The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  The urgency in his voice compelled them out the door. But they had only taken a few steps when the water reached them. Newton and Adam boosted Penelope into a maple tree behind their house and then scrambled up as the water pulled at their feet. They sat in the lower branches, feeling the tree shake as the flood rushed past.

  “If this thing goes over, we’re done for,” Adam said. “They’ll find us down at French Mills.”

  Newton couldn’t answer. His mind had been taken over by unreasoning terror, and all he could do was cling to the trunk of the tree and pray that it would hold. As a child, he had been caught out on the river once and nearly drowned. He had survived by clinging to the mill wheel until rescue came, but he had never forgotten the desperate sensation, the loneliness, the feeling that all was lost and hopeless, and now as they gripped the branches of the maple tree, that feeling returned as powerful and stomach-chilling as before. He was embarrassed but paralyzed by his fright.

  “Don’t know what kind of root system these trees have,” Adam said.

  “Adam, please,” said Penelope. “Don’t talk.” Newton whispered a silent vow of thanks to her.

  He had wasted his life and he knew it, chasing after dreams, people, ideas, that he knew to be foolish and false, not even his own ideas ultimately, but the ideas of the Newton Turner that everyone imagined him to be, and that he himself had imagined, the Newton Turner who was president, son of the founder, the know-it-all leader with a great froth of importance spouting from the top of his head. Did he really want that? Had he ever wanted that? He no longer knew, and there was nothing more useless than a deathbed repentance. All he knew at the moment was that he wanted to live, not die.

  Newton closed his eyes and waited. Shouts and cries came from the distance. He sought to settle his breath as his life tipped in the balance.

  Then he felt the tree move and resigned himself to death.

  But it was only Adam, stepping on his branch as he descended. “Come on!” Adam said. “The water’s going down. People need our help.”

  Newton opened his eyes. The water had receded almost as quickly as it came, and now stood a foot deep at the base of the tree. He climbed down, feeling foolish at his panic. But at the same time, a calm had come over him, leaving him with a refreshing sense of clarity about himself and his place in this little world.

  He saw his mother and Josephine limping toward the Temple. So they were safe. Adam took Penelope in that direction as well. Newton looked back at his house. Still standing.

  So was the home of John Wesley and Sarah Wickman, where Newton found them standing on his bedframe along with Wilhelmina, their windows broken out by the water’s force and a coating of slushy mud over everything. Newton waded to them through floating debris.

  “What happened?” Wickman said. His face was a map of confusion and fear.

  “The dam upstream broke,” said Newton. “Just too much water, I guess.” He turned his back and crouched down. “Climb on my back and I’ll get you out of here.”

  Wickman looked dubious but leaned over him and wrapped his arms around his neck. “My books,” he said to Sarah. “Bring my books.”

  “All right, Papa,” she said. “I’ll bring all I can carry and come back for the rest.”

  Slowly they trudged out of the house and up the slick wet path to the Temple. “Is Penelope all right?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes. I was with her. They’re up ahead.”

  Sarah ran ahead, leaving Newton and Wilhelmina to make their own way, but Newton didn’t mind. The present family was safe; she needed to tend to the family of the future.

  In a few minutes he reached the Temple and found a place near the stove for Wickman. The pews had been arranged into makeshift family circles. Charley Pettibone’s doing, he guessed. Sure enough, Charley came up to him a few minutes later.

  “Trying to get a head count,” he said. “See who’s missing, if anybody.”

  “What do you know so far?”

  “Can’t locate the Miller boy. But his neighbors think he went out hunting this morning.”

  “We should look anyway.” Charley nodded and walked off.

  The warmth of the Temple restored Newton’s strength, and he realized for the first time how chilled and worn he felt. He had fled his house without a coat. In a minute, he needed to get up and join the search, but for one moment more, he would rest and warm up.

