Then he hefted himself off the window frame and walked to the door and turned once more to John Frank who looked like he would argue it more, but the boy only shook his head to tell him not to waste his words.
Anything happens to me, he said, you’ll know where to find me.
* * *
THAT AFTERNOON THE boy found the lawyer’s house as absent as always. He rode swiftly back to the cabin and watered his horse and mule and fed them with oats he had bought at the general store. For a long while he sat by the river’s edge while they drank. The cabin was silent and at length he got up and walked through the door to find the old man sleeping in one of the chairs with a single tooth straggling loose from his open mouth. The boy put his hand on his shoulder.
Hey. Hey now.
The old man’s eyes blinked rapidly, then opened.
Ho.
The boy leaned into his brightly veined ear. Delilah, he said.
The old man opened his eyes wider and raised his eyebrows. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. Like the Bible, he muttered.
The boy looked after him a few seconds, then nodded and put his hand on his shoulder again and patted it and turned to go.
Hey, the old man coughed.
Yeah?
It’s getting cold out there.
Yeah?
Best make yourself a fire.
He followed the old man’s wishes and while the night came on the boy collected brush for kindling and he collected a few splintered one-by-threes from the old bridge and piled them near his camp. He straightened up his gear and tidied the saddlebags. For a while after he sat and thumbed over his mother’s old saddle. He smoothed the cordings flat and caressed the swells and the crusted seat where she once sat. He leaned an elbow on the cantle and watched the river as it blackened with the coming night. He thought about his mother gone and for a moment he thought very clearly that she could not have been saved and he felt a great burden lifted from him.
From the saddlesack the boy removed his razor and he took with him a towel and a bar of soap and walked into the cold river. He undressed in the water and plunged his clothes and scrubbed them with the soap and plunged them again. He hung the heavy linens on a broken tree branch to dry in the wind and then returned to the water and washed himself and shaved blindly and came out of the water clean and naked. He stood still and shivering for a long time, looking up at the black stars pulsing atop the great plate of the western sky.
At last he slung his jacket over his shoulders and wrapped the towel around his waist and hepped back into the cabin. He heated a cup of coffee on the stove and set it in front of the old man who looked at the mug as if it were poison. Drink that, the boy said.
The old man took up the mug grudgingly and sipped at the rim. The boy sat across from him at the table and held his shivering arms across his chest.
Where’s she at then? the old man said. This Delilah.
The boy gripped his arms, then let them down from his chest and onto the table. In the jailhouse, he said.
Mmm. That where you’re headed, all duded up like that?
Yes sir. That’s right. The boy looked out the window where the last of the sun had fallen away. You got any more stories for me before I go? he said.
No, I don’t guess I do. You don’t rightly listen anyway.
I listen.
Well. I don’t know I got the strength right now.
Where do you get em from anyways?
They was given to me. Passed down by my daddy.
Where’d he get em from?
Him? I don’t know. Alls I know is when my mama died we didn’t hear no more from the Bible. I guess maybe he found more comfort in a whole bunch of gods than just that one. Maybe he saw our chances bettered by the numbers.
Have they been?
Been what?
Made better.
I don’t rightly know that either. What’s better? I guess I’m still happy to be alive, if that’s what you mean to ask.
I don’t see how you’ve made it all these years on your own, he said.
The old man raised his eyebrows.
Alone? Son, I was young at one point here myself. And I ain’t alone. Even now.
I know it. I’m here.
I ain’t talkin about you. I’m talkin about the space you occupyin. That chair your ass is sittin in. Was my daddy’s. Built it out of ash-wood. And the table too. I reckon I’ve spent half of all the years of my life at this table. I wish you could play it out like a picture, see the way things have altered. Nine presidents of this country has come and gone in this table’s days. Soldiers from two different wars sat right here. Girls was courted here. My brothers and me all four sat here together. Two of them chairs is gone now, burnt for firewood in the winter of ’11. Them two brothers is gone too. And the other may as well be for all I know. Only this old dinin set’s left. But they’re all here. Here at this table. Here in this wood.
The boy set his hat right on his head and pushed his chair out and stood. I don’t see the comfort in that, he said. Seems more like pain to me.
The old man drained the mug of coffee and shook his head woefully at it, his hands working over the table’s grain as if to soothe away the years he saw there.
You’re right about that, he said. He shook a finger at the boy’s back as he went out the door. But what you think pain is, son? he called. Pain ain’t nothin more than the memory of comfort.
By the time his clothes had dried it was past midnight. The late hours had brought a new showering of cloud and the boy gathered his clothes and dressed quickly. He blew the fire down and kicked it dead and drew back his hair behind his jacket and called out for his mare.
A wicked rain fell across the landscape in the last quarter mile of his descent. The raindrops popped off his hat and the mare snorted nervously until at last they crested the hard paving of the thoroughfare. The surrounding lights of the plaza were washed near to nothing in the rain. He looked down the road to where the bar stood but did not see anyone outside. For a moment he paused, looking around in all directions, then turned the horse up the north road to where the prison stood.
