The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  “I’m used to this place, Papa, and don’t want to leave.”

  “I told her you was set here.” He sucked at his tooth. “I won’t be there though, and I thought you might consent.”

  “You going on the drive?”

  “I know you wouldn’t come if I was there, but it’ll only be Belle and the two servant women. I asked her this morning if she wanted company, and she said she wanted you or Mina, so I went to Inez’s place and asked for Mina, and Inez said Mina was going on the drive, too.”

  “Yes, she’ll help Mildred.”

  “I talked to Ernest, told him not to let her go, and he said if I didn’t want her to go, she’d go in spite of all.” Harrison pressed his lips tightly and shook his head irritably. “So I told Mina she’d have to go as a woman, not a drover, that I’d let her have a horse to ride, and she was to be a lady. She wasn’t going to do Ernest’s work for him, I told her.”

  Lorry tapped the cradle with her foot as she passed it. She took out the shirts she had made and laid them on the bed, hoping he would comment on them, for it was good work she had done.

  “If you could come down and stay with Belle, she would be in better company than with Mina, anyway. Sisters argue and scratch at one another.”

  “Belle can come up here,” Lorry said.

  “No, she’s got a big house and she’s used to it. Belle’s timid. I’ve got feed enough for your stock, too, got pens and everything that’ll stand empty once I leave for Morganton. Why would you rather stay in such a place as this?”

  Irritated, she turned from him and began stirring the pumpkin broth. Why, indeed, she thought. He had no sympathy, no appreciation for one’s own, only for what he owned. He wouldn’t understand that possessions matter to another, too. He could never know how after a few years a house becomes a part of the woman who tends it, so that her ways with the fireplace are old ways, and her pride in the springhouse, being built stone by stone, which she has wanted for so long, is a pride of ownership which owns her and holds her close to it. His will to own was never able to let him give himself to what he owned, as hers was. “I’ve got flax to break and weave,” she said.

  “Lord in Heaven,” he said. “I’m not give many chances to do a thing for you, and you won’t permit it when I try. I’m tired of offering to you and being turned down, do you hear me?”

  “Then don’t offer,” she said bluntly. But at once she was sorry for him. “You want something to eat, Papa?” she said.

  “I’ll take a cup of coffee.”

  “I’ve got none. I’ve not had a coffee bean for months. We’re not so rich up here, Papa.”

  “I see you’re not.”

  She pulled hickory ashes under the pumpkin pot, for the pieces of pumpkin were soft now and could be boiled faster. She brought a chair up to the fire and began cracking grain for the bread. Her hands were strong. The tendons and muscles stood out; the veins were blue and prominent, toughened by the milking and milling, the cleaning and cooking, the hoeing and grubbing, the cold-water washing and the hot water of the outdoors when she washed clothes, by soap-making and thread-spinning and cloth-weaving, by wood-toting and skin-scraping, by stock-tending and the care of the family.

  “Do you ever get through?” he asked her, speaking quietly now.

  “No,” she said

  “I remember,” he said. “Do you know it?”

  “You don’t get through at this season. We had two cribs to fill this year.”

  He sat back and closed his eyes. “It racks a person. It did your mama. You was a baby then, not even talking age. I had a place like this and nothing much on the wall pegs. I was as poor as Job’s turkey, and a chance come to take fourteen hogs off a neighbor whose drove had gone in with mine. I was at the pig lot one morning getting mine ready to drive to market, and market wasn’t but six mile—about a day’s drive for hogs. Your mama and me was to do it, for we had no drivers. I didn’t even have a horse for her to ride, though she was heavy with child. We was so poor we didn’t have much to pray over of a night, and I saw those fourteen hogs. It seemed like Providence had put them there. Them hogs could mean the difference between having something and having nothing all my life, so your mama and me drove them in with mine; your mama and me drove them to market, sold them off, and their owner never could find them. Sometimes after that we heard him in the woods calling them, but they never come.”

