Authors: Walter Mosley
The evening had been cool before that sip. But the warmth of the liquor along with the heat of the tar flame warmed me from the inside out. The moon itself seemed to be a source of heat. I loved that moon and I loved the men I’d worked with that day.
I smiled at Mackie Allitar and he saluted the gesture.
My vision began to play tricks on me. The woods around us, lit by the flickering fire, were as bright as day, but the shadows were impenetrable black. In and out of this absolute dark and light moved deer and bear and Juan Thrombone. I had the urge to join them, but when I tried to rise I ended up flat on my belly — laughing.
For a while I struggled with gravity. I was about as coordinated as an infant. I called out and my friends did too. I remember looking up at the moon. I saw the silhouette of a hand reaching for the orb but couldn’t tell then whether it was my hand or not. And then I was asleep.
The dreams were not mine — not completely, at any rate.
I was the poor boy from Kentucky coming in on his cheating wife, offering her a rose. I was a cop branded by the pain of death, sitting in the dark with a man whose name was an alias. Mackie was sitting next to me in an otherwise all-white classroom. He scared the kids so much that they left us alone.
We moved thus back and forth between one another’s memories and desires until we were the best of friends, brothers beyond blood.
I cried when I felt the jangled pain in Miles Barber’s face.
Gerin sat with me as I bled on the floor of the People’s Warehouse.
We climbed mountains together and cried over our greatest losses. We shared our inner fears and lusts. We weren’t alone for the first time that any one of us could remember.
When I felt the light of morning on my face, it was with disappointment. Never had I felt the intimacy of that night of dreams. I didn’t want it to end.
I was covered with a thick tree-cloth blanket, as were the rest of my friends. Juan Thrombone was gone.
I sat up. I could see that my friends were rousing also. Beyond them was the beginning of a new forest. Fifteen young firs had grown at least eighteen inches in the night.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Get up! Get up!”
“How could this be?” Miles Barber wondered out loud.
Gerin Reed was shaking his head.
We were all chattering and amazed when Juan Thrombone appeared among us. I guess he just came out of the woods, but none of us noticed because we were too busy sharing our new friendship and our surprise.
“No more talk, chatty boys,” Thrombone said. “Man your buckets, water your trees. You’ll have no breakfast until their roots are satisfied. It is the future of civilization you hold in your silly dreams.”
Gerin Reed taught us a coal miner’s song that he’d learned from his grandfather. We alternated singing and talking about our dreams.
We doused the saplings, and they grew just that fast. By the end of the day they were five feet apiece. By the end of four days they were twenty feet high.
While we worked, Bones fueled us with venison stews full of wild mushrooms and greens from the woods. Each night we drank stone liquor and passed out and into one another’s dreams.
On the fourth morning we went back through the grove of god trees. It wasn’t nearly so hard, because we held hands and sang.
Everything changed in those few days. Ex-Detective Barber’s pain subsided and his scars, though still there, lost their red rawness. Mackie Allitar gained at least forty pounds, and every ounce seemed to be muscle. Gerin Reed’s eyes became clear and focused, and his perpetual melancholy lessened until it finally disappeared.
I was different on the inside also. I was happy. For the first time I had real friendships. For the next week or so the four half-light men of Treaty were always visiting and talking, playing catch or just taking walks in the woods. Gerin taught Mackie how to fish, and Miles Barber showed me how to write in shorthand.
After ten days we returned to our tree farm. The plateau was empty again. The trees had disappeared, leaving no trace that they had ever been there. And so we replanted. This became our ritual in all seasons and all weathers. We dressed in the blue-green material that Addy and her friends made and grew sentient singing trees and dreamed.
That was the beginning of the groupings among the citizens of Treaty. The primary separation was between half-lights and Blues. But there were more divisions than that among us, among the half-lights especially.
