IN SEPTEMBER, WHEN BEARBERRY leaves were ready to pick, after the first storm had come upvalley like a drunken miner headed home, snapping limbs as thick as your arms off the maples, Olin Sanders caught a big tree barberchairing and was dead before they could get him out of the woods. They laid him across the laps of two men in the back of the truck and sent word ahead. When they got down to the road his wife was there crying, with pink curlers like pine cones in her hair and in black knit slacks too small for her stout legs and a loose hanging white blouse. And two county sheriffs, drawn by the word of death, wearing clean, pressed clothing, like clerks. When she looked in through the window of the truck and saw him broken in half like a buckled tin can she raised her fists to beat at the thing responsible and began beating the truck. When the sheriff held her back and said in a polite voice, “Now, control yourself,” she began beating her thighs. One of the men stepped up and punched the sheriff.
All this time the son, in whose lap the father’s broken head was cradled, sat silent. He was aware of the beginning of something else, more than his father’s end. His pants were wet with his father’s blood.
That night the boy left the house, walked past his father’s shirts hanging to dry on the line, and drove up the Warner Creek Road to the place where they had been cutting. He sidestepped downslope with the chainsaw in his hands to reach the stump of the tree (the blood congealed like dark sap on the wood) and cut it off, cut off the top of the stump with the stain of his father’s death on it, the saw screaming in the dim night. With a choker and a length of cable he hauled the butt round uphill and cursed and jacked it into the back of his pickup.
He came off Warner Mountain to the Granite Creek Road and went down Granite Creek until he came to the equipment shed, where a logging bridge crossed the river to the highway side. With a front loader and a length of chain he yanked the slab of wood out of the pickup, drove out onto the bridge and with jerking motions and the hiss of hydraulics he twisted the machine crosswise, tipped the bucket and dumped the slab of fir into the river.
He put the front loader away and drove home.
No one had ever done anything like this before. The lack of any tradition in it bothered the boy. As he walked past the trees near the house he was suddenly afraid. His mother was awake, sitting in the darkened living room when he walked in, wearing the tattered quilt robe that embarrassed him when his friends were around. Behind the glow of her cigarette she asked where he had been.
The butt round came back to the surface of the river, the thunderous sound of its plunge evaporating in the night, and it moved off like a dark iceberg riding low in the water. A few miles and it beached quietly on the cobbles of an island.
Cawley Besson and his family—a wife called June, two boys, and a mixed-breed dog—came to work for the Forest Service. There was timber then, timber uncruised in backcountry valleys. Douglas firs ten feet through at the base and straight-grained for two hundred and fifty feet. Dense, slow-grown wood. It was show-off timber and no need to spare it.
Cawley opened roads to it. He was tight-bellied, dedicated, and clipped in his manners. He left early for work and came home late, with a reputation, he said, to think about. He had places to go after this job he told his wife (lying next to him, listening to him, wondering when they would make love again), places to go.
On a hot Sunday in June, Cawley sat at the river’s edge in a pair of shorts, eating a picnic lunch, thinking about Monday, drinking cold beer and watching his sons. The boys were throwing rocks into the river, which the dog chased until he felt the current at his legs and stepped back. Cawley liked the feel of this: he looked toward his wife, feeling the warmth of his own body. The boy swept past him, gesticulating silently, before the scream arrived in his ears, as the dog ran over him barking, and he looked to see the other son standing motionless at the river’s edge with his hands over his mouth.
Cawley leaped to his feet, spilling food away, calling out, running to catch up, cursing jibberish. He could not swim, the boy either. He saw the small white face in the dark water, the sunlight bright in his short wet hair, and what lay ahead began to close in on him. The boy, wide-eyed and quiet, went with the river.
Cawley continued to run. The panic got into him like leeches. The beer was coming up acid in his mouth. The river bore the boy on and he calculated how fast, running harder to get ahead, yelling to the boy Hold on! Hold on! Jesus hold on. A little ahead now. He saw the vine maple coming at him, grabbed it, bent it, broke it so fast he felt hope, ran hard into the shallows ahead of the boy to throw the end of the long branch to him—who spun off its tip with his hands splayed, rigid. Cawley dropped the limb and churning high-legged and mad, chest deep and with a sudden plunge had the boy, had his shirt, and was flailing for shore, grabbing for rocks in the river bed that swept by under him. His feet touched ground and held. His fist was white with his grip twisted in the boy’s tee-shirt—the boy could hardly breathe against his clutch.
The maple limb drifted downriver and came to rest among willows, near a log round on which dark stains were still visible.
