For she had truly loved him69
And tried to claim70 him in her way71,72
Where oaken hearts do gather
67 It’s interesting that she’s in the woods again here, since she had left him there? Didn’t she go home? –Dynamum
68 How is she still being called fair? –BarrowBoy
69 It’s interesting that the song tells us this, since otherwise you’d think she’s monstrous. I mean, her actions are still monstrous, but somehow it’s better if they’re done out of love?–Rhiannononymous
70 Some versions say “keep” instead of claim. –BonnieLass67
71 This “in her way” does a lot of work. –Rhiannononymous
72 Some versions say “and hoped he’d prove his love to her,” which would harken back to whatever proof she was demanding of him earlier. –BonnieLass67
And Ellen’s sisters bowed their heads73
“There’s no good that can follow
A man met moonlight ‘neath the bridge
Where oaken hearts do gather”
73 greek chorus back for an encore of their greatest hit, “i told you so.” –HangThaDJ
The villagers with torches went74,75
To rid their woods of danger76,77
There to avenge the boy they’d hung78
Where oaken hearts do gather
74 This verse and the two above it and one below it are often sung in a different order. –BonnieLass67
75 i’m anti-villagers with torches and pitchforks generally. –HangThaDJ
76 They’re going to burn the oak trees. William must have given good directions before they hung him, if they think they know which specific trees to burn. –Rhiannononymous
> Spoiler: for real, they chopped and burned ALL the oak trees they could find. Jenny’s older sisters say it was barbarous, and I’ve seen the result myself. Everything is new growth from the past forty years since they stopped that practice, but you can see the damage done. –HenryMartyn
77 I wonder what the actual danger is that they think they’re protecting against. Have they had other men stolen this way? I guess if you let it happen once, it could happen more… –Dynamum
–BarrowBoy marked this as a stretch–
> Argh. Go stretch someone else. I’m just saying we’ve all got our eyes on Ellen, but what do her sisters do all day other than watch? And @HenryMartyn, what do their town records say about stolen people? –Dynamum
>Jenny says they lost all their old birth and death records in a fire they lost control of. –HenryMartyn
78 so they felt like they had to hang poor william, but then they go out and avenge him for the wrong ellen did him? there’s some misdirected anger here. –HangThaDJ
But neath the bridge they saw no trace79
Nor down the steep embankment80
And none could ever find the place81
Where oaken hearts do gather82
79 Beneath the bridge they saw no trees or they couldn’t find Ellen? It’s unclear. –Rhiannononymous
80 The steep embankment was another specific geographic clue that Dr. Rydell had hoped to find. –HenryMartyn
>Can confirm: it’s here! The bridge goes over what’s now a sort of dry gully, but the banks are steep. And, cool thing! I don’t know whether it’s the stone or the moss or some mineral or what, but I guess something’s leaching into the ground here that’s tinting the leaves red near the bridge. I wonder if Dr. Rydell ever got to see this. –HenryMartyn
81 The only rhyme in the whole ballad, for what it’s worth. –Rhiannononymous
>Some early variants have the third line as “and none could find poor William’s heart.” It’s possible that the line was original and this change came later, since it’s odd to have a single rhyming line. –BonnieLass67
>If they couldn’t find William’s heart, does that mean there was one old tree that the villagers didn’t manage to find? –Dynamum
>I don’t think @HenryMartyn can search the whole forest. –BarrowBoy
>fun fact! a forest has a traditional legal definition as land owned by the sovereign and set aside as a hunting ground. –HangThaDJ
>He can’t search the whole woods, then. –BarrowBoy
82 I don’t know why I’m only thinking of this like fifteen verses in, but if you frame a song around oaks gathering, isn’t the opposite of that to disperse? Maybe they couldn’t find them because they sometimes go elsewhere. Maybe this whole song exists to tell you what to do if this particular thing starts happening to the oaks near you. That could be why it’s tall bridge and fall’s bridge etc too, and different names=different aliases. Maybe there’s a rotation and this town tried harder to get the warning out and protect themselves. –Dynamum
–BarrowBoy marked this as a stretch–
Long winter passed then came the thaw83,84
That set springtime a-budding
A sapling grew from William’s grave85
Where oaken hearts do gather
83 The Dead turned this verse to major instead of minor. –HolyGreil
84 The Kingston Trio ended with this verse. –BonnieLass67
85 Are we not even going to talk about this sapling thing? –Dynamum
>I found a grave that I think is William Butcher’s, though the stone is very worn and it’s hard to tell. There’s no tree, but I took the next verse to mean that the sapling that grew at the grave was cut down too. –HenryMartyn
And every spring86 the villagers
To the woods bring torch and axe
To cut short every sapling grown87,88
Where oaken hearts do gather
86 And this verse holds Dr. Rydell’s last two big clues! “Every spring” suggested that they might have some sort of village tradition that was still passed down, even if they didn’t know why anymore. On his blog he said the village he found, Gall, had an annual spring festival with a parade and bonfire. –HenryMartyn
