by Win Blevins
Ellie got bread pans out, and two canisters of flour, one white, one pumpernickel. The Welsh Morgans preferred the light, the Turleys the dark, since the mother was Pennsylvania Dutch.
She whacked the white dough flat, flat, flat. Then she realized. I’ve made pie dough instead of bread dough. She put it into a pie pan, mixed more white dough, balled it up and plopped it into a bread pan. She did the same for the pumpernickel and slid both pans into the other oven.
Ellie took in a big breath and let it out slowly. One tear trickled down the side of her nose. “Oh, now what?” she brayed loudly. “I have no time for this.”
Lew’s face flashed here and there in her brain, like lucifers spurting into flame. She always told people, truly, that he had been a good man, never beat her. They grieved together when the first child was stillborn and the last died young. They suffered together through every childhood illness of the other four. They put up with the cramped cabin until they could add a second bedroom. Though he was not educated, nor raised much of a Christian, Lew liked to tell Bible stories every Sunday evening, and she thought he walked through life as much a Christian man as most. When he died two years ago, she, well, she’d been a little off ever since. She didn’t know where she’d put herself, or how long she’d been gone. And she didn’t know where to begin to look.
She had no complaint about her four children. Owen was one go-getter. He’d seen several years ago that they should add a store to the mill, and trade manufactured goods for flour and cornmeal, which they sold in Pittsburgh. Now the store made more profit than the mill, and had turned the ramshackle cluster of houses and businesses into Morgantown. Ellie and her children were as prosperous as anybody, their buildings in good repair, the smokehouse, root cellar, and springhouse full of food.
Gwen? Well, Gwen would make a fine wife and mother, which was exactly what she wanted. Same with Betsy. Sam? She worried about her younger son. He wanted the book learning she couldn’t give him. Where Owen loved the family business, Sam hated it. When Owen told Sam to do this or that (in Owen’s bossy way), Sam just moped. He liked to roam those woods, and he learned by hearing stories and retelling them. Her mother said he was a natural-born druid, like back in Wales. Ellie was just afraid he wouldn’t find a place in the modern world. But Sam was Sam. There was a hunger in him, a big ache. For what? She’d never known. She didn’t understand her younger son, but she loved him. She supposed he’d search till he found … whatever it was.
She’d always regretted especially that Coy died. Sam loved that baby. He needed a brother, and Owen …
“But what about me?” she said much too loud, and was taken aback at the querulous bitterness in her voice.
She was a good wife—she scrubbed and rubbed every surface in her house, she cooked and cleaned, she bore children and reared them up good, even if she couldn’t teach them book learning. She kept them healthy with wardings, the way her mother taught her. She’d wanted to do all those duties. But somehow along the way she’d scrubbed her hope in life down to a nubbin. Though she’d gone hopeless before Lew died, it didn’t chafe at her then like it did now. These last two years she went about her rounds like a phantom. Her children murmured together about her, probably speculating whether she was tetched or just hadn’t gotten over their father’s death. “Both!” she bellowed to the empty room. Then again, softly, “Both.”
All this just made today more important. She was going to do right by her first-born, however much a mother could really do that.
“Gwen, put extra cinnamon and sugar in that pumpkin filling. Owen likes it that way.”
Just then Gwen came in the door with the parsnips.
They studied each other. “Oh. Well, remember, lots of cinnamon and sugar in the pumpkin pie,” Ellie said apologetically.
Very early that same Christmas morning, going back into Eden, Sam felt like he couldn’t do anything right.
When he put his foot down, seemed like a rock would turn under it. When he bent beneath the branches of a tree, seemed like a branch would flip his hat off. Thorns scratched at his eyes. Now he stepped on a patch of snow and his foot went out from under him and he landed hard on his back and his rifle butt hit a rock—CRACK!
Some way to ease through Eden silently.
What was going on with him? Hadn’t he had the best day of his life just yesterday? Wasn’t he going to see Katherine in just a few hours? Wasn’t he doing what he liked best, hunting? He told himself he was as contented as a young man could be. Visions of Katherine danced in his head. Yep, he sure was.
