Brave Enemies

by Robert Morgan

  “I’m going to fall,” I yelled.

  “You’re almost through,” the preacher called back.

  The rope swayed when I cut at it, as if the knife had gotten dull. I sawed at the rope and hacked at the twisted strands. I was so tired my arms felt frozen. The world was upside down and backward, and I tried to look only at the rope. The knife felt like it had no edge or that I was trying to cut with the wrong side. I stopped and just hung there. The glare from the burning house was hot on my face

  “Just a little more,” the preacher shouted.

  I pulled all the strength from my toes and from deep in my guts. Smoke drifted in my eyes and burned my nose. I strained so hard tears came to my eyes. I rubbed the knife back and forth on the strings of the rope and sweat and tears made everything blur. With a crackle the rope gave way and the man hit the ground with a thud.

  But as I put the knife in my teeth and reached for the limb with my right hand, my left gave way. I guess I had a cramp in my hand and couldn’t grip any longer. My fingers slid off the bark and I fell backward. But my legs were still locked around the big limb. There I was, hanging upside down with the knife in my teeth. I let the knife go so I could holler out, and then my legs lost their grip on the limb and I hit the ground with a smack.

  But what I hit was softer than the ground. It was the body of the man that had just fallen. My head hit his head with a bump, and there I was, face to face with his eyes bulging out and blood on his mouth and the rope around his neck. My lips touched his cold bloody lips and I jerked away.

  I rolled aside and Reverend Trethman helped me to my feet. I was nearly too dizzy to stand. I bent over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath.

  “They must be given a Christian burial,” John said. “We will do it tomorrow.”

  The only building on the place that wasn’t burning was the spring-house, and in the springhouse we found some old tow sacks. We took all the sacks and covered the bodies on the ground. And we carried rocks and poles and laid them on the sacks to hold them down. By then the fires were burning lower, but there was still plenty of light to see by.

  THE TRUTH IS I WAS so tired I don’t remember much of the walk to the cabin on Pine Knot Branch. It must not have been that far, but I stumbled in a daze, numb from all the effort and all the terrible things that had happened. I felt I was dreaming a long nightmare as I stumbled along behind John Trethman.

  When we got to the cabin and stepped inside I saw it was just one room with a fireplace and a cot in one corner. There was a table opposite the bed all covered with books and papers. But it was a cabin with a loft. John held the lantern up and I saw the shelf built over one-half of the cabin. There were logs reaching out from the wall in a kind of ladder going up to the loft.

  “You can sleep up there,” John said. He gave me a blanket, a thin gray blanket, and I pulled myself up the logs to the loft. On the puncheons up there lay a tick stuffed with leaves or corn shucks. There was no fire in the fireplace below and the cabin was cold. I took off Mr. Griffin’s coat and wrapped it over me, and I pulled the blanket over that. The bed was thin and rumpled and had lumps in it, but that didn’t make any difference. I heard John say good night below, or maybe I dreamed it.

  When I woke in the morning it took a minute to figure out where I was. And then I remembered that I was supposed to be a boy named Joseph Summers, and a pain cut through the center of my bones.

  I’d always wondered what it was like to be a boy. Since I was an only child, I’d just seen boys at church and at school. We didn’t have any close neighbors, but I’d played with boys while Mama was at quilting bees and spinning bees. Sometimes I wanted to be like a boy and climb trees and catch rabbits and possums. But boys were dirty. They caught toads and carried them in their pockets, and they didn’t clean their fingernails. They wiped snot on their sleeves or the back of their hands. Boys could piss while standing up and they laughed when they farted.

  I always wondered what it was like to have a thing hanging between your legs. I’d seen the thing on horses and on dogs. I wondered how it felt to have something sticking out there. I wondered how it felt to stick it in somebody. I shuddered and heard John Trethman stirring below. I looked over the edge of the loft and saw he’d started a fire in the fireplace. The cabin began to smell like smoke and burning cobs.

