The Stream That Runs West

By noon the next day, half of Thornby had walked up the timber track to look at the ship, and by the day after that, half of Lenndale.

They came in their working clothes with mud to the knee, as they would have come to a barn fire or a two-headed calf. Ned Cotter the smith came with his leather apron on and stood in front of the bow with his arms folded. After a while he went up and laid his palm on a plank, then on a rib, then on one of the great iron bolts that pinned the timbers through. He rubbed the rust between his finger and thumb.

"Somebody forged that," he said to the bow. "Somebody stood at a fire and forged that, and I don't know who."

He went home without another word and worked at his anvil till dark, and the whole village could hear him.

The Pennock boys climbed into the broken end of the hull with a candle and had to be hauled out by their collars. One of them came out holding a wooden cup, black with wet, carved round the rim with little waves. Owen made him put it back. The children of Thornby found that a stick dropped into the stream beside the bow would go bobbing away up the gully, uphill, into the trees. For one afternoon they raced sticks there and shrieked. The next afternoon the older ones stayed away. The little ones came, and dropped one stick each, and watched it go, and went home quietly to their mothers.

Lio went up every morning before work. He told himself it was to keep the Pennock boys out of the hull. On the first morning he cut a hazel peg and drove it into the gravel at the edge of the water, where the stream ran past the bow. On the second morning the water was a hand's breadth below the peg. On the third the stream had drawn in from both banks, and there were bars of clean gray gravel showing at its edges, and the peg stood on dry stones.

He kept the peg to himself. He could not think what he would have said about it.

On the second day a man rode up from Wexley on a fat brown pony. He was Master Pryor, clerk to the reeve who kept the law in the valley, a neat person in good boots who picked his way across the moss as though it might bite him. He walked once round the wreck with a handkerchief over his nose and wrote in a small book.

"A flood curiosity," he said. "A pleasure-boat off some lord's lake in the hills, brought down in the spate."

"Which lake?" said Taren. "Which hills? The hills are the other side of the valley. This came out of the Wood."

"The storm was very great, Master Ashby."

"There are barnacles on it."

"Lakes have their creatures." Master Pryor wrote something else and closed the book. "The reeve will want to know who has the right of salvage. Don't let anyone break it up for firewood."

"Nobody in this valley would burn it," Owen said.

Master Pryor looked at him and at the black hull. Then his eyes went down to the stream running the wrong way past his boots, and for a moment Lio saw the clerk's neat face go uncertain. Then he put his book away, mounted his pony, and rode back down to Wexley, and the valley heard no more of Master Pryor that year.

In the evenings the carving stood propped against the wall beside the dresser, where the firelight reached it.

At supper Taren talked of nothing else. He had been up to the gully twice that day, and he ate with his elbows out, waving his knife at the west window.

"It'll be gone in a week," he said. "I want a look first."

"A look at what?" said Bet.

"At where it goes."

"Elbows," said Bet, and he took them off the table, and put them back the moment she turned to the range. Owen went on eating.

Edda sat by the carving. She had never before come across the yard for supper every night of the week, but she came now, and after supper she stayed, and Bet stopped asking when she meant to go to bed.

Things came back to her. They came in pieces, at odd times, while she was buttering bread or folding a cloth. She would stop with the cloth in her hands and look at nothing. When she spoke, her voice ran higher and quicker than it did over the mending.

"The streets were steep," she said on the third evening. "So steep there were steps in the middle of them, worn hollow in the centers. When it rained the water came pouring down the steps, and you had to walk at the sides."

Taren was on the stool at her knee before she had finished. "What were the houses made of?"

"Stone. Pale stone. And red on the roofs."

"Slate?"

"Not slate." She frowned. "Something baked. Red, and curved, and the rain ran down in the grooves."

"Tiles," said Taren. "Gran, those are tiles. Every roof in the valley is slate or thatch. Where did you see tiles?"

"I don't know, love. I'm telling you what I see."

She saw gulls. They were bigger than the gulls that sometimes came up the Lenn in a hard winter, white and gray and loud, and they would take bread out of your hand. One had taken her whole bun once, out of her fingers, and she had cried, and someone had laughed at her and given her his.

"Who?" said Taren. "Aunt Maud?" He meant the widow who had brought Edda up at Withy Farm, across the river.

"Maud never gave anybody her bun in her life." Edda smiled. "I don't know who. Apparently I was a child who cried over buns. I'd have smacked me."

