With one swift motion he leveled the pistol in his hands and cocked back the trigger. Three of the Ralstons came down from the steps of Garrets’s porch floor and began walking toward him.
The gun crackled and jogged back in his cupped hands. The men who were coming for him ducked, then began to rush forward but stopped when they saw where the bullet had gone.
The tiny motions of Delilah’s body stopped all at once as if summoned into stillness by a command unheard by all but her. The mayor started from the scattered shadows of the tree to find the boy crouching by the truck and holding his head, his hat dashed to the ground and rocking on the pavement in the wind.
All the hushed crowd turned and watched him now. After a while the boy rose again to his feet. The mayor stepped to the front of the gallows where the body of the girl now hung folded in her bloodstained dress with the noose around her neck guiding her eyes to the sky. He put a hand up to the Ralstons and they stepped back. The boy came slowly forward. The crowd so silent only the swish of his trousers and the skidding of his boots could be heard. He held his head low until he came face-to-face with the mayor, then raised both his head and the pistol in unison.
The mayor looked down and gripped his beard. Some of the women in the forefront gasped and the Ralstons came forward again. The mayor held up his hand firmly. Stay there, he said.
The boy looked around. He saw Miss Jane, her eyes covered by her hands. He saw the railroad men still sooted in their work clothes and he recognized the face of the storyteller he had sat with on the mesa wall. He saw Thomas Trewitt standing by with a camera and flashbulb limp in his hands. He saw the old woman from the general store. She was weeping. He looked around for John Frank but did not see him anywhere. Perhaps he had known that the boy would not want him to come, that he would not be able to save her.
He turned back to the mayor. No words occurred from either of them until the mayor spoke to a man dressed in formal black attire on the platform beside them. Cut her down, he said.
The boy raised the pistol to the mayor again. No, he said. You cut her down. He shook his head at the gun in his hand. If you think you’re fit to hang her, you’re fit to cut her down.
The mayor hesitated, looking up at the body from the platform. Then he looked upon the boy. The boy did not seem to be where he stood. The mayor could have simply ungripped the pistol from his hand but he did not. He stepped up to the scaffolding with his knife and cut the girl down.
He caught her over his left shoulder and dropped the knife and took her slight body in his arms. He shuttled her down his chest, then laid her down on the wooden pallet that had been prepared for her and removed the noose. Someone handed him a blanket and he covered her body, for the first time looking full at her, the face of a child.
He came down and stood before the boy. People began to lean in again but he stayed them with his palm. He seemed he would speak again. He put a hand on his beard.
I imagine there is one more life you would like to take, he said.
The boy’s eyes came away from the pallet.
A desert of sadness, he said to his feet. He looked up at the mayor. That’s what you called me. And maybe you’re right. You, though. He looked at his feet again. You’re just a desert.
With that he lowered the pistol away from the mayor’s chest. No, he said. There’s nothin left here I want.
He stood briefly as before, then unclipped the golden chevron from his jacket and dropped it at the mayor’s feet and went up to collect the body. The mayor stared down at the pin for a long time but would not pick it up. Then he stepped away, raising a hand once more to keep off the Ralstons. Before the boy had gone by, the mayor crossed in front of him and put up a hand to the boy’s chest. They stood for a few seconds looking at one another.
I don’t want no apology, the boy said before the mayor could speak. He pushed past the mayor’s raised hand. Whatever you’re offerin, I don’t want it. And if you aim to kill me too, you just go on and do it now.
He held her around the shoulders and under the knees and once he began walking through the crowd he did not look back. When he pulled the truck door open he turned with her body sagging down in his arms. The mayor watched with his eyes slightly upraised from his canted head but he did not move nor did he make any further motion to the Ralstons. When the boy had placed the girl’s body in the passenger seat of the truck he closed the door and walked around and climbed in and was gone.
He held her close as he had waited so long to do, going up the road toward the north. From the fallen strap of her dress the crumpled photograph fell by his feet and he bent and picked it up and pushed it into his shirt pocket. Then he held her against his neck. The road was empty. The sun stayed beneath the clouds, the truck humming through the wind and tearing up the colorless earth beneath them.
* * *
THE OLD MAN was standing at the door when he saw the boy on the far side of the river. Small black-red globes of dirt flung from the shovel the boy had found in his yard. The old man came down from the cabin. He started off toward the river but instead he sat down and watched on. The silver amulet was tight around the boy’s neck and it shimmered in the dying sun. The old man watched him dig long into the evening, the boy’s body grading deeper into the earth until only his head was above the ground and then only the head of the shovel. After some time the boy climbed out of the pit and stood looking into it.
The grave he dug for Delilah was nearly nine feet deep. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow and spat to his side. He had not looked at her body since he carried it out here and he would not look at it again.
He wanted only to bury her now. To bury her deep. Deeper into the world than those places where he walked. Deeper than his mother. Deeper than the place he had buried himself that day.
When the boy was finally finished filling the grave the old man looked across the river at his body silhouetted against the cold sky. The boy leaned and rocked and leaned again, until at last he placed his hat upon his head and began to walk through the quivering trees.
