Across Five Aprils

by Irene Hunt

  He knew a little about wars. The Revolution, of course. The American Revolution, Shadrach had pointed out, and Jethro had been amazed that there was ever any other. He liked stories of wars. There was a beautiful one described in one of Shad’s books in which an ancient king watched ships fight in a place called Salamis Bay; there was another exciting story of a battle in which small, fast ships with the lucky help of a violent storm had played Old Ned with a proud and mighty navy. He wanted to tell his mother about that one, how if the battle had gone the other way, both Ellen and Jethro Creighton might well have been speaking Spanish as they planted their potatoes that April morning.

  She wouldn’t have liked that though; she was suspicious of people who spoke a different language. Well, one learned when to speak and when to keep one’s tongue between his teeth. Jethro was not going to talk to his mother too much of either languages or wars, but he knew that, as far as the latter were concerned, he was one with young Tom and Eb when they hoped that war would come soon. War meant loud brass music and shining horses ridden by men wearing uniforms finer than any suit in the stores at Newton; it meant men riding like kings, looking neither to the right nor the left, while lesser men in perfect lines strode along with guns across their shoulders, their heads held high like horses with short reins. When the battle thundered and exploded on all sides—well, some men were killed, of course, but the stories of war that Jethro remembered were about the men who had managed to live through the thunder and explosion. Matt Creighton’s grandfather had lived through the Revolution; Matt himself had survived the Mexican War; and Uncle Billy Jeffers, down the road, was still alive to tell tales of the War of 1812. Jethro, forgetting the lecture to his mother on the inclination of people to select beliefs that bring them most satisfaction, never doubted that if Tom and Eb got their chance to go to war, they’d be back home when it was over, and that it would be shadowy men from distant parts who would die for the pages of future history books.

  Death, however, was neither simple nor lightly brushed aside when it struck home. Jethro frowned; he didn’t like to think of his sister Mary’s death, but some memory had been touched off as his thoughts wandered. Let a few hours of work go by and let one’s body begin to weary a little—then the thoughts that had been all of beauty and spring a while before started turning to things that were better forgotten. He had not forgotten though; he’d been only seven that winter of ’59, but the memory of the tragedy would always be sharp and terrible in his mind.

  Mary had been as pretty as Jenny, only blond and more delicate. Jethro remembered that it was a bitter night and that he had stood with his nose pressed against the cold windowpane watching Rob Nelson help her into the wagon before they left for a dance over toward Hidalgo. What happened later he’d pieced together from loud outcries and scraps of conversation deep in the middle of the night.

  It seemed that a crowd of young toughs from the south of the county had broken uninvited into the dance, waving whiskey bottles and shouting drunken insults at the guests. As things began to look more and more dangerous, Rob found Mary’s wraps, and they were starting for home when a drunken youth named Travis Burdow saw them leave and followed them on horseback.

  Rob told Matt Creighton how he had urged the team, hoping to get to Ed Turner’s farm where he could get help, because he knew that Burdow was armed. Rob had succeeded in getting as far as Turner’s driveway when Burdow, seeing that his game was about finished, rode up beside Rob’s team and fired a pistol over the heads of the horses. The frightened animals bolted through a rail fence, overturning the wagon and kicking themselves loose from the tongue. Mary was dead when Rob and Ed Turner pulled her from the wreckage.

  The countryside was in an uproar the next day when news of the tragedy got around. Matthew Creighton was held in high esteem by his neighbors, and the senseless killing of his daughter stirred up a rage that was heightened by the fact that the whole Burdow family was commonly despised throughout the countryside as a shiftless lot with a bad background.

