by Vicky Saari
“I’m glad we stayed, too. I never dreamed you’d build me such a fine home. I wuz perfectly happy in the cabin,” she confessed.
“Yeah, but it didn’t have a round room,” Caleb reminded her. “That’s all you ever talked about. Your grandma and that round room!”
Suddenly shy and unsure of herself, Jessie picked at her nightdress as she told her husband how she often fancied talking with her grandmother when she was working in her herb room. Caleb smiled tenderly at the woman beside him and wondered how long it had been since he had last kissed her.
*****
Hogarth was waiting for his workers, and when they didn’t show, he figured it must be a weekend. This always struck him as funny. The old folks always looked upon Sunday as a day of rest, but in those days, Saturday was just another workday. Of course, they didn’t have electricity or boxes with pictures that moved and talked. They had an icehouse not an icebox or a refrigerator. They didn’t have cars and trucks in those days, either. He wondered about his modern family. They should be coming soon.
Chapter 23
Southern Indiana in the fall of 1832 produced a spectacular array of woodland colors. So it was against clear blue skies that the trees produced a rainbow effect, and Caleb’s worries about who would help him harvest his corn and wheat proved unfounded. When word got around that a threshing and a cornhusking were about to take place, the neighbors showed up in force. The women supplied the food, and the men gathered in the fields in early September to cut the wheat and bundle the sheaves. Later, the women and children took turns pounding the sheaves on rocks to remove the grain from the stalks. All of Sethsburg was included in the festivities, including Hiram Ross, the Hamburgs, and the Turners. What began as a working day soon turned into a contest where the women on the sidelines cheered the men on as they raced through the field, determined to have it completed before dusk. Seth and Jed both used their wagons to haul the sheaves to the barn, where the women and children were gathered.
Before the day was over, it was agreed that the same event would take place the next week at the Hodges and would be repeated at the Hogarths when the corn was ready to bring in provided that it didn’t rain that week. Even the children kept a watchful eye on the weather, and many persimmon seeds were opened to see if there was a fork, a knife, or a spoon inside. Old timers, even then, swore by persimmon predictions, knowing that a fork assured them a mild winter, a knife would bring cutting cold, while a spoon warned that a lot of snow could be expected. Others relied more upon the wooly caterpillars, but few could agree whether a wide band on the caterpillars meant a mild winter or a cold one. As for the kids in Lucy’s school, they took both predictions into consideration. By the end of October, most of the harvests were completed, except for the potatoes. Caleb, using the special digging fork that Zeke had made him, did most of the digging while Jessie and Mittens followed behind him picking up potatoes and carrying them to the cabin, where they were laid out to dry away from the sun. Later, they would be carried to the root cellar and stored in baskets for the winter.
The root cellar was really a small, underground room hollowed out of a hillside and lined with rocks and timbers. Shelves were built to keep the foodstuffs away from the earth to prevent them from spoiling. By being underground, the room would stay cool in summer and warm enough in winter to keep things from freezing. Zeke and Jed had helped Caleb build their cellar soon after the house was built. It wasn’t until much later when Zeke brought the pigs home that they had need for a smokehouse. Butchering was a major job, which also involved a lot of people. Usually, Jed and Sarah and Zeke and Lucy came to help with the work, which took place in December or January while it was cold outside. It wasn’t a pleasant job. The men did most of the dirty work, and the kids were kept well away from the most gruesome tasks. More often than not, Lucy and Sarah took the kids home until most of the work was done, leaving Mittens behind with her mom to render the fat into lard and make the sausage. Some of the smaller portions were packed in barrels of salt. The larger chunks of meat were carried into the smokehouse and hung on hooks (made by Zeke) from the ceiling over a fire built from hickory wood. While the meat was “cured,” the fire had to be tended constantly for several days lest the fire went out or, worse, a chunk of meat fell into the fire and set fire to the smokehouse itself. When the process was complete, the women wrapped the meat tightly in freshly laundered muslin cloths and stored it on hooks in the root cellar.
