The Sound of the Trees by Robert Payne Gatewood

Author:Robert Payne Gatewood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

IN THE NIGHT it grew very cold and he woke from a dream of the bears disbanding along a purple ridge and lumbering soundlessly into the knifing snow and after that he could sleep no more. He pushed off the bedroll that had gathered a light dusting of dew and pulled on his boots and rode out upon the foothills in the last hours before dawn. The moon was sickly and disfigured behind the clouds and the light it cast upon the earth was without substance.

Out on the mesa it was profoundly dark and the boy’s horse lost her footing and went down on her front legs and pitched the boy into a gravel ditch from which he emerged bleeding above his left eye. The mare swung her head around and staggered up and stepped backward, panicking with her nose high in the gusts of wind and her eyes drained white and spooked on the boy.

The cut was deep and long across his eyebrow and he wiped the blood away from his face and ran a glove along the back of his trousers. He collected the reins and crawled out of the ditch and soothed the mare down and stroked her mane with his gloved hands and told her it wasn’t her fault.

From where they stood the boy could see off to where the railroad tracks were forming out of the bleak horizon. Below them on the foothills the singed brown conifers were beginning to forest green. Just as he knew there would soon be skeins of dark weather and whorls of blue rain, he knew his own chance for setting out to Colorado would soon pass him by for another season if he did not hurry.

He went on riding long into the remaining night, up along the mesa above the edge of town and down into the mud slicks and crabgrass. Such sparse trees rose before him he took them to be corpses of trees, and soon he found himself galloping the road that stretched out to the lawyer’s lone and silent home.

Though he had figured how to pop the lock on the docket with his knife, all he ever found was news about such things as the water table and a new car for the mayor. He had read fragments of a letter addressing the portioning and zoning of the lands and a bill being drafted that would tax the Indian women for using the space around the willow tree to sell their goods. He read about a number of business transactions and the purchase of pressing machines for a new metal company. He read countless figures that calculated earnings and percentages but never in his search did he find even a single word about the girl.

He slowed the horse at the gate and came down and drew up the latch quietly and stepped into the yard to find the house as he had found it every day. No hand seen through the window nor foot upon the floor.

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