The Trees (2 page)

Their mother went on grimly.

“I told you I’d never go way back there.” Hope died in the young faces. She dropped her eyes and stared a long time across the doorsill, then around the cabin room at the familiar slab stools and puncheon table, the hand-whittled loom and wheel, and across the doorsill again to the mite of a grave in the clearing. None of these things could they take along. After while she stared up halfways at them. “And yit,” back in her mouth she complained, “what’s a body to do if the game’s left the country?”

The four younger ones turned and made stiff and pious passage from the cabin. Once out in the twilight, they threw themselves on the ground, rolling and summersetting, leaping and kicking their bare feet, whooping and giving vent to their feelings like a pack of young coon dogs let out of the pen for a night’s hunt.

Sayward, the oldest, went back to the haunch over the fire, turning it on the hook, catching some of the drippings in a long whittled spoon and basting it with its own juices. She hadn’t given away to her feelings since her small hands had guided her youngest brother into the world. He was the fairest babe any of them had ever laid eyes on and she
had slapped his little body, naked as a wild squab, till her hand was lame, but never would he open his mouth to cry or his lids to clap sight on his brother and sisters waiting to lug him around.

She had been just a little tyke then. Now she was fifteen and most a grown woman with the fire playing on her bare legs and shortgown. It took no trying to carry her breasts and head up. Life flowed through her calm and strong as current down the river. She could throw the other young ones, four at a time, and hold them squirming to the ground. “Not so all-fired hard!” they would yell at her when she’d comb or scrub them. Once when Worth was off to the black forest for pine martens and they hadn’t a sliver of meat or dust of meal in the cabin, she had seen a young white faced buck swimming the river and had run barehanded into the deep water, grabbed hold of his spikes and tried to drown him like the Black Hunter of the Juniata. For a while there they had splashing aplenty while the other young ones and Jary ran helpless up and down the bank. But when Worth came home with a few skins and nothing more than a skinny possum for meat, he found three quarters of venison hanging up and a small fresh deerhide pegged to one of the trees.

Now they had crossed the Ohio on a pole ferry and the mud on their feet was no longer the familiar red and brown earth of Pennsylvania. It was black
like dung. The young ones were wild over tramping the same trace their father had tramped as a boy with Colonel Boquet. Here was where the army sheep had to be shut in for the night and here where the soldiers had axed the trace wider to let the army train through. It was a country of hills and Jary had said she could breathe again like on those mortal sweet hills of Pennsylvania. Now that those hills were so far behind her, it was easier to give them up. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad out here like she thought. What was the use of living in the same state as your folks if you never saw them anyhow?

They rounded a high ridge. A devil’s racecourse cleared the air of limbs below. Here was something Worth had not told them about.

For a moment Sayward reckoned that her father had fetched them unbeknownst to the Western ocean and what lay beneath was the late sun glittering on green-black water. Then she saw that what they looked down on was a dark, illimitable expanse of wilderness. It was a sea of solid treetops broken only by some gash where deep beneath the foliage an unknown stream made its way. As far as the eye could reach, this lonely forest sea rolled on and on till its faint blue billows broke against an incredibly distant horizon.

They had all stopped with a common notion and stood looking out. Sayward saw her mother’s eyes search with the hope of finding some settlement or
leastwise a settler’s clearing. But over that vasty solitude no wisp of smoke arose. Though they waited here till night, the girl knew that no light of human habitation would appear except the solitary red spark of some Delaware or Shawanee campfire. Already the lowering sun slanted melancholy rays over the scene, and as it sank, the shadows of those far hills reached out with long fingers.

It was a picture Sayward was to carry to her grave, although she didn’t know it then. In later years when it was all to go so that her own father wouldn’t know the place if he rose from his bury hole, she was to call the scene to mind. This is the way it was, she would say to herself. Nowhere else but in the American wilderness could it have been.

The sun was gone now. Far out they heard the yelping of a wolf and nearer the caterwauling of a panther. Worth stood leaning on his long Lancaster rifle, his nose wrinkling like a hound’s.

“You kin smell the game!” he said hungrily.

Sayward sniffed. All she could wind was the scent of wild herbs and leaves mingled with the faint strange fetor of ranker, blacker earth than she knew in Pennsylvania. She looked at her brother and sisters. They stood with young eyes drinking in this place and it was plain as if drawn on shellbark that what they saw were otters coasting down muddy slides and gray moose crashing through the woods and fat beaver cracking down their broad
tails on gat water like pistol shots. They could see skins drying on the log walls of a cabin yet unbuilt and skins in a heavy pack on their father’s shoulders and skins handed over the counter of a trader’s post along the Scioto or Ohio where the shelves hung heavy with black and white English blankets, Turkey red calico, bolts of Merrimac blue, shawls with fringes, brass bound muskets and buckets of white beads.

“We mought even git rich and have shoes!” Sulie spoke out.

That broke the tension. They all looked down on her and smiled. Little Ursula, the baby of the family, the one they gave in to the most. One time she could look at you with such a helpless mouth, and then when you least expected it, she was spunky as a young coon and said grand things that no one dared think of but she and her Granmam Powelly who had a story and a half chip log house across the road from Granpap’s gunsmith shop along the Conestoga.

CHAPTER TWO
THE DARK COUNTRY

I
T
seemed strange the next few days when Sayward recollected the vision and realized that now they were down under that ocean of leaves. A red-tailed hawk screeching high over the tree-tops would hardly reckon there was a road down here. You had to be a porcupine rooting under the branches to find it or the black cat of the forest that could see in the dark and that some called the fisher fox.