  He kneaded his hands together and looked at her, stared at her anxiously. “Your mama and me was never the same to one another after that drive.”

  She gazed at him thoughtfully, then went back to stirring the pot. He went to the door and looked up at the mountain. “Lorry,” he said. It was infrequently that he used her name when he addressed her. “You’re showing your age, did you know it?”

  The words shook and weakened her. She knew her age was telling on her; she could even see in the spring water that it was. She would sometimes take a pail of water and set it in the shade and look at herself, so she knew what he said was so.

  “I told you afore. If you’ve got servants, you don’t age so bad. Belle don’t age. She looks like she did when I first took her home with me; she’s as smooth and white of skin as ever.”

  Lorry snatched up the shirts and bundled them, put them under the bed. She was upset now, was angry, was afraid she might even strike him, for he hurt her severely with such talk. A woman knew when she was aging; she didn’t need to be told. And it set up currents in her that washed back and forth like a twisting water storm. “You brought me to this place, Papa,” she said firmly, “and I made the best bargain I could. There’s work here, but I knew it then. We might not hold on; I know that, too. But he’s holding now.”

  “If you had took Lacey back—”

  “I lost him in Virginia, and that’s healed. I don’t think about him now.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t. We all lost something, but we go on. Now and agin we lost what’s dear, and the wound is on us. We carry many a wound by the time we get to aging, but I’m not afraid of scars, and I’m not fireside-tied yet, needing warmth, neither. I’m not old yet.”

  “It’s the work, I tell you, not the years or wounds, either. The work.”

  “I’ve got the work to do,” she said firmly, finally, tired of talking wisply, not wanting to talk any more about it, wanting him to go and let her be. “Go on home, Papa,” she said.

  “I can’t talk to you any more,” he said, hurt.

  “No, there’s too much wounds atween us from the old days. Get on away and leave me be.”

  “I wish you’d come with me,” he said. “I’ve got a place of ease in the valley, Lorry. I’ve worked and fought and even stole to get it, and I tell you something, it was done more for you than for myself, I tell you that’s so, and now I’ve not got the ones with me that I done it for.”

  “No, I’m not coming to your place,” she said. “Belle can come here if she wants to.”

  “I won’t permit it, not to here.”

  “Then tell her that.”

  “I’ll tell her you won’t come.”

  “Tell her what you please. Now let me be.”

  He was standing at the doorway, the dreary daylight behind him, and he murmured to himself in his distress. It started to rain again, a fine rain; he didn’t appear to notice. The rain made light noise on the roof boards, but he was wondering to himself about what he was to do. “This place’ll be lost, Lorry, if he don’t make the drive.”

  She watched him, her arms folded and her face set, but there was a tenderness in her for him in spite of knowing him so well. “You help him make it, Papa,” she said. “If you and Grover and your men help him, he can do it.”

  “Uh huh,” he said quietly, and he nodded. He cleared his throat and spat out into the damp black ground. “You come and stay with Belle,” he said quietly.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t ask of herself what he meant; there was no knowing what he meant. Whether he meant
a threat she didn’t know, but she knew that giving in to him was a weakness, an opening that he would force larger until every human life was open and bare before him. “Go on home, Papa,” she said.

  He nodded slowly, wearily. He sighed and stepped out into the rain and went to his horse. He stopped there and looked back at the place, this little hut perched on the low flank of a mountain, log on log, chinked with clay and stone-chimneyed, a gray-smoke plume rising from it. His daughter’s home.

  Lorry took a string of dried grapes and put them into the pumpkin sirup. She put in a handful of dried cherries. She laid chestnuts on the hearth to roast, and they were popping their shells by the time Fate came up from the road, singing a song Fancy Plover had taught him. He came in, sniffing the air appreciatively.

  She put her arms around him and hugged him tightly. “Where the others?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I saw Mina and she began to talk so fast about the rain I rolled on the ground laughing.” He crouched before the fire and stirred the ashes under the pumpkin pot. “I always did like her, you know it, Mama?” he said. “But she’s more serious any more.”

