Chapter Three
Robert Wallace had come to Tennessee as a young man in 1810. His father Ebenezer had immigrated from Scotland to what was then the British Colony of North Carolina and had later fought in the revolution, taking part in the Battle of King’s Mountain. Awarded land for his service, Ebenezer had trekked over the Great Smoky Mountains into Tennessee, taking his family with him. That included his son Robert.
Growing into manhood on the family farm not far from the newly settled town of Knoxville, in due time Robert had taken himself a wife, the redheaded beauty Samantha Burke. He had claimed land of his own, built a fine cabin there with his own two hands near a spring that bubbled crisp and cold from the ground, and settled down to farm and raise a family.
Four sons had come along in reasonably short order: Edward, Thomas, Jeremiah, and Henry. Samantha made no secret of the fact that she wanted a daughter to go with all those strapping sons, and when she found herself with child again she hoped and prayed this would be the one.
Those prayers were answered, but only to a certain extent. The child was a girl, all right, but she was stillborn. Embittered, Samantha had declared that she would tempt fate no more by bringing additional children into the world.
Such things being beyond frail mortal control in most cases, Samantha conceived again several years later and brought forth another healthy son. Robert named him Breckinridge.
The boy was more than healthy. Robert sometimes said that Breckinridge entered the world squalling and never stopped. He grew like the proverbial weed and was just as hardy. Childhood illnesses barely touched him. As the years passed he shot up and his shoulders broadened. He was tireless and could do more work on the farm than any of his older brothers. Not only that, he was also handsome and usually had a devil-may-care grin on his face. He was known to burst into song out of sheer exuberance. Any parent would have adored him.
Any parent except for his mother, Samantha, who looked at him and saw the daughter Fate had cheated her out of. She loved her youngest son, no doubt about that, but she always harbored an unjustified resentment toward Breckinridge that led her to be sharp and critical with him.
Robert came to feel much the same way, although for different reasons. Breckinridge’s great size, boundless enthusiasm, and reckless nature led him into trouble on a regular basis. Also, Breck’s numerous appetites did not include a hunger for work. Although he could accomplish more around the farm than anyone else when he put his mind to it, getting him to buckle down and do chores instead of skylarking off on some “adventure” was an endless battle, one that Robert usually lost.
In Breckinridge’s uncomplicated mind, he knew these things. He was aware that he was a vexation and a disappointment to his parents and his older brothers, who he regarded as dour and humorless. He would have done something about it if he could, but to his way of thinking, the Good Lord had made him the way he was for a good reason, although he might not know what it was just yet, and it would be blasphemous for him to interfere with the Lord’s handiwork.
Because of that knowledge, when Breckinridge got back to the farm he wasn’t surprised to find his father waiting for him with an angry scowl on his weather-beaten face.
Robert’s frown eased a little as he looked at the carcass draped over his youngest son’s shoulders.
“Where’d ye get that?” he asked.
“Up in the hills,” Breckinridge replied.
“While ye were supposed to be plowin’.”
It was an accusation, not a question. Breckinridge lowered the buck to the ground in front of the cabin and said, “I swear, Pa, it was like I heard him callin’ to me. I knew he was there, and I knew I could get him.”
“Ye nearly always hear something callin’ to you when there’s work to be done, don’t ye?” Robert waved a hand. “Never mind. I grow weary of scoldin’ ye.” He frowned again and pointed. “There’s blood on yer ear.”
Breckinridge touched the lobe where the arrow had clipped it and said, “I caught it on a sharp branch. Wasn’t watchin’ where I was goin’ close enough, I reckon.”
Robert grunted and said, “I would’na be surprised.”
He didn’t seem to have noticed the rip in Breckinridge’s buckskin leggings where the Chickasaw’s knife had struck during the battle in the creek. The wound was just a shallow scratch, and the water had washed it out. Breck barely felt its sting anymore.
Robert nodded toward the buck and went on, “Ye brought it in, ye can dress it out. Best get to work before the meat spoils.”
“Yes, sir,” Breckinridge replied. He picked up the carcass again and carried it to the area near the smokehouse where the men did their butchering.
While he set about the bloody task, he wondered why he hadn’t told his father about the encounter with the Chickasaw. Somehow, he knew instinctively that that wouldn’t be a good idea. It would give his pa one more good reason to insist that Breckinridge stay close to home—and staying close to home was boring.
