The Hollow Tree (3 page)

She had not wanted to leave her own cabin home in Hanover. She had wanted to stay and keep it in good order, in part because it soothed her sorrow to keeps things in order, and in part because leaving meant really accepting that her father was never coming home. Uncle Josiah had come for her. Josiah Robinson was a frail, kind man whom people instinctively wanted to save from worry, and Phoebe was a girl who hated to make trouble for anyone. But she was also stubborn about what mattered greatly to
her. She refused to budge. In the end, Gideon had had to fetch her.

Phoebe had never been able to refuse Gideon anything. He would come knocking on her door, followed by Billy Wilder, and they would pour out of their sacks the bits of bark, the leaves, the birds’ wings they had found for her to organize and label. She had always willingly sorted out and labelled the plant specimens he collected. She had put up with his irritation when she had done things wrong. She had washed and mended his shirts when he had torn or stained them, so his mother would not know. She had even performed that same service for Billy Wilder.

So, when Gideon had come for her, she had packed her spare shift, her spare skirt and petticoat, her Sunday-best gown (the one she had dyed with sumac), and her mother’s old fur-lined, tartan wool cloak; picked up the little orange kitten that had been haunting her doorstep; and gone with him.

Aunt Rachael had welcomed her — and the kitten — as Phoebe had known she would, because Aunt Rachael was, though somewhat reserved, a loving woman. She was also strong and able to take charge of any situation, no matter how difficult, which was good because Uncle Josiah was an ineffectual householder, not capable of much beyond his scholarly work, praying for them all.

It had been Gideon who had put his strong ten-year-old arms to work helping the neighbour men and boys clear land and build their first log cabins, ensuring that they, in turn, would help the Robinsons clear, and build their cabin. Uncle Josiah had a small inheritance, so he could pay for help to build a second, bigger frame house. Now it was done, a house with a big chimney that had fireplaces on both sides to warm the keeping-room and hall on one side, the parlour on the other; a pantry, a kitchen with its own fireplace, and Uncle Josiah’s study along the back; and up the steep, winding stairs from the hallway, three bedrooms. Uncle Josiah spent most of his time in his study, labouring over the essays he was writing on the Book of Jeremiah. His mind had closed to the war that had drawn so many village men and boys to fight its battles and had set families in the village against each other.

Aunt Rachael had been glad of Phoebe’s help with her housework. Anne and Gideon were the oldest of four living children (three babies had died in infancy). The small boys — Jed, five, and Noah, four — were surely, their mother said, “the trials God forgot to send Job.” They ran about, paying no heed to their overworked mother or their soft-spoken father. Their sister Anne seemed never to be around when she was needed to look after them. Phoebe
often thought, as she chased after the noisy, quarrelsome boys, that they would both be better off if, just once, their father would take his hand to their bare backsides.

But Josiah Robinson was a man who would countenance no violence in his household or out of it. Phoebe was sure that, were Gideon at home, the boys would not so readily run off into the woods, take off for the brook, or torment their little sister.

Gideon was not at home. He had gone off the year before, in July, a month after his nineteenth birthday, a week after the newly formed Continental Congress of the thirteen rebellious American colonies had officially declared their independence from Great Britain. He had gone to fight for the British, for the cause of loyalty and reason, he said, and neither his father’s prayers nor his mother’s pleas could keep him home.

On the morning he left, after he had said goodbye to the others, he had asked Anne and Phoebe to meet him in their little meadow by the river. He had stood in the bright sunlight and bowed formally first to one, then to the other. “Ladies,” he had said, “you see before you a soldier for the King.” He had been dressed in his plain brown homespun breeches, waistcoat, and coat, his brown-and-green-striped stockings, and his stout leather shoes. He had looked
strong and handsome, and all Phoebe had thought was that he, too, would soon be dead. She hadn’t been able to utter a sound until Gideon had put his arms around her and said, “I’ll be safe, Mouse, you’ll see. I’ll be right as rain when we’ve licked those rogues. Oh!” He’d gulped and tightened his arms around her. “I didn’t mean that your father was a rogue, Phoebe, truly I didn’t. I know Uncle Jonathan
believed
what he was fighting for, even though — oh, don’t cry, Phoebe, please.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Well, you must. You can. You will. Please, Phoebe, I can’t bear to march off and have a red blotchy face to remember you by. And you need to help me. You need to comfort Billy Wilder and look after Polly Grantham and see she doesn’t marry one of those blasted rebels while I’m saving the country.”

