Old Pines and Other Stories

Old Pines

Old man McDonald sat in the house of his ancestors watching his little railroad die. Its wabbling single track left the Great Southern in the town below him and, climbing with laborious eccentricity, passed near the composed and graceful portico and the old man himself, and meandered away through a ragged wilderness toward the vanished glories of an abandoned port. The old man’s blunt figure at the base of a slender, quiet column stood out sharp and motionless. He was waiting, with his heavy gold watch in his hand, for the evening train to come by.

When he was young, the ruined scrub-clad hills that he could see to the east had borne a vast pine forest stretching away to the sea—great dark trees, shoulder to shoulder, rising tall and true as masts and then, at the very tops, branching fancifully into Japanese designs. Through this as a boy he had run the rough survey for the right of way, blazing the solemn kings with a hardy impudence of which they took no note until too late, when the logging teams came in, and they tumbled stiffly down in impotent majesty.

In time a clean-cut swath wound its way through the forest, and McDonald set himself to gather a nondescript Negro gang from the few scattered towns of the district. With them he started to build the railroad to the coast, bossing them himself. They moved with unhurried and jocular ease, but they made the little rusty mules hump their backs in the stump pullers while the scoops gently, but tirelessly, graded the red-streaked sand. As the roadbed took shape, the rails were laid and spiked down by buck niggers in groups of three, swinging alternately, in rhythm, with a coughing grunt at each stroke.

They kept working farther into the forest. The little eddy of movement sank into the unfathomed calm. The clink of sledge and the rattle of singletrees faded at birth into the dark maze. The gang made lean-to camps of pine boughs, and sat close at night in front of a great fire. They had always a fiddle or two, and at the music one of them sometimes stood up, rocking gently, and began to shuffle softly in the dust, the great flat feet sliding delicately in a little circle with magic fascination. Then all at once the rest began to sing, and a song which had come from forests of mangrove and ebony vanished down aisles of cypress and pine.

He camped with them, going home now and then in a handcar. As winter came, their spirits drooped, and they huddled around little fires all day. It did not pay to work then, but in three summers he had put the line through. He owed money on every nail and crosstie and knew he could not raise another penny anywhere. But the job was done, and in time he would make it pay.

So he went back to the white house his father had left him, and from his little office at one end he garnered the harvest of the halcyon turpentine days and watched his earnings, puffing mightily in their corpulence, steam by below his window—seeping hogsheads of tar and barrels of acrid rosin. Eastbound moved rotund drums of tobacco and cotton bales to the seaboard port at the end of the road. But best of all he liked the evenings when the gangs of turpentine niggers rolled in, swinging their legs from the flatcars and singing Deep River.

He was now a man, self-reliant, but very shy. One day when he had gone down the line to the port and was watching the roustabouts spin the bales along the quay to where a Greenock tramp was nudging the piles, he saw a tall girl standing by the rail. Her face was homely, gentle, and, above all, strong. He knew at once that she was from the Highlands, where such women have been bred since the beginning. Culloden had sent the McDonalds across the sea two centuries before, but at the sight of her his blood went coursing back to the old clans. She saw it, and gave him a straight look without curiosity or fear.

Within a year she had come back to marry him and put his neglected garden to rights. She learned to run levels, and used to ride down the line in the cab or tramp through the forest beside him, knitting without looking down. They were happy with the deep stoic happiness of the Scots, though at times she grew sad and lonely. She would go off by herself, and he could hear her in the distance singing the Skye boat song:

"Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing,

‘Onward’ the sailors cry,

Carry the lad that’s born to be king

Over the sea to Skye."

Her head would go up, and her low voice shiver with a defiant ring which took no reckoning of the poor ruined prince now crumbling in his grave as he had crumbled in his life generations before.

As the years passed, the pine woods were slowly drained of their turpentine. The trees were still mighty, but each dark trunk bore a long pale herringbone scar, stretching as high up as the pullers would reach, at its bottom a little rough-hewed slot into which the precious sap oozed down every spring. The supply was failing, and the demand as well, for the iron and steel ships they were building now had small use for naval stores.

McDonald from his window watched the dwindling stream of freight. He had long since stopped paying off his debts and had begun to borrow again. He saw his earnings of years and, at last, the very life of his road slowly flowing away. It was as if the great forest from which that life had come was silently taking it back to itself again. He used to gaze out over the soft level floor of tree-tops not with any fear or depression, but wondering deeply and sturdily what he should do. At last he saw in the papers the news that he had long been waiting for. He looked on the waving, whispering tops that night with a certain shame and awe, and next morning he started north to talk with hard-faced men.