A storm came this year, against which all other storms were to be measured, on a Saturday in October, a balmy afternoon. Men in the woods cutting firewood for winter, and children outside with melancholy thoughts lodged somewhere in the memory of summer. It built as it came up the valley as did every fall storm, but the steel-gray thunderheads, the first sign of it anyone saw, were higher, much higher, too high. In the stillness before it hit, men looked at each other as though a fast and wiry man had pulled a knife in a bar. They felt the trees falling before they heard the wind, and they dropped tools and scrambled to get out. The wind came up suddenly and like a scythe, like piranha after them, like seawater through a breach in a dike. The first blow bent trees half to the ground, the second caught them and snapped them like kindling, sending limbs raining down and twenty-foot splinters hurtling through the air like mortar shells to stick quivering in the ground. Bawling cattle running the fences, a loose lawnmower bumping across a lawn, a stray dog lunging for a child racing by. The big trees went down screaming, ripping open holes in the wind that were filled with the broken-china explosion of a house and the yawing screech of a pickup rubbed across asphalt, the rivet popping and twang of phone and electric wires.
It was over in three or four minutes. The eerie, sucking silence it left behind seemed palpably evil, something that would get into the standing timber, like insects, a memory.
No one was killed. Roads were cut off, a bridge buckled. No power. A few had to walk in from places far off in the steep wooded country, arriving home later than they’d ever been up. Some said it pulled the community together, others how they hated living in the trees with no light. No warning. The next day it rained and the woods smelled like ashes. It was four or five days before they got the roads opened and the phones working, electricity back. Three sent down to the hospital in Holterville. Among the dead, Cawley Besson’s dog. And two deer, butchered and passed quietly in parts among neighbors.
Of the trees that fell into the river, a number came up like beached whales among willows at the tip of an island.
Rebecca Grayson drove forty-one miles each morning to work in a men’s clothing store in town and came back each evening in time to fix her husband’s dinner. It was a job that had paid for births and funerals, for weddings and a second automobile but it left her depressed and stranded now, at fifty-six, as if it were a clear defeat, invisible but keenly known to her.
Her husband operated a gas station and logging supply shop in Beaver Creek, a small town on the river. They had had four daughters, which had caused Clarence Grayson a kind of dismay from which he never recovered. It wasn’t a country for raising daughters, he thought. He lived as though he were waiting for wounds to heal before moving on.
He hardly noticed, when she helped him in the shop on Saturdays, that someone often came by with wildflowers for her, or to tell a story, to ask had she seen the skunk cabbage in Danmeier’s field or the pussy willows blooming, sure signs of spring. Clarence appreciated these acts of kindness, while he finished a job for whoever it was, as a duty done that he had no way with.
Men were attracted to Rebecca in an innocent but almost hungry way, as though needing the pleasure she took in them. Because there was never a hint of anything but friendship, their attentions both pleased her and left her with a deep longing, out of which, unashamed, she lay awake at night in a self-embrace of fantasy.
Late at night, when he couldn’t sleep, Clarence would roll over to her and try to speak. Sometimes he would begin to cry and sob in anger at a loss he couldn’t find the words for. He cried against her negligee and drove his fist weakly into his pillow. On those nights she held him until the pain ran its course, and said nothing of her own yearning.
After the last daughter had married she thought they could go away. In a deeply private place she wished to go to Europe, alone; but she could not bear the thought of his loneliness and did not believe that in a journey together there could be any joy.
One summer evening while Clarence was in the living room reading, she sat on their bed with her face lowered to a glass bowl of dried blossoms in her lap, a pool of musky odor that triggered memory and passion in her and to which she would touch her face in moments when she needed friendship. Twenty years of anniversary roses, flowers from her first gardens, wildflowers from men who were charmed by her, a daughter’s wedding bouquet. She felt the tears run the length of her nose and the tightness of her small fists pressing against her knees. She wished to be rid of it, and she rose with the bowl and left.
In the dark yard by the side of the house she took off her dress and her soft underclothes. With the bowl firmly in her grip she walked down to the river and stepped in. The cold water rose against her as she moved away from the shore, lapped at her pale belly, and she felt a resolve as strong as any love she could ever remember. Her breasts hardened in the cold air. Waist deep in the water, her feet bent painfully around the stones (on the far bank she could see into the living rooms of people she knew), she scattered the first handful on the water. The pieces landed soundlessly and teetered quickly away. She flung the dry petals, the shrunken blossoms and the discolored flakes until the bowl was empty, and then dipped its lip to the current to swirl it clean.
She stood there, numb to the cold, until the wind had dissipated the perfume, listening to the wash around her hips, feeling the excitement of something she could not grasp. She thought of herself going on, like the river, without a break, with two herons flying overhead, untouchable and graceful, toward an undetermined destination. She had no wish to explain the feeling to anyone.
