The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  From the edge of their clearing, they collected holly berries, which could be used to purge with—eight or ten berries for a single dose, Lorry said. They cut sassafras bark and sassafras roots, which would make a strengthening tea.

  They arrived home and dumped down their store of supplies in the far fireplace corner, and at once the cabin smelled richly of sap and bark, of roots and moldy earth. A person could feel safe to live here now, Mina said, with such herb smells to drive away sickness.

  Even Fate was pleased. Normally he was shy and reticent about anything Mooney did, but he was happy with the store of herbs and even smiled at Mooney now and was pleasant to him. After Mina was gone, Mooney asked Fate a good many questions about their tour of the mountains, and the boy answered them and told Verlin, often with enthusiasm, about what they had done and where they had gone. The change in the boy pleased Mooney and surprised him.

  After supper he went outdoors and stood near the lambing pen, where he often went to listen to the night creatures, and directly Fate came outside, too, and began to walk about, waiting for Mooney to speak to him. Mooney went on up to Imy’s grave and sat down there on a rock, and he began to talk, not to the boy, who was a fair distance away, but to the grave. He had done so before once in a while, telling Imy what had happened of a day; and Lorry, though she always frowned when she saw him sitting up there, had never objected.

  He told Imy what had happened gathering the herbs. He was talking along that way when he saw Fate move up along the west border of the clearing, stopping from time to time as if he were listening for something.

  “Imy, we been out gathering herbs,” Mooney said quietly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Fate had heard him talking. “One spring you and me got a few, but today we harvested a stock that will carry us for a long while, mor’n a year, though we’ll collect others along in the spring when sap comes easier.”

  The boy was trying to hear him.

  “Verlin stayed home and tried to make a trap. He fashioned a piece of one. It’s not going to do, but we’ll weave it again tonight or tomorrow night. A boy learns by trying, and when he’s tried and not done well, he can be taught easier. A man can’t teach a boy much that the boy’s not tried to do for himself.”

  He heard Fate moving slowly up behind him in the bushes.

  “Fate was with us today, Imy. We don’t ordinarily say more’n a dozen words to each other in a day, and they’re not words that pry into a matter, but we got along today without argument.”

  Down below, the doorway of the cabin was yellowing from firelight. He could see Lorry moving about inside, putting the herbs away. Below the cabin, Verlin was leading the ram up toward the pen.

  “I can’t talk to Fate about some matters. I can’t tell him why it is his mama needed to marry again, for that’s something a person grows up to know in feeling more than in mind. I can’t tell him why his papa left and didn’t come back, for I don’t know. Lord, it’s not something I can figure out, for it’s unlikely that a man would do something like that. Fate and me can’t sit down and reason out these matters, not yet, and maybe not ever, for it’s chancey to talk about another person.”

  He was quiet and listening.

  “I can see some matters we might discuss, him and me. I’m thinking of such as my coming into his house down there in the valley and making things over my way, when he had been taking care of his mama right along. I couldn’t a been more plain and blunt than I was, and he had a right to play an angry part with me for it. He had a nice farm there for his mama. He had sheep and chickens, and there I come and changed it all around, took everything off to my place, without talking it over, showing him and his mama and Verlin my place, how it all was bigger here and better. I went in there and whacked my way through. A man can do that. A man as big as me is accustomed to doing his work that way, accustomed to telling stock what to do, to wade in on anything and lash out, moving whatever is in his way, cutting down or plowing up. A man works that way, but I needed to show a difference here, for the boy wasn’t a piece of stock or land. He was a man, not grown yet, but accustomed to his own way, and I wish I had gone about it differently.”

  He was silent and waiting. He could hear the boy breathing, that was all. Then he heard a catch in the boy’s breathing and that tiny sound went through him like a shaft of pain. He closed his eyes tightly, hoping the boy would not sob, would not give in to the pity inside him.

