The Hollow Tree (19 page)

One Is One

P
hoebe sat with her back against an outcrop of rock. She drew her knees up to her chin and put her head down. Her muscles ached, her feet were sore, but with every ragged breath she breathed in the scent of pine. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the waterfall far below. Above its roar she could hear the jays and crows calling to each other through the pines and spruces that grew down the sides of the gorge.

She had run from camp with no thought but to get away. She had paid no attention to where she was headed. She had broken through ice as she raced through streams, badly scratched her hands and face when she pushed hrough bushes, and torn her leggings scrambling up a bare hillside. She stopped on a small plateau beside which the river had cut a deep gorge in the mountain,
and collapsed onto the ground against the rock. There was only one thought in her head, “I did it. I really did it.” She said the words out loud and the enormity of what she had done began to sink in. She, Gideon’s little brown mouse, had stolen up to Japhet Oram, tied to his tree, and cut his bonds. Whatever happened to him from now on, he was not going to be hanged.

“Phoebe! Phoebe Olcott! Don’t you move. Don’t you move!”

Phoebe leapt to her feet. She looked down the hill. The dawn light was pink but still dim. She could just make out the figure charging up the hill towards her, but there was no mistaking Jem’s angry bellow.

“Don’t you come a step closer, James Morrissay,” she cried. “The other side of this hill goes straight down into a deep gorge. If you come one step closer, I’ll jump into it.”

Jem kept coming.

“I mean it.” Phoebe took a step towards the cliff edge.

Jem stopped. He was three-quarters of the way up the mountainside now. “You won’t get away.” He shook both his fists at her. “I ain’t gonna let you. You let that no-account rebel spy loose, ’n’ you’re gonna hafta answer for it! Your cousin Anne was dead-right all along. You had us all bamboozled with your bein’ so nice to the children. And I thought, God Almighty, I was … 
Oh, I could kill you.” He started towards her again.

“I mean it. I’ll jump. You won’t have to kill me, you can just get yourself around by the bottom of the waterfall and gather up the pieces of me. I am not letting you take me back so you and Anne and your friend Joseph Heaton can hang me on that tree where you had Japhet Oram tied up. I’d sooner die here. Right now.”

Jem stopped again. Phoebe could still see only the dark shape of him, his white face topped by his fur cap.

“I guess that’s what you want,” said Phoebe bitterly when he made no response. “You want to see me hanging from that tree. You want to watch my face go black and my eyes bulge out. Then you won’t mind about Japhet Oram. Then maybe you won’t mind about being put off your farm.”

“Phoebe, no! I—”

“Not one step closer. I’ll jump. Then you won’t have me to drag back to show what a fine hero you are. How did you find me, anyway, Jem?”

“You didn’t hit me all that hard,” he said impatiently. “I followed you. Phoebe, I—”

“No, don’t you speak.” Phoebe took a deep breath. Leaning against the rock, exulting in her success only moments before Jem had appeared, something had happened to her. Something had
settled inside her, a kind of understanding. And she felt now that, if she was going to die, she wanted Jem to know about it.

“All my life,” she said, “I have never done a thing because it was only I who wanted it. My poor papa, who was so learned in Latin and Greek, would have gone hungry all the days of his life if I hadn’t shoved a dinner dish under his nose every evening. I did Gideon’s bidding because I loved him. I did Anne’s bidding because I thought she was everything I should be. I so wanted to be like her! Gideon said I was his good-natured little mouse, but it was because I was willing to see the sun rise up from the river if he said it did. Anne thought the sun rose especially to light her path and I wasn’t to block out its light. I was daft enough to think it was so. Daft, that’s the word for me. There are others — cowardly, stupid. But you know, Jem, I do think Gideon was right, I think perhaps I’m good-natured, too. I let your family and Aunt Rachael convince me to come along with you not only because I was afraid to be alone in the forest — and the dear Lord in heaven knows how afraid I am — but because Aunt Rachael needed me and I felt so sorry for those children no one else cared tuppence for. I know how they felt and, if she had lived and I had lived, that little scrap of a Tibby Thayer would have had a place with me wherever I was to go.”

Phoebe paused. She looked down at Jem. The sun was coming up behind his head, so she still couldn’t see his face. All she could see was the outline of him with the fur of his cap like a golden fringe around his head. Behind him, in the distance, the hills and mountains ascended in layers, the rising sun resting on them like a flaming ball. The sky all around was the colour of deep-rose petals. It was so beautiful it hurt her to look at it on this morning.

“But now” — she swallowed — “but now I am going off to find Tibby where she has gone and I am going there without anybody’s by-your-leave. It is a black and terrible deed to hang a person, Jem, and I figure the people who do that have God to answer to when they reach the next life. I could not be one of those people, Jem, nor have aught to do with them, so I cut Japhet Oram loose and I ran away. And if I have to die by my own choosing, though it be a mortal sin, I will do it, today, right now. I am fifteen years old. I turned fifteen the day we buried Tibby, though I did not think on it until this moment. Old enough. So if you’ve a mind to fetch me back to see me hanged, you can watch me pitch myself into that waterfall. You might like it every bit as much. You might.”

“No,” Jem shouted hoarsely. “No! Phoebe don’t jump. I don’t want … Phoebe, I promise, no one’s gonna … I… oh, God, don’t jump! ”

“Jem, I am not coming with you.” For a moment neither of them spoke. An early-morning wind soughing through the pine trees added a mournful note to the steady music of the waterfall. There was no other sound.

