Scattered Seeds (20 page)

Father sighed. “Nudge me if I snore.” Something muffled his words. Henry guessed his tricorn covered his face.

“Well if I do, try not to hack me to death wi’ yon axe.”

By the deafening chorus of crickets and frogs to the north, Henry knew where they would find the Juniata River in the morning. It was close; they’d gone farther than expected.

Thick clouds prevented him from seeing any stars, but he knew many twinkled above them. Mary lay under them, too, and he wondered if she thought of him.

She was about as far away from him now as she could be, he reckoned. It surprised him to feel content about that. The backcountry was no place for a woman, not even a feisty one like Mary.

Something rustled.

Fear kicked Henry awake. Had he been asleep? Aye, he had been. He sat up and strained to hear over the earsplitting birdsong. Dawn was breaking on the eastern horizon, its light not yet useful.

There, there it was again. It was close, too close.

The axe.
He patted the blankets.
Where’s Father?

“I’m here.” A hand pressed against his back.

A shadow too large to be a human’s rooted through their sacks.

“I think it’s the ox,” Henry whispered.

“I ne’er heard him get up. What’s he at?”

Henry crawled toward the animal, hoping to miss the manure he smelled. He felt a crate, then the rolled-up tarp, an iron pot, the adze handle . . . and seed, scattered on the ground.

The ox chewed something crunchy in the darkness.

“Damn it all to hell, he’s in the seed.” Henry never swore in front of his father before.

His father met his oath with one far worse. “Jaysus God, get him away from there.”

Henry ran his hands up the animal’s forequarter and neck to find its head. Its cheek pulsated as it pulverized their precious grain. He located the ox’s nose ring, coated with wheat, and pulled the beast aside.

His father reached the spot where the ox had been standing. “He ripped a hole in the sack, the bloody bastard. It’s all o’er the place.”

He fell silent, and in the rising light, Henry made out his form, sitting on a boulder and bent over his lap.

Henry tethered the ox to one of the corral rails. They should have anticipated this. “Will it sicken him if he ate too much?”

“It might.” His father’s knees muted his words. “Keep your voice low or we risk losing more than a bag of seed.”

Henry dropped to his knees. Daylight gained strength and illuminated their misfortune. He found the old feedbag they kept for wiping down the ox. “We can save some of it.”

Together, they squeezed the damaged sack and its diminished contents into the old bag. Henry scooped up the spilled grain, soil and all. “This last will be wet. We’ll need to get it in the ground afore it goes bad.” He tied the bag shut with a length of cord, then sat next to his father.

The ox, which looked as though it had swallowed a barrel, let loose a fresh splatter of manure.

Father slumped over his lap and shook his head. “Why does seed grow naught for us but trouble?”

If there was any good news at all, it was that his father’s hip improved. His drawn expression disappeared, too, replaced by something far worse: dejection. He lagged behind Henry and the ox, his mind a thousand—or three thousand—miles away.

The sudden influx of nutrients raised the ox’s spirit to a level bordering on unmanageable. A Donegal farmer would have called the beast “hot.” Henry called him a plain old pain in the arse. If he didn’t know better, he would swear the cantankerous animal purposely walked around the far side of every tree to irritate him. Perhaps the ox hoped to force them to camp so it could gorge again while they slept. Well, they wouldn’t make that mistake again, the dumb clod.

They hugged the curving end of a mountain that pressed them close to the river. Through the leaves and veils of willow branches, Henry saw that the Juniata lacked the Susquehanna’s impressive width. Its deep, sluggish flow left a tranquil surface that reflected the sky.

Something larger than a duck or a feeding fish rippled the water. Henry raised a hand to warn his father. They crouched and cocked their ears toward the river.

Voices.

Father eased a finger to his lips and then pointed to three Indians in a canoe. Their skulls and half their faces were as red as if they’d been dipped in blood. They were bare-chested and entirely clean-shaven except for tufts of black hair erupting from their crowns. A musket rested across the middle Indian’s lap. The other two paddled with sinewy arms.

The ox flared its nostrils and flapped its ears. If it snorted or stamped its foot, they were as good as dead.

