The Rootward Calling (Short Story)

The Rootward Calling

It is the peculiar curse of youth, I think, to believe time elastic and consequence indulgent; a perpetual extension granted for charm, apology, and a quickened gait. I had not been long in our new town - scarce a fortnight since my mother and I exchanged the smoke and clatter of the city for what she termed “bracing air and quiet morals” - when I betrayed that foolish creed again. I had whiled away an hour at Mr Penhaligon’s bookshop beyond all reason, swimming between shelves as if through warm water, seduced by the smell of dust and cloth and browned glue, intoxicated by fonts and gilt and the faint exhalations of voices sealed in paper. When I at last emerged to the street I found that the sun, which had earlier stood dutifully over the nave of St Cuthbert’s, now leaned towards the moorland like a servant grown distracted; the town’s long shadows lay in a splay of sombre fingers across the cobbles; and my pocket-watch, when consulted with fingers made faintly tacky by the bloom upon old leather, informed me that I should be late - irredeemably late - if I did not at once make haste homeward. 

“Your mother hates to be kept,” Mr Penhaligon had remarked, as though the fact were a merely pleasing quirk. “A woman of schedules is like a clock with a soul.” He smiled as he said it; he lacks, alas, the courage to frown. He had pressed the book upon me - no, I lie, I pressed it upon myself, for I have always had an appetite unbefitting my purse: an anthology of travellers’ letters from the Levant, much annotated in a careful copperplate hand, the marginalia as attractive to me as any printed line. I meant only to skim the first page whilst still under the shop’s lamp. I read ten; then twenty; then held it to my chest like a charm whilst I drifted along the nearest aisle, half-dreaming of Morocco bindings and sea-salted winds. The fault was mine. 

There was dinner to be observed at six with Mrs Merivale of Church Row, a neighbour whose invitation my mother had deemed “a useful introduction,” and which I had judged, with less ceremony, to be an endurance. Yet my mother depends upon me, for we are two against the world, and a late arrival would earn not merely a sharpened glance but a perfunctory lecture afterwards regarding punctuality, respectability, and the manner in which a household’s standing can be quietly eroded by little discourtesies. She has no cruelty in her; severity resides in her as a plant in poor soil: it survives, stunted and grey. I resolved I would be prompt, even adroit; and then, by increments of selfish pleasure, I ended with the watch face glowering at me and the meridian sliding like oil down the sky. 

A choice rose in me then, as some choices do, with the brisk inevitability of a coin flipping from one’s thumb. The road that rings the forest is long; it skirts the western fields in a respectable arc and returns to the village with a kind of civilised reluctance. The path through the wood - Blackbriar Wood, though some call it Blackbarren in whispers - runs nearly straight, or so the map suggests. It would cut my walk by almost half. The stories about Blackbriar are as plentiful as blackberries, and pricked with the same small barbs. Children in this place are taught to cross themselves passing its verge; infants are warned from the cradle that the trees do not tolerate impertinence; old men drink and commemorate the vanished by nodding towards its darkness. But I am not of this parish. I was not suckled upon the fat teat of its tales. In the city we reverence gaslight and timetables; down there a story must wear the livery of a newspaper before anyone bows to it. 

I told myself, with the candour of a rogue persuading a priest, that the forest’s infamy derived not from spectres but from men. Highwaymen, cut-throats, opportunists: that was the true population of haunted places. They preyed upon fat merchants and their pink-fingered wives, upon footmen, upon anyone foolish enough to drape money on their persons like bait on a hook. I, however, walked alone; my coat was decent but unostentatious; the watch at my breast was inherited, dented; the book beneath my arm would not enrich any honest thief. If there was danger at all - and surely there was not - it did not suit itself to me. Besides, I should be brisk. The light still held. The path was, I had heard, maintained near the entrance, and I could keep pace enough for that initial civil mile. What are legends to a mind fortified by the rhetoric of modernity? What are whispers, to a stomach braced for soup? 

