People said Sevier and his men first gathered near Quaker Meadows up the Catawba River north of my churches. I was told they marched south to Gilbert Town and on to the pastures in the Spartan District of South Carolina known as the Cowpens. The Cowpens were open woods where cattle had been grazed for decades. It was known that people in the region pastured their livestock at the Cowpens and met there for hunting trips and even camp meetings.
The story was bragged all over the Piedmont that Sevier and his men made contact with Ferguson’s forces in early October of 1780, and cornered the loyalists on Kings Mountain near the North Carolina line. Surrounding the mountain, the patriots planned to starve out the British. There was no water source on the steep mountain. It was told how the Overmountain men had long rifles that shot farther and more accurately than the British Brown Bess muskets. The patriots picked off British officers and sergeants at great distances, one at a time.
One man who was there told me it was like shooting turkeys. “Every time I seed a Tory I just touched him off,” he said.
On October 7, 1780, Ferguson himself was killed and his men, those still alive, surrendered. People talked about the several fancy women in Ferguson’s camp when the British finally surrendered.
I KNEW THAT TO be an effective minister there in the woods of Carolina I had to be a part of the life of the communities. An evangelist might sweep through and hold a meeting and exhort and save souls, then move on, but a pastor had to live with his flock and share their lives and hardships. I ate with the members who invited me to their simple homes, and I attended infare celebrations after weddings and wakes after funerals. I played games with the children and sang at corn shuckings and quilting bees.
Most of my members were farmers. They grew corn in little patches recently cleared along creeks, and they grew flax and vegetables. Some already had fruit trees on their acres in the forest. Some were hunters and trappers, and some traded with the Cherokee Indians. Some peeled tan-bark and one was a blacksmith. Some were drovers and some made gristmills. A few were masons and many stilled spirits from corn.
The women worked even harder than the men there. They helped the men in the fields and in the woods. They sheared sheep and carded and spun the wool, dyed the yarn and wove cloth. They gathered herbs and roots in the forest, picked berries and dried fruit for winter. They sewed and quilted, made ale and apple butter. And of course they bore many children and raised them. They carried water from the springs for washing and made soap from fat and lye. Many women chopped with an ax same as the men did. Women hoed the corn and pulled weeds. I saw women driving oxen, though I rarely saw one driving a mule.
One day Curtis Satterfield, who was a carpenter, said they were raising a barn for his neighbor, Redmon, on Alphabet Creek Thursday next. “You’re welcome to come, Reverend,” Satterfield said with a wink, “if you’re not afraid of mashing your nice fingers.” It was not the first time I had been teased in the backcountry about my hands. Most men there had hands rough and calloused from work, joints swollen by weather and bruises, scarred and cracked. Most women had rough hands too. I heard the challenge in Satterfield’s voice and I told him I would attend the raising and bring my ax.
“And bring your songbook for the ladies,” Satterfield laughed.
It was a day in late summer, after the corn was laid by from hoeing and before the harvest began. The Redmon house was on a hill above Alphabet Creek. When I arrived there were already thirty people there, including women and children. It was the biggest gathering I’d seen since arriving in Carolina. Everyone was excited, as though a ceremony was to be celebrated.
Women had brought baskets of bread and cakes and pies. Mrs. Redmon was plucking chickens killed that morning for dinner. Children chased each other around the yard playing tag and hide-and-seek, and some bigger boys were damming a pond in the branch. But the men had arrived at daylight and had already dug out a level site for the barn, shoveling dirt out of the hill and raking it level, tamping it smooth. Several cheered me as I approached. They had already been working for hours. Curtis Satterfield wore his carpenter’s smock and he seemed to be in charge.
“Do you know what timber-frame building is?” Satterfield said. He said it was different from building a log cabin.
“I can learn,” I said and held the ax up to show I was prepared.
A great pile of logs had been cut and dragged into the yard on the side of the hill. Men with axes were hewing the logs into timbers eight or ten inches square. Others with hammers and chisels were cutting holes in the timbers already hewed.
“The timber frames will be mortised and tenoned together,” Satterfield said. “When a side is ready it will be raised into place.”
The wood they hewed was pine and poplar. The fresh pine smelled sweet as incense and the poplar smelled faintly bitter.
“Hey, parson, give us a hand here,” Brother Gibson from Zion Hill called to me. I knew I was going to be teased that day, and I was determined to take it in good humor. Gibson asked me to help lift a heavy timber to join it to a crossbeam. The protruding tenon on the beam had to be mated to the mortise on the heavy timber.
We all lifted on the count of three and there were grunts and groans as the pieces joined. But I held on to the timber too long, for as the other men let go my fingers were mashed as the heavy piece sank to the ground. I must have cried out and then stood up wringing my hand.
“It’s awfully sorry I am,” Brother Gibson said.
There was a little blood where my fingernails were bruised. Satterfield looked at my hand and said I should go to the house and Mrs. Redmon would bind it up.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” All eyes were on me, and I knew whatever I said and did would be reported around the countryside. I took up the ax and began to hew a timber.
