Crockett of Tennessee

by Judd, Cameron

  But there was hope for better times. John, negotiating with a Quaker landholder with good commercial property, had completed his arrangements to erect a log tavern and inn on land on the road between Abdingdon, Virginia, and Knoxville. In the spring John began devoting as much time as his farming would allow to building the tavern. It was a log building, on the small side for taverns, bearing with it the promise to the Crocketts of many nights crowded in with strangers.

  “It’s the wagoners who will provide our business,” Crockett explained to his sons. “We’ll serve them food, give them shelter, fodder for their teams—and plenty of spirits. Rum, whiskey, cider, gin, wine. If all goes as I hope, we will make a better living than we ever have. As the country grows, my boys, so will the traffic on the roads, and so will our livelihood.”

  David was happy to see his father growing enthusiastic and optimistic about life—except that his eagerness to advance his plan brought plenty of hard labor to the Crockett sons. David and his brothers were put to chopping trees, dragging logs by horse power, hewing, notching, lifting. There were shingles to be riven, puncheons to be split, foundation stones to be gathered from the creek and adjacent rocky fields, carted to the tavern site, and put in place.

  But for David, primarily, there was a well to be dug at a spot identified by a local diviner. Because he was lean and small but strong, he was given much of the initial digging work, and he hated it. Only when his uncle Jimmy helped did he find any pleasure at all in the ceaseless shovel-and-barrow drudgery. Jimmy was very used to digging, after all, and gave David much relief.

  But what relief came was largely annulled by the pushing, commanding presence of John Crockett. The man had his good points, but when it came time for labor, he was like a driver of slaves. And because the tavern was the dearest project he had ever undertaken, he drove all the harder. Rain, cold, even snow was not sufficient cause in John Crockett’s view to rest from labor. And on one particularly chilly and damp day, the stress brought ill fortune to young David.

  The well was down about fifteen feet now. Within its claustrophobically constricting walls, it was very cold and damp. Even so, David was sweating, and felt unusually weak, hardly able to fill the buckets with earth and rock for his brothers to pull up by ropes for emptying. He struggled at the task, his fingers growing cold and numb, his face growing hot—until the next thing he knew, he was lying on the wet ground beside the well, his brothers looking down at him with concern. There were ropes around his chest, very tight, and his father was on his knees, struggling to loosen them. As David closed his eyes and faded into a fevered oblivion, he numbly realized he must have fainted in the well, and been pulled from the hole by the ropes.

  The things he was aware of for the next four days were totally beyond his prior experience. Sometimes he saw his family, and the interior of their cabin, but everything seemed distorted and outsized. Other times his perceptions were of unknown faces, of lights, and of odd and miscolored landscapes. At one point he explored a brilliant, flower-filled meadow, warmed by sun and wind, with his dog Painter at his feet, and smiling strangers in unusual clothing calling him by a name that wasn’t his. He was at peace, happy and content.

  He knelt and put his nose into the flowers, which were amazingly bright in color and headily scented. Their aroma grew stronger, filling his nostrils. He wrinkled his nose, unsure whether the smell was pleasant or bad. Then his perceptions became different. There was a heaviness on his chest. The flowery meadow vanished, and he became cold. Music played in the distance, a tune he didn’t know, but which filled him with fear. Struggling, he opened his eyes. He found himself lying on his tick, and above him was the face of his uncle.

  “Jimmy has put a poultice on your chest, David.” The voice was his mother’s. He turned his eyes and saw her face, moving down beside Jimmy’s. “He’s gathered yarbs and such from the woods, and they’ll make you well, God willing. Now, there’s something I want you to drink.” She gave him a strong-tasting, bitter tea that made him frown and wince, and soon he went to sleep.

  After that the strange world David had been living in existed no more. It gave way to the world he had known before. He began to feel hunger and thirst again, and finally to complain about it. His mother laughed to hear it, and David grew angry, failing to understand that it was relief that made her laugh.