She saw a house high up above the water. From the window you could see the ships come in, and in the mornings the sun on the water threw moving light across the ceiling of the room where she slept. Lio, sitting at the table with a harness he was not mending, watched her hands. They lay in her lap, quite quiet, and the thumb of her right hand moved back and forth across the knuckles of her left.

"There was a boy," Edda said.

Taren leaned in. Edda was not looking at him. She was looking at the heron.

"Smaller than me. He'd fallen on the steps and cut his chin, and it had healed in a little white line, here." She touched her chin. "He held on to my skirt. He was always holding on to my skirt, and I was always telling him to let go."

"Your brother," Taren said. "Gran, you had a brother."

"I never had a brother."

"But this boy—"

"I don't know who he was." Her thumb had stopped moving. "I don't know."

"What was his name? Think. You said he held your skirt. What did you call him when you told him to let go?"

Edda opened her mouth, and shut it. Her face was bewildered and frightened, and very young. Bet put down the pan she was drying, came across the kitchen, and laid both her hands on the old woman's shoulders.

"That's enough, Taren," she said.

"I only—"

"You had her shaking the night that thing came in the door. You'll not do it again."

"I'm all right, Bet," said Edda.

"I know you are." Bet kept her hands where they were. "And he's done for tonight."

Taren looked up at his mother. Then he got off the stool and went out, and Lio heard him walking about the dark yard, up and down past the cart shed. Edda put her hand up and held one of Bet's.

"He only wants to know," she said.

"Then he can want it somewhere else," said Bet, to the door he had gone out by. "Not in my kitchen."

On the evening of the fourth day the brothers split wood. The storm had given them the alder from the millrace, the pear branch from the dairy roof and a dozen good limbs from along the lane. All of it had to be sawn and split and stacked before the frosts set in. They worked at it in the last of the light behind the house, by the saw-pit, one of them setting the rounds on the block and the other swinging.

Taren talked with his hands even when they were full. He would set a round on the block and stand back, and before Lio could swing, he would lift both arms to say something, so that Lio had to wait with the axe up.

"It's lower today," Taren said.

"It's lower every day."

"So it's going. Whatever it is. When it's gone we'll never know where it went."

Lio brought the axe down. The round split clean, and the two halves jumped apart and fell in the leaves. "We know where it went," he said. "It went west."

"West where? To what?" Taren set another round. "There's a sea-ship in our wood, Lio. There's salt on it. Gran put her hand on it and said a word none of us has ever heard, and then she said there's a sea at the end of the forest. Doesn't any of that make you want to go and look?"

"I went and looked. I looked every morning."

"At the stream. With your little stick."

Lio had not known that anybody had seen the peg. He felt his face go hot. He swung, missed the center of the round, and the axe bit and stuck. Taren laughed and came to help him work it free, and they stood with all four hands on the haft together, wrenching.

They had the same hands. It was the only thing about them that was alike. Taren was taller, and dark where Lio was brown, and quick where Lio was slow. Their hands were their father's: broad across the palm, long in the thumb, with square nails that never stayed clean. When they were boys their mother used to say she had one pair of hands between the two of them, and two heads, and that was the trouble.

The axe came out. Taren stepped back.

"Don't you ever want to know?" he said.

Lio set the round square on the block. Beyond the saw-pit and the cart shed and the roofs of Thornby, the Great Wood stood up dark against a sky the color of a pigeon's breast. The air smelled of cut alder, which is a sour, wet smell, and of the river, and very faintly of frost.

"I know where the frost lies in the Long Meadow," he said. "That'll do me."

Taren laughed at him. He put out a hand and roughed Lio's hair as he had when Lio was six, and Lio let him.

"Stay-at-home," Taren said.

"Somebody has to be."

"Somebody always is. That's the beauty of it." Taren picked up an armful of split wood and went toward the stack. Halfway there, he started to hum. It was their grandmother's walking tune. Lio had never heard his brother hum it before. He stood with the axe on his shoulder and listened until Taren reached the woodstack, turned, caught him listening, and grinned.

Lio came awake in the dark and lay listening.

For a while he could not tell what was missing. Then he knew. The brothers had slept in the same room under the slope of the roof all their lives, and all their lives Lio had gone to sleep to the sound of Taren breathing. Taren slept noisily, with a catch and a whistle at the top of every breath, and Lio had threatened to smother him a hundred times. Now there was an owl in the cart shed, and nothing from the other bed.