He put a hand up to the brim of his hat when the facade of the jail-house came into sight. It towered above him in the rain, gray and sand-colored and without light. The vigas that were laid through were thick and black as steel. A hundred yards away he walked the horse to a terribly bent acacia on the side of the road. He stood the horse under the tree and withdrew the layout John Frank had given him and looked back and forth between the paper and the prison. Then he swung down off the mare and lifted his hat and pushed back his wet hair and hobbled the horse at the tree, telling her softly not to worry, not to worry for him at all.
* * *
He could see her hair coming down thickly off the crushed pallet where she lay. Through the barred window the raised ticking outlined the sad curve of her shoulder, and for a long while he stood breathing and watching her from the rain below.
The window was cut out of the clay several feet above his head. He watched her head shift in sleep. There was a light affixed to the outer wall of the prison in a white porcelain dome. The boy stood just out of its reach which had been greatly diminished by the black night, the spools of rain. He wiped the water from his face and began to whisper her name up the wall.
Though he could not see her moving he heard her breath, heavy and deep beneath the rain. Then from behind the window bars he saw her eyes. She was standing blankly and suddenly before him with her hands around the iron posts. Through the darkness he saw her eyes and her eyes only and they appeared to him like coal smote from the slate mountainside where he had first seen her, yet still they held that wheeling light.
Delilah, he called.
At last she looked down and saw him. She remained silent for a long minute and they watched each other through the cold sheets of rain. I know you, she whispered at last.
I know it.
For a moment she went away. Then she
appeared at the bars with a piece of cloth held between her fingers. I know you, she said again. She extended her slim dark arm through the bars and held forth the cloth. It’s your blood, she said.
He recognized the scrap of shirt as the one he was wearing when the Englishman had cut him.
I found it in the mountains, she said. After I saw you. After …
She paused and then recoiled her arm and did not go on.
What happened? he said.
Tell me your name, she said.
Trude. My name’s Trude Mason.
Trude, she said. I didn’t think …
She stopped again.
I know it, he said. But I am.
She lowered her head again and he could see her hair rustling through the bars.
How did you know my name?
I read it. On the jail papers. The ones that said you were a thief. What did you steal?
The girl lowered her head to the window again. The breath in her raised chest paused so long it seemed to the boy that it might never come down again.
A rake, she said at long last.
A rake?
She nodded. From one of the builders in town, she said.
He could tell by her lowered voice that she was beginning to cry. What for? he said.
She shook her head.
For my baby.
He recalled when he had seen her in the mountains. He remembered the river and the Englishman and the cloth bundle he held before him and the purple stain upon it.
Yes, he said. I remember.
I wanted to find her. Even though it was him that done it.
She began to sob. He watched her with his hands held at his sides.
But she’s gone, she said. And here I am.
The rain kept coming and he raised his squinted eyes to where her head rested against the bars.
He killed her?
Yes.
That man you were with in the mountains?
Yes.
He was your lover?
She raised her head to him and looked down with a sudden pity in her eyes. No, she said. He was not.
But they put you in jail.
Yes, she said.
Where’s he now?
I don’t know. I woke up one morning and he was gone. Then two men came out and dragged me up and brought me down here. The night I saw you. I’m eighteen and in jail and forgotten.
The manner in which she spoke, so forthrightly and with such bitter clarity, seemed a thing of wonder to him. You ain’t forgotten, he said.
The girl leaned her head against the bars again and outstretched her hand into the rain. Then the boy called out, loud and heedless, his voice like a child’s again. It ain’t over, he said. I’m goin to get you out. I promise. I got to.
I can’t hope for you, Trude. She stood back from the window. Look at me, she said. I can’t.
I hoped someday I’d know your name.
The girl breathed heavily and watched his eyes. The boy could hear her chest heave above the splattering rain.
Hope for it, he said. It’s the one thing left I know.
Then he was quiet again. The rain slowed. After a few minutes it surged again with a loud ripping wind across the landscape.
I wanted to, he started, but stopped himself abruptly.
He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to tell her about his mother and his father and he wanted to tell her about the mountains and the reason why he could not name but it was in him and he wanted only to tell her if he did nothing else ever. He wanted to tell her that he had dreams about her and her dying and he wanted to tell her that he loved her but when he opened his mouth he could say nothing at all.
You better go, she said.
I’m comin back.
No, she said. You can’t.
Why?
She looked down at his face and spoke very softly to him now. Trude, she said. Look here at me. Who I am. In this place. I’m never comin out.
You are, he said. He spoke out louder. You are.
Her hands tightened around the bars and she called to him as he began to walk away. Trude. Please.
He turned back to her. Delilah, he said.
She crooked her long thin neck to the side and called back to him. Yes?
He looked up at her through the hissing rain and once more he spoke her name, then turned and was gone.
