The Trees Page 3

  Still Worth wouldn’t say he had enough. No such thing. He’d work till he was black in the face, splitting out clapboards and laying them on the scalped joists for a loft. Before he was done, they all had to climb the ladder and see how snug and warm a place he’d made under the eaves where you could lay of a night and listen to the rain on the roof over your head. Three of the young ones fought to have their beds up there with the woods mice racing over their legs in the dark and the chipmunks rolling walnuts and hickory nuts over the loft floor soon as it began to come daylight.

  And still Worth wouldn’t stop. Not till he had worked out his mind. He had to make a last splurge. This would be a mortal handy thing for a house, something you had to pay tax on if you had one down in Pennsylvania. He steadied the logs with wedges, marked them with a straight edge and chopped out a hole, dressing it smooth with axe and knife. Over the hole he plastered a few cross sticks and fast to the sticks the marriage paper the Conestoga dominie had given them. Worth had always plagued Jary for lugging such a useless thing around with her. But now that he greased it with bear’s oil, he reckoned it might be of some account. It let the sun through like glass. Oh, then it was a sight to see in that dark cabin, a window light blazing up like it was a fire and making all the cubbyholes and corners plain as outside till you could see the marks the barkworms left on the logs.

  Even Jary said it was a tolerable place to live. They had to blister their feet a long ways to get here, but now they were holed up snug and cozy as a bear in his hollow tree. Let the winter cut up his didoes. Let the king’s men come down from the English Lakes if they had a mind to. They’d have a hard time finding the Lucketts in this shut-in place. The woods were wide and deep. The cabin stood hid in the trees like a piggin in a haystack.

  But after some Indian hunters had foxed them out, Jary complained, what was the use of putting up a cabin fine as a fiddle if you let such kind make it a public house?

  Down in Pennsylvania the whites were thick as dogberries and the few Indians left knew their place. Away back here the whites were scarce as birds’ teeth and the Indians plenty as dogberries. Their sharp eyes picked up Worth’s spent bullet patches and tracked him to his cabin where they drifted in with no more knocking than leaves in October. Their fusils they set in the chimney corner for the priming to dry and themselves on the floor under the bag of Indian meal swinging from a joist.

  “Whoo-stink!” little Sulie cried, holding her nose with her fingers.

  Worth gave her a clip over the head and told Sayward to make them some johnnycake. The warm smell of baking meal in the cabin soon thawed out their tongues. They swapped grave talk with Worth and felt polite hands over the window and the skins he showed them, blowing the fur expertly apart at the places it was thickest and finest.

  But Jary eyed the emptying grainbag with ropy mouth and angry, rebellious eyes. Never had she been the one to take up with the red people. No, Worth was as much Indian as anybody she wanted to know. All the Delawares, Shawanees, Ottawas and the six nations of the Mingos she ever saw were different from her people as a night dog from a hound. Oh, whites weren’t sinless, especially in the woods. Some went around bad as Indians holding a grudge. But they couldn’t hold a candle to their red brothers when it came to paying it. If Indians couldn’t get back at the white persons that harmed them, they’d take it out on some handy white women or poor young ones they happened to meet up with that had nothing to do with it. They’d hack off their scalps likely with some brains hanging to them and set their pitiful hair up on a pole and prance around poking firebrands at it and bragging and carrying on like they had licked General Wayne and his whole army.

  No, Jary had little love for Indians in general and these digging in her meal bag in particular. If the Shawanees raised corn like Worth said, why didn’t they stay at home and eat their own? It rankled her to have to sit by helpless and see them coming this way as long as her meal lasted and eating what was meant for her young ones. And when Worth told Sayward to shake the bag for the last dust of meal to feed some that had been feasting on her plenty before, Jary flared up. She took that meal bag and sat on it, her mouth tight. Her eyes dared them all to come and get it, and Worth too, if he reckoned he could.

  Those red hunters from Shawaneetown didn’t stay long after that.

  “There you go, a makin’ bad friends,” Worth told her when they had left. “They feed me when I go to their place.”