87 Rydell had speculated that the village he was looking for would be near a woods full of mature oaks (keeping in mind that there are plenty of places where woods have been cut back over the centuries, so it wasn’t necessarily there to find at all; he looked at places that had been forested in earlier times as well). Then he realized what this verse implied. Instead of looking for a woods full of oaks, he wanted to go looking for a woods that was, unusually, missing its oaks, under the assumption that the village had kept cutting them down. So now I can personally confirm the woods near Gall is full of old hornbeams and ash trees and the like, but almost no oaks at all. The oaks that are here are younger, which matches up with recent changes to the village’s festival. It used to involve cutting down all the oaks at the end of the summer and burning them in a bonfire, but conservationists argued that was wasteful and poor management, and they stopped doing it in the 1970s. I got here too late for this year’s fest, but apparently now they just do a symbolic burning of a single tree they’ve chopped down for the purpose. –HenryMartyn
–BonnieLass67 marked this as cool stuff–
88 Interesting that this accounts for the saplings in the woods, but not the one at William’s grave. Did they cut that one down or leave it? –Rhiannononymous
>I was asking about that sapling too! –Dynamum
>There’s one broadside that includes a verse that may answer your question. “And when that day the villagers/uprooted William’s sapling/a keening cry was heard by all/where oaken hearts do gather” –BonnieLass67
>Why wasn’t that one generally included? That’s great. –Rhiannononymous
> Child may not have liked the sourcing. In that one version, it replaced the big Revenge On the Trees verse, which was definitely original. –BonnieLass67
Still sometimes89 when the wind blow cold
And strips red leaves90 from branches
Fair Ellen takes91 another love92
Where oaken hearts do gather93
89 Some early versions say “somewhere” instead of “sometimes.” Somewhere doesn�
��t make as much sense, since presumably the where is known, even if the trees weren’t found. –BonnieLass67
> That “somewhere” was something Dr. Rydell speculated about in his final blog post. That post was published widely after his disappearance and derided as sentimental and unmoored from fact by many of the same people who had praised his original forensic work. He had worked so hard to find this village, only to start musing about whether a stray “somewhere” might mean this had happened in more than one place. It undercut everything except the song’s extensive travels. –HenryMartyn
> You haven’t told us anything about his disappearance! What’s up with that? –HolyGreil
>After that last post saying he’d landed in London and was heading to Gall, he stopped posting and all his known emails bounced. He never returned to his professorship. Nobody here remembers him, and there’s nothing in the police records (I was trying to be thorough.) Unsolved mystery. –HenryMartyn
90 I’d just like to point out you’ve discussed stealing voices and oaken hearts but you’ll only accept accurate botanical explanations for the red leaves. Not every line has to be perfectly based in truth. Magic? A portent? Some weather pattern that changes the amount of anthocyanin in certain years? A poetically resonant image? (@BarrowBoy, I’m going to beat you to the punch.) –Dynamum
–Dynamum marked this as a stretch–
91 I love the present tense in this verse, like it’s still going on. And the multiple meanings of “take” here: take a lover, take a life, or the whole sentence “takes another love where oaken hearts do gather” like she’s bringing him home to meet the family. –Rhiannononymous
92 And this reminder again from a narrator that we have no reason to disbelieve, saying that it’s a love she takes, not a victim. –Rhiannononymous
93 In his last blog post, Rydell wrote “One of the strange things about this ballad is that we’re never quite sure what kind of story it is. Is it a warning about monstrous trees or monstrous lovers? A cautionary tale about forest management? Are we meant to laud the villagers as heroic for their actions? The Gall festival would suggest so, but then why is Ellen portrayed so ambiguously? Maybe we are meant to sing it as the love story of sweet William and fair Ellen. If you ignore the incongruous “wicked woman” verse, neither lover betrays the other’s expectations, and it’s only because of the villagers that their story turns tragic.” –HenryMartyn
>Having been here a while and listened to Jenny and her sisters, I’ve come to think it’s a little of all the above. Maybe Rydell is right that it’s a love story with a message that love involves give and take, and some ask for more than others. That’s not always such a bad thing, if you’re willing to give. –HenryMartyn
>@HenryMartyn can you ask your friend Jenny if there are any old oaks that escaped the festival? Like in the “none could ever find the place/none could find poor William’s heart” verse? –Dynamum
>Thanks for that suggestion! Jenny says she thinks she knows of one. We’re taking another walk in the woods tonight. I’m still looking for the right ending for my film, but I think I’m close. It feels funny to be searching for traces of Rydell where he was searching for traces of truth in this ballad, like we’re all chasing each other. Anyway, thanks for your continued help on this, friends. If nothing else, maybe we’re part of the cycle, bringing an old song to new listeners. –HenryMartyn
© 2021 Sarah Pinsker
Sarah Pinsker’s first novel, A Song For A New Day, won the Nebula Award for best novel, and her collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea won the Philip K Dick Award. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and other awards. Her books and stories have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and Mandarin, among other languages. Her second novel, We Are Satellites, will be published in May 2021. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums and another forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore with her wife, their dog, and a lot of guitars.
