The Education of Little Tree

by Forrest Carter

  The husband carried his dead wife. The son carried his dead mother, his father. The mother carried her dead baby. They carried them in their arms. And walked. And they did not turn their heads to look at the soldiers, nor to look at the people who lined the sides of the Trail to watch them pass. Some of the people cried. But the Cherokee did not cry. Not on the outside, for the Cherokee would not let them see his soul; as he would not ride in the wagons.

  And so they called it the Trail of Tears. Not because the Cherokee cried; for he did not. They called it the Trail of Tears for it sounds romantic and speaks of the sorrow of those who stood by the Trail. A death march is not romantic.

  You cannot write poetry about the death-stiffened baby in his mother’s arms, staring at the jolting sky with eyes that will not close, while his mother walks.

  You cannot sing songs of the father laying down the burden of his wife’s corpse, to lie by it through the night and to rise and carry it again in the morning—and tell his oldest son to carry the body of his youngest. And do not look … nor speak … nor cry … nor remember the mountains.

  It would not be a beautiful song. And so they call it the Trail of Tears.

  All of the Cherokee did not go. Some, skilled in the ways of mountains, fled far back into the bosom of her hollows, the raceways of her ridges, and lived with their women and children, always moving.

  They set traps for game but sometimes dared not go back to the traps, for the soldiers had come. They dug the sweet root from the ground, pounded the acorn into meal, cut poke salat from the clearings, and pulled the inner bark from the tree. They fished with their hands under the banks of the cold creeks and moved silent as shadows, a people who were there but not seen (except by a flicker of illusion), not heard; and they left little signs of their living.

  But here and there they found friends. The people of Granpa’s Pa were mountain bred. They did not lust for land, or profit, but loved the freedom of the mountains, as did the Cherokee.

  Granma told how Granpa’s Pa had met his wife, Granpa’s Ma, and her people. He had seen the faintest of signs on the banks of a creek. He had gone home and brought back a haunch of deer and laid it there in a little clearing. With it, he had laid his gun and his knife. The next morning he came back. The deer haunch was gone, but the gun and the knife were there, and lying beside them was another knife, a long Indian knife, and a tomahawk. He did not take them. Instead he brought ears of corn and laid them by the weapons; he stood and waited a long time.

  They came slowly in the late afternoon. Moving through the trees and halting and then coming forward again. Granpa’s Pa reached out his hands, and they, a dozen of them—men, women, children—reached out their hands and they touched. Granma said they each had to reach across a long way to do it, but they did.

  Granpa’s Pa grew up tall and married the youngest of the daughters. They held the hickory marriage stick together and put it in their cabin, and neither of them broke it as long as they lived. She wore the feather of the red-winged blackbird in her hair and so was called Red Wing. Granma said she was slender as a willow wand and sang in the evenings.

  Granma and Granpa spoke of his Pa in his last years. He was an old warrior. He had joined the Confederate raider, John Hunt Morgan, to fight the faraway, faceless monster of “guvmint,” that threatened his people and his cabin.

  His beard was white. Age was overtaking his gauntness; and now when the winter wind bit through the cracks of his cabin, the old hurts came to life. The saber slash that ran the length of his left arm; the steel had hit the bone, like a meat axe. The flesh had healed, but the bone marrow thumped with pain and reminded him of the “guvmint” men.

  He had downed half a jug that night in Kain’tuck, while the boys heated a ramrod over the fire and seared the wound and stopped the blood. He had climbed back in the saddle.

  The ankle was the worst of it. He hated the ankle. It was big and cumbersome where the minnie ball had chewed it in passing. He hadn’t noticed it at the time. It had been the wild exuberance of a cavalry charge that night in Ohio. The fever for combat, that marked his breed, was running high. There was no fear, only exultation, as the horse moved fast and light over the ground, as the wind whipped a storm in his face. Exultation that brought the rebel Indian yell rumbling from his chest and out his throat, screaming, savage.

  That’s why a man could get half his leg mangled and not know it. Not until twenty miles farther on, when they reconnoitered in the dark of a mountain hollow, and he stepped from the saddle and his leg buckled under him, the blood sloshing in his boot like a full well bucket, did he notice the ankle.

