The Fields Page 9

  First the women sang:

  Oh, for a man —,

  Oh, for a man —,

  Oh, for a mansion in the skies!

  Then the men sang:

  Bring down sal —,

  Bring down sal —,

  Bring down salvation from above!

  Sayward sat a long time studying this thing out. The spirit of the Lord must be a different kind of something than she reckoned. It could knock down the walls of Jericho, a slamming and banging to wake the Seven Sleepers, a shaking the earth like all hell had broke loose. And yet it could come in another place still as summer, mild as a sucking dove and sweet as bees honey, a making you feel good toward folks in general and some in particular you had no more use for than vermin. It come from far off in Heaven, they said, and yet was closer than a brother, in front of you, behind you and on both sides a keeping you company, on top of your head and underneath your feet a holding you up. It was in folks that did you a good turn and in them that talked nice of you when they saw you pass. It struck some down like lightning, and yet it raised others up when two or three were gathered together in His name. They need only let themselves go on some meeting house hymn. The timidest then would fear neither man nor devil.

  She could hear Judah MacWhirter now a roaring up in front, rough-voiced, and not so good on the tune, but heart, soul and muscle in it. Why, you felt he could nigh about look over yonder into the kingdom of Heaven and climb up in it his own self if he wanted. This was the last hymn before they broke up.

  Farewell, dear friends, I must be gone.

  I have no home or stay with you.

  I’ll take my staff and travel on

  Till I a better world do view.

  Farewell, farewell, farewell!

  My loving friends, farewell!

  Farewell, O careless sinners, too.

  It grieves my heart to leave you here.

  Eternal vengeance waits for you.

  O, turn and find salvation near.

  O, turn; O, turn; O, turn!

  And find salvation near.

  Farewell, you blooming sons of God.

  Sore conflicts yet await you.

  Yet dauntless keep the heavenly road

  Till Canaan’s happy land you view.

  Fight on, fight on, fight on!

  The crown shall soon be given.

  When she went to bed that evening, she couldn’t see a thing from her doorstep. The black woods had swallowed up the Lord’s house. But some time during the night she had to get up with little Libby and take her out. The moon had risen and the meeting house stood there with its barked logs shining in the faint light. She never gave a thought before how lonesome and almost pitiful it would be here in these dark woods without it. Now her young ones had a place to set with her on the Sabbath and hear the word of the Lord. They would have no notion as yet what He said, but His word would pass over and through them and do them good like their mammy’s milk had done, for they couldn’t spell out where that came from either. And when the sap started to rise in them, the meeting house was likely where her girls would pick out their men and her boys their women. One fine night those boys would sidle up to some girls and see them home against the night dogs. Not long afterwards the dominie would say words over them, and over their young ones soon after.

  And in the church yard, if Portius didn’t gander off, she and him would spend their days a mouldering till nobody could tell which was their dust and which was some other body. Her mother would have plenty company by that time. Jary had always been the sociable kind. She had come to these lonesome parts against her will. If it was let to her, she would have lived her life in the settlements. She liked to be where folks came and went. She and little Sulie would be pleased tonight if they knew they were lying in the shadow of a meeting house.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE DOG DAY

  IT was more than a year till Resolve got back from Kentucky. Most of that time he reckoned he would never see home again. The Kilgores kept sending word to his pappy that his leg wasn’t fit to travel yet. But that was just Kentucky hospitality, he found out before he left. Foul or fair, they hood-winked him to stay so their boy could enjoy his company. Once they did let him go, they sent him as far as they could by boat and paid his passage, although he could walk again good as anybody.