Of the flowers she threw on the water, some floated down as far as the log jam and hung up in its crevices.
By this time beaver had come back to the valley, once having been trapped out. They were few and save for the sight of alders cut along the creeks their lives went unnoticed. One of the dams blocked a feeder stream above Bear Creek and was found one morning in the fall by a boy hunting deer. He walked across, testing it idly as he went, then throwing his weight to it, trying to make it spring. He came to a halt and surveyed the dam with surprise, for it did not give. On the far side he set his gun against a tree and cut an alder pole, stripping the leaves and sharpening the point with swift, deft strokes of his knife. Walking back across the span he began to probe the structure, looking for an opening with depth. He found such a place and twisting the pole into it began to pry and root with the tip, seeking better leverage. Bracing his legs and putting all the strength of his back and upper arms into it, he broke out a wedge of mud and twigs. Against this breach he began to use the pole like a post-hole digger, raising it above his head and ramming deeper and deeper, prying against any purchase. The green twigs were supple and difficult to break so he turned to the knife. Cut through, then pry. He was beginning to sweat. As he took off his jacket he saw the beaver surface in the middle of the pond. He hunkered quietly off the dam and hid in the brush. The beaver, motionless in the center of departing concentric rings of water, followed each movement.
The boy stared at the beaver, angry for having allowed himself to be seen. He could feel his heart pounding, the sudden compression of his muscles, smell his own warm odors. His hand located a rock. In one fluid motion he rose to fire it with tremendous strength, so hard the hair jumped on his head with the snap of his body. He missed. The beaver slipped under. He picked up another rock. Twoosh. The sound of the stone cutting into the pond steadied him. Twoosh. Twoosh.
He returned to the dam, to the place where he had gouged an opening. Prying, batting, cutting, and kicking; finally, against a fulcrum of boulders carried from the shore, he broke through the mesh of limbs. He stepped aside, disheveled. As the water flowed cleanly through the cut he came to realize the break was too shallow, only several inches below the surface of the pond; and that it was too late in the day to go hunting. And that the beaver had not shown himself again. He cursed the beaver, threw the pry pole into the pond and, taking his gun, walked off sullenly.
The pond drained to the level of the cut. After dark the beaver came to the breach and began to weave a closure.
The boy threatened to return to the valley and trap beaver that winter but did not.
Alder branches from the dam were swept down Bear Creek and into the river, where they wedged in the log jam.
The fir that grew next to the Thompsons’ house was, by a count of its rings, 447 years old when it fell at dusk on a March day during dinner. Before it fell the sounds outside were only those of the river coming up softly through the trees and the calls of grosbeaks. Gene Thompson was able to hear other things as he sat at the table. He could hear trees growing and dying. (When he walked in the woods he could distinguish between the creaking of cedar and the creaking of hemlock, between the teeter of rocks in a stream and the heartbeat of a spotted owl. He lay in the woods with his ear pressed to the damp earth listening to the slow burrowing of tree roots, which he distinguished from the digging of moles or worms, or the sound of rivers moving deep in the earth.) When he listened with his forehead against a tree he heard the thinking of woodpeckers asleep inside. He heard the flow of sap which sounded like stratospheric winds to him.
Gene sat quietly at dinner listening to the fir by the house. He heard the sudden spread of a filigree of cracks in the termite-ridden roots, the groaning of fibers stretched as the tree shifted its weight, seventy tons, toward the river and a muffled popping in the earth as it gave way. He heard (the fork poised before his mouth) the sweeping brush of trailing limbs high overhead as it began its descent. With the first loud crack, the terrible whining screech of separation, the gasping, sucking noise in its wake as the tree sailed down, everyone looked up. The tree struck the earth like a sheet of iron and dinner leaped from the table. A soft after-rain of twigs.
Gene went out the door with his father.
“Holy cow!” he said, striding toward it.
It had taken other trees with it, broken the highway and lay with its top in the river. It had to be removed, said his father, right away, to let traffic through. “Six or seven feet,” he said to an approaching neighbor, “through the butt and clean for two hundred feet.” Lucky no one had been killed, he said. He knew its value. Prime old growth. Overmature. Cut right it could be worth $3,000. He figured it roughly, climbed up on it and paced off a measurement in the falling light while another son jerked a chain saw to life to begin to clear the road.
The boy squatted at the stump with his hands spread wide in the tawny sap. He had heard the slow movement of air through the lengthening termite tunnels and had known. He raised his hands from the stump and the sap hung stiffly from his fingers like spirals of honey.
The crown of the tree eventually washed downriver and became entangled at the tip of the island. In the years that followed a pair of osprey came and built a nest, and lived as well as could be expected in that country.