  The breathing steadied. Mooney was grateful for that. “I saw where some of the chinking has come out near the chimney, Imy,” he said simply. “We need to put little rocks in there and some wet clay. I suppose we can use that clay out of the branch, that of it which is gray, and there’s plenty of rocks about.” He let the words settle and the night sounds sweep over him. He stood, brushed the dirt off his pants. “It would be a big help to get that chinking done,” he said quietly, then went down the path, walking slowly, went to the lambing pen, where Verlin was working. He glanced back only once and saw the huddled figure of the boy, there just above Imy’s grave.

  On the next afternoon, in the cool of the day, when he was free for a little while from sheep-tending, Fate went down to the creek and brought back rocks and some of the light-gray clay, and mended the chimney.

  * * *

  The family got the sheep into the pen and one by one Mooney and Lorry hobbled and sheared the ewes. When it came time for the lambs, Lorry hesitated for a moment before cutting on the first one; then quietly, firmly, she said, “The wool’s to be used for a baby’s things.” She noticed the barest flicker of a glance which revealed that Mooney had heard her.

  “When’s it to be?” he said.

  “It’s not far along,” she said.

  “Summer then, is that it?” he said.

  “Summer might be,” she said. Yes, he was pleased, she could tell, and so was she, for this was another way to hold the family together, and was an answer to any question of their right to live together.

  “These lambs are going to be cold as a bare-bottomed baby in the snow,” he said, suddenly cheerful. “But they don’t have as much feeling as a man for coldness, anyhow. Not much feeling or sense, either. A lamb is a fool-stunted thing, and so is a ram.”

  “I don’t know as they are,” she said, gently patting the head of the frightened, shivering animal.

  “They’re pretty, I’ll admit that, and cute as a pearl button, but they’re not sensey.”

  He’s talking about sheep, she thought, but he’s wondering about the baby, what it will be in kind, how it will grow, how he will tend to it and I will tend to it.

  They washed the wool in the pool below the spring. The next day they washed it again. On the third day she sent the boys to the top of the cabin with it, to spread it out on the roof boards in the sun.

  There it lay, drying and growing fluffy, setting off the cabin prettily, she thought. She walked up the hill a ways and looked down at it and at the boys, scampering about, chasing the naked sheep off to the grazing places in the woods.

  Mooney came up the hill to where she was. “I’ve not seen such a sight in years,” he said.

  “Nor I,” she said.

  He gazed down at the house, proud and comfortable to see everything so well done.

  After supper they sat at the fire and he whittled at pegs, which he would need to put together the wheel and the loom. He listened to Lorry as she read to the boys a story about David and the giant, who met in a battle in the great valley of Elah long ago. She taught the boys to read some of the words, those they didn’t already know. Then she went with them up the ladder to the loft and snaked the pallets for them and came back down and brought the chair up close to the fire.

  She folded her hands on her lap. “It’s so pleasant of an evening,” she said. And the fire was so pretty, yellow and white, burning scarcely at all, so that the place was almost dark, even at the fireside. She looked over at him longingly, languidly, and he looked at her.

  She got up s
leepily and went to the shadowed corner across from the fire. She took off her dress and hung it on a wall peg, took off her other things, climbed into the bed and covered up to her chin. She lay looking at the loft floor above her, so safe and content, feeling like that.

  He sat by the fire, whittling on pegs, setting them aside as he finished each one. When he was done, he got up and stretched. He came over to the bed and looked down at her. It pleased her, the way he looked at her. She heard him taking off his things and soon his body was close to her, and she turned herself into his arms.

  She lay there, weary and comfortable, listening to the fire burn; she knew that far above them the tree limbs moved in the moon-lighted wind. They had come to be a family, she thought, more here than in Virginia, more here than she had known a family could be part of itself, safe unto itself, in a house that smelled of cooking and herbs and wool and wine vinegar, each one in its special season, as the family made for itself comfort and protection. All that lies about us is foreign to us yet, she thought, but here we are, come together, and closer will we come.

