The Fields
Page 7
Sayward looked at her young ones with new eyes every night when she put them to bed, and in the morning when she got up. Resolve wasn’t at the cabin much any more but she still had four at home, three walking and one crawling, when it wasn’t in the cradle. This babe, Libby, was the fairest young one, plump as a pheasant. She had sky-blue eyes and hair like the finest tow a curling. Wasn’t it curious all the mortal sweet babies that crowded each other to get born in hard times! The less they had to eat, the more they came. That’s the way it was through the worst years of the Revolution, Granny MacWhirter said. Then even a single woman had to watch out. She hadn’t dare look at a man, or she’d be liable to find herself in a family way. It was Death, Granny claimed, making up in advance for all he would take away.
Sayward didn’t snap or slap at her young ones now, no matter how mean she felt. Up to this time they had got through all right. Little Resolve was bound out by the month to the Covenhovens where Wyitt used to work. If he stayed six months he was to get his weight in shelled corn. Big John might be slow-witted, but he was forehanded. He always had a store of rations put back. This time he said he couldn’t pay, for he was scraping the bottom of the bin. He had to trade one of his cows last winter and butcher another for food, and this fall he had no feed, so he butchered the last one he had. But Sayward figured one away was one less mouth to feed. The worst was, they said, that George Roebuck was closing up his post. When that word got around, a good many despaired. George Roebuck was about the shrewdest in these parts. If he gave up and left, what chance had it here for anybody else? Families kept pulling out now, getting back to the old states the best way they could.
It felt mighty lonesome and forsaken in the settlement when all who were going had cleared out. George Roebuck was still here, though he kept no meal, grain or cured meat to trade. He claimed he couldn’t get it, but Sayward judged he didn’t want to say No to starving folks who had nothing to pay or trade. Now when it was too late in the season for anything to grow, the rains came heavy enough, and the snow and cold after that. It was pitiful to see Portius, who never would carry a rifle, try to go after game. George Roebuck made a deal with him so he could use the old walnut-stock gun Wyitt had traded in for his curly maple sporting rifle. Now with that ancient firelock on his shoulder, Portius went out every day looking for something to shoot at. Sayward let Guerdon run along with him as his hound, to beat the bushes and stamp the brush piles, for Portius looked so poorly she never knew if he could make it back to the cabin by himself. Seldom did they fetch home enough to keep body and soul together. You could go through the woods for miles on end, Portius said, and hardly see a track in the snow.
Sayward had lived all her born days in the woods. Some winters as a girl she had hardly seen a white face save her own family’s from fall to spring. But never had she seen times like these. Winter lay cruel and still through the woods. How they were going to get through it, nobody knew, for the worst was still to come.
When things looked the darkest, Jude MacWhirter sent word for the men to meet. They were to come at Portius’s cabin, for that was the closest to most. About a baker’s dozen showed up, and a gaunter-looking lot Sayward told herself she had never seen. Jude was a master hand at joking, but he had no stories to bandy today. He came in with cheek, chin and nose bones plainly showing and something wrapped in old calico and tied with a thong. But his voice was strong.
“Men,” he said when he warmed himself, “they’s always a way out.”
Nobody said anything to that. They just eyed him.
“I got it here,” Jude went on, undoing the thong with knotted fingers and disclosing a book bigger and heavier than any Portius owned. It was bound in deerskin with the hair still on. Jude tapped it significantly. “All a man ever need know in the world is in here. I don’t keer what you git into, the saints and elders went through it first. Portius, do you reckon you could read out loud whar I have the bark in?”
Sayward threw a look at Portius, for what Jude held in his hands looked like the Good Book, and Portius was a free thinker. It surprised her as much as anybody when Portius took it, turning it over in his hands like Worth used to look at some special rifle another hunter carried. He opened it at the front and held it up to see something, Sayward did not know what. In the end he settled his stool closer to the firelight and spread the monster book where his thumb had been holding the place all the time.
“Genesis, chapter forty-two,” he began, and his deep voice sounded mighty like a preacher’s.
