The Boys in the Trees

by Mary Swan

  Lett was a great talker at his dinner table, in meeting rooms, but he had nothing to say about the men who couldn’t hold out until the railway profits came through. Nothing to say about the new dry goods merchant who came to town with his wife and young family, who left a year later, a broken man. The fire that took most of his stock finished him off, and Lett was right there to buy the building lot with its mounds of blackened timbers, broken glass. Paying a fair price, perhaps, considering the condition, but far from a good price. Right there again to bail out Heath the night he was arrested, although that was an odd thing. Heath was Marl’s bookkeeper, after all, for the factory and his other interests, and it was Marl who had brought the embezzlement charge, sent the constables immediately to his door. There’d be a reason for it, maybe some kind of lesson being taught, but Robinson didn’t care to puzzle it out. The business of living complicated enough, he thought, and harm done for enough plain reasons without having to dream up new, twisted ones.

  There were other things Robinson knew about Lett, among them a condition treated more than once, like one or two others who sang the Sunday hymns with great feeling and supported the movement to ban communion wine. In some ways, he thought, it was easier to deal with a man like Brendan O’Neill, everything plain to see. Hot tempered when he had been drinking, and he had usually been drinking. Lashing out at anyone who was near. His wife, before she took sick, was almost as hard. Had once swung an iron skillet and laid Brendan out flat on the floor, sent for Robinson because she thought maybe she’d killed him, although she was still too angry to be much bothered about it. She was half her own size now, paring away to nothing. Those wild, hulking sons talking softly in the tiny rooms of their house. The one that was Eaton’s friend kept the hard-packed floor swept, washed plates in a tin tub by the crooked front door. Stuffed a clutch of purple flowering weeds into a jar on the sill beside her bed. He’s a good boy, she said, and Robinson thought she was probably right. Wondered if the two of them knowing it would be enough.

  There were many who wouldn’t agree, but Robinson didn’t mind that Eaton ran off with the O’Neill boy to the woods, to the river, whenever he could. Even after the thrown stone, Meyer losing his eye to a jagged piece of the overturned wagon. He still thought that it would be good for his son to learn a little toughness, to have more of the rough and tumble of a boy’s life along with his other lessons. Marianne insisted on tidiness and good manners, the weekly Band of Hope meetings, and there was nothing wrong with that. But there was more involved in becoming the right kind of man, something to do with scraped knuckles and bloodied noses, with taking chances. The thought of his son swinging out on a rope over the deep green river or playing dare on the railroad tracks still clenched his heart, brought pictures of bodies crushed and slashed, a shock of hair stiffened into icy spikes above a small drowned face. He could only trust that it was something like the story of Abraham, that he had to be prepared for a sacrifice that would not, in the end, be required.

  Robinson knew many fathers of sons, and most of them had an idea of the future. A path long mapped out, someone to follow in their footsteps, to take their place in a business and eventually step aside for their own sons. He had maybe thought that too at one time, taking Eaton along on long country rounds, teaching him the position of the organs in the body, the names of the instruments in his bag. But more and more as he sank, bone weary, into his chair, his bed, he wondered why he would wish this life on anyone, let alone his clear-eyed son. Alice Barnes said that Eaton had a fine, inquiring mind, told Robinson that much as she would hate to lose him, she thought it was time to send him on to the Grammar School, to others who could teach him more. She said he had a keen sense of justice, of fairness, that perhaps he was destined for the law. I can see him in the courtroom, she said, and for a moment Robinson could too. As Eaton grew older, grew into himself, it happened sometimes that Robinson caught a glimpse of his adult face. A face something like his own, in the shape of the chin, the way the brown hair lay, though the blue eyes were his mother’s. A glimpse of Eaton grown, maybe with a pen in his hand, or swinging a child up onto his broad shoulders, a glimpse of him even older; at times when Eaton sat reading his schoolbooks Robinson saw a shadow of a face so old that he knew that he himself was long gone, and he was swept with an almost unbearable sadness.

