The Sound of the Trees (24 page)

Look, Trewitt wheezed. I know about the girl and I know about you. I could tell by what you said to me that night at the bar. The look on your face.

The boy tightened his grip on Trewitt but did not speak.

I won't say anything, the newsman throated. I swear it. I'm on your side. Now please. Let go of me a minute, will you?

The boy stared Trewitt in the eye, then let his hand down. Trewitt felt around his neck and took a step backward.

Why then? the boy said.

I don't know, Trewitt said, still fumbling with the shirt at his neck. There are many possibilities. I'm trying to find out but I cannot press him too hard or else I risk losing his faith in me. I have to be careful with him, you understand. The mayor is very good at guarding the happenings of this town.

The boy looked down the road again. I know it, he said.

Trewitt fanned out his shirt. Look, he said. I will say nothing about this to him. I will try and you will try. That's the best I can do.

The boy studied him a moment longer. Try, he said. Then he righted Trewitt's twisted collar and stepped away. Try.

He went up the road and into the town hall where he took up the papers from Molly who stared sullenly at him, then went down the hall to John Frank's office. Frank was standing by the window and frowning down at the road when the boy came in. He turned from the window and looked at the boy. The boy stood in the doorway, breathing heavily. John Frank went around and sat and kicked his feet up on the desk. He inspected the boy's shabby dress and his untamed hair and his hands which were clenched around the loops of his belt. He made his frown tighter. Why are you sweatin? he said. It's cold out there.

The boy only looked steadily at him and nodded.

You ain't done it, have you? John Frank swung his feet off the desk and sat upright. Jesus, he said.

Then I reckon nobody knows yet.

John Frank shook his head absently and with some bewilderment. No, no. I don't think, he said. It's not too often anyone goes in there. Maybe a few days. He folded his hands before him and leaned over them. So you got inside?

Yeah.

Did you

The boy nodded his head meaningfully before John Frank finished getting the words out.

Good lord.

The boy took his hands out of the belt loops and went and leaned down over the desk. She's in number twelve, he said.

Number twelve?

In the jailhouse. Number twelve. You know where it is from outside?

Christ on the cross. Let's see. Cell twelve. Well. I know that's the last one.

Frank rifled through his desk, still looking up at the boy from time to time and saying, If the mayor knew about this, and shaking his head. At last he brought forth a folded sheet of paper gone yellow around the edges. I don't know why I got this but I do.

He handed the paper across the desk to the boy. It was a layout of the prison.

Here it is, the boy said. He pushed the paper back at John Frank with his finger pressed down on it.

Yeah, Frank said. You got it. That's it, alright.

Does it have a window? That's a window right there ain't it?

John Frank looked at the paper, then up at the boy. He nodded his head very slightly. It is, he said.

On the north side.

Yes.

What's the guarding like?

Outside? Nothin, I don't think. Inside, of course. Ain't no way but that window if you was wantin to see her, which I reckon you'd already figured. You go around quiet enough, you just might make it. Frank shook his head at the window. Jesus, he said. But it'll be up high. Whole thing is built on a slope.

The boy studied the paper a moment longer and then folded it and pushed it into his back pocket. He held out his hand. John Frank took it circumspectly and frowned at the boy again. What are we shakin for, he said.

I got to go.

Stay on awhile, why don't you? I could tell you about Salva some more.

I got work to do.

Work can wait.

The boy smiled strangely at him, then walked to the window and leaned against the frame and looked out at the willow tree. Well, he said. I don't reckon she can. He paused and held his hands to the window glass and then he said, I'll go tonight.

Tonight? John Frank put both hands up. Bud, that ain't a good idea.

Why not?

Cause maybe they find out about it and be on the lookout. You ought to wait a while. A week or two at least.

I ain't waitin any longer, the boy said. Seems that's all I've ever been doin.

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.