The Trees Page 6

  “Is her married?” he asked after while.

  “Her?” Worth repeated, a little surprised, looking at Genny who was fair-skinned like Jary as a girl.

  “Her!” little Mathias said, pointing his knife blade-foremost at Sayward, and she felt a strange sensation as if that blade had painlessly pierced one of her strong breasts.

  Worth stared stupidly at his eldest daughter, and by his face she judged what he thought as if he had blurted it out, which he was like as not to do. He was beat out that here in this Northwest Territory where men were scarcer than birds’ teeth, a man with an ox, a mare and a cow had looked on her for marriage. Now Sayward, he always said, was more like Jary’s sister, Beriah who could throw any boy head over tincup. The Conestoga settlement boys looked up to Beriah and told her their troubles, but when it came to walking home with a girl after meeting, it hadn’t been Beriah. No, she could go home safe alone for no man or beast would dare molest her. The girls they saw home safe, bundled up with after, and stood up in front of the dominie or squire with in time were the cunning little wenches who held their ears shut when it thundered and pressed close at the rattle of small vermin in the bushes. Once Worth had said he wondered if a strong-minded, hard-waisted girl like Beriah wasn’t like the third sex of the bees that did all the work and were neither male nor female.

  “She’s not married,” he shook his head.

  “Is her promised?”

  “Not to my knowin’,” Worth said.

  Little Mathias jumped up and went outside where they could hear him priming himself with water from the gourd at the run. He came back in and tramped up and down and it was plain when he started to talk he was full of words to tell.

  “Yesterday I says to myself, Mathias, do ye need a yoke of oxen back here? I says, no, I got a ox. I says, do ye need yer mare and cart? I says, no, they ain’t no roads back here for a mare and cart to go on. I says, Mathias, do ye need yer cow? I says, no, I ain’t got a little bitty ’un wantin’ mush and milk. I says, Mathias, do ye need a woman back here? I says, by Jeems’s cousin, that’s what I need! I kain’t cut down all these yere trees by myself.”

  He flashed his eyes at Sayward but she was listening to the rain on the roof, aware that her own sisters and brother sat in a row on the bench in the firelight staring at her with respectful eyes. What the stranger boy thought she couldn’t tell, for he stayed by himself in the chimney corner.

  Sometimes Worth Luckett was set in his ways as a pignut tree, and sometimes you could get no more out of him than an Indian. But it was plain that this was an unusual occasion and not lightly to be set aside. A man for his oldest girl had never showed himself before and might never again, anyhow not one with a cow, a mare and an ox to his name.

  “You hear what he had to say, Saird?” he asked her.

  “Oh, I heerd him all right,” Sayward told him mildly.

  “Well, kain’t you say something?”

  “I hardly knows him yit.”

  “You don’t need to live with him tonight.”

  She gazed at her father curiously.

  “Oh, Pappy,” she thought, “you might hate just a lick to see me go, for Genny is mighty young to take over a cabin and cookin’!”

  She tried not to read her father’s mind too hard, for she would hate to think he had reasons of his own for wanting her married. A year and a half was mighty long time, she knew, for one like Worth to be fixed and settled in one place. But she wouldn’t like to think that all that held him now with Jary under the ground was having to get meat for his young ones’ bellies and skins to tan for their feet and trade for their backs. If she had a man it might change all that. He could off and forget to come home and they would be all right. Never would they starve or go naked, for their married sister would take them in. He would be free as a bird to wander. He could see those far places they told about where the deer had strange black tails. He could skin the striped tiger cat and the queer mountain ram that some called the bighorn. Even could he cross that far river they said was a river of flowing mud and see those Indians with blue eyes and hair yellow as a panther’s. And when he tired, he could rest in the Spanish Settlements of the Illinois and listen to the women whose talk, they said, was like singing. Oh, he would console himself by telling in his mind what presents he would fetch them home from these foreign parts: a gold ring for Genny’s white finger; a comb carved from a turtle’s back for Achsa’s black hair; a lump of blue gold to lay in Sulie’s small hand. Presents for all would he have in his hunting shirt when he came back. But it wasn’t likely he would come back, Sayward thought, for some Spanish woman who sang when she talked would get him.