Did he have a duty to let folks know that there were renegade Chickasaw in the hills? Well, they already knew that, didn’t they? Half a dozen farms had been raided in the past year. Several cabins had been burned. A number of settlers had been killed. Men went about their daily chores with a rifle or a musket or a fowling piece close at hand.
The government had promised help in rounding up the renegades and forcing them to go to Indian Territory with the rest of their tribe, but Breckinridge knew better than that. He might be young, but he wasn’t naïve enough to believe the government’s promise about anything. Government wasn’t good for much except a bunch of hot air and empty words.
A footstep behind him made him look around. His mother stood there, and Breckinridge felt embarrassed somehow for her to see him with deer blood smeared up to his elbows.
“Your father was stomping around here earlier, saying that you’d run off for good this time,” Samantha Wallace said. “I figured you’d just gone hunting and would be back sooner or later.”
“I’m sorry about neglectin’ my chores, Ma. I know that when I do that, one of the other boys has to make up the work for me. I’ll pay them back, I swear.”
“Don’t waste your breath making promises you won’t keep, Breckinridge,” she told him with a sigh. She folded her arms across her chest and cocked her head a little to the side as she regarded the carcass. “That’s a good buck you brought home. With your appetite, you’ll probably want a whole haunch for yourself tonight.”
“The way you cook it up, I reckon I do,” he said, grinning at her.
Much of Samantha’s beauty had faded with time, as had the red of her hair she had passed on to her youngest son. Every so often, echoes of the way she must have been were visible to Breckinridge, but he had never really seen that in his life. The tragedy that had altered her had occurred before he was born.
She smiled now at the compliment to her cooking, but only for a second. Then she said, “The next time you run off from your chores, I’m taking a strap to you.”
“Yes, ma’am. Whatever you think is best.”
Breckinridge meant it, too. He would take a hiding from her without complaint. He had done so in the past and had no doubt that he would again.
Samantha went back into the cabin, and Breckinridge hung up the meat he had carved out of the buck. He went to the spring, drew a bucket of water, washed his hands and arms in it, then drew another and dumped it over his head. As he shook the water from his hair, he thought about how he planned to spend the evening.
He was going to call on Maureen Grantham, and even though he hadn’t told his father about the encounter with the Indians, he figured he would tell Maureen. He would tell her how bloodthirsty the renegades had been and how close they had come to skewering him with arrows or braining him with a tomahawk, and she would shudder and say how perfectly dreadful and terrifying that was, and then he would take her in his arms and comfort her and tell her not to worry about him, that no Chickasaw was ev
er going to get the best of him.
He might even kiss her if she let him. She had allowed it on a couple of occasions in the past, and he’d spent many a night since with a fever burning in his blood as he remembered the warm, soft sweetness of her lips.
Breckinridge was no innocent. The older girls on neighboring farms had started to notice him several years earlier when he grew larger than the boys their own age. One of them, Charity McFee by name, had lived up to that moniker and freely given him quite an education in the hayloft of her father’s barn. Since then Breck had engaged in a bit of slap and tickle with a few other girls in the area, none of whom were any better than they had to be.
Ah, Maureen, though, Maureen was different. Breckinridge had no desire whatsoever to settle down just yet, but he had made up his mind what the future held for him.
She didn’t know it yet, but one of these days, Maureen Grantham was going to be his wife.
Supper that evening was rather tense. Breckinridge’s brother Henry had taken over the plowing after Breck vanished, and he was angry and resentful about it. Breck put up with the scowls and the snide comments from his next-oldest brother as long as he could before saying sharply, “Just because I don’t want to be tied to a piece of ground for the rest of my life is no reason for you to lambaste me, Henry.”
Robert said, “A piece o’ ground like the one that’s given ye a home all these years, lad, is that what ye mean?”
Breckinridge flushed and looked down at the greasy bone with a few shreds of meat still clinging to it. He’d been gnawing the last bits off when he’d finally lost patience with Henry’s complaining.
“I know you and Ma have been happy with this life here,” he said quietly, which was unusual since his voice usually boomed no matter what he was saying. “But that don’t mean that being a farmer is the right thing for me.”
“What do you want to do, Breck?” his brother Edward asked. Edward was the most scholarly of the bunch, having attended the school in Knoxville for a good five years. “Run off to the woods and be a hunter and adventurer like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Natty Bumppo?”
Breckinridge’s pulse sped up a little as he nodded and said, “That sounds good to me. Who’s Natty Bumppo?”
“The hero of some books by Fenimore Cooper. I just read the latest one, The Pathfinder, if you’d like to borrow it.”