He got up. Taren's blankets were thrown back. The bed was cold. On the nail behind the door, where Taren's pack had hung since the summer, there was nothing but the nail.

Lio stood in the middle of the floor in his shirt. Through the window, which faced west, he could see the first gray in the sky and the black edge of the Wood against it. He thought: he's gone up to look at the stream once more before work. That's all. He'll be back for breakfast with frost on his boots, talking.

He dressed and went down. In the kitchen the lid was off the bread crock, and half the new loaf was gone, and a heel of cheese. The billhook was gone from its hook by the door. Lio looked at the empty hook, went out of the house, and ran for the timber track.

The first real frost of the year had come in the night. The bracken along the track was stiff and white with it and crackled when he brushed it. His breath went up in front of him. He ran past the cold mounds of the charcoal clearing, took the left fork without slowing, and pulled up at the holly thicket above the gully.

The stream was half the width it had been. It ran down the middle of its bed between wide banks of gravel that had been underwater three days before, and its voice was thinner, a quick light chatter over the stones. The wreck stood above it among the beech trees with rime on its timbers. The bank was empty.

He went down. In the soft ground beside the bow, where the moss was trodden through to mud, the frost had stiffened the prints so that they stood up sharp. Lio knew his brother's boots. Taren had worn the same pair two winters and walked them over at the outside of the heel. There was a nail gone from the left heel that he had been meaning to have Ned Cotter replace since harvest. The print of the missing nail was there, again and again, in the mud.

Beside them ran other prints, smaller than Taren's and narrower, a light foot in a boot with a close-nailed sole. They came down out of the beeches above the bow and met Taren's there. The ground there was trodden all over in a small round patch, where two people had stood a while, talking. Lio crouched over it. The moss was not torn. No heel had scraped, nothing had been dropped, and nowhere was there blood. At the edge of the trodden patch the rime on a stone was broken where somebody had sat down hard. Lio could not think what a stranger might say, in a frozen wood at dawn, to sit his brother down on a stone and then stand him up again and walk him west. But Taren had stood here with whoever it was, and talked. Then the two of them had turned, and their prints went side by side along the bank, west, beside the shrinking stream.

"Taren!"

His voice went into the beech wood and nothing came back.

He followed the prints. He followed them a long way, past the place where the gully opened out and the beeches gave way to oak, shouting his brother's name until his throat hurt. The prints went on. Here and there on a hazel at head height there was a fresh cut, slanting down from left to right. Lio knew that cut too. Taren had always blazed a tree backhanded, the way he had been told not to.

He was blazing his way. He meant to come back.

Lio stopped where a fallen oak lay across the bank. The prints went over it and on. The stream ran past him, small and quick and cold, going where it went. He stood with his hand on the oak and made himself think. He had no food and no rope. His mother thought he was in the saw-pit. One man alone in the Wood, chasing another, was two men lost. His father would say that, if his father were here, and his father would be right. He turned round and ran home.

They went at first light the next morning, six of them, with Owen leading. It had taken the day to gather them.

Kit Hay had walked to Wexley and back in the dark the night before, to ask his uncle. Kit worked for Owen in the timber season, a big freckled cheerful young man of nineteen who could shoulder a beech log that took both Ashby brothers to lift.

His uncle was Brannoc Hay, the ferryman. Everyone in the valley knew his story, or the shape of it. Twenty years ago, when Lio was two, twelve men and women had gone west from Wexley into the Great Wood to find what lay beyond it, and only Brannoc had come back. He had come out months later, alone, and never said much about where he had been. He kept the ferry now, and cut hedges, and sometimes guided timber-buyers through the Margin, and he went no deeper than that.

"He'll not come," Kit said in the yard, in the gray before sunrise. He looked ashamed, as though the refusal were his. "I'm sorry, Mr. Ashby. I asked him and asked him."

"I didn't think he would," said Owen.

"He said to tell you one thing." Kit frowned, getting it right. "He said, when the men start arguing about which way is home, turn round."

Owen looked at him, and nodded once, and shouldered his pack.

Bet stood at the door. Edda stood beside her with a shawl over her nightgown and Bet's arm through hers, and neither of them said anything at all. Lio had expected his mother to say a great deal. She only looked at Owen, and at Lio, and went back inside. They heard her begin to rake out the range.