  The grandfather of Travis Burdow had come from somewhere farther downstate, and when he moved into Jasper County he came hurriedly, in order, so the story went, to escape a mob of citizens whose anger during years of petty thieving had exploded over the theft of a team of horses from a prosperous farmer. Whether the story was true or not, suspicion and dislike settled upon the family, and thirty years had failed to dissipate it. The Burdow children were nicknamed “Jail Burd-ows” by taunting schoolmates and persecuted in a hundred petty ways. Dave Burdow, father of young Travis and son of the alleged horse thief, was a sullen, silent man who shunned people in general and accepted their insults as a matter of course when he was forced to deal with them. His sons, for the most part, were much like him except when liquor quickened their courage and defiance. The shot that Travis Burdow fired over Rob Nelson’s team that night was a shot fired at a society that had kicked a boy from childhood on because he bore his grandfather’s name.

  And so the anger of the mob at Mary’s death was doubled and tripled because a Burdow was responsible. By late afternoon, a crowd of fifty or more armed men stopped at the Creighton cabin to tell Matt of their intention of hunting Travis Burdow down and hanging him on the spot. But Matt Creighton had intervened, and it was a mark of the respect he commanded in the community that the men listened as he stood for an hour in the icy afternoon pleading with them to keep their hands free of further bloodshed.

  Jethro, understanding the situation more fully now that he was older, wondered at his father’s intervention that afternoon. His own sympathies, even on a spring morning eighteen months later, were with the angry men as they prepared for the manhunt. He wondered. He had great confidence in his father, but his sense of justice was hard put to accept the fact that Travis Burdow had been allowed to escape the consequences of his drunken crime. It occurred to him that he felt the same way toward his father as he did toward Abraham Lincoln—why should the President waver so long? Why should he refuse, week after week, to start the great explosion which the young men wanted to get started and have finished before the year was well into the summer? Jethro had to admit to himself an uncomfortable feeling of anger for both the President and his father; they had not shown the hard, unyielding attitude that he admired in the talk of Tom and Eb and their friends.

  He sighed suddenly and deeply at his perplexities. Ellen noticed the sigh and glanced at him quickly.

  “Be you spent, Jethro?”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m doin tol’able. I was jest thinkin’ about things.”

  “What kind of things, Son?”

  “Fer one thing I was wonderin’ why Abe Lincoln can’t make up his mind about war. I wonder—is he like Pa? Is he so aginst hevin’ blood on people’s hands that he’s afeared to start a war?”

  Ellen stopped her work and stood for a moment without speaking, her rough brown hands resting on the handle of the hoe.

  “He’s like a man standin’ where two roads meet, Jeth,” she said finally, “and one road is as dark and fearsome as the other; there ain’t a choice between the two, and yet a choice has to be made.” She shook her head. “May the Lord help him,” she whispered. “May the Lord guide his hand.”

  The sounds of morning were all around them as they stood silently in the middle of the furrow. From the fields across the creek came the monotonous shout to the field horses; up at the house Jenny’s voice came clearly, pleasant as the sound of a little bell ringing.

  “Here chick,” she called, “here chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick—”

  Ellen slowly reached out with her hoe and broke a clod of dirt into crumbling fragments.

  “Well, we got plantin’ to do, Jeth,” she said at last, and they went on with their work.

  When the sun was directly above their heads, Ellen leaned her hoe against the fence, and she and the boy trudged slowly up along the fencerow toward the house. Hunger pangs twisted Jethro’s insides, and he was tired, but the prospect of
dinner and an hour of cool rest under the trees in the dooryard cheered him to the point where he could whistle a little and make lazy gestures of play with the shepherd dog that came bounding down the path to greet him.

  The cabin they approached was small and squat, built of logs and entirely plain, a typical pioneer’s cabin. Its basic ugliness was softened by a thick growth of vines clambering over the walls and roof and by a general air of neatness and pleasant dignity in the dooryard, the hedgerow of lilacs, and the prim, green rows of vegetables in the garden. Two rooms of the cabin faced west, both opening onto an uncovered porch where a half dozen split-bottomed chairs were ranged for the comfort of those who wished to rest and get a breath of air after meals, or to sit in the coolness of a spring night and watch the shadows move in over the prairies. Behind these rooms a kitchen extended the width of the house, with doors at either end opening onto the dooryard. Here huge silver poplars towered above the cabin, their roots extending like giant claws, making the ground rough and robbing it of grass. A low picket fence covered with a tangle of sweet honeysuckle stretched along the front of the yard; beyond this fence were the hitching posts in an area covered by sweet clover and an acrid-smelling little flower that Jethro knew as “dog fennel.”