  Now he felt glad he went and glad to be home again. If they hadn’t kept him so long down there, he wouldn’t have any “idee” how spring and summer came in a cleared country. Up here it was still plumb wilderness. The deep woods swallowed you up like Jonah in the whale. He had almost forgot that they never had hot summer nights in Ohio. By day it got sticky enough, but soon as the sun went down, the air turned cool, and early mornings were chilly, and that held back the corn. It was all the fault of the trees, his mammy said, that and the thick, high copses of grass and rank weeds. Now wasn’t it strange it hadn’t many singing birds here like it had in Kentucky, neither crow, blackbird or possum? Why, his brothers and sisters had never laid eyes on such a thing as a smooth-tailed mouse or rat, for seldom came these and many other creatures to deep woods country. Not till it was cleared and settled.

  He had hoped he could get home when Panther Hill was pink with honeysuckle, and “yaller” lady slippers grew by the old beaver gats. But he didn’t even get a taste of low huckleberries from the slashings. These were the dog days, till he got back. Logs moulded. The woods hardly moved. Spider webs on the paths tangled your face. Squirrel were no good to eat, being full of worms, and low river water felt like milk to your hand. The first thing of home he saw was his mam’s corn patch almost ready for tassels, and blue smoke coming out of her chimney. It didn’t come steady but in little puffs, one right on top of the other. Looked like all the young ones were jumping and fighting and scuffling inside, and that’s what puffed the smoke out. Once it spread in the air a ways, those puffs stopped. So did the jumping of his brothers and sisters when they saw him. It had been so long since he was home, they just stood around him at first like he was a stranger. The friendliest right off was his sister, Sooth, he had never seen before. She laid in her cradle and talked up to him cunning as a gabby bird.

  The one he felt gladdest to see was his mammy. Never would he tell her all the homesick he had for her down there. The others seemed different, but she hadn’t changed a lick. When she heard him coming, she came right out smiling at him so good, and when she bussed him on both cheeks, she smelled just the same, that good, clean smell of soap and wood smoke and something broad, sweet and healthy that was just her. He reckoned a part of it came from May apples. She always dried May apples, he recollected, and laid them among her clothes in the chest.

  “Why, you growed four inches,” she said, pleased, looking him over.

  His pappy looked him over, too, with bull’s eyes on either side of his eagle nose.

  “I see you got safely back to the promised land,” was all he said.

  Resolve couldn’t tell whether he meant that as a puff or a dig for this country, especially since they said Jude MacWhirter had been wolf-bit in the leg. Once the younger ones got used to Resolve again, they crowded around to tell him. Jude heard a commotion one night in the pen he kept his stock in. When he got out, some beast sank its teeth in his leg. Now Jude was a big, hearty man afeard of nothing but God Almighty, and he held on to that beast with his bare hands till his boys came out and killed it. They found it was a night dog with slobber on its jaws, though no wolf had been seen around here in the dog days for two years.

  Jude went down to Maytown right away to the doctor, and the doctor gave him a pill. He told him he didn’t need to worry, for he made that pill himself. It was part burgundy pitch and part green rue and had a narrow strip of paper in it with a dozen ill-shaped letters on it. The doctor said he had got the receipt from a priest in Abyssinia. He said all Jude had to do was swallow the pill with the ill-shaped letters and when he got home take a half pint of white walnut bark tea to purge him. He was to be carefu
l not to cut the bark up the tree or it would be for vomit. He had to cut it down the tree to work the way he wanted.

  He was all right for a while after he came back. Then three weeks to the day he was bitten, he took indisposed. For two days those that saw him said he had the look of a man with the intermittent fever. Now they had sent for Sayward to come out tomorrow, for the fits had come on him and she must come prepared, as folks had consternation just at the sight of him.

  Resolve had never seen his mammy’s face so cruel-looking as when she came home that night. She’d say only that they wanted Portius to come out tonight to write Judah’s will. Every last one of the boys begged to go along, but their mammy said since Resolve had just come home, he was the one that could go. Folks had asked about him. Besides, it was no place right now for Guerdon and Kinzie. It had some things in the world no young boy should see. Portius took out his green lawyer satchel Sayward had sewed for him. He put in paper, quill and ink horn. Then he took his high hat, nodded to Resolve, and they went.

