by John Ehle
The bear’s big tongue flopped to the other side of his mouth and he slobbered into the hair of his chest.
Mooney rose slowly. Imy called to him. She was coming down the path. A leap or two of the bear, he thought, and he would be stunned or crushed and Imy would be left alone, out here in the wilderness. “Don’t you move, boy,” he said softly. He remembered that somebody in Virginia had told him how to charm a bear by humming, and he began to hum.
A dry stick broke behind him. He felt Imy’s hand come into his own, and he gripped her fingers tightly. “He stands there as friendly,” he said.
But the bear was not friendly. The bear was austere, was a lonely superior figure, the master of the place, of the spring, of the mountain, of the woods, of whatever his red eyes saw. He looked at them with dumb-minded contemplations.
Mooney and Imy began to back away a step at a time up the path. “Can ye sing a song to him?” he asked her.
“I can’t recollect one,” she said.
“He don’t know words. Sing him a song.”
She began to sing softly. The great bear watched them, not moving, except that the night breeze waved the long hair of his chest and belly.
When they were far enough away to move quickly, they turned and hurried to the fire and began to stack on wood to make it flare brightly.
They worked more swiftly now. They notched the logs and rolled the base logs into place. They notched smaller logs and lifted them up to form the wall, working patiently, determined to keep the corners straight and even. The moon was still shrinking as they laid the roof boards and fastened them down with saplings, which they pegged at the ends.
Next day he cut two saplings and made runners for a sled. He cut ash saplings, for he knew they would not wear out if dragged on the ground. The horse pulled the sled to the river, where he and Imy loaded it with smooth rocks. Time after time they brought rocks back to the house for the hearth and chimney. They laid them and chinked them with small stones and sticks and handfuls of clay. The rocks cut their hands and the clay shriveled on their skins, but they stayed with the work until it was done.
They were weary then; it was as if the work had sapped them, as if their strength had been absorbed into the house. Imy was weaker than he had ever seen her. She was drained to a softness, had wilted even to the eye. He saw her stop in the woods when she didn’t know he was about and stand resting, as if wondering about her weariness, and he was awakened one night by her coughing and restlessness.
I’ll take her into the cabin, he thought, and see that she keeps warm this winter and out of the night air. She will be all right.
He cut eighteen holes with the auger into the door boards. He pegged the boards in a double thickness with large pegs, driving the dried wood into the damp wood, which would shrivel around it and grasp it tightly.
They lifted the door into place. It did not fit exactly, but it could be made secure. They fashioned three hickory hinges and swung the door on these, then put leather hinges on, too, and greased them with deer fat to keep them from squeaking. They gathered leaves for the bed. They carried in firewood and stacked it in one corner. He closed the door and propped it shut. She laid a fire, and he brought his flint and powder and lit it. The fire caught and began to crackle.
“Look a there,” she said. He turned with her and saw the reflection of the fire on the new logs and on the moist, cold clay around the stones on the hearth, and on the unsmoked stones of the hearth on which the fire lay. They were standing in the center of a glistening womb which they had made.
Like children they began to move about, poking their hands at the solid walls, chuckling at the sturdiness of the place, at the warmth of it, at the safety they felt inside it. Then she got to coughing and had to lie down.
No, she wasn’t as well as he wished, but she would come into the fields and help some as he girdled trees, as he would cut gashes around the trunk so that the tree would die. He cleared a patch of land, cutting down small trees, ripping out the bushes, and girdling the big trees. She helped, though not with any heavy work at all.
He made her a bed of saplings and new boards and set it in the cabin across from the fireplace.
As the nights grew more chilly, she coughed all the more. He kept the fire burning high all night, but the night air got into her lungs anyway and stung her. He chinked the house so tightly that very little light could be seen through the walls; even so, the night air always seemed to reach her, and one morning he noticed she was flushed and when he felt of her face, he guessed she had a fever, and nothing in his life had caused him such anguish.
He would pray if he could pray. He would work or slash or kill to spare her, but there was no way to fell the heavy-gripped thing which had a hold of her. He would slash his own body to save her, but that was no good, either. He would walk that valley over, seeking the one who challenged him for her, but even as he stood in the clearing and gazed into the woods, he saw nothing, would see nothing, he knew, out there, except whatever leaves drifted to the newly torn ground.
He wouldn’t let her carry water. He let her cook some, but not as much as before. She made a little cornbread; that was about all. She seemed to like cornbread and coffee better than anything else, and he made her use all the coffee beans they had. At night he would sit by the fire and grind up coffee beans for the next day.
One morning he milked; then he drank some of the milk and took the rest to the door of the cabin and set it inside.
The cow followed him. She stuck her nose against him. He pushed her back. “Get on,” he said.
He stood there waiting, listening for some word or sound, a word of pleasure, an instruction, question, sigh.
He went inside and stood near the door for a while, before he went to the bed and sat down and took her hand. He leaned far forward and looked into her face. “Imy?” he said.
“What time of day is it?” she said.
