The Sound of the Trees

by Robert Payne Gatewood

  The proprietor’s horse was tending to her stall in near darkness, shuffling her hindquarters through the soiled hay beneath her. When the boy came forward she looked up. He set down his rucksack and took her lean jaw in his hand. Even without the light he could see the sick hunger in her eyes. Her unclipped feet were sodden with manure. He stroked her and went across the cold dirt of the barn floor and brought back a tin bowl of water from the spigot and set it before her.

  He sat against the stall gate and listened to the countryside and smoked. He sat for nearly an hour and he seldom moved. Listening and smoking and remembering those sounds and smells that he once knew every day. The quiet insistence of the night and the wilderness was somehow comforting, with the raw smell of the horses and hay and worn-down leather rising above it all. After he rose and fondled the horse’s head, he flicked away the stub of his cigarette and went walking to the inn.

  The innkeeper came rubbing his eyes from the door behind the counter after the third ring of the bell. He squinted at the boy and twisted the ends of his glasses behind his ears and sighed.

  Time at last to come of age? he said. Find yourself whichever one you like. Go on up there. Them girls are always eager for a virgin. Always titterin on about you anyways. Not that I could rightly see why. Lookin at you don’t seem to do nobody no favors. He smirked at the boy and opened the shabby ledger and thumbed through the loose sheets of paper. I can’t read this, he said. I’ll just go on and call Janis down here. First poke in the weeds don’t make no difference but for a hole.

  I ain’t interested in no Janis, the boy said. I ain’t here for none of that. I need a room.

  The proprietor looked up from his ledger.

  Ah, he said after a moment. He squinted at the boy cunningly. Ain’t you in some trouble with the mayor? Something about tomorrow’s show, ain’t it?

  Tomorrow’s what?

  The hangin, boy. The goddamn show.

  The boy only looked down at his hands. Right, he said. The show.

  Far as I’ve heard you should be gone from here, the innkeeper said cheerfully. The fact you’re still hangin around is probably worth a good piece to the mayor I’m sure.

  The boy stared at the man awhile. Then he leaned down to the floor and produced a twenty-dollar bill from his boot heel and set it on the counter. The innkeeper smiled at the money and picked it up and pushed it into his shirt pocket. I’d say that’s about right, he said. He smiled again. Nothin personal, he said. You understand.

  The boy sidled up to the counter and rested his fists upon it. You understand you got a horse out back there?

  The innkeeper stayed studying the tablet for a room. Yeah, he said absently, I know it.

  I was just wonderin if you remembered. Cause it seems it might be the other way around.

  The innkeeper raised his head from the ledger and handed him a key. Room’s on the front right, he said. Upstairs.

  The boy tossed a plug of bills onto the counter. And that’s for the room, he said. Maybe you ought to think about usin some of it on that horse instead of on women that ain’t your wife.

  The proprietor slammed his palms down on the counter. Damnation, he said. I can’t even believe this. You tryin to tell me in one sentence you know more about horses and women than I do? You little son of a bitch.

  I ain’t talkin about women or horses. I don’t know what to tell you about them. What I’m talkin about is quittin, that’s all.

  The innkeeper glared at the boy a moment longer, then slammed the ledger shut and ripped down the glasses from his face and slung them on the counter and walked off for the door.

  Well thank God for that, he said.

  It was the same room he had been given when he first arrived in town. He closed the door behind him and turned the knob on the lamp. The room swelled with a soft yellow glow. The bedcovers were drawn tight and the tablets and pencils on the side desk were even to the thumb. He placed his rucksack on the footstool at the base of the bed and sat down and pulled off his boots. Then he dragged the chair to the window and looked down on the plaza.

  His eyes immediately fell on what he had not seen before, the skeletal structure of the hanging platform. There were no lights around the plaza that evening but he could see it in the moon glow. He watched it for a long time, the hard firm beams of it, the long and rigid shadows it cast upon the earth.

  Some time later, long into the night, his eyes opened to the sound of someone walking beneath the window. He righted himself in the chair he had slumped over in and saw the shape of a boot behind the hanging posts. He saw it alone and then stepping with its twin to eclipse the moonlight on the road, then he saw them turn and walk and slowly turn again. When the boots stopped and turned a third time, in profile against the pale blue light, he recognized the beard of the mayor.

  The mayor looked up at the wooden beams, then higher up into the sky, then at his feet. He walked again and stopped and turned and did the same pace over again. He pulled at his beard and took down his glasses from his face and wiped them on his shirtsleeve. The boy leaned forward and scrambled for his boots and pulled them on but before he rose again the mayor was walking swiftly away. The boy pressed his face to the window and looked out in quiet desperation to where the mayor’s shadow soon vanished and the moon fell behind the clouds and darkness settled once again to shape in a darker hue the gallows below.

  * * *

  He rose before dawn and walked down the cold floor of the hallway toward the bathroom with the faint moaning of whores already beginning or still finishing from the night before. He closed the door, a mournful click, and filled the tub with hot water. He stripped and stepped into the tub and shaved and washed himself and stepped once more from the water and out of the dark steamed room with a towel clinging to his sunken hips.

