The Trees Read Free Page B

cabin than a squirrel hole in a tree. She went about like she didn’t know it was standing there logged up no higher than Sulie’s head with its top open to every gust of rain and wind and flying jaybird. This crib of saddled logs under these dark trees was no place she would ever live in. Daytimes she dallied around the cooking kettles and evenings she lay in their little half-faced leanto with the deep hollows of her eyes closed. She said she couldn’t look at the young ones around the night fire. Here under the big butts they looked like little people. The black arches were mighty far overhead. Even when you threw bark on the fire, its light was swallowedup before it went a dozen poles down these dark forest aisles that ran on and on only God knew how many miles to the English Seas and the New Orleans river.
    Now that the hunting was good, Worth ran balls at night and wandered with his rifle all day. Pegged skins multiplied on the trees. The cabin had blown out of his mind light as a green gabby bird feather.
    “You kin smell the fall,” Sayward one day reminded her mother.
    “I don’t keep track of the days no more,” Jary said.
    “It’s a gittin’ late,” Sayward went on. “Just goin’ to the spring you can see a long ways under the trees.”
    “I hain’t noticed,” Jary complained. “My eyes kain’t see so good in here.”
    “It’ll give ice on the river one of these fine mornin’s.”
    “Like as not,” Jary sighed. “That’s the way it runs.”
    Sayward went about her business. If her mother and father didn’t care how soon the snow flew and them living in a half-faced leanto, it was nothing to her. The gums along the river flew their colored rags. Sassafras mittens hung a kind of red-yellow and the dogwoods flushed up like the wattles of wild turkey gobblers. Of a morning the pinch offrost nipped your legs, and acorns in the deer paths were mighty hard on bare feet. The woods air smelled fermented as cider. And the hill hooters of a night tried to raise the dead.
    Not that the young ones minded it. They were drunk on fall. It was hardly daylight till they piled out of the leanto to hunt chestnuts and drag in shellbarks and look first at their snares for small game. Piles of walnut hulls rose by the big rock and their hands were stained darker than Shawanees. They hung to scarlet creepers and swung back and forward over logs that would have broken their backs had they ever let go. At deep dusk when they came in, they ate, yawned and lay down together in the shelter like a pile of wolf puppies for warmth till it was time to be up and rip and tear again.
    When they wanted anything, they came to Sayward now rather than their mother. It took too long to get their meaning over to this slow woman sucked of her blood who lay abed or dallied around like a crone, though she was still in her thirties. No, they were too full of go for the likes of her.
    It meant small shakes to them that the cabin wasn’t done. They were tickled the leaves were coming down. They ran through them like it was the first snowfall, kicking them with their bare feet to stir up that tanyard smell. The gum leaves were about the first to drop. The maples, ash and poplars shed not long after. You couldn’t open youreyes without seeing the air full of leaves. They had no mind where they wanted to land. Some turned head over tincup till it made a body dizzy to watch. All night long you could hear them whisper when they lit. By morning the sleepers in the shelter were stitched with a hap of red, brown and gold.
    Sulie spread her fingers like a fork and scratched herself a great pile to burrow in.
    “I’m a white-footed mouse!” she yelled, sticking her head through. “And I’m not a comin’ out till I come with young’uns a hangin’ to my dugs.”
    “You’re a young’un yourself still a hangin’ to your mam’s dugs!” Achsa mocked at her, jumping over and kicking at her pile of leaves.
    “Don’t you tech my house or