Tree By Leaf (18 page)

Her own heart was like a monster, horrible to look at, selfish and greedy, grabbing onto what she wanted. If her own heart had ever looked in a mirror—Clothilde hadn’t even known what a bad heart she had.

She turned around, looking back to the distant farmhouse. As she did that, she saw a sail at the mouth of the cove. A small sailboat was approaching, with a skiff in tow. The sailboat had a bright white mainsail hoisted, and a little white jib. It moved quickly, running on a broad reach. Its hull was painted bright green. The skiff bounced away behind it. The skiff had once been painted white but the paint hadn’t been kept up, so it was a dull faded color. They were returning Nate’s boat.

Clothilde climbed up behind the rocks to watch. She didn’t know if she was hiding or spying. She only knew that looking out from behind the rocks, where she wouldn’t be seen, was what she wanted to do.

The two figures on the sailboat must be Bobby
and Alex. Both of them wore white again, and she wondered if they ever wore any other color, and how many times a day they changed into clean clothing, and how many servants they kept busy doing their washing, so that they could always appear in fresh white shirts and trousers. One figure was at the tiller, one handled the main sheet. They sailed into the cove and then dropped sail, with the sailboat’s nose pointed up into the wind. They hauled the skiff up and then tied it to the mooring.

With the skiff moored, they didn’t sail out again. Instead, they kept the sailboat tied to the skiff, so it wouldn’t drift, and sat down low in the cockpit, as if they were hiding. The sails ruffled with the wind. Clothilde saw one of the boys take a thin tube, and put it to his eyes—a spyglass. Half-hidden in the boat, the boys took turns lifting their heads to inspect the farmhouse. Once, one of them jumped up and waved his arms wildly, as if he were daring somebody on shore to notice him. He fell abruptly back down.

Clothilde looked at the farmhouse, but she couldn’t see anything moving. With a spyglass, though, you could see greater distances, maybe even peep into an open door.

If she had a gun, Clothilde thought, she would shoot it at the boat, if she knew how to shoot it. What kind of friends did Nate have anyway. Suspicious friends, who didn’t entirely believe what he told them. They were right, too, because what he’d told them wasn’t the truth.

The world was filled with bad-hearted people, Clothilde thought. No wonder Mother felt lost.

After a while, the boys grew tired of their game, untied the sailboat, hoisted up the sails, and went out of the cove. Clothilde, standing up from her crouching position, hoped they would capsize on their way back, or run onto one of the rocks that rose up from the floor of the bay. That rock would rip into the bright green hull, and bite through the wood. They’d be thrown into the water, and the boat sunk, and serve them right. If she were God, Clothilde thought—

She turned and scrambled up the rocks, as if she was running away from something. It felt as if she was running away. When she climbed up over the last rock, her hands scraped by how hard she had clutched at the stones in her ascent, she didn’t even look back.

She would walk all over the peninsula, every inch
of it. The fields of timothy and alfalfa—the woods—the quiet glades in the middle of pines and spruces and birch, where pools of sunlight fell—the rocky headlands, one after the other—and the rough open spaces where blueberries were coming to ripeness—always before, when she walked around her peninsula, a kind of peace had come up into her heart. It was as if every time she put her foot down, the quiet flowed up from the ground.

The high blueberry fields first, Clothilde decided, setting off, waiting—inside herself—for the peacefulness to begin. She could hear nothing but the wind, blowing.

Mine,
she said out loud to herself, even though she knew it wasn’t true, as she stepped into the windy woods. The leaves whispered, rustled. Sometimes, with a sound like a human voice, the branches creaked, groaned.

Clothilde was hungry, and she’d brought no food. She would just have to be hungry. She almost smiled with the satisfaction of wanting food and saying No to herself.

At last, Clothilde sat on the rough ground of the headland, her face into the wind. She watched the shadow of a cloud come across the surface of the water. It enveloped the islands and then moved on, driving the brightness ahead of it. It wrapped itself around her.

