Across Five Aprils

by Irene Hunt

  The two-mile stretch of woods road was just ahead—the hardest two miles of the trip if one considered the terrain. But to Jethro the several yards along the dooryard and barnlot of Dave Burdow’s place were full of a sinister threat that made the woods road a welcome relief. When it curved among the trees and the Burdow cabin was lost to sight, he breathed easier and shifted himself stiffly on the seat as he prepared for the ordeal of mudholes and jutting tree stumps in the road ahead.

  The curve, however, was no sooner rounded than Jethro discovered that the vague dread he had experienced in passing the cabin had now become a reality. A man stood among the trees at the edge of the road, a saddled horse at his side. As Jethro approached, he walked slowly out, as if he’d known the wagon would soon be along and had been waiting. Jethro saw that it was Dave Burdow.

  With a curt gesture, he motioned Jethro to stop. “Like to ride with ye a piece,” he muttered, and climbed over the wheel and into the seat without raising his eyes to the boy’s face. He led his own horse by a strap.

  Jethro shrank from the great bulk beside him with fear and revulsion. He did not dare look at Burdow, but he remembered the sullen, piglike eyes that had stared at him in the store that morning. He remembered, too, hearing usually mild Ed Turner speak in loud anger about Dave Burdow a few weeks after Mary’s death.

  “Decency ain’t in him,” Ed had declared. “He’s had nary a word of human feelin’ fer what happened to that little girl, nary a word of thanks that Matt saved his worthless boy from his neighbors. He’s more of a dumb brute than a man.”

  Dave Burdow was as silent as the darkness that was drawing in around them. There was no sound but the creaking of the wagon as it floundered through the sour-smelling mud and over mammoth tree roots. The air held a damp chill, as if the sun that had given a pale, late-winter brightness to the streets in Newton had been too weak to penetrate the dense branches above the woods road. The team was tired, the going slow, and a quarter of a mile was covered in only something less than an eternity.

  Jethro did not actually visualize the grim possibilities that faced him. He was still too much a child, still insufficiently acquainted with violence, to believe that bodily harm could possibly come to him. Ugly things happened, it was true, but to people who were distant, unknown people—not to someone named Jethro Creighton. He was afraid, but his fear was vague, and anger was as strong as fear when he thought of the precious bag of coffee and of the little gifts—gifts were as rare for him as comforts or luxuries—the book, the wedge of pie, the handful of Sam Gardiner’s candy. There was the team, too, and the wagon. If a thieving Burdow took these, what could a boy who had been trusted with them say to his father? “You jest hev to keep a level head and use gumption,” he had said confidently the night before.

  He tried to hold himself firm, but after a while the strain became too great, and a shudder shook his body with sudden violence. The silent man at his side turned then and-looked at him for the first time.

  “Ye got no call to be afeared,” he said roughly. “I ain’t aimin’ to hurt ye none.”

  Jethro didn’t answer, and they drove on in silence again for so long that he was startled when Dave Burdow spoke again. His voice was less rough this time, and it held a resonance of anger and sadness that made Jethro remember the stories he had heard of mad old John Brown.

  “There be things that’s evil in these woods tonight. I seed evil apassin’ my place a while ago, comin’ in from the shortcut road to town and reelin’ in the saddle. I heered evil braggin’ in the saloon today about layin’ fer a young‘un on his way home.” He reached over and took the reins from Jethro’s hands. “I’d best drive till we’re out of the brush,” he added. “We’re gittin’ close to the place where some piz’nous snake might strike quick.”

  The world was turning upside down for Jethro. He felt as if he were someone else, someone looking from far off at a boy who had started from home with a team and wagon on a March morning that was at least a hundred years ago. When he tried to speak he found that his voice, like his identity, had gone too; his lips worked as they had often seemed to work in a bad dream to form the words he wanted to say, but no sound passed them, and there was nothing to do but sit quietly while his mind floundered in the uncertainties that beset it.

