The Night of Trees Page 23

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh!” Shim cried. Well, he wasn’t deaf, anyway.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked Shim, and as he asked, terrible fright came upon him. “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, Christ, Murray! I shot you!”

  “What in hell did you do that for?” But Shim was working like a dog digging a hole. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw Shim working, and he was afraid to look. He was going to be sick, so he’d better roll over to the left and not puke on Shim, whatever he was doing there. Shim wouldn’t let him, though.

  “What are you doing?” His voice sounded as if it were coming through a tube.

  “Your arm, Murray. Oh, God damn it!” Shim was that close. Look at that big knife! And then he remembered that the deer hadn’t just taken the bullet; he’d shot right back. Ow! Like throwing a tire iron at a tire. It couldn’t happen, but that deer rose up and slaughtered him right back! What a counterpuncher that little buck was!

  Shim began to get undressed. First he unbuttoned his green shirt, then he pulled up his shirttails, then he took that shirt off, then he took off a pullover—sort of a sweatshirt—then he began to unbutton another shirt.

  “You hot or something?”

  “Yes!” Shim cried. Nearly bawled, actually.

  “Christ, I’m cold, Shim.”

  Shim stopped getting undressed, and bent down to work again. Murray still didn’t want to look to his right, but it did seem as though Shim were turning a great big wheel. And he felt that Shim should let him get his arm out of the goddam thing first, for Christ’s sake, but Shim wouldn’t.

  “Let me get my arm out!” His voice was weak, very weak, mainly because he knew (really did know) that Shim was twisting a stick in a tourniquet, twisting it with both hands, with all his might.

  “It hit me in the arm?” he asked Shim.

  “Um!” Shim grunted as he twisted.

  “I can’t feel it much.”

  Shim took his big knife and slit with it, down out of sight, then put it back in its sheath and began to rip cloth.

  “Murray,” Shim said as he worked, “you’re hit bad. You got to realize it so you won’t fight this tourniquet.” Shim was wrapping and tying red cloth around the stick. “No! Don’t look at it yet!” Shim cried, and put his hand on Murray’s cheek in order to keep his head from turning.

  Then the snow turned, the trees, the sky, everything turned bright yellow, then gradually darker and darker yellow, then orange, then red like a bad egg yolk with a dead chicken in it.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked Shim.

  “You passed out again, is all.”

  He was lying flat, and he couldn’t move his arms at all, either one.

  “I got you all bundled up, now. You don’t need your arms, Murray. I don’t want you to git cold.”

  “I don’t need my arms?”

  Shim was hacking at a spruce trunk with his knife. “I’m going to make a travois and haul you out of here, Murray. I got you all tied up in a bundle, and all you have to do is keep calm.”

  “OK, Shim.”

  “It was an accident, Murray!” Shim worked and worked at the trunk of the spruce, and then, suddenly desperate, he crawled to Murray, his knees kicking up snow, and put his hands on Murray’s cheeks. “It was the most damnedest freak, Murray! We both shot that deer, you know that? We both hit and killed it dead, but my bullet went on through and smashed your arm. It was a freak!”

  “OK, Shim. I know. It’s beginning to hurt, though.”

  His heart was in his biceps, its valves knocking, wanting to get out. Blum, blum, blum (split!), blum, blum (split!) went his heart inside his arm, and it kept splitting the bone into ragged slivers that slid back and forth on each other. The snow turned into tons of orange sherbet, and the sky was jet black.

  “Murray? Murray? Murray, listen to me!” Shim’s face agonized above him again.

  “Yes?”

  “Listen, Murray, this ain’t going to be a comfortable ride. I got you strapped to two poles, see?” He reached down and lifted Murray up like a wheelbarrow. “The closest road is down the Leah side, understand? We’ll find a car, maybe, but we got a long ways to go. If you want to yell out, go ahead any time, OK?”

  “OK, Shim.”

  “I got to stop every so often and look to see how you’re coming, or to rest, but I’ll get you out, Murray. You can trust me.”