  He had only one decline, and with it one more strange dream: himself, drenched in sweat, looking out across a murky, moving field; that odd, trumpeting music he had heard before blowing to him on the hot wind. Something about it made him recoil in fear; he put his hands over his ears, but the sound of the music did not lessen. He tried to run and got nowhere, then his eyes opened and he was on his bed, his mother holding to his hand and saying gentle words. Afterward he improved quickly. There were no more dreams.

  Only later did he understand how sick he had been. His family had been convinced he would die—all but his uncle Jimmy, who had managed to communicate to the others that he had learned skills in his captivity that could save the boy. He had roamed into the woods, gathering what medicinal herbs and plants the winter hadn’t fully decayed, and made free use of the many dried herbs Rebecca Crockett kept on hand. John Crockett seemed skeptical about it, but Rebecca was adamant: it was Jimmy’s herbal treatments that had saved her boy’s life.

  David wanted to thank Jimmy for his help, but this was not possible. A day before the fever left David for good, Jimmy departed. Will Crockett came up from the Dumplin community to take Jimmy home with him. No one knew if he would return; the presumption was that he would not.

  Jimmy had left something behind for David. It was a piece of his precious Indian silver, the largest, smoothest, and most beautiful one.

  “That’s worth something, David,” his father said. “You can sell that for good money.”

  “No,” David replied, clenching his fingers around the silver piece. “I’ll not sell it, no matter what it’s worth. Uncle Jimmy give it to me to keep, and I’m going to keep it.”

  John Crockett studied his son in silence, unsmiling. His eyes were hollow’ and hungry, the eyes of poverty that has come early and lingered too long. David felt vulnerable and a little afraid, yet defensive. He clutched the silver more tightly, and his own eyes took on a fire of determination to keep what was his.

  John Crockett scratched his beard, gave a little grunt, turned and walked away, mumbling under his breath and seeming older than his years.

  Sometimes it seemed to David that there were two incarnations of his father, each appearing from time to time. There was John Crockett the dreamer and planner, always looking for a new scheme, a new way out of debt and trouble. Then there was John Crockett the hollow man—the incarnation present tonight, the one David found repellent and sad.

  David decided that he would never let himself become a hollow man. He would be a dreamer, all the time. Dreamers were better, by a long shot.

  Chapter 9

  Outside the Crockett Tavern, Jefferson County, Tennessee, November 1798

  “Hold it down, boys, that’s right—hold tight there, don’t let her fly up on me!”

  John Crockett yelled the order to his sons, who were groaning loudly as they strained to hold down the top of a tall, bent-over sapling. At the narrow top of the sapling David clung like a grasshopper to a weed stalk.

  David grimaced and struggled to hold his nearly upside-down position. He was the undisputed champion climber of all the Crockett children, and so to him had fallen the task of shinnying all the way up and tying on a rope that his brothers used to bend the tree slowly toward the earth, with David still on it so his weight would help the process. His brothers then waded into the branches, grabbed the tree, and held it down, while John Crockett dragged the carcass of a fresh-killed deer by a rope strap around its neck. He pulled a hatchet from his belt and quickly hacked off the very top of the tree, then slipped the deer’s neck strap over the remaining stub. He then added his muscle to that of his sons as they
held the sapling down.

  “Drop off, Davy, and get them props yonder,” he instructed.

  David was glad to oblige. He dropped to the ground and rolled aside. The other Crocketts then slowly let the sapling rise until it pulled the deer almost entirely off the ground. John and his sons pushed the tree farther upright, as David scampered over and picked up a couple of ten-foot poles, each with a fork on the end. He put the fork of the first against the sapling and pushed, and with the help of the others worked the tree up straighter and the deer higher off the ground. He set the end of the prop into the earth and repeated the same process with the second prop pole. When it was all done, the deer hung by its neck from the bent and propped-up sapling, its hind feet dangling a foot off the ground. David wedged a third prop in place, and the deer hung in the middle of a very stable tripod.