By midmorning my hands were blistered and numb. My fingers would not let go of the ax handle when I tried to lay it down. But I was determined to persist and share in their labor, however much they teased me, however tired I got.
At dinner time I was happy to take a break and say grace before we ate. We sang a hymn, and then the women uncovered the feast they had assembled that morning. Young girls gave me things they had prepared themselves, pieces of pie and cake, puddings and jellies. Platters of chicken and ham loaded the table in the yard, along with bowls of boiled eggs and new potatoes. The men passed a jug around among themselves and I took a sip of the powerful corn spirits.
“I’ve never seen a warmer sense of community,” I said as I looked at the crowd eating together.
“It’s the August heat,” Satterfield said, and the men laughed.
My fingers were sore and my back was sore, but it thrilled me to see such fellowship among my flock.
“How do you like real work, parson?” Mr. Redmon said. There was laughter all around, and I was going to say something about the pleasure of working together, but suddenly all grew quiet and turned toward the woods beyond the clearing. I leaned to see what they were looking at.
A column of royal soldiers on horseback had emerged from the trees and was riding directly toward us. When the officer in front stopped his horse beside the well he called out, “You know perfectly well such meetings are forbidden. Gatherings of more than eight persons are not permitted, except for holy services.”
“This ain’t a meeting, sir,” Curtis Satterfield said. “We are just raising a barn.”
“What better ruse to conceal a meeting,” the officer said. “You will disband at once.”
Sighs and groans swept through the crowd.
“I am the pastor here,” I said, and stepped closer to the horseman. “We are raising a barn for Brother Redmon.”
“Are you defying me?” the lieutenant said.
“We are just carpenters and farmers,” Brother Satterfield said.
The officer pulled out his sword and pointed it at the gathering. “You will disperse,” he said.
“I am Rev. John Trethman,” I sai
d. “I have worked with these people today and sang and prayed, and I give you my word they are only here to raise a barn for Brother Redmon.”
I had taken off my collar and my coat that morning because I was sweating. The officer stared at me as though I was a tramp. “You will disband,” he shouted again.
As the crowd backed away muttering the lieutenant dismounted and walked to the loaded table. The other soldiers dismounted also and helped themselves to the chicken and ham, the pies and puddings.
“This is an outrage,” I said to the officer. “You have no right.”
“I have every right, padre,” the lieutenant said. “It is the duty of every loyal citizen to quarter and board the king’s soldiers.”
“What is your name?” I said.
“You don’t need to know my name,” the lieutenant said. “But I know yours. I will have my eye on you, John Trethman. Be warned, I have my eye on you.”
As the soldiers ate the feast and drank from the jug, the members of the congregation dispersed. They took their tools and children, their baskets and horses, and slipped away into the forest.
• • •
I HAD SWORN I would have no part in the war, and I had avoided any word or deed that would suggest I was loyal to one side or the other. My supervisor had said I must be a messenger of love and peace. It was hard to remain calm and confident when houses burned nearby and farms were looted. Neighbors were hanged, as bands on both sides roved the country accusing and whipping, torturing and killing. They shaved women’s heads and scraped their tongues with sharp knives. They raped young girls and then strangled them and left their bodies in swamps. Some bands seemed to be plain marauders and criminals, using the war as an excuse to rob and rape and go on rampage.
Because I was literate and from Virginia, many local patriots assumed I was loyal to the Crown. Because I read from the Book of Common Prayer and spoke proper English, I was suspect to some of the rebels. I was often threatened and had a church burned at Solomon’s Branch. I was told repeatedly I should carry a pistol or a sword, but I knew it was far more dangerous to go armed. If my only weapons were my songbook and prayer book, it was easier to persuade a foe I was harmless, a mere parson and hymnodist.
But I believed the loyalists and royal troops were far more dangerous to me. The reason was I never made any effort to support the Crown. To royal troops and officials my very neutrality was an act of treason. In their view there could be no such thing as neutrality. You either supported the king, or you were his enemy.
A number of times while walking to my churches I’d been stopped and threatened by soldiers wearing the red uniform. One day a company on horseback came to the little cabin Curtis Satterfield had helped me build on Pine Knot Branch. The officer dismounted and strode to my door, sword in hand.
“And who might you be?” he said, and tapped me on the chest with his sword. I was not wearing my collar, only my linen shirt. I had been splitting firewood. I told him I was John Trethman, psalmodist and minister.
“I’m Lieutenant Withnail,” the officer said. “And I’m here to stamp out sedition in these wretched hills.”
I told the lieutenant I was a simple parson and singer of hymns.
“What better guise for a spy or courier than a circuit rider,” the lieutenant said.
I saw the impossibility of proving my innocence by argument. I told the officer I would be happy to pray with him or sing for him. I tried to sound plain and simple. He placed the tip of his sword against my throat and said, “You may be as fond as you seem, but then again you may be playing a ruse.”
I stood as still and calm as I could with the blade at my throat.