To begin with, each of the half-lights had found what little ability he or she had in very different ways. I had imbibed the whole living blood of Ordé, whereas Mackie had burned out much of his humanity with the crazy and deficient blood of Winch Fargo. Gerin had only tasted the same tainted blood. Addy, on the other hand, had actually shared the living blue blood of her daughter. Of the half-lights only Miles Barber had been transformed by the arcane emanations of Gray Man. No blood had been exchanged, but somehow Gray Man’s dark blue soul had been impressed upon Barber’s mind. Trini had been kissed by Claudia Heart, and Nesta assured us that even a kiss from one of the Blues, under the right circumstances, could afford change. Preeta and later Woolly (the child Gerin and Preeta would have) gained whatever toehold they achieved through the teas and waters, potions, and brews of Juan Thrombone. Bones was a sort of alchemist. He made tars from tree sap and spit that kept insects from biting. No wound could fester under his leaf poultices. He enlightened bears, trained deer, enchanted butterflies, and orchestrated the singing forest.
The whole of our woods, five miles in any direction from Treaty, was deeply touched by Thrombone’s hand. He was the tri-light, as different from his brethren as Gray Man or Winch Fargo.
“I am the forest warden,” he once said. “I tend to the trees and sleep next to First Light.”
Among the half-lights men and women were divided. The four men spent four days out of every fortnight planting trees, drinking stone liquor, and having one another’s dreams. The women worked together also, making tree cloth and cooking, following the recipes given them by Juan Thrombone. About twice a year Addy, Preeta, and Trini would go off with Nesta to perform some ritual in the woods. I don’t know what they did or where they went.
In the hierarchy of the Blues, Bones came first. He was the most powerful (with the possible exception of Gray Man) and knew the most. Not that Juan saw himself as a leader or king.
Everyone loved Juan. He was our patron and protector. After that we looked to Nesta, who seemed to know anything worth knowing. Nesta was concerned and cautious, and her effect on Alacrity calmed many a situation that might have otherwise led to bloodshed.
Winch Fargo, as I said before, had deficient awareness, having seen only the last second of the divine message. Alacrity had not seen the light but had been born of a witness’s blood. And even those that witnessed a single shaft of blue were as different from one another as anyone else in the world. Wanita lived in dreams, Nesta in ideas, and Reggie looked for signs and portents of things that are hidden.
No one actually liked Winch Fargo. He was profane and obnoxious. His nickname for me was Big Nigger with the Woodbook. He called Trini and Preeta Cunt Number 1 and Cunt Number 2. He didn’t have a name for Addy because his respect for Bones was actually fear.
The Blues didn’t like Fargo but did pity him. For them his deformity was not the loss of an arm but a deficiency of light. They allowed his company because of his pain.
But they were all Blues, even Winch Fargo. They convened from time to time to discuss their nature or the nature of the universe or Grey Redstar and the ultimate clash of life and death. I tried to eavesdrop on those meetings but I could never take it for very long. The Blues communed with words and also the power of their minds or souls. I could listen for a few minutes, but soon my head would start to ache. If I weathered the pain, a buzz would start in my ears and then my vision would begin to blur. Finally I’d be forced to run from their presence. After that I’d sleep sometimes for a whole day.
Such was Treaty. A congress of outcasts sitting on the precipice of infinity, under the threat of death and living each day more primitively and more magically than the last.
T
HE YEARS PASSED LIKE
so many moments. Nothing changed much among us. Preeta was the only woman to bear a child — they called him Woolly because he had thick hair like his father. Every seven days Gerin Reed would give a talk on whatever it was that he’d been looking at that week. His sermons covered ants and rocks, the rhythm of the singing white firs, or the bellowing of the puppy sequoias. We’d meet in the clearing, outside of Number Twelve, in the early morning as the sun rose. Warden Reed’s wisdom grew in the forest. Bones said that Reed heard the songs of the trees more clearly than even the Blues did because they took the music for granted but Gerin listened with all his heart. Bones was almost always present at these talks, but other than that, you never knew when he’d be around. He was off
minding his forest
most of the time. Sometimes he was gone for days.
Alacrity also took to leaving Treaty for long stints. She had a boyfriend; she said his name was Eric Beauvais. Eric lived in a cabin sixty or seventy miles distant. She’d found him with a broken leg in the deep winter and nursed him back to health. They became lovers, and so she went to him every spring, when the sap began to flow.
