Thistle Warden's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Thistle woke before dawn with her back still against the old trunk. The green veins under the bark had gone quiet in the night, but they warmed again when she stood. She unwrapped the deed bundle in her lap and laid the brittle paper flat on a low stump. The dried cutting rolled free, brown and spent. She smoothed the deed with the side of her hand until the old signatures faced up. Then she heard the boots on the road. Six men came through the broken fence. Foreman Rusk walked first, a stamped work order folded once in his gloved hand. His beard was gray at the jaw and his vest pockets bulged with tags and pencils. He stopped ten paces from her and looked at the fallen wire, then at the missing notice, then at her bare feet in the sap-dark dirt. He said the grove was company land now and told her to step aside. He held up the order so she could see the court seal. Thistle held up the deed beside it. The names did not match. The boundary lines on his paper cut straight through her family's marks on the trunks behind her. "Read them together," she said. "Mine was signed four generations before yours was stamped." Rusk did read. He took his time. The other men shifted their saws from shoulder to shoulder. A younger one set his blade down in the sawdust and would not pick it back up. Rusk folded his order in half and then in half again. He said the court would settle it, not him, and that until the court spoke he had a schedule to keep. He told her to move. Thistle planted her feet wider and pressed her palm flat to the bark behind her. The green veins pulsed once against her hand. She said he would have to cut through her name before he cut another root. Rusk looked at his men. The younger one still would not pick up his saw. Rusk swore under his breath and told the crew to stand down until noon. He sent a runner back down the road with both papers tucked inside his order, hers and his, to be carried to the district clerk. The loggers sat along the fence line and drank from their canteens. Thistle did not move from the tree. She had won the morning. She had also handed her only deed to a man in a company vest, and the runner was already gone down the road with it. The court that stamped Rusk's order was the same court that would read hers. Half the grove still stood behind her. The other half was stumps at her feet. She sat down again in the sawdust and waited for noon, with nothing left in her pocket but the dead cutting and the notice she had pulled from the trunk.