  “Are you awake, Joseph?” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. But when I stirred I felt the soreness and stiffness in my arms and legs. My groin was sore and my back was sore. In three days my body had taken a lot of punishment.

  “Fetch me some water for coffee and I’ll make us some hoecakes,” the preacher said.

  I threw the blanket aside and ran my fingers through my short hair and climbed down the logs to the puncheon floor. I put my shoes on and took the bucket he handed me.

  “The spring’s behind the cabin,” he said.

  There was frost on the ground outside. The sun was a red spot through the trees. I relieved myself in the woods and then crunched over grass to the spring. When I returned with the bucket of water the cabin was warmer.

  “Here, let me do that,” I said to John, and took the mixing bowl from his hands.

  “Can you cook, Joseph?” he said.

  “I can make hoecakes,” I said.

  He had measured out the cornmeal and shaken salt from the salt gourd into the bowl. He handed me a gourd of soda and I sprinkled some of that in too.

  “Where did you learn to cook, boy?” he said as he poured water into the pot for coffee.

  “On hunting trips to the mountains,” I said.

  When the coffee was ready and the hoecakes were ready, John cleared some of the papers from the little table and we ate there. The hoecakes were good and John got a jug of syrup to pour on the cakes. The steaming coffee warmed me.

  “Now I must preach a funeral,” John said, “much as I dread to.”

  I kept eating and didn’t answer.

  “I’m a song leader and a prayer leader,” John said. “I like services of praise and prayer. I like testimonials and hymns.”

  “Could a funeral be a testimonial?” I said. I thought of the testimonies of the night before.

  “It ought to be,” John said. “It ought to be a celebration. But we’re too human for that. We mourn our loss. We look at the dead body, and we exhort, as Reverend Wesley tells us we must. We warn and we scold.”

  I was surprised that Preacher Trethman was telling me how he felt. I’d never heard a preacher talk that way before. I poured syrup on another hoecake and ate it.

  “The funeral of somebody murdered is sad,” he said. “There is no moral, except that life is short and evil afoot in the land. In these desperate times a preacher can be hanged for what he says in the pulpit. People are all torn apart and confused, and hatred and revenge rule the land.”

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say, for what he said was true. John Trethman was a handsome and eloquent man, but he was a worried man. Though he acted calm and spoke calmly, I could tell he was troubled. The death of the Fielders and the prospect of the funeral had shaken him more than I’d thought at first.

  “It’s easier to preach the funeral of those you don’t know well,” John said. “But when they are victims of murder, what is there to say, but fear God and love thy neighbor. The world is harsh and getting sadder.”

  He was so worried I wanted to reach out and touch his hand. I saw he was a good man and a grieved man. He was different from Mr. Griffin, and he was different from Mr. Pritchard. I wished I could think of some way to comfort him. He had welcomed me to the little church and he had comforted me. I couldn’t think of anything to say to make him feel better. I wanted to touch his hand, but I didn’t.

  “We have work to do,” he said.

  I swept the crumbs off the table into my hand and tossed them into the fire. I rinsed out the cups and threw the water out the door. As the sun rose over the trees, the frost started melting on the grass.

&n
bsp; That morning we walked from house to house in the country west of the river to tell what had happened to the Fielders. Some already knew, and maybe some helped kill them. John asked the carpenter named Satterfield to make coffins out of pine wood, and he asked somebody with a horse and wagon to bring the bodies to the church.

  “There’s something we’ll have to do ourselves,” John said as we approached the little church on the hill. The log building looked different in daytime. It appeared to have shrunk in sunlight. The steeple was the size of a chicken coop with a pointed top and I saw there were graves on the knoll out beyond the church.

  “We will have to dig the graves,” John said.

  A spade and a pick leaned in the corner at the back of the church. John took the pick and handed me the spade, and we walked out to a high place above the other graves. From there you could see the creek through a break in the yellow hickory trees.