  It was mighty dark in the woods and Portius told the boy he better take hold of his coat tail. Oh, his pappy knew these woods better than the boy thought. Resolve could hardly tell where they were. After a while they came close to somebody’s improvement. The woods cleared. You could see night sky and against it the dark roofs of log house and barn, while the black rim of the forest looped around. The house had small squares of yellow light upstairs and down. It was the MacWhirters’. It looked mighty lonesome, like Resolve and his pappy were the only folks abroad this night. Then he smelled tobacco smoke, and as they came closer, he could make out a shadowy group of neighbors and folks in front of the house under the apple trees.

  “That you, Portius?” Billy Harbison’s voice sang out low. Now what was he doing away down here? “They’re a lookin’ for you.”

  “How is Judah?” Portius wanted to know.

  A dark form moved over to Portius and Resolve.

  “Did Saird tell you anything?” Hugh McFall’s voice asked.

  “Very little,” Portius confessed.

  “Then you have no idee. Everybody has to stand quiet as he kin. You darsen’t drop anything or go in front of the candle. If you do, it sets Jude off. You never saw such a thing in this world or the next.”

  “I knew he was bad,” Portius said gravely.

  “We had to tie him hand and foot. If I was you, I’d prepare myself before I went in.”

  Resolve could see by the light from the window that his pappy had straightened and his face was stern and set.

  “I’m prepared,” Portius said shortly. “You can lead the way.”

  Resolve felt pride at whose son he was when the door opened and he saw the high hat and green satchel pass in. Suddenly such a cry of terror, half man and half beast, rang out of that house that Resolve felt rooted to the ground. Who could that be? It couldn’t be Judah MacWhirter. Why, everybody called him the goodliest man that came to these woods. He was Resolve’s own godfather. Many the time Sayward had told him how Judah had stood up and vouched for him when he was baptized.

  “That you, Resolve?” Billy Harbison said kindly, moving over. “When’d you git back?”

  “Yesterday,” the boy stammered.

  “Your leg good again?”

  “Tolerable good,” was all Resolve could fetch out, for those awful sounds were still going on.

  “How was my friend, Kilgore, when you left?”

  “He was good,” Resolve said.

  “Ain’t you got bigger than when you went down?”

  “A little bigger,” Resolve told him.

  “You want to go in?”

  “No, I reckon not.”

  “You kin go in and see him.”

  “I don’t want to see him,” Resolve stammered.

  “Jep and Dave and Jean are in ’ar. Don’t you want to see them?”

  “I kin see them any time,” Resolve told him.

  All evening, stiff as a poking stick, he stood with the older folks in the cool night air. It was hard to believe that anything like that was going on inside, for out here all was peaceful and sweet with the smell of farm and woods. When the terrible sounds came, all would be silent among them save for hard breathing and stirring around. Then when merciful release came for a while, they would talk together again, and the men light their aromatic tincture. It seemed to give them something against what went on in the house to tell the darkest tales they knew. Henry Giddings told of sights he saw in the Revolution, wounded arms and legs that turned black and green till they looked like shapes of dark wood scraped and carved and cut with deep niches running every which way against the gangrene. And Hugh McFall told of a witch-master who burned Wilkersons’ cow to stop his hogs from dying. This was down the river. Never, Hugh said, did he see a cow die so hard. She bawled in the fire all night, though the witch-master claimed he could see witches a dancing in the embers and their tracks where they made off at daylight.

  All the time they spoke the stricken man’s stock moved uneasily in the night pen, the implacable woods stood around and far in the mysterious depths dogs barked, answering each other from distant clearings that lay like hidden islands in the forest sea. Jude MacWhirter’s hound, Rover, heard them but he never answered. He just went around snuffing and licking the hands of those that stood there till the awful sounds from his master and the cries of those trying to hold him would make the dog slink off whining to the barn.