I did not go straight. I am not so bold as that. I took first a lane behind the haberdasher’s, then a twist behind the rectory garden, skirting the market’s tail like a cat refusing the main road. My mother would have told me that secrecy is a friend to error. Perhaps. But I did not wish to be detained by some anxious grocer urging me to turn aside, nor did I wish later to be observed leaving the wood at the village end where tongues would certain wag. The shame of a reprimand is greater, I find, when it is a chorus. I moved quickly, the book held to my ribs - there is something deeply soothing in the pressure of a volume against the body; it is as though the heart reads through the cloth - and came at last to the slope of land which drops to the forest’s dark lip, like the line formed where a cup’s wine meets air. 

The signs appeared before the trees did, as a funeral arrives preceded by its music. They were nailed to posts and to fallen trunks; they hung half-slant upon chains; they leaned together as if conspiring. TURN BACK, warned the first in a florid hand whose curlicues were at odds with so severe a sentiment. DANGER, warned the second with more honesty: the word had been cut with a knife, the edges rough, the letters hacked like wounds. KEEP OUT, suggested the third, which bore the odd air of a suggestion that would not object to being ignored, like a polite old person who hopes to be contradicted. 

Beyond the signs the offerings lay. I will not feign equanimity: they shocked me. I had expected, perhaps, a shrivelled garland, a child’s ribbon, a weathered penny driven into a crack in the bark. Instead I found meat flensed and laid upon green leaves, beads of blood fresh as though the butcher had just now stepped away; a bowl of barley; a heap of seed in a cone like a little cairn; a bottle of wine uncorked with ceremony and tilted to wet the earth; a ribbon of salt; a wedge of bread whose crisp interior gleamed. It had not been assembled by children - the symmetry was too devout for play. Someone had made their obeisance to the wood with the seriousness of a liturgy. 

“Primitive,” I murmured, and then hated myself for the word; it is a poor one, used by people who think history is merely distance. “Silly,” I allowed, more accurately. I have known good Christians - my mother is one - who do not hold with such business. Yet here in this parish the two devotions had struck their bargain: Christ at the nave, and something else at the edge of the trees. Those who cannot be comforted in church will, if it promises safety, pray at a ditch. 

I looked over my shoulder, though I did not know why. No one watched. The moor shook out its faded mantle and the town shrank beneath it like a chick under a wing. “Very well,” I said to the book, to my watch-chain, to whatever portion of myself prefers argument to silence. “We shall be swift; we shall be unromantic; we shall be corrected by dinner.” 

I stepped across the line where offerings ended and leaf-litter began. 

There is, in any stand of trees, a brief labour where the body adjusts to a different proportion of air, a different distribution of light, a change in temperature accomplished by leaf and water. I had felt it before in parks and in the wilder corners of the city’s outskirts. Blackbriar’s change was of another character entirely. The air at the threshold, where the town’s breath and the wood’s sigh contend, was all at once still, and that stillness possessed a quality I cannot precisely name: not emptiness, but a refusal to be disturbed. Dust hung like ash and did not stir though I walked through it. The smell was of damp bark and iron; there was at the back of it a sweetness I did not care to identify. The trunks rose in such narrow closeness that at more than one point I found it necessary to crab sideways between them, feeling the nap of moss against my coat, the press of lichen like an old man’s beard. Above, the lattice of branches had so interlaced that they had learned to support one another against the ambition of the sky; their leaves knotted the air into a net that seized light in small bullion pieces and hoarded it. 

I have heard people speak of silence as a comfort; of quiet places as consolations. The quiet in Blackbriar is a misnomer; it is not quiet; it is a chorus of very soft sounds - the creak of fibres in the trunks, the tick of sap that moves not immediately but in slow determinations, the small, discreet fall of a lichen’s fragment - that refuse the category of noise. Birds did not sing. If a vole passed, it did so in a courtesy so absolute that even its fear would not presume to speak. Other woods have the far carol of rooks; the brittle complaint of a jay; the small conveniences of a robin. Blackbriar seemed to have negotiated against such visits. I did not at the time find this sinister. I found instead a species of awe; and beneath it, an irony, that the people of the town had clothed their wood in bedtime terrors when it carried its own, more delicate majesty. 

The path maintained itself for the first hundred yards or so. It had the embattled look of ways not often taken: the edges were torn by roots like veins risen under the skin; the central strip was modestly churned by the hooves of a pony or two; here and there the weeds had thrown up leaves broad as basins, as if to catch a spill of light. Then, as happens often in life and more often in stories, it changed its mind; it ceased to resemble a path at all; it merged seamlessly with the general disorder of the wood’s floor, leaf upon leaf, brown upon brown, a soft mattress upon which the foot seeks, and does not find, its confidence. I consulted my watch. The hands admonished. I consulted the book beneath my arm. It offered the indifferent assent of print. 

