Across Five Aprils

by Irene Hunt

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Author’s Note

  Titles by Irene Hunt

  Across Five Aprils

  The Lottery Rose

  No Promises in the Wind

  Up a Road Slowly

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ACROSS FIVE APRILS

  A Berkley JAM Book/ published by arrangement with Modem Curriculum Press

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Tempo edition published 1965

  Berkley edition I March 1986

  Berkley JAM edition / January 2002

  Copyright © 1964 by Irene Hunt.

  All rights reserved.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-12794-0

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  To Bruce, Diane, Eric, and Tracy

  1

  Ellen Creighton and her nine-year-old son, Jethro, were planting potatoes in the half-acre just south of their cabin that morning in mid-April 1861; they were out in the field as soon as breakfast was over, and southern Illinois at that hour was pink with sunrise and swelling redbud and clusters of bloom over the apple orchard across the road. Jethro walked on the warm clods of plowed earth and felt them crumble beneath his feet as he helped his mother carry the tub of potato cuttings they had prepared the night before.

  “It’s damp fur down and warm on top,” he remarked, poking a brown hand deep into the soil. “Once we git these planted and a soft rain comes, we’ll hev a crop to make people up north call us ‘Egypt’ fer sure.”

  He filled a burlap pouch with the potato cuttings and hoisted it expertly to his thin shoulder where a batch of new freckles was just beginning to appear. The world seemed a good place to him that morning, and he felt ready to stride down the length of the field with a firm step and a joke on his lips.

  “Do you reckon we’ll be through by the time ham and corn bread is ready fer dinner, Mis’ Creighton?” he asked grinning. He called her “Mis’ Creighton” sometimes as his older brothers did when they teased her; it was just a step from the too-bold joke of addressing her by her given name.

  His mother smiled back at him, acknowledging his mood, but she shook her head at his words.

  “Yore hopes is makin’ a fool of yore reason, Jeth. We’re lucky if these ‘taters is bedded by noon tomorrow.”

  She made short, quick cuts with her hoe in the mellow soil and waited until Jethro placed a cutting, eye upward, in the spot hollowed out for it, after which she raked a covering of soil over it and moved down the long furrow.

  She was a small, spare woman with large dark eyes and skin as brown and dry as leather. She had been a pretty girl back in the 1830’s when she married Matthew Creighton, but prettiness was short-lived among country women of her time; she didn’t think much about it anymore except now and then when Jenny’s fourteen-year-old radiance was especially compelling. Even if she had been concerned, there were reverberations of Calvinism strong within her, which would have protested vigorously against the vanity of regret for a passing beauty. She had borne twelve children, four of whom were dead—perhaps five, for the oldest son had not been heard from since he left for the goldfields of California twelve years before; she had lived through sickness, poverty, and danger for over thirty years; the sight of a pretty face might bring a tired smile to her lips, but it was a thing of little value in Ellen’s world.

  Jethro was her youngest child, born in the year of’52, a year in which three of her children died within one week of the dreaded disease they called child’s paralysis, a disease which struck the country that year, people said, like the soldiers of Herod. Ellen knew that she favored her youngest son, that she overlooked shortcomings in Jethro for which her older children had been punished. It was a weakness of her advancing years, she supposed, but this was the son who had been spared that summer when children all around were dying of the agonizing sickness; it looked as if, somehow, Destiny had marked him. One didn’t talk about such things; the world, she knew, was impatient with women who value their own children too highly. Ellen kept her silence, but she saw signs of special talents in Jethro, and she watched over him with special tenderness.

  They worked together for an hour or more without speaking. Ellen was grave and absorbed in the anxious thoughts of that spring; Jethro was accustomed to adapting himself to the behaviors and moods of older people, and he found enough in the world about him to occupy his interest as he worked. A south breeze brought the scent of lilacs and sweet fennel to his nostrils and set all the frosty-green leaves of a silver poplar tree to trembling. There was a column of wood-smoke feathering up from the kitchen chimney, a sign that Jenny was already making preparations for a hearty noon meal. From the neighboring field across the creek he could hear the shouted commands to the plow horses as Matt Creighton and his two older sons got on with the spring plowing. It was a fine morning; many people around him were troubled, he knew, but that was a part of the adult world which he accepted as a matter of course. Adults were usually troubled. There were chinch bugs and grasshoppers, months of drought, elections, slavery, secession, talk of war—the adult world of trouble, though, was not real enough to dim the goodness of an April morning.

