The Trees

by Conrad Richter

  Buckman Tull was the first to hear and the last to come. Billy Harbison loosed his hounds and they were ready to start. It didn’t seem they cared if Wyitt went along or not to show them the way. They would go out in the woods and find out for themselves what happened to this young one that she didn’t come home. The women crowded out of the door to watch them go. They looked like Sinclair’s army, men and boys, with rifles and clubs, in boots and bare feet, shoepacks and moccasins. Buckman Tull had on his soldier coat with his horn slung over one shoulder, and it was he who took charge.

  “They’ll fetch your young’un back,” Ellen MacWhirter comforted Sayward. “If she hain’t been killed by some wild creater.”

  But all they fetched back next day was news of a barefoot young one’s track by a run. It might have been Sulie’s toes in the black mud, and it might have been the youngest MacWhirter boy’s. At the blast of the horn they had all run up and tramped it out before they could measure. The day after that they found nothing.

  Oh where, Sayward cried in her mind, was her father? Why did he have to be off now when they needed him most? They were out of fresh meat with all these mouths to feed. And Sulie’s bed in the loft was slept in by strangers. Didn’t he know his favorite young one was lost out in the woods while he wandered around digging in the dirt for roots for the pigtail people!

  When he did come home, she pitied him hard. The second evening little Hughie McFall ran in that a strange man was outside. Sayward thought one of the other women could talk to him. Then she looked up and Worth stood in the doorway, his bag of sang roots weighting his back, his rifle in his hand.

  “What fetches all these folks?” he asked sternly of Genny who was nearest him in the crowded cabin.

  When she shrank back and wouldn’t answer, his eyes moved on past Wyitt and Achsa till he found Sayward at the fire.

  “Whar’s Sulie?” he asked louder.

  “She never came home with the cows,” Sayward told him.

  He gave a start like a beast in a trap when it gets the first lick with the club.

  “When was this?” And when Sayward told him, “She ain’t out in the woods yit?”

  The neighbor folks all watched him, pitying him as Sayward told the story. She had told it so often, the words were worn to her tongue like Worth’s pipestem to his teeth. Several times he groaned, and Sayward guessed he was thinking how it might have been different if he had stayed to home. She and John Covenhoven and Wyitt had done what they could that first night, but Worth could find his way through the woods like a lynx in the dark. That first night little Sulie couldn’t have been far off. Now only God knew where she had wandered and to what end she had come.

  When she finished, he looked like he had been dram drinking.

  “Whar’s Louie?” he wanted to know.

  She didn’t answer.

  “You’d better git him.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Louie mought know. He mought a seed her.”

  Louie Scurrah came early next morning. He wore a buck tail like it was some kind of frolic.

  “So you wouldn’t git me before!” the hard look he gave Sayward said.

  Oh, you could see he knew he had been slighted and now they’d had to send for him. It made him cocky as all get out. He set himself in charge and told the men why they hadn’t got anywhere. It was plain Buckman Tull didn’t like this. Today, Louie said, they would stretch a line with every man and boy six poles apart. They would whoop at each other to keep the line straight and when some body found a sign, Buckman Tull would blow his horn. Buckman Tull sat up and nodded. That, you could tell, satisfied him. And if they fired off their rifles, Louie went on, that would mean they had found the young one.

  “Dead or alive,” he said, looking hard at Sayward.

  Wouldn’t they need every human they could get, Achsa put to him. You could see she hankered to go along. Every last man and boy, Louie told her. But not women and girls. They were no good in the woods. They only made it harder. If women found a sign, they would run ahead and screech for the young one till it would hide, if it were around. No, the place for a girl was women’s work at home.

  Achsa’s black eyes burned back at him. You could tell she reckoned it easy enough to be a man and go out in the woods whooping to keep in line and beating the bushes for a little tyke in a red dress that by this time the brush must have whipped halfways off her back. You did no whooping at women’s work. No, you stooped by the fire till your face singed and your leg muscles ached so folks got enough to eat. And you heard no horn. All you listened to was women’s talk from daylight to dark.