  11

  Ernest Plover, when the first bitter cold snap fell upon the valley, took to the bed sick. Inez tended to him, made boneset tea for him, which did him good, but he didn’t like the taste, so she used what ginger she had and such sage as she could borrow form Anna Bentz and made a better-tasting tea for him. Also, she did as Nicholas advised and fed him kraut juice of a morning.

  On seeing how much attention a cold could gain, some of the smaller children came down sick, too, and before long the Germans claimed they had no more boneset, and Inez felt called upon to send Mina to the woods to find some.

  Mina did poorly at the task. She didn’t like to tromp about looking for herbs with snow on the ground and all the leaves gone off the plants. What in the world could she find? She pulled up a few roots and went home with them, said they were boneset roots, and her mama made tea. It was so powerful a tonic that Ernest and the children were panicked into thinking they had rather be well than to suffer such medicine.

  They were too bleak—the woods of a wintertime, Mina thought. The laurel was green, but the leaves curled to protect themselves from coldness; the bushes looked ill. The woods were bare and hateful-looking; every thorn and thicket stood out plain. Dotted underfoot were the patches of galax, which was always pretty and waxen, and there was wintergreen, which she liked, and sometimes overhead in an oak would be a ball of mistletoe. But these specks of green only set off the greater colorlessness and coldness.

  When the forest floor was snow-covered, she couldn’t walk far, for the snow bit at her feet like an animal. She would see where the bouncy rabbits had been through, crossing one another’s paths, and she wondered how in the world they could stand the sting of it, and how they lived in the winter anyhow, and why they didn’t do like the bears and go to dens and cuddle up and sleep for the cold time. Even the bats were asleep in the caves. Sometimes she saw a raccoon track, but even they were snoozing longer than the night each day. Frogs and toads were quiet, too, and for all she knew they and the bees and hornets were asleep.

  But the rabbits were about, they and the foxes and wolves. The wolves were coming closer, seemed to her. They had been up on the mountaintop for a while, but now their lonely howls were close by. And the foxes were slick and hungry. They had got into her father’s chicken lot and done much damage. They would tunnel, leap, tear, bark—somehow they would make a way through. It had been every morning’s work to fix the fences back, until the German came by and cut saplings and vines and leather and made the fences so that they held.

  Mina liked the German very well. He was a strong and handsome body of a man, and was friendly. She sometimes managed to go to his house to get juice or herbs, or to return a jar. The first time she went, she told him about walking through the woods alone, even up on the mountain, and he had cautioned her against that. He talked so nice to her. He was gentle in everything he did and said and seemed to like her, and when she was about to leave, she said she didn’t know how in the world she was going to get back home through the woods, it being so dangerous and all, and he said he would walk her.

  A look had come over his wife’s face that would have frozen a thought, and the young German, Felix, had quickly offered to walk her home himself, but Nicholas said he would go, that he wanted to talk with Ernest about something, anyway.

  They walked along the trail together. They walked side by side, for she liked to walk that way, until it narrowed to a path, and then she walked ahead. She guessed he was watching her walk. She had seen a keenness come into his eyes once or twice before when he had been looking at her. Wasn’t it strange about the way a man would look at a woman sometimes, she thought, at least the way they looked at her, and had since she was a girl. Her dress was so tight and thin, she knew he had a view, all right.

  * * *

  At night, when the boys were fretful with their lessons, Lorry would have them shell corn into a basket, and from the shelled grain take out the colored grains. Every ear, seemed like, was speckled with blue and red. She would have them select the best of the white grains, and these, when they had enough of them, she would boil in water in which she had put a little of the lye from the ash hopper, enough to yellow the corn hulls. She would boil this until the corn was no more than half done, then she would dip the corn out and pour it into a basket, from which the water ran out. She would carry the basket of steaming corn to the spring and wash it, shaking the corn and rubbing it, freeing the kernel from the hulls.