  John took off his coat and began loosening the ground with the pick. I shoveled aside the sod he’d broken loose and dug down under the top-soil into the red clay. We dug three holes by moving back and forth between them. He loosened the hard clay and rocks in one and moved on to another while I shoveled out the clods.

  “Why are graves always on high ground?” I said.

  “Maybe the dead can see farther and clearer than the living,” John said. “And their ground is set aside forever and shouldn’t take up good farmland.”

  I soon had blisters on my hands. By the time we got the holes dug my hands were sore as my back.

  WHEN HE PREACHED the funeral, John talked so quietly I had to strain to hear what he said. I sat on the back row as I had the night before. The three coffins lay in the floor at the front of the church. There was hardly room for them, for the little building was full. Word had gotten around and it appeared people had come for miles. I hoped nobody from across the river was there.

  “A sad occasion brings us together here,” John said. “It is an ugly time, a time that tries faith and tries hope. It is a time of testing. I didn’t know the Fielders well, but I know they were people just like us. They worked the land and raised their cattle and sheep. And they were raising their son. We know they have gone to a better place, away from the trials and tribulations of this valley.”

  John paused and looked out over the gathering in the little church. “But what can we learn from their deaths?” he finally said. “What is the lesson, my friends, of these lives cut short?”

  John paused again, as if he could hardly go on. And then he opened his black book, the one he carried in his coat pocket, and he read, “‘In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succor, but of thee O Lord?’ The death of the Fielders can teach us that death is always with us, that death comes like a thief in the night in such an hour as ye think not. And the death of the Fielders teaches us that we must love one another. That is the new commandment.”

  In all the times I’d gone to church as a girl, I’d never paid much attention to the sermons. They all sounded alike. They were about heaven and hell and how awful people were. But when John talked, everything he said made sense. Everything he said seemed to come from the heart. When he spoke it was like he was speaking to me, and answering questions I’d thought about.

  “Even the oldest among us live only a few years,” John said. “Young Phillip’s life was still at its beginning. My prayer is that he knew the joys of childhood, that he ran and played and swam in the creek, and that he gave his mother and father joy.”

  John looked out over the congregation in the dim light. He was so tall he almost touched the beams of the roof. I’d never seen a man so pretty, a man whose words meant so much. What he said seemed to be what I wanted to hear, what I needed to hear. His words comforted me like nothing else had.

  John paused again and gazed out over the congregation. He looked right at me on the back row. Then he bowed his head and closed his eyes and prayed.

  “Death is not the end but the beginning,” he said. “Death is the doorway to the long ages and the ageless days. Guide us through the dangers. Help us to see the sunlight and the far mountains, and the welcome path ahead.”

  When the service was over we carried the coffins out to the graveyard on the knoll. We had to make three trips, for it took six to carry each coffin. A breeze rattled the leaves on the oak trees above the graves, and purple-colored leaves soared out across the sky. As we assembled beside the holes and got ready to sing, a man on horseback rode out of the woods. He rode right up to the graves, and he had a handkerchief tied over his nose.

  People stepped back a little from the graves to give the horseman room. And they stepped back a little from John. Some of the men had brought guns, but the rifle guns were leaning in the corner in the back of the church.

  The rider didn’t say anything for a minute. He just looked at the graves, and he looked at the little congregation. I wondered if he was there to rob us, or was he there to claim the bodies.

  “You are welcome to join us, friend,” John said finally.

  “Reverend Trethman,” the horseman hollered. “Them that give comfort to the Tories and aid the Tories will be treated the same as traitors. Don’t matter what kind of collar they wear.”

  The man turned his horse and rode away. We watched the horse and rider disappear into the woods as if we had been slapped in the face. All the good feeling of the sermon was smashed by his hateful voice. John watched the masked man ride away, and I thought he was going to call after him. But he never did. Instead, he said we would sing “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.”

