The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  It was quite late when the women drew back from the circle. They went into the cabin and began to mix meal with water to make parting bread for the group. The men began to leave the circle, too, and shift about, walk along the edges of the field, and Mooney went on up into the field to the grave where Imy was, and from there he could see the others, and it was as it had been the night of the bear, when they had come to his house and had stood around a fire. Again they were severe, unsmiling, and again they were close, united, a people who had gone through dangers together.

  He looked up at the mountain. It had a snow topping tonight, and the moon cast a warm light on it. There’s no prettier sight, he thought, and no prettier place than this one. It traps a man into staying, into building here; then it shows him that he doesn’t even possess his own cabin and fields. The valley is it own, he knew now. The valley and the beasts and the mountain and the snows and the water and the cliffs owned themselves yet. If he left here, in a few years there would be little sign that he had even come. The vines would cover the buildings and pull them down; they would pull over even the tombstone here at Imy’s grave. The trees would spring up in the fields and gnarl again with roots the yielding land. The clearing he had made on the hill would become again part of the whole, as the bear had been part of the whole and now in its grave was part of the whole, unprotestingly.

  He could hear the German talking. “If we could have got the stock to the river, we could a made rafts well enough . . .”

  It was only man that was always moving, trying to get more than he had.

  “With weather calm, it might not be so troublesome to make a drive,” Jacob said.

  That night Mooney lay awake in bed. He guessed Lorry was awake, too, and he spoke to her, and she made a soft, murmuring reply. He began to talk to her. They talked about what they would lose in leaving, mentioning the cabin and sheds and springhouse, the work already done, mentioning the plans they had had for other fields and for a mill and for a settlement.

  “We’d have the graves to leave,” he said, “there’s that, too. I buried a woman, you’ve buried a man, and we buried Paul up there near what’s Jacob’s cabin now.”

  They talked that way, not yet seeing how they could stay, not yet willing to tear themselves free from the place they had made.

  * * *

  Grover came by several nights later and said his father was ill, had been sickly since the drive; maybe he had caught a sickness up on the ridge. Anyway, something was sapping his strength.

  The family lighted torches and went down to Harrison’s big house, where they were admitted by the younger of the Negro women. She told them Mr. Harrison was lying down.

  They went quietly into his bedroom, and there he sat bolt upright in bed, fully clothed, with his hat on and a riding crop in his hand. He was tense and alert, but there was no sense of strength about him, and there was no more color in his face than there is in river water.

  “Lie down, Papa,” Belle said to him, but he would not. He sat there as if ready to go to his horse and ride out across his fields.

  “Why did all of you come?” he demanded. “I sent fer Mooney only.”

  “Now, Papa,” Belle said placatingly.

  “Here, help me to my feet.”

  “No, you’re too weak to stand,” she said.

  “Mooney, help me up.”

  Mooney helped him. He thought the old man ought to do what he wanted. He helped him up, and sensed at once the man’s reliance on him, felt his hand tighten on his arm, holding to him desperately. “You carry that there split-bottom chair and come with me,” he said, and he moved shakily across the room, the riding crop falling from his hand and he not knowing it.

  He made his way slowly out of the cabin and across the yard. He went to the riverbank, where a casual wind was moving the willow branches, and he told Mooney to put the chair down. He sat down in it and for the first time realized he had lost his riding crop. Verlin brought it to him; he took it and chased Verlin away. “Git, git,” he said, and the boy fled.

  He held the crop firmly in his hand, as if it were the last authority left to him, and looked at the river, flowing so darkly and swiftly by. “I dreamed the other night an awful dream,” he said.

  Mooney was standing behind him, looking down at the back of his head and at the river beyond.

  “A man’s mind is a strange creature for a man to have to live with; God knows, it don’t make sense most of the time. No telling what a man will dream, or what he will think, either.” He stared down into the rushes of the river, and when he talked it was so softly that his words couldn’t be heard distinctly. “I saw a hole in the ground, and I thought it was my own grave. I crawled into it and begun to dig into the ground, and I dug and made a narrow passageway, and I went on and dug my way into my wife’s grave.” He shook his head, aggravated by the thought. “I dug into the hole where she lay and clawed the pine boards away from her and made love to her remains.”

  Mooney stared sternly at him, sitting still in the straight chair.

  “It was as real as if it happened in my own bed.”

  “I’ve dreamed strange,” Mooney said.

