The Sound of the Trees Read online

  When the boy flung his arms in front of his face he awoke to the sound of his mare whinnying and the mule lowing like a cow. He was up on his knees as he had been in the dream, and in the fragmented moon glow he saw the bear lope off into the trees, the heat from its body rising like smoke, its breath thick in the cool night air.

  He staggered up and stumbled across the field, then fell to his knees again. For a long time after he sat staring into the unlit trees.

  Days passed and though he did not cross the bear again, he saw it everywhere. He saw it in tree shadow and he saw it in water. He saw it standing poised with all its nameless brothers when he woke among the salt cedars that surrounded the permanent camp he had made by the clearing where the bear first appeared to him. He saw it in the wind and he heard it in the night fires by which he slept.

  His life had taken a shape, and it was the hunt. He slipped onward without thoughts beyond the bear, going days without food or water and forgetting to feed his horse and mule. His figure grew hard. In the night he could stand still among the pines and listen for hours. Through the diffused lens of moonlight his eyes moved pale to pale across the frozen fields. They seemed eyes that no longer resided in the world but rather in some alternate and forsaken place that the world had gone from. He was no longer the man he saw himself as on the first night of their leaving, nor was he the boy he had been.

  From time to time he came upon land that was rich with thaw and these times were the only ones that gave him pause, if only for a moment, his knees straightening from their hunting crouch and his hand slackening on the knife. Here he remembered his mother as if she were a brief flash that once appeared before him. And though he did not think of their journey nor her death nor the ranch they once called home, he thought about how in such fertile land, where the earth was sodden and pliable and lush with grass, what a good gravesite she could have had.

  * * *

  DARK WERE THE trees and darker the night. In the makeshift border of rock with which he had encircled the camp, the boy stood over a fire of mesquite and cedarwood and worked the blade of his knife with a stone. He no longer belted his guns but only that knife which he whittled to an even point every night, and he no longer sought any future past the moment when he would at last sink the knife into the bear’s silent and ponderous heart.

  The weather had begun to turn and the columbines opened their silken arms but the boy did not take notice. And though he and his horse and mule had all three grown thin from neglect, he would not yield.

  When the moon rose high enough to see by, he flung the stone into the fire and set out in the last direction he had not yet gone. He went out on foot, hunched at the back like a harridan, the eyes peering out above the collar flaps of his vest stark and caved in the flaxen light. He moved swiftly through the swales of spring grass, jumping soundlessly from rock to rock. The hand in which he held the knife poised by his waist was raw and flaking from gripping Triften’s reins. His hair floated up as one yellowed wave and of the rest of his body only his jaw remained substantial.

  He wore a skullcap of gray squirrel skin under his hat. On his hands he wore nothing at all. One toe stuck out of his boot where the leather carriage had become unstitched. His overalls, pressed against the bones of his chest, were brown with mud, wet and dried so many times on his body they were almost like another husk of skin.

  He pulled up at the downslope of a creekbed that trickled along the mountainside, walking gingerly to where the creek disappeared down the rocks. At the bottom of a bare slide beneath the creek a valley appeared and in that valley a lake, clear and blue and without ripple. At its edge the snow blossomed like wildflower. Ice hung from limp ragbush and nested in the craws of a stand of spruce trees. The trees loomed like silver beasts unto themselves but it was the red glaze from a distant fire that caused him to descend.

  As he neared the flatland of the valley he could make out the fire two hundred yards off, where a canvas tent stood warping inside the rope-and-stake structure. Its aperture wings blustered up and whistled in the licks of wind. He went hedging down the last slope closer to the warmth of the fire, the lighting of his great heaping shadow making him appear to be the bearer of some terrible woodland secret.

  In the valley everything was white snow and blue moon glow and like many places in those mountains it was ruled by silence. He stopped a hundred yards away and crouched on his haunches. The spruce branches sagged toward the fire. Around the camp and upon the tent slush fell from the trees. Stepping closer the boy could see horses of great coloring and beauty, and beside the tent he saw the shape of a man.

  It was the first man he had seen since he and his mother left Silver City two months earlier. He could hear him talking. His voice came loud across the field, like a snap of twigs in the quiet, yet he could see no one else at the fire. When he was ten yards away he saw the man in full, though the man himself still did not seem to notice the boy who was out in the open now, standing erect with his arms folded across his vest.

  The man was dressed in a long jacket of a fine and silky fur and his hands in front of the fire were soft and unblemished. For a moment his words sharpened and his chin bobbed up and down harshly in the direction of the tent but the words were lost to the boy in the fire’s noise. Then the words ceased and the man turned back sullenly with his hands clasped together. The boy called out as he stepped into the fire’s light.

  Evenin.

  The man who until that moment seemed insubstantial now spun and fell flat in the clearing around the fire and rolled to his stomach. In his hands he held a rifle dead set on the boy’s chest. The boy did not jump or turn away but simply gazed into the fire, unfolding his arms and letting them down by his sides. I ain’t huntin you, he said.

  It was strange to hear his own voice after so long, yet the words came, calm and slow and without inflection.

