Thomas was waiting at the stable entrance. “You drove too fast,” he said. “I didn’t expect you back for a couple of hours.”
“Put up the horses, will you?” Joseph asked. “I’ll pump some water on these little trees.” He carried an armload of the switches to the tank and saturated their burlap root-coverings with water. And then he went quickly toward the oak tree. “There is something wrong with it,” he thought fearfully. “There’s no life in it.” He felt the bark again, picked off a leaf, crumpled and smelled it, and nothing appeared wrong.
Elizabeth had his supper ready almost as soon as he went the house. “You look tired, dear. Go to bed early.”
But he looked over his shoulder with worried eyes. “I want to talk to Thomas after supper,” he said.
And when he had done eating, he walked out past the barn and up on the hillside. He felt with his palms the dry earth, still warm from the day’s sun. And he walked to a copse of little live oaks and rested his hands on the bark and crushed and smelled a leaf of each. Everywhere he went, inquiring with his fingers after the earth’s health. The cold was coming in over the mountains, chilling the grasses, and on this night Joseph heard the first flight of wild geese.
The earth told him nothing. It was dry but alive, needing only the rain to make it shoot its spears of green. At last, satisfied, he walked back to the house and stood under his own tree. “I was afraid, sir,” he said. “Something in the air made me afraid.” And as he stroked the bark, suddenly he felt cold and lonely. “This tree is dead,” his mind cried. “There’s no life in my tree.” The sense of loss staggered him, and all the sorrow he should have felt when his father died rolled in on him. The black mountains surrounded him, and the cold grey sky and the unfriendly stars shut him down, and the land stretched out from the center where he stood. It was all hostile, not ready to attack but aloof and silent and cold. Joseph sat at the foot of the tree, and not even the hard bark held any comfort for him. It was as hostile as the rest of the earth, as frigid and contemptuous as the corpse of a friend.
“Now what will I do?” he thought. “Where will I go now?” A white meteor flared into the air and burned up. “Perhaps I’m wrong,” Joseph thought. “The tree may be all right after all.” He stood up and went into the house; and that night, because of his loneliness, he held Elizabeth so fiercely in his arms that she cried out in pain and was very glad.
“Why are you so lonely, dear?” she asked. “Why do you hurt me tonight?”
“I didn’t know I was hurting you, I am sorry,” he said. “I think my tree is dead.”
“How could it be dead? Trees don’t die so quickly, Joseph.”
“I don’t know how. I think it is dead.”
She lay quietly after a while, pretending to be asleep. And she knew he was not sleeping.
When the dawn came he slipped out of bed and went outside. The oak leaves were a little shriveled and some of their glossiness was gone.
Thomas, on his way to the stable, saw Joseph and walked over. “By George, there is something wrong with that tree,” he said. Joseph watched anxiously while he inspected the bark and the limbs. “Nothing to kill it here,” Thomas said. He picked up a hoe and dug into the soft earth at the base of the trunk. Only two strokes he made, and then stepped back. “There it is, Joseph.”
He knelt down beside the, hole and saw a chopped path on the trunk. “What did it?” he demanded angrily.
Thomas laughed brutally. “Why, Burton girdled your tree! He’s keeping the devil out.”
Joseph frantically dug around with his fingers until the path of the girdle was exposed. “Can’t we do something, Thomas? Wouldn’t tar help it?”
Thomas shook his head. “The veins are cut. There’s nothing to do,” he paused,—”except beat Hell out of Burton.”
Joseph sat back on his heels. Now that it was done, the muffling calm settled over him, the blind inability to judge. “That was what he was talking about, then, about being right?”
“I guess it was. I’d like to beat Hell out of him. That was a fine tree.”
Joseph spoke very slowly, as though he pulled each word out of a swirling mist. “He wasn’t sure he was right. No, he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t quite his nature to do this thing. And so he will suffer for it.”
“Won’t you do anything at all to him?” Thomas demanded.
“No.” The calm and the sorrow were so great that they bore down on his chest, and the loneliness was complete, a circle impenetrable. “He will punish himself. I have no punishments.” His eyes went to the tree, still green, but dead. After a long time he turned his head and looked up to the pine grove on the ridge, and he thought, “I must go there soon. I’ll be needing the sweetness and the strength of that place.”
21
THE cold of late autumn came into the valley, and the high brindled clouds hung in the air for days at a time. Elizabeth felt the golden sadness of the approaching winter, but there was missing the excitement of the storms. She went often to the porch to look at the oak tree. The leaves were all pale tan by now, waiting only the buffeting of rain to fall to the ground. Joseph did not look at the tree any more. When its life was gone, no remnant of his feeling for it remained. He walked often in the brittle grass of the side-hills. He went bareheaded, wearing jeans and a shirt and a black vest. Often he looked up at the grey clouds and sniffed at the air and found nothing in the air to reassure him. “There’s no rain in these clouds,” he told Thomas. “This is a high fog from the ocean.”
Thomas had caught two baby hawks in the spring and he was making hoods for them and preparing to fly them against the wild ducks that whistled down the sky. “It isn’t time, Joseph,” he said. “Last year the rains came early, I know, but I’ve heard it isn’t usual in this country to get much rain before Christmas.”
Joseph stooped and picked up a handful of ash-dry dust and let it trickle through his fingers. “It’ll take a lot of rain to do any good,” he complained. “The summer drank the water out deep down. Have you noticed how low the water is in the well? Even the potholes in the river are dry now.”
“I’ve smelled the dead eels,” Thomas said. “Look! This little leather cap goes on the hawk’s head to keep him blind until I’m ready to start him. It’s better than shooting ducks?’ The hawk gashed at his thick gloves while he fitted the leather hood on its head.
When November came and went without rain, Joseph grew quiet with worry. He rode to the springs and found them dried up, and he drove his post-hole digger deep into the ground without finding damp soil. The hills were turning grey as the covering of grass wore off, and the white flints stuck out and caught the light. When December was half gone, the clouds broke and scattered. The sun grew warm and an apparition of summer came to the valley.
Elizabeth saw how the worry was making Joseph thin, how his eyes were strained and almost white. She tried to find tasks to keep him busy. She needed new cupboard space, new clothes lines; it was time a high-chair was made ready for the baby. Joseph went about the tasks and finished them before Elizabeth could think of new ones. She sent him to town for supplies, and he returned on a wet and panting horse.
“Why do you rush back?” she demanded.
“I don’t know. I’m ready to go away. Something might happen.” Slowly in his mind there was arising the fear that the dry years had come. The dusty air and the high barometer did not reassure him. Head colds broke out among the people on the ranch. The children sniffled all day long. Elizabeth developed a hard cough, and even Thomas, who was never sick, wore a cold compress made of a black stocking on his throat at night. But Joseph grew leaner and harder. The muscles of his neck and jaws stood out under a thin covering of brown skin. His hands grew restless, went to playing with pieces of stick, or with a pocket-knife, or worked interminably at his beard, smoothing it down and turning the ends under.