“ ‘Now when Jacob saw there was corn in Egypt, Jacob said unto his sons, Why do you look one upon another?
“ ‘And he said, Behold I have heard that there is corn in Egypt; get you down thither, and buy for us from thence; that we may live and not die.
“ ‘And Joseph’s ten brethren went down to buy corn in Egypt.
“ ‘But Benjamin, Joseph’s brother, Jacob sent not with his brethren; for he said, Lest peradventure mischief befall him.
“ ‘And the sons of Israel came to buy corn among those that came; for the famine was in the land of Canaan….’ ”
Nobody hindered that reading. Portius sat there gravely holding the great book. All the jaw-cracking names he knew, when to stop a little and when to turn the page. Overhead the cold wind from the English Lakes rattled the clapboards. The men settled their selves on the benches and stools. Faces kept turned toward the Good Book. Guerdon and Kinzie lay at the loft hole listening while Huldah on a stool and Libby on the floor had eyes and ears only for their pappy.
Sayward had heard a grist of stories in her time, but never had she heard this one, how Joseph hadn’t seen his brothers in all these years and how, when he saw them now, he had to weep. Oh, this was no made-up tale like Portius once said the Good Book was. This must be a true story, for that’s the way she would feel if ever her sisters, Sulie and Achsa, came back and she could lay eyes on them and hear their talk again.
But Jake Tench wouldn’t let Portius finish.
“Where is this Egypt at?” he called out.
“That’s what I want to know!” Mathias Cottle said, jumping up from his bench. “How do ye git ’ar?”
“Egypt’s on the other side of the world,” Buckman Tull put in scornfully. “This thing happened a long time ago.”
“Hold on, Buck!” Jude MacWhirter said. “Jake and Matt git the idee better’n you. I reckon Portius knows what I mean.”
Portius nodded. His face had set into sober lines like a judge.
“There should be corn in Marietta. But how do you propose to get it?”
“I was thinkin’ of Kentuck,” Jude MacWhirter said. “Whar my woman comes from. They got cribs down ’ar a runnin’ over. The drought never reached them, we heard.”
Portius considered.
“Have you given any thought to the matter of payment? You recall that Joseph’s brothers in the story carried gold down into Egypt.”
“We got no gold,” Jude admitted. “But you could go along, Portius. You could write out lawful notes and talk them into takin’ it. They’re dead game folks down ’ar. They’ll listen to any arguments you put up, and nobody kin talk you down, Portius, once you got right on your side.”
“He ain’t very good,” Sayward put in. “He could hardly make it all the way down ’ar. And he couldn’t pack much meal home if he did.”
“Your boy could go along,” Hugh McFall said.
“Sure, I kin go!” Guerdon cried from the loft.
“I mean the oldest,” Hugh McFall said.
“Resolve’s bound out,” Sayward told him.
“Could you let him go long enough for that?” Hugh asked John Covenhoven.
“I reckon Saird’s number-two boy could do what little it has to do around my place any more,” Big John agreed.
“Then it’s fixed. Resolve kin go,” Jude said, relieved. “He must be twelve or goin’ on it.”
“He’s only goin’ for eleven,” Sayward told him.
Sayward said nothing more, only watched Portius. He sat there on his stool in front of the fire, a slight, almost delicate figure. He looked as if he could never break the snow to the Forks, let alone to far away Kentucky. But he didn’t lose his dignity.
“It’s a considerable journey to make on foot this time of year,” he said. “But if you gentlemen need me, I shall accompany you, and Resolve can go along.”
Sayward never opened her mouth, not then nor a couple days after as she watched them take their leave. How mighty young Resolve looked, she thought, with all these men! He was slim and fair-faced as a girl against the dark winter woods. She reckoned she knew now how Jacob felt when he let the boy Benjamin go down into Egypt with the men. She stood in the cold at the open door with Kinzie standing by, Huldah holding to her skirt and Libby in her arms. Far as they could see their pappy and brother across the cleared patch, those little arms moved, shaking goodbye.