Sam put his mind back on what he was doing, moving down to the creek silently. There he would wait for the deer and then the sun. His mind drifted back again to the Eve he’d gotten right here yesterday. He couldn’t believe it, not yet.
Whoa! This morning was no time for dreaming. Owen had objected to Sam going into the woods on Christmas Day. Ma overruled the older brother, saying the family always needed meat in the winter. So Sam would ease up the back side of his favorite lookout, sit completely still, and deer would come to him. He would keep his mind off what happened yesterday and keep his eyes on today’s deer.
SCRATCH-SCRATCH-CRACK-SCRATCH-SNAP-SWOOSH!
Sam jumped backward and fell on his butt. The Celt’s barrel banged a limb.
A huge, dark blob dropped from the tree, scarier than any snake he ever dreamed. It hit the ground right in front of him and roared like the boom of thunder.
Wild with fear, Sam threw up the flintlock.
The dark blob bounded away.
Shivers ran up and down his legs and trunk and neck. Goose bumps prickled his arms.
He watched the blob run off, its hind end bouncing up and down with every step. Then he laughed. He broke the silence again with another low chuckle. Damn. A cinnamon bear! It spied Sam, but Sam, his eyes ranging the ground for deer, didn’t pick out the bear in the tree, a dark ball of fur against the pearly pre-dawn sky. And then the bear’s man fear overcame all, and lickety-split it rammed down that trunk as fast as falling and skedaddled. Scaring the bejesus out of Sam.
A man stood up right in front of him. An Indian. Above the bush he held a rifle, and he was grinning.
The Indian said, “You scared off my bear.”
The Indian was speaking English. For that matter, he was wearing white-man clothes, or half white and half Indian.
“You could say you’re sorry.” Said with a big smile, like he was one of those fellows who finds everything funny.
“I’m sorry.”
The Indian stuck out a hand to help him up. Sam got to his feet without using it.
He studied the Indian. “You’re not pointing that rifle at me.”
“Not a bit,” said the Indian.
“You’re not mad.”
“Some days I’m mad, some days I’m crazy, some days I’m a pretty good fellow. This is one of the pretty good days.”
Sam nodded to himself. He could understand that. The Indian was much older than he was, thirty or more, fleshy-faced, tall, put together stockily.
“I was hunting that bear. Unusual to see one this late in the season. Warm winter. I played a game with myself, seeing how close I could get without spooking him, before I took the shot. He sure skedaddled away from you.”
Now Sam knew what was odd, or one thing that was. The Indian spoke regular English, no accent. You didn’t hear “Heap big” or “No want” from this fellow.
“What do you want with the bear?” The Indian wasn’t from around here—Sam would have known him. And there wasn’t much a traveling man could do with hundreds of pounds of bear meat.
“My folks live up the river, below the ferry.” That was a couple of hours’ walk. “They need the meat.”
“Old man MacKye?” MacKye—pronounced to rhyme with sky—was a white man, his wife a squaw, Delaware as Sam recalled. Because of that, no one really knew them.
This Indian—Delaware, apparently—nodded and stuck out his hand again. “Hanniba
l MacKye.”
Sam stopped gawking long enough to shake it. Hannibal? A Delaware?
“The usual way is to say your own name,” said MacKye, grinning again.
“Sam Morgan.”
“I know. Saw you here yesterday. Knew your pa a little.”
“You were here yesterday?”
“Scouting for that bear. You ran him off two straight days.”
Sam felt his flesh go hot and knew he must be the color of a tomato. Yesterday he and Katherine, he and Katherine …
“Nothing wrong with young love,” said the Delaware. “Good sight to see, matter of fact.”
Sam kept flushing, and it all flooded back on him, the looks, the feelings, the touches, the heating of the senses. Our first time together. Oh, Katherine …
“Want to smoke?”
At first Sam thought maybe the Delaware meant a peace pipe—Sam had never done that, or even seen one for real. But the man whipped out a corncob pipe and a leather pouch and started fingering the tobacco into the bowl. He sat on one end of a boulder and Sam took the other end. Without hurrying, the Delaware readied the pipe, struck a lucifer, and got the smoke going. A lucifer—the latest thing, and from an Indian. One strange Indian.