Henry backed away from their hiding spot to carefully slip a feedbag over the ox’s muzzle. At Father’s scowl, he sank to the forest floor.

He made no sound, but something raised the middle Indian’s unease, and he stood up in the canoe to look around. Henry held his breath, aware that any movement would bring the Indians scrambling out of their canoe and up the riverbank.

The agitated Indian wore only leggings and a breechclout. Above this, a gruesome belt of scalps supported a bone-handled knife and a tomahawk. His eyes flashed white within a black stripe painted across his face. Had it not been for the downy feathers fluttering at his earlobes, he would have been as still as a gravestone.

Henry’s lungs burned with want of air.

The Indian uttered a shrill yowl, which was answered by a shriek somewhere downriver. His comrade in the canoe’s bow muttered something, and the standing man shook his head and sat quickly. He returned the musket to his knees, and they paddled downriver and out of view.

Henry and his father fell to the ground, panting. Father’s eyes were glazed and darting, and he pressed a hand over his chest and whispered, “Ye took a wild chance feeding yon ox, but it was good thinking. He was about to bellow. We’d be dead now, our scalps adding to the girth of yon devil’s belt.”

Henry could not yet find words or the means to utter them.

“Makes the loss of the seed seem a minor thing now,” Father said.

Henry rubbed hands that still tingled from shock.

They sat in silence, stilling their hearts and straining their eyes until they were sure all danger had passed.

At last, Father stood slowly. “We’ll need to move on. We’re too close to the river here.” He looked past Henry’s shoulder, where boulders covered a steep slope. “The ox canny go up that. We have no choice but to keep going this way.” He flicked his chin upriver.

As Henry followed his father’s gesture, he noticed odd markings on a beech tree. “Hold on, what’s that?” He strode to the tree. There, in a blaze hacked into the sapwood, someone had carved initials.

E.W.

He pressed his fingers into the letters. “It has to stand for Elias White.”

“Must be one of his corner posts.” Father stepped to the right and pointed at another tree with three notches. “He’s marked his line. These will lead us to him. Thank God, thank God, we’re closer than I thought.”

Visions of a warm meal vanquished Henry’s terror. They pressed on, keeping a careful watch on the shadows.

Bread. Mayhap Elias White will have bread.

His mouth watered. It seemed like forever since his last slice of bread.

A shadow raced across the forest floor. Henry stopped dead.

Damn my belly for luring my eyes off the watch!

Another shadow glided past, and he looked up to see a bird with a vast wingspan soaring above the canopy.

His father saw it, too. “I’ve ne’er clapped eyes on a bird so big. What is it, do ye know?”

“Eagles, maybe.” Alexander MacFarlane spoke of eagles large enough to fly off with a lamb in their talons.

“Look.” Edward pointed at a stump which had been sawn down, not felled by rot or lightning. “We must be close.”

The stumps grew numerous and the canopy thinner until the forest ended at a thicket of brambles and grapevines. Getting the ox through the tangle proved challenging and left twigs and briars stuck around the animal’s horns, but the scrub eventually yielded to a meadow. They stood at the edge and surveyed the sun-drenched space, nervous about crossing it.

The ox grazed while they considered what to do.

“It must be White’s pasture.” Father pointed at a grassy knoll. “His house and byre are probably o’er that rise, oot of the wind.”

“Something does nae feel right.”

The nagging disquiet differed from the feeling Henry experienced at Elizabeth’s Town. He surveyed the edges of the meadow to detect the source of his agitation, but all seemed quiet. There were no scattering crows, no alarmed chirps from songbirds, just an unconcerned squirrel hopping along the western tree line with a nut in its mouth.

“There’s more of them birds.” Father squinted at the sky.

Three more eagles soared past, lower this time. Only they weren’t eagles at all. They were vultures.

Chapter 34

Elias White lay on his back, charred and bloated in the middle of a blackened field. The fire that destroyed his crop left him naked except for a few shreds of homespun fabric peeking out from under his body. Flies crawled in and out of his mouth, now fixed in an eternal scream. His arms were locked above his chest with curled fists, as if he still somehow hoped to fight off his attackers.

“Dear God.” Father doffed his tricorn, which he clapped to his chest.

