The Fields

by Conrad Richter

  When she opened her eyes from the thunderclap, nothing but the frozen woods lay in sight. The snow among the butts stretched from here to yonder, empty of bird or beast. She couldn’t mind when she felt so spited and downhearted. She felt like she couldn’t get up from her knees. Then from behind that granddaddy log, a bronze and gold feathered wing heaved up and fell out of sight. Hardly could she believe her great fortune when she got there, and hardly could she get her hands on it quick enough so it couldn’t get away. She told herself she could go back to her hungry young ones now. Wouldn’t their mouths gape and their eyes pop when they saw their mam come across the clearing with a whole slew of turkey cock, its blood-red wattles a dragging on the snow! Tomorrow she would take some white meat, a drumstick and second joint over for Mrs. Covenhoven, Genny and Guerdon. Her own young ones would have plenty to eat till Portius got back.

  It was close to candle light the day he showed up. She heard men talking and threw open the door. There was Portius coming up the trace with Jake Tench and four or five men. They all leaned forward as they tramped on account of the sacks on their backs. Portius seemed bent over the most. It looked like he carried his whole load. Her eyes ran back and forward but couldn’t find what she looked for. Some of the men came over a ways with Portius when they saw her. They called out that the Kentucky folks had treated them fine. They couldn’t have treated them finer had Portius been a judge. Each man had got sixty pounds of shelled corn to pack home.

  “But where’s Resolve?” Sayward wanted to know.

  The other men turned eyes on Portius, who shifted his sack. He had a little more flesh than when he left but he looked mighty tired and stooped from toting his load so long.

  “Resolve didn’t come home with us, Sayward,” he said kindly.

  A great fear rose in her. Hush up, she scolded herself; now wait till you hear about this.

  “Where’s he at?” she wanted to know.

  “He hurt his self, Saird,” Jake Tench told her.

  “How bad?” she put to them; her eyes on one face after the other.

  “His leg’s fractured in two places,” Portius said gravely. “He was out horseback with another boy and fell off.”

  “Everybody in Kentuck has horses,” Billy Harbison put in.

  “You didn’t leave him down ’ar with his leg broke in two places!” Sayward cried.

  “We couldn’t carry him and the corn,” Portius explained. “Also, it wouldn’t have helped his leg to mend.”

  “You could have made him a sled.”

  “It has no snow down ’ar, Saird,” Jake Tench said. “And moughty little at the river.”

  “But who’s a takin’ keer of him?” Sayward begged.

  “You need have no fear on that score,” Portius promised her. “The people he is with are very fine. They have means and own several slaves. I am convinced Resolve will be well taken care of. They gave me their word they would bring him home as soon as his leg was healed.”

  Sayward took the heavy sack from his back and said nothing more. Perhaps Resolve had a warm house to stay in and rations to eat, but what if he got sick down there? He was only a boy and there was no telling what might happen to such in a foreign place. How could they have come back without him? She poured some of Portius’s corn from the sack to the handmill to grind. This was “yaller”-colored, white man’s corn. In the dark cabin it looked like nuggets of gold. Oh, they’d have meal now, but a mighty dear price they had to pay for it. She reckoned she knew tonight why Jacob cried he would surely die if his lad, Benjamin, did not come back to his house. That story in the Good Book was only too true. Wasn’t the whole story of Joseph most like what had happened here in Ohio — the famine that came sore to the land — the men who went down to Egypt for corn — and the lad, Benjamin, they took along? Now the men had come back to Canaan with their corn, but the boy, Benjamin, had not come back with them. No, they had kept him down among the flesh pots of Egypt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE IMPROVEMENT

  IT was a pitiful-looking lot, Sayward thought, that heard the circuit rider when he came around in the spring. The sawmill church looked done for. Goshorn had gone down the river last year taking the mill irons with him. The sawmill roof was blown to the ground and the March flood this year had left its mud over everything. There were no planks. Those that came had to sit where they could, on the frame logs and the piles of drift stuff.

