The Fields Page 5

  Oh, there were plenty witnesses in the sound of his voice to remind Sayward if the need came. Buckman Tull shut up like a jack knife. Only the strange humble man paid no notice. He seemed like one apart. Sayward watched him struggle up with the rock and tote it off cradled in his arms and belly.

  “I seen one of them when I was a gal,” she said to Resolve. “I reckon it’s Zephon Brown’s new hireling.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” Resolve asked.

  “They ain’t nothin’ the matter with him. He’s a black man.”

  “Why is he black?”

  “Because God made him so.”

  “But why did God make him so?”

  “I reckon God wanted a change.”

  “But why did He want a change?”

  “You can ask your pappy tonight. Maybe he kin tell you,” she put him off and went back to the cabin. Ever since Portius spoke about dying, she had felt the repeated stabs of her babe deep in her being.

  All through the spells of pain that night Sayward kept her mind off any notion of signs or tokens. Oh, it had things in this world, if you believed them, that were darker and more fearsome than hell itself. It had babes born to decent girls, she’d heard, that were monstrous as toads, hairy as wild bulls or mad as a wolf with slobber on its jaws. When the hard labor was over, the first thing she asked about was her baby.

  “How does it look?” she put to them.

  “Just fine,” Mrs. Covenhoven said.

  “Is it dark or fair?” Sayward asked.

  “Why,” Mrs. Covenhoven said with surprise, looking it over in her hands, “I’d say fair.”

  “It has no dark spots?” Sayward persisted.

  “She hasn’t a blemish on her.”

  “It’s not a boy then.” Sayward took a good breath.

  “It’s a fine little girl child,” Mrs. Covenhoven declared. “What makes you talk this way, Saird?”

  “I’m just glad it’s all right,” Sayward said and shut her eyes with relief.

  All this was a few years back. That baby grew like a “stock” of anise weed. She could say Mammy and Pappy at eight months and bobble from stool to stool at nine. At ten months she came big as you please down over the door log where Sayward was talking to Granny MacWhirter and said, “Howdee. Howdee.” Now she was two years pushing on three and knew more letters than her mammy did. Oh, she was bright and sharp as a needle. She picked up everything she heard and plenty she didn’t. She might be the littlest, except for the new baby, but she was always one step ahead of the rest with her Yankee tricks.

  Today Sayward was out boiling soap, and you’d think Sulie was the one making it. She lugged water in her little kettle, spilling half of it over herself. She made Sayward bend down so she could stick a bunch of sweet fern in her mammy’s hair against the woods flies. She was always the one to do anything first. She stood big as you please on the stump stirring the kettle with the sassafras paddle, plaguing her mammy with questions. She wouldn’t give Sayward any rest. She’d pop a new question before you could muster up an answer to the old. And when she wore out her mammy’s tongue, she’d make the answers herself. She was going to have her own ash barrel. She would pour in water and out would come lye. It would be lye strong as whiskey. Only white hickory ashes would she put in the barrel, and only coon fat in the kettle, for soap made from coon fat never smarted the face like her mammy’s soap and A’nt Ginny’s. No, her soap would be soft as butter. With it you could wash a silken towel. Oh, Sulie was a pest if there ever was one. She could talk you deaf and dumb if you’d let her.

  When the others hollered for their turn with the paddle, Sulie threw it down and swept hard on the ground with her little hickory broom. Then she toddled around in a circle and stopped stock-still on one foot with a stupid look on her face.

  “What ye doin’?” Guerdon wanted to know while Kinzie on the stump tried to look this way and that through the smoke.

  “I’m a chicken,” she called, solemn as all get-out, standing on that one foot like she was one of Mrs. Covenhoven’s gypsy fowl. “I’m a thinkin’ how to lay a egg!”

  Guerdon had to try it while Kinzie itched and sweated, wanting to come down and try it too. But before Guerdon had his foot down, Sulie had a new trick. She was meandering around with her head bent way down and her eyes looking out back between her fat, far-apart legs.

  “What’s that now?” Kinzie wanted to know.