  “You got no business a goin’ to their place,” Jary’s eyes flashed at him. “You got a family to come on home to.”

  “They mought not be good enough for you,” Worth said. “But they are for me.”

  The only sign that Jary heard him was her sewed-up mouth. He began to get mad as she.

  “If the Injun has any ornery tricks, who do you expect he learned them from but the whites?”

  That was too much for Jary.

  “Bosh and moonshine!” she flared out at him. “Injuns was a scalpin’ and massacreein’ and torturin’ and burnin’ up their own brothers long before they ever heerd of a white person. They brag their own selves how they killed off all the Injuns that used to live around here. Did you ever hear of an Injun payin’ even a fi’penny bit for land like the whites?”

  Worth would say nothing more. There was no use trying to get the best of Jary. You might as well try to head off a gadd or talk back to a whaup. His eyes retreated ominously into his beard till you couldn’t see much more than the whites. In the morning he took his gun and Sarge and did not come back that night. Next day it started a cold rain.

  On toward dusk they thought they heard Worth coming and Sulie ran to open the door. A Delaware stood there with the firelight licking on his wet face and on the silver wheels in his ears that were stretched down halfways to his shoulders. He was ugly as sin, bedraggled in his matchcoat as a wet turkey hen, but in he tramped big as some redcoat major. The water ran off him in little streams and when he got to the fire, he shook himself like a dog. The drops rained all over. He sat himself down by the warm hearth to dry. You might have reckoned this was his own cabin, and his squaw and young ones could be mortal glad to see him home again.

  Jary had stared after him with a tight-mouthed, angry look. Now she turned to Sayward.

  “If I had my way,” her eyes said, “I’d a seed him in the river first. But what’s a body to do — turn him out in the rain?”

  Sayward was sitting by the trencher when he came. Now she went on about her business, working a doeskin with her hands. They had taken the hair off with lye from fire ashes and tanned it with oak bark liquor in a log trough. Once the hide was worked soft, Jary would lay it on the trencher and cut it out with the cabin knife, and Genny’s nimble fingers would sew up a shirt for Wyitt. He had some squirrel ready that he wanted it trimmed with. Every morning he made the rounds of his log and sapling snares, hoping for a mink or otter skin Worth could trade for buttons when he went to some post. Oh, with black fur trimmings and horn or pewter buttons, Wyitt was going to be a dandy and no mistake.

  When their caller got too hot in front, he turned his side to the fire and Sayward had a good look at him. She had never seen this one before. His nose was big as a red Conestoga potato. It even had eyes like a potato. Put that nose in a dark place like a cellar, and it looked like it would grow white sprouts. But nobody could sit bigger at the hearth.

  Sayward had nothing for the way squaws gave in to their men, waiting on them hand and foot, giving them the notion they were lords of creation. About all these men would turn a finger to was war and hunt. Let them kill themselves a fat deer, would they fetch it in? Not them. They’d hang it up on the nearest tree where the wolves couldn’t get it and march back to camp with nothing but their fusils over their shoulders: No, their squaws could come out and skin it and fetch it in.

  For all she knew, this one here had plenty meat hanging out in the woods right now. It looked like it, for mighty little of theirs did he eat that evening, though she had roasted it
to a turn. Worth hadn’t come home and he wasn’t likely to any more tonight, for when Sayward went out, the rain on the door log had turned to ice. It was a black world but tomorrow, she reckoned, would be a white one. And then they would have a new job getting rid of their company, for if there was one thing an Indian hated worse than getting out in the rain, it was getting out in the snow.

  “You kin sleep up in the loft tonight,” Sayward told Genny. “I’ll lay with Mam.”

  Genny had plenty to say to that. She wouldn’t have a savage who never washed from one summer to the next sleeping on her and Sayward’s bed. But Sayward shooed her up the ladder and that was an end to it. When the Delaware was out, she pushed the axe under the leaves where she and Jary would lie. She piled logs on the fire to give light till morning. Then when he came in she barred the door and lay down beside her mother in her shortgown. If this fellow had any red cronies hanging around outside, he would have to get up to let them in.