  “I heerd you say,” she said politely to little Mathias, “about a goin’ to the Youghiheny this fall after your stock and fixens. Hain’t it some nice woman you know down ’ar?”

  “Oh, it has plenty down ’ar. I know a fine one and her name’s Maggie Bradley,” he said.

  Sayward nodded at him.

  “Why don’t you make her your lawful wife and fetch her home with your stock and turnip seed? I’d like to see a nice woman away back here.”

  Little Mathias looked at her but couldn’t make her out. No, you could see he thought she held herself not good enough for a man with a cow, a mare, a cart and an ox when all her father had was a cabin with a paper window. It made him stand high as a little fellow could. When the rain slacked off, he and his boy went friendly home.

  They were hardly over the door log till Worth turned on Sayward.

  “What’s got over you?” he grunted.

  She took down a gut of bear’s oil to fry some dodgers for supper, for the company had eaten all the bread, waiting till little Mathias and his boy were plenty out of hearing.

  “I’m a standin’ up with no Tom Thumb,” she told him.

  “You mought not git another chance,” Worth said.

  “He mought be the first,” Sayward told him. “But I have a feelin’ he ain’t the last.”

  She stood there mixing meal with meat scraps, a forebearing, independent figure with the firelight playing on her long yellow braids and muscled legs that were bare above the knees.

  Her father watched her through his brushy eyebrows.

  “Next time I go to Hough’s, I’ll fetch you back goods for a new shortgown. You’re too old to be a runnin’ around any more like some young Injun with his backside stickin’ out.” He spoke gruffly but Sayward could see the respect in his eyes.

  He meant it, she knew, but when he would remember there was no telling. So she pieced a hem on her clean shortgown that week and went down to the river to wash. The river was the oldest road through the forest there was. Big yellow butterflies traveled it all day. Now and then slow, green and gold gabby birds or some swift water birds flew up or down. The wind liked to use it, too, but this day it was calm. The only ripple in this smooth stretch moved straight across where she stood. It was like a swimming stick with its head sticking up but she knew it was only a water snake getting tired of one side like Worth and coming over to the other. Well, she would send him back where he belonged.

  She waded in driving a flock of water bugs in front of her and stopped in some sandy shallows fetched down by a run. Here it had two or three old water logs on whose mossy top it was handy to lay your clean clothes and your gourd of soft soap. River foam had piled up in between the logs, dark brown behind and light in front. It would take a miller’s bag to hold it all but little Sulie could hoist it to her back and never know it was there.

  She pulled her dirty shortgown over her head and laid it on the logs. Nothing could be pleasanter than to stand here without a stitch on and feel the sand come boiling up between your legs and the whole river pushing at you downstream. Bubbles rose. Some claimed they were the breath of catfish and lamper eels in the mud, but Worth said it was the old earth herself breathing from some hollow place. The limbs covered her over here like a green roof. Down in the amber water she saw a picture of her naked body sha
king soft and delicate as a young tree in the spring wind.

  A porcupine nosed out of low leaves along the bank and stood peering at her with its beady black eyes.

  “Go ahead and look all you like,” she said to it. “I wouldn’t trouble to duck myself from a porkypine.”

  She tied her braids up over her head and scrubbed her body well with grease and sand, rinsing it off in the fresh current. Then for a while she stood to dry, inspecting with matter-of-fact criticalness her strong breasts and hams.

  Yes, she was a woman now, she told herself, a white woman in this country of the men of the Western waters. It was good enough being a woman. She didn’t know as she’d change it now, had she the chance.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SETTLEMENT

  THINGS were looking poorly in this Northwest Territory, Worth complained early next spring to Sayward; yes, mighty poorly. A man had to be afraid of not making his lead and powder by another year. Only a little while back it was as fine and rich a country as a man could clap eyes on. Game was plenty as pigeons in the woods. Deer shed their horns within gunshot of your cabin. The Indians didn’t trouble much, for most of them lived further north and west. And it had no white hunters nearer than the forks.

  Then the government had to go and cut that fool trace through the woods across the big bend of the Ohio.

  Worth had taken it for a kind of surveyor’s line at first, for they let the trees lay where they fell. Now, the Delawares told him, white men and women from the old states were beating along this line, their mud sleds, carts and once in a while a wagon pitching like crazy over the logs, stumps and rocks in the trace. You wouldn’t expect, Worth said bitterly, these same whites had whole counties of new land left back in the old states if they wanted something to break their backs on. No, they had to come out here, first the Cottles last spring and the MacWhirters in the fall. And now the country was at the Deil’s door, for a trader, his bound boy and a kind of runner had come poling up the river with a boatload of goods and plagued if they weren’t fixing to start in the store trade where Indian trace forded the river!

  “I’ll thank them none for that,” he said. “They’ll draw more squatters than carrion kin flies.”

  Wyitt sat in a dark corner listening to his father. Not a word dare he say, but the news of a trading post right here along the river bobbed up like a float in his blood. His young back, stiff with import, pointed straight up to the roof and gable where his small pelts skinned with Sayward’s cabin knife were. Oh, he had taken to the woods already like a young gadd to wind and water. His hand could make snares and deadfalls shrewd as a man. Already he smelled so heavy of skunk that the girls complained of him sleeping with them up in the loft.

  Then tonight of all times didn’t Sulie have to shoot off her mouth about a thing she had been told in secret.

  “This here trader got any knives, Pappy?” she piped, innocent as all get out.

  Worth lifted his head and threw a look around.

  “Who’s a needin’ any knife?”

  Wyitt in his dark corner would have liked to get his hands on that blabbing tyke of a sister. He’d tend to her in the loft tonight yet if his father wouldn’t hear.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’,” she whined.

  “Which of them’s lost your cabin knife?” Worth demanded of Sayward.

  “It’s right up ’ar on the shelf,” she said, placid as could be.

  His eyes retreated suspiciously into his two weeks’ sprouts of beard while Wyitt’s eyes burned at his youngest sister. Oh, he wasn’t finished with her yet. He would fix her in the brush tomorrow. When he woke up early next morning, she lay so small, warm and helpless beside him, all his hate melted. He cared about nothing now save how soon his father went to the woods again. For three days he sat around still as a stone but inside he had never been on such tenterhooks. If his father didn’t clear out soon, he told himself, he’d have to push him. That trader might change his mind and go somewhere else before he could get there. He might sell out all he had, for Worth said some Shawanees passing on the trace had already stopped and looked over his stock.

  The morning Worth went after fresh meat, Wyitt watched every move he made. His father had hardly crossed the run till the boy was up throwing down his skins in the bushes. In the cabin he pulled on his hunting shirt with the black squirrel trimming and sopped his hair so that sandy corn-shock of his would slick down.

  “Where you reckon you’re a goin’?” Sayward put to him.

  “I ain’t a goin’ no place much,” he said shortly.

  He didn’t fool her for a minute. When he went out, she took her work and sat on the doorsill with one eye on him, and he hung around fooling with Sarge a while like he was in no hurry. The hound had aged fast the past year. Even the gunpowder Worth fed him sometimes wouldn’t liven him any more. All winter he lay in the cabin where he could feel the chimney heat. Now that it was getting to spring he liked to lay outside where he could smell the woods though he was too blind and worn out to chase any more. Oh, that old hound was a gone Josie! There he made his bed under the eaves where the ground was a little dry, his ears sore, his eyes filmed over with white, his coat gray-streaked, scabby and bothered by flies. But he could still lift his head and wrinkle his nose when a fox or some other game passed between him and the river.

  “C’m on, Sarge! C’m on!” Wyitt coaxed him to climb stiffly to his legs and stagger down the path after him. If he took Sarge along a piece, Sayward had no way but to think he wasn’t going far. Once he got the old hound down in the woods, he sneaked back for his skins. The dog was waiting for him when he got to the path again. He struggled up and started to come after.

  “Go back, Sarge! Go on back!” Wyitt mouthed at him. “You kain’t go along where I’m a goin’.”

