Two warm days followed. On the second, I left my desk, feeling sure
that I could find a sourwood in leaf on the south side of High
Point. My path lay through the glen. Nearing it, I heard alarming
sounds of activity, and running past the last obscuring half-acre of
rhododendrons, I looked ahead. The pride of my woods measured his long
trunk on the ground, half of his broken arms digging helplessly into
the earth, the other half appealing to the winds, birds, and skies,
that had loved him, for some mitigation of his doom. Granpap’s beaming
face shone above the bleeding stump.
“You oughter seen him fall! Just et up those little chestnuts and
poplars as he went down.”
And I had thought I heard thunder. Had even speculated on the peculiar
crackling quality of the vibrations.
“I don’t know how I happened to miss it when we were lookin’ around.
Now we’ll get some _boards_.”
A tightness of the throat kept me silent. Moreover, I could not rebuke
him. He was too happy. Here was material worthy of his skill.
“Sam is going to help me saw the cuts and make the bolts,” he said.
“Here he comes now.”
I turned away. I was the primary cause of the murder, but I could not
stay to see the victim drawn and quartered.
A day or two later I had to carry a message to the board-maker. I found
him a little sad.
“I’m gittin’ old,” he said. “These here boards are the sorriest I ever
made.”
“But you’ve got a good pile of them, granpap.”
“Them’s my splinters,” he said, with high contempt, both for me and
the boards. “That was the desaptivest tree I ever cut. I bumbed on
it as fur as I could reach and it was plumb sound. But in choosin’ a
board-tree you’ve got to ’low so much for what you don’t see.”
He sat down. Speech was coming on the tide of injury.
“A shore desaptive tree. Look at them cuts me and Sam made. Half a
day’s work wasted in ’em.”
I looked at the great blocks and wondered how they had cunningly
escaped further mutilation. And though I saw myself roofless for the
next winter, I could not repress an inward bubble over the tree’s
revenge.
“It had lost so many limbs when it was young and pushin’ up, that it
was jest the snirliest tree I ever saw.”
“Snirly, granpap?”
“Ay, it must ’a’ been an awful thrifty tree. Every time a limb broke
off it plumb healed up, an’ thar’s eight and ten rings over some of the
scars. Here I’ve cut it down an’ split into it jest to find a lot of
knot-holes spilin’ my best boards. And it looked so purty and straight.”
He got up, adjusted his brake, which was the strong fork of a limb
chained to a log, fixed his bolt upright, set his adze carefully, and
with precise restraint evenly separated a smooth, shining three-foot
board from the rest of the bolt. From the splitting wood came an odor
that must have been the essence of the forest condensed for generations
into its living vase.
But granpap was not pleased with his work.
“Did you see how tough that was? When I do git a good board I have to
tear it out. But it’s nateral for the south side of a tree to be tough.”
“Don’t you mean the north side, granpap?”
“No,” he said patiently. “It’s the sun that toughens wood. You’ll see
them bolts from the north side are brickle.”
He balanced the board disapprovingly.
“Look how narr’ it is. By the time I’ve sapped this there won’t be
enough of it left to turn a rain-drap.”
He began to chip off the inch of white sap-wood along the edge of the
board.
“I could ’a’ cast out the snirly blocks, but it was the wind-shake that
finally ruined me. I never counted on a wind-shake in a tree as proud
as that.”
“Show me the wind-shake, granpap.”
“Look at this block, here in the crosscut, an’ you’ll see it. A
wind-shake starts at the heart an’ twists round and round, gettin’
bigger and bigger an’ breakin’ the wood as it goes, till thar’s only
enough left for a little narr’ board ’tween the shake-rings and the
bark. Then sometimes, when the tree weaves in the wind, you can hear it
cry. If I’d ’a’ listened at this tree in a high wind it couldn’t ’a’
fooled me. But they never make no sign on the outside.”
“Granpap,” I began slowly.
He looked up, met my eyes, and laid down his axe.
“Don’t you think some people are like that?”
I was trembling. If he failed me now, the line of Merlin would be
extinct. There would be no more seers in the Unakas, or anywhere.
“Ay,” he said. He still used the “ay” of Westmoreland and the hills of
Malvern. “Ay, Cyn was like that after Ben got killed.”
He thought my silence was the silence of sympathy, and in alarm took up
his axe.
“’Tain’t no use to----”
The axe finished the sentence, slicing a curl of white sap-bark. But
his face was a shade grayer. The tree was avenged.
I started on, thinking of all the Cyns and Bens I had known; and of a
gay friend, now fallen, who liked to assure me that “A heart is known
by the autopsy.” My foot turned up a boss of sweet turf. A broken heart
makes as good loam as a sound one, I thought. And I would have gone
down the slope singing in the face of a looming to-morrow, if only
granpap had not been standing so still.