  The women hardly stirred foot outside the cabin, yet it hadn’t one who didn’t have her own notion why they hadn’t found little Sulie. Tod Wylder’s woman told about a boy called Chris that had been lost in the woods back in York state. This was in the olden times. When they found him, a panther had scratched leaves over what was left of him till it would get back that way again, and that’s why it took so long to find him. Then Sally Harbison was acquainted with a lost girl it took four years to find down in Virginia. An Indian had shot her for a deer and buried her so the whites wouldn’t find out. But her grave fell in and when they dug it up, they found the bullet in her breast bone.

  God help you, getting lost in the woods was a fearsome thing, old Granny MacWhirter said. She had toothless gums and on the back of her head a white knit cap that was all yellow with age and hair grease. She was lost once herself for forty-eight hours.

  “They’s only one word for it,” she bobbed her head, “and that’s lostness. Even a growed woman keeps a runnin’ and stumblin’ till she’s wore out. The smartest man gits fogged. He kain’t see straight any more. He goes crazy with bein’ lost, that’s what he does. If he comes on a trace he tromped every day, he don’t know it any more. Let him take it, and his craziness takes the wrong end. He thinks his own tracks an hour past are the tracks of some man he never seed or knowed. Let him hear man, woman or young’un a comin’, and he runs and hides. He ain’t a human no more. He’s nothin’ but a wild creater. Git him home and the whole world’s turned around end for end. The sun’s in the wrong place. It rises in the west and sets in the east. The North Star’s away down yonder.”

  She knew a case once in Kentucky pitiful to tell. A young boy was lost seventeen days. They found him digging up acorns like a squirrel with its paws and wilder than anything in the woods. He tried to bite the thumb off his own pappy and run off. Once he was home, they reckoned he would come back to his old life, but he never owned his own sister or mother. He wouldn’t sleep in a bed, and he dirtied the house like a hound. What end he came to she didn’t hear, but the doctors knew nothing to do for a case like that.

  “Sometimes,” Granny MacWhirter bobbed her cap and worked her lips and drew down her face at you, “it’s a good thing if you don’t find a lost young’un!”

  “Once they’re out too long,” Mrs. McFall said, wiping her eyes, “I’d as soon see them dead and buried. That’s easier to stand than this waitin’ around and never knowin’.”

  But Sayward reckoned different. She wouldn’t mind if their little Sulie snapped at them like a pet fox for a while, just so they found her alive. She always snapped some anyhow. A little more would be of no account. And sooner never find her than see her dead and buried. So long as you never knew, you could keep on hoping, if it was a score of years. Once you saw a body put underground, that was an end to it and to a little part inside of you that died, too.

  How many times the horn blew that day they didn’t know, for it was too far to hear. The men must have camped out somewhere in the woods that night. You could see this wasn’t going to be over and done with easy like Louie Scurrah thought. In the morning Achsa, Cora MacWhirter and some of the other big girls made the rounds of the improvements that had stock to tend. They fetched back food and bedding. The men did not come back that night either. But a few nights following, when they were all down on pallets on the floor like so many logs jammed s
ide by each at a rolling, they heard a whooping. Genny’s hands trembled so she could hardly pull on her shortgown. She thought they had Sulie.

  It was old Hugh McFall and Hen Giddings whooping before they got to the cabin so the women and young ones wouldn’t be scared. They had come back to see if the women folk were all right and the stock tended. They would take back some meal to the woods tomorrow. Sayward threw wood on the fire for light and got them rations. After their bellies were filled, they told what they knew.

  No, they hadn’t come on the young one yet. But that Louie Scurrah had a lynx eye in the woods. You needn’t be out long to know he’d been raised by the Delawares. Between him and Worth they had no need of Billy Harbison’s hounds. The first day Louie found spicewood chewed by some other creature than a deer, for it had teeth marks on the upper side of the twig. And Worth picked up a red thread torn off by a black haw.

  Oh, those two could follow where you could see nothing. And every sign they came on, the young one was further and further from home. They found where she ate wild cherries and whortleberries and where she crossed the runs. You could see her foot plain as could be in the sand. The third day they came on a nest of old leaves where she spent the night. She must have camped here more than one day, for her little feet had beaten a path in a heavy stand of timber. Now what do you reckon she had in there?

