The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  Bridges tipped his hat to her. “You are most kind. Sunday, then.”

  As he picked his way up the steep slope behind the village, Bridges reproached himself for his failings of the day. Some captain of industry he was, letting himself be pushed around by subordinates and then trotting off on such a dubious errand. He hadn’t even made it down to the village itself, spending his time instead on a bench in a hilltop cemetery spilling his sorrows to a complete stranger! Aunt Marie, indeed. If he wanted to emulate Mr. Crecelius, he needed to toughen up.

  Soon enough, he reached level ground and ALM land. His last few miles would be ridden in darkness, and he wanted to make the main road by dusk. But he also wanted to check on the sawyers and give them a stern look, if nothing else, to show that he had been by. So he veered east a little, toward the river, listening for the sound of their saws.

  Silence.

  He wasn’t sure whether to be angry or concerned but urged his horse ahead faster. If he found them loafing, he would fire them on the spot. If there had been an accident—well, he would deal with that.

  Movement in the distance. It was the teamster, afoot, running toward him, arms flailing. Bridges reined up and waited for him to approach.

  “Them boys that are working over toward the shut-ins,” the teamster said, bent over and breathing hard.

  “Yes.”

  “George Washington Jent, he’s lived around here all his life.” The teamster straightened up and waved his arm as if to encompass the whole countryside. “He’s been all over these woods for years.”

  “Yes.” Impatience laced through Bridges voice.

  “He swears up and down that he’s run across a vein of silver down there.”

  Chapter 7

  Adam Turner awoke with an erection, as he often did, and lay in the dark, thinking. It would be light soon; he could hear the birds. Penelope was still asleep.

  Should he go now, or wait till later? Ever since those timber cutters had found a vein of silver upriver, Adam had been determined to locate the same on Daybreak land. During the harvest there had been little time for treasure hunting, but now in the early winter he had been going out nearly every day. He kept careful records of every location he had tried and was sure his discovery would come soon.

  Penelope didn’t like it. She thought he was wasting his time when the community had other needs, so Adam didn’t talk about where he was going or what he was doing. Good reason to get up now and go out, so he’d be back in time for chores, rather than waiting till later when his absence was more noticeable.

  But the bed was warm, and he had the notion of a new poem to write if only he could put his mind to it for a few minutes. His sheaf of poems grew ever larger, and one of these days he would release them to the public. What was it they called Whitcomb Riley? The Hoosier Poet. He would become the same, the Missouri Poet or the Ozarks Poet, maybe some other name, something more alliterative. Missouri Muse? No, a muse was the inspiration, not the poet. The Ozark Oracle, perhaps. That wasn’t quite right either, but he’d think about that later. First to the poem.

  Penelope stirred and rolled toward him, her nose against his shoulder. A fine woman, someone a lot of men would have overlooked because of her plain features and awkward gait—from birth her hips had never joined right, and even today she walked with a stiff-legged swing—but she was sensible, witty, and more agile in bed than anyone could imagine. They’d not produced any children, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. They’d even talked about taking in an orphan to help with the work, a good enough idea as long as it didn’t substitute for getting a child the old-fashioned way. Fortunately, Penelope’s inclinations in that regard seemed as strong as his.

  So the prospecting and the poem could wait. He rolled toward her and placed her hand on his member. “Yoo hoo,” he said softly. “Wake up.”

  She roused a little more and gave him a squeeze as if to confirm that he was real. “All right,” she said. She rolled onto her back and groped for the jar of sweet-smelling cream she kept on the bedside table, and in a moment his proud stiffness was fragrant and slick. He moved atop her.

  Two days earlier, he had come across that odd preacher who had moved in down the road. He was out in the woods—their woods—hunched over a device that seemed to be leading him along an unseen, winding path. He had straightened up at the sound of Adam’s approach.

  “Where am I?” he said.

  As if you don’t know, Adam would have said to anyone else, but this man was a preacher, after all, and he wore such a look of bewilderment on his face that Adam had to believe him. “You’re on Daybreak Ridge,” he said.