Wanita remained a child, but that didn’t keep her from becoming our counsel and guide in most things. She interpreted dreams and told of important events. She settled disputes on the strength of her wisdom. Even Juan Thrombone came to Wanita for advice now and then.
I divided my time between the four days it took us to cultivate a crop of fifteen singing trees and ten days of solitude. The hard days of working and imbibing the stone liquor made me strong, stronger than any normal man. And the friendships I forged with my fellow half-light workers were worth all the pain and loneliness of my childhood. But I still craved the peace and privacy of the deep woods. Walking the hills and valleys around Treaty, I was in a daze most of the time, high on the vision granted me by the blood of my teacher. We all had different abilities. Mine was like a drug. Over the years my hallucinations became more vivid. The visions that came to me I could not describe in words. I did not understand their purpose or origin. Some days the sunlight would speak in colors and sound. The texture of trees and earth had their own tales, meandering and unfocused.
Whenever I could, I slept with Nesta. She made time for me when she wasn’t teaching or off with Alacrity. We spent a lot of time together in the spring when Alacrity was off with her woodsman lover. Sometimes after a whole evening of passionate lovemaking I’d realize that Nesta and I hadn’t said five full sentences to each other.
But I wasn’t sad. I caught fish and slept in the shadow of Number Twelve. I hummed the song of the singing trees and plotted out the day that I would end my life by sitting in the hollow of the great tree that grew in the bellowing grove.
How can I explain to you what it felt like over the months and years? Looking back on it now from my cell, there seems to be very little to say. We cultivated more than eleven thousand firs to protect, with their songs, and the twenty-four bellowing sequoias that were also gods. We grew the saplings and they moved away. I never recognized a tree after it had gone from our gardening place.
Nothing happened in the way that events of a life usually occur in the modern world. No heartbreaks, job promotions, goals met. Only one child was born.
There’s no way for me to impress upon you the passage of time in the ordinary sense. It was just one long day and one long night passed in the presence, if not the concern, of God. Not the God of organized religion, but the amazing vitality of existence.
It was like sitting before a simple granite boulder every day, seeing in that plain surface more variation than is possible to comprehend. Every night is spent dreaming of that stone, wondering what amazing differences lay beneath the small surface that you have failed to perceive.
Now and then, while contemplating that boulder, comes a magic moment when you catch a glimpse of an image or phrase that increases the smallest possible increment of not only your knowledge but also the sum total of possibility in the universe.
Looking back on it now, I am unutterably sad with the loss.
The years passed. Woolly, who aged at a normal rate as far as I could tell, was about fifteen.
And then one night I had a dream:
Gray Man was sleeping fitfully in a dark cave blocked by a huge boulder. He groaned and there was the smell of redwood in his nostrils. In my dream he dreamed that he was in a wide wood dressed formally and swinging an ax against the greatest, tallest sequoia that I had ever seen. I knew that this towering giant was the parent of the Bellowing Trees. I understood then why Bones had called them puppies.
Gray Man was swinging his ax to great effect. Large chips of the giant tree were flying off. But she was wide. Thirty feet or more in diameter. Gray Man was more than halfway through the thick trunk. He was standing inside the wound, hacking away. Hacking, hacking.
Somehow I realized that when the tree fell, Gray Man would be freed from his cave.
Near where I stood a man was crying. A black man. The spitting image of Death. He was different, though; he was the man I’d seen in my room before Gray Man came out of him. Horace LaFontaine.
“Who’re you?” he asked.
“I’m Chance.”
“What you doin’ here?”
“I think I must be inside your head,” I said.
“I ain’t got no head, man. I’m dead. It’s his head. I was gone up till a couple minutes ago. That tree there done blowed up an’ I was dead. I thought he was dead too; that Grey Redstar, that Gray Man.”
All the while the hacking continued. And as it went, I became more anxious and afraid.
“You have to be alive, Horace,” I said.
“How you know my name?”