She had walked the whole peninsula, from its narrow wrist out to this fingertip, skipping only that part where the burned cottage stood. She had paced the edges of the fields of timothy and alfalfa and stood on the rocks that cropped up among the ground-hugging blueberry plants. She had made her way through tangled woods, putting her hands, sometimes, against the peeling bark of a birch. It was no good. None of it did any good. The feeling was no longer there. If she hadn’t been so shadowed by sorrow, she would have been sad.

The cloud’s shadow blew away, leaving bright
windy air filled with the careless water sounds and bird cries, and the rush of wind in her ears, but Clothilde sat wrapped in her own thoughts. She almost wanted the Voice to come back, so she could tell it or ask it or plead with it to please stop. But she never wanted to hear that Voice again. It was dangerous, that Voice.

The land, her peninsula, had nothing to give her any longer. Because it wasn’t hers, she thought. If it wasn’t hers now, then it never had been hers, even if a will gave it to her. Great-Aunt Clothilde had paid money for it, so she owned it, and could leave it to Clothilde in her will—but Clothilde knew now that the peninsula had nothing to do with money, or with wills, or the laws behind them either.

But if laws and wills and money couldn’t make things yours, what could? If you couldn’t own things, what could you be sure of? With the peninsula gone from under her feet, Clothilde felt as if she were floating, drifting, through a black night; and falling too, with a terrible speed, and there wasn’t anything she could hold on to. If she reached out her hand, her fingers would only grasp emptiness.

She couldn’t go on sitting there, sitting still. If she was going to feel this way, she thought she might as
well go back to the farmhouse and do something, something useful. Mr. Henderson delivered milk on Fridays, and eggs, and butter; she could go back and set the milk into jars, then wait until the cream had risen, and then pour that off into the smaller cream jar. She could, she thought—standing up and pulling her skirt down straight, brushing wrinkles out of it—finish taking apart the cloak, although how she would get the fabric to Lou now, she didn’t know. But if she finished that chore this afternoon, what would she do for the long evening?

She moved quietly back through the woods, still hoping even though she knew there was no use to hope. She took an unaccustomed route, not her own path. She couldn’t get lost; she knew the peninsula too well for that; if she didn’t know precisely where she was, with the woods closing in around her, she always knew her direction.

When she came to a small open glade in the woods and saw papers scattered around the ground, with a big wooden box of paints open, she almost turned away. Only curiosity led her to step into the sunlit glade, once she had made sure no one was there, and no one nearby. She recognized the size of that wooden box and saw colors on the scattered
papers. She was too curious to just walk away.

In the woods, the wind was quieter, having spent some of its energy pushing its way through the trees. The papers on the ground occasionally rustled along, like leaves in that fall. Clothilde stood above them, looking at what they might be.

He was painting the ground, mostly, as if he were lying flat on his stomach to look at he ground. Sometimes, he had done three or four pictures of exactly the same thing, and she could see—by how much was included and the changes between pictures—which he had done last.

Clothilde had never looked so closely at the ground as he was doing when he painted it. In one picture, three birch trees had grown up close together, but two of them had been blown down. She could see which of the logs on the ground had come from which broken trunk. In another, clusters of red berries rested on their clustered green leaves above the tangle of twigs and pine needles and sharp gray stone that covered the ground. Looking at that one, Clothilde caught at her breath, and hunkered down beside it. One cluster, just one, and its four leaves too, casting shadows on one another—if she were ever to see that same cluster she would recognize it. He had made it
so absolutely itself when he painted it, that for a minute Clothilde was taken back to the afternoon on the headlands, after the Voice had left her and she could see.

She made herself took at the other pictures, wondering if he had done that almost magical thing at any other time. In a picture of the whole glade, one of the many tree trunks—an old pine, lichen-covered, spiny bare lower branches sticking out—was entirely itself, and the lichen colony too was itself. So he could do it—whatever it was—more than once. He had done it only twice that she could find, crawling among the sheets of paper, entirely absorbed; but he had done it more than once.

She pulled those two thick pieces of paper toward her, and sat cross-legged, looking at them. The bright red groundberries—if she could learn to feel with her eyes as she did with her fingers, she would be able to feel their hardness and roundness and smallness, each one complete. That tree trunk—she could see the years of growing, as if she could see inside it and count its rings, she could feel its reaching upward and how it spread out its high branches.