  “I trust you, Shim,” he said, and Shim’s face went dark and painful for a second before it moved away. Then Murray’s head rose up, and his body bounced awkwardly. His sleeves caught him in his armpits and his pants caught him in his crotch; it was like being on a spit, and his right side was against the fire, his left (would it soon turn?) against ice. But with this new and now bearable pain came an excruciating clarity, and Shim was no longer playing some surrealist game with knives and rope and poles. The trees swayed like masts, Shim grunted and sighed, and he began to feel motion. The little pains helped the big one.

  He was badly hurt. His right arm ended in a vise almost where it began. He was tightly trussed, arms and legs, helpless, and someone (Shim) was helping him. Shim was pulling his heart out for him—could it be Shim? Funny Shim didn’t just gut him and tag him. Where was his rifle? Who gave a God damn where his rifle was?

  The tourniquet was too tight, because his ribs were bending. If only the bouncing would stop, maybe they could get everything straightened out again.

  Then clarity returned, and he asked: Why did this have to happen to me? What a stupid piece of luck! His arm was broken, no doubt about that. He couldn’t feel it, but maybe the tourniquet caused that. No, Shim’s remarks ruled out anything simple; it was smashed, but smashed. That meant he couldn’t drive. Oh, damn it!

  “Ow!” he yelled.

  Shim’s voice, from ahead somewhere, full of phlegm and air: “Sorry, Murray.” Breaths and snores from Shim. “Yell out. Yell right out, you want to.” Gasps and grunts. “Remember. Doing my. Best. Help you!”

  “Thanks, Shim. I mean it. Oh!” He hadn’t meant to cry out at the end, there. Shim was taking care of him, and Shim was good at what he was good at. No, don’t be facetious. Nobody would be as good in this situation. Granted, Shim had shot him in the first place, but if you insisted upon playing around with guns—No, Shim would now give his life, practically, to save him. If only his father would come, then everything would be fine. His father would get him out, all right. Maybe he would be along—if he hadn’t got himself a deer with those shots they’d heard. He’d follow the deer track right up to the ridge, read the whole mess in the snow, and come right along. Of course his father would come.

  “Ouch!”

  His father would come loping up, and Murray would smile at the O.M. and say: “Slight accident, O.M. Nobody’s fault. Just a freak.” And his father would say: “Don’t you worry, Murray. We’ll have you to Doc Silver in a jiffy.” Wait a minute. Doc Silver was in New York. Steady, Grimald, we’ll have no regression here. And his father would say to Shim, “Let’s have a look at it,” and they would put him down gently and his father would stop that pain, throw away those awful poles, and pick him up in his big arms and carry him in and put him to bed even though he knew he’d only been pretending to be asleep so that when they got home Daddy would carry him out of the car and upstairs and give him a drink of water.

  What am I, a goddam baby? he thought. (Ow!) The sky turned from bright blue to an old bruise; the whole sky, the moving, falling trees were bruised flesh.

  “You’re bleeding, God damn it,” Shim said, and grunted out loud as he took two thousand more turns on the winch.

  “I really appreciate what you’re doing for me, Shim.” Shim wore only his green chino shirt on top, and it was wet through except for the shirttails, which were frozen into green boards that knocked woodenly against his legs.

  “I ate your sandwich a while back, Murray. You was out.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “We’re gitting there, kid. Don’t
you fret. I’ll git you out of the woods.”

  Out of the trees, Murray thought dreamily. The dark trees, the night that covers me. Don’t ever shoot a deer, or the trees will kill you for it. They bent over him like cold ghouls: birches in antiseptic white; spruce dark executioners with hidden faces; beech gray prison orderlies, arms high, hands clenched, full of knotty clubs. They all bent over him, and when Shim tried to pull him away they ran around and got in front of him again, and were waiting just as before in their threatening, silent postures. Shim wouldn’t give up, though. Shim kept going, and you could depend on him. Shim was strong, like his father, and knew about this cold place; lived in it and beat it out of its prizes.

  “Shim!” he called.

  “Ayuh!” Shim called back.

  “Thanks, Shim.”

  “Take it easy, kid. We got a long. Ways. Yet.”