Ned Cotter was waiting at the top of the lane with a rope over his shoulder and a black iron pot tied to his pack, because, he said, a man could bear anything if he had hot food. Robin Pennock was with him, Ambrose's son, with his bow, and Will Snape the trapper sat on the bank chewing willow bark. They went up the track and past the charcoal clearing and down into the gully. The wreck was white with frost. They turned west along the bank, and the beeches closed behind them.

All morning they followed the stream. It led them through country Lio half knew, by the old pig-runs and over the shoulder of a ridge. He and Taren had once spent a whole autumn day up there getting a felled oak down to the track. The prints showed wherever the ground was soft. Sometimes Taren's lay over the narrow ones, and sometimes the narrow ones lay over his. Taren's blazes were on the hazels, backhanded, every few hundred yards. Each time Lio saw one, he touched the cut as he passed.

Will Snape walked at Owen's shoulder. He was a small lean old man who smelled of fox, and he had trapped the Margin for fifty years. "That's the last of mine," he said toward noon. He touched a blaze on an ash tree, an old one, gray and healed over, the shape of a crow's foot. "Never set a trap beyond here. Never needed to." He looked west along the stream. "Never wanted to, neither."

Beyond Will's ash the trees were older. The beeches gave way to oaks, and the oaks were bigger than any in the Margin, with roots that came up out of the leaf-mold in great humps and dove back in. The undergrowth thinned, and the wood grew quieter. The stream grew smaller as the afternoon went on, drawing in on itself, until it was no wider than a man's stride and they could step across it without wetting their boots.

In the last of the light they came to the split oak.

It stood on the bank above the stream, an oak so old that its trunk had been split from the crown nearly to the ground, long ago, by lightning. The two halves had leaned apart and gone on living, each with a crown of leaves, each with a share of the roots. Between them there was a gap where a man could stand. The bark round the wound had grown over in great lips, smooth and gray.

Kit Hay walked through the gap and out the other side, grinning.

"My gran says go through a split oak and you'll be wed within the year," he said.

"Who'd have you?" said Ned.

"Nobody yet. That's why I'm going through."

Will Snape took out his knife and cut his crow's foot into the bark of the left-hand half, at the height of his eyes, so that the sap ran. "So we know it coming back," he said.

They camped beyond it, by the stream. Ned made a stew in his iron pot, and it was very good, and they ate it with their heads down. Lio lay a long time awake with his head on his pack, listening to the water. It had the clean steady voice it had had on the first day, only smaller. It was going away from them. All night it went on going, west into the dark, and in the morning, when he went down to fill the pot, it was a trickle he could have stopped with his hand.

By the middle of the morning there was no stream at all.

A bed of clean stones ran away through the oaks, gray and rounded. When Lio turned one over, the underside was damp, and under the damp lay nothing. The prints were gone. The stones took them. They found one more of Taren's blazes on a hazel beside the dry bed, and after that, though they spread out on both sides and walked slowly and searched every tree, they found none.

They went on west by the dry bed, because there was nothing else to go by.

The sky had closed over. A white light came from everywhere, and the oaks stood in it without shadows. Before noon they came down a slope to a brook. It was a real brook, small and brown and running, crossing their way from right to left. A birch had fallen across it, and below the birch there was a pool with a white stone in the bottom like a dropped egg.

Lio stopped on the bank. "We crossed this," he said.

Will Snape turned. "What?"

"We crossed this yesterday. In the afternoon, before the oak. That birch. That stone." Lio pointed. "Kit slipped on the birch and went in up to his knee."

"All brooks look alike, lad," said Will.

"Not to me."

Kit came and looked. On the birch, at the end nearest them, there was a long raw scar in the moss where a boot had skidded. Kit looked at it, and at his left boot, dark to the knee from yesterday's wetting. His cheerful face went blank.

"That's mine," he said.

"Can't be," said Ned Cotter. "We've walked west all morning. West all yesterday. You don't cross the same water again going the one way."

"I know," said Lio.

They crossed it, and after that the talk died. They walked on along the dry bed with the oaks going past them. In an hour or so they came up a slope, and the split oak stood in front of them.

Will Snape's crow's foot was cut into the left-hand half, at the height of his eyes. The sap had run from it and dried in a brown teardrop.

Will went up to it and put his thumb in the cut. He stood there with his thumb in it. He was an old man, Lio saw, much older than he had looked in the yard.

