To a God Unknown

  "You'll come to see us," Harriet called sadly. "It's nice up there. You must come to visit us."

  Burton took up the lines, but before he clucked to the horses, he turned to Joseph. "Goodbye. I've done right. When you come to see it, you'll know it was right. It was the only way. Remember that, Joseph. When you come to see it, you'll thank me."

  Joseph moved close to the wagon and patted his brother's shoulder. "I offered to swear, and I would have tried to keep the oath."

  Burton raised the lines and clucked. The horses strained into the collars. The children, sitting on the load, waved their hands, and those who were to stay ran behind and hung to the tail-board and dragged their feet.

  Rama stood waving a handkerchief, but she said aside to Elizabeth, "They wear out more shoes that way than by all the walking in the world."

  Still the family stood in the morning sunlight and watched the departing wagon. It disappeared into the river wood, and after a while it came in sight again, and they saw it mount a little hill and finally drop from sight over the ridge.

  When it was gone a listlessness came over the families. They stood silently, wondering what they should do now. They were conscious that a period was over, that a phase was past. At length the children moved slowly away.

  Martha said, "Our dog had puppies last night," and they all ran to see the dog, which hadn't had puppies at all.

  Joseph turned away at last, and Thomas walked with him. "I'm going to bring in some horses, Joe," he said. "I'm going to level part of the vegetable-flat so the water won't all run off."

  Joseph walked slowly, with his head down. "You know I'm responsible for Burton's going."

  "No you aren't. He wanted to go."

  "It was because of the tree," Joseph went on. "He said I worshipped it." Joseph's eyes raised to the tree, and suddenly he stood still, startled. "Thomas, look at the tree!"

  "I see it. What's the matter?"

  Joseph walked hurriedly to the trunk and looked up at the branches. "Why, it seems all right." He paused and ran his hands over the bark. "That was funny. When I looked at it, I thought something was wrong with it. It was just a feeling, I guess." And he continued, "I didn't want Burton to go away. It splits the family."

  Elizabeth passed behind them, toward the house. "Still at the game, Joseph?" she called mockingly.

  He jerked his hand from the bark and turned to follow her. "We'll try to get along without another hand," he told Thomas. "If the work gets too much for us, I'll hire another Mexican." He went into the house and stood idly in the sitting-room.

  Elizabeth came out of the bedroom, brushing her hair back with her fingertips. "I hardly had time to dress," she explained. She looked quickly at Joseph. "Are you feeling badly about having Burton go?"

  "I think I am," he said uncertainly. "I'm worried about something, and I don't know what it is."

  "Why don't you ride? Haven't you anything to do?" He shook his head impatiently. "I have fruit trees coming to Nuestra Senora. I should go in for them."

  "Why don't you go, then?"

  He walked to the front door and looked out at the tree. "I don't know," he said. "I'm afraid to go. There's something wrong."

  Elizabeth stood beside him. "Don't play your game too hard, Joseph. Don't let the game take you in."

  He shrugged his shoulders. "That's what I'm doing, I guess. I told you once I could tell weather by the tree. It's a kind of ambassador between the land and me. Look at the tree, Elizabeth! Does it seem all right to you?"

  "You're overwrought," she said. "The tree is all right. Go in and get the fruit trees. It won't do them any good to be standing out of ground."

  But it was with a powerful reluctance to leave the ranch that he hitched up the buckboard and drove to town.

  It was the time of flies, when they became active before the winter death. They cut dazzling slashes in the sunlight, landed on the horses' ears and sat in circles around their eyes. Although the morning had been cool with the sharpness of autumn, the Indian-summer sun still burned the land. The river had disappeared underground, while in the few deep pools that remained, the black eels swam sluggishly and big trout mouthed the surface without fear.

  Joseph drove his team at a trot over the crisp sycamore leaves. A foreboding followed him and enveloped him. "Maybe Burton was right," he thought. "Maybe I've been doing wrong without knowing it. There's an evil hanging over the land." And he thought, "I hope the rain comes early and starts the river again."

  The dry river was a sad thing to him. To defeat the sadness he thought of the barn, piled to the roof trees with hay, and of the haystacks by the corral, all thatched against the winter. And then he wondered whether the little stream in the pine grove still ran from its cave. "I'll go up and see pretty soon,' he thought. He drove quickly, and hurried back to the ranch, but it was late at night when he arrived. The tired horses hung down their heads when the checkreins were loosened.

  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 h
ere," 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 sidehills. 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 pocketknife, or worked interminably at his beard, smoothing it down and turning the ends under.

  He looked about his land and it seemed to be dying. The pale hills and fields, the dust-grey sage, the naked stones frightened him. On the hills only the black pine grove did not change. It brooded darkly, as always, on the ridge top.