One event that occurred in Sethsburg every week, come rain or shine, was church on Sundays. Each week, Brother Pritchett conducted the services. His sermons were short and often included asking for speakers from the congregation. Once a month, the circuit-riding preacher would come through and preach a real sermon, which could last a couple of hours. The older folks didn’t seem to mind, but the children had a tendency to get antsy. Sarah and Jed took turns carrying one child and then the other outside during the services. One Sunday, Lucy came up with the idea of creating a Sunday school for the children. While the preacher was at work, she took the kids outside, where she would tell stories from the Bible, sing songs, and organize games for them. As long as the weather was good, this plan worked out quite well, and the young mothers sure appreciated the rest.
Seth was the first to come up with the idea of adding a “classroom” onto the church, which was still used as a school during the week. However, several years passed before the plan could be put into action. Meanwhile, it was customary when the preacher came to town that one of the families of the church should provide him with food and lodging. Ever since Seth brought the first preacher to Sethsburg, it had also become the custom to turn the event into another all-day dinner. This plan had worked quite well until the “fever” hit, and troubles began. Since then, this practice had fallen by the wayside. Caleb was the first to bring up the idea the week before the “preacher” was due. He and Jessie were scheduled to be hosts for the circuit rider, and he thought it was a tradition that they should revive. Later, he claimed it was spring fever that caused him to speak up. The truth was, he’d enjoyed the harvest dinners and the camaraderie of friends old and new, and welcomed the chance to invite them again. Brother Pritchett agreed. The wives all looked at one another and rolled their eyes, but no one disagreed.
The only real disruption to the routine of everyday life that had settled over Sethsburg was in the fall of 1832 with the birth of Miss Minnie Bascom. Her arrival had been no surprise. Indeed, her grandmother, Martha Hodges, had been busy for weeks spinning, weaving, and creating a layette for her first grandchild. If only she could have known if the child would be a boy or a girl, it would have made her life simpler. One of the cornhuskings in late October had turned into a baby shower, and all the neighbors brought gifts to the dinner at the Hogarths’. Lucy had made a special quilt for her sister’s baby. Job even spent money from the sale of his coal on a real silver spoon for his brother’s child. He knew it was something his mother would have wanted her first grandchild to have. Likewise, Jed surprised them with a new cradle that Sarah and Jessie had convinced the men to create. Indeed, Jed, Caleb, Brad, Little Jed, and Abner had all participated in its creation so that no one person could claim all the credit. Lucinda and John were both overwhelmed by the outpouring of love that had surrounded them, and it was then that they announced that whether the child was a girl or a boy, it would be named for one of John’s parents.
It was late at night in early December when John woke Mattie and sent her across the road to rouse Zeke and ask him to get his ma. The news spread quickly, and by daylight the Hodges and the Hogarths were congregated in the dining room of the inn. The men did their duty by keeping the new father duly occupied while the women alternated between the kitchen and the back bedroom, where Cindy struggled with her labors. Little Minnie announced her arrival in the new world with a great wail, and the men immediately began slapping John on the back while they awaited the news. Was it a Minnie or a
n Opal? For young Jessie, this was the first birth she had participated in, and she listened to her mother as she explained what was occurring and watched each step along the way. Martha, however, was too nervous to be of any real help, and more than once Jessie was tempted to send her from the room. Fortunately, Sarah was wise enough to intercede and draw Martha’s attention away from the baby and encourage her to focus on keeping her daughter calm.
Babies were nothing new to little Mattie. She’d watched her mom give birth to six in their own home, and these memories triggered her own sad longings to see her mother again. She had to fight to keep the tears at bay. If only there had been something she could have done to help her ma then, maybe none of the bad things would have happened. While the grown-up women were busy with Cindy and the new baby, Mattie busied herself in the kitchen keeping the fire going under the water kettle and working hard to put her memories at rest. She looked for her brother, Todd, but he had sought refuge in the stable with the horses.
