The Education of Little Tree

by Forrest Carter

  The mule run straight toward where Granpa was hiding. When it got close, Granpa jumped up and waved his arms and the mule swerved back into the field and headed for the woods over to one side. The soldier had circled his horse in the woods, and he scared the mule back into the field. Neither Granpa nor the soldier was noticed, for the woman and the old black man had their eyes on the mule.

  The one-legged man was trying to run, stumping his hickory sapling into the ground, and falling flat down every few steps. The two young’uns was running, hollering through briers, trying to head the mule off.

  The old mule got confused and run back through the whole crowd of them. The woman grabbed his tail. He jerked her off her feet but she held on, the mule dragging her through the bushes, tearing off her dress. The old black man sprung at the mule and got hold on his neck. He was flung around like a rag doll, but he held on like he would die if he turned loose. The old mule give it up and stopped.

  The one-legged man and the young’uns come up. He put a leather strap around the old mule’s head. They all walked around the old mule, petting him and rubbing him like he was the finest mule in the world. Granpa thought the old mule commenced to feel pretty good about the whole thing.

  Then they all knelt down in the field in a circle around the old mule, and stayed a good while that way, with their heads turned to the ground.

  Granpa watched them hitch the mule to the plow. First one would plow behind the mule then another’n—even the young’uns. Granpa watched from the bushes and kept his eye on the soldier watching them from the woods.

  The valley got to be something that Granpa kept watch on right regular. He had to see how the plowing would come out. In three days’ time, they had turned a quarter of the field.

  On the morning of the fourth day, Granpa saw the Union soldier drop a white sack at the end of the field. The one-legged man saw him too. He half lifted his hand to wave, like he wasn’t sure he’d ought to. The Union soldier done the same, and rode off into the woods. It was a sack of seed corn.

  The next morning, when Granpa got to the valley, the Union soldier was dismounted in front of the house. He was talking with the one-legged man and the old black man. Granpa edged in close to hear them.

  In a little while the Union soldier was plowing the old mule. He had the plow lines tied and looped around his neck, and Granpa could tell he knew his business. Every once in a while, he would stop the mule. He would reach down and get a handful of fresh turned earth and smell of it. Sometimes he would even taste it. Then he would crumble the dirt in his hand and start plowing again.

  Turned out, he was a sergeant, and he was a farmer from Illinois. Usually, he couldn’t show up to plow until nearly sundown, when he could slip away from the army post. But he come and plowed nearly every day.

  One evening he brought a skinny private with him. He looked too young to be in the army, but he was. He commenced coming with the sergeant every evening. He brought little bushes with him. They was apple trees.

  He would set one out on the edge of the field and work at it for an hour, getting it set in and watered. He would pat the ground around it, prune it up, fix frames of wood to put around it, and then set back and look at it like it was the first apple tree he had ever seen.

  The two little girls taken to helping him, and in a month’s time he had completely ringed the field with apple trees. Turned out, he was from New York and come from apple raising as his trade. By the time he had all his apple trees put out, the rest of them had the entire valley planted in corn.

  Granpa left a dozen catfish on the front porch after dark one time. The next evening, they cooked the catfish and was eating them off a table set under a tree in the yard. Occasionally, while they was eating, the sergeant or the woman would stand up and wave toward the mountains, inviting Granpa in. They knew an Indian had left the fish but they could never spot Granpa, they just waved at the mountains. Not being Indian, they could never tell how to separate a wrong color from the woods around it. Granpa never went in. He left them some more fish, though. He would hang the fish on tree limbs near the yard, for he was afraid to go on the front porch anymore.

  Granpa said he left them the fish because, them not being Indian, and so being ignorant, they would likely total starve to death before they could get their crop in. And too, he was not, nowise, going to be outdone by a Union soldier, ner any two of them, though he drawed the line at crop raising, not taken up too favorable with plowing and such.