Henry could say nothing. A breeze brought the scent of death spiraling up to him, and he covered his nose and mouth and turned away.

Several vultures strutted nearby with their enormous wings outstretched menacingly. They wanted maggots, not meat. The flies and the September heat had yet to oblige them.

A scorched split-rail fence ringed White’s house, now a heap of ash and clay, a dark bump in the middle of seared acreage.

“We’ll have to bury him,” Father said.

Henry nearly objected. He wanted to. Six months ago, he would have. But the birds craning their hideous bald necks forced him to relent. If they didn’t bury Elias White, who would?

“I’m sorry, son. We have to. We canny just let him lie here for the birds to pick clean.”

“I know.” Henry pulled the ox, sidestepping and rolling its eyes, past White’s body. He knew. The ox knew. Henry tied the beast to the remnants of White’s fence, slipped a pick and a shovel from their packs, then carried them back to his father.

Father knelt beside White’s body, the soot staining his breeches. “They scalped him.”

Henry couldn’t look. “Do nae tell me anymore. Let’s just get him buried and get oot of here.” He longed for the cover of the forest.

“I’ll look in what’s left of the hoose. There could be others.”

Judging by the size of his house and cleared fields, Elias White had been an industrious man. Now he was dead, probably at the hands of those barbarians they’d seen on the river. One of the scalps tickling the red man’s thighs likely belonged to Elias White.

Henry longed for Alexander MacFarlane’s rifle. He would take great pleasure in using it on the haughty brute in the canoe. Animals, that’s what they were, animals, and they deserved naught but a lead ball between their eyes.

He unleashed his rage with the pick, hacking away at the earth where he intended to bury a man he did not know. A year ago, he ran from his own shadow. Now he was standing next to a dead man, one whose outstretched arms clawed into his peripheral vision.

By the time his father returned, the grave was ready for White’s corpse. “Anyone inside?” he asked.

Father shook his head.

Thank God for small mercies.

Elias White paid for his funeral with wheat.

The fire that mangled him burned itself out before reaching the lowest corner of his field. There, ears of mature grain still nodded on their stalks. Henry plucked one and dropped it into his sack.

“It feels like we’re stealing.”

Snap, snap, snap.

Father threw three more ears into the sack. “Ye reckon White still needs it?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how’s it stealing?”

“I suppose it is nae. Just feels wrong to profit by another man’s misfortune.”

“White was a tidy farmer, hardworking. My guess is he was a good Presbyterian. He’d hate the waste.”

“I suppose it’s better for us to get it than those . . .” He could think of no term vile enough for the savages responsible for Elias White’s death.

He stretched his aching back and studied the tree line for the millionth time. Something watched them. He felt it. So did the ox, which lay in the sun’s last rays chewing its cud and swinging its ears like doors.

Snap.

Henry jumped.

Father took the sack from him. “We’re almost done here, I promise. I’ve asked more of ye than any man should ask of his son. Who would nae be jumpy after this day? First Injuns, then this.” He looked back at the fresh grave.

“I’m worn oot.” Henry picked another three ears of wheat.

“It’s been a long few months. We’ve a bit of work yet, then we’ll tuck oursel’ in for winter and come oot in spring as fat as bears.”

“Ye need a shave,” Henry said.

“And ye need a bath. I’m surprised the vultures did nae think ye dead. Come on. I’d like to get away from this place afore night falls.”

Henry looked up at the cloudless sky. “Gonny be a clear night.”

“Aye, we’ll be able to see well.”

Henry shuddered. Whatever hunted them would see well, too.

They walked all night, tripping over limbs and logs and skinning their shins on the earth’s sharp bones.

At dawn, when the chorus of crickets and frogs yielded to birdsong, they found the Cocolamus Creek. Its clear waters led them inland along the base of a steep ridge. Two hours later, it took a sharp turn northwest. There, at a flood plain, beavers left pointed stumps and mounds of wood shavings. An understory of young hemlocks thrived beneath buttonwood trees so large that a chain of five men could not ring their arms around a single trunk.

It was secluded, peaceful, and the perfect place to rest.

The ox’s limp returned, and Father’s shoe soles were gone, replaced now by slabs of bark tied with cord.