  The road in front of the house ran due north through that line where the last glacier had melted in some distant age and left its final load of drift, a line that separated the rich, black loam culture of northern Illinois from the poor, hard-packed clay culture to the south.

  Jethro regretted the melting of that glacier; if it could have hung on another hundred miles, life might have been very different for him and his family. But then it hadn’t, and anyway he loved the dog fennel and the silver poplars and the hedge of lilacs on the south that separated Jenny’s well-drained kitchen garden from the dooryard. He doubted that there were such wooded hills or winding creeks in the cornbelt of the north as one could find by the dozens in the clay lands, and he could not imagine contentment in any spot other than this one, which his father had chosen thirty years before. But it was a pity about the glacier. Only another hundred miles!

  Jenny had poured fresh water into a big basin so that her mother and Jethro could cool their faces and wash the dirt and grime from their hands.

  “Nancy and the little tykes are here,” she called to Ellen. “We got a nice meal fixed fer you.”

  Jenny had swept her shining black hair high upon her head because of the heat in the kitchen where the food was prepared over an open fireplace, and little drops of sweat stood out under her eyes and over a very firm chin. She grinned at Jethro and whacked him briskly on the seat as he came up to the kitchen well.

  “I’ve got a crock of lettuce fer you, Jeth, though I’m terr‘ble wasteful in pickin’ it too young. But I know how you been dreamin’ green things as fur back as last December. Nancy and I allowed maybe yore body had need of spring eatin’.”

  Green food. The hunger pangs grew even sharper at her words. His body did, indeed, have need of green food, if a continuous hunger for it meant that a need existed. He had felt many times during the long winter that he would have gladly exchanged all the pork in the smokehouse and all the gallons of sorghum, which he had helped to boil down, for one big crock of salad greens. He smiled at her, and Jenny understood his gratitude. It was as much as she expected; the Creighton males did not go into long speeches about such matters.

  John’s wife looked up from her work and smiled shyly at Jethro and her mother-in-law when they entered the kitchen.

  “I invited myself up fer the day, Mis’ Creighton,” she said in her thin voice. The name “Mis’ Creighton” was not a joke when Nancy used it; there was a reserve about the thin, quiet girl John had brought back from Kansas four years before that kept her almost a stranger to her husband’s family. She was amiable but aloof to the friendly Creightons, except for an occasional gesture of fondness for Jenny and for John’s favorite brother, Bill. John defended his wife earnestly to his mother.

  “She was brought up by relations that treated her harsh. To draw back and say nothin’ is her way of protectin’ herself. You must be patient with her, Ma, like one of yore own—”

  Ellen had had long schooling in patience. Now as she answered Nancy’s greeting her voice was very quiet.

  “You never need ary invitation to John’s home, Nancy. It’s yorn, too, and you’ll hev welcome any day.”

  She seated herself beside the door and took the youngest child in her lap. Nancy went on with her work, not sullenly, but so withdrawn that Ellen wearily gave up trying to talk with her and directed all her attention to the small boy.

  The men came in from the fields soon. Jethro, because he was now a field worker, was allowed to eat at the first table with his parents and elder brothers. It was a coveted honor and he accepted it with dignity, looking somewhat like a solemn dwarf as he sat between his father and Bill, his eyes wide beneath the tumble of yellow curls that clung to his forehead and the back of his neck.