  Elizabeth was very busy in the house. Alice had gone home to Nuestra Senora to take up her rightful position as a sad woman whose husband would return some day. She carried the affair with dignity, and her mother received compliments upon Alice's fine restraint and decent mourning. Alice began every day as though Juanito would return by evening.

  The loss of her helper made more work for Elizabeth. Caring for her child, washing and cooking filled her days. She remembered the time before her marriage only hazily, and with a good deal of contempt. In the evenings, when she sat with Joseph, she tried to re-establish the fine contact she had made before the baby was born. She liked to tell him things that had happened when she was a little girl in Monterey, although the things didn't seem real to her any more. While Joseph stared moodily at the spots of fire that showed through the little windows of the stove, she talked to him.

  "I had a dog," she said. "His name was Camille. I used to think that was the loveliest name in the world. I knew a little girl who was named Camille, and the name fitted her. She had a skin with the softness of camellias, so I named my dog after her, and she was very angry." Elizabeth told how Tarpey shot a squatter and was hanged to the limb of tree on the fish flats; and she told of the lean stern woman who kept the lighthouse at Point Joe. Joseph liked to hear her soft voice, and he didn't usually listen to her words, but he took her hand and explored it all over with his fingertips.

  Sometimes she tried to argue him out of his fear. "Don't worry about the rain. It will come. Even if there isn't much water this year, there will be in another year. I know this country, dear."

  "But it would take so much rain. There won't be time if it doesn't start pretty soon. The rain will get behind in the year."

  One evening she said, "I think I'd like to ride again. Rama says it won't hurt me now. Will you ride with me, dear?"

  "Of course," he said. "Begin a little at a time. Then it won't hurt you."

  "I'd like to have you ride up to the pines with me. The smell of pines would be good."

  He looked slowly over at her. "I've thought of going there, too. There's a spring in the grove, and I want to see if it is dried up like all the rest." His eyes grew more animated as he thought of the circle in the pines. The rock had been so green when he saw it last. "That must be a deep spring, I don't see how it could dry up," he said.

  "Oh I have more reasons than that for wanting to go," she said laughing. "I think I told you something about it. When I was carrying the baby I deceived Thomas one day and drove up to the pines. And I went into that central place where the big rock is, and where the spring is." She frowned, trying to remember the thing exactly. "Of course," she said, "my condition was responsible for what happened. I was oversensitive."

  She glanced up to find Joseph eagerly looking at her.

  "Yes?" he said. "Tell me."

  "Well, as I say, it was my condition. When I was carrying the child, little things grew huge. I didn't find the path, going in. I broke my way through the underbrush, and then I came into the circle. It was quiet, Joseph, more quite than anything I've ever known. I sat in front of the rock because that place seemed saturated with peace. It seemed to be giving me so
mething I needed." In speaking of it, the feeling came back to her. She brushed her hair over her ears, and the wide-set eyes looked far off. "And I loved the rock. It's bard to describe. I loved the rock more than you or the baby or myself. And this is harder to say: While I sat there I went into the rock. The little stream was flowing out of me and I was the rock, and the rock was--I don't know--the rock was the strongest dearest thing in the world." She looked nervously about the room. Her fingers picked at her skirt. The thing she had intended to tell as a joke was forcing itself back upon her.

  Joseph took up her nervous hand and held the fingers still. "Tell me," he insisted gently.

  "Well, I must have stayed there quite a while, because the sun moved, but it seemed only a moment to me. And then the feeling of the place changed. Something evil came into it." Her voice grew husky with the memory. "Something malicious was in the glade, something that wanted to destroy me. I ran away. I thought it was after me, that great crouched rock, and when I got outside, I prayed. Oh, I prayed a long time."

  Joseph's light eyes were piercing. "Why do you want to go back there?" he demanded.

  "Why don't you see?" she replied eagerly. "The whole thing was my condition. But I've dreamed about it several times and it comes often to my mind. Now that I'm all well again, I want to go back, and see that it is just an old moss-covered rock in a clearing. Then I won't dream about it any more. Then it won't threaten me any more. I want to touch it. I want to insult it because it frightened me." She released her fingers from Joseph's grip and rubbed them to ease the pain in them. "You've hurt my hand, dear. Are you afraid of the place, too?"

  "No," he said. "I'm not afraid. I'll take you up there." He fell silent, wondering whether he should tell her what Juanito had said about the pregnant Indian women who went to sit in front of the rock, and about the old ones who lived in the forest. "It might frighten her," he thought. "It is better that she should lose her fear of the place." He opened the stove and threw in an armful of wood and turned the damper straight, to set the flame roaring. "When would you like to go?" he asked.

  "Why, anytime. If the day is warm tomorrow, I'll pack a lunch into a saddle bag. Rama will take care of the baby. We'll have a picnic." She spoke eagerly. "We haven't had a picnic since I've been here I don't know anything I love more. At home," she said, "we took our lunches to Huckleberry Hill, and after we'd eaten, mother and I picked buckets of berries."