Little Minnie Bascom was not the only newcomer to Sethsburg in 1832. Less than a week later, Johann Hamburg came into the world but with much less fanfare. Because of her delicate condition, Greta was forced to stay off her feet for nearly a month, and Mattie became her “mother’s helper” and Abigail moved in with the Turners. Greta enjoyed having the older girl with her and did much to make her stay pleasant. Mattie liked Cindy and John and felt more like a younger sister than a hired girl. But Greta’s warm, motherly nature drew the girl in, and she came to feel like a daughter and big sister in the Hamburg home.
Christmas had never been a big event on the frontier except for its religious significance. Many families had among their traditions a special dinner with small gifts for one another. Most of those gifts had been small handmade tokens of affections. The Hamburgs had brought with them some unique traditions from the old country. They introduced the children to the legend of Kris Kringle, and Hans brought in a small cedar tree, which he and Greta decorated with small handmade ornaments. Many of these Greta had brought with her all the way from Germany. When Mattie told the other children at school about these fabulous decorations, Lucy arranged a special field trip for her class to the Hamburgs’ house, where Hans and Greta both regaled the children with stories of their childhood in Bavaria. The children had never heard of using skis on snow or skating on ice in the winter, largely because the snows in southern Indiana were never that deep, and there was so little water in the creeks in winter that there was even less ice. What impressed the children and the adults most were the beautiful hand-embroidered clothes she had made for her new baby with special threads she had brought with her from the old country. As a surprise for the children, she gave them each a small ribbon, with their names embroidered on them, which they could use to mark their places in their books. As they left to go back to the school, she had another gift and asked Mattie to pass them around. These were delicate cookies shaped like angels, stars, and trees with frosting on top—a delicacy that none of the children had ever seen or tasted before. No one was prouder that day than Mattie, for Greta had let her cut the cookies for baking and then spread the frosting on them when they had cooled.
As spring began to unveil itself in 1833, Caleb, with help from Little Jed, went about tapping maple trees, while Jessie and Mittens were kept busy in the old cabin overseeing the cooking of the syrup. That spring was especially important to Caleb for yet another reason. The idea had come from Moses, and Caleb had followed through with it by setting aside a half acre or so of his cornfield to plant fruit trees and create his own orchard. For several weeks in the fall, he and Little Jed had gone on hunting expeditions, as they called them, to search for saplings they could transplant to their own orchard. They had also dug up and transplanted wild raspberries, blackberries, and gooseberries, and were trying to get them started. Little Jed’s involvement in the project came about as the result of his staying with his grandfather so much during the summer after the new baby was born and his dad and grandma had been so sick. His aunt Jessie was so busy helping his mom and looking after both houses that it only seemed natural that he should follow his grandpa about in the fields. While Moses was there, he had been good-natured and had encouraged the boy. After Moses left, Caleb came to recognize that having Little Jed underfoot filled not only the void left by Moses’s departure, but in many ways the young boy filled another void that Caleb had wrestled with for a long time. The one created when both of his sons seemed to have outgrown him and made new lives for themselves.
He was proud of both of his sons. Jed was a fine furniture builder, and Zeke had become a master blacksmith, but the dream he had when coming west—that of creating a homestead that he could share with his sons and their families as they all grew older, seemed to wither away. Somehow real life just doesn’t work out the way we dream, he’d decided. With Little Jed underfoot, asking a thousand questions, for which he didn’t always have answers, he was beginning to think maybe his dream was not quite out of reach. This seemed to have renewed his own interest in improving his land and making it meaningful. Jessie couldn’t help but notice the renewed spring in Caleb’s step as she watched him and little Jed from her window. What warmed her heart most was watching how the lad walked behind his grandpa and imitated the older man’s movements.
*****
“It looks like Caleb is about to get his wish.” Jessie spoke reverently to no one in particular and the old house in general. Hogarth simply smiled and quietly agreed.