He would have said more, but Anne had interrupted.

“Stop your silly blubbering, Phoebe. Only think how splendid Gideon will be.” Her eyes had sparkled with excitement. “I don’t care what Papa says, Gideon. You will have a beautiful uniform with a scarlet coat and a sword. Were I a boy, I would march off to war with you. Oh, war is so romantic!”

“A fine soldier you’d be with your simpering, flirting ways,” Gideon had scoffed. Phoebe had
said nothing. She had thought about Uncle Josiah and Aunt Rachael, about Billy Wilder and Polly Grantham. “The dearest, sweetest girl in all the world,” Gideon had said about Polly once when Phoebe was helping sort plant specimens. She had turned from him quickly, not wanting him to see how those words hurt. How could someone be dearer and sweeter to him than she was? Gideon had been dearer to her than her own father. She had never built romantic day-dreams around him as she had around some of her father’s students, that wasn’t how she loved him, but to hear that someone else was the dearest, sweetest girl in all the world was painful.

But, in this moment of goodbye, she had not even minded about Polly Grantham. All she had thought was that Gideon was going to war, Gideon who studied the forest as diligently as her father had studied his books. He was no more a soldier than her father had been. Why did he care so much for the King that he would leave his precious plants to go off and fight? Why had her father cared so much for being free of that king that he had let himself be killed for it? Wasn’t it enough for them that they had a warm house to keep out the rain and snow, a garden patch to grow vegetables in, flax and wool to have cloth from?

There didn’t seem to be any answer to these questions. But, there was Gideon, standing with
the sun shining on his bare head, his brown hair neatly braided and tied with his best black ribbon in its soldierly queue, his face full of resolve.

Now, more than a year later, as the maple trees turned bright red and gold in the fall sunshine, Phoebe was still asking herself those questions. She was not asking them of anyone else, though. Since those early days in Lexington and Concord and Boston, battles had been fought all through the thirteen colonies, and people had become frightened, uncertain about who was friend and who foe. There were stories of families — children and adults alike — being hounded from their homes, injured, and even killed, by neighbours who called them enemies, sometimes in the name of the King, sometimes in the name of the rebellious Continental Congress. In this year, 1777, there was fierce fighting in lower New York Province and on the western side of Vermont’s own Green Mountains, at Hubbardton and Bennington. No battles had yet been fought on the eastern side of the mountains — Orland Village was still peaceful. All the same, the war had invaded the lives of the settlers there, as everywhere in America.

Only a few months earlier, Vermont had declared itself an independent republic, but, all the same, people in this new republic were as divided in their feelings about the war as were people everywhere. Neighbours, friends, families
here, too, had turned against one another, although a few, like Josiah Robinson, believed too strongly in peace to take either side. Village life had changed. Families no longer gathered for house- or barn-raisings. Gone now was the easy way in which Master Jonas Marsh, the Orland Village blacksmith, would have forged a pair of door hinges for Master Philip Grantham, the miller, and be willing to wait for his pay until the grain was ready for grinding. Gone was the way Mistress Mary Converse had offered her bread starter when Mistress Deborah Williams had let hers run out. Never quite sure which side of the rebellion a family inclined to — unless the men had gone off to fight on one side or the other — people feared to be too friendly. Up and down the rutted path through the village, doors were shut against known British sympathizers. Only Polly Grantham remained friendly towards the Robinsons.

Phoebe knew that some of the Orland Village men had formed a Committee of Public Safety — as in other villages sympathetic to the rebellion — to ensure loyalty to the rebel cause. They called themselves Patriots. Those, like Gideon, who stayed with the King called themselves Loyalists, though the Patriots called them Tories, an old British word for supporters of the king. As for those who wanted nothing to do with the war — the Patriots figured they were Tories, too.