Henry gave up begging him to try the moccasins. He stopped flinching at every sound, too, weary of whatever trailed them. He was spent, so much so that death seemed a fine and proper thing.

Father said, “The ox can take no more.”

Neither can ye.

Father pointed to the base of a knobby buttonwood, gutted by generations of floods and decay. “By God, this forenoon will see us at a fire. A fire and a warm meal will restore us. There are plenty of trees for a chimney. Look at that one. Why, it’s so big we could sit inside it.”

They decided to do just that.

Henry’s arms and back ached as he shoveled out the tree’s punky interior while his father built a lean-to. The crude structure hid both tree and ox, thanks to an abundance of driftwood and hemlock boughs.

After he placed the last bough, they ducked inside the trunk.

Father nodded at the kindling Henry tiered for a fire. “Looks grand, son.” He slipped their tinderbox and its accoutrements from a leather pouch.

“I’ll do it.” Henry took the items. He pointed to a blanket. “Rest yoursel’.”

Father wasted no time in removing what remained of his shoes.

“Your feet are bleeding.” Henry struck flint on steel above the open tinderbox.

“Not anymore.” Father’s eyes appeared sunken, and his hair looked greasy and plastered to his head.

The tinderbox caught a spark on the first strike. Henry held dried grass to the glowing coals and blew on it until he became lightheaded. The grass caught fire, and he placed the tiny conflagration under the tiered kindling, which ignited instantly.

They watched the smoke spiral up inside the tree.

Across the fire, his father’s lids grew heavy.

“Go to sleep.” Henry stacked more wood on the blaze. “I’ll keep an eye on the fire.”

Father slipped off his stockings, exposing his raw heels. “Ye must be done in, too.”

“I am.” Henry felt so tired he floated. “I am past the point of sleep, though. Mayhap I will try to catch us a fish.”

He rolled a round stone into the embers and allowed it to heat, then tumbled it into a scrap of cloth. “Put that on your hip.”

Father took the hot bundle from him, then pressed it against his hip. “Feels good.” Exhaustion slurred his speech. “Henry, I’m sorry for dragging ye into this mess. Ye’ve suffered much. It’s my fault for—”

“What choice did ye have? If we’d stayed in Ireland, we’d be dead already, wi’ Uncle Sorley wearing the torc to our pauper funerals.”

Father leaned his head against the tree’s firelit interior. “Ye’ve seen more despair in the past six months than a lad should witness in his whole life. If I had nae invested in that godforsaken seed.”

Henry positioned a tripod over the fire. “How could ye know a drought would come?” He hung a kettle and poured water from their canteen into it. Flames licked at the tin. “Come, let us talk no more of it. We will soon find Uncle William’s cabin. Let us be content in that and think no more on . . .”

Further words would be wasted. Father was asleep.

Henry diced pemmican into the kettle of water and added the wrinkled mushrooms. They would have broth at last, and fish, too, once he found their hooks and line.

His father deserved the small pleasure of waking to the smell of food. He would be impressed by Henry’s courage and resourcefulness.

Henry crept out of the tree. The ox eyed him doubtfully as he searched through their packs for the tin can containing his hooks and line. He found it nestled inside a leather sack among pouches of vegetable seeds and carried it—and the hammer—to the creek.

Less than an hour later, he stood at the water’s edge holding a fishing pole in one hand and a stick with three dead trout in the other. The fish were plentiful and easily caught; schools of them lazed in the shade of overhanging branches. Just one more and they’d have two apiece.

With his hook baited and the line cast, he turned and peered through the branches of a young hemlock tree to where Father slept. Everything remained still. No smoke escaped their hiding spot.

Something tugged on his line. He yanked—too hard—and his hook flew out of the water and ricocheted off his chest.

“Shite.” A fish had stolen the bait, his last worm. He flipped over a few rocks, hoping to find more. When the habitat underneath them proved either too wet or too dry to sustain anything but ants or crayfish, he scanned the floodplain for another source.