  “I got the rheumatiz,” she called. “I kin see how the world looks upside down! The kettle’s a fallin’, and you’re a standin’ on your head in the sky!”

  Kinzie couldn’t stand that. He dropped the paddle and jumped from the stump to see the world down side up. In two shakes Sulie had scrambled up to stir with the paddle while Kinzie cried she stole it from him, and little bittie Sulie stood up there and sang at the top of her voice.

  Liar, liar,

  Hangin’ on the brier

  With your britches on fire!

  Oh, she was too quick and bright for her brothers. They fought and screeched to high heaven, but it didn’t hurt the soap any. When Sayward got it done, the soap was clean and “yaller” as jelly. Sayward still had time to grind meal for supper and to visit in the cabin with Mary Harbison who came along the trace with her little girl, Salomy. She could hear the four young ones running outside, yelling to each other, a playing Injun against the black hornets who reckoned the run belonged to the hornet nation. Then for a while it was quiet as a sitting hen.

  Sayward inside picked up her ears. Fighting and bawling she paid small heed to, but peace and quiet sometimes called for looking into. That fire under the big kettle, she told herself should be out this long time. Even so, the youngsters had strict orders to stay away. She had no idea that this minute Resolve was running halfway to the cabin hard as he could come. Not that Resolve was a tattletale. He just wanted to tell his mammy that Sulie was playing with those ashes. She was showing off to Salomy, that’s what she was. She’d swept them out from under the big kettle with her little hickory broom. Now she was a running through with her bare feet to show she “wa’n’t afeared.”

  But Resolve never got more than halfway to the cabin. He must have stopped dead when he heard Sulie screech. Sayward heard it plain enough, a high screech, sharp and mad like the edge of a scalping knife. It lifted Sayward off her stool like God Almighty had yanked her. When she got to the door her eye took in Resolve, Guerdon, Kinzie and Salomy, all standing at different places, stiff as small steelyards, staring at the ball of fire running for its mammy. Not till then did Sayward get through her head that the ball of fire was Sulie.

  It was only a shake and a half till Sayward was across that yard, wrapping her skirt around the fire, beating out the flame with her bare hands. But that was a shake and a half too long, for fire is a cruel, tarnal thing, and a little girl child is soft and tender as a young Marybud coming up in the spring. Sayward wouldn’t believe what she saw when she took her skirt away. This was something to make her blood stop and her hair stand. That was something that couldn’t be.

  “Oh, Mammy!” those blackened little lips of Sulie tried to say, a telling her she meant no harm, a begging her not to scold that her dress was burned, a asking her mammy to help her little Sulie who had never asked help from anybody but always knew her own self what to do.

  If she got to be a hundred years old, Sayward told herself, never without her voice breaking could she tell a stranger how it went with their little Sulie that day. How she lay in her bed looking up at them with blackened rims where her eyelashes ought to be. How one minute she had been in this world light and free, and the next the gates of the other world were open and she had to pass through. Already she was where her own mammy couldn’t reach her. She couldn’t even touch grease to that scorched young flesh without Sulie screaming so they could hear her over at the Covenhovens’.

  Never did Sayward think she would be weak enough to let other folks get her own child ready for the bury hole. She fou
ght cruel as death to do with her own burned hands what had to be done. When the women wouldn’t have it, she let them push her in the chimney corner. But it would have been easier to do it herself than watch. They tried to pretty but they only darkened that little burned face and body that were once white as milk. They tried to fix the gold hair that Sayward used to run her haw comb through but was now like a lump of burned weeds. The worst was to sit and listen while they dragged in their young ones to show what would happen to them if they played with fire.

  All the time in her mind she could see that little body when she first started to walk. Back and forwards Sulie’s small red dress used to go, her little red arms out to balance. She’d never get a weary. She could go it all day, wraggling and wriggling, skipping and jumping, going hoppity-hoppity, nodding and bobbing, in and out, from one side to another. Did that little mite know, she wondered? Did something tell her she had only a short while in this world, and that’s why she was always on the go, making up for it, cutting one dido after another?