  Resolve got to wishing that he hadn’t come. He wished his pappy would come out and be ready to go home. From time to time men came from the house and others went in, for they could stand it only so long. But Portius didn’t show up. As the night went on, it got worse. The worst, they said, would be just before dawn. It took six men now besides the buckskin thongs to hold Judah down when the fits came on, and those at the head had to wear mittens and watch he didn’t bite through. Between the spells he was rational as anybody. That’s what made it so pitiful. He was always afeared of his next spell and what harm he might do to those he loved.

  Resolve was sure his pappy had forgot him altogether, for never did he even send out word to him. The boy spoke to Billy Harbison, and Billy went in to see. He said when he came out that Judah’s mind didn’t stay clear long enough to have his will written. Soon as Portius started to ask him about it, thinking on his wife and children made the spell come on.

  Never did they get that will fixed up, for on toward morning Judah got his worst. The only way Resolve could stand it then was to spell and keep spelling in his mind all the two- to four-syllable words he recollected from the speller down in Kentucky. A-p-p-1-e, apple; A-r-a-b-y, Araby; A-r-i-t-h-m-e-t-i-c, arithmetic. When he ran out of words, he started repeating in his mind the penman-ship examples he had written over and over again in his copy book. “Demonstration is the best way of Instruction”; “Evil Communications corrupt”; “When Land is gone and Money spent, then Learning is most excellent”; “Hail, beauteous Strangers of the Woods, Companions of…”

  That was as far as he got with that one, for there was a great commotion in the house and a calling for help, that Judah was getting loose. Every man outside ran in then. Oh, Resolve was not partial to be left alone out in the dark, but that was better than going in. He went to the kitchen door. The room stood empty except for Granny MacWhirter sitting with her head in her hands in the corner and Cora and Ellen holding each other at the door to the next room. Then he went along the log side of the house where the yellow candle light made a path out in the blackness. He was very close now and the awful sounds that came out of that window, the scuffling and cries, the grunts and heavy breathing and the scrape of boots on the floor went through him like locust thorns.

  You could tell when a spell was over, for the struggling stopped, and the beast sounds ceased. Now the voice of Judah MacWhirter came out human and rational. But he knew there was no hope, you could tell.

  “Portius!” he begged. “In the name of God, I ask ye mercy! Ye bleed others,
bleed me! Bleed me hard!”

  “I tried to open up two veins, Judah,” Portius’s voice sounded through the window. “But no blood came. I think it must be lodged in your viscera.”

  Outside Resolve could feel the trapped man’s despair.

  “Take the axe to me then!” he cried out. “You kin find blood with that.”

  “We couldn’t do that, Judah,” Portius told him.

  “Are ye cowards?” the doomed man entreated them. “Take my rifle. God won’t blame ye. He will call ye merciful. I’ll testify for ye in front of the throne. Ellen won’t blame ye. Will ye, Ellen? My childer will thank thee. As for me, Portius,” his voice grew so filled with wild and crying beseechment that it was almost mare than ears could bear, “I will look at ye with delight and thankfulness while ye pull the trigger!”

  In the piteous silence it sounded like a stool fell over upstairs. Young Jep and Jeanie came down a hurrying. Resolve reckoned they were going in to their pappy, but they ran out of the house, and Resolve after. They wouldn’t stop when he called on them to wait. It was dark enough but those young MacWhirters knew just where to step. They legged it past the barn, over the low log bridge spanning the run, up the lane where you could smell blue mint and sweet grass, through a patch of dark young corn to the other end of the meadow. It must be they had come here before. A low stack of old anise weed and rush grass the stock wouldn’t eat, lay a mouldering. The two young ones threw themselves down on that old stack, burrowing their heads in like they didn’t want to hear any rifle shot at their pappy. Here they lay never saying a word, while the licorice smell of anise weed rose in the night air and Resolve tried to tell them nobody would shoot their pap, for he was older than either one.

  The morning star was clear, pure and bright just above the black line of the woods when Resolve heard Cora and Dave calling them. He had to take them by their hands to drag them in.