The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  They planted eight rows of sorghum. Lorry had a few flower seeds, and she planted these near the lambing pen. Then, on the east side of the house, where the plants would get the morning sun but be shaded during the heat of the day, she planted gourd seed, and she and Fate cut grape vines in the woods and made runners for them so that they could grow up the side of the cabin.

  New ground wouldn’t produce wheat, oats, barley or rye. Only corn of all the grains would grow well in new land. Corn was the crop they both respected and taught the boys to respect. Corn grew better in new land than in any other, and was able to protect itself. Beetles couldn’t strip its tough leaves. Birds couldn’t peck the grain from inside the shucks. Water wouldn’t beat it down or flood it out or rot it. Wild turkeys couldn’t reach the ears, nor could chipmunks, groundhogs and squirrels get to it.

  Corn served as food for family and stock both. Even the cow and horse would eat it and grow fat on it, and the leaves of the corn plant made fodder for winter stock feeding; the stalks were cut for rough fodder.

  The corn crop was the major hope they had, and as soon as the plants broke ground, the family got busy pulling weeds, protecting the light-green shoots. At the start of each day, they would walk through the corn patch to see if it had suffered damage in the night, and at evening it was the last place they checked before Lorry went inside the cabin to take up supper. They would often talk about the corn, about having bread to eat once more, about what they would do when they had corn in the crib.

  “I’m going to pen two hogs and fatten them in the fall,” he told her. “At least two. It’ll take more’n a thousand ears to get the wild masty taste out of two, for they’ll need to be penned two months apiece, but we’ll just have to use it, that’s all.”

  “I wish we could fatten three hogs,” she said.

  “Might do a third one this time next year, if we’ve got corn left. I’ve got to trade somehow for a bushel of salt as it is, to cure the two. I hate to ride all the way to Morganton for no more’n that. You reckon your papa would trade me a bushel of salt?”

  She stared off at the tall trees down below the cabin. She didn’t move and she didn’t say anything. There was a gentle wind there in the cornfield, fluffing up the leaves, and it was as if the wind had caught her ear.

  “Or had you rather I not ask him?” he said.

  “I wish the corn was already grown,” she said, “and I could get some watery meal and fix a pudding. I can taste corn pudding right now, as if I had a bite in my mouth. I’ve not had corn pudding for two year, if it’s a day.”

  “No,” he said, looking at the green leaves turning, listening to the slight noises of the wind and the cooling noise of the river. “It’ll take me four days going, four days getting back, but I can leave soon as the corn plants are well started. It won’t matter when I go, if you’re not afraid to keep the place.”

  “I declare,” she said, “I kept a place in Virginia for years. It wasn’t on a wild mountain, but I know how to protect myself from strangers. I’m not new-made at all.”

  “I won’t ask him for help then,” he said.

  9

  Belle was sitting in her new house at one of the windows, looking out at the falling rain, so she was the first one in the valley to see the Germans, who came up along the valley road on a summer day with rain splashing down on them and on the horse cart which was behind them, and on the man, the two children and the little wife, all of them walking against the wind. Even from the parlor window, some hundred yards away, Belle could tell they were new settlers, and she called out excitedly to Tinkler Harrison, who hurried in from the bedroom, fastening his clothes in place. He rushed into the wet yard and, shielding himself with his hands, began to call to them to come on into his place if they were aiming to settle.

  The Germans came up the path, through the fields. The son, who was about fifteen, ran on ahead, then stopped, gazing suspiciously at the watchful old man.

  “I been a hoping for settlers,” Harrison said to them when they were close. “Did ye want land?”

  The German grunted and nodded and came on, covering his head with his arms as best he could, trying to protect himself from the washes of water. As he neared the house, he began to complain in German, and it was then that Harrison realized he was of foreign stock. He might have shut the door had not Belle been standing in the way.

  The German, Nicholas Bentz, reached the door and stopped, rain dripping from his black hair. His dark eyes surveyed quickly the people before him, the long house and the sheds, and nearby the Negroes. He watched as the elderly, bearded man came close to him, looked closely at him.

  “Well, come on inside,” Harrison said, “afore ye melt from the water.”

  Nicholas stood there yet. His wife and two children waited near the cart. “I saw your notice,” he said.

  Harrison chewed on his lip and considered that. He had sent Grover a month before to Morganton with a parchment to be posted at the store. The sign advertised free land. “Come on inside and set,” Harrison said evasively.

  “Where is the free land?” Nicholas asked.

  “Up that a way,” Harrison said, making a vague gesture toward the mountain behind them.

  The German turned. He studied the mountain for a long while; then he looked at his wife, who was shawl-cloaked and dripping water; then he looked at his two children. Heavily, wearily, he turned back to the old man. “It can’t be farmed,” he said.

  “No,” Harrison said. He looked off at the rainy sky, vaguely unhappy to be questioned about the notice. He had not known anybody would take such a generous offer seriously.