  Sarah brought a cup of coffee from the stove. “I need to thank you,” she said. “I don’t know how long we could have stayed up there before Papa lost his composure.” Her glance darted to Wickman, who sat in one of the pews caressing the pile of books she had brought.

  “You don’t need to thank me,” Newton said.

  “Just doing your duty as president, eh.”

  “No.” Newton took a breath. “Sarah, I have been unfair to you over the years. I’ve been foolish and blind, and I have underestimated you in every way. I hope that we could blot the page and start fresh.”

  “Newton, we’re not children anymore,” she said. “We can’t go back to being the kind of confidants we were then.”

  He took her hand. “I don’t want to return to childhood. I want to start from where we are and see what happens between us. I don’t know what that will be, but I’d like to find out.”

  “Oh, go on,” she said. Her voice had a scoffing tone as she turned away, but there were tears in her eyes.

  Josephine stood by as Charlotte laid her hand against her mother’s cheek. They had wrapped Marie in a wool blanket and propped her head with a pillow, but she had not regained consciousness. Charlotte turned away and bent close to Josephine.

  “We don’t know how much of a beating she took,” Charlotte whispered. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you how this is going to turn out.”

  “Will she live?” Josephine asked.

  “Keep your voice down!” Charlotte said. “You’d be surprised what the unconscious can hear. I’ve seen it before.” She pulled her farther away. “I’m telling you, I don’t know. I can’t tell how badly she’s hurt. All we can do it wait, keep her warm, and watch for changes. I’m sorry.”

  Josephine knew she shouldn’t have asked, shouldn’t have let her frustrations take voice. She felt short of breath and fought back an overwhelming desire to run from the building. But she knew she couldn’t run and ultimately didn’t want to. So she sat at a table by herself for a moment, with the flurry of villagers around her, and waited for the panic to subside.

  J.M. Bridges sat propped against the back wall of the building, his shoulder tightly bound with a makeshift sling and an ill-concealed look of pain on his face. Josephine walked over and sat on the floor facing him.

  “How is it?” she said.

  He grimaced. “Mrs. Turner says she can feel a broken bone, maybe more than one. She wants me to go up to town and see a doctor once the roads are passable.”

  “That sawbones? I’d trust Charlotte Turner a long way before I’d call on him.”

  “I know.” Bridges forced a smile. “But I have my instructions.”

  Josephine studied his face, still boyish and open despite his recent tribulations. “Ever since I was a girl, I cared for my mother,” she said. “There have been days when I hated it. Hated it more than I could say. It seemed my whole life was being spoiled, wasted. And here I am today, and there’s nothing I wish more on earth than to be allowed to care for her one more day.”

  “I understand,” Bridges said. “Our worst fears and our greatest hopes look an awful lot alike sometimes.”

  “Don’t they, though.” Josephine suddenly felt shy. “Listen,” she said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “You don’t have to go back East. Not if you don’t want to.”

  “Oh, but I already quit my job. Didn’t want to wait to be fired. And from what I can tell, Mr. Crecelius doesn’t forgive.”

  “I didn’t mean going back to work for the company.”

  The silence hung between
them for a long minute. Then Josephine found the courage to speak.

  “There’s so much to do. We will have to rebuild our house, only better this time. The fields will be a mess, with God knows what washed up in them. And then we’ll have the community work—the streets, the ferry—”

  “So you’ll need a hired hand.”

  She blushed. “No. That’s not what I meant.” She smiled.

  Bridges finally caught onto what she was too embarrassed to say aloud. “Miss Mercadier, I think you love me after all.”

  Two hours later, a group of men from the mine came down the hill path and made their way to the Temple, asking for Bridges. Charlotte led them inside to Bridges’ resting spot.

  “Hey, boss. Thought you all might use some help,” he said.

  “Thank you. But I’m a spectator here.” He gestured to his shoulder. “Mrs. Turner can direct you. How are things at the mine?”