  At a point near the north end of the woods road there was a bridge spanning the ravine that cut a deep, jagged gash across the road and through the fields beyond. As they approached the bridge, Jethro saw the dim outline of a horse beside a tree; Dave Burdow saw it too, and he leaned forward in the seat, his hands tightening on the lines and the strap by which he led his own horse beside the wagon.

  At the bridge the thing happened quickly and was over without a word being spoken by either the attacker or the attacked. A man leaped up from the ravine when the wagon was midway across the bridge and, running up beside the team, laid a long whip across the backs of the horses. There was a bad moment as the horses plunged and kicked and as Burdow’s horse responded to the fright of the team; seconds later the tethered horse at the roadside broke away and galloped off into the darkness ahead of the wagon.

  The thing was over quickly with Dave Burdow’s strong hands on the reins. It had been a close brush with tragedy, but as the horses became quiet again the event became as routine in Jethro’s mind as the tilting of the wagon had been that morning; it would be a while before he would grasp the full terror of the thing that had happened.

  There was no word between the two in the wagon when the danger was over. Both man and boy seemed to be in tacit agreement that the attack at the bridge was a closed incident, a thing for which they felt a solid indifference. Jethro realized that he had clung to Dave Burdow’s arm during the worst of the moment, and he drew aside.

  Shortly after the incident at the bridge, the light from Jake Roscoe’s cabin could be seen through the trees. The old man was waiting at his gate when the wagon finally came up. “Air ye young Creighton?” he called out. “Did ye bring me my paper?”

  Burdow stopped the team, and Jethro handed the paper down across the wheel. He found that his lips were still too numb for speech, and he wanted desperately to be beyond earshot of the old man’s plaintive questioning.

  “Who is it that’s with ye?” Roscoe asked, peering up through the darkness.

  Jethro could only shake his head, and Dave Burdow did not speak. The team started on, no less communicative than the two figures in the wagon, and the old man was left muttering angrily at his gate.

  A little distance beyond Roscoe’s place, Dave Burdow stopped the team again and prepared to climb down from the wagon.

  “Wortman caint foller ye—ye can git on by yoreself now.” He jumped from the top of the wheel to the ground and turned his horse’s head to the south.

  Jethro managed the words “I’m obleeged,” but Dave Burdow made no sign of having heard him. He mounted his horse and, without looking around, started back over the road they had just traveled.

  Jethro watched horse and rider for as long as he could see them; then he flipped the lines across the backs of his team. There were still four full miles to cover, and he was weak with a deep weariness that seemed to penetrate every muscle of his body. His head swam in a way that frightened him, and to protect himself against the danger of falling off the high seat, he slid down into the bed of the wagon and leaned against the side. The horses needed no guiding now; they knew they were on the last lap of the day’s journey.

  There was a dim new moon, which he hadn’t seen while he was in the woods, and Jethro watched it dully as home came closer, step by step. His thoughts skirted the danger that had threatened him; he wondered instead if Guy Wortman’s horse had run away for good and all; he wondered, too, what Dave Burdow would say to the woman who had watched Jethro from the shadowy door of her cabin. Then he slept a little and wakened suddenly to feel about the seat and bed, locating each parcel that he had brought with him from town.

  When at last he saw the ligh
t from the kitchen window at home, he urged the horses to a trot, and under cover of the wagon’s rattling, the sound of a few sobs amounted to almost nothing. A long rectangle of light appeared in the dark outline of the cabin while he was still some distance down the road; he knew then that his approach had been heard, that the door was opened, and that someone was coming outside to welcome him.

  At home, the relief of those who had waited was obvious in the excitement of their welcome. When the parcels were carried inside and the team cared for, Jethro sat beside his father at the table, with Jenny and Ellen facing him and waiting for all the news of his trip to town. They noticed his pallor, and Ellen’s eyes were tender as she recognized the signs of tears, but they would not shame him by asking if the trip had been too hard for him. They spoke instead of his purchases; he’d shown good judgment in the things he’d bought. They congratulated him on being able to account for every penny of the money earned through sales and expended for their needs.