  Nicholas Bentz that morning purchased from Tinkler Harrison three hundred twenty acres of valley land at the head of the river, where the creeks webbed and joined. He paid half of the cost at the time, and signed a debt to Tinkler Harrison for the remainder. He had no alternative. He had left his home on the Yadkin River two weeks before, having been ordered from his home by his younger brothers.

  The situation had come about largely as a consequence of his own actions, Nicholas admitted. He was the oldest son of a wealthy planter, a stern, strict Lutheran gentleman who had come from the Ruhr valley when young, fleeing religious intolerance and persecution, and had cleared land and built an estate, much of it with his own hands. In this family, in a stone house in which two fireplaces were large enough for a grown person to walk into, in which an organ was installed, in which only the German language was spoken, Nicholas grew up, working hard.

  As he matured, he sought ways to rebel against the tough rule of his father. At the age of sixteen he began to run away from the house at night and seek out new friends. When he was eighteen, he had a mistress, whom he supported by stealing goods from his father’s chests and cupboards. When he was nineteen, he was beaten by his father with a horse whip for being found in the home of a married female cousin. By the time he was twenty, he discovered that he preferred the company of non-German women. All in all, the situation became so aggravating that his father locked him in the cellar of the house for a week. There the young man drank all the beer he could hold and sang ribald songs in a bellowing voice which astonished his younger brothers. When he was released from the cellar, the servants found that he had broken every bottle down there, and had smashed every barrel as well.

  He was placed in the custody of his uncle, a pastor, and he submitted to a series of lessons intended to elevate him and make him more noble. He respected his uncle, a strong and benevolent man who was not averse to moderate drinking in the privacy of the parish house. They became close friends, and the relationship might have proved beneficial, had his uncle not revealed one evening that he was infatuated with Nicholas; his advances so repulsed the young man that he left the parsonage at once and was found a few days later in the embrace of an unattractive whore.

  He was returned to his father. No explanation for the failure of the uncle’s good services was made, at least none was made by Nicholas. The father
assumed the boy was beyond salvation and made preparations to marry him to a reliable girl.

  Her name was Anna. She was plain and straight; there was no protuberance at all where Nicholas had always believed protuberances would be found on women. She was most serious of manner and speech. He agreed to the wedding because Anna had a pensive quality he liked, a solemnness which indicated that perhaps she understood what he was suffering.

  They were married in the Lutheran church, and he took her to a small, new house built for him by his father and brothers. There he lived with her a year before she conceived a child. The child was a boy and was named Felix. Four years later, a girl was born. There were no more children, and Nicholas rarely desired further intimacies with his wife; their infrequent and unsatisfying encounters had led him into deeper despair.

  Soon after the birth of the daughter, whom he named Sally in spite of his father’s objections, he began to seek out other women. His father knew of this; his brothers knew of it, too, and lost no chance to mention it. Each of the seven brothers had a wife and children, had a happy home so far as could be told from the outside of their stone-and-log walls; each of them had plenty of stock and had fields cleared and grain-bearing. Only Nicholas was a blight on the plantation; his part of the plantation alone was weed-choked and unproductive.

  Tiring finally of old age, the father grew sick, accepted death and was buried. Three days later his will was read. Nicholas didn’t bother to go to hear it, but Anna came home more drained of energy than heretofore, and in her small, slight voice, which was no more than the husky sound of the frailty of herself, told him what the lawyer had read.

  And to my eldest son, Nicholas, because he, when he reached an age of discretion, did forsake the teachings of his parents and his church, and when he reached his majority did receive a colt, a cow, and calf, but shamefully lost them by gambling and drinking and entered upon a very godless life, indeed even cursed his father and laid hands upon him and one time threw him to the ground, who took unto himself women not of wedlock, and did even after marriage in the church forsake his wife for other women, to him I leave one shilling sterling and exclude him from everything else.

  Two days later, even before his father’s waxen, white face had vanished from the brightness of Nicholas’ mind, his seven brothers came to Nicholas’ door and asked him to leave the farm, the land, the house. They gave him a horse to pull his cart, and in the cart they put a few belongings and a sow.

  “You can put you a house over there on that little rise,” Tinkler advised him. The rain had stopped and they were standing out near the biggest of the Harrison fields. “There’s creeks nigh there, and springs. I know how the Germans has always been ones for creeks and springs.”

  “And trees,” Nicholas said, looking up at the great willows which shaded the river.

  “I cut down most all I could on my place. Where my father come from, he said you could look across thousands of acres and not see ary tree.”

  “A pity,” Nicholas said. He reflected on the sight of the trees along the river and said, “Silly things, aren’t they, each one standing on one leg, silly creatures. No man, if given the mission to make a cover for the land, would ever dare to make so funny-looking a thing as a tree.”

  Harrison frowned at him, wondering how strange a man he was to talk so whimsically, without reason in what he said.

  * * *

  When Mooney left to go to Morganton, he took a few skins of deer with him and the horse to carry them and to bring back the salt and other supplies he needed. While he was away, another new family came into the valley, came to Mooney’s place. Lorry had never seen a dustier pair than they were when they stopped at the edge of the clearing, these two young people and a huge ox, which had been pulling a narrow sled on which possessions had been packed and tied, what possessions were not on the man’s back. He was blond, of sturdy build, with a handsome face and ready smile.