  The foreman shrugged. “Your whirligig is about twenty yards downstream, stuck between some boulders. I think we’re about done for.”

  Charley Pettibone joined them. “This’ll cheer you up,” he said to Charlotte. “I think we’ve found everyone. Last bunch was on their roof, snagged in some bushes downstream. Didn’t get carried into the main channel, thank God.”

  Charlotte was relieved but also immensely fatigued, unable to properly register the news. “Charley, these men have come to help,” she said. She left them and walked to the front door of the Temple.

  From its high spot on the hillside, the Temple overlooked the entire community, as they had planned. Had it really been thirty years since they had built this grandiose structure, out of proportion to the actual settlement, a testament to the size of their imaginations? Evidently so.

  She stood on the landing with her back to the door. The ferry washed out, the fields with great ruts in some places and mounds of sand in others. The upper third of houses demolished or damaged beyond repair, the middle third awash in mud. Daybreak looked less like a utopia than ever, more like a slow-rolling catastrophe. Maybe it was time to admit defeat and be done with it.

  Far to the south, she could see Ambrose Gardner picking his way up the road, George behind him. He stopped every few feet to throw debris to the side. Soon enough, surely, he would figure out that they had regrouped at the Temple, and that she was still alive. The town dogs came out to sniff at George, tails held high.

  She turned inside and walked through the clusters of devastated families who spoke in quiet murmurs among themselves about homes lost, treasured possessions swept away, futures uncertain. Of course she was not going to admit defeat. She was the banker of their hope, and the banker must never appear bankrupt.

  Charlotte climbed onto the dais. “Everyone,” she said, and waited. The room became quiet.

  “A little over a year ago we sat in this very place and celebrated the courage of our founders. I was lucky to be among those founders, and I’m lucky today to be among you. They say opportunity dresses as disaster sometimes, and I think that’s true.”

  She let the silence hang a minute before continuing. “When John Wesley Wickman, and Marie Mercadier, and Charley Pettibone, and my husband and I came out here, along with the scores of others, we weren’t leaving easy lives to come to the wilderness. We were a mixed lot, comfortable, desperate, most of us in between. So don’t believe all our old-time stories about our tribulations. We had hard times, but we had good times too. But we had one thing in common. We didn’t know what the future would bring.”

  She didn’t know what she was going to say next, but the only choice was to speak or fall silent. So she opened her mouth in hopes that words would find their way out.

  “I’m not sure today if I believe in all the ideals that led us out here. But here is where we are. I have no other life to live than this one. And now just as much as then, I don’t know what the future will bring.”

  Ambrose Gardner entered and stood quietly in the back.

  “We have a town to rebuild, fields to prepare, wells to repair, roads to clear. We have people to care for. I have no idea if we will succeed, but I do know we are hard workers. That’s what we do. So … let’s get to work.”

  Charlotte stepped down from the dais and walked to the circle of chairs where John Wesley and his family huddled. “How are you?” she said to him, but he didn’t answer, lost in himself.

  “He’s banged up,” Sarah said. “But we’ll be all right.”

  They nodded to each other in silent understanding of how far “all right” would extend in their current situation. All right was not that good, but it was good enough for now, and it would have to do.

  John Wesley paid them no mind. His gaze was fixed out the window, and for a moment Charlotte allowed herself to join him, staring out the window with an empty mind at the ravaged town below. It had once been an Indian village, and then a plantation with enslaved people crowded into cabins along the hillside, and then their grand experiment in communal living, and now it was to be—what? A mere town, a cluster of houses along one main street, with a church and a school and rich land surrounding it. A sleepy village with nothing to distinguish it from the ones down the road. But ultimately, a place to make a life. What other choice was there? You made your life wherever you found it. And all the while, a river ran alongside them, and a forest stretched out in front of them as far as the eye could penetrate, and behind them, always, the shadow of the mountain.