They spent the rest of that day trying. Owen would not give it up, and neither would Lio. They cast north of the oak and south of it. They went on west again by the dry bed, carefully, choosing a tree ahead and walking to it and choosing another. In the gray of the afternoon they came out of a hollow and saw the split oak on the slope below them. They turned away from it and walked west into the dusk, until it was too dark to see the next tree.

They made a fire, and the arguing began.

Will began it, quietly. Home lay over that way, he said, south and east; he could feel it in the lie of the ground. Ned said the lie of the ground had made fools of them already. The only sure way was back along the dry bed, which must come from the gully because it ran there. Kit said the dry bed ran the other way. Robin Pennock, who had a small daughter at home and a soft voice, and carried his bow as if he hoped not to need it, said he didn't know and didn't like to guess. Lio sat with his back to an oak and listened. He found that he knew where east was, or thought he did. He knew it in the middle of his chest. But Will had walked the Margin since before Lio was born, and Lio was twenty-two, and the brook had been on the wrong side of the oak.

Owen had not said a word since the split oak. Now he looked up from the fire.

"Kit," he said. "Your uncle."

Kit looked down at the fire. "When the men start arguing about which way is home," he said, "turn round."

The fire cracked. "We go home in the morning," said Owen.

Lio got up. "He's out here."

"He is."

"He was blazing his way. He meant to come back. If he's lost, he'll be looking for us, and if we go—"

"Lio."

"If we go, there'll be no one."

His father looked at him across the fire without anger. He looked tired beyond anything Lio had ever seen, more tired than in the hardest harvest, more tired than the winter Lio's grandfather died.

"I'll not lose two," Owen said.

Lio sat down.

His father sat up all that night. Lio slept in snatches, and each time he opened his eyes, Owen was on the other side of the fire with his knife and a length of hazel, cutting. Owen could make anything with a knife. He made spoons and pegs and toys and the dowels for his bridges, and he had made both his sons a whistle apiece when they were small. In the morning there was a drift of pale shavings round his boots, and no stick at all.

Owen led them home by the dry bed.

He walked first, at one steady pace, with his eyes on the stones ahead, and asked for no opinions. Toward noon sleet began, fine and gray and blowing, so that they walked with their heads down and their collars up. Lio walked behind his father with his eyes on the broad wet back and the dry stones going by underneath. Once they passed a hazel with a backhanded blaze on it, and Lio stopped and put his hand on it, and his father walked on.

In the early afternoon they came to Will Snape's old crow's foot on the ash tree. A little after, the oaks gave way to beeches, and the ground began to tilt down toward the east, and Lio could smell charcoal. At dusk, soaked and stumbling, they came out at the top of the gully, and there was the wreck, black and gleaming with wet.

Kit Hay stood looking at it with the sleet running off his nose.

"We were two days going out," he said.

"Aye," said Will Snape.

That was all anybody said about it. They went down through the dark to Thornby. At the bottom of the lane the kitchen door opened, and Bet stood in it with a lantern held up. She looked along the line of them as they came into the yard, one face and then the next. When she came to the end of the line she lowered the lantern and stood aside to let them in.

The sleet stopped in the night, and the sky cleared, and it froze.

Lio went up in the morning by himself, before the house was awake. He walked up the white track with his hands in his armpits, past the charcoal clearing, and took the left fork, and came round the holly thicket at the top of the gully.

The wreck was there. It lay among the beech trees above him, tilted up the bank with its broken nose in the air. The frost had come into the seams between the planks and lay there white, where the salt had been. He could see the raw place on the stem where they had cut the heron away.

The stream was gone.

He went down the bank to where it had run. The channel had gone, and the gravel bars, and the clean stones, and the damp. Leaf-litter lay there, brown and deep, with the roots of the beeches running through it and moss over the roots in unbroken cushions, thick and old and green under the frost. He knelt and pushed his hand into the leaves. They were dry. He pushed deeper, through the mold, to the wrist, and it was dry there too.

The gully lay as it had lain every summer of his life, full of fern and moss and the bones of the fallen oak. Lio knelt in it with his arm in the leaves to the wrist.

A yard away, where he had driven it into wet gravel at the water's edge on the first morning he went up, his hazel peg stood up out of the moss.

He let it be. He took his arm out of the leaves and knelt there with his hands on his knees. Down in the valley the mill was knocking, slow and wooden, and the smoke of Thornby stood straight up into the frost. Nothing moved in the gully. The wreck leaned among the beech trees above him with the white in its seams, and the peg stood where he had put it, and Lio stayed with them until the sun came over the hill and the frost began to go.