“I’m, uh, not much of one for readin’,” Breckinridge said. “But if he’s like Boone and Crockett, this Bumppo sounds like my sort of fella.”
“Crockett went off adventuring to Texas and died there, slaughtered by Santa Anna’s army at the Alamo. And Boone died an old man, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of his son’s house.”
“Only after he had plenty of excitement in his life,” Breckinridge countered. “And as for Crockett . . . well, dyin’ while you’re fightin’ for what’s right don’t sound like such a bad way to go.”
Samantha said, “Hush up all this bloodthirsty talk at the dinner table. Land’s sake, the way you men go on, you’d think you were in a tavern or something!”
“Yes, ma’am,” all five of the Wallace sons murmured automatically.
After supper, Breckinridge went up into the loft where he slept with his brothers and put on a clean homespun shirt. His brother Thomas caught him at it, reaching the top of the ladder leading to the loft just as Breck was pulling the shirt over his head, and said, “You’re going courting, aren’t you?”
“That’s none of your business,” Breckinridge said.
“Going to see Maureen Grantham?”
“What if I am?”
“Better not let Richard Aylesworth catch you there if you do.”
Anger boiled up inside Breckinridge. He clenched both hands into big, ham-like fists and declared, “I’m not afraid of Richard Aylesworth.”
“You should be, Breck. You should at least be worried about him. He has his eye on the Grantham girl, too.”
What Thomas said was true, although Breckinridge didn’t like to think about it. Richard Aylesworth was interested in Maureen, all right, and as the son of a well-to-do merchant in Knoxville, he had advantages that Breck didn’t, such as money and schooling. He was also several years older, in his early twenties, which might make him more impressive to a girl. His father had sent him to an academy all the way up in Philadelphia for a year, and it was rumored that he had fought a duel while he was there, giving him an air of mystery and danger.
Breckinridge was willing to wager, though, that Aylesworth had never battled four bloody-handed Chickasaw renegades to the death.
Thomas followed his brother outside and said, “Just be careful, Breck. I’ve known Dick Aylesworth all my life. I don’t like him, and I don’t trust him. Whenever he sets his sights on something, he feels like it ought to be his by natural right, and he gets mad when anybody interferes with that. I once saw him hand a beating to a man who’d bought a horse that he wanted.”
“All I’m going to do is sit with Maureen on the porch of her father’s house,” Breckinridge said. “I don’t see how anybody could get angry about that, even Richard Aylesworth.”
His declaration wasn’t strictly true. He planned to regale Maureen with his blood-and-thunder tale of battling the Chickasaw, then steal a kiss . . . but Thomas didn’t need to know about that. None of his family did.
“All right,” Thomas replied gloomily. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Breckinridge went to the barn and saddled Hector, the only one of the plow horses that was a halfway decent mount to ride. A faint fan of reddish-gold from the sunset lingered in the western sky as he headed for Knoxville, five miles away.
What did the sunset look like from the vast plains and the towering mountains he had heard about, the ones that lay hundreds of miles farther west across the continent? Such distances were almost beyond Breckinridge’s imagining. He had never been more than ten miles from the cabin in which he’d been born.
He felt a stirring inside whenever he thought about such things. Just like that buck had seemed to call to him from the hills earlier today, something was pulling on him from the other direction, from the sprawling wilderness that now made up so much of the American nation.
He remembered Edward talking about another story he’d read, a tale about one of those ancient Greeks or some such who had gone off to fight in a war and then taken the long way home, having all sorts of adventures along the way. One of those adventures involved a bunch of beautiful women on an island who sang songs so pretty that they were irresistible to any sailors who happened to pass by. That was sort of the way Breckinridge felt about the frontier, like it was calling to him so powerfully that sooner or later he would have to answer.
Of course, those sailors who listened to the song the women were singing usually came to a bad end, Breckinridge recollected. But anything in life that was worth doing had some risks that came along with it, he supposed.
With those thoughts occupying his mind, the ride to Knoxville passed quickly. Almost before he knew it, he was entering the outskirts of the settlement, and he soon came to the house of Alonzo Grantham, who owned a successful livery stable and wagon yard. Breckinridge reined in sharply when he spotted the lantern hanging from a hook and lighting up the porch of the Grantham house.
Maureen was already out there, but she wasn’t waiting for him to come calling. She was sitting there with someone else, and Breckinridge knew instantly who it was.
Richard Aylesworth!
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Notes
1 From MacCallister: The Eagles Legacy
MacCallister Kingdom Come Page 28
