Chapter III

If tree-worship was ever the religion of any tribe, I know that I am ancestrally bound to that folk. Once an artist told me of his happy method of protecting his wife, children, and friends from the outbursts incidental to genius. He would go to the woods and beat a tree until his symptomatic rage was exhausted. As if a tree-beater and a wife-beater were not cousins german in crime! And now I was going to steep my soul more heinously. The oak boards of my cabin roof had to be reinforced. I could not spend another winter with the snows driving in on me. A “board-tree” had to be felled before the sap was up; and on one of those days which are claimed by both spring and winter, but belong to neither, I set out with granpap, the most skilful board-maker in the Unakas, to select a victim.

“Now this white oak,” said granpap, pausing by a giant that gazed reflectively over the valley, “will make as good boards as you’d want to sleep under.”

“But, granpap, don’t you see--we are interrupting him.”

His eyes narrowed in the suspicious way of our first acquaintance.

“I mean he is sort of on duty here, as if the spirit of the woods needed a sentry just at this place.”

His glance became a cold squint, and I plunged for a practical argument.

“White oaks make good mast. We must think of the hogs. There’ll be three new litters to feed next winter.”

“I reckon you’re right,” he said, instantly at home. “And yander at the head of Flume Cove is a black oak that will make tollable boards if it don’t do better.”

“A black oak? With all that green moss on it? And look at the first branch. It has an elbow crooked round a bellwood. Would you divorce such a pair? What God hath joined, granpap.”

“Well, it wouldn’t make prize boards anyhow,” he said, moving on unregretfully.

Suddenly a fear gripped me. We were nearing a glen at whose door stood a tree which for me symbolized the perfect life. I had often wondered why no human being could achieve maturity so unblemished, and I never passed it without a wave of happy solemnity rolling over me. I began to talk about bee-trees, the only subject on which granpap was excitable. Thickly, hurriedly, I developed a rapacious interest in the wild bee and its hidden ways. And at the precise moment when we passed the pride of my woods, granpap was singsonging the lines which an old, old man had taught his grandfather when a boy:

“A swarm in May,
Count a dollar a day;
A swarm in June,
A silver spoon;
A swarm in July,
Not worth a house-fly.”

I had lured him safely by, and we neared the road again. His eye was on a tree with a long, perfect trunk, but which slanted from the root up, leaning over the road.

“I might do with that,” said he. “It’s dangerous thar anyway.”

“Dangerous! Don’t you see how strong it is, and how gently it leans over the road, like a great arm of blessing? I’m so used to that tree I should feel sure of accident overtaking me before I reached the village if I didn’t pass under it.”

Granpap halted. “I ain’t got time to waste corkusin’ around like this. I’ll go to the new ground and do some grubbin’. Then to-morr’ I’ll git up early and find a tree.”

I was dismissed, conscience-free.

Two warm days followed. On the second, I left my desk, feeling sure that I could find a sourwood in leaf on the south side of High Point. My path lay through the glen. Nearing it, I heard alarming sounds of activity, and running past the last obscuring half-acre of rhododendrons, I looked ahead. The pride of my woods measured his long trunk on the ground, half of his broken arms digging helplessly into the earth, the other half appealing to the winds, birds, and skies, that had loved him, for some mitigation of his doom. Granpap’s beaming face shone above the bleeding stump.

“You oughter seen him fall! Just et up those little chestnuts and poplars as he went down.”

And I had thought I heard thunder. Had even speculated on the peculiar crackling quality of the vibrations.

“I don’t know how I happened to miss it when we were lookin’ around. Now we’ll get some _boards_.”

A tightness of the throat kept me silent. Moreover, I could not rebuke him. He was too happy. Here was material worthy of his skill.

“Sam is going to help me saw the cuts and make the bolts,” he said. “Here he comes now.”

I turned away. I was the primary cause of the murder, but I could not stay to see the victim drawn and quartered.

A day or two later I had to carry a message to the board-maker. I found him a little sad.

“I’m gittin’ old,” he said. “These here boards are the sorriest I ever made.”

“But you’ve got a good pile of them, granpap.”

“Them’s my splinters,” he said, with high contempt, both for me and the boards. “That was the desaptivest tree I ever cut. I bumbed on it as fur as I could reach and it was plumb sound. But in choosin’ a board-tree you’ve got to ’low so much for what you don’t see.”

He sat down. Speech was coming on the tide of injury.

“A shore desaptive tree. Look at them cuts me and Sam made. Half a day’s work wasted in ’em.”

I looked at the great blocks and wondered how they had cunningly escaped further mutilation. And though I saw myself roofless for the next winter, I could not repress an inward bubble over the tree’s revenge.

“It had lost so many limbs when it was young and pushin’ up, that it was jest the snirliest tree I ever saw.”

“Snirly, granpap?”

“Ay, it must ’a’ been an awful thrifty tree. Every time a limb broke off it plumb healed up, an’ thar’s eight and ten rings over some of the scars. Here I’ve cut it down an’ split into it jest to find a lot of knot-holes spilin’ my best boards. And it looked so purty and straight.”

He got up, adjusted his brake, which was the strong fork of a limb chained to a log, fixed his bolt upright, set his adze carefully, and with precise restraint evenly separated a smooth, shining three-foot board from the rest of the bolt. From the splitting wood came an odor that must have been the essence of the forest condensed for generations into its living vase.

But granpap was not pleased with his work.

“Did you see how tough that was? When I do git a good board I have to tear it out. But it’s nateral for the south side of a tree to be tough.”

“Don’t you mean the north side, granpap?”

“No,” he said patiently. “It’s the sun that toughens wood. You’ll see them bolts from the north side are brickle.”

He balanced the board disapprovingly.

“Look how narr’ it is. By the time I’ve sapped this there won’t be enough of it left to turn a rain-drap.”

He began to chip off the inch of white sap-wood along the edge of the board.

“I could ’a’ cast out the snirly blocks, but it was the wind-shake that finally ruined me. I never counted on a wind-shake in a tree as proud as that.”

“Show me the wind-shake, granpap.”

“Look at this block, here in the crosscut, an’ you’ll see it. A wind-shake starts at the heart an’ twists round and round, gettin’ bigger and bigger an’ breakin’ the wood as it goes, till thar’s only enough left for a little narr’ board ’tween the shake-rings and the bark. Then sometimes, when the tree weaves in the wind, you can hear it cry. If I’d ’a’ listened at this tree in a high wind it couldn’t ’a’ fooled me. But they never make no sign on the outside.”

“Granpap,” I began slowly.

He looked up, met my eyes, and laid down his axe.

“Don’t you think some people are like that?”

I was trembling. If he failed me now, the line of Merlin would be extinct. There would be no more seers in the Unakas, or anywhere.

“Ay,” he said. He still used the “ay” of Westmoreland and the hills of Malvern. “Ay, Cyn was like that after Ben got killed.”

He thought my silence was the silence of sympathy, and in alarm took up his axe.

“’Tain’t no use to----”

The axe finished the sentence, slicing a curl of white sap-bark. But his face was a shade grayer. The tree was avenged.

I started on, thinking of all the Cyns and Bens I had known; and of a gay friend, now fallen, who liked to assure me that “A heart is known by the autopsy.” My foot turned up a boss of sweet turf. A broken heart makes as good loam as a sound one, I thought. And I would have gone down the slope singing in the face of a looming to-morrow, if only granpap had not been standing so still.

II

CORETTA AND AUTUMN