  “Oh my,” said the preacher. “I’ve wandered far.” He extended his hand. “Barton Braswell is the name. I’m the one who’s started a church down the road.”

  “Adam Turner. I’ve seen your sign.” Out of politeness, he held back from saying, “your strange and confusing sign.” But they’d talked about it enough. “Church of the Holy Word” painted in tall capitals on the front of Masterson’s barn, and beneath it “The Lord’s Barn” in letters slightly smaller. What kind of church met in a barn? A few of the colonists had strolled down last Sunday and reported the preaching to be vigorous but nonspecific, the hymn-singing better than most, the congregants sitting on plank benches in the freshly-swept hay floor of Masterson’s barn.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Turner. You’re from Daybreak?”

  “Born and raised.”

  “I’ve read about you all. Must have been interesting, growing up inside a great social experiment like that.”

  “Like growing up anywhere, I suppose. You don’t really notice the conditions you grow up in, just accept them as they are.”

  Braswell looked down at the device in his hand, a two-foot polished brass tube with a crank on one end and a long coil on the other, from which dangled something like a plumb-bob. “I was trying to follow my doodlebug, and I guess it led me onto your land. I apologize.”

  “That’s all right. Doodlebug, you say?”

  “Yes, sir.” He held it up. “It’s electrical. Made in Germany. They built it to witch water, but turns out it can find precious metals, too, and copper. Anything conductive.” He frowned. “You have to be conductive to feel it right. I’m not sure I’m conductive enough.”

  “Let me try.” Adam reached for it but Braswell held back, dubious. After a moment, he relented and handed it over.

  The device was surprisingly heavy, the metal cool and shiny, He watched the plumb-bob dance at the end of the coil.

  “All right. Now what?”

  “Turn the crank a little,” Braswell said.

  He did, half a turn, and the tingling that coursed through his forearm almost made him drop it.

  “Hold it out from you,” Braswell advised. “Follow the sensations.”

  Adam didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he did as he was told, and in a few minutes the two of them were pacing through the woods in a slow zigzag as Adam followed the tingling across the ridge. Twice the plumb-bob seemed to dip lower; “Probably just a vein of water,” Braswell said, but Adam noted the locations for future investigation anyway.

  By the end of that outing, he had bought the doodlebug, for three dollars taken from the family jar, and since then it had been sitting out in the tool shed while Adam waited for the next opportunity to take it to the woods for a longer tryout. He needed to find something of value before Penelope noticed the money missing, or else he would get what-for. So that settled it. He would write his poem, and then slip out to the ridge with his doodlebug and his shovel, and he would find that vein of silver, the one he knew had to be there, for if those hound dogs upriver could find one by mere stumbling, surely he could do the same with his scientific approach. And it would be his vein, his by right of discovery, although he would share the proceeds with Daybreak, of course. He believed in the common ownership and sharing, but something like this, where he had gone out on his own initiative, should stand outsid
e the usual accounting.

  All these thoughts about silver, poetry, the strange preacher, and the three dollars missing from the family jar, had distracted him, and he felt himself wilting. He willed himself back to the moment and turned his attention to Penelope’s warm thighs, her breasts and body beneath him, and the sensation of her womanly center that drew him in like the pull of a current in a stream. He plunged into that current, and in the moment of release thought of the poem he would write, and the vein he would find, and the joy it would give Penelope when he brought it home, a nugget as big as his hand, he imagined, and he knew he was conductive, conductive indeed, and that everything would be all right.

  Chapter 8

  December 1887

  Josephine noticed it first, which was only to be expected since she went to the riverbank almost every day to gather her thoughts or whatever she did, so when she showed up at Newton’s door in the dim light of a December morning, he knew not to ask questions. “You need to look at this,” she said, then turned and walked up the road.