  But the woods didn’t look pitiful. No, these last two years the settlers had their tails cut off right behind their ears, but the trees hadn’t. The big butts stood around, more lordly and toplofty than ever, shouldering one another, crowding out the sky, keeping the humans down under their thumb. Close to the mill where some of the trees had been cut down, the brush was already high as a man’s head and thicker than hair on a dog’s back. In the mill itself sprouts had rammed up here and yonder between the logs of the saw carriage. Meeting-folk looked mighty discouraged sitting there with brush between them and the preacher. Had it done no good then fighting the woods all these years, breaking their backs over roots, sprouts and butts? Every deserted improvement they saw had gone back to the wild. Even this place where every six weeks the Lord came down, was wilderness again.

  Were the woods stronger than God Almighty then? Sayward asked herself. Going back on the trace with her young ones, the MacWhirters, the Covenhovens and others, she hardly heard what was said. She was thinking of all the settler folks she knew bent with rheumatiz and joint-thickened from lifting the monster logs. Oh, the big butts were a hard foe for humans to fight, a race of giants with arms thicker than any other beast around, and body weighty as the river bed. There they stood with their feet deep in the guts of the old earth and their heads in the sky, never even looking at you or letting on you were there. This was their country. Here they had lived and died since back in heathen times. Even the Lord, it seemed, couldn’t do much with them. For every one He blew down, a hundred tried to grow up in its place.

  Sayward kept thinking till her party came to the parting of the ways.

  “What do you say, Saird?” Jude MacWhirter asked her.

  “Say to what?” she wanted to know.

  “I’ve been askin’ ye,” Jude said, “would ye and Portius part with a lick of your land for the Lord?”

  “What for?” she pondered.

  “Does the Lord have to tell ye His will?” Jude twittered her.

  “No, but He told you. I reckon He kin tell me. It’s my land.”

  Jude sobered.

  “The last two year we’ve been outside the Lord’s mercy. We ought to raise Him a house and tabernacle so He kin dwell among us.”

  Sayward did not say anything.

  “We can’t meet at that old mill any more,” Mrs. Covenhoven put in.

  “Remember the word of the Lord in Exodus,” the circuit rider exhorted. He always left his horse at the MacWhirters’ and walked with them to meeting. “God said, ‘Speak unto the children of Israel, that they may bring me an offering….And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them….Behold, I make them a covenant; before all thy people will I do marvels such as have not been done in all the earth.’ ”

  Sayward looked at him. Oh, his voice rang out strong and sure as if he knew. His surtout was long, his hat black and cocked with churchly authority. And yet how puny he looked against all the great butts!

  “What do you say, Saird?” Jude asked her again.

  “What ails your land? You got more than me.” Sayward knew they wouldn’t pay for meeting-house land. She’d be expected to give it free.

  “They’s plenty would jump at the chance to have it by their place, Saird,” Jude said simply. “But your land is handiest to all. Besides, it’s got a buryin’ ground.”

  Sayward looked off through the trees where rude headstones showed the three or four graves. Now wouldn’t it be fitting if little Sulie and Jary could lie in a church yard!

  “None of my land’s for sale,
Jude,” she said. “But the meetin’ house kin have a acre up against the buryin’ ground if it wants.”

  “That’s just where we want it,” he declared. “I claim them two always go together.”

  The men walked over through the woods so the circuit rider could give them the benefit of ecclesiastical advice, where the house of God should stand and how it should face. Sayward stayed back with the others. It wasn’t good for a woman to horn in on men’s matters, though she be asked to help provide for them. Freely she would give land toward the Lord’s home and freely chink and daub it with her own hands. But in her heart she must ask herself what good would it do against the wilderness? Oh, the woods might shake and tremble the first time they saw humans eating bread that was the Lord’s body and drinking wine that was His blood. But not any more. Not after seeing His meeting place today. How wrecked and brush-choked and pitiful it looked! No heathen trees around here would be scared again. They would only whisper and mock among themselves at a new house of the Lord.

  She half expected Portius to cast it up to her when he heard she had agreed to give away an acre of their ground, for he was a free thinker and didn’t hold to the church or gospel. Now if he had come out against it, she would have stood up for it more, remembering how she felt at the first meeting. But all he gave her was a halfways sharp look.