  Jethro chose carefully from among the day’s happenings those things that he wished to tell them. He related parts of his conversation with old Jake Roscoe; he told them of meeting the editor in Sam Gardiner’s store and that the young man named Charley had looked after the team while Jethro had gone to the restaurant for dinner with Mr. Milton. He made them taste Mrs. Hile’s pie and share Sam Gardiner’s candy; he showed them the book on English usage and told them about the cartoon in the paper relating to General McClellan’s late demotion. He spoke slowly and a little wearily, but they were too much interested to guess that he was holding back some news of keener interest.

  After a while, Ellen held out her hand to him. “You air spent, Jethro; I kin see it in yore face. Let’s all git to our beds and talk the rest of yore trip in the mornin’.”

  Jenny pushed her chair back and Matt started to rise, but Jethro sat in his place and motioned toward the others to sit again.

  “There is more I hev to tell you before we sleep,” he said. There was a catch in his voice, and they all looked at him with anxious eyes. Then he stretched his arms out on the table and, with a long sigh, began his story.

  “I didn’t tell you this, but in the store this mornin’ there was a man named Guy Wortman. And there was another man, Trav Burdow’s pa—”

  6

  Matt did not sleep the night after Jethro’s return from Newton; and the next morning he was up at dawn moving aimlessly about the cabin and out around the dooryard and woodlot. Ellen had managed to sleep a little in the early morning hours, but she got up when she heard him and prepared a breakfast that neither of them wanted. They drank a little coffee and looked at one another in silence; she noticed that his face was pale, but so was the dim light in the cabin and so, she supposed, was her own face. A moment later, though, a frown came between her eyes as she watched his trembling hand place his cup back in its saucer.

  “You air ailin‘, Matt,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you git back to bed and rest a little? There ain’t so much that needs doin’ this mornin’.”

  He shook his head. “If you ask me am I afeared, the answer is ‘yes’; ailin‘, it’s ‘no.’ ” He pushed his chair back from the table a little. “I think I’ll go over and ask Turner to drive to Newton with me this mornin’. I want to talk to him and to some of the men down there as knows this Wortman.”

  “Will you stop at Burdow’s, Matt?” she asked tensely.

  His fingers clutched at strands of his beard as if it were necessary to hold on to something. “You’d hev me do it, wouldn’t you?”

  She nodded. “We’ve held it aginst him that his boy stuck a knife in our hearts; now he’s grabbed a second knife that was aimed at us.”

  “Mother,” he turned toward her with eyes full of despair, “if you could ha’ knowed back in 1830 of all the griefs you’d hev...”

  She put a hand out to him quickly when he paused. “Yore spirit needs bolsterin’ today, old man.” She smiled at him. “You know good and well I wouldn’t ha’ believed ary prophecy. And if I had, I reckon I’d ha’ risked it. I wanted Matt Creighton fer mine awful bad, if you air of a mind to remember.”

  They were silent again, each of them preoccupied and troubled. Upstairs they heard Jenny in her room getting dressed to come down to the kitchen; there was no sound from Jethro’s room.

  “Let the boy sleep,” Matt said after a minute. “Yesterday was too much fer a lad of his years.”

  “I’m glad that you air willin‘,” she answered. “I don’t want to be a soft mother because he’s my last, but it would hurt me to deny him his rest this mornin’.”

  They got to their feet, and Ellen began to gather up their cups and saucers while Matt pulled on his jacket and cap. “I aim to walk over to Ed’s now,” he said, and she nodded absently.

  A minute or two later she thought she heard a noise at the gate, and hurrying out, she found him lying unconscious on the ground with one hand clutching at his left side.

