The Hollow Tree

by Janet Lunn

  Betsy gave Phoebe a tentative little smile.

  Jem and Joseph Heaton dug a hole in the soft earth where an old tree had recently fallen. There they buried Tibby’s body, wrapped in one of Bertha Anderson’s petticoats. To everybody’s astonishment, Phoebe’s uncle roused himself from his torpor and, in a clear, deep voice, read the service for the burial of the dead from his prayer-book.

  The rest of the day people spent drying out their sodden clothes as best they could by the three small fires, baking bannocks, and preparing to start out the next morning by first light.

  Around sundown that evening, Phoebe sat alone by the grave, remembering Tibby saying to her, “You got me to look after,” remembering, too, Bartlett clinging to her, letting her know, in his own way, that she had him to look after.

  “And now you are both gone.” She rubbed the tears from her eyes. She remembered something else: that last afternoon with Anne and Gideon. “War is so romantic,” Anne had said. Phoebe’s tears came, then, in a torrent she could not rub away.

  She became aware, after a time, that someone was standing beside her. She looked up. It was Jem, carrying a small roughly carved cedar cross he had made to mark Tibby’s grave. He sat down and put an arm around her.

  “Oh, Jem, I don’t think anything worse than this can happen. I really don’t.”

  The Prisoner

  Early the next morning, when all the others were barely stirring, Phoebe went looking for something that might do for flowers to put on the grave. She broke the soft ends from a few cedar branches. Shivering in her blanket, she crouched down in the snow by a small rock pool in the stream. She was concentrating on finding a sharp stone to break the ice so she could wash, and didn’t hear the whistling until it was quite near.

  Someone was whistling “Yankee Doodle.” Within seconds a young man appeared through the trees. He was dressed in a fringed deerskin hunting shirt and leggings, with high moccasins on his feet and a fur cap on his head, and he had a rifle over his shoulder. His whistling stopped abruptly when he saw Phoebe. They stared at each other.

  Phoebe recovered first. She stood up slowly. Images raced through her head of the men she had run from with George and Bartlett, of the soldiers who had held the refugees at gunpoint while they stole their provisions. She would not let him see that she was afraid. She spoke without a quaver. “I am not alone. If I shout someone will come.”

  “I don’t aim to do you no harm, Mistress. I’ll just get myself gone before your friends get here.” He gave her a little smile and turned to go. Too late. The sound of feet on the ice along the brook’s bank was loud and clear. The young man started to run.

  “Stop!” roared Joseph Heaton. He raised his gun. Jem sprinted through the trees, threw himself at the stranger, and brought him down by the knees. They tussled briefly, but Jem had the advantage of surprise and Joseph Heaton with his gun at the ready.

  “You took me fair and square,” the stranger conceded when Jem had taken his rifle and forced him to his feet. “But I got no quarrel with you, nor, I figger, do you got none with me.” He looked over at Phoebe, a rueful expression in his dark eyes. “I wasn’t about to offer no injury nor no insult to your sweetheart.” Jem flushed. It took Phoebe a moment to realize what he’d said. Then all she could think was, What a notion! How that will anger Jem.

  “Never mind that,” barked Joseph Heaton. “You just best give out what you’re a-doin’ here, and right smart, too.”

  The young man said his name was Japhet Oram and that he’d been working for his uncle up on the Onion River but was on his way home to see his sick mother over the mountains in Bellows Falls, on the Connecticut.

  Phoebe listened in silence as he told his tale. She knew he was lying. It wasn’t just the momentary hesitation before he said Bellows Falls, it was the way he talked. There wasn’t a settler in the whole Upper Connecticut River valley, her father had told her once, “who you can’t identify by his speech.” Japhet Oram did not speak with the clipped words or broad vowels she was used to hearing in Vermont. He had a slow, drawly accent, not one she had heard before. There was something else. Despite his hunting clothes and his ragged brown beard, he looked more like a soldier than a woodsman. It was the way he moved, and it was his black hair tied back in a neat queue. He looked like Gideon the day she had discovered him in her house in Hanover.

