The Fields

by Conrad Richter

  Sayward walked around the side of her house. It wouldn’t be long now till the Covenhovens’ fields and hers joined up. She could look out then and see smoke rising from Genny’s fire. Genny was a fixture at the Covenhovens by this time. Colonel Suydam had offered her wages if she’d come up to his great log house with a long, sloping roof that came out in a kind of forbey like a barn. Under that forbey they had an outside room with benches they called a porch. He wanted her to help with the housework. But Will Beagle didn’t wish her to take it. Besides, Genny was like one of the family at Big John’s. She had it easy, too, for neither she nor the Covenhovens had chick nor child to their name. And yet Sayward was telling Mrs. Covenhoven only last week, here she was just a short piece from her sister and hardly ever did they see each other last winter save at meeting. She would be glad when the last strip of woods was down between. Then she could look out and see Genny fetch in wood or hang up the wash or go to the outhouse.

  Yes, the country around here was taming up a little with the woods partly cut down. It didn’t seem like the Ohio wilderness any more on a soft day like today. You could see and smell spring in the air. The whole countryside hung in a faint blue March mist. Oh, you knew spring wasn’t here to stay. That’s what made it so mortal sweet. In the woods was still winter but here in the open fields it was different. The bosom of the old earth warmed to the milky sun like a babe to its mam who had been off a good while. The ground thawed. Every place had water running and tinkling. They’d had such good licks of rain lately, and last winter’s deep snows had left plenty moisture deep in the guts of the old earth. It would likely run out all summer in the springs and small branches. Where she had sowed grass seed on the last melting snow, the ground was already faintly green with tiny shoots, and Libby claimed she had seen blue-stem mint along the run where it liked to keep its feet wet along with calmus root. Little birds were here flushing out of the winter wheat and feeding along the cleared ground. On the other side somewheres came the tank-a-lank-lank of Star’s and Bossy’s and Spot’s bells. Those cows knew just where to crop along the edge of the woods where the sun and warmth of the open fields had swelled up the leaf buds with sap and life.

  Now who was that coming up the run with her younger ones? It looked like Billy Harbison with something in his hand. When he got closer, she saw it was a bird in a cage that he made his own self out of basket willow.

  “Why, Billy!” she said, pleased. “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age. How’s Mary and Salomy?”

  “Oh, middlin’ fair,” he told her.

  “They never come down any more,” Sayward complained.

  “I reckon they just don’t get around to it,” he said, dodging her eyes.

  Sayward didn’t need ask more. She knew why they didn’t come like they used to. The last years Billy looked like a bush-nipple in his old-style buckskin hunting frock with half the tassels torn off. His britches had a leather seat and knees, but the homespun parts were nigh onto whipped to pieces by the brush. His cap was fur even in the summer time. Oh, she knew good enough. Hadn’t her own pappy been a hunter like Billy? When this was still all woods, and game, he had been good as anybody else, and better than most, for he knew just where to get meat for his table and skins that were good as gold at the post. Yes, those days Worth Luckett and Billy Harbison with their rifles and hounds counted for something around here. But the country had changed and passed Billy by. He’d lost his first place to Zephon Brown, and he never raised much on his second place up the river. He wouldn’t hire out with the axe if he could help it. His work was following the woods. No one was better at it than he, but that’s all he could do. Now the times had left him behind, for he couldn’t fit himself to the new. He kept on hunting what game he could find, selling what pelts he could skin. Mostly they were small and no account. He helped out at butcherings and tramped far for sang. It hadn’t much left to dig out, and he filled in with all the dried slippery-elm bark the chemist shop at Maytown would buy. Now and then he trapped some small beast or bird alive and sold it as a pet, but gabby birds were getting scarce. Their fine green and gold feathers had doomed them. It was a slim living he made and small comforts they had in their cabin up the river. Mary and Salomy hadn’t much to trick themselves out in, and that’s why they didn’t come around any more now that Sayward and Portius were getting up in the world with farm and stock, a two-pen cabin and Portius’s lawyer business.

  “What you got ’ar, Billy?” Sayward asked him.