  Newton threw on his coat, chased after her, then slowed to a walk, not wanting to seem inappropriate. He was so rarely alone with his half-sister that he hardly knew how to act. He caught sight of Charley Pettibone, coming back from his habitual morning trip to the barn to check on the horses, and waved him over. He gestured toward Josephine, disappearing up the road toward the ford.

  “She says she has something to show us,” Newton said. “Apparently it’s important.”

  Charley wiped his hand across his face. “That gal makes me nervous,” he said. “Always has, even when she was just a little squeak.” He wiped his face again. “Oh, well.” They started up the road trying to match Josephine’s brisk pace.

  At the riverbank her cause for concern was obvious. The river, normally eighty feet wide at the ford, had slowed to a shallow trickle, narrow enough to step across. In the exposed mud flats, fish wallowed and flopped. Newton could see them churning for space in the few deep holes where water still remained.

  “River’s gone,” Josephine said simply. “It’s those bastards upriver. The company.”

  Newton knew who she meant without her spelling it out. Sometime in the fall, they had stopped using “American Lumber and Minerals” or even “ALM” and simply started calling it “the company.” And he knew she was right.

  “I thought it looked low when I crossed last night,” Charley said. “Didn’t think much about it.”

  “I’m glad you’re here to see this, Charley,” she said. “Isn’t it some sort of crime to cut off people’s water?”

  Charley scratched his head. “I can’t rightly say. I’ll need to look into it. This ain’t an everyday occurrence.”

  “I should think not.” Josephine’s tone was matter of fact. “This place is going to stink to high heaven by tomorrow.” She turned to Newton and addressed him for the first time. “We should take your mother along. She knows how to talk to these louts.”

  As Josephine turned toward the village, leaving him and Charley in her wake, Newton reflected how her look and tone reminded him of his mother, as if Josephine was turning into Charlotte Turner without intention or actual family connection. Except for the language, of course; he had never heard his mother say a vulgar word.

  They hurried through breakfast and returned to the riverbank, this time accompanied by everyone else in the village. On the other side, where the road came down to the ford, an old couple emerged. It was Dathan, the former slave, and his Indian wife Cedeh, inhabitants of the valley before there was a colony, members of Daybreak who chose not to live in the village but up on the ridgetop where Cedeh’s people had once had their homes. They were pulling a handcart, and Newton watched in puzzlement as they clambered down the bank into the riverbed. They left the cart on the rocky bottom of the ford and ventured out into the mud, stopping at the first waterhole they reached.

  “Of course,” Charlotte murmured. “We should have thought of that. Charley, your boys should help them. They’re going to harvest those fish.”

  “Ain’t no way we can eat all those fish before they go bad,” Charley said. But he gestured at his sons to descend into the riverbed.

  “I doubt if she’s planning to cook them right now,” Charlotte said. “She’ll probably dry them or smoke them.”

  Sarah Wickman appeared at Newton’s elbow, a kitchen knife in her hand. She stepped out into the muddy bottom, and turned back to those gathered on dry ground. “There aren’t many who can say they walked all the way across the river.” Several villagers walked in to join her, or ran to the village to fetch their own kitchen tools and buckets.

  Charlotte turned to Newton, Charley, and Josephine. “There’s the communal spirit for you. With everyone pitching in, they’ll have all those fish gutted and boned by noon.”

  “Them fish guts will start stinking to high heaven by tomorrow,” Charley muttered. “Pray for cold weather.”

  “Why, Charley! Aren’t you just the image of cheerfulness!” Charlotte laughed. “Do you think those fish weren’t going to smell with their guts still in them? I’m going to start calling you ‘Cheerful Charley’ from now on.”

  Charley gave Newton a rueful look. “Your mama only abuses me because she likes me so much.”

  Charlotte headed up the hill, setting a quick pace for the group’s journey toward the company. “Better get a move on, Cheerful Charley.”

  They climbed the hill quickly, Charlotte and Josephine refusing to stop for breath along the way as if to demonstrate their capacities to the men, though by the time they reached the top they all stopped by unspoken consent and took a rest.