  Lorry sat down on a chair near him. She took the comb out of her hair, let it fall long; she combed her hair and watched him. When he grew older, was of courting age, no doubt he would be a young knight, she thought, a shining danger in that valley to every young woman’s heart, as his father had been in Virginia. There would be no worry about aging then, no looking for wrinkles in spring water for him, not for many years yet.

  When she heard Mooney coming, she rolled her hair up quickly and went at once to the bed and changed her dress, put on her yellow dress, which was the only good piece of cloth she had left. She went outdoors and waited for him. The wetness from the ground seeped through the breaks in her shoes and around the edges of the straps which she had bound around them to hold them together. He came riding up through the clearing, a big man on a huge work horse, the horse’s hoofs splattering mud.

  Behind him Verlin loped along.

  He rode up close, and the horse stomped the ground and mud and rain water swished out. “Be on our way by morning,” he said. He gave the horse to Fate to unsaddle for him, and all the while he kept glancing at her yellow dress.

  When the horse was put away, he and Verlin went inside, and she waited, holding her breath, wanting them to like what they found. She heard Verlin let out a shout, and Mooney got talking loud, and it was almost more joy than she had known before, to hear them.

  She went inside; Mooney smiled at her, and a wave of tenderness and embarrassment came over her. At once she went to the bed, took out the shirts she had made, and laid them out. “Now, I didn’t have time to do as well with these as I wanted to,” she said. The men watched carefully what she was doing. “It’s just a little piece of clothing to help keep the dampness away.” She laid the last shirt out and stepped back, feeling awkward and out of place, even though she was at home showing what she had made.

  “I declare to my soul,” Mooney said, holding his up before him.

  “I’d a made sleeves, but I didn’t have the cloth ready.”

  “It’s enough as it is,” he said. The boys were putting on their shirts. “When did you get time to make a shirt for me?” he said.

  “I did it now and then of a day,” she said.

  “I thought that piece of wool cloth was going to be for the girl.”

  “I’ll make more cloth while you’re away.”

  “But this wool is—”

  “I declare, I don’t think we’re so short of cloth that you can’t have a wool shirt when you’re going on such a journey, and no telling who you’ll meet on the road.”

  He put it on. He was obviously proud of himself in it. The boys had their shirts on, too, and she was so overcome with pleasure at the way the three of them acted, like children with colored presents, that she went at once to the fireplace and busied herself taking up the food. “You carry on so over nothing,” she said.

  When she called them, they came to the table, still talking loud, and as they ate they spoke confidently of the coming day, speaking with whipcrack sounds in their manner and voices. “First day’s the hardest,” Mooney told the boys. “Got to get the stock accustomed to the road.”

  The boys showed no fear of the work.

  “Going to Morganton, boys. Going to get your mama a present and a half.”

  They were pleased as could be.

  “Going to drive herds tomorrow,” he said happily.

  A joy, she thought, to have them happy. It had all been so hard and long, and now their life was coming to an opening. It would be rewarding now. The work of clearing had a meaning now, the planting and harvesting, the building of the cribs and pens, the nights of watching, the days of labor. It all had its meaning now, the bearing and the saving and the hunting down and the skinning, and she would be left to keep the cabin and the place for them, which had its meaning, too.

  He kept glancing at her, at the clean dress and the way her hair was. “Get you a present,” he told her again, and a wave of warmth went through her. It was a pleasure to be noticed, she would admit that. She remembered that first time he had seemed to notice her, in the cabin on her father’s land, and she was even more thrilled now than she had been then. He kept glancing at her as they ate, and he talked about the food, how good it was.

  They ate all she had made, then sat back in the chair and bragged on the dinner, and the boys beamed at him, and he said, “Verlin, you and Fate go down and count the drove; be sure they can all be found.”