  He relished thinking of that charge. The memory of it softened his hatred for the cane—and the limp.

  The worst of the hurts was in the gut; in his side, near the hip. That’s where the lead was never taken out. It gnawed, like a rat chewing at a corn crib, night and day; and never stopped. It was eating away at his insides; and soon now, they would stretch him out on the floor of the mountain cabin and cut him open, like a butchered bull.

  The putridness would come out; the gangrene. They would not use anesthetics, just a swig from the mountain jug. And he would die there on the floor, in his blood. No last words; but as they held his arms and legs in the death throes, the old sinewy body would bow up from the floor, and the wild scream of the exulting rebel’s challenge to hated government would come from his throat and he would die. Forty years it had taken the “guvmint” lead to kill him.

  The century was dying. The time of blood and fighting and death; the time he had met, and by which he had been measured, was dying. There would be a new century, with another people marching and carrying their dead, but he knew only the past—of the Cherokee.

  His oldest son had ridden off to the Nations; the next oldest dead in Texas. Now, only Red Wing, as in the beginning, and his youngest son.

  He could still ride. He could jump a Morgan horse over a five-rail fence. He still bobbed the horses’ tails, out of habit, to leave no tail hair on the brush to be followed.

  But the pains were worse and the jug didn’t quieten them as it had. He was coming to the time of being spread-eagled on the floor of the cabin. And he knew it.

  The fall of year was dying in the Tennessee mountains. The wind bit the last of the leaves from hickory and oak. He stood, that winter afternoon with his son, halfway down the hollow; not admitting that he couldn’t climb the mountain anymore.

  They watched the naked trees, stark on the ridge against the sky; as though they were studying the winter slant of sun. They would not look at each other.

  “Reckin I’ll not be leavin’ ye much,” he said, and laughed soft, “best ye could git from that cabin would be to touch a lighter knot to it fer a hand warming.” His son studied the mountain. “I reckin,” he said quietly.

  “Ye’re a man, full and with family,” the old man said, “and I’ll not hold ye to a lot … ’ceptin’ we stretch our hand to clasp any man’s as quick as we’ll defend what we was give to believe. My time is gone, and now the time will be something I don’t know, fer you. I wouldn’t know how to live in it … no more’n ’Coon Jack. Mind ye’ve little to meet it with … but the mountains’ll not change on ye, and ye kin them; and we be honest men with our feelings.”

  “I mind,” the son said. The weak sun had set behind the ridge, and the wind bit sharp. It came hard for the old man to say … but he did. “… and … I … kin ye, son.”

  The son did not speak, but he slipped his arm around the old, skinny shoulders. The shadows of the hollow were deep now and blurred the mountains black on either side of them. They walked slowly in this fashion, the old man touching his cane to the ground, down the hollow to the cabin.

  It was the last walk and talk Granpa had with his Pa. I have been many times to their graves; close together, high on a ridge of white oak, where the leaves fall knee-deep in autumn, until they are whipped away by mean winter winds. Where only the hardiest Indian violets poke tiny
and blue around them in the spring, timid in their presence before the fierce and lasting souls who weathered their time.

  The marriage stick is there, hickory and gnarled, unbroken still, and filled with the notches they carved in it each time they had a sorrow, a happiness, a quarrel they had mended. It rests at their heads, holding them together.

  And so small are the carved names in the stick, you must get down on your knees to read: Ethan and Red Wing.

  Pine Billy

  In the wintertime, we carried leaves and put them on the corn patch. Back in the hollow, past the barn, the corn patch flattened out on either side of the spring branch. Granpa had cleared it a little ways up the sides of the mountain. The “slants,” as Granpa called the sloping sides of the corn patch, didn’t raise good corn, but he planted it anyhow. There wasn’t much flat ground in the hollow.

  I liked gathering the leaves and putting them in the tow sacks. They were light to carry. Me and Granpa and Granma would help each other fill the sacks. Granpa would carry two, and sometimes three sacks. I tried to carry two, but couldn’t make much headway at it. Knee-deep for me, the leaves were like a brown snowfall on the ground, dappled with the yellow paint of maple leaves, and the red of bee gum and sumach bushes.