  Who are you? the man called out.

  Just a hunter.

  The brass hammer flickered in the firelight.

  Just a hunter?

  Yeah.

  They were both silent. The man studied the boy, his eyes slit and his head upraised from the sighting. Then he rose to his knees. He put one hand on the ground and hefted himself to his feet. The gun stayed hoisted across his forearm with his finger curled around the trigger.

  I saw your fire. The boy did not take his gaze from the flames. He made a gesture with his head toward the bluff he had descended from. I was up yonder, he said.

  What was it you were doing up yonder?

  The last two words he spoke more deliberately, and the manner in which he spoke seemed stately and precise.

  I wasn’t doin nothin. Can I sit?

  Look at my jacket, the man said. He snapped the back of his hand across the muddy sleeve. Ruined.

  He inspected the boy a moment longer, on his face a look perhaps reserved for things he could not name. He puckered his small mouth and raised his eyebrows, but for fear or amusement it was unclear.

  Sit, he said. Please.

  The boy slid his knife into his vest pocket and lowered himself onto the mud, sitting crosswise from the man, who himself leaned down again to sit high upon folded Mexican blanket. He set the gun by his side and crossed his black leather boots at his ankles. Off behind them the horses mulled about, huffing and sniffing beneath the trees. The boy peered over the man’s shoulder to the tent where he could see no shadow nor hear any sound. The man pressed him with a stare and asked him if he liked the horses.

  Yes sir. They’re some beauties.

  Is that why you came down here, to see my horses? To steal my horses from me?

  No.

  No to see the horses, or No to steal them?

  No to both. I just came down is all.

  Yes, the man said. Yes, he repeated, with the same deliberateness he had used before. Do you know these horses, then?

  Not by personal name, but they’re all Tennessee walkers, I can tell you that.

  Yes, they are ind
eed.

  I never seen stallions run like that in the mountains.

  They weren’t supposed to be.

  Why are they up here then?

  The man breathed deeply. He adjusted his jacket and folded his arms.

  You want to know why I am here? Is that it? He looked at his mud-caked sleeve again and shook his head. Very well, he said, looking up at the boy. I will tell you. Our train derailed and slid into a ravine on one of the new mountain passes. At least that’s what they call it. New. The locomotive driver said it would take a few days for the trucks to get up the mountains to bring us down, so I bought these from a man on the train who was moving them for sale to Texas.

  The man lit a pipe with his delicate hands, his pinky finger extended as though he was holding a cup of tea.

  Must have taken some amount of money to buy them.

  It did, the man said between draws on the pipe, but his voice allowed no emotion, neither pride nor arrogance nor sorrow.

  You alone?

  The man looked up from behind the smoke of his pipe. He nodded his head very slowly.

  Yes, he said. I am alone.

  His hand went down to his side and rested itself upon the rifle again. The boy’s eyes went away from the fire and back to the man.

  His coat had buttons of ivory the size of half dollars and he wore gold chains at the collar of his shirt. His hat was of some strange rounded felt the boy did not recognize and his pants were wide and straight without a flare at the bottom. To the boy he looked more alien than any beast he had seen in all his days in that land, and he knew no such man would travel alone.

  I ain’t never seen an English saddle like that around here, he said.

  The man did not reply. His face darkened and he puffed on the pipe with his thin blue lips.

  You from England?

  Again the man made no response nor did he look at the boy. He pressed back his short oiled hair above his ears with his fingertips and leaned back and pitched his head back as if to listen behind him, at the tent.

  Where you headed? the boy said at length.

  There was now suspicion in the boy’s voice, though he could not have said exactly why. The Englishman stared at him a moment longer, then outstretched one of his fleshy fingers and waved it about the general north. Over there, he said.

  Over that mountain peak?

  Yes. Over that mountain peak.

  There a town over there?

  But of course. What else? More mountains? I don’t think so. The Englishman leaned over the fire, puffing steadily on the pipe and lifting the rifle into his lap. And you? he said.

  The boy looked in the direction the man had pointed, forking his hat between his fingers and lifting it slightly off his head. He gazed out at the moon, the wide north starless sky appearing to him as if for the first time.

  Same, he said.

  The constant hum of the valley crosswinds was uprooted by a voice that came low and mournful from the tent. It was the voice of a girl. Her words were distorted by the ripple and snap of the tent flaps. The Englishman, whose face had fallen blank on the fire, jerked upright and uncrossed his legs. He set the pipe on the ground and squared the rifle on his shoulder again and aimed it at the boy. His eyes across the fire and on the boy were like dull green pebbles even the leaping flames could not give sparkle to.

  The sound came louder now. Then the voice seemed to give up altogether on words and became a deep and breathy sob. The Englishman tilted the rifle up in the air to signal the boy to rise. I’m alone, he repeated. He let up the hammer. He looked above the sighting in question of what the boy was waiting for.

  Yeah, the boy said, rising stiffly and walking backward from the fire with his eyes on the ground. You’re alone.