On the village green there was a great oak tree — a tree too splendid to be felled, the villagers had decided when they had first cut through the forest to make their settlement. This, the Committee of Public Safety labelled their “Liberty Tree.” Every village and town in the thirteen rebellious colonies had a liberty tree, where zealous Patriots read proclamations, gave speeches, and hanged effigies of the Loyalist leaders.

The Robinsons were anxious, but until that fall there had been no violence in Orland Village. Elsewhere suspected Tories had been robbed, imprisoned, or turned from their homes to make their way, if they could, through the deep wilderness to find refuge in British strongholds. Some, it was said, to take ship to Halifax, in Nova Scotia, the fourteenth American colony, where the rebellion had not taken hold, or to head up the river to Canada, where the conquered French took no part in the revolution. Some people had been “tarred and feathered” — stripped naked, covered with hot pine pitch, and rolled in chicken feathers until their skin peeled, then carried out of town clinging to fence rails. News of these horrors had been reaching the village with every traveller coming up the river or over the mountains.

Then, very early one clear, cold October morning not long after the first light snowfall, when the sun had only just risen over the flaming
red of the maple trees, the quiet of the village was shattered by sounds of shouting. Jed and Noah rushed outside to see what had happened. Phoebe was right behind them, intent on getting them back into the house to finish their breakfast, but when she heard what was happening she was so shocked she forgot about the boys.

“We don’t need the likes of traitors like you in our God-fearing village!” It was Elihu Pickens, the head of the Committee of Public Safety. He was pulling Deborah Williams through her front doorway. Phoebe caught sight of Asa Johnson behind her, and there were others barely discernible in the dim house — other members of the committee, she knew. The Williams’s hound, Scout, crouched by the door, growling. People farther down the road were clutching shawls, thrusting arms into coats, shoving hats onto their heads as they hurried to the scene. Phoebe caught sight of Polly Grantham being pulled along by her mother. She could see how frightened the girl was.

John Williams, his wife, Deborah, and their five children, lived across the road from the blacksmith shop, only three houses away from the Robinsons. Now the Williams’s cart, the ox harnessed to the front, was pulled up to the door. Moses Litchfield and Hiram Jesse were shoving the four small Williams children, wide-eyed with bewilderment, into the cart. With one
hand Deborah clung to her door jamb. She held her baby tightly in her other arm. Her usually neatly pinned brown hair hung loose around her face and her clothes were in disarray. It was clear she had been dressing when the men had forced their way into her house.

“No!” she cried. “You can’t set me out of my own house. Where will we go? We’ll starve!”

“Starve if you must,” jeered Elihu Pickens, “that ain’t no never mind of ourn. We been generous. We let you have a sack of beans, a sack of flour, and a cooking pot. We gived you yer bible and yer fancy clock you set such store by, and blankets and such so’s you won’t up and freeze. What’s more, we gived you yer marriage lines so’s you can be legal up there with them mon-seers in Canaday or in Novy Scotey or wherever you fetches up.”

With these words Pickens pried her hand from the door jamb and shoved her towards the cart. Deborah Williams was small, she had no chance of winning a battle of strength against a big, burly man like Elihu Pickens. She climbed, almost fell, into the cart.

“Aw, she don’t need that fancy clock.” Moses Litchfield grabbed the tall case clock from little Margaret Williams, who was trying desperately to get her arms around it. She burst into tears and started to climb down from the cart to take it back, Litchfield gave her a shove.

“Easy there.” Jonas Marsh, the blacksmith, spoke up from across the road. “Whatever they’ve a-done, Mose Litchfield, you got no call for to hurt them little ones. You got no right to steal their clock, neither.”

“You a Tory-lover, Jonas Marsh?” Litchfield spat in Marsh’s direction. “You a-wantin’ to keep yer friends company?”

There was an indignant murmur from the crowd. Hiram Jesse gave the ox a slap on the rump that started it moving. The cart wheels creaked. Deborah Williams, clutching her baby to her breast, sat stony-faced at the front of the cart. Her jaw was rigid, her eyes looked straight ahead. The terrified children behind her clung to each other soundlessly. The hound, with one final growl, jumped up into the cart beside the children.