“If I find you are a messenger or spy I will return and castrate you,” Lieutenant Withnail said. He drew his sword away and swung it, slashing the front of my trousers. When I looked down I saw the cloth had fallen away revealing my private parts. I covered myself with my hands as the lieutenant mounted his horse. As I watched them ride away I thought how sharp his sword must have been, and how close it had come to my person.
WHEN I WAS TEMPTED to feel sorry for myself and pity myself, because of the violent and uncertain times in which I lived, I often thought of Archbishop Cranmer, founder of the Church of England and author of the Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer had lived in the reign of Henry VIII and taken part in the Reformation. When I needed a hero I thought of Cranmer.
Thomas Cranmer was born in 1489 and became a brilliant student at Cambridge. But when he married secretly and was found out he lost his fellowship. After his young wife died in childbirth he was reinstated by his college. I was thrilled to read that one of Cranmer’s favorite ideas was that Rome should not have so much control over the English church. He wrote a paper arguing that nothing in the New Testament gave the pope such authority over all churches.
When Henry VIII decided he wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, and the pope would not grant him a divorce, the king became very interested in the idea of an independent English church. Hearing about the young scholar at Cambridge, he brought Cranmer to court. Cranmer impressed the king so much that in a short time he was promoted from a mere deacon to be archbishop of Canterbury.
It moved me that Cranmer was a great poet as well as minister. He translated the services of the church and the calendar into English and added words of his own to make the Book of Common Prayer. But like Peter, that other founder of a church, Cranmer was also very human. Sent to Germany, he met the theologian Andreas Osiander in Nuremburg. And Osiander had a beautiful niece named Margaret whom Cranmer married secretly and brought back to England.
In the terrible times of Henry VIII and Edward and Mary Tudor, Cranmer worked and argued, confronted, and survived, until Bloody Mary demanded he return the English church to Rome. I had wept when I read in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs how when he refused he was tortured. An old man by then, he was eventually forced to recant his faith.
But soon as he regained his health a little he denied his recantation. No threats or tortures could make him budge. Condemned to burn at the stake in Oxford, he held his right hand in the flames, “the hand that hath offended,” until it burned, and then he stepped into the center of the fire.
I admired Cranmer for his humanness, his fallibility, and the way he could rise above his weaknesses. If there was hope for me it was that I might rise above my failures and my weaknesses. For I too had the human stink and human frailty, even as I aspired to carry peace and hope to the broken world.
THREE
IT WAS A PITIFUL SIGHT, the three bodies hanging from an oak tree in the light of their burning house. You couldn’t have dreamed anything more awful. The fire lit up the woods all around, like the door to hell had been opened and the world was burned by eternal torment. I smelled burning meat too but didn’t know if it was stock in the burning barn or meat in the smokehouse. Smoke drifted across the clearing, making everything hard to see.
I’d never understood how men could hate each other and hurt each other so badly over politics.
“These are terrible times,” I said.
“We must cut the bodies down,” John Trethman said. I looked up at the oak limb and saw it was too tall to reach unless you were on a horse, and maybe not even then.
“We need a horse,” I said.
“I’m afraid I’m a circuit rider that travels on shank’s mare,” the preacher said.
We looked around for a ladder or pole to climb on. Maybe there was a table we could drag under the bodies to reach the ropes. Everything in the house was burning up, and I didn’t see anything to stand on in the yard. Preacher Trethman looked at the tree and he looked at me. “You’ll have to stand on my shoulders,” he said.
I’d not climbed trees since I was a girl. I was afraid if I climbed onto his shoulders he might feel my breasts or my thighs and see I was not a boy.
“Could we leave them till morning?” I said.
“These are the Fielders,” Preacher Trethman sa
id. “It’s not Christian to leave them hanging here like common criminals to be a spectacle. The crows will come and peck their faces.”
He knelt down beneath the tree and I stepped up on his shoulders. I was trembling and weak and my knees shook. I put my hands on the oak and John stood up. He was a tall man and I was just able to reach the big limb the ropes were tied to.
“Here,” John said, and pulled a knife from his pocket and handed it to me. I nearly fell when I reached for the knife. I put the blade between my teeth, for I needed both hands to climb out the limb.
I was shaky and tired. But you don’t know what you can do till you have to do it. More than anything, I didn’t want the preacher to know I was a girl. For if he knew that, he’d find out I’d killed Mr. Griffin and that Mr. Griffin had shamed me. For some reason the most important thing in the world at that moment seemed to be climbing that limb and cutting down the bodies so he wouldn’t know I’d been shamed.
The hardest thing was to pull myself up far enough to wrap my legs around the limb. My arms were weak and I strained till I thought my eyes would pop out. I tried to hook my legs over the limb twice and slipped back, but finally made it. Hand over hand, I cooned out the limb, not looking down. When I got to the boy’s body I held on to the limb with my left hand and cut through the rope with the right. I had to saw the knife back and forth. When I got most of the way through, the last fibers tore and the boy hit the ground like a sack of corn.
I crawled out farther and cut the second rope. But the limb bounced and the rope swayed and it took me even longer to cut the woman down. But I finally made it and inched out to the last rope. My arms trembled so badly I could hardly hold on.
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