  The skinny private and the little girls drawed water from the well at dusk every evening. They toted buckets, sloshing water, and watered every apple tree. This went on while the other was hoeing and thinning the corn. Granpa realized the Union sergeant was as total crazy about hoeing as he had been about plowing. The corn was up, dark green, which meant it was a good corn crop. The apple trees taken to sprigging green.

  It was summer then; the days long, and dusk evening slow in coming. The sergeant and the private could get in two or three hours work before they had to leave and go back to the army post.

  In the cool of the dusk, just as the whippoorwills started to sing, they would all stand in the front yard and look out over the field. The sergeant smoked his pipe, and the two little girls stood close as they could to the skinny private. His hands was always caked with dirt from clawing around his apple trees, for he would not trust a hoe to work around them.

  The sergeant would take his pipe in his hand. “It’s good land,” he would say with his eyes on the field like he would eat the ground if he could.

  “Yes,” the one-legged man would say, “it’s good land.”

  “Best corn crop I ever seed,” the old black man would say. He would say it every evening. Granpa said he slipped close, but all they ever done was stand and stare at the fields … and say the same things every evening, like the field was some kind of natural wonder they was all supposed to stare at. The skinny private would always say, “Wait a year—when them apple trees start blooming … you ain’t never seen nothing like it.” The little girls would giggle, which made them look younger.

  The sergeant would point with his pipe. “Now next year, you’ll want to clear that little neck of brush against the far mountain. It’ll make maybe three, four acres of corn.”

  Granpa could see the little valley was looking might near like there was nothing else could be done to it. He said it looked like they had everything set. He commenced to lose interest in the whole thing. But then the Regulators come.

  They rode in one evening when the sun was still high, a dozen of them. They had fancy uniforms and guns, and represented the politicians who passed new-set laws and raised taxes.

  Riding up to the house yard, they planted a pole in the yard, and on top of the pole they put a red flag. Granpa knew what the red flag meant. He had seen it around in the settlements. It meant some politician wanted your property, and so they raised the taxes on it high enough that you couldn’t pay it. Then they put up the red flag, meaning they was going to take it over.

  The one-legged man, the woman, and the old black man and the young’uns, all come out of the field with their hoes when they saw the Regulators. They bunched up in the yard. Granpa saw the one-legged man throw down his hoe and go in the house. In a minute, he stumped back out and he had an old musket in his hands. He pointed it at the Regulators.

  The Union sergeant rode up. The skinny private wasn’t with him. The sergeant got off his horse and stepped between the Regulators and the one-legged man. About that time, a Regulator fired his gun, and the sergeant staggered back, looking surprised and hurt. His hat tumbled off his head, and he fell to the ground.

  The one-legged man shot off his musket and hit a Regulator, and the Regulators commenced firing their guns. They killed the one-legged man and he fell off the porch. The woman and little girls run screaming to him. They tried to prop him up but Granpa knew he was dead, for his neck was limp.

  Granpa saw the old black man run at the Regulators with hi
s hoe raised up in the air. They shot him two or three times and he fell, laying over his hoe handle. Then they rode off.

  Granpa took to the back trail, for he was sure they would circle about, making to know that they hadn’t been seen. He told his Pa about it and expected there would be trouble over it, but there wasn’t.

  Granpa found out in the settlement how it was passed off. The politicians passed it out that it looked like an uprising, and they was going to have to be reelected to handle it and get more money for what looked like a war. People got worked up about it, and told the politicians to go to it. Which they did.

  A rich man took over the valley. Granpa never knew what happened to the woman and the young’uns. The rich man brought in sharecroppers. The land and weather being as it is, you can’t raise apples in big enough bunches to make real money, so they plowed up the apple trees.

  Word was passed that a private from New York deserted the army. He was posted as a coward, running out on a uprising and all.

  Granpa said they boxed the sergeant up to send his remains and such back to Illinois. He said when they went to fix him and dress him, one of his hands was clenched into a fist. They tried to unclench the fist, and finally had to take tools to do it. They got his fist open, but there wasn’t anything in it worthwhile. Nothing but a handful of black dirt fell out.

