The Sound of the Trees (39 page)

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

T
WENTY-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 table. 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.

In the days since he had left the town he had scarcely slept, but his exhaustion went past his body. In his eyes was some past so darkly original, built by a world extinguishing and in some places already extinguished and from which even its own witnesses, of which he was one, could no longer be called forth for study.

Yet when he rode during the day his thoughts sometimes cleared and he rode with her and her riding was all the beauty and light and wind that lay trapped in tree and field and the water that went running south, always running south, down the mountains and into the nameless crystal ocean that he kept in his pocket, where she would soak her hair and swim and emerge from the water and walk to where he stood on the bank waiting for her.

*   *   *

At the end of the first month of winter he rode into a valley where he came upon a wooden signpost stuck crookedly in the earth. Scrawled upon it with indigo an arrow pointed northwest toward a frozen creekbed. It read, Juanita's Herbal Remedies. For Sale. Thank You.

It was growing late and cold. His chest and forearms had grown thick again with the heavy labors he took on, and he passed one broad hand across the rubble of his face. The terrain on which he rode was now replete with thornbrush and gravel washes and the moon was dimming under the clouds.

In a strangely geometric half circle of ponderosa pines the boy came upon a tremendous campfire around which several bodies reclined. Behind them were raised broad tents with fur pelts and beads hanging over the stake posts like the trappers of old. They were lanternlit from the inside and the boy could see hands moving within them.