  “That’s rather close to home,” was all he said.

  “I reckon a meetin’ house won’t hurt us none,” she said, but to herself she added, “and won’t hurt the wilderness none either.”

  Portius said nothing more right then, and nothing right out afterwards. You had to look sharp on anything he did say to see whether he was making fun or not. That was Portius’s way. He called back settlers Salt Creekers, and the kettleful of milk that first Resolve and then Guerdon fetched from Covenhovens, sassafras milk. The first time the farmers came to clear ground for the church was by moonlight, for they had plenty to do at home by day. Next morning Portius started calling it the Moonshine Church. Sayward gave him a sharp look the first time he said it and he never cracked a smile. Still, she didn’t trust him. But if he aimed to poke fun at the meeting house, it didn’t work, for others took up the name. Evenings were about the only time they had to work on the raising. Soon most everybody called it the Moonshine Church, and the name got so common, nobody thought about it any more one way or the other.

  But Portius wasn’t one of these single-ball hunters who shot off his lead and was done. So, sirree, his mind was rich and rank as a chestnut stump underground. Cut off one sprout, and up came another. When his moonshine joke didn’t work, he tried some other. Portius mightn’t believe in churches but he wrote out a deed for it without charging a penny and worked hard as anybody notching and saddling logs. One time when the women were putting in the chinking, he told how a traveling dominie back in the Bay State made a bet he could make those in front of him cry while those in the back laughed.

  Well, sir, Portius said, that dominie preached in a hayfield. He preached on Ruth who followed her husband into an alien land. Soon he had those in front of him crying. Then he reached around to scratch himself. Now when he parted the tails of his fine coat, those that stood in back of him had to snicker, for they could see the dominie’s bare behind. So he won his bet to make those in front cry and them in back laugh at the same time.

  “Wha’? Wha’s that ye say?” Granny MacWhirter wanted to know when they laughed, and Portius had to say it over the second time loud in her ear. “That’s an old one,” she said, making a face. “I heerd that long ago. And it didn’t happen in the Bay State either. If I mind right, it was in Pennsylvany. But I’ll tell ye one ye ain’t heerd. It’s true as gospel though. I knowed a lad who was ’ar. This was in Pennsylvany too. The dominie’s name was Ballard. He was a stout, hearty feller. Most dominies like their grog. This one liked playing deil’s cards in the back of the tavern. ‘Do like I say, not like I do,’ he would tell his church folks. Well, this time he played moughty late Saturday night. He was still a dealin’ when the church bell threw a scare in him Sabbath mornin’. ‘Tha’s my call to meetin’, boys,’ he said. ‘I got a sarment to preach and ye got to go along and support me.’ Well, his cronies got him ’ar, though he fell asleep through the choir singin’. When the singin’ was done, the choir master had to step on the pulpit and give him a nedge. ‘It’s your turn now, parson,’ he give him the whisper, and the dominie woke up. ‘Whar’s the jack o’ diamonds?’ he called out, a rubbin’ his eyes. Right out in church, he said it. Wa’n’t that a rich one?” Granny cackled. “Right out in meetin’, he said it. ‘Whar’s the jack o’ diamonds?’ he said. A boy I knowed, heerd him.”

  Everybody laughed, but Sayward noticed that the men went right on fitting rafters to the comb of the meeting house, and the women wedging sticks between the logs for chinking. It seemed those that could laugh the heartiest at a joke on a dominie or church were the ones who worked the hardest getting one here and gave more sang and skins toward it than anybody else. There wasn’t much more to do now, not till that “kag” of nails came up the river from a nailery back along the Monongahela. Long roof poles tied with hickory wythes might be all right to hold down the shakes on settlers’ cabins, but they would look like heathen horns a sticking out from the house of the Lord. The roof could wait for those nails. The circuit rider wasn’t making his rounds again now till fall. The Sabbath he was coming had been marked off in the almanacs, and that would see preaching in the first God’s house around these parts.