  She covered him with heavy comforters while Jenny ran to Ed Turner’s for help. Then, between them, they got Matt to his bed while the Turners’ oldest boy drove over to Hidalgo for the doctor.

  Matt revived, but the vigorous, erect Matt Creighton was gone. A man who looked twenty years older had taken his place.

  If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older member of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

  By the second week of April that year, the fields were dry enough for plowing, and Jethro, full of the optimism of inexperience, harnessed his team and went out to the field alone. Ed Turner, driving past on his way home from town, stopped and waited until Jethro could get from mid-field up to the fencerow.

  “You kin count on me fer whatever help I kin spare, Jeth, and whatever counsel. You air young fer what’s ahead—and I don’t like to see a boy made a man too soon. I reckon, though, that it was writ you’d be the staff of yore pa’s old age.”

  Jethro flushed, proud and embarrassed at the same time. “I reckon I kin manage,” he said in his slow way.

  Ed hesitated and then pointed to the newspaper on the seat beside him. “There’s bin a bad fight, Jeth, down in south Tennessee.”

  “Grant’s army?” Jethro asked quickly.

  Ed nodded. “At a place they call Pittsburg Landing—somewhere down on the Tennessee River. Grant let hisself git su‘prised by the Rebs—papers say that it was Sherman and Buell as saved things. They say it was a vic’try fer us, but they’re down on Grant—make it sound like he’s next of kin to Jeff Davis.”

  “Two months ago they was yellin’ and praisin’ him to the skies after Donelson.”

  “I know. It’s a sight easier to be a general in a newspaper office, I reckon, than it is to be one out on a battlefield. I’m not losin’ my feelin’ fer ol’ Grant—not yit, I ain’t.”

  “The fightin’—it was bad, was it?”

  Ed understood his meaning. “Upwards of twenty thousand, Jeth; mor’n twelve thousand of’em was our boys.”

  Jethro looked up at the neighbor thoughtfully. “I reckon we’d best not tell Pa—not till we hear from Tom or Eb.”

  “It would be better that way,” Turner agreed. “You and Jenny kin read the papers off to yoreselves somewhere; don’t talk about it before yore pa—or yore ma either, fer that matter.”

  “Pa don’t ask about the news these da
ys—that’s one way he’s so diff’rent.” Jethro was troubled. “How long do you think it might take a letter to git up from Tennessee?” he asked after a while.

  “It’s bound to take a spell. I wouldn’t worry, was I you. You’ll be hearin’ from young Tom or Eb before long. Remember the fight at Donelson was a bad one too, and both the boys come through without a scratch. I don’t doubt but what you’ll hev a letter one of these days.”

  “Sure hope so.” Jethro turned slowly back toward his team, his thin shoulders stooped a little. He did not weigh more than eighty pounds. Ed Turner must have been sharply aware of the look of frailty about the boy in contrast to the great plow horses and the wide fields where Matt with his four boys and Shadrach Yale had worked only the year before. His eyes were troubled as he made ready to drive on.

  “Now, spell yoreself every hour or so, Jeth—don’t drive too hard. I’m goin’ to send one of my boys over to help you before long, and some of the men over tow‘rd Hidalgo, they ’low to give you a day’s work now and agin—yore pa’s got plenty friends around here in spite of all the Wortmans and their kind in the county.”

  One afternoon later in the week Jenny had hurried with her housework and was prepared to go back to the field with her brother.

  “One of us kin take a furrow or so while the other one rests; we’ll save each other a sight of weary achin’ by day’s end,” she told her mother.

  Ellen nodded without speaking. She watched them as they walked off to the field together, and then turned slowly back to sit beside her husband.

  “They’re good young ’uns, Matt,” she said.

  He cried very easily in his weakness. “I bin thinkin’ of young Tom,” he said after a moment.

  “I know. I think of him too—him and all the others. We’ll be hearin’ from some of’em soon. You’re not to fret, Matt; we mustn’t give trouble a shape before it throws its shadder.”