It had never been so quiet in the cabin like when she closed the door and came back. Even the littlest one could spell out that something had changed. They kept a watching her. When night came and the wind went down, they slept still as death. All you could hear were the cabin logs creaking and cracking with the cold. It would have been a comfort to listen to Put barking in the clearing or whining at the door to be let in, but he had gone off with Wyitt. Where was Wyitt now, she wondered, and how were Portius and Resolve making it, lying out somewhere in the woods on a night like this?
A week after Portius was off, rations at home turned mighty slim. Sayward had shaken the meal bag dry, and the last squirred was sucked to the bones. On purpose that noon she let the fire die low. Then she lifted down the rifle and wrapped herself up warm as she could.
“Now don’t you let Libby crawl to that fire!” she warned Kinzie. “And don’t go near it your own self.”
“Whar you goin’?” the little feller asked, looking at her so straight.
“I’m a goin’ over to Covenhovens and A’nt Ginny.”
“Then what’re you takin’ Pappy’s rifle for?”
“I mought see some meat on the way.”
“What kinda meat?”
“B’ar or ven’zon may be. I’d settle for a gray squirrel if only I kin draw a straight bead on him.”
“Did Pappy say you c’d have his rifle?”
“He knows I have it. He left it for me.”
“Whar is Pappy?”
“You know as good as I do. I tole you twenty times. Now you asked me enough.”
He stood looking at her so steady with his light blue eyes in that freckled face.
“You’re a comin’ back?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t run off from you. Not so long as you ain’t mean and ornery.”
As she closed the door she told herself she didn’t need worry over him. He was nigh onto six years old and he’d take care of that cabin big as a Bay State grownup. It was her own self she better worry about with this rifle. Never had she loaded or fired it up to now. She had to watch she didn’t shoot the wrong way. Wouldn’t it be pitiful if those young ones never saw their mammy again, and not a lick of rations in the cabin? What a sad sight for Portius to find when he got back with the corn, his three littlest ones laying there all skin and bone and froze stiff as steelyards!
First she went to the Covenhovens, but she left the rifle out behind the log barn. Mrs. Covenhoven was down on a pallet. She and Genny both looked pinched. You could see they had mighty little themselves till Big John got back with the corn. Sayward made up her mind she would take no speck of rations from them. If Portius and Guerdon could find some game in these woods, so could she.
“Portius leave you enough till he gits back?” Genny asked.
“Oh, I reckon we kin make out,” Sayward told them. “I just dropped in to see if Guerdon was doin’ right by you.”
All that short winter afternoon Sayward tramped the woods in the snow. Every place she went, the brown bare trees stood frozen. The world looked bleak and dead. It seemed hard to believe it ever had anything in these woods that ran or flew. The only life she found was where some bird or vermin had broken red stuff from a rotten log and scattered it over the white snow. The sun hid behind gray frost smoke. She tramped up the side hills where every path lay white and plain. She tramped the frozen swamps where the trees leaned this way and that. Their roots stood up like great bent knees. But not a living thing did she scare out from under them. Every place she went, nothing moved. The river stood still with ice. Not even a snowbird did she lay eyes on. The whole wilderness stood empty, deserted and forlorn.
Oh, down in her heart she knew what was the matter. It wasn’t the drought that had done this. It was the big hunts. It wasn’t the Lord, but the humans. The men claimed they would clean the game and vermin from these woods. Well, they could be satisfied now. They should be glad her pappy wasn’t here to curse them. Couldn’t they leave enough game to breed for next year, he’d a yelled at them. More than once she heard him sneer at men and women back in Pennsylvany for wasting pigeons. They’d knock them down by the thousands from their roost, salt them away in hogsheads for trade, and shovel the rest to the hogs. But what made him cruel as death when he told it, was the massacre of Pennsylvany’s buffalo. The Wild Bulls’ Last Stand, he used to call it. Up in the White Mountains. They had broke down some hay stacks, and the settlers vowed they’d get those wild bulls. They drove them up in a high mountain valley where the herd could go no further for the deep crusted snow. Then they shot them, first and last, big and little, cut out their tongues and a few humps and let them stand while they went back to their farms singing hymns and whooping themselves hoarse as crows. Worth had seen it his own self. Not that he’d been with the butcher gang. He came by a month after when the herd was still there, a sight for only strong eyes to see, over three hundred bulls, cows and calves standing upright in the deep frozen drifts with their tongues cut out and the crusted snow for half a mile like a red sheet of glass with their blood. He had tried to take some of the hides, but all the thaws and freezes had made them unfit.