  The boys appeared to be surprised, for they had counted stock that morning, but they went outdoors. Mooney sat across from her, listening to them as they went through the yard, looking at her with longing, and she got up and brushed her dress down in front of her, for there were bread crumbs on it. She glanced back at him and he was still looking at her. “I declare, a woman does a little something and surely gets praise around here,” she said. She knelt to stir the fire, and she heard him get up and she saw the light on the floor close in on itself as the door was closed and latched. She stood, and suddenly a nervousness flooded through her, for it was as it had been a long while ago and she felt a youngness in herself. He came close to her, and she suddenly moved to him and put herself in his arms and put her face hard against his chest. Even in the darkened room she could see the outline of his face above her.

  * * *

  The boys were up before dawn, cracking their whips and yelling, rounding up the drove and counting the sheep flock.

  The family ate breakfast in the coolness, the fire burning low, and when they had finished, Mooney tested the sharpness of his knife, then tested the sharpness of his ax, then took his gun down from the wall. The boys crept past him and ran down toward the pens, calling back that Jacob’s drove had arrived.

  Lorry put a shawl around the baby and carried her down to where the drove was, where the boys were running about. The two droves mingled and mixed with a clashing of tusks and hoofs. Jacob’s big boar easily won out for the lead, and Mooney threw corn to him and spoke roughly to him to get his attention. Jacob had his cart full of corn, and his ox was hitched to it and seemed none too satisfied. “Come along,” he called to it, and the great ox lowered his shoulders and pulled, the old cart groaned and moved. “Lead them out,” Jacob called. Mooney mounted at once and started down the trail, calling to the boar to follow, and behind the boar came the drove and sheep flock; then Jacob mounted, then the ox and creaky cart.

  The women followed. They saw Inez coming from her clearing as they approached Harrison’s big field, where most of the people of the settlement had already gathered. The men were sitting on horses, the boys were trying to keep the stock from bolting away. Mildred was there, sad-faced and dejected, astride a worn brown horse, her skirt pushed in tightly around her legs.

  The cross-river boars began fighting with those of Jacob, Ernest and Harrison. Jacob waded in among them, be
gan beating them with a club, fearless of their tusks, striking hard enough to addle them.

  Harrison shouted to his men and rode partway across the field. His horses and cattle began to follow, the Negro flailing them with switches and cracking whips about their heads. Harrison’s big fluffy ram followed the cattle, and the ewes and a few lambs followed the ram. Then Jacob and Mooney drove the lead boar into place. The drove moved, white and red and brown and spotted, big and small pigs, bobbing up and down as if riding on a sea.

  Mina, mounted on a proud horse, came at the rear with the prisoner woman and Charley Turpin. Behind them came Frank, with two corn carts.

  “Papa, you get them geese in the line,” Mina shouted suddenly. She abandoned her ladylike ways and rode swiftly to where Ernest was pestering his flock. A turkey whip appeared as if by magic in her hand and she cracked it at the gander’s head. “You take them geese along after them pigs,” she said, “or you’ll get left.”

  Ernest snorted at her defiantly, but one more crack of the whip sent his geese scurrying to take their places in the drive. “Papa, you keep up now,” Mina said, starting back toward Mildred, who was staring ahead as if she could see a vision.

  “You let my flock be, you hear?” Ernest shouted after her.

  Mina rode over to where Inez and Lorry were. She sat there on her horse and looked down sadly at her mother and the children. “I’m going now, Mama.”

  “You’re not coming back? Mina, why don’t you come back?”

  “Maybe I will when it’s a settlement here and has more people in it.”

  “I can’t stand to think of your living way off, with nobody to care for you.”

  “I’ll take care of myself, Mama.”

  “And what’ll I do for loneliness with you gone?”

  “Mama, you got enough children to spare one. There’s all them others.” She leaned far forward and kissed her mother on the cheek, then touched Fancy’s face, then, almost in tears, touched Lorry and the baby. She swung her horse and rode off, her hair shining in the sun, streaming out behind her.