  “Corn cracker,” Billy said. He held up the cage. Behind the wicker bars the prisoner sat with dejected red feathers. Billy shook the cage and whistled at the bird, but it never stirred. “He’ll whistle once he’s broke in,” he promised.

  “I heerd some around of late,” Sayward told. “But I didn’t think they were that plenty. How’d you get him?”

  “Oh, you got to know how,” Billy grinned. His teeth were mossy-brown as a gray moose’s. He wouldn’t tell. That was just like her pappy. Worth wouldn’t tell his trapping secrets to his own young ones for fear they’d give them away.

  “Can I have the red bird, Mam?” Sooth begged.

  “It’s for Mrs. Covenhoven,” Billy explained. “She said she’d give me a shillin’ for the cage and maybe more for the bird.”

  In the old days, Sayward thought, Billy would have given such for nothing. Sooth began to sniffle.

  “You can see it over at A’nt Ginny’s,” Sayward said.

  “I could fetch ye a fox kit,” Billy offered. “I got one at the cabin. But maybe your mam don’t want one.” He looked slyly at Sayward. “You know that tame fox I sold the preacher down at Maytown? He got loose in the lot of the lady next door. She had sewin’ thread on the grass to bleach, and he rolled on it and tangled it. She claimed he spoiled it, dirtied it all up. You know how a fox does.”

  “I want a red bird in a willer cage!” Sooth wailed.

  “Well, I’ll git ye one,” Billy promised. “I kain’t tell you when, but they’re a comin’ in. I seed a bee bird last summer. It’s no bigger’n a snake doctor. Feeds and hums like a honey bee. Quail pa’tridges comin’ in, too. Redbreast robins and blue birds!”

  “Land sakes!” Sayward said, pleased. “Where are they all comin’ from?”

  “It’s the fields that fetch them. Possum’s here now and slick-tailed mice. Crows and blackbirds. The game’s moved out and they’re a movin’ in. I reckon the woods is done for. It’s farmin’ country through here now.” He said it sadly, his eyes far off as if he was thinking of something long ago.

  “Come in the house, Billy. I’ll get a piece for you. I got something you like,” Sayward said.

  “No, thankee, Saird. I want to git my money outa this corn cracker before he dies on me.”

  She watched him as he went, carrying the freshly barked willow cage. It made her feel as if she were looking after her father. That’s how he’d still dress if he were back, in brush-whipped buckskins. That’s about what he’d be doing, toting around some trapped bird or small beast to trade. And that’s the pitiful way he’d walk. She felt glad he wasn’t here. The country was changing fast. Why, she could mind when folks came from all over to see Hugh McFall’s field without stumps! It was a nine days’ wonder then. Now she had a field like that herself. She was putting it back to corn this spring.

  It wouldn’t be long now, she told herself, till the stumps in most of her fields would be gone, burned through, yanked up and dug out. She hated in a way to see them go, for she knew every last one as good as she did her sheep and geese, the fat stumps and the leaner ones, those that leaned this way and those that leaned that, some cut high, some low, some barked and most of them blackened by fire. They were all she had left to remind her of the world of butts she had cut and niggered, mostly with her own hands, to free her black ground.

  Yes, times here in the Ohio wilderness were changing. When you went on B’ars Hill today you could see the whole land circling around you studded with farms. Why, this w
as settlement country now. Only yesterday an old woman from up Crazy Creek stopped at the cabin with her grand-child. She said the young one just moped in the woods at Crazy Creek. She didn’t even want to tramp along to Moonshine Church to trade. Not till she had passed through most of the woods and begun to smell the sweetness of chimney smoke and know it had cabins with humans living close by did she perk up. She couldn’t get over all the worn paths that told how many young ones were living around here. And when she saw cleared field after field with rail fences, she started to talk and chatter. It was the farms here that “done it,” her grandmam said, the cleared land, the houses and cabins, the store and ferry house that opened her mind to life like cutting down the trees opened the ground to light. It made a different young body out of her.