  The women in the chimney corner kept up their women talk to “cam” Sayward. They said a woman couldn’t expect to raise all her young ones. It was a blessing Sulie was spared the trial of going through this vale of tears. She was too bright to grow up anyway. The Lord took such for His own. Oh, Sayward never said back a word. But she would have changed places in a shake with Sulie if only Sulie could go through this vale of tears. And in her heart she cried her disbelief that the Lord would steal human flesh from His children. No, you couldn’t throw the blame on the Lord. She didn’t hold too hard against herself either for not harping more about staying away from fire. She had done it a plenty. You couldn’t dingdong at young ones all the time. You had to let them be their own selves once in a while, or they’d grow up tied to their mam’s apron strings. But if she’d had her wits about her, she would have taken a bucket of water and doused that fire good before she came in the cabin. She might have reckoned that Sulie would be up to one of her Yankee tricks.

  She felt hard for Portius when he came. He looked like he had slept with a hex. He had been way out at Keleher’s improvement when he heard the news. He didn’t carry on any more than she did, but she knew how he felt, for little Sulie was his favor-rite, and now she’d never climb his knee again or call out the letters of the alphabet, but spend her days a mouldering in the ground till nobody could tell any more which dust belonged to her and which to the woods.

  The only comfort Sayward had was that they had cleared a burying place for Mrs. Giddings and those that came after. Now Sulie could lay out of the dark of the trees in the sun. She wouldn’t have to lay alone either. She would be next to her grandmam. Both she and Jary had always been the sociable kind. Jary had come to these lonesome parts against her will. If she’d had her way, she’d have lived her life in the settlements. Her mother would feel kindly tonight, Sayward thought, if she knew she wasn’t lying in the woods any more, and that she had kin for company.

  The hardest thing was to look at your young one the last time by the open grave. Once they put the lid on that box, you would never lay eyes on her again. She lay so uncommon still for Sulie, wrapped in her muslin winding sheet. The bound boy had stayed up most the night to make this small box of sawn boards for her. He had made it fine as a town box, shaped like a diamond, the widest place at the shoulders. He had taken some shavings and pegged a scrap of muslin over for a pillow. Four young boys had carried the box out of the cabin to the grave. Now wasn’t it a pity that Sulie couldn’t have made a nicer-looking corpse? And yet you might know Sulie would not be as other folks. Even in the way she had to die, she’d go her own way. She wouldn’t waste away or die from the flux or a fever. No, she had to be a ball of fire and die from swallowing some of the flame.

  Sayward never knew how long she stood there, bitter and cruel, looking down for the last time. She held her youngest, Huldah, in her arms so in after years that babe could say she had looked on her sister in her grave box. Portius and the boys came close after. Guerdon and Kinzie said no word, but Resolve stiffened when he looked in the box.

  He stood like he saw a ghost.

  “Mam!” he said, pulling at her skirt. “Mam!”

  “It’s all right,” Sayward told him.

  “I want to tell you something, Mam. Do you know who that is?”

  “It’s our poor little Sulie,” Sayward said quiet as she could to “cam” him.

  “No, it ain’t, Mam!” he told her, starting to sputter.

  “It’s just that she went through the fire,” Sayward told him.

  “No, it ain’t, Mam!” Resolve stood his ground. “I knowed our Sulie and I know this one. Don’t you mind the one I told you about that time?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Sayward reproved him in a low voice, trying to get him still. But he wouldn’t listen.

  “I’d know that one anywhere’s!” he cried the louder. “That’s the little dark boy I seen that time a peekin’ at me and you through the winder.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  HIS OWN MAN

  MOST every day Wyitt told himself he’d never make a farmer. He plumb hated the looks of a reap hook or flax swingle. You could tell he hadn’t been born between two plow handles, for never did his hands get the hang of cradling, or pulling tits at milking. No, he took after his pappy. If it hadn’t been for his sister, Sayward, he’d never kept at it. When he wasn’t helping her clear land, he was hiring out to John Covenhoven or Buckman Tull. He wished he had a penny for every gavel of grain he bound or hill of corn he planted.