  She would then walk the basket back to the pot, carry more water from the spring, and boil the grain again. Later she dipped it out as before and washed it. Then she boiled it until it was tender.

  The boys liked this hominy, so she made some every week. It would keep for two days if put in the kitchen or for three or four days if put in the loft.

  The rest of the shelled corn would be ground into meal. The finer bits would be sifted out for bread, and the coarser ones would be stored for grits. She did most of this work herself, though the baby was taking on size within her and sapped her strength.

  She carded the wool and spun it on the wheel, and she spun the flax. She could relax as she made cloth. She could sit there at the loom and listen to the boys talk and watch Mooney work on wood and leather. The shuttle murmured under her hand, and there was the steady thud of the batten striking the web, sounds which settled in nicely with the fire sounds. She would tramp the treadles, all without conscious thought, for she had done it in many winters before this one, had made cloth for her boys before this time, and cloth for a husband before this one. The flax was on the loom, dyed light tan from the black walnut bark, and she threw the shuttle, carrying yarn of undyed lamb’s wool, through it, and the cloth inch by inch came from the loom night by night. It was a loosely woven cloth, but once she had put it in the dye pot and the dye had struck the lamb’s wool, once the new wool soaked it up, it would shrink around the linen with a tight grip.

  She had all too little of the lamb’s wool for her needs, and half of it she would weave not with linen at all, but into itself, to make soft cloth for the baby. Later, from the flax, she would make a piece of cloth for the baby, too, as well as tow for the gun barrel and dress cloth for herself.

  But from the linsey cloth, the strongest of all, she would make a shirt apiece for the boys, and a shirt for Mooney.

  He was making a pack saddle while she worked. He had cut a forked limb out of white oak; he had looked for two days in the woods for just the right one, and he had had to climb high in the tree just to get it. He had whittled it down to fit the horse’s back, and to each fork of the prong he pegged a board into which he had drilled holes, and into each hole he inserted and bound a wooden ring.

  They worked until late most nights, and liked to work. Toward the end of evening he might put a log of birch on the fire, for it threw such pretty flames to talk about. She could see faces in the flames; it was if other people wer
e there in the room, people long since forgotten, or old ancestors never known, who had come to keep them company.

  He would talk of plans, and of what he had heard. The German had told him his wife made a yellow dye from crushed chestnut hulls and a bit of alum. Also he had heard that old man Harrison had gone to ride, to see that everything on his farm was set for the wintertime, and his shoes had frozen to the wooden stirrups. There was no way for him to get off his horse except to get out of his boots, which took some doing. Ernest Plover had seen it, or said he had.

  Or had made up the story, Lorry said.

  The boys might mention a chipmunk which stayed not far from the spring and could be found on almost any warm winter morning, waiting there.

  “The laurel buds are big,” Lorry said. “The dogwood buttons are almost off their stems from being so fat. It’s going to be an opening out for certain, come spring.” And she said, “The cardinals are so frigid with the cold, I give them a handful of bread this morning when I milked. That’s why I put that little piece of bread atop the door lintel tonight, to save it for them. They’re such pretty birds to stay here through such a wintertime . . .”

  They talked so softly that not a sound got through the chinked walls of their place.

  And down the valley road, Inez would be talking to her brood, getting them bedded down on the floor for the night, for as yet they had no loft.

  And farther along the Germans were doing their firelight work, and the fire threw shadows into the lines of Nicholas Bentz’s somber face as he carved on a small wooden toy, which he was going to give Mina Plover. As he sat there near his wife, he thought about Mina and wondered if ever he would dare touch her, hold her, love her.

  We are set in the world, Nicholas thought, we are set not adrift as on a sea, for the sea supports whatever floats on it; we are adrift in the air and move like dried leaves whisked about, subject any moment to the falling to the ground, to age-olding, to the open grave or leaf-molding.