  “A man can dream anything. Years ago I dreamed I slept with Lorry. Does that surprise ye?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “A man dreams what he dreams, that’s all, and might be anything at all, for he’s all tied up with lies, anyhow, and worries. My Lord, we come out of a narrow opening in a woman and try to get our eyes to see something, not knowing at all what the world is, or our parents are, or we are. And now I’m nigh to old-age death and I don’t know yet what the world is, or I am. I know it’s been a pleasure to be alive for these years, though I don’t know what being alive is. I might very well die in this chair afore I ever stop looking at that river, but I don’t know what death is. Some say it’s angels in Heaven, but I don’t have any more use for angels than I have for a lame horse. Sometimes I hear tell about angel voices singing. What do they sing? Do they sing about work, about the plowing and planting? Do they sing about this valley when the blooms open out? Do they sing about that river? Can they sing better than that river can? Do they plant crops and watch it rain and watch growth come? Do they harrow the fields with a pine bough, like you, or use a harrow with locust teeth like me, or do they use a harrow with gold teeth, or some such foolish contraption, or turn soil with a gold-tipped plow?”

  “No need to talk as if you’re about to die, Mr. Harrison,” Mooney said, for he felt he ought to say something like that.

  “In one dream the other night, I was going back through the cord into the belly of my mama. That’s a sign of coming death, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t know what dreams mean.”

  “What I’m saying is that I’m dying, I’m going on out of here, and I’ve come to wondering what I’m leaving and who I’m leaving it to. A man likes to die in order, if he can, and I see now that all I got is here in this valley, and it was about this valley I used to have my dreams.” He fidgeted with the riding crop. “They’re not coming true, air they?”

  “I believe not,” Mooney said.

  “There’s no better river than that one, no better land than that you stand on now, no prettier sight than them hills over there, but something’s wrong with it all. Is it me? I know it might be, for nothing I’ve ever done has been of the best quality.”

  “There’s no road in or out, that’s part of it.”

  “You can make a way, if you take control and drive on through, and have half luck with the weather.”

  “We tried it—”

  “I know, but I didn’t do so well, wasn’t sold on it then. A drive takes working together, and so does a settlement. I tell you, a drive can be made, given time.”

  “It’s still a long way up here. It’s harder here than anywhere else.”

  “Then learn to make your own goods last longer.”

  “We’re ragged now; we’re nigh naked.”

  “Make mo
re clothes, make more wool and cotton. You can grow cotton here, once the land gets wore out some.”

  It was so, Mooney knew, much of it was, but the old man needed to admit to the toughness of the situation, too. “Lacey Pollard left a section of flat land out West, and we’re bound to go there and at least see if it suits us.”

  “Lacey’s buried right over there beyond them willows, outside the root spread of them trees. I picked the place out myself. That damn fool Ernest Plover come down here and set about making a coffin, and I had to have it all done proper. His coffin wouldn’t do fer a chicken coop. I had a hole dug as deep as a man is tall, and we put Lacey away in it. He’s here in this valley now. He never cared one whit about the Cumberland, and neither do I, or you for that matter. I never cared one whit about Virginia, neither, or my farm there. But I care here, and that’s what I’m saying. I know it’s harder here, but I care more here. It takes more work here, it takes a man’s life here, it asks all a man has to give and a man gains as well as loses by joining in with land like that. But now it’s being deserted. Even whatever grave I have in it will be deserted, seems like. I don’t want it that way. I want it peopled. I want a church here and a school and men and women on the trails; I want people out farming and women cooking meals. I don’t want vines to cover over what we’ve made, or take away the best dream I ever had.”

  “Do you know what it takes to live up here, and how little it offers?”

  “Yes, I know. But a settlement, afore it’s started, is bound to be like that. Every new thing is unpromising at birth.”

  The water flashed behind, skitted over the rocks and rapids, and the clouds moved swiftly over the moon, there beyond the ridge across the river, and the ridge was shaded and was as dark as hemlock trees in summer.

  “So I’m going to parcel out my possessions according to my wishes. My house will go to Belle; she’s not earned it, for she’s not bore a single time, is as empty of fruit as an elm tree, but I aim to give her the house and her choice of beds. These fields and most of my stock I’ll leave to Grover. He can keep it unless he ever weds with Belle, in which case he loses ever’ inheritance from me. I’ll not have son and wife living together, do ye hear that?” He lifted the riding crop and whipped it through the air in a fierce and determined gesture. “As for the rest,” he said, and once more he raised the riding crop, though now he used it as a pointer to indicate the valley, the mountain, the ridges on both sides of the river, indicating the land that lay as far as the eye could see. He turned partway around in the chair. “The rest I’ll give to you. No, not to you, but to Lorry and the boys. I’ll give you nary thing except whatever’s left of my vision for this place. Do ye take it? Or do I go down plumb useless to the ground?”

