Across Five Aprils (12 page)

When at last he saw the light from the kitchen window at home, he urged the horses to a trot, and under cover of the wagon’s rattling, the sound of a few sobs amounted to almost nothing. A long rectangle of light appeared in the dark outline of the cabin while he was still some distance down the road; he knew then that his approach had been heard, that the door was opened, and that someone was coming outside to welcome him.

At home, the relief of those who had waited was obvious in the excitement of their welcome. When the parcels were carried inside and the team cared for, Jethro sat beside his father at the table, with Jenny and Ellen facing him and waiting for all the news of his trip to town. They noticed his pallor, and Ellen’s eyes were tender as she recognized the signs of tears, but they would not shame him by asking if the trip had been too hard for him. They spoke instead of his purchases; he’d shown good judgment in the things he’d bought. They congratulated him on being able to account for every penny of the money earned through sales and expended for their needs.

Jethro chose carefully from among the day’s happenings those things that he wished to tell them. He related parts of his conversation with old Jake Roscoe; he told them of meeting the editor in Sam Gardiner’s store and that the young man named Charley had looked after the team while Jethro had gone to the restaurant for dinner with Mr. Milton. He made them taste Mrs. Hile’s pie and share Sam Gardiner’s candy; he showed them the book on English usage and told them about the cartoon in the paper relating to General McClellan’s late demotion. He spoke slowly and a little wearily, but they were too much interested to guess that he was holding back some news of keener interest.

After a while, Ellen held out her hand to him. “You air spent, Jethro; I kin see it in yore face. Let’s all git to our beds and talk the rest of yore trip in the mornin’.”

Jenny pushed her chair back and Matt started to rise, but Jethro sat in his place and motioned toward the others to sit again.

“There is more I hev to tell you before we sleep,” he said. There was a catch in his voice, and they all looked at him with anxious eyes. Then he stretched his arms out on the table and, with a long sigh, began his story.

“I didn’t tell you this, but in the store this mornin’ there was a man named Guy Wortman. And there was another man, Trav Burdow’s pa—”

Matt
did not sleep the night after Jethro’s return from Newton; and the next morning he was up at dawn moving aimlessly about the cabin and out around the dooryard and woodlot. Ellen had managed to sleep a little in the early morning hours, but she got up when she heard him and prepared a breakfast that neither of them wanted. They drank a little coffee and looked at one another in silence; she noticed that his face was pale, but so was the dim light in the cabin and so, she supposed, was her own face. A moment later, though, a frown came between her eyes as she watched his trembling hand place his cup back in its saucer.

“You air ailin‘, Matt,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you git back to bed and rest a little? There ain’t so much that needs doin’ this mornin’.”

He shook his head. “If you ask me am I afeared, the answer is ‘yes’; ailin‘, it’s ‘no.’ ” He pushed his chair back from the table a little. “I think I’ll go over and ask Turner to drive to Newton with me this mornin’. I want to talk to him and to some of the men down there as knows this Wortman.”

“Will you stop at Burdow’s, Matt?” she asked tensely.

His fingers clutched at strands of his beard as if it were necessary to hold on to something. “You’d hev me do it, wouldn’t you?”

She nodded. “We’ve held it aginst him that his boy stuck a knife in our hearts; now he’s grabbed a second knife that was aimed at us.”

“Mother,” he turned toward her with eyes full of despair, “if you could ha’ knowed back in 1830 of all the griefs you’d hev...”

She put a hand out to him quickly when he paused. “Yore spirit needs bolsterin’ today, old man.” She smiled at him. “You know good and well I wouldn’t ha’ believed ary prophecy. And if I had, I reckon I’d ha’ risked it. I wanted Matt Creighton fer mine awful bad, if you air of a mind to remember.”

They were silent again, each of them preoccupied and troubled. Upstairs they heard Jenny in her room getting dressed to come down to the kitchen; there was no sound from Jethro’s room.

“Let the boy sleep,” Matt said after a minute. “Yesterday was too much fer a lad of his years.”