  Old Hugh, who was telling it, settled himself. He blinked solemn as an owl.

  You’d never guess it, he said. Louie Scurrah found it himself and had Buckman Tull blow his horn. When they all came up, he took them in and asked did they see anything. So help him, if there wasn’t a little bitty play house made of sticks in that big timber! It had bark on the roof and a doorway in the middle. Inside it had a bed of leaves and a block of wood for a trencher with a scrap off a young one’s dress for a fancy trencher cloth. It even had a nosegay of flowers. Anybody could see right off a mite of a girl had done this. Away back here in the wilderness, far from any human’s cabin, she had made herself a little house just like her pappy’s. You might reckon a big bearded fellow like Jake Tench wouldn’t mind looking at such. But when Worth raised up and called out to the woods, “Sulie! Sulie! Be you still alive?” Jake had to walk himself off in the bush.

  Genny couldn’t listen any more. She buried her head in the bed clothing. Achsa’s brown face twisted up in cruel lumps. Sayward turned hard to the fire because like Jake she couldn’t stop her eyes. “Sulie! Sulie! Be you still alive?” she called out in her mind with her father. Out there in the great woods, further than any of them had ever been except maybe one or two, their little Sulie had built a play house to recollect how she and Wyitt and Genny and Achsa had run and played together by this cabin. Wasn’t it just like her? Who but little Sulie would put a nosegay in a play house or make up a trencher with a fine red cloth? She was ever saying grand things that no one dared think of but she and her Granmam Powelly who lived in a story-and-a-half chipped-log house across the road from Granpappy’s gunsmith shop along the Conestoga.

  Sayward wished she could see for herself that little play house Sulie had made. She’d give all she had if Hugh McFall and Hen Giddings would take her back with them when they went. Those men would need a woman if ever they found Sulie. God knows that after all these days she would be a poor little bag of bones. She would need special waiting on. Men would not know how.

  But old Hugh McFall and Hen Giddings went back to the woods without saying a word, no not a word. They went alone at daylight, and that was the last the women saw of them for a week.

  Once upon a time Sayward wished she had a clock. Mrs. Covenhoven had one, and Portius Wheeler, the bound boy said, carried a pocket clock that struck the hours though it was no bigger around than his fist. A clock, Sayward reckoned, was almost human, for it had face, hands and sense to tell the time. No doubt it was a friendly face to have around and to hear it ticking sociably through the day and night. But a human could tell time the best, for some hours were fast and some were slow. Now you could tell nothing from Sayward’s face, but the hours of this last week were the longest in all her born days. This was a time in her life, she thought, she would never want to go back to and live again.

  You would expect, Genny said, that since they found Sulie’s play house, it wouldn’t take long till they found the little tyke herself. But it didn’t work out that way. No, it seemed the deil had done it like this just to work up their hopes and then let them fall through. The men said there was a plain track of Sulie going into that place but none going out. Like a pack of hounds trying to find the lost scent, they made bigger and bigger circles around, but the one cold track was all they could find. It was almost like an eagle had swooped down by her play house and carried her off, leaving never a sign on the ground.

  In worn-out bunches the men and boys straggled back. They said they had done all mortal man could do. They had tramped the woods from Dan to Bersheba. They had tramped it further than any young one could travel on its own shanks. They had raked it with a fine tooth comb. All they had found were horse tracks and a place where some strange Indians had made fire for the night.

  “The young’un’s a gone Josie,” Jude MacWhirter shook his shaggy head. “They ain’t no use a huntin’ what ain’t thar.”

  Now little Sulie’s bed up in the loft lay empty and lonesome again. Only Worth and Louie Scurrah had not come back. No, they had stuck to the woods like stubborn hounds that can’t be clubbed into giving up the scent. There wasn’t a fresh bone or dust of meal left in the cabin, but Sayward reckoned they could make out by their selves. The young ones could pick berries and fish the river with whang leather outlines. Wyitt could snare rabbits, and she could cut out the summer worms. Maybe, too, a body could take a rock and keep still long enough in the woods to call a turkey or kill a cock pheasant when he came strutting to his log.