  Most late summer and early fall Sayward could see the log walls of the meeting house from her doorstep. Standing there wet and cold during the rainy spells, it looked lonesome as any settler’s or savage’s cabin half-built and deserted in the deep woods. Back in the hills Louie’s and Genny’s old cabin gave Sayward a turn every time she saw it, dark, rainsoaked and not a human sign around. That’s the way it was with this meeting house of the Lord’s, and worse, for Genny’s house had a roof and the Lord’s had none. Will Beagle had axed and worked a pulpit out of black walnut and a Lord’s table of white oak with legs pegged into holes on the under side to hold it up. What stumps had been inside the church they had left stand, and now they rolled in handsawn blocks so puncheons could be laid from one to the other for pews. And yet every time Sayward walked over and peeped in, it still looked damp, homeless and forsaken. It made her wonder why the Lord, who the dominie said had all heaven and earth to live in, would choose to come down and stay in a dark, friendless place like that even if it was His house and tabernacle. You’d reckon He’d rather visit some settler’s cabin where it had a fire burning, the milk of human talk a flowing and the pleasant sound of young ones fighting and scuffling on the floor.

  By the time the big day of the first meeting came around, Sayward had a coat and cap made for Sooth, her littlest, who hadn’t been sprinkled yet. Billy Harbison had paid Portius a small sack of sang roots for settling up his land, and this she traded at George Roebuck’s for red flannel that wasn’t too scratchy. She made the coat big enough so Sooth wouldn’t grow out of it in a hurry. But if she did, there was another coming along to use it. When she pulled the little limber arms through the sleeves, fitted the cap over head and ears and tied the ribbon under that scrimpy chin, the small face smirked out at her like a pleased possum out of a fall “shumack” bush. Over yonder she could hear Buckman Tull blowing his horn for meeting, but she didn’t need to hurry. All she and her young ones had to do was cross the run and tramp a short ways beyond.

  It was too bad that “kag” of nails hadn’t come up the river yet. The church roof was still lacking. You could look right up through the rafters and see a gray squirrel throwing his self from branch to branch on the red oak. Before Buckman blew his horn the second time, the meeting house was nearly full, for settlers were coming in the woods again. She could hear Jake Tench and some of the men still outside calling and joking to late ones as they came. Inside it was quiet and still. Sayward reckoned this must
be what the circuit rider called holy. The whispering s-s-s and sh-sh-sh of women’s lips only fitted the hush and solemn piety of the place.

  Now when, Sayward asked herself, had the spirit of the Lord come into His house? Why, only last evening when she walked over here, the meeting house had looked empty and forlorn. But sitting here today with the elders up in front and the dominie on his pulpit, you could feel something mortal good in this place that wasn’t here before. Could it be, she pondered, that the spirit of the Lord had strayed in with the folks when they came?

  Even the rain, when it started, didn’t hurt that good feeling any. Seemed like rain couldn’t touch it. Zephon Brown stood holding his umbrella over the circuit rider’s head, and the people listened all the harder to his preaching. Sayward had settled back for the “sarment.” It wasn’t so much what the circuit rider said. You didn’t have to listen to him all the time if you didn’t want. You knew anyway what he was going to say for long stretches, and if you didn’t, you wouldn’t starve on that account. You could let your mind run where the spirit took you. Mostly it took Sayward out of this meeting house, down the river to Resolve in Kentucky. Why, she hadn’t seen her oldest boy for nigh onto a year! God keep him and mend that leg of his’n which didn’t want to heal so she could lay eyes on him again! The spirit took her to Wyitt, too, and to Achsa, her sister Sulie and Worth. But which way it went to them she had no “idee,” for nobody around here knew where they were at.

  Now and then she let her mind come back to the preacher to see if she had missed anything. Her young ones pressed close on her lap and both sides of her. They pricked up their ears when their “A’nt Ginny” stood up and sang. This was special. Buckman Tull, Zephon Brown and Idy Tull stood up with her, and nobody else could join in with them. An anthem, Genny had called it. All summer she had been telling Sayward how they got together and practised at it. This is the way at one place it went: