The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  “You’ve busted it afore,” Mildred said calmly.

  “You hand me that jug, Mildred,” he said.

  One of the children came forward to get it for him, but he shoved the child back.

  “You hand it here, Mildred.”

  Mildred stayed where she was. “It’s a brave man that will order a woman around,” she said, “even after the woman has bore him six youngins.”

  “Ay God, if that jug ain’t in my hand afore I count to three, you’ll know more’n the pains of birthing.”

  Mildred wiped snuff juice from the corners of her mouth. She calmly looked at Amos, then belched, and the belch seemed to defy him.

  Amos leaped at her, but she bolted away. He landed in the dirt and the children set up a gale of laughter, but the laughter stopped short when Amos began to curse as he moved toward Mildred. She began to move cautiously around the fire, evading him.

  Amos, seeing he couldn’t catch her, leaped for a rifle, but even as he picked it up Frank grabbed him, pinned his arms to his side, and Charley Turpin took the rifle out of his hands. No matter how much Amos struggled, the two men held him until he was quiet and promised to stay that way.

  Mildred walked to her place near the fire and sat down. “My, my,” she said. She began fanning herself with a turkey wing. “Don’t matter a mind in this world about him,” she said to Ernest, who had watched the scuffle without moving from the fiddling log. “Whiskey makes him ornery, that’s all.”

  Others arrived, attracted by the sounds of music; among them were Grover, Mina, Jacob, Nicholas Bentz, and his son, Felix. There was loud talking and gun firing, followed by a dance, which left everybody spent. Mina was so exhausted that she walked down through the brush to the riverbank and sat down with her feet dangling in the cold water. She couldn’t see the campfire now, but she could hear some of what was said. Felix said something to Charley Turpin, and he made a reply. She heard Frank’s boy come running to the fire, and she heard a call from upriver. It was all pleasant-sounding and lively, and a proper way to let pass on off the memory of Lorry’s struggle.

  Strong arms went around her all of a sudden; she gasped in surprise and squirmed, tried to break free. It was Nicholas Bentz, she suspected, getting hold of her, which he had tried before, daring to do so now that he was drunk. She was pushed roughly to the ground, and she heard a low voice laughing softly as she wiggled against him.

  “You let me go, Nicholas,” she whispered. “You hear?”

  “Does Nicholas get you on the ground, too?” It was Charley Turpin, not Nicholas at all.

  “You let me go,” she said angrily. Her feet were in the water, and she was slipping down the bank into the water now, and he was letting her slip down. “Let go.” She heard her father talking back at the fire.

  “They’ll hear you if you yell,” Charley said. “Why don’t you yell?”

  “I don’t want to alarm the whole place,” she said bitterly. “Now you let me go.”

  One of his hands began to move alongside her waist and seek her breast. She half turned, but he held her. He got to kissing the back of her neck and shoulders, and when she squirmed, he made her slide down farther into the water, so she couldn’t even squirm, and then he was holding her close to him and rubbing her shoulder with his chin and was talking gently to her and rocking her slightly, as if she were a baby, and once she whispered to him in spite of the way she disliked him.

  They slid even farther into the water. “Law, I’m getting my tail wet,” she said.

  He kissed her neck, and when she turned her head, he kissed her cheek and tried to kiss her mouth. He turned her body around and got a tight grip on her. She saw a little stick nearby, a pointed one, and when he leaned over to kiss her face, she put the point of the stick against the back of his neck. “I’ll knife you, Charley Turpin.”

  “You won’t, either.” He kissed her and the stick dropped out of her hands and there wasn’t anything she could do, she guessed. She thought about that man in the blacksmith shop a long time ago in Virginia, but it seemed so far away now, and here she was with a man she liked next to nothing at all, and his hands were on her body and he was in the water with her, they were halfway in the water, and the bank earth was cold to her back, and he was whispering to her again.

  Suddenly she brought her knee up sharply against him and wiggled free, leaped away from him, and waded out from him into the river.

  “Come on now, Mina, what’s that matter?” he said, astonished and angry. “You said you loved me.”

  “Law, listen to that,” she said. “As if I meant a word I said to you while you was biting my ear. I just said what I thought would make you glad.”

  “You and me could beat the world, don’t you know that? Now come on back here to this bank.”

  “You get a hold on a woman that she can’t break, and then you say she loves you.”

  He started toward her, wading slowly, but she moved farther into the stream, toward where most of the mist was rising. His teeth got to chattering and he stopped. “When I catch you I’m going to teach you something,” he said.

  “I thought that was what you just tried.”

  He tried to run toward her, but she turned and swam downstream. He was chattering and murmuring threats, and was exasperated with the cold and the predicament he was in. “You devil,” he said, and started for her again, but he slipped and fell into the water and a shout came out of him, one of surprise and cold-anguish, and the group back at the fire set up a questioning.

  He was wading toward the bank when Grover and Felix Bentz reached the riverbank. Felix, who could see that Mina had been trying to flee Charley, let his jealousy of her and his dislike for Charley get the better of him. He leaped, caught hold of Charley, and carried him backward into the river with a splash and a cry. Nicholas arrived and moved at once to fight beside his son. Frank came into the water and began helping his friend Charley. Mina was amazed to see such a commotion; she had never before seen such solid hitting of blows.

  Frank, with his staff, broke up the fight. He whacked Felix then turned on Charley, and broke it up completely in the way he would break up a hog fight in the road, and the men stumbled over to the bank and slumped against it, clung there exhausted. It seemed like the only ones who weren’t all wet and soggy and club-beat were Amos, Ernest and the children, who were up on the bank looking down, confused smiles on their faces.

  The men helped each other up the bank and back to the fire. Mina, water dripping from her hair and body, her clothes clinging to her, climbed out of the cold river and sank down on the bank. Grover came close to her, stooped over her and touched her face. She slapped at his hand. “Git away,” she said, out of sorts with them all now.

  Soon after Grover left she heard the sound of music at the fire and somebody said, “To hell with women,” and a shout went up. Evidently all the men were friendly once more.

  Disgruntled, she looked back toward the camp and saw Mooney, who must have just arrived, coming along the path. He saw her and came to stand over her, and she felt more comfortable all at once and was grateful to him. “How is Lorry feeling?” she said.

  “She’s well and better,” he said. He sat down on the riverbank. “It’s been right much of a night, I hear,” he said.

  She had to smile at that, and she felt friendly toward him and leaned over and put her chin against his shoulder and nudged him. “There’s been a party going on,” she said. It’s like all the others, except there’s been only two fights so far.”

  They listened to the music together; then he said, “Did he get to you, Mina?”

  She touched his arm and squeezed it. “No,” she said.

  “He’s a clever man, so I thought he might’ve, but he’s not a steady one. He’s not going to give a woman a place for her family, and you’ll be wanting one of those afore long.”

  “I saw Lorry work the day through bearing, and if I thought I had to do that, I’d jump in that water and float away.”
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  “You better leave Charley Turpin alone then,” he said, smiling. “I expect he’s got an attraction for women, with that head of curly hair and those big dark eyes.”

  She sniffed; it was chilly and she was catching cold sitting on that damp place; she ought to go to the fire, she knew, but she had rather talk like this. She could stay there all her life and have him close by to comfort her, for she was content to be with him. Maybe they could have made a life together if she hadn’t got skittish in that cabin three years before. She wouldn’t have been skittish, she guessed, except for that man who had tried to attack her in Virginia, and had hurt her so much. She supposed life went from one such moment to another, each one breaking open and showing itself, each one coming on a person in surprise and with freshness, yet each one a reminder of the others, so that they were the prints her life made as it had found its way through all the many plights of place and time and had come at last tonight to this river.

  She caught a willow branch in her hand and ran her fingers along it, entwined her fingers in the twigs of it. “I used to think about you all the time,” she said. “Even after you married Lorry, I would think about you.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought I’d die, I did, for a long time. Then I forgot about you mostly.”

  He smiled. “You might get that young German for a mate. He’s strong.”

  “Make sauerkraut all my life?”

  “Yes, that may be, but you’re not Charley’s kind of woman, either, are you?”

  “Sometimes I am,” she said. “Sometimes I get to wanting to love somebody crazy.”

  “Uh huh,” he said. “You better watch those kinds of days.”

  “It comes on me mostly at night,” she said, and saw him smile, so she smiled, too, and suddenly she turned to him and said, “I think about Lacey Pollard of a time, too, but seems like ever man I like has got to travel.”

  He considered that. “I’m only telling you that Felix is the best one that’s here now. You need to choose a strong one, for it’s no pleasure farming a mountain place alone. It takes a will to do it. And there’s a plenty that’s not got it.”

  She turned to view the river and fell to wandering about Lacey Pollard and where he was now, and about herself and what she was to do, caught as she was. “You ever worry about me when—afore you married Lorry?”

  “That’s right,” he said, his voice husky. “I worried afore. I’ve always been more’n average fond of you.”

  “Do you think about me now?”

  “I do,” he said. “I do. It’s there yet. But a man has never had a better woman than Lorry.”

  She let the words settle into the river sounds; then she pressed her head against his arm, nudged her chin at his arm. “You’re funny to hear talk,” she said. “You and Lacey speak so well of Lorry.”

  A fiddle started playing another tune. She heard Charley let out a yell. “How many kinds of love are there?” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, “there’s kinds I don’t know.”

  “I love you so much, and I love Felix, and I love Grover, and I love my sisters, and I love Charley, but they’re ever’ one a different love. Maybe love is like collecting things, like collecting colored rocks to put at the bottom of a spring.”

  “It might be. I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said.

  “And some people got so many they can’t hardly use the spring. And some people got just the one. Or none at all.”

  “That older boy of mine, he thinks I don’t have a fondness for him, but he don’t know. ’Course, he’s not like me, and I don’t understand him, but I think as much of him as I do the other’n, and maybe think about him more, for I know I’ve not been able to help him as much. He looks to Jacob now more’n he does to me, for Jacob knows hunting, and I don’t interfere, for it seems Jacob knows what that boy is after. If a boy don’t want to plow and plant and harvest, I don’t know what he’s after. That’s why I like Felix, and why I never have got to care for Charley Turpin, nor to think he’s the one you need. And I don’t know what to make of Lacey Pollard, except it seems to me after all he’s done that he’s not a proper sort.”

  He had not meant to say that, but it was said now. He got up, embarrassed by his frankness, and stared out over the shiny river.

  She stood up, too. “I love you like a piece of colored stone,” she said, and went up the path toward the fire.

  * * *

  The party got bigger as the night wore on. People came and went, the fight was forgotten, the whiskey was passed around again and again. Ernest played better than ordinarily; everybody got to singing so loud they got hoarse, and they danced until they were leg-weary. Ernest was the last to lose his powers and call a night of it. His arms were tired from playing; it seemed his arms had sapped the strength from the other parts of his body, and he was wobbly as he went down the trail that led away from Mildred’s house, from the ashes of the fire, from the empty jugs and sleeping children.

  Where is Mina, he wondered, and where is Fancy? The last he had seen of Fancy she had been running from Charley Turpin. Where had they got to?

  The moon went behind a cloud. He stopped and tried to remember where he was. It was hard to keep track of a woods like this, of where one was in it, in the dark. The bench must be on down the trail.

  Suddenly a figure loomed up out of the darkness. It rushed toward him, making strange sounds. He froze in his tracks, and it came on and brushed past him, and was gone all in one instant. As his terror lessened, his fuddled brain began to work. It had been a woman, he reasoned, a large woman. It must have been Mildred. And she had been sobbing and running back toward her house.

  He waited. Not another sound, not a breath did he take that could be heard. He waited until the moonlight came out again, and he saw that the trail was empty.

  It had all been a vision, he realized, and supported by confidence, he boldly walked on down the trail. He had not gone far, however, when the moon went behind another cloud and directly his foot struck something hard but yielding that sent him sprawling on the ground. Cursing, he groped around for his fiddle. His hand touched something warm. The moon came out again, and he looked down at the figure of a man lying still, his mouth open as if he were trying to speak or cry out. Amos, he thought, Amos dead drunk. But why wasn’t he breathing?

  Not so, not so, Ernest thought, turning away, shutting his mind to the sight and to his thoughts. Ah, he had seen so many sights that were not so.

  He got up and stumbled away, seeking the bench, and found it before he was fully aware that he was there. He stopped at the edge of it, wondering how he was to cross a bridge so narrow. He moved onto it, driven by his fears of the place he was leaving, fleeing the ghost of the dead man who he knew was not dead, hurrying, until suddenly he stopped, sank down on the shaky bridge to save himself from tumbling headlong into the river, his confidence in both bench and reasoning leaving him at the same time. He held to the bench with both hands and stared down at the rushing water.

  He began to inch his way forward, holding to the board, accepting unprotestingly such splinters as the board stuck into him, swearing an end to the curses of drink and nighttime travel.

  20

  Often Mina would go by and see Lorry’s baby. It was as round-faced and pretty as any she had ever seen, and Mooney most often was hovering about, talking about every look and way the baby had. He said the baby, whom they had named Amarantha, could tell when Mina was singing. Mina knew a lot of songs babies liked, for she had sung a hundred to her own sisters.

  Bye, baby bunting,

  Daddy’s gone a hunting

  To get a little rabbit skin

  To wrap the baby bunting in.

  The baby would smile and laugh with Mina.

  Pitty patty poke,

  Shoe the wild colt.

  Here a nail, there a nail,

  Pitty patty poke.

  Verlin and Fate learned to sing some of the songs. They were both timid
at first, but singing soon became as natural with them as talking.

  I bought me a hen and my hen loved me

  I fed my hen under yonder tree.

  Hen said, “Fiddle I fee.”

  I bought me a turkey and my turkey loved me,

  I fed my turkey under yonder tree.

  Turkey said, “Gobble gobble,”

  Hen said, “Fiddle I fee.”

  I bought me a duck and my duck loved me,

  I fed my duck under yonder tree.

  Duck said, “Quack quack,”

  Turkey said, “Gobble gobble,”

  Hen said, “Fiddle I fee.”

  The song went on and on. Sometimes it seemed to take up much of the afternoon, with the sheep saying, “Baa baa,” and the horse saying, “Neigh neigh,” and the guinea saying, “Potrack potrack.” Mina made up many new verses for it.

  I had my baby and my baby pleased me,

  Had my baby in the crabapple tree;

  Baby says, “Ba ba,”

  Turkey says, “Gobble gobble,”

  Guinea says, “Potrack potrack,”

  Hen says, “Fiddle I fee.”

  She liked more than anything being there in the house, cuddling the baby and laughing with Lorry and the family. Often when she left there, she would go up to Jacob’s place and fuss with him, for he liked fussing so well and seemed to want her company. One evening she was coming back from there and was almost to Mooney Wright’s clearing, when she noticed the hoofprints of a big horse. She stopped and saw through the trees a black jacket hanging on a tree.

  She moved up a small path and came upon Lacey Pollard sitting there.

  He had been down to Morganton. He had been waiting, he said, but he didn’t say for what. He had got restless, he said, and there was indeed a restlessness about him, Mina saw.

  “I went to her clearing and I heard a babe cry,” he said.

  “Yes,” Mina said. “It’s borned. It’s a girl.”

  “So it lived?”

  “Yes. Did ye want it to die?”