The Sound of the Trees (29 page)

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THE ROOM HE
awoke in was cool and bright. A breeze loitered around a half-open window to agitate the pale white drapery from the wall. When he tried to move he found he could not without a tremendous pain in his head. He was sweating and had sweated immensely through the night, the sheets stained yellow and wet upon his legs. The same eye that had been cut in the fall from his mare was now completely shut. He did not know how long he had been lying there, in the quiet of that white room. He stared up at the ceiling for a long time until at last he struggled to his side and looked out the window.

The window gave way to a back alley littered with broken clay pots and baling wire. Strung across the buildings a clothesline sunk under the weight of a blue twill blanket and three woolen stockings. The head of a child's doll looked back at him from the mud with painted eyes that were washed out and grotesquely still.

He rolled onto his back again and managed himself upright against the headboard and looked around the room. There was a dresser and a bed stand. A small serving table standing in the corner. There was a bathroom to his right with a cotton partition and a light fixture screwed into the ceiling and glowing palely in the noonday sun. On the wall opposite the bed was a portrait of Christ on the cross. His face was near Spanish and those who stood around him were too, all standing against a background of flaming red.

He woke and slept for several days without a clear thought in his head. The clock on the wall ticked with the rhythm of his breath but was of little use to the boy otherwise. He woke both morning and night to find his eye open to the Christ figure's pegged hands and in his clouded mind he reinvented the torture and loss and the divinity his own mother had long ago spoken to him about, and oftentimes in those formless hours he wished he had been sent to a place where the walls were bare of anything at all.

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Late in the day he woke and sat up to the sound of the window closing. A woman turned to him from across the room and saw the single eye wide upon her. She put her hands to her chest. He studied her for a moment, a girl not much older than he, dressed in a long white coat with her hair brought up behind her head.

Mornin, he said.

The nurse rested a hand on the window ledge and tapped her fingers nervously, then pointed out the darkened window.

Seven in the evening, she said.

A few days later he sat up in the bed and fingered the bandage where it covered his ear and rubbed his eyes. The clock ticked formally from across the room and he swung his feet over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. The light in the bathroom was off and only the first glints of sun caught his bedsheets. There was a plate of sliced apple and a glass of water on the bedside table. He drank the water in one flush and pressed the glass against his forehead. The picture eyes seemed to watch him in the silence of the coming day.

After a while the nurse came in and stopped short at the door. The boy was standing by the window. He turned with the sound of her feet and gazed vacantly upon her.

It was gettin a mite chilly, she said.

What was.

You stopped sweating. It was gettin chilly so I closed the window. The nurse wrung her hands together and stepped timidly into the room. Your head's healed pretty good since the fever broke, she said. You broke some ribs too, but they're on their way to whole again.

The boy came away from the window and lowered himself onto the edge of the bed. I don't know how to ask but I can't figure it out, he said. Where are we?

Why, we're in the town hall. The nurse gestured with a closed fist she brought from her chest and lifted toward the door. Mayor's office is right down the hall. He sleeps here himself some nights.

The boy leaned up again and sat with his bare feet on the polished floorboards. He smiled coldly to himself. The sun began to push its way into the room and the boy closed his eye against it and when he opened his eye again the nurse was gone.

In the evening she returned with two envelopes in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other. She placed all three on the bed stand while he watched her from the bed.

These are for you, she said.

She walked to the end of the bed and tucked the loose corner of the blanket under the mattress and did not look up at him again but smiled falsely when she bent to raise the mattress, then went out the door.

The boy moved the pitcher away and took up the envelopes. They were already open. He laid one in his lap and fingered loose the contents of the other. In it he found a photograph of himself that Jane had taken when he first arrived in town. He was sitting shoulders back astride Triften, not quite smiling and not quite at ease, but in his unstudied pose he remained somehow imponderable to himself. On the back of the picture she had written, What have you done? I'm saving a pie for you. Get better. He looked at the picture a few seconds longer, then set it aside and picked up the other envelope.

It was a letter from the doctor. How he had come to find him there he could not imagine. There were forwarding stamps from six towns and two counties, and six times the word Urgent had been scribbled on the envelope. The paper was worn so thin it seemed to have passed through a hundred hands. The ink was faded and drawn down the grain but the precise lettering of the old doctor's handwriting was still legible to the boy's working eye. He held the paper up to the light and leaned into it.

There were a few lines about the town and the goings on there and another about Larry Bowles losing his hand to a renegade bull and something about everyone's hair grown so long it looked like a town of women. The remainder of the letter was about his father's death. The boy read the lines over and over until nightfall came. In the middle of the night he woke and stumbled into the bathroom and pulled on the light and read them again and somewhere in between he wept.

Your daddy seemed to fall to pieces after you all left. He cursed your mother endlessly but I could tell his heart wasn't in it. I think he missed her beyond the possibility of his own words. He was like a can of worms, your daddy was. Wriggling and wriggling inside but nowhere to go but back down to the bottom. He fell off New Bend Bridge second Tuesday of September. Some here say he jumped off of his own accord but I reckon he just fell off drunk. Your daddy was never one to quit. I think you know something about that. But he never did have too much luck succeeding in the end neither. Hope you're finding it better for you and your mama. Doc.

In the morning there was a knock at the door. A voice called out and the door opened. The boy was sitting upright with the pillows beneath his back. The mayor came in and crossed the room and stood by the foot of the bed. He outstretched his arms and gripped the bedposts.

I am sorry about your father, he said.

He looked at the boy with surprisingly sad eyes. The boy straightened his back against the headboard. I'm sure he appreciates it, he said.

