The Boys in the Trees (2 page)

SADIE WAS BORN
with a mass of dark hair and a strong cry and we named her for my mother. Though I didn’t remember my mother at all, I thought she would have been pleased. William called through the door,
Is it all right? Is it all right?
and Bessie said,
A beautiful girl, I’ll bring her out to you
. I’d told her once how he was about blood. I had been so tired but suddenly I felt that I could do anything and I sat up, thinking I should be the one to bring our child to him. But Bessie bade me lie back; she had finished the washing and wrapped Sadie in a blanket I had ready, only a sprig of dark hair showing, and she said over her shoulder that she would bring me a nice cup of tea but I didn’t even hear the door closing, I fell into the most beautiful sleep of my life.

There was such a change in William when he sat with Sadie on his knee. The two lines between his eyebrows disappeared and he looked more like the boy he must have been, long before
I knew him. He sang her songs I’d never heard before, that must have come from his people. Songs about cruel sisters and sailing ships, and boys in the tall trees. My friends thought I was mad, with his stern look, his serious mouth, but when William sang to Sadie, I knew that I was right to join my life to his.

Willie came with a worried look; my fault, for I couldn’t stop fretting all the time I was carrying him. They say you forget the pain but I remembered enough and the churchyard was full of women, their babies growing without them. And besides, I didn’t see how I could ever love another child as much as I loved my Sadie. William had been moved from the brickyard to the office, adding up figures all day. He came home with a pain behind his eyes instead of an aching back, but the hours were just as long. We had moved into a place with three rooms so that took up most of the extra money, and when it was time for the birth I had to send clear across town for Bessie, but she came without complaint. Annie Ashe down the stair took Sadie so she wouldn’t hear my cries, a good thing. Bessie had to do some turning which hurt me a great deal, but she said it was nothing she hadn’t seen before. She sent a boy to tell William and when he finally opened the door, holding Sadie by the hand, his eyes were bright like that time he drank ale on our wedding night.

William’s back and legs were covered in scars; he said he would never beat our children and he never did, though Tom sorely tried him at times. He was born early and all in a rush, Tom was; I had barely time to get to my bed. It was a Sunday morning and the sun was high, and Sadie was on a chair by our window, calling out the shapes she could see in the clouds. William shouted for Annie and she came running, her hands covered with flour. She meant well but her floured hands were rough and when Bessie came later, puffing, with her bonnet askew, I started to weep and could not stop.

Tom was a hard baby, crying to be fed every hour, wailing and wailing for no reason at all. Bessie came one day; I heard her groaning on the stairs.
It’s a terrible thing to be old
, she said. My hair was down and knotted, all of us still in our nightclothes though it was well past ten o’clock. Tom howling and Willie banging on the pot with a wooden spoon and Sadie on her chair by the window, humming with her hands over her ears.
Lord love you
, Bessie said,
we can’t have this—where’s the Godfrey’s? William doesn’t like it
, I said, and she snorted and said,
No law says you have to tell him
. I climbed on a chair and brought down the steeple-shaped bottle of cordial, the same bottle she had given me when Sadie was born. She got a spoonful into Tom’s wide-open mouth and sent me to dress; by the time I had put the last pin in my hair he was sound asleep and a pot of tea was steaming on the table, Willie and Sadie sitting quiet as mice, sucking on bits of peppermint.
What can I ever do for you
, I said, but Bessie said,
No more than you have done
. Her own children were grown and gone to London; they wrote letters sometimes, that she brought for me to read to her. It never took long.

I gave Tom another good dose in the evening, and he slept all through the night.
Maybe he’s grown out of it
, William said, and
I just smiled, and thought that he looked a little different to me, though I couldn’t have said just why.

•  •  •

There was a great change in William after the children, and my little doubts disappeared. My father had brought him home one night, after a talk in the Hall.
This is Mr. Heath
, he said, and I noticed the shine on his boots, though they were far from new. I lived a quiet life then, keeping house for my father. I had friends still from the neighborhood, from the time I was at school, and sometimes we would meet and laugh and laugh. But mostly they talked about their young men, and I found it strange, the things they could go on about. How this one had the most adorable ears, how that one couldn’t abide a radish. Sometimes we went with the young men to a concert or a show of some kind, but I often wished myself home by the fire with a book in my hands, half listening for the stumbling sounds of my father’s footsteps.

But then my father dropped like a stone, dead, they said, before he hit the ground. Rain dripped from the trees the day we buried him, a few friends from the shipyard, a distant aunt, and William, who held my arm and took me out to supper. His shiny boots were splashed with mud, like the hem of my dress.
Now you are all alone
, he said,
like me
. It was the way he spoke of himself; he’d been making his own way since he was a boy of eleven or twelve, although he had parents somewhere, and brothers and sisters and cousins. The knives were dull and a piece of meat shot from his plate; he bent to the floor and when he sat up again his cheeks were flushed.
I think we should marry
, he said.
I think that would be best
.

What we would have done without Bessie those weeks after Sadie was born, I don’t know. She was a good baby—I knew how good once Tom came, but she was a great mystery to me. I knew nothing of babies, had only seen them lying asleep in a cradle, or in someone’s arms in a shop or on the street. And William was just as baffled; he said he remembered nothing from his early life, from the birth of brothers and sisters, nothing but the thick piece of leather hanging by the door.

•  •  •

Sadie loved to draw. I saved all the paper wrappings when I went to the shop and she could sit for hours at our table, lost, with one hand splayed on her forehead, pushing her hair up. She liked to draw the rivers and fields William told her about and she liked to draw all of us, standing together.
What are those
, I said, pointing to some lines arching over us, and she said,
Those are the trees, and those are the boys in the trees
. She left her pictures on the table with William’s knife and plate; they were all asleep nights he came home but on early Saturdays they’d wait for him at the top of the stair, sitting close together with Tom in the middle, his knees jigging up and down.

They resembled each other so much, my children, but of course they were nothing the same. Willie was worried all his life; that look he had when he was born never really left him. As a baby he would lie quite still and stare at the cracked ceiling,
and he was slow to talk, so different from his sister. Sadie was not yet a year when she looked at me and said,
Mama
, and I can still see the dress she was wearing, still feel the chill in my fingertips, for it was the end of a cold winter. I scooped her up and held her so tight. I often thought, when Sadie was small, how I had my own mother until I was almost three. I thought of the things Sadie and I said to each other, of the shape of our days, the little games we played, and I couldn’t believe that if I were to die, she would keep nothing of that. What Tom said first I don’t remember; he made noise from the minute he was born, and at some point it turned into words. Without the cordial I don’t know how I would have lived through his first year, how either of us would.

William loved Sadie, she was always his special girl, but he had such pride in his sons. Sometimes he had to go back to the Works for some reason and would take them with him, Tom in his arms and Willie trotting beside, and he let them sit on his high stool and once Mr. Keele was there, and said they were fine fellows. Sometimes on a Sunday he took them down to the docks to see the big ships while Sadie and I swept out our rooms, and coming home Tom said he was going to be a sea captain and sail all around the world. On Saturdays William always had something in his pockets and the one after that he had a sailor’s cap for Tom; it was big and drooped over his left eye but he didn’t take it off for weeks, not even to sleep.
How much did that cost
, I said, but he said what he always did, that it wasn’t my concern.
When we married I thought we might live in my father’s house but it seemed he had borrowed against it, and had other debts besides, so there was nothing left. When William was moved to the office he got a little rise but most of it went on our bigger rooms and he still wore the cracked, shined boots he’d had when I met him. But on Saturdays there was always something in his pockets and sometimes things I knew we couldn’t afford. A spyglass for Willie, three sheets of fine paper for Sadie. Once I said, sharpish, that maybe we could have meat twice in the week if there was so much money to spare.

•  •  •

Bessie had a growth that started to eat away at her from the inside, and from such a big woman she turned into the frailest thing. I went to see her when I could but it was difficult, trailing three small children, the long trip across town. After she died her daughters came and took everything, even the silver spoon she meant for me to have. It was like my own mother dying all over again, and this time I was grown and knew it. Sorrow like a weight I felt on my shoulders.

I am your family
, William said.
We are your family
. Pointing to the room where the children slept.
We are everything you need
.

The building where we lived was mostly families, except for a few like Old John, all on his own, who roared and shook his walking stick when anyone stepped in his way. The children played in the courtyard all day and into the evening and the
sound of their chanting, their calling, was like the sound of hooves, of cart wheels rumbling by, so constant I only noticed when it stopped. Sadie played there most days, though William didn’t know. He thought she would pick up all kinds of things; said,
We’re not like them
. In some ways it was true, and I thanked God every Saturday night when Harold Ashe came stumbling home, tripping on the steps on the landing, cursing and banging on the door because his fingers had become too thick to fit in his pocket for his key. The thumps and crashes. All the women on their own with sickly children or just too many, hunched over washtubs with cracked red hands.

But in some ways we were just like them, a family with young children and never enough money. It’s no life for a child, cooped up in three small rooms when the sun is shining and voices float up the stairwell. Willie played in the courtyard too, though mostly he liked to sit in his own corner, building things from the scraps of wood and brick that William sometimes brought home. Once I was carrying Tom to the shop and I stopped to tell Sadie I’d be soon back. The children were all in a line, ten of them or twelve, with their arms down at their sides, jumping straight up in the air and one little girl watching, calling out who jumped highest. And every time it was Willie, my Willie, with his eyes closed and his arms stiff at his sides, jumping higher and higher, jumping straight into the air.
He’s the fastest runner too
, Sadie said.
He can run like the wind, he wins all the races
. How strange it was, that I hadn’t known that about my own child, that I hadn’t known that Willie, with his calm and thoughtful way, could run like the wind. And though I’d been with my children every day of their lives, though I’d loved them more than I could imagine, I suddenly saw them in a new way, saw things I’d been missing because I’d never thought to look for
them, because maybe I’d never really looked, thinking I already knew.