Chapter 24
Little Jed finished his first year of school in the spring of 1834. Each day he had hurried home to show off his new skills in reading, writing, and even knew his numbers up to a hundred. Abner was getting more and more feeble and less able to work much, but he always had time to listen to Little Jed talk about his day. Little Jed proved to be a valuable teacher for, by the end of the school year, he had even taught Abner how to write his own name. “Now don’t you go tellin’ anybody about this,” he cautioned the boy. “This is our little secret.”
Little Jed snickered slyly at the idea of keeping a grown-up’s secret, but he made a promise that he would never reveal to anyone what most of the grown-ups already knew. Abner was like many men of his age; he couldn’t even write his own name.
Of course, Abner’s secret wasn’t the only one Little Jed was used to keeping. His big brother Brad and his aunt Jessie had their share of secrets, and both had threatened him with bodily harm if he were to forget himself and tell about their kissing when they were supposed to be walking him home or watching the pigs. He wasn’t sure what all of that stuff was about, and the truth was, he didn’t much care. He thought it was all kinds of silly.
On this particular day, Little Jed wasn’t thinking a whole lot about anything. His mom had sent him to the store in Sethsburg to take a note to Mrs. Hodges. Mrs. Hodges gave him a sarsaparilla candy, which he sat and ate on the front steps of the store while she got his ma’s goods together. If anything, he was more interested in the birds in the trees than in what was going on about him. Perhaps that was why it was such a surprise when two men on horseback spoke to him. “Kid! You one of them darkie lovers that live in this town?” the one man sneered.
Little Jed choked on his candy, and it took him a couple of minutes to catch his breath. Meanwhile, Martha Hodges overheard the boy’s coughing and had looked out the window to see what the problem was. “Jed, I got your ma’s order ready,” she interrupted the men, who turned their attention from the boy to the woman standing in the doorway.
Little Jed rose slowly and backed up the steps to where Martha could grab hold of his sleeve and pull him inside with her. She then stepped forward, and, with her other hand, she raised the pistol that Seth kept loaded behind the counter. “Now if you men have store business to take care of, I’ll take care of it. If not, then you just get on down the road.” She cocked the hammer on the flintlock pistol and aimed it at the bigger of the two me
n.
“Awe, now looky here. We got us a real darkie lover. Can’t you see by the way she’s holdin’ that gun?” sneered the dirtier-looking man. “Are you the one what called the sheriff on us the last time we wuz here?”
As Little Jed listened to the two men, he carefully slipped out the back door of the living area and ran over to the backdoor of the inn and ran inside. “They’s two men over at the store givin’ Miss Hodges a bad time,” he blurted out to Jonathan, who was busy moping the dining room floor. Jonathan quickly grabbed his own pistol from behind the desk and slipped quietly across the street to Zeke’s place.
At the store, the men had climbed down from their horses, and as soon as the first one stepped onto the bottom step, Martha pulled the trigger, and the man grabbed his leg and fell. Unfortunately, there was no time to reload her flintlock pistol, so she threw it at the second man and slammed the door. She was trying get it bolted when the other man began pushing against it. “Ma’am, we just want our darkie, the one your men cheated us out of and we aims to find him, even if we have to kill you to get him!”
The door gave way with an explosive sound, and Martha was forced onto her back. The slave hunter fell on top of her, with blood flying in all directions. At the foot of the steps, the injured hunter turned to see a gnarled old man hobbling toward the store with an old long rifle swinging from his arm. The injured man looked at his dying brother half in and half out of the doorway, raised his own musket, and shot the old man just feet from where he lay. He was about to rise to his feet and mount his horse when he was hit from behind by something wild, kicking, scratching and yelling, “You killed Abner! You killed Abner!”
In the confusion, Jonathan pulled the boy off the man, and Zeke immediately jerked the injured man to his feet, which only aggravated the bleeding in his thigh. Within minutes, the man was lying unconscious at their feet. Jonathan then hurried into the store to check on Martha, who was still struggling to get out from under the dead man.