  We would come out of the woods and scatter the leaves over the field. Pine straw too. Granpa said some pine straw was necessary to acid the ground—but not too much.

  We never worked so long or hard that it got tedious. We usually was “drawed off,” as Granpa put it, to something else.

  Granma would see yellowroot and dig that up; and that led her to some ginseng, or iron root … or calum … or sassafras … or lady’s slipper. She knew them all, and had a remedy for any ailment of which I have ever heard. Her remedies worked too; though some of the tonics I would as soon not have drunk.

  Me and Granpa usually run across hickor’nuts, or chinkapins and chestnuts; sometimes black walnuts. It wasn’t that we special looked for them, it just seemed to happen. Between our eating and gathering nuts and roots, and seeing a ’coon or watching a peckerwood, our leaf carrying would get down to practical nothing.

  As we would walk down the hollow in evening dusk, all of us loaded with nuts and roots and such, Granpa would cuss under his breath where Granma couldn’t hear him, and then he’d announce that next time we was not going to get “drawed off” to such foolishness; and were going to spend the whole time carrying leaves. Which always sounded mighty dismal to me; but it never happened.

  Sack by sack, we got the field covered with leaves and pine straw. And after a light rain, when the leaves clung to the ground just enough, Granpa would hitch up ol’ Sam, the mule, to the plow; and we turned the leaves under the ground.

  I say “we,” because Granpa let me plow some. I had to reach up over my head to hold the handles of the plow stock, and spent most of my time pulling all my weight down on the handles to keep the plow point from going too deep into the ground. Sometimes the point would come out of the ground, and the plow would skitter along, not plowing. Ol’ Sam was patient with me. He would stop while I pulled and strained at getting the plow upright, and then would move ahead when I said, “Giddup!”

  I had to push up on the handles to make the plow point go into the ground; and so, between the pulling down and the pushing up, I learned to keep my chin away from the crossbar between the handles, for I was getting continual licks that jolted me up pretty bad.

  Granpa followed along behind us, but he would let me do it. If you wanted ol’ Sam to move to the left, you said, “Haw!” and if you wanted him to move to the right, you said, “Gee!” Ol’ Sam would meander off a little to the left and I would holler, “Gee!”; but he was hard of hearing and would keep meandering. Granpa would take it up, “Gee! Gee GEE! DAMMITOHELL! GEE!” and ol’ Sam would come back to the right.

  Trouble was, ol’ Sam heard this so much, that he begun to connect up the total geeing and the cussing, and would not go right until he heard all of it; figuring natural, that to go right, it took the whole amount. This led to considerable cussing, which I had to take up in order to plow. This was all right until Granma heard me and spoke hard to Granpa about it. This cut down on my plowing considerable when Granma was around.

  Ol’ Sam was blind in his left eye, so when he reached the end of the field, he would not turn around going to his left, figuring he might bump into something. He would always turn to his right. When you’re plowing, turning to the right works good at one end of the field; but at the other, it seems you have to turn a full circle, dragging the plow completely out of the field into bushes and briers and such. Granpa said we had to be patient with ol’ Sam, as he was old and half-blind, so I was, but I dreaded every other turn at the end of the field; especially when there was a thicket of blackberry bushes waiting on me.

  One time, Granpa was pulling and dragging the plow around through a mass of nettles, and stepped in a stump hole. It was a warm day, and yellow jackets had a nest in that hole. They got up Granpa’s britches leg and he taken off hollering for the spring branch. I saw the yellow jackets come out, and I taken off too. Granpa flattened out in the spring branch, slapping at his britches and cussing ol’ Sam. He might near lost his patience.

  But ol’ Sam stood patient and waited until Granpa got over it. Trouble was, we couldn’t get near the plow. The yellow jackets was all stirred up and swarming around that plow. Me and Granpa got out in the middle of the field and Granpa would try to get ol’ Sam to come forward, away from the yellow jacket nest.

  Granpa would call, “Come on, Sam—come on, boy,” but ol’ Sam wouldn’t move. He knew his business and he knew better than to pull a plow laying sidewise on the ground. Granpa tried everything; a considerable cussing, and he got down on all fours and brayed like a mule. I thought he brayed tolerable close to the sound of a mule; and once, ol’ Sam leaned his ears forward and looked hard at Granpa, but he wouldn’t move. I tried braying myself, but I couldn’t touch Granpa’s bray. When Granpa saw Granma had come up and was watching us on all fours in the middle of the field and braying, he quit.