They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass
by Alaya Dawn Johnson
It’s noon, the middle of wheat harvest, and Tris is standing on the edge of the field while Bill and Harris and I drive three ancient combine threshers across the grain. It’s dangerous to stand so close and Tris knows it. Tris knows better than to get in the way during harvest, too. Not a good idea if she wants to survive the winter. Fifteen days ago a cluster bomb dropped on the east field, so no combines there. No harvest. Just a feast for the crows.
Tris wrote the signs (with pictures for the ones who don’t read) warning the kids to stay off the grass, stay out of the fields, don’t pick up the bright-colored glass jewels. So I raise my hand, wave my straw hat in the sun—it’s hot as hell out here, we could use a break, no problem—and the deafening noise of eighty-year-old engines forced unwillingly into service chokes, gasps, falls silent.
Bill stands and cups his hands over his mouth. “Something wrong with Meshach, Libby?”
I shake my head, realize he can’t see, and holler, “The old man’s doing fine. It’s just hot. Give me ten?”
Harris, closer to me, takes a long drink from his bottle and climbs off Abednego. I don’t mind his silence. This is the sort of sticky day that makes it hard to move, let alone bring in a harvest, and this sun is hot enough to burn darker skin than his.
It’s enough to burn Tris, standing without a hat and wearing a skinny strappy dress of faded red that stands out against the wheat’s dusty gold. I hop off Meshach, check to make sure he’s not leaking oil, and head over to my sister. I’m a little worried. Tris wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. Another cluster bomb? But I haven’t heard the whining drone of any reapers. The sky is clear. But even though I’m too far to read her expression, I can tell Tris is worried. That way she has of balancing on one leg, a red stork in a wheat marsh. I hurry as I get closer, though my overalls stick to the slick sweat on my thighs and I have to hitch them up like a skirt to move quickly.
“Is it Dad?” I ask, when I’m close.
She frowns and shakes her head. “Told me this morning he’s going fishing again.”
“And you let him?”
She shrugs. “What do you want me to do, take away his cane? He’s old, Libs. A few toxic fish won’t kill him any faster.”
“They might,” I grumble, but this is an old argument, one I’m not winning, and besides, that’s not why Tris is here. “So what is it?”
She smiles, but it shakes at the edges. She’s scared and I wonder if that makes her look old or just reminds me of our age. Dad is eighty, but I’m forty-two, and we had a funeral for an eight-year-old last week. Every night since I was ten I’ve gone to sleep thinking I might not wake up the next morning. I don’t know how you get to forty-two doing that.
Tris is thirty-eight, but she looks twenty-five—at least, when she isn’t scanning the skies for reapers, or walking behind a tiny coffin in a funeral procession.
“Walk with me,” she says, her voice low, as though Harris can hear us from under that magnolia tree twenty feet away. I sigh and roll my eyes and mutter under my breath, but she’s my baby sister and she knows I’ll follow her anywhere. We climb to the top of the hill, so I can see the muddy creek that irrigates the little postage stamp of our cornfield, and the big hill just north of town, with its wood tower and reassuring white flag. Yolanda usually takes the morning shift, spending her hours watching the sky for that subtle disturbance, too smooth for a bird, too fast for a cloud. Reapers. If she rings the bell, some of us might get to cover in time.
Sometimes I don’t like to look at the sky, so I sprawl belly-down on the ground, drink half of the warm water from my bottle and offer the rest to Tris. She finishes it and grimaces.
“Don’t know how you stand it,” she says. “Aren’t you hot?”
“You won’t complain when you’re eating cornbread tonight.”
“You made some?”
“Who does everything around here, bookworm?” I nudge her in the ribs an
d she laughs reluctantly and smiles at me with our smile. I remember learning to comb her hair after Mom got sick; the careful part I would make while she squirmed and hollered at me, the two hair balls I would twist and fasten to each side of her head. I would make the bottom of her hair immaculate: brushed and gelled and fastened into glossy, thick homogeneity. But on top it would sprout like a bunch of curly kale, straight up and out and olive-oil shiny. She would parade around the house in this flouncy slip she thought was a dress and pose for photos with her hand on her hip. I’m in a few of those pictures, usually in overalls or a smock. I look awkward and drab as an old sock next to her, but maybe it doesn’t matter, because we have the same slightly bucked front teeth, the same fat cheeks, the same wide eyes going wider. We have a nice smile, Tris and I.
Tris doesn’t wear afro-puffs any more. She keeps her hair in a bun and I keep mine short.
“Libs, oh Libs, things aren’t so bad, are they?”
I look up at Tris, startled. She’s sitting in the grass with her hands beneath her thighs and tears are dripping off the tip of her nose. I was lulled by her laugh—we don’t often talk about the shit we can’t control. Our lives, for instance.
I think about the field that we’re going to leave for crows so no one gets blown up for touching one of a thousand beautiful multi-colored jewels. I think about funerals and Dad killing himself faster just so he can eat catfish with bellies full of white phosphorus.
“It’s not that great, Tris.”
“You think it’s shit.”
“No, not shit—”
“Close. You think it’s close.”
I sigh. “Some days. Tris. I have to get back to Meshach in a minute. What is going on?”
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
I make myself meet her eyes, and see she’s scared; almost as scared as I am.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 39 Page 13