A strip of mud upstream caught his eye. Mud was agreeable to worms, and he headed for it, climbing over bent trees and crunching across pebbles littered with empty clam and mussel shells. He wondered what put them there and found the answer pressed into the silt: raccoon footprints. They were like tiny handprints, and he followed them, stooping to get a closer look. They led him to a patch of grass . . . and a moccasin-clad foot.

He dropped the pole and fish and fled.

The hammer. Where’s the hammer?

He raced for his father, hurdling logs and ducking under vines and branches. He flung open the entrance to their lean-to, then skidded on his knees inside the tree, where he found his father shocked awake.

“Henry, what’s wrong?”

“The axe, where’s the axe?” He tossed the blanket aside. “Jaysus, Father, where’s the goddamn axe!”

“Mind your mouth, Henry. I’ve got it right here. What in the name of—”

“Injuns . . . doon by the creek.”

Father hobbled outside on his tender feet, his eyes wild. “Where’s the hammer?”

”I left it at the creek,” he wheezed, panic choking him.

“Where are they?” Father’s knuckles were white on the axe shaft. “How many are there?”

Henry pointed toward the creek. “I . . . I do nae know. I only saw a foot.”

“A foot?”

“Aye, Father, I ran afore I saw more, but I’d bet my life they’re lying in yon patch of grass.”

They crouched and stared at the grass, where nothing moved but butterflies.

“Are ye sure, Henry? A man’s mind, especially when he’s tired, can—”

“I saw an Injun’s foot, I tell ye. It was a moccasin, plain as day, wi’ beads sewn on it.”

Father rose slowly to inspect the forest around them. “The only footsteps I heard were yours, but I was asleep. Mayhap they slipped behind us.”

“My only thought was to get the axe. I wish to God we had Alexander’s gun.”

They waited for what seemed an interminable amount of time. A blue jay flitted from limb to limb above the spot where Henry saw the Indian’s foot.

Father broke the silence. “Yon bird is nae concerned. I’ll go look.”

“Not wi’oot me, ye will nae, and not wi’oot my hammer.”

They crept to the fishing hole to retrieve the hammer, then toward the grass with their tools poised to strike. Henry’s shin thumped. He must have hit it on something in his panic.

He halted his father with a touch to his arm and pointed at a moccasin sticking out of the weeds.

Father nodded.

Henry raised the hammer, ready to bash in the brains of whatever ran toward them. He licked his lips and felt blood fill the muscles of his arms.

“Good day, sir,” Father said, loud enough for the Indian to hear.

Nothing moved.

Henry jabbed his elbow into his father’s side. “Try French.”

“Good idea.
Qui est là?
”

Nothing.

“He must be dead,” Father declared.

They approached cautiously and found two Indians beside a spent fire, one flat on his back with a bloodstained cloth binding his abdomen and the other lying on his side with his bare legs in the creek. His right ankle was swollen. A fly-infested wound marred his right arm.

“Are they dead?” Henry asked.

His father gestured to the man with the arm wound. “Dead men do nae sweat.”

Henry inched closer, aware that the Indians could turn at a moment’s notice and slaughter them like they slaughtered Elias White. The memory of that man’s charred face ignited his fury. “Finish them off.”

“Henry, we canny . . .”

“We can. I can. Two less Injuns to worry about.”

“They’ve done naught to us, son.”

“Only because they’re doon. They’re naught but wild dogs, Father, wild dogs that would sooner tear oot our throats than look at us. Go back to the tree, if ye canny watch. I’ll take care of them and eat my broth wi’oot a single pang of guilt.”

Father’s incredulous look shamed him. “I canny believe what I’m hearing. I raised ye better than this. These men have done us no wrong. Have I sired a murderer?”

Henry studied the Indian with the leg wound and tried to see a man. The top half of his face was stained red, and the bottom half, black. The rims of his ears had been cut free and stretched into grotesque shapes. He was bald except for a shock of hair adorned with turkey feathers and porcupine quills. A polished turtle shell lay on his chest, which had been shaved or plucked. A plump belly swelled above his breechclout, probably from eating stolen cattle, maybe even from eating settlers. His only redeeming quality was that he wore no scalp belt.

With his gaze locked on the live Indian, Father felt for a pulse on the one with the gut wound. “He’s dead.” He stepped over the corpse.