  John Crockett got his breath and evaluated the job. A quick, unsmiling nod showed his approval; he seldom was demonstrative beyond that. He swept back his hair and turned to David. “You still want the honors?”

  “Yes, Pap. If you’ll let me.”

  “You killed the deer. You want to skin it, you can do it. Besides, you need the practice. A twelve-year-old boy ought to know how to skin a deer the right way. I ain’t seen you do it right yet.”

  David might have replied that he had never been given the opportunity to show his skills until now. This year alone he had killed two deer prior to this one, but had not been allowed to skin either of them alone. His father, grumbling about the ineptitude of boys, would always intrude and take over the job as soon as David showed the least sign of uncertainty, or asked even the simplest question. Today David intended to have no help at all, but that would mean he could not falter or seem unsure of himself at any point. If he did falter, his father would take over the job, like always.

  David took up his knife, freshly sharpened, and placed himself between the forelegs of the dead deer, resting them on his shoulders to keep them out of the way. He probed the knife through the skin on the inside of one of the deer’s hind legs and carefully sliced up the inside of the leg to the groin. He repeated the process on the other hind leg, then similarly opened the flesh inside the forelegs. Returning to the groin, he slowly cut the hide all the way up to the deer’s neck. When he was done, the slices inside the legs joined the main central cut like tributaries leading to a river.

  He worked the legs out of the skin, then wriggled the tailbone out of its sheath. Then the hardest labor began, as he slowly peeled the deer’s body out of its hide, all the way up to the neck. He sliced a circle around the neck, just below the hanging rope, and within a few minutes had the hide entirely loose. The skinned carcass hung glistening in the sunlight, and David stood aside, panting from exertion but satisfied that he had done a fine skinning job.

  John Crockett spat tobacco juice onto the ground. He grunted his satisfaction with the job. “Fine work, son,” he said. “Now, let’s get that skin into the water.”

  Thrilling privately at his father’s compliment, and taking care to keep the furred outer portion of the hide from contacting the meaty underside, David carried the hide over to a barrel full of water. He immersed the hide and topped the barrel with a lid.

  Over the next several days the weather cooled substantially and David worried that the water in the barrel would freeze. This didn’t happen, to his pleasure, and when he removed the soaked hide at last, the fur was well loosened.

  He carried it over to the scraping block, a smooth, barkless log, fixed in place at a slant so it butted up at about half a man’s height. David laid the hide over the log, fur side up, and began scraping in an outward direction with the same bone scraper his father had used for years. The sodden fur scraped off in handful-size clumps. David kept at it, working until he sweated even in the cool, and freed the hide of all hair. Then he turned the hide over and scraped away the fats and tendrils that sill clung to it.

  David had saved the deer’s head, keeping it in the cold, and now he turned to it, opening the skull and removing the brain. His mother had heated water ready, and into a bucket of it he plunged the brains, working them through his fingers into a paste.

  Next David stretched the hide over a frame and pulled it tight, then tied it in place. Over every inch of the hide he spread the paste of deer brains, then removed the hide from the frame and rolled it up with the brains still on it. A couple of days later he washed the hide in clear water, removing all the brains, and then worked the hide for a long time against the sharpened edge of a fixed hardwood board until the hide was worn and supple. He smoked the hide afterward over a smoldering black birch fire to seal off the pores.

  Rebecca Crockett examined the finished article. “That’s as fine a piece of buckskin as I’ve seen,” she said. “I’m proud of you, David.”

  It so happened that on this particular day, one of the Crockett tavern’s more frequent patrons was present, and watched David at work. David knew the man only by his surname of Dunn. He was an elderly fellow, spry despite his years, who kept busy shuttling goods by wagon between the settlements.

  Dunn approached David as he stood admiring the buckskin he had tanned out. “That was a right fine bit of tanning work, boy.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Dunn.”

  “Did you do it alone?”

  “Yes sir. I killed and skinned the deer too.”

  “That’s the first tanning you’ve done?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re quite the young man, ain’t you? How old are you?”

  “Twelve years old.”