The mayor acquiesced with a bow of his head.

Yes. I hope so.

They looked at each other from across the crumpled bed linens. The swelling in the boy's eye had gone down, but his eyelid still remained low upon it.

This is something I do not like, the mayor said.

He looked out the window, at the gnarled light staining the drapery. Then he began to pace the room.

You are just a young man, you see. Just a young man. He turned back and studied the boy with the same troubled eyes. A simple error is all it was, he said. That is what I like to believe. No different from the way the sound of wind rustling through a bush can sometimes be mistaken for water being poured out on the ground. You only mistook the deceitfulness of your actions for nobility. But a young man should be given chances. A young man does not need to be stricken down for faltering. He needs to be helped back up and shown where he has diverged from his path.

The mayor's face clouded and he shook his thumb across the room at the boy.

But there are some places and some people with whom a young man should know not to seek out a conflict. People he should know better than to cross.

He paused and stood in front of the window and looked out, with the boy watching him from the bed.

I am sorry for what the Ralston boys have done to you. I did not wish this.

The mayor turned his hands one over the other.

I did not wish this, he said deliberately. I explicitly ordered against it and they have been reprimanded for the way in which they handled the situation. The mayor nodded only to himself, then turned on his heels again. They did not handle it well at all, he said.

He pulled a chair from the corner of the room and set it by the side of the bed and sat down and crossed his legs and pressed his hands on his knee.

I want you to listen to me now. I want you to hear me. I do not intend to keep you in here. I once told you it is a fair town and I must not make a liar of myself. You have done wrong, but I believe it was commanded by the whim of the young, and this is not a thing you can be expected to help. Truth be told, I did not wish to believe it was you. That is why you have been untouched for so long. But it was you, and it is a thing you will learn from. A thing you must learn from.

The mayor made like he would stand, but he only resituated himself in the chair and raised up his laced hands.

When you are young as you are, you believe you hold autonomy over your life. Over what occurs to you and around you in your life. I know this feeling. But there is nothing more to it than that. It is a feeling, and feelings are not what we should proceed by. The code of your life is no different than the code of mine or any other. We are many. Even in this small town we are many. And we must balance ourselves within one another. We must follow in a code that is common to us all, and that code has no rulers. That code is a house for all. You cannot flee from it to satisfy things to your own liking. You cannot burn it down.

The mayor's face grew serious. He put a hand across his beard.

Choices that concern your life are constantly about nor can you make them all. Here is an example of one such choice and you are lucky to have the opportunity to make it.

The boy at last turned his head. He inspected the mayor through his half-shut eye. The mayor turned uncomfortably and stood and began to pace the room again.

A payment can be made for your release, he said. A payment of two hundred dollars can be made to the town hall and you will walk with impunity. You will be free to go on to Colorado. Where you are headed. Where the choice you have made is now common with mine. You will leave and not cross me again.

The mayor stopped pacing and looked out steadily at the doleful light falling on the alleyway mud.

If you do not leave, I'm sure the Ralstons would be eager to visit you again. This time without orders of restraint. And if you choose not to pay, you will remain here. With me. Let us say indefinitely.

The mayor came and sat again and his face hardened and the sad eyes now sparkled fiercely.

With the wages you have earned from me. From me, he repeated emphatically. You should have no problem with this.

The boy shook his head slowly on the pillow and turned away toward the hard glow of the bathroom bulb. The mayor stood and placed his hands behind his back. When the boy did not respond he went to the door and held the knob and paused and turned back once more.

Either way, he said evenly, you will not see her. To kill her or to love her, for in truth I know not which you seek, though I have my ideas. With respect, he said, making a deep bow toward the bed, you will not.

The mayor tugged the bottom stitching of his waistcoat and straightened his glasses and flattened his beard with the back of his hand and went out into the hallway where behind the closed door the creak of his polished leather boots trailed off into nothing.

E
IGHTEEN

JOHN FRANK STOOD with his shoulder leaned against the door frame and his arms folded across his chest. He looked dumbly across the room to where the boy sat with his legs folded beneath him on the bed.

You comin in or holdin up that wall?

John Frank smiled at the floor and pushed himself upright and came and sat in the chair beside the bed. How you feelin, he said.

The boy drew the covers up to his waist and raised an eyebrow.

Your head got busted up pretty good, John Frank said.

He leaned in and took the boy's head in his hands and turned it right to left.

Get them sweaty paws off me.

Hold on. Let me see it.

It's all mended.

Jesus. That's a mighty stretch of scar.

I guess it is.

It is. I'm tellin ya.

John Frank took his hands away and the boy regarded him, the pressed clothes, the slicked back hair.

Look at you. Went and got yourself all jellied up.

He reached out and flipped the lapel of Frank's suit coat.

I figure someone ought to look halfway good between the two of us.

I don't know, the boy said, fixing a shirt button Frank had missed. Halfway might be a stretch.

They sat quietly in the soft morning light. John Frank got up and went to the window. Heat's still hangin on today, he said quietly.

Did we clear through September yet?

John Frank opened the window a crack and looked over his shoulder at the boy, then came and sat again.

It's the middle of October, bud.

He righted the chair so he sat square to the boy and folded his hands and set them firmly in his lap. Lots of things have happened, he said.

Like what.

First off, the mayor told me you weren't biting on his offer. Says you'll stay here until he sees fit to let you go. Ain't nobody really standin up to say otherwise. I think the people round here figure you've finally become what they suspected in you.

And what's that.

John Frank opened his hands. Look where you are, he said.