  And what good did it do? Squirrel and other vermin reckoned you hid grain in the ground just to dare them could they find it and dig it out. When corn was in the ear, coon and foxes stole it. Deer spoiled grain and clover patches. A rail fence didn’t stop them any. Hugh McFall ringed a field with stumps he’d dug out. Women and young ones passing at nightfall claimed those monsters were a fearful sight to see, laying there on their sides with their gaunt roots sticking way up yonder, enough to scare you out of your wits. But that fence kept out no deer. They sailed over easy as pigeons.

  And yet, do you reckon Sayward wanted him to quit Covenhovens’ and Buckman Tull and put in his time tracking down game and varmints? No, she had even fought his getting his new rifle. What he made was his to trade like he pleased, she said, but he had one rifle already. What did he want another for? Oh, Wyitt learned to keep his mouth shut to her about anything that had to do with guns or game. He never breathed a word about the monster hunt till the night before it was to happen. Then he reckoned he ought to tell her he was taking tomorrow off.

  He took the sporting rifle down from the horns over the mantel. That ought to be a hint, he thought. He put the ramrod in the barrel.

  “You hear about the big hunt they’re a havin’, Saird? Don’t that make you feel good?”

  “I ain’t thought much about it,” his sister said.

  He looked up.

  “Why, they’re a doin’ it for you and everybody else that has a patch of corn or head of stock. They aim to stop all this stealin’ and spoilin’ that’s goin’ on. They’re bound they’ll clean all the vermin and varmints out of these woods.”

  “I’m not partial to folks trying to hog it all,” Sayward said gravely.

  “You don’t keer about farmers!” Wyitt cried. “You don’t give a hait what stock they lose! Why, painters are sneakin’ right up to their barns. B’ars are takin’ shotes out of pens. That Yankee up on Skull Crick lost ten sheep one night to night dogs alone.”

  “He ought to watch his sheep at night. Then he wouldn’t lose them,” Sayward said calmly.

  “Don’t you keer about young girls?” Wyitt demanded. “Up by the English Lakes the night dogs chased one a horseback. The horse throwed her and wouldn’t let her back on. She had to walk in a ring in the snow around that horse all night. When daylight come, she swounded.”

  “I heerd about her,” Sayward said with brief pity, “but
any night dogs you shot around here wouldn’t help much up her way.”

  “It would help around here,” Wyitt declared. “Last week they hollered so loud in the day time, Buckman couldn’t make out what I said.”

  “I don’t reckon he missed much,” Sayward said lightly, going about her business.

  Her brother just shut his mouth and looked at her. You could never get the best of Sayward. First thing he knew, she’d claim it would be better for the country if the men had logging bees instead of big hunts. The woods, the trees, she’d say, that’s what was holding back the country. Once they cleaned out these forests, the vermin and varmints would go of themselves, for they would have no place to stay.

  Oh, he knew what she was after. She didn’t want him a hunter like his pappy wandering here and yonder where it pleased him. No, she wanted him to steady down and be a farmer like slow John Covenhoven or survey with a compass and chain like Buckman Tull. Once she said she didn’t want to see any woman have to traipse through the wilderness after Wyitt like she and all of them had to do after their pappy.

  But if she figured she could break him, she had another think a coming. Oh, he wouldn’t let on to her one more lick about the big hunt if he could help it. Let her reckon he was a going to work at the Covenhovens tomorrow. Let Big John think so too, if he wanted. When Sayward turned her back, he took his rifle out to his shanty.

  That fancy rifle was the nighest thing to his heart, a close twin to the sporting rifle of Louie Scurrah! It was of curly maple, striped the short way like a tiger, with a brass butt and box in the stock for tallow and patches. He kept it in the cabin, for it was safer there, and it didn’t get so damp as the shanty. Then fine folks who visited Portius and Sayward could see it, too. He kept that rifle clean as a whistle, but now he sat down and worked it over from front sight to butt plate. The pan and frizzen he scraped with his knife till the pure metal shone through. He swabbed and polished the barrel like it was hammered out of gold guineas. When he couldn’t find more to do, he laid it by his pallet. To him it was fine as a gamecock and closer than a brother.