  Tonight when Sayward came out after supper to help Resolve milk, the sun was down behind the woods, and clear shadows lay over the fields. Half wild, half sweet it was. She took the cows out her own self to the black, stumpy pasture with its velvet sod cropped close to the ground. That pasture flowed right into the timber till the woods stood all around it. The bells on her cows sounded lazy on the evening air. A soft pink cloud floated over the trees like summer. The air moving down the run was cold and fresh as spring water. When she went back she could see her sheep together in a clump, facing the old straw stack. They liked to stand with their front feet higher than their hind ones, their heads highest of all. It was like a picture. They never moved, waiting for her to let them in the shed for the night.

  Yes, Billy was right, she told herself. This was getting to be farming country. If she didn’t know it before, she did now that the red birds had come. That was a sure sign. The times of the deep woods were passing. Farming times were coming around. It would be better times, too, if she knew anything. What was that catch Genny used to sing when she was a slip of a girl?

  Hay cocks in the meader,

  Cherries in the dish.

  Red bird, fly up!

  Give me my wish.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHERRY YOKE

  NOW wasn’t that a surprise, Sayward thought, the news that Jake Tench would marry the school mistress! Tomorrow morning it was to be up at Squire Chew’s. Why, Jake was nigh onto old enough to be her pappy. He didn’t own an acre of land to his name. All he worked at was to fetch goods for George Roebuck up the river and take down skins, grain, maple sugar, sang, ’parilla and feathers, whatever the posts here and Tateville took over the counter in trade. The only good things she ever knew he could do were steer a keel boat over riffles and help pole it back up stream. He wasn’t Mistress Bartram’s kind. Sayward always took it for granted nobody less than the gentry would do for her, but when a babe is on the way, a bride can’t be a chooser.

  The truth was Sayward felt surprise that Jake would even marry her, for he was independent as all get-out. Oh, he was wild enough and would stop for neither dominie nor devil. Just the same he must be beholden to the real father to give the lady a married name and her unborn babe a father, for Sayward didn’t believe the child his. Whose it was, nobody made out to know. When she asked, not a soul could tell her. “Just a woods colt,” was all they would say.

  Oh, this, Sayward reckoned, would be a sad enough wedding. She felt real sorry for the lady. She was such a pretty thing with hair “yaller” and fine as Chiny silk, and clothes neat as wax works. Any other school mistress would have the best folks to her wedding, but none would come to this, Sayward guessed, unless she went her own self. Nobody but the close families would be bid to such makeshift doings, and neither bride nor bridesman had close kin in Ohio. That’s why she spoke to Jake like she did when she passed him on the trace, for Jake was the oldest friend she had in this country. He had come to her wedding. Fact is, if it hadn’t been for Jake, she would have no Portius or family, either one.

  “I’d come to your weddin’ if I was bid, Jake,” she said.

  She never heard Jake laugh harder. He threw back his head, but it hadn’t a good sound.

  “Come on, then,” he told her. “I bid you, Saird.”

  But when she told Portius, she felt the cabin air blow cold. She looked up and found him stern.

  “I don’t wish you to go there,” he told her.

  “Well, I guess I can if I want,” she said mildly. “I know Jake longer’n I do you.” That’s all she said, not a word that it wasn’t for Jake but for his bride that she was going.

  Already when she came up the Chews’ lane she had a kind of gloomy feeling. The squire’s place lay back from the trace in the woods. It had a fine two-storey log house and a good size barn, but folks said it had no stock in it. She never saw a barn stand so far from the house. Oh, the place was laid out on grand lines, but hardly a well-cleared field to the squire’s name. You had to stumble through brush and stumps to go from house to barn.

  Jake and Mistress Bartram were already inside and Mary MacWhirter with them, but if Sayward reckoned they would be glad to see her, she knew better now. Even Jake at his own wedding acted uneasy toward her, and Mary and the school mistress talked together in low voices, with their faces turned away. All the while Squire Chew and his wife stood like two black crows. Sayward never let it disturb her. She greeted them all hearty, then stood “cam” and peaceful as if all were right and proper here as two missionaries marrying in a meeting house. After while as the lawful words came out in the raftered room, she felt something yield in those around her so that the hardness slackened some, and she felt she had been of some use. But, oh, she told herself when she left, it had been a pitiful wedding, with Jake’s hair wild and coarse as a bear’s and his lady pale like she just got out of a sick bed to marry her own coachman. Sayward never felt sorrier at a wedding. She couldn’t put that girl’s frightened tallow face out of her mind.

