The Fields

by Conrad Richter

  CONRAD RICHTER has written

  The Sea of Grass (1937)

  Tacey Cromwell (1942)

  The Free Man (1943)

  Always Young and Fair (1947)

  The Trees (1940) WHICH IS CONTINUED IN

  The Fields (1946) AND

  The Town (1950)

  The Light in the Forest (1953)

  The Mountain on the Desert (1955)

  The Lady (1957)

  The Waters of Kronos (1960)

  AND A VOLUME OF SHORT STORIES

  Early Americana (1936)

  THESE ARE BORZOI BOOKS, PUBLISHED BY

  Alfred A. Knopf

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 1945 and 1946 by Conrad Richter, renewed in 1973 by Harvena Richter.

  All rights reserved . Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Published March 28, 1946

  ISBN 9780394424682

  eBook ISBN 9780451493736

  v4.1

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Titles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  1 Lawfully Married

  2 First Come

  3 The Sawmill Church

  4 The Taxin’

  5 The Face at the Winder

  6 His Own Man

  7 The Flesh Pots of Egypt

  8 The Improvement

  9 The Dog Day

  10 The Sweat Mill

  11 The Laurel Hut

  12 The Fields

  13 The Nettle Patch

  14 Freely Be His Wife

  15 The Reap Hook

  16 The Old Adam

  17 Red Bird

  18 Cherry Yoke

  19 Townsite

  A Note About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author acknowledges again his debt to the historical collections and works of HENRY HOWE, SHERMAN DAY, JOSEPH DODDRIDGE and others; to numerous early volumes, manuscripts and first-hand source material made available by Miss HELEN MILLS, reference librarian, and Miss BERTHA E. JOSEPHSON, head of the Department of Documents, both of the Ohio State Historical Society at Columbus; by SYLVESTER L. VIGILANTE, head of the American History room of the New York Public Library; by Colonel HENRY W. SHOEMAKER, State Archivist of Pennsylvania, and his assistants, Mrs. DOROTHY K. LYNCH and Miss EDNA ALBERT; by Dr. JAMES R. JOY, librarian of the Methodist Historical Society of New York; and to the help, counsel or original material of Miss DAWES MARKWELL of Bradford County; Mrs. SAMANTHA RIGGS of the Ohio Valley; Dean A. H. M. STONECIPHER of Lebanon Valley College; the Rt. Rev. Monsignor JAMES E. HEIR; Miss AGNES SELIN SCHOCH and MARION S. SCHOCH; Miss NELL B. STEVENS, Miss ALICE WILLIGEROD, Miss ROSEMARIE BOYLE, Miss ISABEL CRAWFORD SCHOCH, Miss M. FRANCES FERRIS, W. T. BOYD, THOMAS R. THOMSON, HERBERT T. F. CAHOON, NEVIN MOYER, JAMES MULHERN and many others;

  And finally to those neighbors of pioneer stock the author knew intimately as boy and man in the hills of Pennsylvania and Ohio, in whose speech much of this volume is told; a speech approximating the store of eighteenth and early nineteenth century speech collected by the author from old manuscripts, letters, records and other sources, and quite different from the formal written language of the period, into which respectable form the talk and thoughts of the people, the testimony of court witnesses and even the conversation of ladies and gentlemen in the privacy of their family circles had almost invariably to be translated before daring to reach print or public. This peculiar, often vigorous spoken language, contrary to public belief, had its considerable origin in the Northeastern states, from whence it was carried by emigration into early Ohio and adjoining territories, where today it has almost disappeared, and into the South and Southwest, where it has widely survived and where it is sometimes thought to be an exclusively native form of speech, but which, wherever found today, should be recognized with its local variants as a living reminder of the great, early mother-tongue of pioneer America.

  CHAPTER ONE

  LAWFULLY MARRIED

  SHE moved up the trace, a strong young figure, “cam” and on the deliberate side in her red-brown shawl, with her “willer” basket on her arm. Oh, you had to be a stout body to be a woman way back here, for this was up West in the Ohio wilderness. The trace ran through the deep woods. Here the lonesome path to the Tulls’ improvement led off, though you couldn’t see a stick cut. Back there the stumpy lane to the Covenhovens ran, just wide enough for Big John’s wagon to go winding and rocking between the big butts.

  The trace was here before the woods lane, for the Indians had made it, or the wild bulls ahead of them. Away back before these old butts were whips, the Shawnees claimed the wild bulls had traveled it. It ran up the river and was wide as a road, but it didn’t have any sky. Only the under part of the trace was what you call clear. Harvests of old leaves covered the black ground. Overhead the trees were thick as always. Branches and vines fought and locked up there. Under them the trace was a dark green tunnel. At the other end you could just see the faint promise of light. That light was George Roebuck’s clearing and his post where Sayward was going.

  Outside the log store, two Shawnees lay drunk and sprawled over each other on the ground, like two copper snakes twined in their winter den, and numb to what was going on around. Inside, Buckman Tull, Jake Tench and other white men loafed on benches or tipped-back stools. Sayward passed them the time while George Roebuck waited red as a fox behind his counter. Oh, she said nothing as yet that he had sent for her to come up. She put her basket on the counter, lifting out bunches of dried sang and slippery elm bark tied with linn string. No use coming up here without fetching what she could along. Her sharp eye watched him weigh it and shear off the barred flannel she would take back.

  That done, he looked solemn as a governor.

  “I’ve been expecting you, Saird,” he said shortly. He reached around to a cubby place like a pigeon hole and threw something on the counter.

  Sayward stood there looking at it, a kind of thin, square packet of paper lying across the salt and sugar filled cracks of the planking. That it had come a long way was plain from the smudges of hands it had passed through, big hands, little hands, dirty hands and a bloody hand, all leaving their thumb marks, some plumb on top of the fine “handwrite.”

  Now who would have reckoned it was a letter that the trader had for her! Why, this was the first letter to come to her in all her born years. Through her mind ran the searching question who could have sent it, for she knew well enough when you cracked the seal and unfolded the paper, somebody’s name had to be pothooked at the bottom. Was that name her pappy’s, she wondered? Was he still a living away out there, a skinning wild bulls across the great river that had winter at one end and palm orchards on the other? She could see him now in her mind clear as through spring water, a stepping along in his gray buckskins with his long pole of a Pennsylvany rifle on his arm. Or was it from Achsa, her sister, sending word of herself for the first time since she ran off with Genny’s man, telling if she had young ones, and whether she and Louie still lived together or had he run off now with some new woman?

  The letter felt heavy as deed paper as she picked it up in her brown fingers. Oh, this was too quality and genteel to come from Worth or Achsa or any person who would write their letter for them.

  “You kin charge the postage to me,” she said, then turned it over and saw that the blob of vermilion seali
ng wax had been broken.

  “It’s my letter, Saird,” the trader told her. “But since you’re the one it wants to know about, I’ll charge you with the postage like you say. I didn’t like to talk about you behind your back. I thought I’d read you the questions it asks. Then you could tell me what to say.”

  Sayward’s short gown flared a little in front as it always did when she reared up so straight.

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Personal,” George Roebuck said.

  “Have I got to answer?”

  “No, you don’t have to.”

  Sayward stood studying a little.

  “I don’t even know who it’s from.”

  He took the letter from her fingers and spread it open on the counter. Then he pulled down his temple specs that made him look like a great, gray-eyed frog ready to jump in the river.

  “He writes this letter from the Bay State. He says he’s the lawyer for Portius’s mother.”

  Sayward stood stock still. So it had come, she told herself. Portius’s folks were starting to pay interest in him and her at last.

  “What does he want?”

  George Roebuck’s head was furry. His face had pits and hair holes. Yet you could tell he was somebody, and here in his own post, in his leather apron, he looked sovereign of all he laid eyes to. He gave her a sharp scrutiny around his spectacles.