  When they next stopped, and his head was lowered, it seemed to him that his life had receded into his trunk, and there it nestled, protected and warm. Sometimes it would sneak up into his eyes and look cautiously out into the cold: above him a maple had been ringed and etched to the bone by porcupines, and the white, naked branches quivered—brittle quiverings against the blue.

  Now he could not go on his journey, and it was not fair! Did he still believe that things were fair? How much of the world did a man have to see, how often must he observe his fellow men, how often must he excuse his own filthy ego before he understood the word? The word, the word. Should he pity himself, and cry? he wondered. Then he said, whispering through rubbery lips: “Let’s face it, Grimald. Let’s forget this man stuff. You’re a nasty child, ready to be cuddled.”—And convinced. Ready, but no one was there to convince him of the fairness of it all. How did he get to be a man? He outgrew the arms that might comfort, he outthought the lies that might comfort, and if he found himself grown big enough to comfort others, what if he were unequipped with comforting lies? In the beginning was the lie, and the lie was everything.

  Again they were moving, and Shim groaned with each heaving pull; he cried, and cursed the trees that stood in their way. The lurching sky was black behind the sun’s orange light.

  One fantasy he might allow himself: his father was grown up, and he could no longer be called Daddy. His mother then became a woman, an adult, and the double image of those two, which had been his constant dream image of them, as if they had both been placed against his mind in a double exposure—that double image began to slide apart, and as the two people slid out of each other’s ectoplasm they grew into solid flesh, and their skins turned rosy and alive.

  Just one more: if the sky were black, and the sun an orange bleeding out that strange nonlight, he might bring to life, no matter the number of ragged wounds and half-healed scars this vision suffered, a time of love and happiness. He didn’t deserve it, to be sure, but in this time there was a just and gentle God—somewhat resembling his grandfather, but uglier and ten times as big—and God was a forgiving one. Stern, yes, but you could work off your gigs and be forgiven. All right, but it had better not be too pretty, this fantasy, for in the woodsy darkness the sadists still plotted, and the vain wanted to kill to justify their positions. The only difference between this time and reality was that here the bullies and the stupids didn’t run the world, the calm voice was somehow louder than the screams of hatred; an impossibility, but after all, this was a fantasy.

  But let’s keep it under control, Grimald! Behind the dais were the combined symbols in prismatic juxtaposition—a lack of focus no scientist then present itched to correct; if they bothered you, you didn’t have to look at them. Cross and phallus, candelabra and star, syringe and crescent moon, curette and burnished belly and the kind, calm smile, torii and hydra, flute and dancer, etc.—overlapping, diplopic mirror tricks. All right; if you didn’t like the queasy feeling they gave you, you could shut your eyes, or look, like a Gothic rubberneck, up, up the slim columnations to a serene blue Universe.

  Where were we? Yes. Music; we will this day in the lives of Murray Grimald and Christine Wilson give over this office to the Christians for their melodies and brave hopes, their early lack of sentimentality. Their symbol was a torture device, to remind mankind that sometimes his games were not very funny, “but in the cruellest man there might remain, dry and inactive as a spore, the seed of grace.”

  Christine: “Hello, Murray,” she said, her soft voice full of love and humor. They both thought all this ceremony was rather silly, but they did it for the old folks, and actually they found it rather moving and impressive; at one point they looked at each other and found tears in each other’s eyes, and smiled at their own sentiment. They were aware of their parents and grandparents back in the darkness, and knew the pride and love all felt toward the tall young couple. Christine wore white, and she stood, as he did, taller than the religious man who stood making the old incantations and poetry, making with God the garbled and multilingual litanies.

  Then, at the proper moment (all this had been rehearsed on Wednesday), Sophie came with the babe, its tiny head and sleeping, rosy face snuggled against the silk, and as they knelt, Sophie, her face dark with happiness, presented the baby to Christine, who took it in her arms as they stood up again. The holy man touched them according to the ritual, and then said the final words: “With this babe I thee wed.” They had to kiss each other then, in public, but since it was part of the ceremony they didn’t mind. Their mouths met smiling, and the baby cried a little just for comic relief before they walked back up the aisle in the softly radiant light from all those fond faces.