“I’m glad that you air willin‘,” she answered. “I don’t want to be a soft mother because he’s my last, but it would hurt me to deny him his rest this mornin’.”

They got to their feet, and Ellen began to gather up their cups and saucers while Matt pulled on his jacket and cap. “I aim to walk over to Ed’s now,” he said, and she nodded absently.

A minute or two later she thought she heard a noise at the gate, and hurrying out, she found him lying unconscious on the ground with one hand clutching at his left side.

She covered him with heavy comforters while Jenny ran to Ed Turner’s for help. Then, between them, they got Matt to his bed while the Turners’ oldest boy drove over to Hidalgo for the doctor.

Matt revived, but the vigorous, erect Matt Creighton was gone. A man who looked twenty years older had taken his place.

If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older member of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

By the second week of April that year, the fields were dry enough for plowing, and Jethro, full of the optimism of inexperience, harnessed his team and went out to the field alone. Ed Turner, driving past on his way home from town, stopped and waited until Jethro could get from mid-field up to the fencerow.

“You kin count on me fer whatever help I kin spare, Jeth, and whatever counsel. You air young fer what’s ahead—and I don’t like to see a boy made a man too soon. I reckon, though, that it was writ you’d be the staff of yore pa’s old age.”

Jethro flushed, proud and embarrassed at the same time. “I reckon I kin manage,” he said in his slow way.

Ed hesitated and then pointed to the newspaper on the seat beside him. “There’s bin a bad fight, Jeth, down in south Tennessee.”

“Grant’s army?” Jethro asked quickly.

Ed nodded. “At a place they call Pittsburg Landing—somewhere down on the Tennessee River. Grant let hisself git su‘prised by the Rebs—papers say that it was Sherman and Buell as saved things. They say it was a vic’try fer us, but they’re down on Grant—make it sound like he’s next of kin to Jeff Davis.”

“Two months ago they was yellin’ and praisin’ him to the skies after Donelson.”

“I know. It’s a sight easier to be a general in a newspaper office, I reckon, than it is to be one out on a battlefield. I’m not losin’ my feelin’ fer ol’ Grant—not yit, I ain’t.”

“The fightin’—it was bad, was it?”

Ed understood his meaning. “Upwards of twenty thousand, Jeth; mor’n twelve thousand of’em was our boys.”

Jethro looked up at the neighbor thoughtfully. “I reckon we’d best not tell Pa—not till we hear from Tom or Eb.”

“It would be better that way,” Turner agreed. “You and Jenny kin read the papers off to yoreselves somewhere; don’t talk about it before yore pa—or yore ma either, fer that matter.”

“Pa don’t ask about the news these days—that’s one way he’s so diff’rent.” Jethro was troubled. “How long do you think it might take a letter to git up from Tennessee?” he asked after a while.

“It’s bound to take a spell. I wouldn’t worry, was I you. You’ll be hearin’ from young Tom or Eb before long. Remember the fight at Donelson was a bad one too, and both the boys come through without a scratch. I don’t doubt but what you’ll hev a letter one of these days.”

“Sure hope so.” Jethro turned slowly back toward his team, his thin shoulders stooped a little. He did not weigh more than eighty pounds. Ed Turner must have been sharply aware of the look of frailty about the boy in contrast to the great plow horses and the wide fields where Matt with his four boys and Shadrach Yale had worked only the year before. His eyes were troubled as he made ready to drive on.

“Now, spell yoreself every hour or so, Jeth—don’t drive too hard. I’m goin’ to send one of my boys over to help you before long, and some of the men over tow‘rd Hidalgo, they ’low to give you a day’s work now and agin—yore pa’s got plenty friends around here in spite of all the Wortmans and their kind in the county.”

 

 

One
afternoon later in the week Jenny had hurried with her housework and was prepared to go back to the field with her brother.

“One of us kin take a furrow or so while the other one rests; we’ll save each other a sight of weary achin’ by day’s end,” she told her mother.