  “Twelve! Nigh a man, then. You’ll do well for yourself, I reckon. You’d make a fine tanner, at the very least. There’s always need for good buckskin.”

  Dunn walked away, going back into the tavern for another round of whiskey. David grinned and fingered the buckskin. Dunn’s comments had greatly pleased him. Nigh a man. He liked the sound of that.

  “Nigh a man.” he said aloud. “Reckon I am at that. Nigh a man.”

  Early December, 1798

  It was nights such as these that Rebecca Crockett hated, as David knew from having watched her at work night after night. She moved through the smoke and noise of the tavern with a dour expression on her face. Every motion, every glance, revealed her displeasure at the revelry and drunkenness all around her—and David noticed that when she looked at her husband, her expression was darkest of all.

  John Crockett was in the corner, by the fireplace, drinking and talking intently to a man who had come to the tavern today, driving a big herd of cattle. His name was Jacob Siler, and he spoke with a Germanic accent that David thought was intriguing.

  It wasn’t Siler who was responsible for the spirit of drunkenness permeating the tavern tonight, but the two drovers who had come in with him. One was a skinny, mean-faced boy, maybe four or five years older than David, who drank like a man twice his age but leered at Rebecca with the lust of youth. That infuriated David, who was growing old enough now to understand such things. It also surprised him, because he couldn’t think of his mother as the kind men would stare at. She wasn’t just any woman, or some lewd wench—she was his mother! But clearly the drover boy was the type who stared at any grown female. It made David want to yank the dog irons from the fireplace and wallop the young lecher in the head with them.

  The other drover, much larger and a few years older than the lecherous one, was the main source of noise. There was something in his face and manner that indicated he lacked a full share of mental capacity. He was engaged in a loud conversation with a stranger, seemingly a vagrant, who was on his way to Knoxville. The two shouted at each other rather than doing the logical thing and moving within easy talking distance. Their initial subject had been something to do with the oddities of weather in North Carolina; now, somehow, it had shifted to the topic of raising chickens, an area in which both men seemed eager to claim superior expertise.

  “A man can tell by his fingers which hen has laid the egg,” Siler’s drov
er was saying. “You got to feel the lay bones, you see. If a man can lay two fingers between them, there’s your laying hen. That’s her.”

  “Why, surely that’s the truth, sir, but only if you have checked her the day of the laying of the last egg of the batch.”

  “Or the day after,” returned the other. “You can check her the day after too.”

  The other fellow must have detected the simple-mindedness of the drover, because he had adopted a crisp, confident tone of voice that contrasted greatly with the other’s slurring. “No, no, not in my opinion. The bones, they begin to come together right fast. The day after is too late.”

  David found the odd conversation amusing. He was sitting in the corner, whittling on a cedar stick, and listening quietly. Wilson was beside him.

  “Them men is funny,” Wilson said. “I like to listen at drunks a-talking. Don’t care what Mama thinks about it. I think a drunk is funny.”

  “So do I,” David replied.

  The arguers were getting louder now, and irritated with each other. They had come to a point of violent disagreement, something to do with the best time of spring to cull nonlayers from the flock.

  “Pap’ll up and tell them to quiet down, once they get to cussing,” Wilson predicted.

  David expected the same, and looked at his father, waiting for him to rise and quiet the disagreement. But John Crockett didn’t rise. He leaned closer to Siler so as to hear whatever he was saying, and then David was surprised when Siler and his father turned their heads at exactly the same moment and stared directly at him. David’s eyes met his father’s, and their mutual gaze held for a moment. Then John and Siler looked back at each other and resumed their conversation.

  David knew they had been talking about him, and it was very unsettling. He laid down his knife and cedar stick.

  “Rebecca,” John Crockett said, waving for her to come. She left the fireside, where she had been stocking the blaze, and came to him. David watched with great concern as his father talked to Rebecca, whose face was turned away from him. When she turned and looked back at him, over her shoulder, a solemn expression on her face, David thought he might become ill. Every intuition told him that whatever was being said was not something he would want to hear.