  The girl was pretty, a blonde with good coloring, not too tanned of face. Lorry could see that what they had on the sled—a few bags of salt, gunpowder and corn meal, a few tool heads—would not put them in good stead here.

  “We had a wagon,” he said, “but two wheels busted, so we made a sled.”

  They ought to go back to wherever they had come from, Lorry suspected. How in the world could two people with no more experience than these make out up here, when they had brought so little.

  “We had a plenty of furniture,” the girl said, “but we had to leave it along the way. We’ve got chairs and chests scattered all the way down the mountain road. We couldn’t get up the mountain with so much of a load.”

  “Not with one steer, I wouldn’t think you could,” Lorry said.

  “We had two,” the boy said, “but one stepped in a woodchuck hole and broke a leg. We had seven hundred pounds of possessions when we left home.”

  He spoke about his loss without a ripple of worry, Lorry noticed, so maybe they could make out up here, for endurance in spite of losses was mostly what was needed. “You come on in and eat your dinner,” she said to them.

  “We have no money,” the girl said.

  “I’ve got no food worth money,” Lorry said, and led the way through the clearing to the house.

  On the way she heard the young man commenting to his wife about the way the trees were deeply girdled and at the right height for later cutting, about how the corn was over twelve feet high, about how the crib and lambing pens were solid, how the shed was built low, so as to be all the sturdier. When they got to the cabin door, they both stopped and admired what they saw so thoroughly that Lorry came to wonder if they were playacting, though she knew they were not and that was all part of their own young dream.

  They toured the walls, looking at the possessions. To the girl every piece of color and piece of cloth was a marvel, and the trappings, bags, the comfort of the place were signs of wealth, though no doubt at the home she had left, these would be thought of as poverty items. The strangers ate fast and said they hadn’t had any greens to eat for a long while, except for one patch of water cress. They had eaten mostly bread and meat and the breast of a turkey he had shot, which they had broiled on a spit over a fire. To hear them tell it, they had attracted plenty of wild animals.

  It was all a cheerful game to them, Lorry realized; they had not yet come to terms with the hardness of it. Maybe on the long journey they had told themselves that an end would come to it and they would be at their destination soon; then life would take on a brighter hue. Now the end had come to the journey, and hardness had only begun. It would go on and on and on, but she would not tell them that. Let them enjoy their springtime thoughts while they could. She had enjoyed hers, back when first she had married a man she loved and settled in her own cabin in Virginia.

  After eating, the two new settlers, whose names were Paul and Nancy Larkins, carried a load of goods along the path toward down-river. They walked along, heavy-shouldered under the loads they had, but laughing and joking with one another, helping each other endure for a few steps farther.

  “Look out for that snake,” Paul said suddenly. The girl threw down the pack she was carrying and scampered out of the way. He laid down his pack and commenced to laugh, for there was no snake. She was so provoked she chased him, and they ended up far down the path, their goods, except for his rifle, strewn behind. He let her catch him, and they fell into each other’s arms there in a quiet place and rested, breathing deeply, laughing and waiting, not waiting for any sound or action or arrival or anything at all, but letting their lives stay suspended for the moment.

  “We can build our place right here, if you want to,” he said after a while. “Or up there on that rock.”

  “I never heard tell of a house on a rock,” she said.

  “Never heard tell about you and me, either, until we met. Never knew there was a girl pretty as you, and eager as you to have love made to her.”

  “You be quiet with talk like that.”

  �
�What you blushing for?”

  “Am I?”

  “I think you are.”

  “I’m ashamed, that’s the reason, for it’s partly true.”

  He laughed softly and squeezed her tightly. He kissed her.

  “You better go get them things,” she whispered, but she didn’t let him leave.

  They walked up on the path to the rock he had mentioned, climbed up on it, and from the top, where there was a flat place, they could see all the way up the river valley. “We’ll put our cabin here; we’ll be different, you and me,” he said. “We’ll open our door and see all that way, see those mountains back in there at the hind end of the cove.”

  “Maybe when the leaves are off the trees, we can see the river from up here,” she said.

  “It must be down there near where those beech trees are.”

  “We’ll be up above the mist here.”

  “Look,” he said, grasping her arm. “See,” he said, whispering.

  She saw it then, a black bear waddling along far away, studying the tracks on the ground before it, wondering what sort of intruders had come up this way. She saw Paul raise his gun, and she whispered to him not to annoy the bear, knowing when she said it that he had never known a moment of fear in his life.

  The sound of the shot burst across them and swept up onto the mountain; immediately came a roar of outrage from the annoyed beast.

  She was aware then of three ever-changing actions, each of life importance to her. One was the action of the bear as it sought a reason for the red gushes that were trickling out of its stomach. Annoyed, pained, it must have sensed that the two people somehow were robbing it of itself, so it started toward them, moving at a gallop.