  The last he saw of him, the old hound was standing in the path holding up his head high like he did of late, trying to gaze after through his blind spots, the drooped tip of his tail moving just inches between his legs.

  It was a good thing he didn’t take Sarge along, Wyitt told himself when he got there. An old hound wouldn’t know how to act here, for he didn’t himself right. He hardly knew the place when he saw it on ahead through the woods. Trees were down. A fattish boy, bigger than he was, and a black-bearded giant had started putting up a pair of cabins. Wyitt watched them a while from safe back in the bushes. Oh, this was a tony place for a young woodsy to visit. Out there in the clearing a brush cabin had been set up first. This was the store. He could tell by the squaws sitting on the logs outside while their near-naked young ones rolled and raced around. Every once in a while the squaws would yell at one for getting too close to a lunging beast tied to a log. It was a gaunt, live wolf with a slobbered, rawhide muzzle on to keep him from biting his heavy strap through.

  The Indian dogs left off worrying the wolf to bark at Wyitt and the squaws smiled broadly at him as he came up. Oh, they could tell the way he hung back he had never done anything like this before, hadn’t ever seen the inside of a store up to now. But he was going to see this one. With his back stiff as a poking stick he went up to the brush door. Through the smoky gloom inside he made out a white man in a leather apron, red and cunning as a fox. That must be the trader, George Roebuck. Then he saw he would have to wait his turn, for a row of Shawanee men were ahead of him to try out this new trader’s prices.

  Holding up his small pack of skins so all could see he had business here, the boy slipped inside. The Shawanees turned their heads. They made like they didn’t see him. Down in Pennsylvania the Indian looked up at a white boy like a dog would. Out here the Indian looked down on you like you were the dog. These Shawanees sat big as king’s men on that log, taking long, slow puffs on their gift tobacco. One with bearclaws around his neck and scars all over his chest stood up with the post’s yardstick. He’d point at something and the trader would tell him the price in skins. If the Indian bought it, he paid for it right off out of his roll of furs before he went on t
o something else. But first he had to heft and feel of it a long time.

  Wyitt wished Sayward, Genny, Achsa and Sulie could see him here. Not that they ever would. Women folks couldn’t walk in a post like a boy and stand with all the riches of the settlements piled up in front of them: bars of bright, new lead laid crosswise on powder kegs; red and green blankets and black ones with a broad white stripe that were the best; bolts of blue strouding and Turkey red goods; new fusils that had hardly been shot off yet; Indian vermilion for the paint bags; wooden buckets of beads, of bells for leggins, of rings for the nose and finger; and a half barrel that kept dripping from its tap in a wooden bowl, making the air sweet with whiskey. But what ran through the boy’s blood like horses were those red tomahawks and shiny scalping knives stuck in a tree corner of the post.

  He had plenty time to look at them today. He stood first on one leg and then the other, going out sometimes for a drink in the run or to put a tree between him and the squaws like a man. When old Bearclaws sat down, another stood up, and when the last sat down, the Shawanees started all over again with their best furs they had saved out for whiskey. Oh, they knew better than to mix their trading and dram-drinking. It was almost dark and the post candles had been lighted when those Indians got done and cleared out.

  Wyitt pushed up.

  “How much fur one a them knives?” he fetched out.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have bothered the trader right now, for wrinkles had to come between George Roebuck’s eyes to hold his mind on the counting of his hairy gold. His lips moved as he laid out skins in piles — bear, beaver, otter, buck, doe, wolf, mink, redcross fox, fisher fox and coon. His quill had to tally these first in his tanned-leather account book. Then he held out a hand for Wyitt’s scanty pack, looked the small skins over, threw them down behind him like they weren’t worth putting in with the others, grunted and reached down a knife. From the trading Wyitt figured he ought to have a couple coon or rat skins left over. But once he got that knife in his fingers, with its round bone handle and blade heavy enough to strike flint with, he wouldn’t hurt the feelings of the trader. Holding tight to that knife, he went out. The squaws had started fires and by their light he saw the trader’s bound boy with two Shawanee boys laying for him outside the door.