. If the two of them had formed a bond, this news would cause her pain, and regardless of whatever tangled feelings he had, he didn’t want that. He couldn’t imagine Bridges actually killing a man, but allowing it to happen—or quietly giving the nod to another—

  He was getting ahead of himself. Perhaps nothing more ominous had happened than a man slipping off a rock ledge in the dark. And when had he ever seen Josephine Mercadier get wrought up about a man? Time to calm down and act like a leader. He stood up and pressed his hair down with the palms of his hands, then put on his coat and headed for Josephine’s house.

&
nbsp; She sat on her porch shelling beans with her usual intent expression, as if the beans were arguing back. A light rain had started to fall, and Newton drew his coat to him as he stepped under the roof overhang and cleared his throat.

  “I’m not inclined to delay this vote, if that’s what you’ve come to talk about,” she said without lifting her gaze from her work.

  “No,” he said. “Something else.”

  She heard the odd sound in his voice and looked up, searching his face. “All right.”

  “That Pierce fellow. He didn’t come back last night, so Charley and I went looking for him. We found him dead in the river just below the mine dam.”

  Josephine folded her hands in her lap. “Dead? How so?”

  “Not sure. He had been dead a while when we pulled him out.”

  “And you came over here special to tell me this? What on earth for?”

  Newton tried to decide how to approach the subject. “Well, it’s not clear how he died. If it turns out that this was no accident, then a lot of eyes will turn toward the mine and the people who run it.” She arched an eyebrow and waited. “And since you and Mr. Bridges are friends, I thought you should hear about this from someone who knows you, and not some stranger on the street.”

  “Why, Newton!” she said, and there was genuine pleasure in her voice, although her musical laughter always had a faintly derisive tone to Newton’s ears. “You’re wanting to protect my feelings. That’s a sweet thing to do. And I’m grateful.” She laughed again, a little deeper. “But surely you don’t envision Mr. Bridges as the murderous type. He’s as harmless as a dove.”

  Newton was about to chuckle as well, but remembered his earlier worries and stopped himself. “Doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is there are likely to be troubled times ahead, and those troubles won’t be confined once they start to spread.”

  “Of course it matters what you think,” Josephine retorted. “You’re the president of the community. Whatever you say, people will follow.”

  He knew she was right, but that knowledge didn’t bring him any comfort. It just made his head hurt. “But what am I to say? That’s my dilemma. The man was living under my roof, though I can’t say I knew him. Now he turns up dead on company property, just as we’re about to vote on whether to sell off land to them. It’s a damn mess, is what it is.”