He offered the pipe to the east, south, west, and north, and handed it to Sam.
“This smoke is a ceremony?”
“All smoking is. No big thing.”
Sam puffed on the pipe and handed it back.
“Don’t come tomorrow and I’ll get that bear.”
He could figure why MacKye was doing the hunting. Old man MacKye was really old. As far as Sam knew, he and his squaw had no one around to help them.
“I could take your folks some meat,” Sam ventured. He didn’t know why he hadn’t done it before. Well, yes, he did know—the white man and his Indian wife, they weren’t accepted. Squaw man, people called him.
The Delaware handed him the pipe. Sam pulled hard on it, hiding his shame behind a cupped hand.
“It would be good if you went to see them. My old man knows a lot. But I’ll take care of the meat for a while. May I see your rifle?”
Sam handed him The Celt. The Delaware turned it over and over, inspecting. “Jacob Schmidt, a Lancaster gunsmith. I’ve seen this rifle before. Your father’s, wasn’t it?”
“He willed it to me.” Only thing his father left him, but Sam didn’t say that.
“I heard he passed. We made a trip together. Buffalo, to see the western end of the Erie Canal.”
Sam didn’t like to think about that trip. Three years ago—he was sick and didn’t get to go. Owen went. “My pa and brother were keen on progress,” he said. “Owen still is. You?”
“I’m curious and curiouser. I like to see what human beings decide to do, the good and the bad. You take care of that rifle. Good piece of work.”
It was the only rifle in the family, a tool worth a month’s wages. “I treasure it.”
They looked at each other through an awkward silence. Sam felt like he’d known this man a long time.
“Why don’t you take supper with me tonight?” said Hannibal MacKye. He sucked on the pipe and puffed smoke out. It shimmied upward from his face. “My camp is at the mouth of the creek.”
Sam felt embarrassed again. “All right, Mr. MacKye. May I bring … the young lady you saw me with yesterday?”
“Call me Hannibal. Bring anyone you want. Come about sundown.”
Tongue-tied, Sam nodded yes. I don’t know any Indians, really. Why do I feel sheepish about this?
“You still want a deer?”
Had Sam told the Delaware he was hunting deer?
“There’s two bucks over that rise, in the bottom.” He nodded toward the low hill in the east.
“Thanks.”
Hannibal handed him the pipe. “Offer those bucks the last of the smoke.”
Owen came into the kitchen like the man in charge, as was his way. Ellie cast a fond eye on her eldest, but she had long since lost control of her son, her self, her life. Welcome to it, Owen, she thought.
Owen marched around the kitchen. How odd it was, she thought, that for a small man, he bristled energy at you. While her youngest, far bigger, was shy and standoffish.
Owen took the lid off the pot of boiling redskin potatoes. “I’ll scallop them,” she assured him.
“And don’t forget to sprinkle bread crumbs on top,” he said briskly.
“The ham and hen are in the oven,” Ellie said meekly.
“And the pies are cooling on the window sill,” put in Gwen, stepping through the back door. Gwen didn’t allow for Owen’s bossy manner the way Ellie did. She studied Gwen’s face to see if she was standing in dread too. No. That was just as well.
“Gwen, would you slice a saucer full of cheese?” Keep her busy, that’s the solution. “Oh!” Ellie nearly startled herself, exclaiming like that. “I almost forgot the coffee.” She got the hand grinder out and took down a canister of beans she’d roasted herself.
Owen stepped into the parlor where the grandfather clock stood. “Eleven minutes,” he called. “Eleven minutes and they’re here.”
Ellie stifled a sob.
Sam labored up the last hill as fast as he could. It’s past noon, I’m sure, damn it. Owen will be upset.
He’d done the work as fast as he could. Clean head shot. Buck gutted quickly and steaming innards left on the ground. Then he shouldered it and trudged toward home, feeling guilty. He was at least an hour behind what he’d promised.