  He had to go into the woods and get a lighter knot, which he touched a match to and pitched in the stump hole. This smoked the yellow jackets away from the plow.

  Going back to the cabin that evening, Granpa said it had been a worrisome puzzlement to him for many years whether ol’ Sam was the dumbest mule in the world, or the smartest. I never figured it out myself.

  I liked the field plowing, though. It growed me up. When we walked down the trail to the cabin, it ’peared to me that my steps was lengthening quite some bit behind Granpa. Granpa bragged on me a lot to Granma at the supper table and Granma agreed that it looked like I was coming on to being a man.

  We were at the supper table one such evening, when the hounds set up a racket. We all went out to the front porch to see a man coming across the foot log. He was a fine looking feller, nearly tall as Granpa. I liked his shoes the best, they was bright yellow, high top, with white socks rolled around and lump tied to hold them up. His overalls struck him just above the socks. He had on a short black coat and a white shirt and had a little hat that set square on his head. He was carrying a long case. Granma and Granpa knew him.

  “Well, it’s Pine Billy,” Granpa said. Pine Billy waved. “Come in and stay awhile,” Granpa said.

  Pine Billy stopped at the doorstep. “Aw, I was just passing by,” he said … and I wondered where he was passing to, with just mountains behind us.

  “Ye’re goin’ to stay and eat with us,” Granma said, and got Pine Billy by the arm and led him up the doorsteps. Granpa taken his long case by the handle, and we all went in the kitchen.

  I could tell right off that Granpa and Granma liked Pine Billy a lot. He had four sweet ’taters in his coat pockets and gave them to Granma. She made them into a pie right then, and Pine Billy et three pieces of it. I got one, and was hoping he would not eat the last piece. We moved away from the table to set by the fireplace and left the
piece of pie in a pan on the table.

  Pine Billy laughed a whole lot and said I was going to be bigger’n Granpa. Which made me feel good. He said Granma was purtier’n the last time he’d seen her, and this pleased Granma; Granpa too. I commenced to feel right good about Pine Billy, even if he had et the three pieces of pie—they was his ’taters.

  We all set around the fire. Granma in her rocker and Granpa leaning forward in his. I figured something was up. Granpa asked, “Well, what’s the news, Pine Billy, that ye hear around?”

  Pine Billy leaned back on two legs of the straight-back chair. He took a finger and thumb and pulled out his lower lip and turned a little can upward, putting snuff in his lip. He offered the can to Granpa and Granma. They shook their heads. Pine Billy was sure taking his time. He spit in the fire. “Well,” he said, “look’s like I might have come up on something that’ll fix me in good shape.” He spit in the fire again and looked around at all of us.

  I didn’t know what it was, but I could tell it was important.

  Granpa figured it was too, for he asked, “What is it, Pine Billy?” Pine Billy leaned back again and looked at the roof rafters. He clasped his hands across his stomach.

  “Must’a been last Wednesday … nooo, it was a’Tuesday, fer I’d been playin’ at a Jumpin’ Jody dance on a’Monday night; Tuesday it was. I come through the settlement on a’Tuesday. Ye know the po-liceman there, Smokehouse Turner?”

  “Yes, yes, I’ve seed him,” Granpa said, impatient.

  “Well,” Pine Billy said, “I was standing on the corner there, talking to Smokehouse, when this big, shiny car pulled into the fillin’ station acrost the road. Smokehouse didn’t notice it … but I did. It had one feller in it, and he was dressed fit to kill; big city. He got out of his car and told Joe Holcomb to fill it up with gasoline. Well, I was watchin’ ’em, all the time; and he looked around, kind’a sneaky. It hit me right off. I says to myself, ‘That’s a big-city CRIMINAL.’ Mind ye,” Pine Billy said, “I didn’t say it to Smokehouse. I jest said it to m’self. But to Smokehouse I says, ‘Smokehouse, ye know I’m agin turning anybody in to the law … but big-city criminals is different, and that feller over there looks total suspicious to me.’