  Overhead in the loft she could hear the young ones restless and wakeful. But Jary could doze off the minute her head touched the bed leaves. She lay there on her back with her mouth open. Her quiet snoring served to quiet those in the loft. Little by little their whisperings and turnings played out. After while the clapboards overhead lay silent for all the firelight that ran back and forward across them.

  Now, Sayward told herself, there were only two left awake in the cabin. Oh, that red body on the hearth could lie there still as it pleased him. He could suck his breath in and out like he was dead to the world. But he couldn’t pull wool over her eyes. She was shy of believing that a woods Indian would drop off to sleep like a baby in a white man’s house.

  The wind was coming up, driving sleet and hard snow like fine bullets against the cabin, hunting for holes, but it couldn’t get in. Sayward lay there thinking of all the folks she had heard about who had taken in strangers on some cold or rainy night when they shouldn’t. From the loft she could hear the young ones’ soft breathing. In her mind she could see them lying close together with their arms around each other. Achsa or Genny would be on the outside. That one would be the first a tomahawk would reach from the ladder.

  Once or twice she caught herself breathing heavy and mighty near asleep. After a long while a shadow told her that their company was moving. She lay still as a log, save for her breath, watching through her merely shut lashes. He was raising up like a possum that had played dead. Now he looked over at the bed with sharp black eyes. He took his knife out of his belt and Sayward’s hand found the axe helve under the leaves, sweating around it.

  When she was a little tyke, Sayward recollected, Jary would tell her not to fret if an Indian came around the cabin. No, she could shut her eyes and go to sleep. Like as not the Black Hunter of the Juniata was outside in the bushes, watching over them like he watched over all mothers and young ones, and his ball never missed. But across the Ohio it had no Black Hunter. She would have to do this her own self. Should he climb for the young ones first, never would he know what struck him. But if he came first for her and Jary’s bed, then she would rise up and cleave him straight between the eyes like the woman back on Dunkard’s Creek in Pennsylvania. Oh, she wasn’t as big as Experience Bogarth who had hacked out the brains of one red devil and the insides of another and cleaved the head of the third who tried to push himself in the door when she would shut it. But if a lone woman could do that much, she could drive her axe in one shaved head so it would take Worth to pull it out when he came home.

  She flexed her muscles ready to raise up and that’s the last she had to till morning. Now who would have thought this Delaware didn’t like her roast? That big heavy body had pulled a hunk of meat black with dried blood from his hunting shirt and was cutting it in two on the hearth. Now he sat there big as you please roasting a piece to suit himself on a long sharp stick of kindling from the chimney corner. Oh, you could see he could hardly wait to gobble it down. He ate with the blood running down his chin, smacking his lips and licking his fingers. Then he lay down belching like one who had to wait a long time for a supper he liked, but now he was well fed and these white squaws with their burned cooking weren’t any wiser.

  Sayward wouldn’t have felt surprised to find the door open and him gone next morning, but the snow was still coming down and that held him. Worth tracked in soon after with two deer-hides and a fine black fisher fox. He scowled a little to see the Indian sitting there on the floor. They talked a while in Delaware till Jary ran out of firewood.

  “I tole you many a time,” Worth growled, “not to leave your axe out under the snow.”

  Sayward took it from the bed of leaves while her father eyed her close.

  “You sleep here with Jary last night?”

  She nodded. The Delaware was watching too. His sharp black eyes ran from face to face for what he could read. He picked up the axe and ran his finger over the bit and you could see he was putting two and two together. Oh, you could see this was a joke to him, a young squaw taking an axe to bed against a stout, hearty hunter like he was. He laughed silently, his nose and belly both shaking like bone jelly. He gave her back the axe and felt the girl’s arm and thigh.

  “He don’t know no better,” Worth said.

  The Delaware was like a big child now. He had to go over this joke till it was stale. But Worth didn’t laugh.