  The End

  Questions for Book

  Club Discussion

  1. Were you familiar with the story of the “orphan trains” before now? What do you think of them as a way of relocating orphans from orphanages?

  2. Did it surprise you to see Adam and Newton react badly to Charlotte’s new romance? Why or why not?

  3. At one point, Josephine vows, “I will not be made a fool of.” What do you think of that approach to life?

  4. Charlotte tells Josephine at another point, “Never make peace. Never, never, never.” What do you think of that approach to life?

  5. Do either of these women live up to these declarations?

  6. J. M. Bridges takes on the management of the timber operation and mine without having any experience in either. Is he brave or foolhardy?

  7. How do you see Bridges’ reading as compared with his actual experience?

  8. The novel ends with several characters apparently embarking on new stages in their lives. How do you imagine things turning out for them?

  Acknowledgments

  The decades-long destruction of the Ozark forest—and its decades-long rehabilitation—is one of the epic stories of the American environment. Between 1888 and 1903, three companies took out 1.3 billion board feet of lumber from the Missouri Ozarks, a staggering figure. Parts of the Ozarks had already been cut over: the area from the Mississippi to St. James fed its forests to the charcoal kilns necessary for iron and lead smelting, and the Gasconade River valley, because of its ease in river access, was considered cut over by the 1850s. But it was the coming of the railroad, and the steam-powered sawmill, that brought on the widespread destruction of the Ozark woodlands.

  First went the pines, cut for dimension lumber. By the second decade of the 20th Century, they were largely wiped out. Next went the oaks, for railroad ties, barrel staves, building lumber, and charcoal. This devastation had a ripple effect on soil, as the loss of forest cover allowed rains to wash the thin topsoil of the steep hillsides, filling streambeds with the gravel we see in them today; on wildlife through loss of habitat, with only about 2,000 deer and a few thousand turkeys in the entire state by the 1930s; and on the human inhabitants of the Ozarks, who unlike the timber companies were unable to pick up stakes and relocate to Louisiana, Texas, or points west with the same degree of ease.

  This intertwined environmental and economic struggle forms the backdrop for this book, and for those interested in a deeper history of this era than can be gained from a fictional account, I recommend David Benac’s Co
nflict in the Ozarks: Hill Folk, Industrialists, and Government in Missouri’s Courtois Hills (Truman State University Press, 2010). An insightful treatment of the broader range of resistance methods that Missourians of the humble strata used against the perceived threats of corporatization and industrialism can be found in David Thelen’s Paths of Resistance: Dignity and Tradition in Industrializing Missouri (Oxford University Press, 1986). Earlier, but still valuable, resources include Milton D. Rafferty’s The Ozarks: Land and Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), James F. Keefe’s The First 50 Years (Missouri Department of Conservation, 1987), and Charles H. Callison’s Man and Wildlife: The History of One State’s Treatment of Its Natural Resources (Stackpole, 1953).

  This is a work of fiction, not history, and although my lumber and mining company is loosely based on the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company, readers should not take its practices as representative of the MLM. The history of the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company is well documented in Benac’s book.

  I mentioned the decades-long rehabilitation of the Missouri Ozark forest ecosystem. This work is not yet complete. It began in the 1920s with the establishment of a state forestry commission, continued through the Depression with the creation of national forests and CCC camps, and carries on today with the struggles over public versus private ownership and the recurrent attempts to politicize the resolutely apolitical Missouri Department of Conservation. May we remember that the stewardship of the land is not a settled matter in history, but a constant push and pull, and that its roots are ultimately economic. As Wendell Berry recently wrote, “The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value—minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and ‘labor’—has been taken at the lowest possible price.”

  Much appreciation is due to my Blank Slate Press editor and publisher, Kristina Blank Makansi, and to her colleagues Lisa Miller and Donna Essner of the Amphorae Publishing Group. My wife, Sharon Buzzard, goes over my work with great care, and much appreciation is due to her as well. All errors and infelicities in the book are my own.