I went on. It was - do not laugh - necessary, I told myself, not to be seen to turn back. Who would see me? I did not care to ask that question out loud. The trees leaned; or perhaps it is truer to say they did not lean, but that the mind, seeking the horizon, misread their constancy as movement. At intervals the wood creaked as ships creak when they lift from a swell and settle into their own weight. The sound unnerved me, but only as crowded theatres do when the audience shifts all at once upon its benches. I had nearly mastered myself when my boot struck a hard object submerged beneath the leaf-fall. I stumbled, steadied myself with one hand against a trunk, and looked down. 

It was iron. My first thought was that it was part of a fence half-swallowed by the wood. I scraped away the leaves with my heel and revealed not wire but wheel: the curve of a rim; spoke-upon-spoke; the hinge of a door. Leaves and ivy had drawn a veil across the shape, but the fingers of oak had not yet entirely concealed its identity. It lay canted, as though it had fallen and learned to sleep in its crookedness. I fetched out my handkerchief, which is a thing I keep for the dignity of it and not for the utility, and wiped at a brass fitting where mud had not quite triumphed. It shone dully. Beneath the slime the metal bore a small crest - a greyhound couchant within a wreath - and the trace of a name I could not wholly recover: the letters M A R, then either a C or a G or something that was once both and now neither. 

It is funny what chills and what does not. The offerings had not chilled me. The absence of bird-voice had not. The signs had drawn from me only a shrug. But that crest, set upon an object that had once flown smooth upon a road, solicitous of its occupants and soothed by hoof and hand - now fallen, now embalmed in fern, now gnawed by the slow hunger of wood - gave me something like a toothache in my spine. All at once the thing I had discounted - a story with teeth - raised its head. 

I made myself step past the carriage’s wreck. To pretend indifference is a safety; it preserves a man from much. I told myself then the old remedy: that to see a relic is not to see its cause; that a fallen carriage is not a murder; that this was not a story at all but a misadventure with a footnote. “Late,” I said aloud, and started at the sound of my own voice. I have rarely heard it as odd as it sounded in that place: it seemed to reach only as far as my own lips and then fall, as if the air had refused it. 

It occurred to me - slowly, as some dread occurs - to check that I had not long since passed the point where turning back would have been simple. I turned upon myself and attempted in my mind to reverse my steps. There is a kind of wit that is no wit at all when the horizon is not available: the trunks were an army and I had mislaid my regiment’s banner; each tree resembled its neighbour and wore upon its bark the same mottle, the same arrangements of fungus like coins, the same scars like eyes. If there had been a shooting-star above the canopy I should not have seen it. I selected a likely direction with the careful carelessness of the desperate and walked six paces. Then I stopped. Then I took two paces back. Then I laughed, which is to say, I made the small sound that is the nearest available cousin to laughter when no one hears you. Then I told myself I should rest for a moment, collect myself, and proceed with the method that has preserved generations of civil servants from ignominy: I would reason my way out. 

There was a stump close by; it looked as if it had been cut square, though the cut had not been made by any axe I recognised. Its surface was scored with intricate spirals, as if a child had idly traced patterns with a blade whilst waiting for someone who never came. I sat upon it. The wood was not warm, though the sun, somewhere above, had not yet completely withdrawn its favour. My legs felt slightly tremulous, as after a dance; my hands shook in a way I chose to attribute to temper rather than to nerves. I set the book upon my lap and allowed my fingers to find the marginal notes again. They are a kind of society, marginal notes; when one has been a lonely child, as I was, they console with the fiction that one speaks in chorus. I read: 

“and the guide urged us not to attempt the gorge at dusk, for the light there obeys a strange law of its own. I confess, my curiosity nearly triumphed over my prudence. If I had ignored him, I do not think I should be setting down these words.” 

I smiled; the irony seemed as obvious as a punctuation mark. “Yes, yes,” I told the hand that wrote, and my own inattention afterwards did not trouble me until later. After an interval which, to give a name to it, I should call five minutes, though I suspect it was less or more by orders of magnitude we possess no arithmetic for, I stood. 