  “Now you understand, Saird, I can’t help for what he says. It’s a lawyer’s right to ask unhandy questions.”

  Sayward looked back at him without winking. No, he couldn’t help for it as he said. But he could shoo off some of these loafers sitting around to listen. Not that she would ask him.

  “You kin go ahead and read it,” she said.

  A look she well knew came into George Roebuck’s face. She had given him lief. Now she would have to take it as it came.

  “He wants to know,” the trader put to her, “is it true that Portius Wheeler is living out here with a woods girl? That’s his first question.”

  Sayward felt a slow thump somewhere inside her. But outside she held cool and steady.

  “You kin say it’s true,” she said clearly.

  “Is it true, he wants to know, that you can’t read or write?”

  Sayward hung her head. “You know it’s true,” she said in a low voice.

  “Now, he says, is it true,” the trader went on, “that you and Portius are living together — this is how he puts it — without benefit of laws or clergy?”

  “That’s not true,” Sayward looked him in the eye. “You know your own self we’re lawfully married.”

  “I’m just saying what he says here,” George Roebuck reminded her. “He says he heard men under the influence of whiskey forced Portius to stand up with you and he had no other way but marry you.”

  Back of Sayward came the bang of a stool fallen over on the puncheons.

  “Who says I was under the influence of whiskey?” Jake Tench demanded. “I kin drink a hogshead and never feel it!”

  “Hush up, Jake,” Sayward told him curtly. “You only make it worse.” She had not turned around. Her eyes met George Roebuck’s as hard as flints. “You kin say it’s true. He had no choice.”

  “You gave him the choice afterward, Saird,” Jake Tench reminded her angrily. “I was ’ar and seed you. You opened the door and told him he could go or stay.”

  “The letter don’t ask about afterwards,” Sayward said.

  “Why don’t you tell him then how Portius was afore you married him?” Jake shouted. “How much would they a thought of him then?”

  Sayward’s face grew cruel. In her mind she could see Portius as he was when first he came to the woods, a dandy then and no mistake with a whole casson, they said, of shirts and fixens. Nobody knew why he came away back here all alone, but every two weeks he went to Roebuck’s looking for a letter. She could see him afterwards, too, when all hope of that letter had gone, looking like a bush-nipple. You never would have reckoned that shaggy woodsy in shoe packs was a Bay State lawyer who could say by heart anything he wanted out of the Bible, the poetry books or the Constitution! His seamed buckskin britches had the legs shrunk and dried hard as boards so that they went clap, clap when he walked. He lived in a log shanty of buckeye logs, for they were the easiest to cut down. Seldom saw he a human face save his own staring up at him from some wild run, or heard a voice save the frogs’ wild croaking.

  But now that a woman had gone and married him, coaxed him back to be a human again and got him to practising his law business, his Bay State relations wanted to know about this woman, and was she good enough for him.

  “No,” she said darkly, “you’ll say nothin’ to his mam how he was then.”

  “Like you say, Saird.” The less to write, the better it suited George Roebuck. “Here’s the last he wants to know. He says the business that made Portius leave back there is settled now. Portius’s family want him to come home and practise law in the Bay State. They’ve written to him, they say, but he doesn’t answer. Is it his woman, they want to know, who’s holding him back and keeping him from coming home?” He looked at her over his lenses like a red owl.

  “No, I ain’t a holdin’ him back,” Sayward said. “You kin tell them so. Portius never said nothin’ to me.”

  “Why don’t you go along back with him?” Buckman Tull put in.

  It was mighty still in the post and none was quieter than Sayward herself. Oh, she would give a good deal to be back there long enough to catch sight of Portius’s folks. She’d like to lay her eyes on another, too. Many a time she felt sure it had a woman at the bottom of Portius’s burying himself out in the woods. She would like to get a look at that woman he thought so much of. But Sayward showed none of that in her face. You might think she was coldblooded the stony way she stood there.