  It was a song of dignity and peacefulness. It was the perfect answer to the threat and anger of the man’s warning. A song brought people together in harmony. It’s hard to be angry while you’re singing. After the hymn John prayed again, and then we filled in the graves.

  As the crowd was breaking up Mr. Satterfield told John he was afraid for him. “You go unarmed from church to church in these fearful times,” he said.

  But John said it would not help him to be armed. For though he carried a weapon he might still be ambushed or waylaid. “My message is my only armor. A weapon would only invite violence,” he said.

  “You must at least not travel by night,” Mr. Satterfield said.

  “Brother Satterfield, if the devil would find me he will find me,” John said.

  By the time the graves were filled it was afternoon. John and I were left to finish the job ourselves. I had blisters on my hands, so I wrapped pieces of a sack around my right palm as I shoveled the clods into the last hole and heaped the turf in a mound. John put a cross made of hickory sticks on each grave.

  “Why were the Fielders killed?” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” John said. “The rumor was they gave a horse to the redcoats and let them bivouac on their property. They may have given corn or hams to the royal soldiers.”

  “And for that they were hanged?”

  “As scores of others have been,” John said. “Many have been killed for less.”

  “And now they are gone,” I said.

  “Perhaps a stonecutter will one day makes stones for these graves,” John said.

  We placed the pick and spade back in the corner of the log church. I knew it was time for me to announce I was moving on. It was time for Reverend Trethman to dismiss me and go on to the next church on his circuit.

  “Brother Joseph, what are your plans?” he said as he washed his hands in the branch and dried them on his coat. I washed my hands and dried them on Mr. Griffin’s coat.

  “I’ve thought about going to the mountains,” I said, and paused. I couldn’t tell the preacher what had happened to me. I couldn’t tell him that I’d murdered Mr. Griffin.

  “Do you have family there?” John said. “Do you have business farther west?” He looked into my eyes and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and hot tears came into my eyes. I didn’t mean to cry, but my eyes got damp and light swelled in them.
If I cried he would see I was a girl and send me away.

  “You are sorely troubled,” John said. “You are welcome to travel with me if that will lighten your burden.”

  “It will,” I said.

  “I have no horse and no cart. I hoof it from congregation to congregation. But you are welcome to walk with me and pray with me. It’s better not to walk alone in the world.”

  More tears came to my eyes, but I turned away so he couldn’t see them. I followed him on the path past the Fielders’ burned house.

  THE NEXT DAY WE walked from the cabin on Pine Knot Branch to the settlement at Crowfoot. Crowfoot was at the edge of the mountains, farther west than I’d ever been. It was at the edge of the Cherokee country, half a day’s walk from the cabin.

  “The Cherokees don’t come into the valley,” John said, “but they claim all the mountains.”

  John said the Cherokees had sided with the Crown and killed any patriots that came among them. Tories hid out on Cherokee land, in remote valleys in the mountains.

  “Why would the Cherokees side with the Crown?” I asked.

  “They have signed many treaties with the British,” John said. “Perhaps they feel they have to honor those treaties. And they hope the king will prevent settlers from taking their land.”

  The road was just two ruts of cartway across the hills, what people called a topsoil road. There were puddles and rocks in the way and logs had fallen across the ruts in places. The road led down through muddy swamps and sinkholes along creeks. My shoes got dirty and I skipped to keep up with John’s long strides.

  “Why don’t your churches give you a horse?” I said.

  “My flocks are small and just getting started,” John said. “They have no treasuries. A flock must grow before it can provide for a minister. A preacher must give before he is given to. Besides, I have nowhere to keep a horse and nothing to feed a horse.”

  I’d never met anybody like John Trethman. He gave himself to working for others, to encouraging and spiriting up others. He was tall and strong as any man, yet he thought more of songs and sermons than of profit from his work. He stepped forward with strength I found hard to follow. Yet I was happy to follow him.