* * *
Charlie Ford was off cutting brush along the pasture fences when the truck formed out of the darkness. He saw the way the boy was holding his head and he set down his ax.
He helped him down from the truck and put his arm over his shoulder and led him toward the house. The boy stopped them there, weakly gripping the rancher’s forearm.
Just take me to my horse, he said.
Charlie Ford stood on the hay floor and watched as the boy set the horse for riding. He placed the pad delicately on the mare’s back and soothed her with his hands across her chest. He set the saddle on and shifted it and centered the pad and took down the cinches with the wind turning through the stable fence and the light of the moon spreading about his feet.
When he was finished he sat by her feet. Charlie Ford came forward to give the horse her hackamore. He looked down at the boy. He was holding his hat in his lap and turning it with a terrible deliberateness.
After a long time the boy raised his head. I shot her before she was dead, he said. Before they killed her. She was dying. She was about to die. He raised his eyebrows at Charlie Ford, then looked down again. I couldn’t bear the notion of her dyin at their hands.
You did the best you could, Charlie Ford said.
But I should have been there sooner. I should have known they might do it early on account of me. I had all the time. I could have. I had all the time.
He fumbled for more explanation, but he could not go on.
No you didn’t, Charlie Ford said. You done all you could. He paused. I want you to stay on here a while.
The boy looked square at him. Charlie Ford nodded at the look in his eyes.
What do you aim to do now, then?
Get clear of this country. That’s one thing for sure.
I’m sorry.
Yeah. I know it. The boy lowered his head again and ground his fist in the dirt. I know you are, he said
.
Where will you go?
I don’t know. To Colorado, I reckon. To the north country. Seems like up there’s the kind of wilderness I belong to. So that’s where I aim to go, but I don’t know. I aimed at it once before and look where I am.
Charlie Ford set down the bridle reins and took the boy by the lapels of his jacket and straightened the collar. Well, he said. You promise me you’ll go easy when you go.
I’d like that, Charlie. I’d like to go easy but I don’t got any promise I could put to it.
Charlie Ford acquiesced with a hand raised to his hat and a tug of the brim. He went up to the boy’s mare and stroked her nose. You take care of Trude now, you hear?
The boy got up on the mare with the rancher holding the reins again. When he was set in the saddle Charlie Ford asked him once more if he’d like to stay but the boy only lowered his head and Charlie Ford handed up the reins and the boy took them and touched the horse with his boot and the mare raised her nose then kicked her feet against the darkened earth.
V
TWENTY-THREE
HE RODE WITH the black twisting trees and nothing besides. He rode all night and all morning, stopping only when Triften needed water. He rode the plateland that was sucked down into the horizon with a dull constancy, and he thought little of where he was going as he went. As he had with his father before he rode swiftly, laying up in hillside groves to watch for a pursuit, but no one came.
In the early evening of the following day he upstepped the horse from an arroyo and came upon a small Indian pueblo in a basin of barbed pine trees. The road he hit at the pueblo edge was hardly a road and more a path worn by feet. The sky was clear and the evening sun struck yellow on both adobe and tree. He came down from the mare and took down his hat and held it against his pale chest. He looked off to where people were gathered in what seemed formal assembly. He led his horse up the road.
They were of the Zuni tribe and all were brightly dressed and standing upon a fine carpet of pine needles and white flowers. On a small wooden step the chief stood before them. The boy stopped along the rim of the gathering and tied his horse to a nearby tree. The chief was making flowing gestures with his arms and he was very old and weather-worn and slow in his movements. Directly in front of him stood a young man and woman and they were the only ones among the gathered who were plainly dressed.
He knew at once it was a wedding ceremony. He turned to go but a hand caught him by the arm and turned him back. It was a woman with a young face and hair that was pure white and long to the back of her knees and unbound by any cord or garment. He saw the scrutiny in her eyes and he stood still, saying nothing. The woman’s face was intense upon him and he shifted under her gaze. Then she looked at his horse and at the boy once more and her face softened. No white men, she said.
He made to take hold of the mare’s reins but she only squeezed his arm tighter.
No white men except for today. Today you stay, she said. For a ceremony of love everyone who come here they stay.
He looked off behind her hair at the gathering. The sun lay copper on the slim face of the bride. He shook his head but the woman would not let go of his arm. She guided him firmly toward the assembly as the witnesses all bent to sit at the chief’s command. They stepped among the crossings of legs where some eyes turned curiously at him, and at last she pulled him seated by his jacket sleeve.
The language of the chief was unknown to the boy but there was a gentleness to it that held his attention. He presided over the congregation with his dark pitted eyes and all watched his face keenly save the lovers whose gaze stayed fixed on each other.
When the ceremony was over all stood and began to walk toward the makeshift gazebo that had been erected in a small circle of pines. The woman with the long hair led the boy along by the arm. No one looked his way nor would the boy have noticed if they did.