Finally Jem spoke. “Phoebe” — the crack in his deep voice was very pronounced. There wasn’t a trace of anger in it — “Phoebe, I don’t want … Phoebe, please don’t jump. I won’t ask you to come back with me if you think … Oh, damn, Phoebe.” He pulled off his cap and ran his hand through his hair until it stood up like a hayrick. “Phoebe, I’ll go back ’n’ say I couldn’t find you. But …”

“Why, Jem?”

“Why?” Jem’s tone incredulous. “Why? Phoebe, I ain’t never seen a body hanged ’n’ I sure don’t aim to start with you. I guess I don’t care what you done, I ain’t seein’ you get hanged.” His voice was shaky, and, in the growing light, Phoebe could see that he was clutching his cap to his chest as though he would save it, too, from that horrible fate. She took a deep breath. “So you mean to let me be?”

“What’ll you do all by your lone self?”

“I’ll do what I was doing before I found you by Lake Champlain. I’ll make my own way.”

“But you said yourself you was grief-crazed or you never coulda done it.”

“But I did and I can do it again.”

“It ain’t safe, Phoebe, not for one girl alone.”

“To my mind it’s a lot safer than coming back to be with people with the intent of doing me harm.”

“Not all of ’em.”

“No, not all, but since everyone among you seems to do Master Heaton’s bidding, I will not feel very safe. No, I don’t belong with you refugees, Jem, because I was never forced out of my home. My father fought and died on the side of the people who did that to you. People you hate. My cousin Gideon was killed because he was a soldier for your side of the war. I picked up his spy papers, but I didn’t pick them up because I wanted your side to win, it was because I needed to do it for Gideon. I set Japhet Oram free so he wouldn’t be hanged, not because I’m for his side of the war — and I don’t even know for certain which side he’s for, nor do you. And, do you know, Jem, I don’t care. I saw neighbours doing terrible things to neighbours back in Orland Village, and those neighbours who did those things do not seem to me to be any different from Joseph Heaton or Charity Yardley. Jem, I do not care who wins this dreadful war. And whoever wins it, I do not belong with you. I do not belong with the rebels. I do not belong with anyone, I think. But you do. Go back now, Jem, where you belong.”

Jem didn’t move. He stood there, clutching
his cap, staring up at Phoebe. “I can’t just leave you.” He took a step towards her. “Phoebe, I can’t. And you ain’t even got Bartlett nor George.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Phoebe” — his voice dropped so low Phoebe could scarcely hear him — “would … mightn’t it be best if I was to come along with you?”

“What? What did you say?”

“I said I’ll come along with you.”

For a moment she could think of nothing to say, she was so dumbfounded. How could he say that after she had freed Japhet? After he had been so angry? After … after everything? It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t do it. “No,” she said. “You have your way to go and I have mine.” She paused. “Jem, it was good of you to say that, but you must go back now and keep your own promises.” She turned to look down on the waterfall. The sun had just touched the mist over the cascade and it glowed with a deep coral light. On the other side of the gorge a doe stood sniffing the air around her. There was joy in her that she did not have to end her life there. She turned back to Jem.

“Goodbye, Jem. God keep you.” She started up the hillside along the cliff edge.

“Phoebe!” Jem’s voice was full of pain. “Phoebe, don’t go! Phoebe, you do belong with us. Phoebe, I care about you.”

Phoebe stopped, turned back once more, and said, “I care about you, too, Jem.” Then she set her feet again in the direction she had chosen. She climbed until she reached the next plateau. There she stopped and looked back down the hillside. Jem had gone.

The British Fort

I
t was on a morning more than three weeks later that Phoebe dragged herself to the shore of a wide river and collapsed. She was starving, she had cut one leg badly when she had fallen down a mountain crevice, and she was so spent she could no longer think.

Through the haze of exhaustion, she heard a startled exclamation, then a man say, “Lookee ’ere, ’ere’s another of them half-starved refugees. Give us an ’and, will ye?”

Phoebe heard no more, felt no more, until she opened her eyes, many days later, although she did not know that then, to find herself staring up into a pair of anxious grey eyes. The eyes blinked in surprise, crinkled at the corners in a smile, and retreated.

“Plum tuckered out is all that’s wrong,” said a woman’s deep voice, “that and a shortage of
vittles. Now she’s awake, better fetch up a bowl of broth from over to the mess.”

Another voice answered, “Yes, ma’am.” Phoebe drifted back to sleep.

The next time she woke it was dark and she was alone. She wondered where she was but didn’t have enough energy to think about it. She learned later she was in the isolation hut because it was feared when she was found that she might have measles or smallpox or scarlet fever. It seemed as though only a moment had passed when she woke again, but she knew that was not so because there was light coming through the oiled cloth over the small window in the wall opposite. She was lying on a narrow cot built into the wall of a one-room log house. Against the wall, across from the foot of the cot, a fire was flickering in a rough stone fireplace.

That’s good, she thought. She closed her eyes, then opened them again because she heard the creak of leather hinges as the door was pushed open. A kind-faced woman came in carrying a tray.

“Oh happy morning,” the woman cheered. She threw off her shawl and picked her way across the room to the bed. “You’ve waked. Now don’t you go back to sleep, dearie, not before you’ve had a wee sup of this good chicken broth. There’s so little meat on them bones of yours, a starving wolf would turn up his nose at you.”

Obediently Phoebe opened her mouth to the round pewter spoon thrust towards it. She was too weak to drink more than three mouthfuls, but they tasted so good and the broth smelled so good she asked if she might save the rest by her for later — and promptly fell asleep.