Every man's memory has its own compass. Mine tends toward last things -- I can recall the deaths of all my family members, of the last horse I'd owned, even the last lines of a rhyme I'd heard while lying, ankle in a sling to staunch the seepage from my new stump, in the Depot Master's infirmary:
        

        The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, --
        For the reed which grows nevermore again
        As a reed with the reeds in the river.

And I recall the last hour I walked on a pair of matched feet.
        
I'd taken my post dockside, watchkeeper of the unsteady snugging-to of riverboat hull against warehouse landing. Otis forward and Earl aft were meant to call out the speed of the meeting; were meant to.  But I could see the cross swell was pushing in too fast. The long horizontals of the hull, coming to meet the grayed thick planks of the dock with the look of a hay rake, would strike too hard. I braced a guide pole on the dock and aimed to meet the under-edge of the gunwale--but I slipped on a swipe of pork offal leaked from some crate and I went down. Hull met dock, and the wide tines of the dock planking gnashed down on my ankle with animal ferocity.
        
I knew there was no snowy ivory at hand in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, so a wooden leg it would have to be. While the carpenter who came to fit me was measuring my good leg, knee to sole, and my newly-hewn one, knee to gap, he kept up a distractive account of his professional history.

"The name's Morris. I've been carpenter for this firm since before its first day. Trees were felled, the warehouse built by rivermen under my direction; the dock built with my own hands." He held them out, palms toward me, as if his skills were written in the creases there. His smile said he expected admiring words. A nod was all I could summon.

"Your new accommodation will be of spruce, from a trunk I harvested myself."

"Aren't oak or hickory best? Some hardwood?"

"You've been taken in, my boy. I gather you've been around men with accommodations?"

"Working a dock you can't avoid it."

"True. Sadly. But very good, as well. You have seen for yourself how men fitted with hardwoods cover ground?"

"Yes."

"And how is that? Anything resembling the way a man naturally walks? Or is it an alternation of a natural step and an abrupt slam as the peg comes down?"

"That can't be helped. The ankle is gone."

"Wrong, then right," Morris said. "That lost gimbal can't be rebuilt. But it can be replaced, with something that offers smoother motion." His hands began to shape the air. "What I offer is a thin wooden blade, with a face to side ratio of ten-to-one. It will flex when weight bears down, and lend a bit of spring when the leg begins to raise. But it can only do so if it is sawn from a softer wood. That's why the choice of spruce." I agreed then, and the blade was delivered the day I left the infirmary.


I've always needed more air than most. If my stomach could abide waves I would have become a sailor. But "naus" was the very word for "ship" for those first sailors, the Greeks. My stomach kept me dockside. I have no wooden house, no snug, tight roof. I dwell in a cast-off miner's tent I found washed up on the bank. A little stitching-up, some over-the-knee straightening of slim iron uprights, and I settled in.  I rested in that tent some long days and nights, feeling the fresh rushes of air blowing through the sidewalls draw the heat out of the swelling. Once that cooled, I set out to look over a derelict livery station a mile south. The Depot Master, the kind man who had read to me, had said, "I have properties nearby where you could start anew once you're able." He'd offered the livery.

I endured the soreness I felt as I walked, and decided the carpenter had been overly confident: there was no spring in my step as the spruce blade struck the rutted road.

Little remained inside the derelict station. Benches built to the walls, two stacks of rough-fit drawers standing five feet apart, their counter gone, pale soft twigs with globed ends like tails lost from a scourge, rodent pellets. Athwart one of the stacks of drawers rested a deep-sided rectangular box. There had been a hasp and lock on the lid, but it had been roughly broken off. Lifting the lid I saw why the human vultures who had passed through had left it. It was a table piano, a two-octave reduction of a pianoforte; more wire than wood, it would not have burned well.

What had burned well was the stable. The depot's previous lessees had decided to burn out a large pine stump, but had neglected to take into account how fire can move down into a pine's resin-heavy roots and travel for yards, bursting up out of the ground when least expected. The stable and surrounding trees had been lost. The lessees had vanished. Starting over surrounded by this much bareness would suit me; I remember I smiled.


The road south from the depot had meandered, and I was in a rush to get back. I was confident I knew my bearing and set off through the wood as the sun began to set. But the night was cloudy, and it was if the land I walked were a ship and the last of the sunlight had retracted the gangway behind it as it faded, leaving me with no way back to the docks.
 