  “I don’t want you takin’ no more Injuns in when I’m off,” he said darkly after the company was gone.

  “I thought you liked Injuns?” Jary’s mouth was grim.

  “I kin git along with them, but you mought not,” Worth said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BREAD

  IF I had bread,” Jary complained that morning, “then I believe I could eat.”

  The young ones stared at her, avoiding each other’s eyes. They had known for a long time that their mother was tottery, with one foot in the grave. What they didn’t know was that her sense was failing. Never had she talked queer before. It was a sign her other foot was shuffling mighty close to the bury hole.

  “Look, Saird, she got bread now and ain’t teched it yit,” Wyitt said, pointing to what Jary held in her hand.

  Even Sayward had to think a minute what her mother meant. Then she recollected that it started back in Pennsylvania one of the times the meal bag had been empty. The young ones were tired of meat. They had cried for a change. They wanted johnnycake and mush. Now Indian meal was something unhandy to get hold of in the woods, Jary told them, but if they were tired of meat, they could eat bread for a while. Bread was better than johnnycake or mush, everybody knew.

  That opened the young ones’ eyes. So they had bread! Jary called on Worth to swear to it and he nodded his head shortly. Now bread, she told them, was venison, turkey and such. Only the dark flesh of bear, coon and such was meat. Bread was lighter and went in the blood easier than meat. And from now on she wanted to hear them call things by their right names, bread bread and meat meat. Even Worth had to say bread for venison, though for a while the word stuck in his throat. And now the young ones had grown so used to seeing bread on their mother’s trencher, they thought her weak in the head to be calling for bread and standing there with an untouched turkey wing in her hand.

  What the young ones didn’t know, Sayward told herself, wouldn’t hurt them. But this was something too good for Genny to pass by. Sayward could hear her now up in the limbs of the hung elm with the younger ones still as possums around her. Genny had a knowing mind. And now she was telling them the bread their mother hankered for wasn’t turkey or venison. No, turkey and venison weren’t bread at all. Their mother had made that up. Bread was something settlement people had on their trenchers. It was a little like johnnycake, only bigger and better. She and Sayward had tasted it when they were little tykes on a Conestoga visit. It made her mouth water now just to mind it.

  All the others’ mouths were watering, too. They spat to the ground lushly with Genny.

  “Ginny, go on!” they told her, but all Genn
y could tell them was that once on a time a chit of a girl had sat up to a shaved-board table. She was pretty as a settlement lady tricked out in her white church gown and neats leather shoes made over a cobbler’s last. And in her hands was a big piece of bread white as gray moose milk —

  Sayward moved away. You wouldn’t reckon, she told herself, that that girl pretty as a settlement lady had been their mother. Not to look at her now, puttering around this cabin in her old walnut shortgown that hadn’t been washed since Genny’s fingers had taken it in again. And still it liked to fall off Jary’s bones. Oh, her mother’s days were numbered. The slow fever burned off mortal flesh like a fire cooked meat off a bone. All day it never let you rest. Jary had four stout girls to do all the cabin chores and yet her bare feet kept scraping over the earthern floor that had been damped and tamped and topped with white clay to match the daubing on the chinking. Talking did no good. It went in Jary’s one ear and out the other. Her hair kept sliding down the side or back of her head, coming apart like a hanging bird’s nest in December. It made her look like she was in her second childhood and her mother only thirty-six or seven.

  “I’d thin it out, Mam,” Sayward told her. “It’s a mortal weight to lug around. Hair kin suck your strength like a blood sucker.”

  But Jary Luckett wouldn’t part with any of her hair. Not her. Once her hams had been plump as Achsa’s and her skin white as Genny’s, and Sayward’s breast were no firmer than her’s once were. All she had left that hadn’t shriveled up was her hair. When one of the girls tended it of a morning, it swept down from the bench over the earthen floor, heavy as China silk before it went to the loom. You couldn’t find a gray thread. No, she still had her hair and by Jeem’s cousin, she meant to keep it.