Tree By Leaf (7 page)

Clothilde didn’t want to believe her ears.

“Who would you sell it to?” Nate asked. “Has someone made an offer?”

“A lumber company would want it for timber,” Mother explained.

“But you can’t do that. It’s mine,” Clothilde protested. “Its mine and I wont let you.”

“You’re only a child,” Mother answered, brushing her away.

Nate was more patient. “Look, Clothilde, if the Old Man’s putting money into the factory—because, its these cheap gasoline models, and that Henry Ford, don’t you see? Electric is better—didn’t President Wilson get an electric automobile? But we have to compete harder right now.”

Clothilde looked, but she didn’t see why she had to give up the peninsula. It was hers, even if she was a child. There was a will. “I won’t let you,” she repeated.

“You can’t stop it, dear, not if Father decides it’s best. He’s your father. Little girls don’t know anything about property, so their fathers take care of it. Don’t you want to help your family?”

Clothilde shook her head, No. She wasn’t saying no to Mother’s question, but to everything, to Father being able to sell the Point, to not being able to stop him, to Lou going away and Nate going away, to not
being able to do anything about any of it. “No,” Clothilde said. She said it around the room to everyone, “No.”

“Yes,” Dierdre yelled back. “Yes. Yes.”

Clothilde got up and left the room, ignoring Mother’s voice. She went upstairs to her bedroom. She kept saying it inside her, No, No, No, as if by saying it she could keep things from happening. She heard her feet slamming down on the stairs and on the floorboards of her room, which she and Lou had painted that winter. She heard her feet hit the floor of her bedroom, but it felt like the floor was gone out from under her. Clothilde sat down at the little table that made a writing desk in her room, tucked in under the low slanting ceiling, with the window off to her right.

She wasn’t crying and she didn’t even want to cry. If she was a grown-up, if she was a boy, she’d show them, she wouldn’t let them. She wished she were Nate and had friends to go stay with. She wished she were Dierdre who didn’t understand. She wished—if she were God—

Outside, the light shone and the leaves hung motionless. Clothilde got up to close her window. She sat down again, and thought she’d never get up, she’d
just sit there until she died. In the silence, silence from downstairs, silence from outside, there was a rattling, as if the window shook in its frame. As if the window was knocking.

But it was a knock on her door, which was repeated before Lou opened it and stood in the doorway. “I’ve been thinking,” Lou said, not coming into the room. “I could he’p my ma, with better wages from one of the summer cottages. I’m fifteen, and your mother has paid my wages to me, not to him, so we’ve got a little set aside. And it’s not like having to go back to the mills, Clothilde, it’s not the worst it could be.”

“I don’t care,” Clothilde said. She didn’t get up, and as soon as Lou had closed the door behind her, she turned back to the wall.

The wall had been painted blue, years and years ago, in her great-aunt’s time, a blue the color of a robin’s egg. The wall angled down from the ceiling and then straightened out just at Clothilde’s eye level. The paint was faded with time, and little cracks ran along it, like pencil lines, making a design she couldn’t see the order of. Clothilde stared at the wall. The feelings—anger and fear and misery—which had carried her up the stairs and given her voice, dropped her. She was like some fish dropped by a wave onto a rock, a rock alone in the middle of the ocean. There was nothing she was going to be able to do about anything.

The window knocked again.

Clothilde turned her face to it, without curiosity. She wasn’t looking at the window, or through it. She just turned her face to it. The frame of wood held flat glass in place; beyond the glass was a view of leaves and branches and sky, as unmoving as a picture.
Clothilde turned her face to the wall again, leaned her elbows on the tabletop, and covered her ears with her hands as she stared at the cracks on the wall.

She should have known that the peninsula couldn’t be hers. Children didn’t own things, girls didn’t, people like her family didn’t. People like Grandfather owned things and could decide how to use them. She wished she’d known that all along, because then …

The sound the window made, making it again, was like the knock of a giant hand. If it were a hand, it would be so huge and heavy … the sound was like such a hand making itself as gentle as possible. The sound of that knocking echoed in Clothilde’s bedroom and sounded as if it must be rattling the whole side of the house. If it was a hand, knocking …

Clothilde opened the window. Nothing came in. She hadn’t expected anything to come in. She had probably imagined the sound, too, even though she could still hear it. She was probably going crazy, hearing things that weren’t real. If you were crazy, like Jeb Twohey, then people would take care of you and you’d never have to know anything. You’d just be crazy until you could die and be done with being frightened and helpless.