  He dressed in his newly purchased clothes and scrubbed the mud from his boots and sat on the edge of the bed and pulled them on. He combed back his hair with his hands and situated the new hat on his head, moving it this way and that until it sat straight. He rubbed his face and turned his hat around once more and buttoned his shirt to the middle of his chest and folded the sleeve cuffs over his forearms. Then he stood and crossed the room and regarded himself in the gilded mirror.

  He could have been a young man calling on his sweetheart. Or a soldier returned from war and on his way to a dinner where his family had gathered to receive his arrival. Or just a regular boy his age, dressed for the first day of his job at an office in town where they would pay for his schooling and room and board until he found a wife and a place for them to live. He pulled the brim of his hat lower still and he knew that he could have been a number of things but he knew also that he was none of them and that he never would be.

  He turned away from the mirror and went to the window and looked out. No one was walking the street. There was no visible sun nor moon and the town lay in a light so flat it seemed no light at all. He withdrew the knife from his rucksack and slid it in the small scabbard he’d tied to his leg just under the cuff of his boot. Then he took out the old man’s pistol. He held it in his hands and stared at it a long time.

  * * *

  When he came to Old 17 he veered the truck into a low ditch and cut off the engine. The cottonwoods along the bank of the road and out toward the Englishman’s house were thin and unknitted by winter’s coming but packed densely together, densely enough to cover his approach.

  He walked swiftly along the stream, a quarter mile away from the road. The sun made its first clean rise in the east, dashing red coins of light upon the trickling water he stepped through. He stumbled along the rocks and swathed through the brush with a low swishing sound when he emerged from the stream.

  After about a half an hour he stopped and listened. Voices rose from the distant road. He could tell they were at their card games already, shouting and drinking and calling for queens and diamonds.

  When he cleared out from the cottonwoods almost an hour later, he could see t
he back of the Englishman’s house cloistered by the light of the cold sun. He looked up and estimated it was nearly seven o’clock, five hours before the girl would be led from the prison house to the willow tree.

  He walked along some flattened logs and down into the soft earth and shuttled through an open field toward a copse of box elders rising dark and feathered behind the house. There he found a wide trunk of a tree that had been cut down and he glanced around for any sign of the Ralstons and finally sat. He undid his shirt pocket and rustled out a cigarette with his chilled and shaking fingers and lit it and began his watch.

  Not long after, he saw some of the guards emerge at the edges of the front yard. Then they turned and disappeared again. There were two of them from what he could make out and he smoked and watched them as the sun mounted a sky now loaded with a heavy basket of cloud. They would come into his view, then turn and fall toward the house again in slow repetition. He tugged his jacket around his neck and blew steady streams of smoke at his feet. He knew the Englishman would come out sometime. He waited. His gun was tucked to his side and after a while he took it from his belt and ran his fingers over the steel barrel, pointing it and bringing it down and flipping it on the ground by his side. He lit another cigarette and inspected the yard.

  Along the northern edge of the property stood a jagged row of acacia which appeared at some point to have been subject to a firestorm. The thin trunks of the trees corded one another and their blackened limbs lay sunken and tangled. They stretched out all the way past the water well behind the house and as he waited he listened to the wind tearing through the old branches.

  An hour of waiting soon became two and then three. The two men in the front of the house kept up their pacing all morning long, pausing only to exchange a few words or pass cigarettes. They had long-barreled rifles slung over their shoulders and they held the stocks in the cups of their hands.

  The sun rose higher yet, splitting the clouds and bringing not heat but simply a bright glare that shed everything around him of its shadow. The house stood cold and bare in the white wash of light. The guards winced and pulled their hats low. Nothing moved save those men and the failing limbs of the acacia which whined and clattered in the periodic gales of wind and the boy knew he could not wait any longer.

  Just as he began to rise from the tree trunk he heard a door open in the front of the house. He leaned forward into a squat. The Englishman was down in the yard. The Ralstons fell back out of view. He could hear muffled voices and a sharp command upon which the guards reappeared together at the edge of the yard. They sat against a fence pole facing out at the road and went to smoking and shaking their heads.

  The Englishman’s hands were held loosely behind his back as he strolled toward the back of the house. He wore a dark blue suit with the waistcoat slung over his shoulders. Before he saw if the Englishman was wearing a weapon himself, the boy was up and crossing through the field and into the trees.

  He stepped over the husks of bark and twigs, gliding swiftly with his knife raised out of his boot and his pistol resituated in his belt. Halfway to the house he looked up. The guards were still sitting with their backs to him, watching the road. The Englishman was lowering the bucket into the well, standing with one hand in his pocket while the other moved the wheel crank. The boy pressed on. When he was parallel with the Englishman he lightened his steps. At last he stood silent and listened for the guards. There was nothing save the grind of the wheel crank and the creak of the bucket. He waited in hopes that the Englishman would lower his head to watch after the bucket, and a moment later he did.

  As the boy came forward a strong wind made the Englishman look up, but before he could turn or speak the boy had his hand clenched over his mouth and the knife poised at his throat. For a moment the Englishman struggled, but when the blade of the knife exacted itself against his powdered skin he withdrew.