This place, Jary quavered to Sayward, must be the grandaddy of all the forests. Here the trees had been old men with beards when the woods in Pennsylvania were still whips. Sayward watched her mother puttering along between the great shaggy butts that dripped with moss and moisture.
All day she could see Jary’s sunken eyes keep watching dully ahead for some sign that they might be coming out under a bit of sky.

Down in Pennsylvania you could tell by the light. When a faint white drifted through the dark forest wall ahead, you knew you were getting to the top of a hill or an open place. You might come out in a meadow or clearing, perhaps even in an open field with the corn making tassels and smelling sweet in the sun. But away back here across the Ohio, it had no fields. You tramped day long and when you looked ahead, the woods were dark as an hour or a day ago.

Sayward could feel the woods most when the time came to step a few feet into the brush. Sometimes Sulie or Genny ran in after her. Sometimes she went alone. The family bobbed on in single file and in a lick or two the forest had swallowed them up. While she waited here with the green leaves brushing her skin, with the monster brown trunks close enough to touch and all around her those wild unkempt graves of ancient windfalls, she minded what her father had once told her.

He had been tramping with his gun in the black forest when he felt it. He was a grown man and had followed the woods since he was a boy, and yet something came over him in those dark pines and hemlocks where the sun never came so that he wanted to run. He had hardly seen even a piney
squirrel all day, and he saw nothing afterwards.

“I was so afeard I broke out in a sweat,” he said.

Two hunters from the West Branch told him they knew what he meant. What made it they didn’t know. It came over them no place but the deep woods. When pressed, Worth reckoned it might be a panther following his scent, for panthers were curious about humans. A while back he had circled in a tracking snow and found where one of the long yellow beasts had been snuffing behind him on his trail.

But Sayward had the feeling her father hadn’t said what lay deepest in his mind. Alone here in these woods sometimes she could feel it. The trace was gone as if it had never been. The only roads were the deer paths. They looked like humans had made them. They coaxed you to come on. They’d lead you to a clearing, they said. They’d take you clear out of the woods. But well she knew that once she followed, they would twist and turn and circle on themselves and peter out in the middle of some swamp. Nothing moved in here. Even the green daylight stood still. The moss was thick and soft as a pallet. It invited you to lay down, and yet Sayward’s feet wanted to run.

“It’s nothin’ but the woods fever,” she would tell herself and make that self stand there and count clock time before she let her legs go. She stood up so stout, the skirt of her shortgown flared out a
little in front. Between strong cheek bones her eyes looked at you blue and straight as whortleberries, and her hair hung in yellow braids heavy as hawsers on a Monongahela keel boat.

It was good to get back to the Indian trace after that. Human feet had packed it and like human feet it was never still, turning and dodging to miss the butts of the big trees. It pleased her to catch up to the family and hear the young ones crowing and quarreling over the droppings of some fox, wolf, coon or fisher fox in the trace, or to see her father point where a beast had stood on its hind legs and sharpened its claws in long scratches on the bark of a tree.

Some of the young ones would guess “painter” and some “link,” meaning the black-browed catamount with hair on the balls of its feet.

“I reckon it was no more’n a bobcat,” Jary would say soothingly, for she liked to think there was no savage beast in these woods as big as Sulie.

“It was a big black bear!” little Sulie herself would call out and look quickly behind her. Nothing could ever come big enough for Sulie, though it might come too close.

Generally Worth would wait to tell them what it was until the pack had come down off his shoulders. Camp and household chores blew out of his mind like down out of a thistle, but he never forgot a lick that had to do with the woods. When his
tongue was supple, he could sit on a log by the campfire and go back over the day’s tramp, naming every sign and the beast that had made it together with the trees that stood by. Most times he even said whether it was made by a he or she one.

Once they came to a fork in the trace where a child’s skull hung on a pole and the beech trees were carved with sign.

“Kin you read it?” little Wyitt asked, standing there with his fur cap askew high on the shock of his sandy hair.

“Oh, I kin read it all right,” his father said evasively. He went from tree to tree, standing in front of each and rubbing his beard. He told them the lefthand fork kept to the woods and the righthand one, if he minded right, led to Sandusky and the English seas.

Sayward saw a faint light break on her mother’s face here in this shadowy, shut-in place.

“I heerd,” she said, “it’s fine livin’ in the open prairie by the English seas.”

“It’s too fur for you, Jary,” Worth told her.

“I’m stout,” she said, straightening. “I kin walk a long ways.”

“The game’s cleaned out up there.”

“You mought git wild bulls in the open prairies,” she told him.

But Worth didn’t hold much to that. How could he swap talk with any of the foreign Indians up
there? Now Delaware was second nature to him for wasn’t he part Delaware himself? And Shawanee he could get along with.

In the end they took the lefthand fork, and the light faded from Jary’s face. All that day and the next the forest continued to thicken. None but Worth had ever laid eyes on such trees. A black walnut stood along the trace and three of them couldn’t reach around it. No, they had to get a fourth to span it. Still bigger buttonwoods stood rooted on a creek’s bank. Worth reckoned the heaviest close to fifteen feet through. He bragged he could drive two yoke of oxen past each other and never get off that stump.

Jary’s face had gone cruelly bleak at the talk of oxen in this wild place. She peered dully at the nameless stream. The giant trees reached over and covered it from either side. Even in the middle the water looked dark as old Virginia tobacco.

“Ain’t it got sun in these woods, Worth?” she complained, her eyes hard on him like her enemy. And when he had shed his pack and gone nosing downstream with his gun and Sarge, “If anything happens me, Saird, don’t let him always have his way. You’ll never git the chance to see Pennsylvany again.”