  She said nothing about her suspicions. Japhet Oram didn’t look to be any older than Jem — or Gideon. She didn’t trust Joseph Heaton, and she wasn’t sure Jem could stop him from shooting the boy where he stood if he thought he was a rebel spy. She thought, not for the first time, how Joseph Heaton reminded her of Elihu Pickens and the men on his Committee of Public Safety back in Orland Village. No, she would not say anything.

  “We ain’t settin’ you free just on your say-so,” snarled Joseph Heaton. He grabbed Japhet Oram’s arms, pinned them behind his back, and held them there. “Who’s to say you ain’t a soldier of that dad-blasted rebel John Stark or Israel Putman? And who’s to say you ain’t a rebel spy? We ain’t settin’ you free.”

  “See here,” Japhet Oram began, but Joseph Heaton paid no attention. He swivelled around to face Phoebe. “What’s more,” he snarled, “we ain’t lettin’ no one else set you free, neither.” There was a look of such intense ill will on his face that, involuntarily, Phoebe backed away from him.

  “You keep the gun on ’im,” he barked at Jem and, pushing his captive before him, disappeared into the forest.

  Phoebe felt sick. The look on Joseph Heaton’s face had frightened her. “Jem?” she said uncertainly.

  Jem had started after Master Heaton. He swung around. There was no warmth in his blue eyes now. “I don’t think you’re a spy, Phoebe Olcott. Not anymore. You know I don’t. But I’d give a whole pound sterling if I had it to know what you ’n’ that Japhet Oram was talkin’ about.”

  “We weren’t … ”

  There was no use explaining. Jem did not wait to hear. Phoebe pulled Katsi’tsiénhawe’s blanket more tightly around herself, and stood, irresolute. She did not want to go back to camp. She did not want to think about Japhet Oram and what might happen to him. She looked down. She had not moved from the rock pool, and there, staring bleakly back at her, was her reflection in the clear black ice. “I do not want to think about you, either,” she told it. She lifted her braid of matted brown hair and dropped it with a sigh. She looked at her tired, thin face, the hollows under eyes that were bigger and darker than she remembered. “I guess nobody could call me a plump partridge now,” she said.

  Back in camp Joseph Heaton had tied his prisoner’s hands behind his back with a rope and was peppering him with questions. “Where were you? What’re you really doin’ out here? Why ain’t a stout young feller like you in uniform? Where’d you get that rifle? It ain’t commonplace around these parts.” And on and on, until Charity Yardley said, acidly, “Master Heaton, if you are hoping for answers to your questions, you might give the young man time to respond.”

  With that, everyone had something to say, something to ask. He told them his family were Loyalists. He told them again that he was going home to visit his mother. Nothing Japhet Oram could say would satisfy Joseph Heaton. “We knows you rebel spies. The general at Fort St. John’s is goin’ to be some happy to get a-hold of you,” he crowed, “I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if they wasn’t willing to offer a nice reward.” Almost everyone else wanted to let him go free. Bertha Anderson said she saw no reason why “half-starved folk like us should feed a healthy varmint like him,” and, for once, Charity Yardley agreed with her.

  Then Anne came forward to stand in front of their prisoner. “Don’t you let him go.” Her face was contorted with rage, her voice was shaking, her fists were clenched. “Don’t you let him go. If he is a spy he must hang. Hanging is what happens to spies.”

  The look of sick terror that came over Japhet Oram’s face was one Phoebe did not think she would ever forget, or the way his glance darted fran
tically from one person to another. In that moment she knew she would have to set him free. For a split second their eyes met. She did not dare look at him again.

  Joseph Heaton’s arguments won out. Japhet Oram was to be taken along to Fort St. John’s. The snow and cold winter winds, Tibby’s death, and now the capture of a man who might be a spy, gave the refugees a new sense of urgency. Quickly, they set to preparing the morning meal and assembling their possessions. While the cornmeal stir-about was being rationed out, Phoebe slipped away to the hillside where they had buried Tibby. She knelt by the cross Jem had made and laid there the bunch of cedar she’d been clutching since she’d gathered it by the pool. She prayed for Tibby’s soul. Then she said, “Goodbye, Tibby Thayer. You were an odd, cross-grained little creature, and now the good Lord has taken you to be with your mama and your papa. I hope you are happier there than you were here.” She wiped the tears from her eyes. She stood up — and saw Jem a few feet away.