Clothilde left her room. There had been that
knock and it had to be answered, so she went down the stairs and out the front door. Not that she wanted to go answer, not that she didn’t want to, not that she’d decided to: she went to answer it. She walked to the vegetable garden, where the early peas were growing taller and the lettuces curled delicately in upon themselves. The knocking wasn’t to be answered there, nor among the apple trees of the orchard. It was crazy, she was crazy, the knocking that filled her skull was driving her crazy.

As if she were being pushed from behind, Clothilde moved slowly along the rutted driveway, into the trees. No sound broke the stillness. She walked under the branches of trees, which seemed to wait, listening in the silence. She followed the dirt roadway up beside the fields where Mr. Henderson’s crop of mixed timothy and alfalfa sprouted up through the ground in thin green blades. She kept her shoes on the dirt track, one foot following the other, when the road reentered the woods. There pines stood at attention and even the birches seemed to have halted, in midgesture, like girls photographed at a dance. When the road looped around to the right to go to a ruined cottage, Clothilde left it and went on through the
woods to the headlands. She moved slowly, as if she were being pulled.

When she stepped out onto the headlands, the sky and sea spread out before her, reflecting each other. The tide was out, but even with the knocking at last silenced, the water lay dark and still at the foot of the heavy rockfalls. The sunny air spread out all around her. Clothilde stepped out onto a flat chunk of granite. Sunlight fell over her. Her shadow lay curled at her feet.

“Clothilde,” the Voice named her. “Child.”

But she was alone. Clothilde spun around to see who had spoken, her heart beating fast. She saw no one. She didn’t expect to see anyone, because nobody could have a voice like that. It was a huge, rich voice, rich like Mother’s chowder, rich with pungent clam broth and sweet silky milk, with soft chunks of bland potatoes and sharp bits of onions, rich with the springy, nutty clams and crisp slivers of fried salt pork. She recognized the Voice, which she had never heard before. Her heart beat with painful slowness.

“Child,” the Voice said again, but not from the woods she peered into. She turned around to catch it, over the water. “Clothilde.”

It was behind her and in front of her. It surrounded her. It weighed down on her from above and
rose up under her feet. But it wasn’t the Voice that was making her feel squeezed; it was scaredness squeezing at her. Oh, she was glad—gladness burst out of her the way it had when she first stood on the headlands and understood that the peninsula lying behind her was hers, her own. With the gladness, however, she was also remembering, knowing, all of the things she shouldn’t have done—the meanness in her heart and the way she’d wanted to take away Polly Dethier’s ruffledy dress and her dimple; times she’d sat there and watched Lou or Mother work when she could have got up and helped; and the way she’d run away from things at school instead of standing to fight them. The remembering made her afraid.

Clothilde turned around, putting the water behind her. She ran as fast as she could. She held her skirt up so her legs could move freely. She ran among the trees and through the woods, not following any path, dodging and ducking. Leaves brushed at her face. Branches slapped at her body. When a root caught at her foot, she stumbled but she didn’t fall. She ran on.

The Voice ran beside her.

Clothilde’s blood beat in her ears and she gasped for breath. It hurt her feet, the way they were pounding
down onto the ground. It hurt her chest, the way it tried to suck in air. But the Voice beside her ran like water, flowed beside her like water.

Clothilde couldn’t get away. She halted, and rested her forehead against the white trunk of a birch until she had caught her breath and had stopped the sobbing she hadn’t realized she’d been doing as she ran. Then she turned around to return to the headlands, rubbing at her eyes and nose. She was tired. She’d been as frightened as she could stand to be, more frightened than she could have imagined being, and now she was too exhausted and afraid to feel frightened. She walked back through the shady woods, with the dappled sunlight falling like rain. The Voice walked beside her.

Standing again on the rock, facing again over the water, Clothilde just waited. Her hands felt like they were trembling, so she put them behind her back. There, they held tightly each to the other, and her fingers wound together. Her back straight, her shoulders stiff, Clothilde held her head up. She made her head stay up.