  A Night on the Mountain

  Me and Granpa thought Indian. Later people would tell me that this is naive—but I knew—and I remembered what Granpa said about “words.” If it is “naive,” it does not matter, for it is also good. Granpa said it would always carry me through … which it has; like the time the big-city men made a trip to our mountains.

  Granpa was half Scot, but he thought Indian. Such seemed to be the case with others, like the great Red Eagle, Bill Weatherford, or Emperor McGilvery or McIntosh. They gave themselves, as the Indian did, to nature, not trying to subdue it, or pervert it, but to live with it. And so they loved the thought, and loving it grew to be it, so that they could not think as the white man.

  Granpa told me. The Indian brought something to trade and laid it at the white man’s feet. If he saw nothing he wanted, he picked up his wares and walked off. The white man, not understanding, called him an “Indian giver” meaning one who gives and then takes back. This is not so. If the Indian gives a gift, he will make no ceremony of it, but will simply leave it to be found.

  Granpa said the Indian held his palm up to show “peace,” that he held no weapon. This was logical to Granpa but seemed funny as hell to everybody else. Granpa said the white man meant the same thing by shaking hands, except his words was so crooked, he had to try to shake a weapon out of the sleeve of the feller who claimed he was a friend. Granpa was not given much to handshaking, as he said he didn’t like for a man to try to shake something out of his sleeve after he had presented himself as a friend. It was total distrustful of a man’s word. Which is reasonable.

  As to folks saying, “How!” and then laughing when they see an Indian, Granpa said it all come about over a couple of hundred years. He said every time the Indian met a white man, the white man commenced to ask him: how are you feeling, or how are your people, or how are you getting along, or how is the game where you come from, and so on. He said the Indian come to believe that the white man’s favorite subject was how; and so, being polite, when he met the white man, he figured he would just say how, and then let the son of a bitch talk about whichever how he wanted to. Granpa said people laughing at that was laughing at an Indian who was trying to be courteous and considerate.

  We had delivered our wares to the crossroads store and Mr. Jenkins said two big-city men had been there. He said they was from Chattanooga and drove a long black automobile. Mr. Jenkins said they wanted to talk to Granpa.

  Granpa looked at Mr. Jenkins from under his big hat. “Tax law?”

  “No,” Mr. Jenkins said. “They wasn’t law at all. Said they was in the whiskey trade. Said they heard tell you was a good maker and they wanted to put you in a big still, and that you could get rich working for them.”

  Granpa didn’t say anything. He bought some coffee and sugar for Granma. I picked up the wood chips and taken the old candy off Mr. Jenkins’ hands. Mr. Jenkins fidgeted around to hear what Granpa had to say about it, but he knew Granpa too well to ask.

  “They said they would be back.” Mr. Jenkins said.

  Granpa bought some cheese … which I was glad, as I liked cheese. We walked out, and didn’t hang around the store; but headed straight off up the trail. Granpa walked fast. I hadn’t time to pick berries and had to do away with the old candy while I was in a continual trot behind Granpa.

  When we got to the cabin Granpa told Granma about the big-city men. He said, “You stay here, Little Tree. I’m going to the still and lay some more covering branches over it. If they come, you let me know.” He taken off, up the hollow trail.

  I set on the front porch watching for the big-city men. Granpa had not hardly gone from sight when I saw them and told Granma. Granma stayed back, standing in the dogtrot, and we watched them coming up the trail and across the foot log.

  They had fine clothes like politicians. The big fat man wore a lavender suit and white tie. The skinny man had on a white suit and black shirt which shined. They wore big-city hats made of fine straw.

  They walked right up to the porch, though they didn’t mount the steps. The big man was sweating pretty bad. He looked at Granma. “We want to see the old man,” he said. I figured he was sick, for his breathing was bad and it was hard to see his eyes. His eyes looked slitted, way back in swelled-up fat.

  Granma didn’t say anything. I didn’t either. The big man turned around to the skinny man. “The old squaw don’t understand English, Slick.”