There was a tarpaulin of cloth thin as silk strung up over four old cattle posts that had been squared and pounded into the ground. Under it was a long table of dark wood. Around the table in the open air stood several small tables and smaller chairs where the others sat with their knees high to eat. The woman with the white hair pointed the boy to set himself at one of the tables on the periphery. He leaned down and took hold of one of the chair backs and lowered himself into it.
Within a few moments young girls arrived from across the road bearing great platters of posole and red corn tamales and loaves of skinned corn paste and wooden bowls of hominy and blue corn dumpling soup. One girl carried a large box filled with cut leaves of tobacco and corn husks to roll them in. Another balanced three jugs of water in her arms.
When the boy and the woman were served the woman leaned toward him and told him to eat for it was a feast and that it was a holy one that not even he, a white man, could deny.
They ate. It grew dark quickly. The same girls who had served the food crossed the road again and came back carrying long poles with rags soaked in kerosene at the tips. They planted them around the gazebo, the tallest among them igniting the rags with an old silver lighter. The space around them incandesced in a remarkable green among the trees, and after the woman had seen the boy eat a sufficient amount of food she rose and told him she would return shortly.
He turned in the chair to watch her. People drifted in and out of the canopy presenting gifts to the father of the groom, who would study them and bow his head gratefully, then pass them to the father of the bride, who would then hand them to his daughter. The woman with the white hair offered up a large turquoise stone that did not seem to have been fashioned for ornament, but for what purpose the boy did not know.
When the woman returned and sat again the boy spoke for the first time, asking her what her gift was and what it could be used for. The woman swept her white hair back from her shoulder and shook her head and said that it was not these things that mattered, but only how much the gift meant to the giver. How cherished was the thing being given away.
She watched the boy smoke in the flutter of light. Each time she caught his eye he looked down. The early noises of celebration one by one subsided with the approach of nightfall. Those who still remained at their tables leaned against the low backs of their chairs and passed the box of tobacco and watched the night unfold. After a while the woman asked the boy for a name.
Trude, he said. Trude Mason.
The woman pushed her hair aside again and smiled mournfully. I did not mean yours, she said.
Whose then?
The girl’s. Tell me the girl’s name.
He looked away at the trees. She moved her chair closer to him. When she touched his hair with her fingers he flinched and recoiled from her hand. He kept his eyes on the trees and the woman watched his face and shook her head. So young, she said.
That was all she said for a while. She watched the moon slide in and out of the trees and her face against it lit up blue. When she turned to him again he looked away and she spoke to him slowly and with a great quietness.
She told the boy that love appears to people as the sky. That there is a landscape in the world of love that one may travel through. Free to pick and choose, she said. To discover hidden places. She said that with grief this was not so. She said that grief was like a tree. Like the trees he now looked upon. It could not be moved or shaken loose. Nor could it be uprooted and carried away. It planted itself in the heart like a dagger clot in stone.
She paused only briefly and then said with some sadness that love and grief indeed took a very long time to join together rightly in one’s heart. That they were complicated forces, the sky and the tree. But she said that no matter how complicated they became, that when the heart found a place to hold them together as one, they could be lived with.
When he rose from his chair the woman did not try to stop him. He walked to the marriage table under the canopy. All that remained at the table were the gifts that had been given to the new couple and a drape of muslin covering them. He stared down at the t
able. The last green slivers of light bent and faltered on the dying kerosene rags. He unbuttoned his shirt slowly and slowly drew the silver amulet from his throat, lifting it over his head and placing it upon the cloth. He touched it once more, turning its small brightness in his fingers, then withdrew his hand. When he turned the woman was standing before him.
What is that? she asked him.
The boy glanced down at his hands which he held open on his stomach. It was Delilah’s, he said. It was my wife’s.
He turned to go. She walked with him to his horse. When he was up in his mount he bent down and took his hat down and thanked the woman for her kindness.
Before he kicked the horse on and disappeared down the road the woman put a hand on the mare and with the other she grasped the boy’s stirruped boot, telling him that no matter how sorrowful a love was, what was important was that love still remained in his heart. We are not long for this world, she said. And that however fine and true any story of love may be, what was more important was that love remained in his heart, for in the heart is where it would always continue to begin.
* * *
TWO WEEKS LATER the boy was riding the mountains again. He had loosed the shoes from Triften’s feet and bought a new saddlebag and filled it with tins of beans and hard bread and a gallon jug of water.
He passed through Cibola County where he talked to many men about the country to the north and about ranchers they knew who might be looking to take him on. He studied maps laid out crudely by traders and foragers and he carved himself a path up through McKinley County riding by the edge of the Tularosas and toward Apache Mountain in San Juan County which would lead him across the border and into towns named Durango and Silverton and Ouray in the state of Colorado.
He stopped for a few hours on certain days, taking odd jobs that required bodies who could move things around. In some towns he slept in hotels and listened for the sounds of the wild beneath the telephone exchanges from other rooms and the thrumming of trucks on the faraway roads. Far from sight and sound were the highways of distant cities he never knew or believed he would, but at times lying on cot or grass he envisioned them and what they might mean in the long space of things.
The Sound of the Trees Page 30