He hung the deer in the icehouse, washed at the pump, got the blood off. He stripped off his deerskin jacket outside the kitchen door and hung it on a peg, his shirt being much more presentable, and turned into the wide opening to the dining room.
They were arrayed around the gala table, the Turleys, Betsy and husband, Gwen and husband, his mother. Katherine, though, wasn’t sitting with her family. She was standing at the head of the table. And holding hands with … Owen.
Sam’s head swirled.
“Towhead,” said his older brother, giving his fierce, public smile, “you have missed our great announcement.” He lifted Katherine’s hand high and declaimed, “Katherine and I are betrothed to be married.”
Sam could see nothing in her face. She was smiling broadly at everyone in the room and no one in particular, looking at everyone in the room and no one special. Not at Sam.
Bile came up his gullet.
He tried to fix her eye, but she beamed wider and cast her gaze about the room democratically.
Words rumbled in the bottom of his brain. ‘Katherine, yesterday, just yesterday … I was going to ask you to …’ Unspoken words, ones to strangle on.
His mother poured applejack into the heavy glasses, her best.
He staggered but recovered his balance.
His mother set the jug down and stood next to him. He could feel her, willing him to be calm.
“A toast!” cried Arthur Turley. “Many happy years to the new couple, and many, many children!”
Owen led the cry of “Hear! Hear!” Only Sam and Ellie were silent, the mother looking with panic into her youngest’s eye.
Sam lurched backward, tripped on the door sill, and tumbled into the kitchen. His head hit the floor with a resounding crack!
Ellie gasped.
Owen looked at Arthur Turley with a knowing smile. “Just like my little brother,” he said, “to try and outshine me.”
After a long moment of fussing with him, Ellie said. “It’s not a bad cut, but I’d best put him to bed.”
With her support he got up dizzily.
Anything to get out of here, he thought.
Later, much later, his bedroom door scraped. He blinked his eyes open. A shaft of twilight showed Katherine’s figure. She closed the door and stood with her back against it. “Yesterday,” she said softly, “yesterday I told you, ‘That’s all.’ You were my first. But I meant it. I have no more to give. That’s all.”
She looked at him hard,
stepped back through the door, and closed it.
Chapter Three
Sam slipped out the window into the night. He could hear them all, still celebrating. He’d be damned if he’d join in. He’d be damned if he’d act sick either. He needed to roam.
He opened the porch door quietly, got his jacket, and brought down his father’s rifle. Not that he knew what he might shoot at night. He also took his bundle of taffy. He crossed the yard, going around a shaft of light made by the candles—Owen was burning all the candles tonight. As he passed the parlor window, he did not look in.
The darkness made no difference to him, nor the lack of help from the new moon. He knew his way to Eden in the dark, in the light, in his dreams.
Beyond the barn he looked for the place where the bare branches of the trees showed an opening. At the edge of the wood he felt the path with his feet. He took a deep breath and let it out.
Quietly, he stepped into the forest.
Something hit his shoulder.
Sam whirled.
“Easy,” said a voice he recognized. Sam realized it was a hand on his shoulder. “It’s Hannibal.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for my dinner guest.”
Sam burst into laughter and at the same time felt tears spring into his eyes. He was glad Hannibal couldn’t see his tears in the darkness.
“You missed your Christmas dinner and didn’t have any supper either. Come down to my camp and eat.”
Sam searched Hannibal’s face, but could see it only dimly. Suddenly he was ravenous. “How’d you know I missed meals?”
“Been waiting for you. Your brother and his fiancée came outside and talked together.”
So Hannibal knew. “They hug and kiss a lot?” In the chill evening Sam felt the hot blood rush to his face.
“They hugged and kissed and did more than that.”
“What else did they say?”
“Nothing that matters. Let’s go, I’m hungry too.”
Hannibal moved out through the darkness, his feet sure on the path. Sam followed behind him uncomfortably. What the hell am I doing? They padded for ten minutes and came alongside Eden, now dark and impenetrable to the eye. Ten more minutes and they came to the river, the Allegheny, a minstrel ditty of little whooshes, gurglings, and gulps in the night, and a breath of cold air.