  “They ain’t asked me,” she said after a minute. “But if they did, I’d never go back ’ar.”

  “You could live in a mansion house likely!” Jake Tench called to her. “You’d have a coachman to drive you around.”

  “No,” Sayward told the trader. “Me and Portius came out here in the woods and here’s whar we aim to make our stake. You kin say I said so. You kin say I’m wilful, too, and set in my ways.”

  Then she put her basket on her arm and made her way to the door.

  It was getting late, she told herself when she got outside. The sun must be pretty close to down, for the forest wall threw shadows clean across the cleared ground. The two Shawnees still lay struck by jugged lightning. Will Beagle’s bear cub had crawled out of his low, log shelter and was trying to reach them with one claw. But his chain wouldn’t let him go that far.

  Oh, she could talk big enough about the woods, but it wasn’t all cake and pie to live in them. It had grown mighty dark on the trace. Deep in the forest she could see the last melancholy rays of the sun like red Deil’s candles. Now they faded out and the woods were black and still. This was the time the night air started coming out under the trees and small bodies of mist to rise and float close to earth. Why mist came from certain spots in the ground nobody knew, but even in the black dark, you could taste its cold breath when you passed through.

  By day the woods seemed more open. In the morning light you could see deer paths and traces running this way and that, openings and galleries through the leafage, and cubby holes and recesses between the great pillars. You could look up and see through hole after hole in the branches overhead till way up there you could tell must be sky, for the leaves were bright with the sun. But at sundown the woods thickened. Oh, if you went in there and counted, there would be no more butts than before. But when you looked back from the trace, it had got thicker again. All around, you could feel the woods swarming and crowding, butt to butt, with branches matted and braided, all shrouded with moss, older than the wild bulls’ trails and dark as midnight, running on and on a slew of miles you couldn’t count, over hills and bottoms and soft oozy swamps, north to the English Lakes an
d west to the big prairies. That was a power of woods at night to feel around you.

  It was good to come out in her own clearing where it still had some light left and to tramp clear of the trees. The only thing left of the big butts in here was their stumps, and that was their best part, for the stumps couldn’t shut you in, and you could grow life-giving crops around them. Yes, and it had one more thing left of the trees. That was their brush cut and piled over yonder. Those limbs a drying and leaves a dying would block out no more sun from her or her ground. They made a pleasing sight to a settler; for the best way such liked the trees was down, with their arms slashed off and ready for burning. The sweetest sound to a human deep in these woods was the hard whack of the axe, cutting or splitting, trimming or hewing, ringing a long ways through the timber till all the trees around knew what was coming to them.

  She stopped in the dusk to look about her clearing. Open sky hung above but the woods never went far off. They stood just over yonder with their walls black against the sky. Her corn stems looked thin and puny against the great butts, her cleared ground scanty. Even her cabin looked small and pitiful aside of the big timber. But it had a tight roof against the rain, stout walls against beasts and winter, a bed to sleep in, a fireplace to cook by and gourds on clapboard shelves spilling over with what grew in woods and patches. Hanging on her rafters she had dittany for tea, herbs for complaints, a jug of whiskey if you needed it and sacks of meal and grain. With these she reckoned they could make out.

  As she crossed the corn patch she could hear night dogs carrying on around Panther Hill. Portius’s folks from the Bay State would think it a howling wilderness out here. But you got used to it. Last winter young John MacWhirter had to club a whole pack of night dogs on the way home from seeing the girl he was sweet on. He claimed those wolves had cured him of sparking. But next Sunday night, Cora said, he was back with the girl like usual.

  Oh, it was a strong country out here. The woods died mighty hard. No soft living like back East. It had slews of work and plenty varmints, beasts and humans. But they couldn’t keep folks from clearing and plowing, hunting and sugaring, visiting and celebrating some public day if they wanted. Life went on much the same out here, she reckoned, like it did back in the Bay State.