Dirt and Blossom

This small, strange account was originally published in Northern Woodlands magazine and subsequently in my essay collection, A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters, and Wildlife, from Skyhorse Publishing and re-issued by the same press in 2024.

I piece this narrative together from some things the late Bill White told me, and these were sketchy, as he conceded, even to him.

At the very turn of the twentieth century, Bill said, there were two savvy woodsmen. I think their names were Harry and Charles; in any case I’ll call them that. They had a lean-to camp in the Musquash country, smack in the middle of nowhere at all back then, and vacant of humans, because it was almost entirely marshland.

One thing Bill heard from Harry and Charles has stuck with me more vividly than any other. It had to do with a dead man. Neither of those older woodsmen could reckon how he came to die. No blood on his body, no other mark of violence. He looked clean and pure as an altar boy.

It was never found out just who he was, or so Bill insisted. I’d bet the authorities—such as they may have been in that barely populated region and in that era—did learn a name, but I never challenged the claim, nor so much as asked any of the other veteran citizens about the story itself, let alone about this detail, and I can’t ask them now. I never speculated, because the victim’s identity was not and is not the point. Indeed, his lack of it seems more important.

It happened that Harry and Charles were hunting on a certain day, and no matter it was May. This was early times, Bill pointed out. If it wouldn’t’ve been for fish in the water and critters on the ground, folks would’ve starved. No, as a rule the old ones didn’t wait for some season to arrive; they shot and jigged and netted all year round.

That morning, a thunderstorm raced in from nowhere, the downpour something ferocious. Harry and Charles took for a thicket of cabbage pine, which clumped in an old burntland that another lightning storm had fashioned long before, eliminating what few larger standing trees there may have been. Boughs grew dense enough in that tangle to keep the men fairly dry. They scooched inside to wait on the weather.

Then one of them looked out and noticed the corpse.

No, not a corpse, but only the bottom of one bare foot, which glowed with each bolt from the sky. The two hunters knew of course there had to be a body too; they just couldn’t see it. Whenever it fell, it must have dropped right over the near bank of the stream, that bone-white sole the one thing left to show. The men might easily have missed it if they’d sheltered elsewhere. They told Bill they wished they had.

The two hunters didn’t speak for a while, but each of them knew what the other must be thinking. Neither liked the idea of what they’d find by that little stream but when time arrived they’d by God have to go find it. You couldn’t just walk away, although both admitted to Bill that they might have done so if there hadn’t been the two of them. They was each other’s conscience, Bill said.

In any case, they stayed under those scruffy pines long after the storm moved on. Whoever he was, after all, would be in no hurry now. The men left him resting right there until they could puzzle out what on earth to do about him.

What those old poachers did do at length —well, for whatever reason, in Bill’s retelling that was a bit of a blur. No doubt they contrived to paddle him out at length. But what he more clearly remembered was their coming out of the shelter when it faired, and suddenly noticing a twisty but thick-trunked small tree: a pear, of all things.

Now so far as anyone ever knew, this godforsaken spot had not been a settlement, not even for tribal people; there wasn’t enough solid or level ground. There were no white man’s cellar holes either, no remnant fire pits. Nothing for miles but marsh and wind, with here and there a horseback of land to tread on. The fruit tree, just into tiny leafage, was the only indication that the place might have been lived in after all. And how had the pear tree survived the fire that had swept this solitary patch of solid ground?

How, further, unless a seed had been carried by a bird or an animal (from where?), and unless it had been dropped just here, was a pear standing on its spot at all? The only answer seemed that someone, in some dim time, had made a dwelling. Could there have been a dooryard, could this tree have been one of many that amounted to an orchard? If so, why pears? Bill also wondered how they’d identify a tree so rare in those parts anyhow. He wouldn’t have been able himself.

It was barely true spring, the pear’s petals fallen. A few ribbons of ice held out along the water’s edge where it ran under alder shade. The corpse lay in that darkness. That fringe of ice chilled the hunters’ souls, they said.

The story still chills mine, though that’s to describe its impression too simply.

The hard gully-washer from which they’d sought refuge in the green-growth had splattered mud on the dead man, but sodden pear flowers too, which at first they took for old snow. The poor fellow lay naked otherwise, no sign of clothes anywhere they looked.

And the dirt-and-blossom trousers, the mask and cap, as one of the woodsmen told Bill, They wouldn’t make no difference to him now.