  At about seven o’clock a team and wagon pulled out of the barnlot, stopping for a minute before turning into the road while the driver spoke to a girl who came run
ning out of the kitchen door.

  Jethro chuckled. “Shad’s leavin’ fer Newton now, I guess. Jenny has to say goodbye like as if he was goin’ to the North Pole.”

  He watched the wagon from the corner of his eye as he worked, and when the team started coming down the road toward the potato patch, he put the heavy bag of cuttings aside and raced across the field to the roadside. His mother laid down her hoe and followed slowly, picking her way over the mounds of plowed earth that Jethro’s feet seemed barely to touch.

  The young schoolmaster stopped the team and climbed down from the wagon to stand at the fencerow waiting for Jethro and Ellen to come up from midfield. He was a tall, powerfully built youth of twenty, with a firm mouth and grave, dark eyes that gave him the appearance of an older man. He had come out from Pennsylvania three years earlier to study at McKendree College, where an uncle was professor of natural philosophy, a subject that later generations would call physics. Faced with insufficient funds to carry on his studies at the end of his first year, young Yale had turned to the country schools as a stepping-stone toward further work in college, and a series of circumstances had led him to the school for which Matt Creighton served as a director. Here he had stayed, not just one year as originally planned, but two, and now in 1861 he had hired himself out as a farmhand to Matt for the summer and contracted to teach still a third term that fall.

  He had been stricken with typhoid fever during his first year of teaching, and Ellen Creighton had patiently nursed him back to health with the skill she had learned over the years. There was a strong tie of affection between the two of them; Ellen counted Shadrach as a part of her family and looked after him as she did her own, and Shadrach Yale, in turn, showed a thoughtful courtesy for her that few women of the prairies received from their own sons.

  “Will you be back by suppertime, Shad?” Jethro called breathlessly as he approached the fencerow.

  At school he addressed the young teacher as “Master,” but now that Shadrach was so much a member of the family the necessary formalities of a schoolroom were forgotten.

  “It’s not likely, Jeth, not before nine or maybe later.” Shadrach smiled at the thin eager face turned up to him. He was mature enough at twenty to appreciate being a hero to a nine-year-old boy; besides that, Jethro’s quick mind and delight in learning had been a source of pleasure for studious young Yale, who had known the frustration of trying to penetrate the apathy and unconcern of a backwoods classroom. He had talked to both parents about the promise he recognized in the boy; Matt, in spite of his pleasure, had shaken his head and wondered if the praise for Jethro had not stemmed from interest in Jethro’s sister, Jenny. But Ellen had felt no doubts; the praise was in line with what she herself believed firmly.

  She stood beside the gray rails that morning with her hands folded beneath her apron. Matt had made a pretext of needing supplies from town, but she knew that this trip to Newton in the midst of a late planting season would have been unthinkable except for the urgency of getting word from the world beyond their own fields and woods pastures. Her face looked drawn in the bright sunlight.

  “I wisht there was a telegraph in Newton, Shad,” she said.

  He nodded. “There’s one in Olney; they’ll send any important news on up to Newton as soon as it comes through. At any rate I’ll bring the latest papers.”

  “Seems sometimes there’s a deep silence all about us out here waitin’ to be filled.” She and the young man looked at one another, each pair of eyes dark with anxiety.

  Jethro kicked a stone in the road. “Sure wisht I was goin’ to town with you, Shad,” he said finally, because it seemed that someone must say something.

  “I know. Well, there’ll be other trips this summer, Jeth.”

  Shadrach started to climb back into the wagon as he spoke; then, changing his mind, he turned back and placed his hands quickly on Ellen’s shoulders. “Try not to worry,” he said quietly.

  The caress brought sudden tears to her eyes. She and Jethro stood watching as he drove away; when the wagon disappeared in a clump of trees at a bend in the road, Ellen turned back to her work slowly as if overwhelmed by a deep weariness.

  “The Lord knows what news he’ll bring back,” she said. “There may be war in the land at this minute fer all we know.”

  Jethro was depressed by her somber mood, but not by the imminence of war. He had listened to his brother Tom and their cousin Eb, the two younger of the grown boys in the household, and their excitement had found its way into his blood. Dread of war was a womanly weakness, he had discovered, evidenced by his mother’s melancholy and the tears of Jenny and his brother John’s wife, Nancy.

  “I heered some of the big fellers talkin’ the other night, and they said the war, even if it comes, will be no more than a breakfas’ spell. They said that soldiers up here kin take the South by the britches and make it holler ‘Nough’ quicker than it takes coffee to cool off fer swallerin’.”