  Maybe it was the sadness of Tibby, maybe the capture of Japhet Oram, or the reliving of Gideon’s hanging and Anne’s hysteria, maybe the knowledge that Jem still distrusted her, but Phoebe was filled with a sudden, overpowering rage.

  “What kind of spying do you think I’ll be doing here?” She was so angry she spat out the words. She bent down, grabbed a loose clod of earth, and hurled it at Jem with all her strength. Then she burst into tears and ran, sliding and falling and bumping into trees, down the hill.

  Much later, when she had calmed down and was pushing her way through the snow behind the Robinsons’ cart, where Betsy rode with Jed and Noah, she remembered seeing pine cones and moss in Jem’s hands. She felt ashamed that she had misunderstood, and she tried to tell him so, but whenever she moved up beside him to ask his forgiveness, he found a reason to busy himself somewhere else.

  Bertha Anderson, with her ox and cart, now led the refugee party. Joseph Heaton brought up the rear with the prisoner, his hands bound in front of him, tied to the back of the Heatons’ cart. The job of guarding the prisoner, Joseph Heaton told everyone, was not to be entrusted to a feeble old man like Aaron Yardley or a youth like Jem Morrissay. He only glanced disdainfully at Josiah Robinson and obviously did not consider that any of the women could do the job, so he had relinquished the lead position with reluctance, a shake of his fist, and the admonition to Bertha Anderson to “keep us outta the swamps and don’t go gettin’ us halfway up no mountains. And if you sees signs of catamounts ’n’ such, you’re to give a good warnin’.”

  Phoebe heard his loud complaints, his sharp orders to his wife and to his prisoner, but all she listened for was a silence that said he had left his post. He did that only twice in the day, but shouted for Jem to “come keep guard” while he disappeared to relieve himself. She knew she couldn’t get near Japhet with Jem marching along beside him.

  They plodded up steep hills in snow so thick everyone had to walk in order to lighten the weight in the carts. Now and then one of the mothers would insist that they stop for the children. Uncle Josiah leaned heavily on Rachael’s arm. Jonah Yardley, on the other hand, seemed to gain strength from his very need of it, and he swung along on his crutches beside Phoebe with never a word of complaint, the cat by his feet.

  Anne had withdrawn into herself once more. She no longer bothered with Jem. She no longer gossiped with Charity Yardley. Phoebe heard Charity say to Lucy Heaton that “the Robinson chit is the most unobliging human being I have ever met.” She couldn’t help smiling bitterly, but nothing could take her mind from Japhet for long.

  All day and long after they had camped for the night, the question went round and round in Phoebe’s head — how was she to free Japhet? Joseph Heaton never left the prisoner’s side while they walked, and stationed himself near him once he had him safely secured to a tree after they’d stopped. If he left him for even a minute, Jem took his place.

  Japhet. Phoebe had begun to think of him by his first name. It was as though, having made up her mind to rescue him even though he did not know it, there existed a bond between them. There was another bond. She didn’t know where he had come from or anything about him except that he was not what he had said he was. She knew, though, that he was a prisoner and so was she. Unlike him, she was free to run off into the wilderness, but she was afraid of it. She no longer felt she would ever convince Anne that she was not the villain Anne thought she was. She had been thinking, for some time, though she still kept it in the pocket tucked into her sleeve, that she would never deliver Gideon’s message in time to anyone who’d have any use for it. Tibby, who she had promised to care for, was dead, and although Betsy Parker had glued herself to Phoebe’s side, she was sure that both she and Jonah would manage without her. No, she was not imprisoned by anything but her own terror of going out alone again into the wild. But the bonds of that prison were every bit as strong as the rope that tied Japhet. In a kind of way she felt that, if she freed Japhet, she was freeing herself — and Gideon.

  When all the fires had burned low and people were restlessly settling down to sleep, Phoebe watched for her chance to creep over to where Japhet sat, tied to a large oak tree, hands and feet bound before him with the tough cedar-root rope the Mohawks called watapi. She could see, because the moon was full and it was a clear night, that he had fallen asleep. His head was hanging down, bobbing like an apple on its branch. Joseph Heaton was sitting a foot or two from him, his head nodding, too. Jem lay sleeping, the same distance on the other side. Phoebe thought desperately of creeping over to where they slept and knocking them both on the head with Charity Yardley’s iron cooking pot. The only thing that stopped her was not knowing how she could hit one of them without the other one waking up.