  The girl cried out again, a resounding guttural moan, and the Englishman wheeled around to the tent then turned back as quickly, clicking the hammer down again and setting his finger to the trigger, but all that remained of the boy were a few muddy boot prints and the low pound of his breath which drifted off and faded into the blue valley winds.

  * * *

  The tune he hummed to himself between bouts of coughing had played on the dusty old Victrola that had once occupied the parlor where his mother entertained the wives of the neighboring ranchers. It was a steady ascension of notes not unlike the grandstand music that rumbled from the aluminum horns at the rodeo grounds, and it reminded the boy not of any particular day or place but rather it gave him some distant sense of continuity in which all seemed good and warm and unbidden by time.

  The illness had come with swift resolve after sleeping restlessly the night he met with the Englishman. He had kicked off his bedroll in the early morning hours, wet and sweating before the fire. He woke with a clot of blood in his throat and could only rise to kindle the fire before he was overcome by weakness.

  Two days passed and all he could do was watch the fire and the trees that leaned in the soft earth around the stone border of his camp, and he watched them constantly, separate and in tandem, as if they shared some news of his demise.

  The clots of blood became bigger and ran down from his lips with each cough, and lying as he was now on the cold mud floor of his roofless home, he recalled snaking beneath the blue flannel covers of his bed and reading tales of the Indian wars. He recalled the stack of them he kept beneath his bed to hide from his mother, all written on slick yellow paper bound by raw leather spines and illustrated with explosions of gunpowder and thick-necked men whose faces were drawn with heroic intensity, always crouched behind stone walls and always lighted by a dusky red serenity as if each battle were the last. He remembered pulling the quilt up under his arms and piling the pillows behind his head, placing the book on his stomach and tilting it up with his fingers and half listening to the rusty sound of the needle pulling along the record. He remembered the murmurs of the women downstairs and his mother’s light laughter coming now and again, up the stairs and muted through the walls like a balm swept across his forehead to assure him that the world as it was now was as it would be forever.

  In the evening of the third day he rekindled the fire and climbed into his bedroll and shimmied closer to the flames until the heat of them wore on his face. Still and quiet as he was, the sounds that came to him from the woodland were haunting and unfamiliar. Even his horse and mule would not shift or stammer to relieve him of the night’s anonymity. He rolled again with his arms still pinned inside the bedroll and let his nose turn under the slop of mud he lay upon.

  For a while he thought about the girl’s voice that had come from the tent. It was a voice he would not have recognized if he had not remembered the cry from his mother when the snake found the artery that lay beside her ankle. It was as if they shared a common voice, as if their bodies had resigned themselves to another time and place where their calls were calls come forth from the throat of their spirits.

  Later in the night the sound of the Victrola came back to him from beyond the fire and the voice of the girl beyond that. He wrestled from the blanket and placed his hands on his head. The music and cries commingled until they were together and steady, a melody so unlikely as not to have been music at all but instead some old telling wrought from the bones of his painted heroes whose bodies lay scattered on the empty hillsides, their tongues black and the cores of their eyes spilled out of their heads.

  At last it was his mother’s voice that rose above all, without music or cries but simply calling his name as she had that dawn when they left their ranch behind. It was a sound so pure and lost, like the warble of a bird from a far-off tree, and even when he pushed down the bedroll and sat upright with his elbows on his knees it remained with him. It came and went, pausing in attendance for another wind to carry its sound, then came again. The fire was spent to embers and only a low shadow of his own body wavered beside him in the mud.

  Dawn began red from the bosom of the mountains and his tears were the first since his mother’s passing, and once they began they w
ould not cease. He gripped his face full in his hands and rocked up and over his ribcage to lay his head between his knees. The voice of his mother went away and the woods were quiet but for a brisk morning wind that moaned in the treetops. Yet he went on that way, and before him passed the vision of his mother not yet of her thirty-sixth year, driven away by the violence of her man and the brazenness of her son and now calling out to the dim and vacant woodlands which were no more to the boy than his own dark image.

  He woke again to a heavy sun. He sat up slowly and wiped away the salt and dried blood from his face with the back of his hand. He looked up at his horse. She had moved closer to him during the night and now stood stamping her foot in the ash at the edge of the fire’s waste. He studied her chest, rippled lean with muscle and covered with a hard shell of mud. He leaned over himself and put a hand on her leg and coughed violently but the blood did not come.

  Later in the morning he got up and kicked out the surviving embers of the fire. He sharpened his knife with the tune of the Victrola still upon his lips, humming to himself like he imagined the warriors of the old Americas had done when their tribe had been slaughtered and they prepared for the last battle they would ever fight beneath the wide spirit of the sky.

  * * *

  His knife glowed pale among the white trees. In a patch of weed and scrub he bent with his hands on his knees to study some fresh markings on a fir tree.

  He had stripped down to his boots and overalls, the bib folded at his waist and cinched by a belt he had fashioned out of one of his mother’s old lead ropes. About his neck was the silver chain, the lusterless silver amulet that kept his mother’s name. He was thinner now than he had ever been and his whitened chest looked nothing more than a sheet of paper bound around a pole.