  The ugly trees bent down as they passed, then swung up like the heads of angry horses toward the black sky. Shim cursed and labored; each breath was a groan.

  21

  AT LAST he had come within sight of the house. His clothes had sweat through, his knees trembled, his arms were about to come loose at the elbows and shoulders. The buck did not want to come out of the woods; if he had been alive he could hardly have managed to hook himself around so many saplings, or to slide his haunches into so many holes. He had, Richard thought, what the automobile magazines he’d been reading lately called “a pronounced oversteer.” Now, with his forelegs hooked up behind his antlers so that they would be out of the way, he slid grudgingly along, pushing up snow in front of his brisket. Richard stopped, and leaned against the last sapling before the open slope. The buck’s black eye was frosted over—a star pattern of white crystals. With his hoofs higher than his eyes he seemed frozen into a parody of leaping, and in their wake, a deep groove in the snow, were dots and dashes of the bright blood that he seemed never to stop leaving behind him. He, the buck; he, Richard Grimald. He smiled, and weary temblors moved through his thighs. Soon he would be pulling the buck up on the hook, and then he could look at him with no more duty to do, only the victorious telling about it. They would finger the holes in the brown sides—Murray, Shim, and Zach—and read the marksmanship in them. That was the story he wouldn’t have to tell!

  It was just noon when he reached the barn. Zach and Opal came out to see the deer, and Zach nodded professionally. He’d put on his old mackinaw, and in his unbuckled overshoes he helped Richard hoist the deer up in the barn doorway, then read the holes in its side and nodded again. The buck swung there by the neck, his white belly with the red slash in it exposed, his white tail—his flag—dripping the last of his blood from its now crimson tip.

  Opal looked at the deer. She stood away from it and looked at it, holding her coat tightly around her; then she shivered and looked steadily at Richard. She would not congratulate him; she was not a hunter. He couldn’t read her expression. Her gaze bothered him a little, and he owed her some of his time, he knew, even though he wanted only to be the victorious hunter—to wait happily for Murray’s praise.

  “I heard them shoot, too,” he said, knowing that she wouldn’t particularly care. It disappointed her—he could see it in her eyes—that he put her off with that sort of talk, but then he glanced at Z
ach, as if to say that he spoke of hunting because Zach was there. He didn’t want to hurt her. Now that he was happy again he must not hurt anyone.

  She and Zach went back into the house. Before he washed up he had to clean out the rest of the lungs from the deer and tidy up a few ragged edges here and there. When he went inside, Opal was not in the kitchen.

  “Hoach! Damn fine. Huch! Buck,” Zach said, nodding from his blue chair. “Runnin’. Hough! That second. Hoach! Shot?”

  “I guess I didn’t have to take it, but I sure didn’t want to lose him,” Richard said.

  Zach nodded, his mouth set in an expression of severe approval. “Huch! You’re a hunter. Hough! All right.”

  Murray and Shim would know that, too! He took most of the blood from his hands with cold water at the sink. He didn’t want to change the strong clothes he had been so lucky wearing, but he did go upstairs and wash his upper body. His tiredness had left him already, and he thought he might go out again. There were always bear and wildcat, and a few other animals worth bringing in, and he might, if Shim or Murray had scored, help with the last of the dragging. His shirt and underwear were drying out quickly; he would hang them in his room for a while.

  Opal sat on his bed waiting for him.

  “I just wanted to talk,” she said. “Would you talk to me for a minute?” She was shy, now, and wouldn’t look directly at him. She looked around the room, then at the bedspread, which she smoothed gently with her little hand. Then, evidently, she remembered what they had done on that bed, for she drew her hand quickly away.

  “I’m not stupid, you know,” she said. He saw that she had been crying a little. He turned to hang his shirts on the door, and she ran to him and put her hand on his naked ribs. He felt very strong, but only as a hunter in the woods, and he didn’t really want her to touch him. If only Murray had shot a deer! That other young buck, for instance, with the nubbins for antlers.

  But even in that little second or two he was communicating his indifference to Opal, and he could not be that cruel. He took her face between his hands and kissed her on the lips. “It was wonderful yesterday,” he said. “You made me very happy.”