“Morning. It’s early yet, and it’s a cloudy day again.”
“I lose track of time.”
“You want some milk? I finished the milking.”
“I lose track of time and get so scared of dying.”
“Oh, listen here, you talk like Mrs. Martingale when she come ill, but she lived for years after that.”
“We come so far to here. Way off from where we was. The mountains crowd us in.” She shuddered and turned from that thought and held out her hand to him. “See how strong I am,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, feeling her squeeze his fingers in her hand, but she was not strong at all.
Yet she would be all right, he knew, if she could get through to spring. It was simply that she had overworked, here at a time when winter weather came, for snows were beginning to come down from the high peak; a few whiffs of snow could be felt almost any morning. Lord knows how cold it would get up here.
She had helped him too much. A woman wasn’t made to do clearing. She had helped cut trees and pull brush and burn off. Maybe that was it, that in the brush smoke had been the pained spirit of this place, and it had got inside her and was expanding outward, smoldering, stifling her.
It was stealing her away from him at the start of their work and adventure. He was losing her, the body and presence and affection of her, and there was no one else in the place or in his life.
2
A few days later, a large party led by a small bearded man, his head heavy with white hair, was making its way into the valley. Out front three Negro male slaves worked to hack a wider trail for the oxen and carts, sweating in the cold morning air. They never ceased work, their axes never stopped flailing in the sunlight. One of them began to sing, a low-voiced dusky song that seemed more for the lowlands than for this high place, and another answered.
“He’s fierce this morning,” the first one whispered.
“This morning’s no different,” the other said.
They got to singing about him, Tinkler Harrison, but in words so sullied and hidden that he couldn�
��t make them out, in meanings so secret he couldn’t understand. They were singing about Virginia and the farm there, and about the long road they had traveled since in late summer, once the crops were in, he had told them he had sold the land off and was moving out from there. He never said why, or to where they were going.
Harrison heard them singing but didn’t pay much attention. He was not a man of music, or a man who cared about diversion. He watched their axes and knives flash in the mountainside sunlight; he watched the trail as it was being widened, and he paced about in an unsettled way, made discontent by every delay, here on the day of his arrival at the place he had sought out, had driven for over thirty days to reach.
Off in Virginia he had had a plantation, not as good as the best in that country, but one rich enough. It was not the best, however, and he could not command the sort of respect he wanted in a place where other men had a right to as much respect as he, so he had made plans to leave there even before he knew in any clear thought that he would leave.
His plans had started when his two oldest sons had left home, one in flight of a night, one more leisurely. This second boy had married and had brought his wife home to stay, and all went as well as needed to, the old man thought, until one day Avery, the son, came to him and asked for a piece of land of his own. “No,” Harrison told him. “I don’t want to break up my plantation; it’s not as large as the Wilson place now, there down the road.” Avery went away to consider that, and a second day he came to him and said he wanted stock so that he could start his own fortune. “No,” Harrison told him. “I need the best stock for my own use, and I wouldn’t want to give you poor stock to start with.” Avery went away and thought about that, and once more he came to his father and asked this time for a wagon, a team of horses, an ax, a plow and a kettle so that he could go away. “No,” the father said. “I want you here, you and Grover, for I have lost one son to the West, and God knows where he is now.”
The next morning, while the old man stood at the front window of the second floor of this big white house, he saw a sight which stirred him almost to tears. He saw Avery come out of the house, a pack on his shoulders in which no doubt he had rolled up his clothes, and behind him came his wife, she who could not put up with home life any longer; her oldest child toddled along behind her and she carried in her arms the babe she had recently borne. That small troupe of a family walked down the long drive to the road, and not until they were near the end of it did the old man give way to his grief. He threw open the window and shouted to them, shrill in his haste and confusion, called harshly to them: “Go, God damn you, go, God, if you can’t stay under me.”
That was a stark, clean moment when clearly he saw that in order to save what was left of his family and authority he must get away to a more isolated place. Another and earlier moment, one not so plain, had come when the first son, the oldest, whose name was Joseph, had left, had put on the best saddle on the best horse early of a Sunday morning, had packed up the best clothes he had and a pair of boots he stole from his brother, had taken from his father’s room all the money which was hidden there, over four hundred dollars, and had ridden out from home, riding in a dust trail that the father saw and wondered about at the time. “Oh, he has only gone to town to find a girl for tonight,” he assured his wife, but when the boy did not return by dinner of the following day, he knew he had fled. He offered a reward for the capture of the horse and the imprisonment of the thief, but by then the boy was far way.
So two of the three sons had left home; only Grover remained, and he was not as fanciful and strong of spirit as the other two. He was handsome; he had a puffy face which seemed to have been molded out of soft clay; it was not an expressive face, except in fear or other negative emotions, which it could display well. His mother, even there at the last days, when she lay sick month after month, kept him near her bedside and had him read to her out of the Bible, mostly from the psalms, which irritated the old man, for he had precious little use for sentiment. This third son he had with him at home, but he was no heir at all; he was not fitted to control, to instruct, to rule with toughness—and it had to be done that way or a plantation would falter within a season. Once the mother at last gave way to the illness and was packed in the Virginia ground, his family was himself, this weak son Grover, and the only daughter, Lorry, who lived nearby.