Ellen nodded without speaking. She watched them as they walked off to the field together, and then turned slowly back to sit beside her husband.

“They’re good young ’uns, Matt,” she said.

He cried very easily in his weakness. “I bin thinkin’ of young Tom,” he said after a moment.

“I know. I think of him too—him and all the others. We’ll be hearin’ from some of’em soon. You’re not to fret, Matt; we mustn’t give trouble a shape before it throws its shadder.”

He closed his eyes and did not answer. He was suddenly old and weak—not himself anymore, but rational enough to know that several troubles had already thrown their shadows.

Out in the field Jethro and his sister were able to escape for a while from the gloom of the cabin. April was in full bloom, and they were young enough to accept the sunlight and color of a new spring as omens of good fortune. They liked being together, and in the early afternoon before he grew too tired, Jethro would walk along with Jenny when she took her turn at the plow, preferring conversation to solitary rest.

“I can’t quite see how they’re callin’ it a vict‘ry,” he said, his eyes fixed on the ground as they walked along the furrow. “If we’d got down to Corinth and pushed the Rebs out, that would hev bin good news. This way, looks to me like all we done was to keep the Rebs from hevin’ a vict’ry.”

“Anyway, we held on, Jeth. They can’t say that our boys was puny alongside of theirs—like they said about us last year at Bull Run.”

“What I wonder about though, Jenny, is why Grant wouldn’t ha’ knowed that the Rebs was fixin’ to attack. I think about it over and over—why didn’t he be more keerful?”

“Air you goin’ aginst Grant like all the papers, Jeth?”

“No, I ain’t. Things went aginst him—Buell was late in gittin’ more soldiers to him—that Wallace feller got himself lost in the woods right when Grant needed him bad. If things had happened a little different, maybe the papers would be singin’ a different tune about Grant.”

“They’re sayin’ now that the President ought to fire him.”

“I wonder why it is that folks air so ready to be down on Grant—even Shad wasn’t exactly fer him the way most folks was after Donelson—”

“I don’t doubt that it’s because of that awful name—Ulysses. You know the name I like, Jeth? Don Carlos Buell. If ever I have a little boy, I aim to name him Don Carlos.”

Jethro looked at her with mingled astonishment and disapproval. “Jenny, sometimes you air so foolish I’m su’prised that Shad ever took a likin’ to you.”

Jenny produced deep dimples in her hot cheeks. “You and Shad air much alike, Jeth—too sober and solemn fer yore own good. Sometimes you make me think you air a little ol’ man with a boy’s body. You and Shad—both of you need a foolish girl around to jolt the corners of yore mouths into a grin once in a while.”

He was pleased to be compared with Shad, and he walked for a while in silence as he thought it over. Then Jenny spoke again, and he was surprised at the change in her voice.

“I’m thinkin’ about the battle too, Jeth—and the boys—and maybe Bill on the other side. There’s lots of thoughts deep inside me; I ain’t jest as foolish as I seem sometimes.”

“I know it,” he said gruffly.

They worked together often during the following weeks. Ed Turner’s oldest boy came over to help every few days, and during one week three men from neighboring farms came over and put in a day’s work. Jethro appreciated their help, but he was always glad when it was Jenny who went with him to the field and talked of one thing and another and sometimes made him laugh. The difference in their ages seemed to have narrowed that spring, and subtly he stepped out of the role of a petted little brother and became a peer of Jenny, with the full rights of teasing or criticizing that had belonged to Tom a year ago.

But Jethro was to experience one attack of childish fury before the transition to his new standing was fully accomplished. It happened with the arrival of a letter from Shadrach Yale, and it was very painful.

The day had been, up until the noon hour, one of more optimism than they had known that month. Matt was much better, well enough to come to the table that noon and to listen with interest as Jenny and Jethro told him about the progress of the farm work. Ellen’s face was full of relief, and she had stopped long enough in the midst of washing, cooking, and weeding her garden to gather a bunch of lilacs from the hedge and to place them in a small stone jar at Matt’s plate.