  I will have to be very quiet, she thought, and she was about to stand up when, as though reading her mind, Jem woke, sat up, and looked over towards where she sat. She could feel his eyes boring into her. She lay down, determined to keep awake, but, after a little while, she fell asleep — and dreamed that Joseph Heaton was riding on Bartlett’s back, chasing Tibby and Gideon and Japhet with his hunting knife. Jem was running beside them, his coppery hair flying loose behind him.

  She woke because Jem was squatting beside her, shaking her. “You was havin’ a nightmare.” She blinked and rubbed her eyes. There were tears. She sat up, shivering. She grabbed Jem’s hand. “Why were you chasing them?”

  “Huh?”

  “You were, oh … ” She shook her head. “It was the dream.” She didn’t move from his comforting presence until she realized she was holding his hand. “Thank you,” she mumbled, pulling free.

  “That’s all right.” Jem sounded as self-conscious as she felt. He got up and went back to his place by Japhet Oram. Phoebe pulled her blanket up around her shoulders, but she didn’t sleep for a long time.

  The second day was much the same as the first had been. Although the sun was bright, it was cold, and the going was all uphill in the snow. Jem and Joseph Heaton had a quarrel that stopped just short of a fist fight after Jem asked Japhet how near the Onion River they were, where it might be best to cross it, and what would be the best procedure north from there. Joseph Heaton told Jem not to “trust no dad-blasted spy.” Jem muttered something Joseph said he hadn’t any business saying in front of good Christian women. If Jem’s mother and Bertha Anderson hadn’t stepped between them, they might well have come to blows.

  The first time Jem took his turn guarding “the spy,” Phoebe could see by the expression on his face that he was more than a little tired of Joseph Heaton. She couldn’t help but smile. Then suddenly Noah Robinson darted from his mother’s side after a rabbit, fell in the snow, and started to roll downhill. Jem took after him. Phoebe slipped towards Japhet. She drew her knife from her sleeve just as Jed Robinson bounded towards her with the cat in his arms.

  “Phoebe! Phoebe! I found George. He got lost in the bushes.” He pointed towards a clump of bushes leaning over the frozen stream that ran beside the hill they were climbing. Wondering where
Jed found the energy, as thin and hungry as he was, Phoebe took the cat from him and made no further attempt to free Japhet.

  Two near-fights among the boys were avoided by Bertha Anderson bullying Charity Yardley into taking some of the children into her cart once they reached the top of the hill. Johnny Anderson and Arnie Colliver were begging for something to eat, and Sam Colliver was whimpering that he was so cold. It was easy to see that trouble between some of the refugees could easily erupt.

  As for Phoebe, all she hoped was that any one who had noticed her at Japhet’s side would think she had simply wandered there.

  But Jonah had noticed, after she had returned to his side and thrust George into his arms. “I see what you was gonna do,” he told her in a low voice. A chill ran down Phoebe’s spine.

  “I won’t tell,” he said.

  Phoebe looked at him, disbelieving.

  “I can see this Japhet Oram isn’t likely what he says he is. I’m hobbled in the leg, I’m not very old, but I’m not slow in my upper works.” He grinned at her. “And I hate that old buzzard. He’s not the king and he doesn’t know all there is to know, and I don’t want to see him win over anybody, not even General George Washington himself.”

  Phoebe squeezed his hand. She wondered if everybody else disliked Joseph Heaton as much as she and Jonah and, probably, Jem did. Jem. Phoebe was sure he had seen her slip in beside Japhet Oram, because every time she glanced in his direction he was looking at her with a thoughtful expression on his face. But he said nothing about it.

  When, in mid afternoon the refugees reached a small beaver meadow, surrounded by a mostly evergreen woods, the level ground and the shelter the trees gave from the rising wind were too good to pass up, so they stopped there for the night. There was one large maple tree in the meadow at a little distance from the surrounding forest, and there Joseph Heaton tied Japhet.