At least, I meant to stand. The motion required, ordinarily the simplest of the body’s algorithms, betrayed me like a friend asked too much of. My legs answered slowly. They answered, as tired servants answer at the end of a day in which everything has been demanded of them: they stirred, but with reluctance and a kind of sullen dignity. A dull ache had formed in my thighs. As I braced my hands upon the stump to raise myself, I found my fingers did not grip the wood as I expected. The bark beneath them carried a nap like that of a deer’s pelt; my fingers felt not pressure against that nap but a mingling with it, as hair tangles in hair. 

“Sit for too long,” my mother has said, “and your limbs will learn idleness from the furniture.” I smiled at this recollection; it soothed me, as memories of admonitions sometimes do, when they prove the parent exists outside the house. “Up,” I told myself. “Now.” 

I drew my left foot backward to plant it; it did not entirely heed me. It had discovered a preference for the position it presently occupied. I stamped my heel as a child stamps when defying instruction. A small, bright pain travelled from my ankle to my knee in a quick thread; I grunted; and then I did the thing which breaches composure: I looked. Until that moment I had not thought to look at my own feet. It is remarkable what we will not attend to until attention is forced. 

The leather of my boots had suffered some indignities since morning: a scratch on the vamp I knew I should not be able to remove; mud pressed into the welt; a missing lace-end. But now the leather itself had stretched. Not in the ordinary way, where it yields to the insistence of a joint and then stays, resigned, in its new shape; no, this was a stretching that looked almost… active. From the seams beneath the instep there pushed out a small seam of fibrous matter, pale as an almond with the brown still clinging. I thought at first it was some freakish bundle of straw picked up from the forest floor. Then I watched it lengthen with the slow relish of a snail coming from its house. It emerged with soft authority and, to my astonishment, sank into the soil just before the heel, as if the earth had opened a little mouth and taken it. 

A rational mind, confronted all at once with an irrational phenomenon, begins by rearranging facts to accommodate comfort. “A root has pushed up through the leaf-mould,” I said to myself. Yes. The wood’s roots are like hair - fine, innumerable, a web binding the world’s crumbs together. One of them has come up and threaded itself into the seam of my boot. That is the explanation. I laughed at my own startlement. If I simply step aside, I reasoned, it will detach and the whole little absurdity will end as farces always do, with a bow. 

I lifted my foot. It lifted sacrificially, with the manner of a reluctant saint. The fibrous strand tightened; the pale line darkened as sap (I cannot call it any other thing) ran up it in a brief and furious flight. The fibre grew thicker, a memory of my own veins re-enacted in bark. It broke, yes, but not with the release I had expected; it broke with a small wet sound like a child swallowing. Another strand answered at once from the boot’s toe. This one did not merely touch the earth but probed it, tested it, and found the seam in which its purpose lay. 

I do not know what sound I made. I suspect it is not in any liturgy. I dragged my right foot in a careful circle, and discovered that the same indignity had visited that one too, though more discreetly; the fibres there had not yet reached the ground; they fanned themselves like cautious tongues and hesitated. Without planning to do so, I stooped and set my hand upon my right ankle to reach the seam, meaning to tear at the leather, to free myself in a flurry, to reduce the problem to ruin. My hand closed upon… not hand. Something like bark met my palm. No, the bark did not meet my palm. My palm was bark - not wholly, but upon the inner creases of my fingers a stippling had appeared, a delicate roughness like the first day of unshaved skin. It was darker than my usual colour; it bore in it a fine grain. 

I am not given to that bluntness of prayer which spills from the throat when the mind, bruised, seeks the old words. Some do; I do not. Yet there in that close air a set of syllables rose in me - nothing to do with churches; nothing to do with the houses in which people sing and forgive one another - but older phrases, learned perhaps in the cradle and never in any school: little moans: mother, help; mother, come; mother, I have done it again. 

I shook myself like a dog will do when some blundering affection lays hands upon it and I refused the leaves. I tugged at the boot. It gave the way a tooth gives when the dentist has applied the right lever: it hurt with a clean anger. The leather tore. The fibres came away. I felt them at the same moment not only upon my skin but within it; there was the altogether obscene sensation of something drawn from something that had, until that second, considered itself whole. I freed the foot, staggered, and then - like a fool - set that foot down again at once. 