It wasn’t gone, she knew that.

“All right,” she said out loud. Her voice sounded thin and high. “I’m listening,” she squeaked out.

“Sit down,” the Voice told her. “Let your body rest upon the rock.” The Voice was trying to make itself as little as it could, which wasn’t very little. Clothilde almost smiled, at how large small was to the Voice.

“No,” she said, adding politely. “Thank you.”

She waited to hear what the Voice wanted from her. Maybe it was going to tell her she was about to die. Maybe this was what happened when you died, and she was already dead. She looked quickly down at herself, the blouse, rumpled now from the exertions of running, the blue skirt hanging, the toes of her shoes with their laces threading back and forth between the eyelets. She didn’t think she was dead.

“I—” she started to say. But she didn’t know what to say next and she thought she should have kept on waiting. Was she supposed to stand and wait? “What—” she tried next, which was no better.

“You called to me,” the Voice said. “Knocking upon my door.”

“No, I didn’t,” Clothilde said. “Did I?” Because the Voice must be right about everything. “Why are you saying that?”

The Voice smiled. It wasn’t the way a grown-up smiled at something a child said, and it wasn’t the way someone smiled when he heard something funny. It
wasn’t exactly the way the whole world smiled on a bright day, but that was the closest.

“I didn’t,” Clothilde repeated. She wasn’t going to be forced into saying something that wasn’t true.

“Sit down,” the Voice told her. “Sit down up on this rock, and let your body rest.”

That was what Clothilde wanted to do anyway. She sat down abruptly, Indian fashion, carefully arranging her skirt over her legs. Once she was sitting, she wanted to be standing again. She needed to move, she could feel that in her legs; but she wanted to sit still and silent, with not even the blood going around her body. This was more than frightened. This was fear of something you were glad to be afraid of. “What do you want me for?” she finally asked, looking out to the east, over the spreading sky and water, as if she could see the Voice.

“To be my people, to know the creatures of land and sea and air, to know the leaf and to know the tree. To carry light in your hand as you step from one season to the next, to guard the light from darkness, guard the darkness from the—” The Voice stopped, as if it saw the smile Clothilde was hiding. Of course, the Voice couldn’t understand her question—it was too large to know how small she was—she understood
that, but the smile rollicked along under her skin and the most she could do was to conceal it.

“Yes,” the Voice said. Then, “Yes?”

“I meant, what do you want me to do?”

“You called to me,” the Voice said.

“Do you mean, what do I want you to do?” she asked, so surprised that she didn’t hear the disrespectful speech until she had uttered it. “I’m sorry—I didn’t think—I shouldn’t have even—it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I shouldn’t have disturbed you, if I did. I didn’t mean to. It’s not important.”

“The leaf grows and the tree grows; it is important.”

Clothilde knew then what was happening, and she was ashamed. She knew why it had happened—because it was more than she could bear. To bear meant to carry, and her strength wasn’t equal to the weight of what piled up on her. Like an egg you pushed and pushed down on until its shell gave way, and your hand’s weight crushed the shell into the yolk and white, her brain had given way. She retreated into herself, to find her normal self again. Her crazy self—the self that thought she could call out and be answered, and be asked what she wanted—as if God had time—Clothilde was frightened of herself. She’d never been frightened of herself before, and that frightened her
even more And if the Voice might be real—which she half believed—which was the craziest thing about the whole—she felt her brain’s shell cracking.

Clothilde jumped up, to stand on the rock with her hands on her hips and the sea before her and the trees behind her. Turning her face right up to face the sky, she called: “Why do you make wars, anyway?”

It rose up, a great black wave from the sea. It curled over her. She was there where the air was thick yellow and red, where the thick air smelled of things burning, and of mud. She was there with whistling explosions, with voices crying out like the minister’s description of damned souls, souls damned to hell, and crying out. She was there under an icy rain, where a doomed silence wrapped voices around, silence like a bandage that courage bound around an incurable wound. She was there, where a black horse lay fallen in mud that streaked his face like tears, his mouth frothing blood, and a man had to put the gun to the horse’s head, and shoot Bucephalus even though Father would have been happier to put the gun to his own head, and his hand shook as he pulled the exploding trigger. The black wave held her, then passed on.