  All around the ridgetop were the holes dug by Adam in his search for silver. Charlotte’s lips pursed as she took in the scene. Charley averted his eyes, and even Josephine for once had the discretion not to say anything. But Newton felt embarrassed on his brother’s behalf. At least the damn fool had the sense to fill in a hole once he’d given up on it, but the assortment of fill-ins and settled mounds made the ridge look as if it had been shelled at some time in the past. Adam’s new obsession was an open secret around Daybreak, although he appeared to think that no one noticed him heading to the mountain with a pick and his gadget tucked under his arm, returning muddy in the late morning with feigned nonchalance. Every man to his own foolishness.

  They left Adam’s handiwork behind and kept walking. When they crossed into company property, they knew it immediately—the logged-off landscape, dotted with piles of waste wood and underbrush, stretched out in front of them as far as they could see. Some of the piles had been burned.

  Charley shaded his eyes and peered into the distance. “Sure get the long view, with all the wood cut. I think that’s the Fredericktown road over there. Must be two miles off.”

  They followed the wagon trails north until they crossed a more heavily used path, trenched with ruts that made walking difficult, and headed toward the river.

  “This settles my vote as to selling them our timberland,” Charlotte said. “This is the damnedest mess I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’ll grow back,” Newton said. “Trees grow back. Most of this was junk oaks anyway.” But his words sounded hollow even to himself, and he said no more.

  The road ended at a cluster of encampments on the edge of the bluff overlooking the river, a jumble of tents and two raw-lumber buildings that looked like they could blow into the valley with the next high wind. Josephine walked to the larger of the two buildings and pushed open the door. Charlotte followed her in; Newton and Charley stopped in the doorway.

  Inside, two men sat at a table in the center of the room, bent over a ledger book. At a smaller table by the cabin’s only window, a man sat with his back to them, facing the light from the window, with rows of rock samples spread out before him. A fourth man stood by the woodstove.

  The two at the central table were J. M. Bridges and his associate, Mason. They stood as the women entered.

  “What have you done
with our river, Mr. Bridges?” Josephine demanded.

  “Ladies!” Bridges cast a glance at Mason and exclaimed. “Our neighbors from the south. So good to see you.” He turned to Charlotte. “Madam, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  “Charlotte Turner, Mr. Bridges. I met you and Mr. Mason when you came to speak to us, but didn’t linger for a conversation.” They shook hands. “I believe you know my son Newton, and this is another member of our community, Charley Pettibone. Charley is the deputy sheriff for these parts.” Charley and Newton tipped their hats.

  “And what have you done with our river?” Josephine repeated.

  “Miss Mercadier, I was getting to that,” Bridges said. “Your river—our river—is fine and dandy. We’re just putting it to work a little. Come and see.”

  He reached for the coat rack, then stopped. “I forget myself. May I introduce Dr. Kessler, the eminent geologist. We brought him down from Chicago.” The man at the other table kept his head bent over his work, but waved a hand in the air. “And this is Mr. Yancey, of the local area.” The man at the woodstove, broad and imposing with folded arms, nodded to the group without speaking.

  “Mr. Yancey,” Charlotte said, inclining her chin. Bridges snatched down his overcoat and led them outside. Yancey and Kessler stayed where they were.

  Bridges turned back to them. “Gentlemen, will you join us?”

  “What? Oh. Yes, of course,” Kessler said, looking up from his specimens. He had thin gray hair, bald on top but long in back, and wore a pair of magnifiers on his eyes that made him look like a fish. “I could use a little air.”

  “Not me,” Yancey said. “I’ll be riding out before long, and I want to warm up my hind end some more.”

  “Up to you,” said Bridges. He led the way down the slope to a level spot where they could look down into the river valley. “Here’s your river.”

  Below they could see a rock dam, the same color as the red granite of the river rocks, four feet wide at the top and forty feet above the water’s surface. Behind the dam, a lake was building up. As they watched they could see the water inch upward.