In six months the lumbermen came in, jovial, drunken vandals who descended roaring from the train and skirmished with all who appeared on the streets that night. Here and there along the road they set up their ramshackle sawmills, crazy sheds from which came shrill, purposeless toots, wisps of steam and, endlessly repeated, a high-pitched groan as each cradled log struck the spinning saw. Slowly the heaps of ruddy, golden sawdust grew until they seemed like the burial mounds of the old giants who had there been sacrificed. The log wagons rutted their twisting roads back into the hills, through the great raw stumps and the heaps of dying slash, ever seeking the quavering cry of Timber! and the crackle of branches and groan of the heart pine which followed it. They came back, padding noiselessly over the bark and sawdust; only the complaining axles told of their mighty burden. The deer and the wildcat fled before them to the mountains of the west, and the little gray foxes crowded into the branches and lived precariously on the dark-furred swamp rabbits. Down by the sidings, heaps of rough-sawed lumber, a light, sharp yellow, shone in the raw light that now flooded for the first time those unaccustomed places. There were sturdy blockhouses of joist and scantling, and fan-shaped piles of sagging boards, while now and then a twelve-inch beam, destined for some distant, mighty task, basked its broad sides, still dripping from the saw.

The railroad flourished, and McDonald was happy again. The menace of the lean years had passed; he was once more paying off his debts; once more he had become a power in the land, a dispenser of prosperity to whom others turned deferential, hopeful faces; and above all he had now a child, a daughter, Flora. Small wonder he failed to see that his fortune was founded on nothing less and nothing more than the ruin of the countryside. Like the great pines that had fallen before him, he was in turn to stand, proud in the memory of countless frustrated storms, until disaster’s unforeseen, keen edge should lay him low.

The first stroke came one evening in spring. He was sitting on the porch, his long square-tipped fingers were locked on his knee, and in the circle of his arms his little girl was curled up asleep like a puppy. Straggling pines barred the deep, rich sky; shadowy mockingbirds busied themselves after twilight insects; down in the yards he could hear the somnolent, metallic breathing of an engine.

His wife came to the door; even in the failing light he could see the startling pallor of her face. He would have sprung up, but she saw the child and stretched out a hand.

No, she said,—her voice was taut and whispering,—it’s come to me. The doctor said it would.

He could almost see the yearning glow of her eyes as they strained to make out his figure and the child’s. The next instant she had slipped inside the house. All down his back the primeval hackles rose at the unseen menace of the enemy. He sat numb, while three chill, tingling waves of dread swept quickly over him. Then he raised himself by his will and, swinging the child into a chair, passed with quiet swiftness through the door. He found her on a wide sofa near a small ivory-shaded lamp. She was curled up cunningly, in the same way as the child outside, a position incongruous and touching in one of her years. She was dead, but at the last a faint flush had come back to her face, an exquisite afterglow. He came no nearer, but dropped on his knees like a peasant before a wayside shrine.

Now the struggle against failure began—a struggle as bleak and endless as the moors which had bred the McDonald stock. Almost imperceptibly, timber became scarcer and poorer. Instead of the sinewy stringers of clear heart pine, in time only shingles, slats, and crate-boards came out, the off-scourings of the forest. And across the waste lands spread the useless scrub oaks in puny triumph over the old masters.

Along the coast the new ships of iron were bigger. Each year fewer of them could make the river port to the coast; slowly it withered away. The tall, serene houses of the old merchants and sailing masters passed shabbily into the hands of petty tradesmen. The tide of commerce receded, leaving at length only an impassive flotsam stranded in the town—Negroes, Portuguese, some Swedes, and Yankees. One by one the ships lanterns over the doors of inns and drinking places went out.

Of the railroad and its business nothing at length remained except a small traffic in grains and cheap manufactured goods that were carried by a single dingy engine over the crumbling line to the port and the scattered dead hamlets along the way. Nothing remained but that and old man McDonald himself. He used to sit on the porch every evening to see the only train come by. It would have been hard for a stranger to place him. More than anything else he might have been taken for a sheriff or a master engineer. His clothes were not those of a workman, but they could be worked in. His frame was heavy and blocklike. At rest he seemed made of concrete, but he moved with a swiftness and certainty that had about them almost slighter and taller than he really was. His face was ruddy with a grim, humourous kindness that disconcerted small minds. His eyes were like the muzzle of his gun, steel-gray, with an impersonal threat in their black depths. His gray hair grew thickly in wind-tossed eddies, and he carried his head thrust a little forward, with the face upraised, like a seaman fronting a storm.

Now as he sat there holding his great, heavy watch in his hand he heard the distant whistle of the locomotive and saw the creeping smoke-serpent draw nearer over the tops of the trees. It ended in a curling black cloud as the fireman threw on more pine knots. The next moment the grotesque front of the engine appeared round the bend. She was an antique wood-burner, with a funnel-shaped stack and a wide-spreading cowcatcher, like a prim old lady’s crinoline. She passed with prodigious, woolly puffs and unearthly clankings, a string of box-cars