In the way of all dock men, I thought myself on a higher plane than those who work in the barrens, the saw men, the hazelnut harvesters. But I realized that what I was beginning to feel was the same smothering embrace of fear that moves woodcutters to tell stories of unknown creatures stalking our mild forest, and the loners who exile themselves beyond the Cumberland for months at a go to tell tales of 7-foot fur-bearing men. We all need explanations; the more afraid we become the more urgently we wish for them.

Sages with knot-holed boot soles and snuff in the cheapest of packets like to say that exhaustion closes a man down, deadens his mind. The truth is that exhaustion opens doors to the mind, throws them wide, as the priggish gatekeepers of sense and personality lay them down to sleep. So it was that other thoughts, other voices, other minds began to arrive, to step over those guardians in repose, and take up residence in my bobbing skull alongside what remained there of me. Stumbling through the darkness of the wood, I thought I heard an occasional scurrying through the matting of needles, signaling some live company. Humor trumps at least the first wedge of panic, so I tried joking with the trees: "I'm just like most of you--I've lost a limb!" There was no response. Then, in a brief moment when a frayed cloud edge allowed moonlight to show the slope I was moving along, I saw that there was nothing moving through the needles; rather there was something moving up through them, moving to ensnare me.

Those who live and work in the barrens know well how Mountain Pine and Spruce husband together, and I'd stumbled into a copse of pairs of them. Although none can see miniscule belowground activities, it's known that the two conjoin at the level of the root, with tendrils and nodules wound about to mutual advantage. They've also discovered that the pine should be cut down while the spruce is young or the spruce will be stunted. If I were in the business of writing homilies, I imagine I could do something telling with such facts.

But now these nimble paired roots were rising up out of the sandy ground, showing nodules like warty knuckles, grasping at my spruce blade, winding around and up it, then unspooling in whipping motions that pushed my trouser leg to my knee. I began to sense the tiniest hairs of the roots, invisible to me in my own moon shadow, boring into the spruce. Some agent in my system, the dark flow of some humor that moved freely from sensation to thought, believed it had messages arriving from what I'd lost. I felt pains where none could be felt. Twitches and tremblings like young fingerlings moved under my skin under the hoops of the leather harness; my thigh began to shiver at their approach. How long, I wondered, before my body becomes nothing more than a shallow bed nurturing pine roots? I answered myself by screaming into the dark.

I was instantly answered. "Where are you?" I heard through the muffling scrim of limbs and needles. It was Morris. In response, I screamed yet again; every word I'd ever learned had abandoned me, left me, sprawled out, behind. Then I heard a sound, and once the word for it returned to me--"crashing"--the rest flooded back, as well. "Here," I shouted, again and again.

"Here!"

Morris carried a lantern, and I watched him approach. The black scraggle of limbs against the wan lantern glow looked like the reversed-outline that lingers on the inside of eyelids when we close them against a flash of lighting. He moved as quickly as the lantern allowed, and was soon at my side.

His light showed how the thin filaments of the pine roots had penetrated the blade, gone through it and back down into the ground, pulling the spruce beneath the sand. Morris drew his knife and began hacking away the harness.

"I was worried you'd somehow lost my brand new blade out here." He was sawing away at the last strap. "This application's a dead loss. Best just let it go. I can shape you another. I've got bundles of spruce and pine fagots in my shop."

Anyone who's spent time working with a gang of men can read minds--thoughts show clear in bodies even before muscles move to obey, show in the ways they tense. By the flickering light of Morris's lantern, I could see the knotted roots and winding green limbs thinking, saw them decide to dismiss me even before they released my leg. Their thoughts showed as clear as pricked-up ears. They whipped around in a directed tangle and entwined Morris.

I don't know if it's true that drowning sailors go down three times, but Morris managed to rise twice before he found himself laced to the ground. His lantern showed me everything as it happened. He tried to rise from his one-kneed stance, but his calf was wound with pale veiny loops. He pulled free, but when he leaned to reach for the lantern he was felled full-length on the soft downslope, his head downward, his shirt up to his neck. He tried to lift again but could not.

I could see his mouth moving, but all my knowledge of human words was gone again. Not from terror this time, no--I had formed an allegiance to another language. A pine branch was moving over his skin, needles marking tiny scratches as it moved from nape to waist. It was writing. A message? A detailed account of his crimes? Who can read the language of trees? For that one moment, I could. I sat quietly, reading, until his body was drawn down out of sight, down into the embrace of the roots.


I found a fallen limb that formed a tall-stalked "Y," and I lifted the lantern. As I hobbled my way back toward the road I resolved I would bring those bundles of sticks to that slope and stack them over his sandy bed, where they could molder to dust with no one disturbing them. The justness of the thought immediately put a spring in my step.