  His eyes flashed, as if moonlighted, and he sat there with his white hair blowing in the river breeze. His mouth was half open as he waited for an answer, and Mooney nodded curtly to him, felt sorry for him, gave him some assurance anyway, for Mooney knew, even before the old man had finished, that he was likely to stay here. The old man’s dream was Mooney’s dream as well, had been for a long time. He would not stay for that reason, or for the old man at all, or do anything else for him, but he would stay for the place itself, of which already he was a part, possessor of some of it and possessed by it. For five years he had dug himself into the land, and every death and loss had driven him deeper, every planting had made him more a part of his own fields, and he would not leave, could not leave, nor could Lorry. Maybe Fate could leave; maybe Fate ought to leave and seek out the property on the Cumberland. But poverty or not, lean years or not, suffering or not, Mooney would have to stay.

  A person becomes part of what he does, he thought, grows into what grows around him, and if he works the land, he comes to be the land, and owner of and slave to it.

  He looked away from Harrison, gazed at the far ridge across the river. Calmly he said, “That cow of mine, I been meaning to get a bull to breed her to, so’s I can get the start of a herd that way.”

  Harrison’s gaze sharpened. “How much is the service of a bull worth to ye?”

  “And a bag of salt is needed at my place. I hate to travel all the way to Morganton for it, when I can borrow it from you and pay you back after next year’s drive.”

  The eyes glistened sharper still. “Salt up here ought to be worth a sow a bushel.”

  “I’ll give you two lambs for a bushel of salt and the use of the bull,” Mooney said.

  “Two sows is what I’m asking.”

  “I’ll give you two lambs, and when I pay the salt back, you can give me one lamb in return.”

  “I’ll not bargain for lambs. What do I want with mutton? I’ll take two sows or nothing; now state your preference.”

  They stood out there in the moonlight, the old man trembling, Mooney being as adamant as he, and they argued the matter down to one lamb, one pig, and two hens from Lorry’s chicken flock. It was the first trade the two of them had made together in some time.

  He and Lorry and the boys were walking back up toward home, and they saw a fire burning in the woods between the Plovers’ and the Germans’ places. “Somebody camping,” he said, and stopped to consider it. A hunter maybe, or new settlers who had stopped there for the night.

  Then he heard a chopping sound. The sound went out across the valley and was echoed back from the far hills, and it reminded him of the time he and Imy had cut down the first trees long years before and had worked at night to bark and notch them in time to get a shelter up. “Who do ye suppose?” he said.

  They walked along until they were near the fire. They moved quietly, feeling their way toward it. They were close by when he made out the figure of the young German, saw him lift the ax and bring it down with sureness. He made his way even closer, and was near him when Felix laid down the ax and wiped sweat from his face.

  A girl got up from where she had been sitting, went to the ax and took it up. It was Mina, and as he watched she began to chop at the log, and his mind went trailing back in time to the earlier evenings, to when she had cut logs at Ernest Plover’s place, and even back to when he and Imy had cut logs before that, at night, too, and when she had made a fire so he could see to cut logs, and from time to time had moved it.

  “I thought I was done with cutting of trees a long time ago,” Mina said. “I get so tired of trees I wisht a streak of lightning would come and set a blaze to ever’ one that ever sprouted. The trees and the wolves is the curse of this country, and if I didn’t know we’d have a cabin built afore winter, and if I didn’t want to have a place to warm myself, I never would do such work again.”

  Felix looked at her fondly, watched her as she moved in the firelight, and now and then she would flash a smile at him.

  It’s all as it should be, Mooney thought, it’s all right for her at last. Up on the ridge, in the days of the drive, she and Felix must have come to know each other; they had gone through dangers together and had suffered loss together. Now they would do very well.

  It wasn’t far, this place, from where he and Imy had first camped, he thought. Not far, either, from the place where the bear had come. A good starting place, he thought. It would take Mina and Felix only a few years to have children growing and stock ready for fall drives. They would start here their own clan to struggle with and be a part of the land.

  He looked up at the dark mountain. Another small house and family will be set against it, he thought, close to the wildness of it, the merciless, the pitiless mind of it, there in the shadow of it.

  1784

  27

  Spring must have intended to come in April that year, but coolness lingered at night in spite of the warm days, and it was May before the buds broke open and Mooney took from the rafters of the shed the handles of the plow which he had made. He fastened into place with hickory pegs the plowshare, and got out the horse. She seemed to know from many times past how to wait and what it was she waited for.

  He fastened the harness, whi
ch he had cut from the bearskin, which he, Verlin and Fate had tanned. He flicked a switch and the old horse moved, and he and Verlin and Fate lifted the plow and carried it up the hill to the field. “Whoa, here,” he said, and the horse stopped.

  Lorry came to the door of the cabin and watched them. “How many rows you planning on making?” she asked.

  “As many as we can fit in,” he said, checking the harness. He and Verlin set the plow in place. He clicked his tongue at the horse, took the plow handles firmly in hand, and put his weight on the plow handles and weighted the blade, and the plow moved, the earth turned, the dark earth turned and the smell of the earth came into the air and the row opened to him and yielded to him and was ready.