Sayward hated to come back to the cabin at nightfall without anything. Oh, she hated to face those hungry little ones empty-handed. When she opened the door she felt glad they lay asleep, all tumbled together in their mammy’s bed with the yarn blankets pulled over them. She would let them sleep all night if they would, for bodies dead to the world didn’t know that their little guts were empty.
Next morning she shook out the two bed ticks and went over them like a fine haw comb. From the corn shucks she got a few colored kernels and from the wheat straw enough scrubby grains to make a fistful. Kinzie helped her. These she ground separately as well as she could. She set the stones close as they’d go and put it through more than once to make it fine as miller’s meal. Then she hung each on the fire in different kettles. The wheat she would let boil a couple days to make the coarse parts soft so little guts could take them. The mush they could have by evening. It was a hard thing to hold those hungry young mouths back. Any one of them could have downed that kettle of thin mush by its own self, but the mush had to last three days, and the wheat gruel as long afterward. Kentucky was a far place. It would be a coon’s age till their pappy and brother came back. And then how did she know if they’d fetch anything?
Sayward little more than licked the wooden spoon for herself. She was big and hearty and could go without. But never, she told herself, did she know how mortal sweet mush tasted before. Once a day she gave each mouth a couple of spoonsful and the rest of the time kept it out of young arms’ reach. Oh, they scraped the second kettle clean as the first till they had nothing to suck on but spicewood. Sayward had seen pitiful things in her time, but never anything that gave her the cold sweat like these three little pinched bodies. The two oldest didn’t fight and yell their heads off any more. No, they stayed
put like hunks of firewood and when they cried, it was to themselves, in a kind of low, numb misery.
Sometimes she wasn’t sure it was them a crying. That soft moaning might be in her own head. One time she thought she heard men a coming. Their voices sounded plain. But when she went to the door, not a living soul was in sight. Today the notion drifted in her mind that she heard a turkey gobbling. Now wasn’t that mocking? She could hear it plain in her head. She paid no heed for it couldn’t be. Didn’t she know? Hadn’t she tramped these woods with a gun from Panther Hill to the Narrows? Only when she went out with the kettle for snow to melt did she see a dark-colored fowl big as a goose halfway run and halfway fly across the corn stubbles. Then she stumbled back for the rifle.
She was out again crawling from stump to stump when it came to her she had put on nothing against the cold. She couldn’t mind closing the door either. She looked back. There it stood wide open and her youngest three looking out for what they could see. It was too late to go back now. If they frosted their tender young faces, they would have to take it. Already her own fingers were blue with snow and cold. She could see nothing of the turkey, but she could hear him some ways on in the woods. She hadn’t noticed before how far her and Portius’s small corn patch was across. Once in the woods she knelt behind some buck laurel and looked through. After a while a head stuck up from behind a great log on ahead. That head had a long neck and blood-red wattles swinging. One time she could see nothing. Another time it would straighten up behind that granddaddy log and look all around. Oh, she tried to keep still as a saw horse and draw a bead with Wyitt’s rifle, but her hands shook so with cold that the barrel pitched and heaved. Her frozen lump of a finger couldn’t find the trigger. She wondered how that turkey cock could stand there so long, laying its head this way and that, turning one eye and then the other. Now Wyitt and her pappy had always said the turkey had the sharpest eyes in the woods. Or maybe it was ears. Sayward couldn’t mind which.