She hadn’t heard footsteps, not so that they registered in her brain and gave her time to run away, but
the shadow falling over the two papers didn’t surprise her.

“What are you doing here?” his voice demanded.

It’s mine, Clothilde almost answered. She didn’t look at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. Then, although she didn’t plan to say anything more, the words came out of her mouth as she stood up and turned around, her eyes on the ground. He’d come sneaking up on her and now he was making her feel as if she had no business being on her own peninsula. “Where were you, anyway?”

His voice laughed but she didn’t look to see what his mouth was doing. “I went to relieve myself, if you must know. If you’re so curious.”

“Oh,” she said. Her cheeks grew hot. “Oh.” She should have known better than to ask, she thought, it served her right.

“Is there anything else?” He was still standing there right in front of her, as if he was daring her to look right at him.

“No.” Clothilde shook her head. His heavy shoes were covered with mud, the leather scraped in many places, the toes scuffed bare of color. “I don’t think so. It wasn’t—”

He had waited there as long as he could. He
moved away. He stood farther away from her, still facing her, but not looming close.

“Clothilde,” he said. “I wouldn’t take the Point away from you, I won’t if I can help it. Aunt Clothilde wanted you to have it—for some reason of her own she never bothered to explain.”

At that she did look at him, and quickly away. His skin looked rough, hard, painful; it looked like muddy sharp rocks, not skin.

“I don’t remember her at all,” she said.

“I do; she was easy to remember—loud, bossy, bold. And quarrelsome. I enjoyed her visit.”

“She must have liked you,” Clothilde said.

“Me? No, she didn’t. She didn’t think much of men, and I was the kind of man she thought least of. My father—she didn’t like him either but he could stand up to her. She wasn’t interested in me at all.”

She looked at him again, briefly, and the mouth was smiling, as she had guessed.

“I don’t know what she saw in you,” he said, “except being a namesake, but—whatever it was, she saw it. The Point is yours. You have my word—”

Clothilde felt his words being true, as if he could give it back to her, and had done that. She could feel the land beneath her feet rising up from the center of
the earth, for her to stand on. She knew that it had been there, that way, all morning too, if she had been able to feel it. If she had been able to feel the way he had been able to see twice in his pictures, she would have felt it.

The man from the boathouse waited, as if she should say something, but she didn’t know what to say, standing there. So she asked him, pointing, “Those berries.”

“Yes, I saw you studying my little efforts,” he said, bitterness in his voice.

“No, those—” She picked up the paper and took it over to him, pointing out to him the one particular cluster.

He didn’t say anything, tall beside her. She’d forgotten how big he was. He looked at where her finger pointed until she let her finger drop.

“Was there anything else?” he asked. She knew what he wanted to say; she knew he wasn’t asking her if there was anything else she wanted, the way you said that to people to tell them it was time for them to go. She knew it, just as he knew—however queerly she’d said it—what she was telling him about the berries. She could feel him forgetting, for a minute, about his monster face. He forgot, for just that
minute, so entirely that he didn’t even remember he was forgetting something.

“Yes,” she answered. She put the paper she held into his hand and picked up the second one. “This.” Her finger touched the tree trunk; and her finger could almost feel the scratchiness of the lichen.

“Well,” he said, standing beside her. “Well, well. You’ve got an eye, haven’t you.”

She shook her head. “It’s you. You did it twice,” she explained, asking.

“I know what you mean,” he said, his voice like water, deep and glad and full of wonder. He did know.

A gust of wind blew through the woods, pulling at Clothilde’s skirt and the papers they held in their hands. It blew away the communication between them, too. Without looking, Clothilde felt him remember again. He remembered his face and moved away from her. he gathered up the blowing papers. He put a rock on them to hold them, and then walked away from her. Across the way he sat down, leaning his back against a tree, with the pad of paper on his knees. He didn’t look at her. He sat so that if she stayed she’d have to look at him. He was waiting for her to go away. Clothilde just stood there.