It had been nine years ago almost to the day that Lorry married Lacey Pollard, a fiery-mannered boy, a courting fool, who had won her heart away, doubtless with slippery words and roving hands. She had been a steady girl, dutiful, the closest one of the children to him. He had never expected her to leave him so impetuously, but first thing he knew, when she was no more than nineteen, still a girl in her father’s view, she and Lacey Pollard had gone to take up housekeeping there on the farm Lacey had inherited from his father—a good plantation at that time. He was a man of music and song, with a flashing smile for a pretty woman’s face, but no sense for business. He gave Lorry two sons; then, when the boys were scarcely out of swaddling clothes, he went away, leaving the remnants of the old plantation. Some of the land he had lost in trading, some he had lost in gambling, some in folly. “I’m going on to Kentucky to see if I can find a new place there,” he told the old man, and he asked for a loan of money to see him through. “Oh, it takes no money at all to ride to Kentucky,” the old man said; “there are no toll roads on that way.” Lacey Pollard mentioned food he needed. “You can hunt for your food,” Harrison said. He was not about to help him, not until Lacey offered to sell what was left of his land, all except the house in which Lorry lived and the yard around it, yes, and the flock of sheep and chickens and two cows, which she was to keep. The old man accepted the land, paying money for it, and watched him leave his daughter.
In this way, she came back under his care to tend.
When four years later he decided to leave that part of the country and seek a place where he could have the reins of all that belonged to him, where he could have certain say in matters of the family and the settlement, she refused to accompany him. He wanted to sell the land he had in Virginia and buy a piece of land many times as large on the frontier, and sell off parts of it as he chose, to settlers he approved of. He could by this means, he was confident, take a river valley off somewhere and build on it a pleasant, well-ordered place that would rival any in the country; he could establish a community of busy, good people and strong families. When he told Grover they were moving, Grover packed up his things. When he told the slaves they were moving, the slaves made ready. When he told Lorry to get her two boys and herself packed up and prepared, she refused. She would not go, she said.
“Why, how will you live here then?” he asked her. “Do you think you can make a living on the two acres of land Lacey Pollard left you?”
“He’ll be back in time,” she said.
“I’ll build you a separate cabin and give you two acres of land at this place we’re going,” he promised. “I want to go on south this year, to the south and west of here, while I’m able.”
“Lacey will most likely be back soon, Papa,” she said.
“You burn a sign in the tree outside, or on the door, to tell him where you are going.”
Once more she said no. She would stay in Virginia, she said.
He went on home, packed his possessions, and began to make demands far and wide for full payment of all debts owed him. He sold off his land and houses and stock and garnered in to himself his wealth. He made ready to leave, and to leave her, but on the night before he was to go, she came down the drive from the road and came to the porch where he was out sitting, enjoying the breezes, and she said something to him about having heard that he had taken a new wife. “Yes,” he said, “I need a woman with me, so I have taken one.”
“I hear it’s Belle, your own sister’s daughter.”
“Yes,” he said. “I trust my own blood better than another’s.”
“Belle’s only seventeen, Papa, and you’re in you
r late fifties.”
“That proves my merit,” he said curtly, annoyed that his daughter would bring up private matters. He felt awkward himself climbing into bed with the girl, for she was youthful and a happy person by nature, and always had been a girl of light songs. The first night he had slept with her, she had been reluctant, but he had on the next day given her a room of her own, had given her a red quilt, had given her the clothes of his dead wife, from which Belle could make sashes and skirts and blouses as she chose. He had given her a necklace his wife had worn, a simple thing which the girl liked, and now of a night she was willing to do as he said. But none of this was for his own daughter to ask about.
“She’s very pretty,” Lorry mentioned wistfully, as if Lorry herself, who was not thirty yet, thought back on her own youthful days with regret and wonder. Then she said she would go with them to the new place, and he wondered if Belle had asked her to go, or if Belle’s mother had, or if Lorry was simply going because she knew she could not stay behind and make her own way, for there was no way for her to marry since she was married to Lacey Pollard. Anyway, whatever her reason, he was glad to have her and he struck with her that night a fair price for her passage.
He noticed that the three blacks had got the trail widened for a considerable way. “Drive the carts on down,” he called, and the Negro man at once came back up the road to get the oxen, but the oxen moved, even as the old man spoke, and started down the rocky road, the carts creaking and threatening to break apart, here after the long, rough drive.
“Down there’s the valley,” the old man said, calling back to where Lorry and the two Negro women walked. “Keep the breed stock close,” he called to the two Negro boys, who at once began to talk to the heifers and the great hobbled bull, and to the flock of sheep. In one cart rode the noisy stock of pigs, and in another rode the chickens and geese. In a third was a store of sash glass, crocks and other household supplies.