  The boy spoke only once, saying, Walk out there.

  They went slowly at first along the trees and then with the boy’s elbow against the Englishman’s back they upstepped toward the box elders. The boy looked back and saw the two Ralston brothers facing each other, one holding a lit match and the other cupping his hands around it. They did not see the two figures walking out through the blazing field nor did they look up again until the boy had him well inside the grove.

  He lowered the Englishman to the tree stump. The Englishman’s hands trembled by his sides but his face appeared unmoved. The boy told him he would kill him right there if he tried to call out. He asked the Englishman if he understood and the Englishman tilted his head and smiled under the boy’s hand. The boy took the blade from his neck and took away his hand from his face and came around and stood facing him. He drew the pistol from his belt and tapped it against the Englishman’s head.

  Here we are again, the Englishman said calmly. Wasting our time on a little black whore.

  The boy brought down the chamber of the gun against the side of his face. The Englishman fell back against the trunk and smiled, exposing his bloodstained teeth. Blood also ran from the Englishman’s ear, but he only eased himself back on the stump and watched the boy. This will not save her, he said blandly. Or you. What do you think? Do you think you are a revolutionary? Such men no longer exist. Did you truly think that?

  No, the boy said. I don’t. And this ain’t no revolt.

  Ah. The Englishman smiled obliquely and shook his head. Then what, young monument of justice, is it?

  It’s a reckoning.

  The Englishman went mute. He was looking into the eyes of the boy now, no longer eyes but shells of eyes.

  The boy raised the pistol. The Englishman saw it come up from the boy’s waist to his own face. He watched the boy but he was no longer smiling.

  The reports from the pistol clipped twice then vanished into the wide empty country. The wind spun up, plunging out of the trees and across the field. The body of the Englishman jerked back with the force of the bullets, then went limp to the ground. The boy leaned down and put a hand upon him and tore off the golden chevron from the dead man’s waistcoat.

  Then he was going across the field with the nubs of old wheat stalks brushing his knees. Down from the mountains the terraced light raced across the valley. He did not look across the field to see if the Ralstons saw him but went headlong toward the stream with his breath rattling out of his chest. He fumbled with the pin as he went and clamped it across the front of his jacket. He listened to his feet splashing through the water and he held his hat down against the wind.

  * * *

  When he reached the truck nothing had altered except for a new armada of clouds that had once again stolen the light from the sky. He leaned on the hood to catch his wind and looked down the road. He saw dust swirling and the flat red line at which the road slipped from sight. He climbed up in the cab and cranked the engine. The truck sputtered under his heavy foot and his body bounced up and down as he spun the truck out of the ditch and onto the road. Then he shoved the gearshift higher and sped off toward the town.

  When the sun came clean he craned his neck out the window and looked up. He knew he had cut it close but there was time yet. It was not much past eleven from all he could tell. He moved the truck into fourth gear, clinging to the wheel as if it alone were the force behind his driving. He fumbled once, knocking the gearshift down to third, and the truck sputtered and died.

  When he had the truck moving again he saw the thoroughfare coming into sight. He could make out the assembly already gathered around the tree. People were crowded all the way around the perimeter of the plaza, standing on porch steps, crouched in the road. There were no children to be seen but a few who clung to their fathers’ legs and pressed their faces into their pants. He could not see the scaffolding for the tree branches but he saw the mayor standing by and he saw his hand raised decisively and he saw his hand drop.

  He slammed hard on the gas pedal. As he came to the plaza rim the boy was met by a maze of cars and trucks par
ked on the road and the road’s edge and in the grass. They offered no clear path through, as though some malevolent metal garrison had been set against him. He swerved the wheel of the truck and braked and wove his way through, clipping bumpers and doors and bumping the pistol off the seat. When he was nearly through the frozen traffic the truck hit the front wheel of a remaining car and jerked back and died again.

  It wheezed when he turned the key and he cranked the engine again and more viciously, whatever curses from his lips lost in the engine’s surge. When it caught he put the gear forward and drove into the open road. As he came abreast of the willow tree he slowed the truck and leaned across the seat and squinted against the light, reaching blindly to the floor for his gun. Some of the people turned at the sound of his truck but their eyes quickly returned to the tree.

  He rode on to the left and steered the truck around. He could see the crowd clearly now. All seemed subject to the same torpid motion. The faces lolling in the cloudlight. The eyes going to slits, then opening wide. Hands of women going to their mouths. The men lowering their hats from their heads. He came around. He saw the mayor standing with a knife at his side. His face seemed drained of any thought at all.

  The boy pressed down on the brake and pitched open the door and spilled his body over the hood. When he regained his balance and looked up he saw the wooden platform. There were no shoes on her feet and the first thing he saw was that the child-pink paint upon her toes matched that of her fingers. Then he saw the silver amulet glistening faintly from the caved pool of her throat.

  One of her feet kicked briefly. He was yet thirty yards from her. Her color had already blanched and was going paler yet. Nothing could transport him to her side fast enough, and yet there she was.