Tree by Leaf

by Cynthia Voigt

  She didn’t look at herself in the bathroom mirror. They had buried Mr. Small and Mr. Twohey yesterday. Nobody from the Point had gone to the service, or to the little graveyard, it wouldn’t have been proper. But even if it had been proper, Clothilde couldn’t have gone, knowing what she knew. She braided her hair tight, so tight it hurt her scalp. It should never have come asking her, that Voice. And the man in the boathouse, she didn’t know what was due to happen to him.

  She pulled on a sweater over her blouse and laced her shoes up impatiently. She wanted to get out of her room and out of the house, to get away. She wasn’t hungry. Her stomach was a flat board of nonhunger; she couldn’t even remember what hunger felt like. If Mother tried to make her eat something—and she would—Clothilde might just be sick. There wasn’t any way Mother could force her to open her mouth, put a spoon into it, and swallow. She better not try, Clothilde thought, clattering down the steep stairs.

  She had slept late. It was after nine o’clock. Mother was at the kitchen sink, washing her hands. Dierdre sat unhappily at the table, her face newly scrubbed, her hair in French braids, tears hanging from her eyelashes. Clothilde didn’t sit down.

  “You’re too late. I was going to make a chowder, but there won’t be another low tide until late evening,” Mother said, her voice muffled by running water, and because she was speaking with her back to Clothilde.

  All Clothilde could have said about that was I’m sorry, so she didn’t say anything. “What’s wrong?” she asked Dierdre.

  “I don’t know what we’ll eat for supper,” Dierdre said. At the thought, her eyes filled with tears again, and the tears spilled over. “Mother won’t tell me.”

  Why wouldn’t Mother tell her? And why did Dierdre have to cry about something that hadn’t even happened yet? “We’ve got bacon, there’s fried bread and bacon. You like that,” she reminded her little sister.

  Dierdre’s fresh dress and little white pinafore, and hair subdued into stiff braids, and her scrubbed face—all looked as if she were going to go to a tea party. But Dierdre wasn’t going to a tea party. What was she supposed to do with her day, dressed like that? Her eyes looked big and sad, “I wanted chowder,” she said. “Mother said. With crispy things.”

  Dierdre’s got down from her chair and stood beside Clothilde, glaring at Mother. Her little head came no further than Clothilde’s hip. Clothilde didn’t know what Dierdre expected her to be able to do—you couldn’t dig clams except at low tide. It just wasn’t possible. But she did know what Dierdre wanted, what Dierdre always wanted. When Dierdre turned around and buried her face in Clothilde’s skirt, reaching her arms around Clothilde’s legs, Clothilde let her two hands stroke Dierdre’s back. Mother stayed at the sink, washing away.

  When Mother turned around it was only to hold her hands out to Clothilde. The skin was red with scrubbing, the nails were broken short with garden work. “Just look at them,” Mother said, as if she was asking Clothilde to look at a crooked seam or some other bad piece of work.

  Clothilde looked at the hands. They looked strong, capable, clever.

  “And look at me,” Mother said.

  Clothilde did. Mother’s cheeks were pink from being outside in the wind, and her face was getting brown. Her blue eyes with their dark lashes—Mother looked lost, lost and afraid.

  Behind her eyes, Mother looked as if she was lost in some strange country, where nobody could understand what she was saying, and she couldn’t understand where she was supposed to try to go. She looked as if she were a little child who didn’t know what to do and was holding her hand out—but there was nobody there to take her hand.

  “I look like some working woman,” Mother said.

  What did Mother expect to look like? After all, she did work. Clothilde felt as if everything was her fault, but it wasn’t.

  “He didn’t marry you because you were a lady,” she said to her mother. “He married you because you weren’t. If he’d wanted to marry someone—like the aunts—there were plenty of them in Manfield.”

  Mother put her hands down and gathered herself up straight. She was going to reprimand Clothilde, the way a lady should. Dierdre went to take Mother’s hand, and stand glaring at Clothilde.

  Clothilde didn’t let her mother speak. “There’s going to be money, he told me yesterday. He hired lawyers, because Grandfather has to pay the trust money. He didn’t want to do that, but he did it for you. You don’t know what he wants,” Clothilde told her mother, right to her face.

  She didn’t wait to hear anything Mother had to say. She ran out of the kitchen and across the long grass down to the beach. She didn’t know why she’d talked that way to her mother, and she didn’t want to think about it. And she meant what she said, she meant every word.

  The tide was up. Waves blew sideways across the cove. The water was dark blue, and the grainy sand sparkled. The rocks she approached, running along the curve of the beach, running into the wind, shone gray and brown. Clouds—great masses of high clouds—blew across the deep blue sky. Clothilde slowed to a walk, looking around her. The bright wind blew over everything. It was a wind from the east, where the war had been. When one of the clouds covered the sun, the wind blew its shadow across the beach and out over the water.

  Anger blew through her like a shadow. Mother could have told them, but she never had. Mother must have known for months what had happened to the man’s face, but she hadn’t told Clothilde. She’d never said, either, that Grandfather didn’t want them at his house, or that the aunts didn’t like them. Clothilde had had to learn that for herself. Clothilde remembered how she had gradually figured it out, not wanting to be hearing and seeing all the little clues, about the money troubles. It was as if Mother put things off until the last minute, hoping something would happen. Mother just didn’tdo anything.

  Clothilde stopped dead in her tracks beside the rocks. Her thoughts rose like rocks before her.She did things—and now look at the mess she had made. Besides, if you thought about it, all the things she’d done were selfish, all the things she asked for. No wonder she had caused so much trouble. She knew she had caused it, even if nobody else did. She had no business being angry at Mother when her own heart was so bad.

  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, a
s 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.

  Chapter 15

  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 cam
e 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—”