  Mr. Slick was looking around over his shoulder, though I didn’t see anything behind him. He had a high voice. “Screw the old squaw,” he said, “I don’t like this place, Chunk—too far back in the mountains. Let’s get outa here.” Mr. Slick had a little mustache.

  “Shut up,” Mr. Chunk said. Mr. Chunk pushed his hat back. He didn’t have any hair. He looked at me setting in the chair.

  “The boy looks like a breed,” he said. “Maybe he understands English. Do you understand English, boy?”

  I said, “I reckin.”

  Mr. Chunk looked at Mr. Slick. “Hear that … he reckins.” They got tickled about this and laughed right loud about it. I saw Granma move back and turn Blue Boy out. He headed up the hollow for Granpa.

  Mr. Chunk said, “Where’s your Pa, boy?” I told him I didn’t recollect my Pa; that I lived here with Granpa and Granma. Mr. Chunk wanted to know where Granpa was, and I pointed back up the trail. He reached in his pocket and took out a whole dollar and held it out toward me. “You can have this dollar, boy, if you take us to your Granpa.”

  He had big rings on his fingers. I seen right off that he was rich and more than likely could afford the dollar. I taken it and put it in my pocket. I knew figures pretty well. Even splitting with Granpa, I would get back the fifty cents which I had been slickered out of by the Christian.

  I felt pretty good about the whole thing, leading them up the trail. But as we walked I commenced to think. I couldn’t take them to the still. I led them up the high trail.

  As we walked up the high trail, I felt kind of bad about it, and I didn’t have any idea in the world what I was going to do. Mr. Chunk and Mr. Slick, however, was in fine spirits. They pulled off their coats and walked long behind me. Each one had a pistol in his belt. Mr. Slick said, “Don’t remember your Pa, huh kid?” I stopped and said I hadn’t no recollection of him at all. Mr. Slick said, “That would make you a bastard, wouldn’t it, kid?” I said I reckined, though I had not got to the B’s in the dictionary and had not studied that word. They both laughed until they commenced coughing. I laughed too. They seemed like happy fellers.

  Mr. Chunk said, “Hell, they’re all a bunch of animals.” I said we had lots of animals in the mounta
ins … wildcats and wild hogs; and me and Granpa had seen a black bear oncet.

  Mr. Slick wanted to know if we had seen one lately. I said we hadn’t but we had seen signs. I pointed to a poplar tree where a bear had taken a claw swipe. “There’s a sign right there,” I said. Mr. Chunk jumped sideways like a snake had struck at him. He bumped into Mr. Slick and knocked him down. Mr. Slick got mad. “Goddam you, Chunk, you nearly knocked me off the trail! If you had knocked me down there …” Mr. Slick pointed down into the hollow. Him and Mr. Chunk both leaned over and looked down. You could barely see the spring branch, far below us.

  “God almighty,” Mr. Chunk said, “how high are we? Hell, if you slipped off this trail, you’d break your neck.” I told Mr. Chunk I didn’t know how high we was, but I reckined it was pretty high; though I had never give any thought to it.

  The higher we got, the more Mr. Chunk and Mr. Slick coughed. They also fell farther and farther behind me. Once I come back down the trail looking for them, and they were sprawled out under a white oak. The white oak had poison ivy all around its roots. They was laying in the middle of it.

  Poison ivy is pretty and green, but you had better not lay in it. It will pop welts out all over you and make sores that will last for months. I didn’t say anything about the poison ivy. They was already in it anyway, and I didn’t want to make them feel worse about things. They was looking pretty bad.

  Mr. Slick raised his head up. “Listen, you little bastard,” he said, “how much farther we got to go?” Mr. Chunk didn’t raise his head. He laid there in the poison ivy with his eyes closed. I said we was nearly there.

  I had been thinking. I knew that Granma would send Granpa up the high trail after me, so when we got to the top of the mountain, I was going to tell Mr. Slick and Mr. Chunk that we would just set down and wait; that Granpa would be along directly. Which he would. I figured it would work all right and I could keep the dollar, seeing as how I would have, more or less, taken them to Granpa.