  Jethro spoke hurriedly, almost sure that the words would anger his mother and vaguely realizing that he wanted to anger her a little for spoiling the brightness of the morning by her obvious sadness.

  She had a way of closing her eyes briefly when exasperated as if to reject for at least a second the existence of a folly that she was bound to recognize later. Her hoe jabbed deeper and more sharply into the brown earth at her feet.

  “They’re foolish young ‘uns, and they’re talkin’ without a spark of reason to guide their words,” she said angrily. “It ain’t that I don’t love ’em—big talk or not,” she added, “but I’m fearful of the day when they face their comeuppance. I’m fearful of the time when I’ll hev no boys left but you—and the three little ones up on Walnut Hill.”

  Jethro squirmed inwardly. If there were going to be tears and talk of the children who had died the summer he was born, he wanted to escape. And since one didn’t easily escape from his mother in the midst of planting a half-acre of potatoes, he searched hurriedly for a way to turn the conversation.

  “Did ever I tell you, Ma, of an old feller that give all the people of the earth their comeuppance?” he asked brightly, knowing that she was always proud to hear of the things he’d learned from Shadrach at school.

  “I reckon you didn’t, Jeth, not that I’m able to recollect.”

  Jethro straightened his shoulders a little under the weight upon them.

  “Well, ma‘am, there was a long time when people allowed that the earth was the big kingpin amongst all the stars and things. They thought that the moon and sun and all the stars went ’round the earth and maybe kind of tipped their hats as they went by. Shad says that most everybody went on believin’ that fer years till finally there come along this man I’m tellin’ you about. He was head and shoulders smarter than the run of the mill, and after he’d watched the sun and moon and stars fer a long time he set down and he done some figgerin’. Well, when he got through figgerin’ he showed it to some other fellers and there it was, plain as anything—the earth wasn’t the big kingpin at all. He allowed it was jest a little old star chasin’ ’round the sun with a pack of others, some of’em a lot bigger than us. Shad says that some folks took that news real hard; it kind of let the wind out of their sails all of a sudden.”

  “That ain’t in the Scriptures, is it, Jeth?”

  “I don’t reckon so, but it’s in one of the books Shad brought out from Philadelphy.”

  His mother looked thoughtful. “The Lord God created the earth and all upon it, Jeth. I don’t like to hear that His work warn’t of the best.”

  “But don’t you see, Ma, He created the sun and moon and stars too—some a little bigger, others maybe a little purtier. Seems like people on earth believed we had the best diggin’s jest because we wanted to believe that—because it made us feel important—”

  “You ain’t watchin’ to keep the ’tater eyes facin’ up, Jeth,” Ellen said quietly, pointing with the tip of her hoe.

  He stooped and turned a cutting over. �
�Guess I kind of got carried away with my own noise,” he said flushing.

  Her eyes lighted a little. “Well, you done me a favor—tellin’ me things I ain’t never learned and givin’ me somethin’ to ponder over. It ’mazes me, Jeth, it does fer a fact, the way you kin recollect all the things Shad tells you and how you kin put them from his way of talkin’ into mine.”

  She hoed in silence for a minute and then paid him the great compliment of going back to his story.

  “Did you tell me what the old feller’s name was, the one that done all the figgerin’?”

  “His name was Copernicus. I kin even spell it fer you if you’re a mind. Shad made me learn how to say it and spell it too.”

  “Sounds like a furriner.”

  Jethro nodded. “I allow,” he agreed.

  Ellen sighed. “Seems like furriners is allus stirrin’ up somethin’. Well, the pot can’t call the kettle black—look what we’re stirrin’ up amongst ourselves.”

  She was back to the problems of the times, and Jethro knew that he could not tempt her away from them. For months he had moved along the edge of the furor that raged among the adults of his family, of the neighborhood, and even of the church. He knew that there had been fights in the neighborhood, anger and triumph over the election of President Lincoln in the fall of ’60, but he supposed, if he thought of it at all, that this was the natural behavior of people interested in a vague thing called politics. He had heard talk of tariffs, of slave states and free ones, of a violent old man named John Brown, and during the past winter, of states seceding from the Union. But it had just been talk to him, and the only part of all the talk that held any interest for him was the conviction among all the men that war was sure to break out sooner or later. It hadn’t broken out yet, however, and some men were swearing because the President had not declared war, while others were saying, “Jest let Ol’ Abe fire on the South and watch Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee—yes, and maybe southern Illinois—tumble over on the Confederate side of the fence.”