FIFTEEN
AFTER A LONG night of rain the boy leaned up and shed the wet flannel bedroll he had reclothed his camp with and sat facing the river with his arms wrapped around his knees. The river was fast and swollen and he watched it going by. He could hear the old man stumbling somewhere downstream. He was singing a song about a girl named Sadie. The sun was gone and the moon high and the morning winds blew his hair across his face and after a while he lowered his head to his chest and watched the white of his breath rise between his knees.
Many days had passed since he had seen her. He’d spent little time awake, and he rose from dreams he no longer wished to recall. She was locked away and there was nothing he could yet think to do.
He rode the papers out to the lawyer’s house but no longer looked inside. He saw the Italian only twice and both times what passed between them was no more than a nod and once a sideways smile from the boy from which John Frank quickly turned away.
A few times he rode through the town, speaking briefly to those who would speak to him. New storefronts were going up and the foundation of the metal press he had read about was being laid behind the inn. Wagons and trucks wobbled into the thoroughfare loaded with machinery and foodstuff. Around the plaza women sat on porch fronts, ogling and putting their hands to their mouths when deliveries from the East brought crates of clothing from New York and Chicago and paving tools and pipelines for the engineers. Sounds of hammers and nails and the groan of saws moved across the town like echoes of voices from a land far off. On the occasion when the sky was clear, he could see the path of the railroad snaking along the mesa and down through the foothills and sometimes back at the cabin at night he could hear the rails being driven and sometimes in his dreams it was he who swung the mallet, heavy and lifeless upon the earth.
During the evenings he sat as he had always done, by the river, looking out at the great and dark expanse beyond. He thought often about his old wide dreams of Colorado. He imagined his mother awake before him and he thought about the land he had roamed in the days after her death. At times in the slash of wind and cloud he even conjured his father, his figure a mere shadow in the bleak and tired fields.
And then in the darkest hours, he rode the open country. She had made him love the night and all of its colors. The tree branches became silhouettes of her hair and the ripple of stream or brook became her eyes and all of the hard brittle stone beneath them her heart.
One night he took a high trail above the prison house and looked down. He could see the lights from the guards’ quarters and he counted out the windows until he was sure he was looking at hers. He stayed there for over an hour, his hands folded tensely over the saddlehorn, looking down at the bars which in his heart felt not like bars of one window in one small jail but bars slammed down into the mortar of the world.
* * *
He sat on the porch steps of the general store and watched the road. The weather was coming down in great heaves from the mountains and the wind slushed through the streets and raised the dust around the legs of the townspeople. Beneath the willow tree a young girl wearing a heavy twill skirt that fanned out at her ankles was peering over a wooden box filled with silver rings and clap bracelets. All of the Indian women wore their hair long to the small of their backs and wound and braided in thick ropes and studded with beads. They circled around the girl very slowly, looking out into the distance as if it were the mountains themselves that were coming down and not simply the cold. The boy stared down at the steps and wondered where their men were. Their eyes reminded him of his own, as if they belonged to other scenes. As if the world they looke
d upon was not truly their own.
After a while he rose and went down the road and sat in his booth at Garrets and ate with his head down. He drank a mug of coffee. When he finished his eggs he leaned back to smoke. A car passed. Smoke and dirt blew up to obscure his view. A woman came stumbling out of the inn across the plaza. Her face was screwed up in anger. She spat onto the porch but seemed to be dancing all the way out. No one else appeared in the doorway save a small dark wren who settled down on the porch floor, then flew off when the woman spat again. The boy ground out his cigarette in the ashtray and rubbed his shoulder where the Englishman’s knife had gone in and drank another cup of coffee.
Miss Jane came and sat across from him. She asked the boy if he was still staying up in the hills and wasn’t it cold out there and was he still working with John Frank. She asked him if he had heard about the break-in at the records building and she asked him then and more quietly if he had heard about someone being hanged before the new year. On this last question the boy stopped and put down his mug and asked her civil as he could if she knew who it was, but she only shook her head and shrugged her shoulders and said she wished it wasn’t nobody at all.
It don’t seem right, she said. I mean, I can’t imagine the mayor allowing something like that. He’s such a gentleman. And such a soft voice.
The boy pushed away the ashtray with his matchbook and then pushed the matchbook into his shirt pocket. I wish the same, he said. But he wants the town a certain way, and if fearing it out of the people is the way he thinks to do it, I reckon he will. And I doubt when he does you’ll hear that soft voice you come to expect.
He nodded to himself and closed his eyes briefly, as though he had just made clear what had been in his mind by speaking it aloud, then rose from the table. I got to get on, he said.
Miss Jane got up and put her hand on his shoulder.
No more coffee? You look bad tired, Trude.
Well, he said. I don’t imagine there’s enough coffee in all of New Mexico that would make me feel otherwise.
* * *
He went toward the bar as the last light went away. The sky he and his horse walked under was black and clear and cluttered with stars. He could feel the earth hardening beneath him and he knew the colder nights were coming soon.
The Sound of the Trees Page 19