  It happened the other way too, some movement bringing such a clear picture of Eaton stumbling on learning legs, holding tight to his hand. He had the fanciful thought that each person moved around with the shades of themselves in the past and the future, the seed both foretelling the tall standing flower and contained within it. Talking to Alice Barnes, in front of Allen’s store on a drowsy afternoon, he remembered the girl with flying skirts, the way she and her sister Sarah, looking so alike, would pinch and kick at each other all through church, pull each other’s hair in rages on their front walk. He remembered their father saying that he’d have to get them married off early, more trouble than a whole herd of boys.

  Andrew Barnes was a man he had liked, a man who might have become the kind of friend he was thinking about, if he had lived a little longer. Mrs. Lewis sent a cab to bring Robinson to Neeve Street one still Christmas night, when the snow fell in fast, soft flakes. Upstairs in her tall, narrow house, Barnes lay dead on an iron bed. His heart, was it? Mrs. Lewis said from the doorway, while Robinson lifted back the thin sheet, checked the cooling body, and he told her that it seemed so. How long ago? he asked, and she said that it had been a little while, that she’d had to clear the house, find a boy to go for the cab. But he’d been dead as a doornail, beyond saving, she was quite sure of that.

  There were those, Robinson knew, who would have crammed Barnes back into his clothes, dumped him somewhere in the snow, maybe even in front of another establishment. But Mrs. Lewis knew the law, knew that nothing could be proved against her. The doctor called, her three nieces fast asleep in their beds, and no business of hers to ask why a man would want a room in her lodging house with his own fine place just blocks away.

  Robinson had been there before, the first time to see a girl raving on a couch, her cheeks flaming with fever. That was when he was newly arrived in the town and didn’t know, didn’t think anything of walking up to the front door in the broad light of day. Mrs. Lewis was a stout woman, white-haired now and plainly dressed, looking like anyone’s mother. A kindly seeming woman, but with iron at the core. The kindness was real, Robinson knew that, but knew too that she never let it get in the way of things. Not so different, in that way, from many he could name.

  The fevered girl had recovered but her wits were affected and Mrs. Lewis sent her back to her people. Sent her somewhere, at any rate. She didn’t like her girls to go about much in town and so Robinson came to the house from time to time, when one of them needed attention. She always offered him a glass, a cup of tea, and he occasionally accepted, sinking into a plush chair in a parlor that looked almost like any other. Mrs. Lewis knew what she could and could not ask of him and made other arrangements if she needed to, although there was rarely a problem like that in her house. Almost as if a child could not be conceived without love, although he knew that was far from true. More to do with the douches and infusions, the sponges and tents and mixtures of ergot, tansy, knowledge that Mrs. Lewis shared in the dim parlor, speaking in a voice that could have been telling him the price of a bolt of cloth. It was information Robinson himself sometimes passed on, presenting it as something he’d come across in his latest medical journal. For so many pale women, there was little else he could do.

  Once, when it was gin they were sipping in the comfortable chairs, she told Robinson that she thought they were rather similar, and not just in their helping professions. She said she was thinking more of the way they both knew too many secrets to ever be completely welcome, outside their own doors. Another time she sent a note to Robinson’s house, the name and direction of a farmer one of her girls had clawed in the face. It was a face the girl knew from yea
rs before, when she was a slip of a thing in a faded dress, stepping off a boat and being lifted up into his wagon. He’d had a wife then, who was waiting at the farmhouse door. Maybe still did, not that that made any difference.

  Attacking a customer was not something Mrs. Lewis would ever have tolerated, except that Junie was one of her best girls ever, and she knew there must have been powerful reasons. To calm her down, Mrs. Lewis promised to find out if he still lived in the badly chinked house at the edge of the swamp, find out if he’d changed his ways. The next day, Robinson bumped up the rutted track, knocked at the blistered front door that faced nothing but stony fields. Found Abby in a mucky, dark room, and took her home with him.

  • • •

  The main dining room at Blyth’s was half full when Robinson arrived and he nodded to more familiar faces but kept walking through. When he opened the door to the private room a falsetto voice was saying, But sir, me mother told me—and he was slapped by a wave of laughter, pulled with it as it rolled back, and released at the last empty chair. It was a round table, but somehow Lett was at the head, Jervis at his right hand, still laughing although it had been his put-on voice telling the joke. Jervis had made a fool of the defense lawyer at the trial, turning his words, shifting the tone and firing them back at him. Wellman was an earnest young man from the city, with spectacles and an untamed cowlick. Hired by someone, maybe even Lett or Marl, to do the impossible. He had scuttled away as soon as the verdict was read, still cramming papers into his bag as he walked toward the station.

  The walls of the small room were newly papered, the gas fixtures elaborately scrolled. No sign of the sweeping arm of temperance here; someone filled his glass to the brim and told him he’d have to down it quickly to catch up. Looking around the table, he saw how true that was. Spence, the banker, with his jacket off, McAdam’s collar undone. It was McAdam’s young clerk who had sold Heath the gun, wrapped it in brown paper as requested. He couldn’t have known, even McAdam himself couldn’t have known, but he let the boy go anyway, sent him off with a good recommendation and a week’s wages in his pocket.

  Luft was saying that he’d already written his front page, lacked only a statement from the hangman, last seen running toward the stables. A bad business, Robinson said, and everyone nodded. They had all been there, had all seen it, heard the awful noises that came from beneath the dark hood, but at the same time were everywhere around them. Bad enough to execute the poor mad bastard, Luft said, and from across the table Jervis said, Ah, will you leave it.

  But Luft wouldn’t leave it, the two of them getting louder and louder until Jervis banged his glass, amber sloshing over the rim, and counted off the points on his fingers, much as he had done in the courtroom. One: Heath was sane enough to make a devious plan. Two: the plan was clearly made ahead, coldly followed through. Buying the gun on credit before news of the charge had time to spread, sending the older girl for the music, taking the little one out of school. Three: he fled; he was sane enough for that. He tried to escape, not like that madwoman from up near Blasted, the one who took an ax to her man and then just sat down at the edge of the stony field, smeared with his blood, until some poor soul happened by. You remember that, Robinson? he said, and Robinson did. And finally, Jervis said, if you think about it, it was in fact a very sane act. He’d have gone to prison, wouldn’t he, for the embezzlement. Wouldn’t he, Jervis repeated, looking at Lett, who nodded. And what would have become of his womenfolk? Jervis said. No money, no family to help them. It would have been the Poor-house, wouldn’t it? That’s what I mean by sane. Sane enough to make a choice, to know what their fate would be without him.

  There are worse things than the Poor-house, Luft said, and Jervis shook his head, said, Not many.

  They wouldn’t have survived it, Spence said. My wife said the older girl was so simple she could barely speak, the mother a meek little thing. When she saw them about in the town, you know.

  And if he was mad, McAdam said, there would have been some sign. My clerk said he was cool as could be, quite as usual. Aren’t I right, Robinson? he said. Let’s have your opinion, wouldn’t someone have noticed if he was mad?

  Most likely, Robinson said, but he was thinking of something he’d read in Beard’s book that very afternoon, started to tell them about it. A class of patients Beard called Border-liners, who were almost insane at times, or even all of the time, but never quite enough to justify a diagnosis. A happily married woman, perfectly normal except for her calmly stated belief that some gnawing creature lived inside her right leg. A man who slapped his own face, hard enough to mark, whenever he heard church bells. As for the girl, Robinson said, she was suffering from a disease, poor thing. He told them that the course of therapy he had devised was beginning to prove successful, that given a little more time he firmly believed that she could have lived a normal life. Normal enough.

  There you have it, McAdam said. The voice of modern medicine. He seemed content, although Robinson wasn’t sure what point he thought had been proved.

  A long way from old Dr. Poole’s day, Lett said, and everyone laughed. Spence put on a raspy, quavering voice, said, The problem clearly stems from a disturbance in the bowels. Purgatives for one and all, Luft said, raising his glass, and Jervis told a story about consulting Dr. Poole about pain in his stomach, the day before his first big trial. The Epsom salts he was given seemed to help and before leaving for the courthouse he took a triple dose, with predictable results.

  • • •

  Robinson’s glass was full again and he noticed that his fog of fatigue had blown away. He was suddenly very hungry and just as he realized that, the door opened and Blyth himself appeared, carrying a tray of steaming plates, a boy behind him with several bottles. It seemed important to mention the coincidence, but Spence had begun a complicated joke or story about a farmer and a spotted cow and Robinson found himself laughing with the others, mostly at the way Spence mangled the telling. McAdam laughed loudest and longest and Robinson remembered something he’d heard, an argument over a loan the banker had not given, or called in early. He wondered if it was really possible to leave business at the door, couldn’t imagine his own life, if his work was the same. He’d known them all for years, Lett and Spence and McAdam, Jervis and Luft. He’d sat with them on rickety stages, at ceremonies and prize-givings. Spoken with them on the street, examined some behind the closed door of his office. But he’d never been with them all in a room like this, leaning back in their chairs, easy together. He thought of his tipsy conversation in Mrs. Lewis’ parlor, thought that she had been wrong, for here he was at this round table, the things he knew not any kind of barrier. Across from him Lett raised his glass, and Robinson lifted his own, and drank.

  • • •

  There was not much talk while they ate and he found he was thinking of the farmer, the woman he hadn’t seen but had been told about, blood on her hands and face, spattered all over her dress. He knew the place, might even have seen the ax, leaning by the door, although it was years before, possibly not the same ax. The words New Home were written on the ragged hem of the shift Abby had been wearing and he had sent an angry letter, received by return post a reply from Miss Augusta Weir who was distressed, appalled, who assured him that no more girls would be sent to Ashfield’s farm. She enclosed the fare to send the girl back but it didn’t seem right to ship her off like a parcel, and at the time he was far too busy to take her himself. From the first she was very good with Eaton and quick to learn the household details Marianne showed her, and she was cheerful enough after the first few days. Robinson wrote again to Miss Weir saying they would keep her, asked about her history, if she had any family living. There was a brother, apparently, who had been sent to the West, and a sister who had also been placed, after a great deal of difficulty. Miss Weir suggested that the information not be passed on until Abby was older and he thought about that, decided that if she asked, he would tell her what he knew, help her to find out more. But she didn�
��t ask, and he thought that was to her credit. The way she fit herself into a new life, the way she was able to leave the past completely behind.

  Abby had been with them for years before she began to disturb his sleep, before he woke from a dream of his hand cupped over her bare breast, his fingers trickling down her thigh. He despised himself, the things he couldn’t stop noticing. The movement of her skirts when she bent to the oven door, the flush in her cheeks when she stood up again. He despised his thoughts, the excuses he found to seek her out in the quiet kitchen, once Marianne had climbed the stairs. The way he was driven half mad imagining rumpled sheets on her narrow, sweet-smelling bed. It was wearing him out, this control, and he was sorry, knew that she was hurt when he arranged a new place. Knew that his voice was too hard, explaining that Eaton was old enough now, that Mr. Cowan, old and frail, needed her more, that it would better suit her.

  After Cowan died, she found employment in young Ryan’s studio and Marianne tutted, but Robinson saw it a different way. Proof that Abby would be all right, that she would always pick herself up and start again, go on with the life he could so easily have interfered with. He was glad of that, happy to see her occasionally when she came to visit Lucy, but in a proper way. In the way he had felt when she was a bony, trembling child, carried safe in his arms.

  • • •

  The boy cleared away the smeared plates and brought another decanter, a box of cigars Lett must have requested. Rolling one between his thin fingers, Jervis told a story of being in Daly’s once, waiting behind Heath who was inspecting each type of cigar. I didn’t know who he was, Jervis said, not then. But I couldn’t help noticing him, the cut of his coat, the boots that had seen better days. But carrying on like a lord, asking the price of a box of this one and that. Well, he left with a single, of course, and even then he had to count out coppers. Daly and I had quite a laugh about it, after he’d gone.