  But the hungry young ones were glad enough to lay eyes on Louie Scurrah at the cabin door one morning. Flowers sprang out on Genny’s white cheeks though it would be an hour before she should taste the venison slung in a red summer hide on his back. No meat ever came in handier but Sayward begrudged him sorely that it wasn’t their Sulie he had fetched back. Never would she forgive him that.

  He said he and Worth had followed the tracks of the horseback Indians till they separated and petered out. Back on the Miami River he had to give up, but Worth wouldn’t come home. No, he said he couldn’t look at his cabin now with his littlest gone. Now that he was out this far, he would keep on beating the woods for her till he reached the grandaddy of rivers. Always had Worth wanted to lay eyes on that long river frozen in winter at one end while the other end has flowers and palm trees on either bank.

  “He said one man could keep his cabin in meat till he got back,” Louie told her.

  Sayward’s face was tight-lipped and cruel. She had not a word to say as she got a roast ready, for what could you say to a man who had beat the woods for your littlest sister that was likely dead, then fetched meat home for your living sisters and brother to eat. Oh, she would feed their empty bellies with smoking, hot flesh till their cheeks stuck out again, but it would be bitter enough meat to her. Dinner done she scrubbed what little she had to scrub and took herself off by her lonesome to the woods where she could work this thing off with her legs.

  Everywhere she went the trees stood around her like a great herd of dark beasts. Up and up shot the heavy butts of the live ones. Down and down every which way on the forest floor lay the thick rotting butts of the dead ones. Alive or dead, they were mostly grown over with moss. The light that came down here was dim and green. All day even in the cabin you lived in a green light. At night that changed. By day you looked paler than you really were. By night the fire gave you a ruddy glow. She always waited for night time when little Sulie had looked to be ailing. Likely it was only the woods light. By firelight she would be well again.

  Oh, it was a cruel thing for the trees to do this to a little girl who had never harmed them more th
an to shinny up their branches or swing on a creeper. Some claimed the trees were softhearted as humans. They said the pole of the cross had been cut from pine and that’s why the pine was always bleeding. The crosspiece, they claimed, was from quaking ash. The quaking ash has shook ever since, and never can it live now more than the thirty-three years of the Lord.

  Likely as not, Sayward told herself, a tree might tremble and bleed for the son of the Almighty who could heave it out by its roots with His breath or smack it down with His thunder. But neither pine nor quaking ash would give a hait for a poor little girl body wandering around lost in the woods crying for her sisters and pappy who never came to answer. And the birds and beasts would be as bad. Oh, she heard Genny sing a catch once where the birds and beasts covered up the lost Babes in the Woods with leaves. But that was just a pretty song. Any woodsy knew that the corbies would sit around in a ring waiting to pick out the poor little Babes in the Woods’s eyes. And if any beast covered them up with leaves it would be the panther so he could come back and munch at their starved little hams another day.

  Back along the Conestoga the trees seemed tame enough. Out here they were wild trees. Even in the daytime you could feel something was watching you. When you went through the woods it followed sly as a fox and stealthy as a Shawanee. Leave your cabin for a season and it would choke it around with brush. Likely you would find trees growing out of your bed when you got back.

  Once Sayward thought she heard voices, but it was only beetles in the air. The sound came stronger when she got to the riffles. Far off she swore she could hear Sulie calling. “Sairdy! Pappy!” her little voice came. Sayward knew it was no more than river water slopping and gargling over logs and stones, but it sounded real enough to make the sweat come and her knees to tremble.

  She let her legs go till she reckoned she had tramped far enough. First thing she knew she’d be lost like Sulie. Back along the river she couldn’t shut out those voices. Even the place was such as a little tyke like Sulie would hanker to play in. Fern grew like a garden all over the ground. You couldn’t walk without it feeling soft and smelling sweet against your leg. Yonder was a row of fat pines you didn’t often lay eyes on in this hardwood country.