  Across from him were the eighteen-year-olds. Tom was a mild-faced lad who, like Jethro and Bill, had inherited the blond hair and blue eyes of his father’s side of the family. Eb Carron, a nephew of Matt’s, had lived with the Creightons since he had been orphaned in childhood. Jethro admired the two big boys, but he sensed their indifference toward him and kept his distance generally. He was not especially hurt by their attitude; the youngest in the family knew his place. Besides, Jenny and Bill made up for any neglect on the part of the big boys a hundred times or more.

  Bill, his favorite, was a big, silent man who was considered “peculiar” in the neighborhood. In an environment where reading was not regarded highly there was something suspect about a young man who not only cared very little for hunting or wrestling and nothing at all for drinking and rampaging about the country, but who read every book he could lay his hands upon as if he prized a printed page more than the people around him. He wasn’t quite held in contempt, for he had great physical strength and was a hard worker, two attributes admired by the people around him; but he was odd, and there was no doubt of that. Men had seen him stop his team in midfield to watch the flight of a line of birds, and a story went the rounds of Bill talking to his horse as if it were a person. “He talked to it gentle,” the story went, “like a woman talkin’ to a young ’un.” He had even attended school the previous winter when work was slack, which was surely a fool thing to do unless one was interested in “breakin’ up school.” He had listened intently to what a young man three years his junior had to say; he had studied and done the tasks set for him by Shadrach Yale as if he were no older than Jethro. It was not a behavior pattern of which the backwoods community approved; a lot of people smirked a little when they mentioned Bill Creighton.

  Jethro loved Bill far and away beyond his other brothers; his mother understood why. “He’d put his hand in the fire fer you, Jeth,” she told him once, and Jethro believed her.

  John, the oldest of the children left at the home place, sat at the end of the table facing his mother. He was dark like Ellen and more slender and wiry than Bill. These two brothers were very close to one another, a fact which had always been a matter of pride to Ellen, who strove to make family ties firm and secure. John was more impatient, quicker to anger than Bill, but the two of them had sought each other’s companionship from childhood; there seemed to be a bond of understanding between them that had developed with the years. John’s oldest son was named for this brother, and Nancy, whose aloofness toward Ellen and Matt never once gave way in the face of all their efforts, addressed John’s favorite as “Brother Bill.”

  Jethro neither liked nor disliked John. Perhaps because of Nancy’s shyness, which he interpreted as unfriendliness, the boy extended his feeling of uneasiness with her to John and the two children. He seldom went near his brother’s cabin, which was only a half-mile away, and he made no move to attract or amuse the children.

  Jenny moved quickly and a little breathlessly from fireplace
to table, carrying dishes of meat and roasted potatoes, pitchers of milk, and great mounds of corn bread squares, still powdered with the wood ashes in which they had been baked. She was red-cheeked with pride over her efforts at providing a good dinner, and her eyes flashed a little in the direction of Tom and Eb, from whom she anticipated the usual teasing. Jethro smiled at her when she brought on the huge crock of lettuce, and Jenny saw to it that he received a generous serving before she passed it around the table.

  Nancy poured steaming coffee into big mugs, and Jenny placed one beside the plate of each adult at the table. Children might have priority to a pudding or the last piece of cake, but coffee was an adult luxury, which Jethro enjoyed but dismissed with a passive acceptance of family custom that he never thought to question. On this day of the boy’s graduation to “first table” honors, however, Bill took a dried crust of bread—the remains of a rarely served “white loaf”—and after soaking it in his coffee cup for a few seconds, spread it with butter and placed it on his brother’s plate. Jethro nodded his thanks briefly; he did not wish to attract the attention of the others at the table to the favor.

  “This meal is right good, Jenny,” John remarked pleasantly. “You air a fair cook fer yore years.”

  “We might ha’ had cake and fixin’s though, if Shad had been eatin’ with us,” Tom said, grinning at his sister, who could hardly hold back the pleased smile that mention of the young schoolmaster elicited.

  “Can’t help but feel a mite sorry fer pore Shad,” Eb added solemnly. “Jenny’s been feedin’ him so nice lately, he won’t be able to say ‘No’ comes a leap year.”