  She was glad to be off on the trace for home. When she got by the Covenhovens, Genny was waiting for her at the start of the lane.

  “Where you been?” Genny came right out like she was her sister and had full right to know.

  “Just up to the squire’s,” Sayward told her.

  “You didn’t go to that weddin’?”

  “What if I did?” Sayward wanted to know.

  Genny just set her lips and gazed at her.

  “I heerd it, but I wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I’ll get mad in a minute,” Sayward told her patiently. “Why couldn’t I go if I wanted?”

  Genny opened her mouth so you could see her missing tooth. Then she closed it again.

  “Well, I won’t be the one to tell you and have you hold it against me.”

  Sayward set her face.

  “Now I had enough fooling from everybody about this thing. I won’t stir from this spot till you come right out with it,” she said and anybody could tell she meant business.

  When she got back to the farm, Guerdon and Kinzie were grubbing sprouts in the new ground while the younger ones stood around waiting for her to show up. It was long past noon. She set to work right off getting their dinner. After while she could feel her four girls watching her.

  “Your head ache, Mam?” Libby asked when she was nearly ready.

  “No.” Sayward shook it.

  “You feel sick any place?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Sayward said.

  “You don’t look good.”

  “Somethin’s the matter with your eyes,” Sayward told them.

  But when Kinzie came in, he asked, too, if she felt poorly.

  “Why, no, I’m good as I ever was. Call your pap. Dinner’s ready,” she told them, but Kinzie said he wasn’t there. He had gone to Tateville on business and taken Resolve along. Something went through Sayward then. She didn’t know she could feel so cheated. She might have known Portius would go somewheres before she came back from the squire’s. Well, perhaps it was better that way.

  This was the quietest meal she ever remembered with the young ones at the table. Nobody whined or fought or complained.

  “Why
don’t you sit down and eat, Mam?” Guerdon plagued her.

  “I ain’t a hungry,” she said.

  “You got to eat,” Kinzie put in.

  “I know why she won’t eat,” Huldah told Kinzie.

  Sayward turned her weary eyes on her oldest girl. Never before had she noticed how Huldah fetched her sister Achsa to mind. Oh, Achsa had been heavy-set while Huldah was slim as a maple whip. Achsa’s face used to put you in mind of a Delaware, while Huldah’s skin was light and pretty as a new tavern sign. But Huldah’s hair grew black as Achsa’s ever grew, and today her voice was Achsa’s through and through.

  Seeing Achsa in her mind like that must have fetched out all the trouble that lay within her and brought it to a point, for Achsa had done her wrong like Portius had. And now Huldah was acting mighty like her. She’d rather for a little if she didn’t look at Huldah. She turned her back and went to the fire, poking it hard. Never did she notice all the sparks and smoke that kept coming out in the cabin till she turned to see her oldest ones close around her. They had pushed back from the table for never had they seen their mam like this before. She looked like the puncheons were coming up to meet her and like the cabin logs slunk in the walls like snakes.

  “Come on, sit down, Mam!” Guerdon argued with her. He took one side and Kinzie the other. They tried to get her to the table, but she was a horse you couldn’t lead to water and neither could you make her drink. She just shook them off and stood there holding on to her chair.

  So this, she told herself, was how folks felt when they said they had “narve strings” a twitching them this way and that. Why, up to now never did she even know she had a “narve string” in her body. Oh, she had gone through plenty in her time. She had buried her mother and oldest girl. Her pap had run off, her sister lost her mind for a while, and more than once she never knew where her next mouthful was coming from. But always could she hold up her head, even after Achsa ran off with Genny’s Louie. Now she and her young ones had been shamed to the settlement. And it would get no better when Portius and Mistress Bartram’s babe was born. Long as it lived, folks would put their hands to their mouths when they saw it and tell strangers and youth what they knew.