The ground receives an apology; it remembers it. A dozen small, pale strands shot from beneath the ball of my foot as a blush is said to shoot from beneath the cheek; they probed; they found; they entered. Their progress was not a burrowing like a worm’s; it was a virile interlacing, as though the world itself were a fabric and I the proffered needle. I lifted again; again they held; the skin of my ankle tightened, as when it is cold beyond endurance and the body reminds you it still desires to keep you. Then a pressure came in the calves, a dull inwards pressure as though the bone had been given a mission the muscle could not countermand. 

I yanked. I tore. I fell. The book flew from my crook and landed face-down, and I saw with an irrelevant distress one corner bend. The right boot’s seam split. With a desperate caterwaul of breath I kicked the leather free, and the sight that greeted me in that nude moment, my ankle bared, the stocking half-scraped, is an image I should pay many guineas not to have collected. It was not a foot. It was the idea of a foot rendered impatiently in wood. The bones were there in implication; the arch remained like the ghost of itself; but on the instep, small damp knots had appeared like eyes closed in prayer. From those knots the pale fibres issued again and again like hair in a flood, and each hair sought its purpose in the dirt as water seeks the incline. The colour shifted even as I watched, from the pallor of new wood to the browner etiquette of bark. 

“For God’s sake,” I said then, because there was no mother to hear me and something must, and the wood - oh, the wood - creaked in answer. It creaked with the patience of old houses; with the complaint of ships under load; with the soft, well-bred sound of a congregation standing. I might, if I had been mad (and I do not assert I was not), have said it creaked with sympathy. 

Panic is only the application of speed to despair. I began to apply it. I twisted upon myself and tried the petty trick of hopping, which in any other circumstance is an act one cannot perform with dignity but may perform with humour. There was no humour here. The free foot (wood-foot; foot-that-was) caught and rerooted between one shock and the next. My knee stiffened; I felt within it a pressure like damp wood set to a lathe. The muscles around it made a series of frantic arrangements and then retired from the conversation altogether. The weight of me - whatever part of me that weight then belonged to - settled over the hips. I had the absurd image, bright as stained glass, of a tree that could think, disdaining to become my shape and choosing instead its own. 

I raised my hands towards my face. I intended to cover it. That has always been my habit in pain. The hands did not find a face of the sort they had formerly known. The mask beneath them resisted with a firmness that was not bone; it yielded with a give that was not flesh. Besides, the hands themselves had concerns of their own. The fingers’ tips, which I had used a thousand times to turn a page, to stroke the nap of a cat’s ear, to tap a table to call the waiter, had lengthened not more than a thumb’s breadth; but that thumb’s breadth contained the whole of a new category of matter. The skin had quilted into a bark that was somehow both plate and pith; and at the very ends, where one would have expected nails, there were small, folded parcels like green origami pressed and waiting. As I watched them they uncreased themselves with a deliberation that mocked my haste. They became leaves. Leaves do not appear, we are told, until spring has argued successfully with a tree; they are the last concession a winter makes. These small leaves unfurled upon my new twigs with a docility that humbled me. 

I screamed then: properly, indecorously; I cast away any hope that the wood would continue to respect me if only I respected it. The scream was the sound of a rope drawn tight in an empty court; it was the sound of a violin bow dragged slowly along the string. It entered the air and travelled a foot or two and then settled as if it had become suddenly heavy. The creak of the surrounding trunks deepened as if, I swear, an older generation of trees had leaned very slightly nearer to convey whatever passes for sympathy among those who drink water through their toes. 

I do not think this was an enchantment. Enchantment suggests a mind behind a hand, a hand behind a word. I believe - if you permit me the vanity of a belief - that this was simply the wood’s way; that the communion at its edge is not appeasement but obeisance; that the parish understands something I did not. Whether the wood meant me harm I cannot say. A knife does not mean harm by being sharp; harm is what happens when a wrist decides to move. 

Time went odd then. The canopy had made of the day a chamber, but now the chamber’s walls seemed to creep, one course of brick rising silently upon another; the air thickened into a green faintness like glass set before a fire. I became aware of my heart, not beating as it had always beat, stimmed to my steps, but slow, considered, negotiating with a drum hidden under the hill and answering to it. My breath, too, lost its conviction; the impulse to breathe withdrew its patronage as a city banker withdraws his from a failing charity. I tore one foot free again, and again it answered with reflex; it went down; it sought; it understood preference. My thighs hardened; the fibres within them arranged along a grain I could feel when I slapped them; the sting was not of flesh striking flesh but of knuckle upon wood. 

In the distance - though distances were now rearranged by someone else’s mathematics - I fancied a sound of carriage wheels, and my mind, eager to curry favour with reality, rewarded me at once with the image of the overgrown phaeton I had seen: perhaps, it thought, the sound was only sympathy for myself, a memory echoing as a man might hear horses in a shell. Then a far different sound struck me, low and insistent: a cluck, very gentle, as when a mother’s tongue clicks against her teeth to soothe a fretful child. It came from the roots. That is where understanding dawns in the forest: in the things beneath. 

I do not know, now, whether the clucking was encouragement (there is a way to do this, dear; you will find it), or a reprimand (you have done this, and therefore you must). I know only that the last movement I made of my own was to turn my head to the left and take, with the avidity preserved even in animals dying, a last comfort from this: my book was there, upon the leaf-mould, its binding dulled, its corner bent. It lay just beyond the reach of my elongated hand. I desired, with a passion that eclipsed dinner, mother, town, whatever trumpery remains when all else collapses, to pick it up and press it to my chest and take it with me, into whatever standing fate intended, a token of the companionship that had made of loneliness a manageable thing. 

The head would not turn further. The muscles that had lifted and swivelled it since infancy had been pensioned off. The neck had discovered a better use for itself than being a hinge, and that use was to be a column. To my right a twig brushed my ear and I startled again, then chastised the reflex: it was my twig, my leaf, my ear was also a leaf, everything was leaf and wood and the old war between the two (who will have the light?) had begun to rage in me like fever. 

I did not - this is perhaps the last mercy - see all of it. There are transformations that a mind is right not to own. I felt the lengthening at the wrists; I felt the stiffening across the shoulders; I felt the small pin-pricks upon the scalp as the hair withdrew its claim and was replaced by something with better tenure. The face was last; you may interpret that as a kindness. The skin drew itself tight as the surface of a drum; the underlying architecture made a series of small choices that did not consult me; the lips, which have always been the traitors of the face - they cannot keep a secret even when reminded - found themselves drawn cleanly into a smile I did not intend; the jaw settled as a new wedge in an old join; the eyes… I could see myself seeing, then could see myself not seeing - a shimmering - and in that shimmering there occurred the moment my mother, if she had been beside me, would have called the crossing. 

It is her face that troubles me now in such recollection as I retain. If there were a one to whom I might apologise I would shape the word upon bark. We had quarrelled a little the night before over nothing - an intonation in my voice when she asked for help with the cases; my refusal, coloured by fatigue, to indulge the neighbour’s gossip; a light burned too late; a draught kept open; the ordinary detritus of cohabitation. I had meant, after dinner, to bring her the book and read to her from the traveller’s letters about a basin of red water and how birds do not drink it, and for her to smile and say that perhaps we had chosen a perfect town in which to seek our own red basin. Silly. There is the word again. It belongs not to the parish, but to me. 

In Blackbriar the offerings will continue. Meat will be laid; grain will be poured; wine will make the soil shine black for a moment and then vanish as quickly as if it were a trick of light. The priest will thunder. The children will whisper. 

If you walk there - and I do not advise it - you may hear a creak not wholly unlike the sound a voice makes when it learns that the shape of its throat has altered. You may feel beneath your boot a light tug as if the earth wanted, civilly, to test whether you, too, are a thing that will consent. You may see, if the wind has been generous with the boughs, a small square of light fall precisely upon the ground where a book might lie. 

My leaves - I call them mine; the pronoun persists even when the category fails - whisper now to one another in the vocabulary of surfaces. The drum under the hill keeps its clock. The roots maintain their gossip. If you come near and put your hand to the bark you may feel a faint thrum and mistake it for your own pulse travelling in sympathy. You will be right to do so. The sympathy is real. We are all of us, all our lives, attempting to take root. Few succeed. The wood is patient. It will teach you, if you will let it, that to be late once is not a sin; to be late always is to be finally on time for a different appointment.