The Trees (13 page)

When Sayward came back in the cabin she sent the younger ones up the ladder to bed. Matters crossed her mind now she never let herself think of before. It wasn’t for nothing that the little cheeping birds stayed away from these deep woods. Slimy, clammy things that crawled or hopped you could hear night and day. Bullfrogs bawled and tree frogs screeched. But Sayward couldn’t mind hearing a woods robin all year. Mostly the token bird called. He started in the morning before it was hardly light. Owk-owk-owk-owk-owk he went and then flew to a new place in the woods to
tell his bad news. You could hear him making all the rounds. He wasn’t satisfied with the daytime. Sometimes he called like a Death Watch in the night.

She recollected how Jary used to say Death would take the strongest and let the weakest be. Death was like the pair of black wolves Worth had once watched from some elk rocks in the Seven Mountains. They started a small herd of deer and one of the does was poor. She couldn’t go it with the others and fell behind. Those wolves could have got her without half trying but it wasn’t such a one they were after. They never turned a foot right or left from the main herd till they cut off a strong young buck, ripped his ham strings and fetched him down in the snow.

Achsa was stout and hearty a young body as you’d want to find and yet here she was fetched down in her bed. It never bothered her to club the life out of a fox or coon caught in a trap. Now Genny had to turn her face some other way. Achsa could throw the young ones down on their backs and hold them with one foot on their breast. But hands and feet were not much good against Death. And if you ran off, Death was waiting for you behind a stump when you got there.

Once Worth had gone, Achsa didn’t call for run water any more. She might work on her father till he gave her what wasn’t good for her, but she
had no such hopes with Sayward. She just lay like a lump of ore melting in a forge. Her cheeks were stained with pokeberry juice and she panted faster than a hound. Mostly she stared up with bright jelled eyes at the loft boards as if her bed up there was mighty far away, farther than she would ever go again. Sometimes she would leer at Sayward with bitter eyes. Oh, she would ask no favor of her oldest sister. Her mouth was shut hard. If die she must, die she would.

Worth didn’t come home and Sayward woke up that night in his bed. Something was outside. The fire had died down. The cabin was black as charcoal but she could hear this thing crawling over the ground. It sounded heavy and chinked like a musket or kettle. She thought she had barred the door but now it opened and the thing came painfully in. Only when it crawled on the leaves of the other bed did it come over her what it was. If they wouldn’t fetch her any water, Achsa must have reckoned she would take the small kettle and lug it to the run herself.

Sayward lay in her dark bed and spelled this out. It was no use locking the stable after the ox was stolen. Likely Achsa had already sucked her fill, pressing her hot face down in the cool run. Twice she heard her sucking greedily at the kettle. She thought, let her have her run water now. It was little enough while she lived. Worth could come
home now and sleep in his bed. Achsa would not likely plague him for water again.

Sayward only meant to half-doze after that but when she woke it was late. Gray light came through the oiled-paper window. She saw what had roused her. Genny was backing down from the loft, staring around at the empty kettle beside Achsa’s bed. Her face was mighty sober as if looking on a corpse.

A splinter in the ladder caught Genny’s skirt and lifted it as she came down.

“The bound boy’s a thinkin’ of you, Gin!” Achsa jeered in her heavy voice.

Sayward expected she better get up. It sounded like Achsa would want some breakfast this morning. She wouldn’t be surprised if Achsa overed it now. Only passing the bed you could smell that she was soaked with sweat and still sweating. There was one thing, it looked like, that could stand off Death. If your time hadn’t come yet, it made you slick as an eel and Death couldn’t hold you. Not even if you lay at Death’s door burning up with a fever and swilled yourself with cold water at the run.

No, Achsa’s time hadn’t come yet. The Lord might have something he had in mind for her to do first.

CHAPTER TWELVE
THE CABIN IN THE SHUMACK

W
YITT
and Sulie seldom came this way if the cows were willing. They didn’t talk much about it but it had a place on this path they hated to pass. You went down a long, dark hollow. A little run from a spring slimed across the path. Up that run stood a deserted cabin all grown up with sumach. Its logs were black with age and weather. Once there must have been a little clearing around it. One time smoke had pushed out of that chimney and human feet pattered about. Now you could hardly tell humans ever lived here. A pair of hickory saplings had rammed up through the bark roof like it belonged to them.

“No Injun ever set up that cabin,” Worth told them. “Unless it was a white Injun.”

“How kin you tell?” Wyitt wanted to know.

“It has a lilock tree in’ar.”

“A lilock tree — away back here!” Genny’s voice came out almost like Jary’s.

“I stopped by today and seed it myself,” Worth nodded. “The Shawanees say it’s Louie Scurrah’s place. You know the one where used to be with Simon Girty.”

All the young ones stared. When they were back in Pennsylvania, Jary would say, don’t you do this and that or Simon Girty will get you! Every young woodsy knew that Louie Scurrah was mighty near as bad, for hadn’t he been a boy with Girty the time the Indians burned Colonel Crawford at the stake! Hadn’t he used to stand as a little tyke white and naked in the Ohio River and call piteously for arks and keel boats to come to shore and pick him up? And all the time Girty and his Delawares lay behind trees waiting to massacre every one!

“They say Scurrah had a woman a livin’ with him in that cabin,” Worth went on. “The Shawanees called her the white-faced gal. He fetched her up from Virginny. She died on him one time he was off to the English Lakes. But her lilock tree’s still a livin’.”

One time Sulie let Wyitt go on with the cows and crawled through the sumach to see the lilac tree. The cabin stood still and dark as if no human
had ever walked or talked inside. The door was down and a copper snake lay coiled up on the doorstep looking in, waiting for a deer mouse or some foolish small creature just off the nest. Sulie kept her eyes off its ugly arrow head so that it couldn’t put a spell on her. She knew Wyitt would tell her she had ought to’ve killed that snake. Now she had let her worst enemy get away for a whole year to plague her. She wished she hadn’t come, but she had to see that lilac tree. A stale dank breath came out of the cabin like out of the white-faced girl’s grave.

Sulie didn’t take a look around for any grave. It got dark early in the woods and she’d heard tell of humans who came out when they couldn’t rest in their bury hole. Not humans that lived good lives and did what was right. No, they would wait for resurrection morn. Nor folks that had worked hard and were all played out. No, they wanted a good long rest. You never saw Jary no matter how often one of them had to go out at night, and her grave only yonder from the cabin. Jary had been an old woman of thirty-seven and mighty near tuckered out. Now this white-faced girl was young and likely full of life when they put her underground, and such would get plenty tired lying in one place so long.

In the short time she stayed, Sulie didn’t see any lilac tree. But she found a bush nearly choked back
to the ground in front of the cabin. The little that was still green had smooth, tender leaves like none she had seen before. You could tell plain enough this wasn’t a wild thing the way it stooped down and pined away out here. She smelled at the lone, scrawny bunch of flowers and reckoned this was what the white-faced girl had liked to smell. She wanted to break it off and take it along back for the rest to smell at. But the ugly old cabin watched her out of its dark eye. She was glad just to get out of the sumach herself and run after Wyitt and smell again the good stable smell of Mrs. Covenhoven’s cows.

When she and Wyitt passed the old Scurrah place after that, Sulie’s mind ran right to the lilac tree. She wondered was it still living. But she didn’t go in to see. It was close enough just to pass on the path with Wyitt for company and all the cowbells chiming sociably on the smothery air. Most times when the cows fed up this far, Wyitt drove them home another way. Tonight it hadn’t much daylight left and Sulie could see he was letting them take the short path home by the cabin in the sumach.

The cows saw it first. The black one with the bent horn stopped dead in the path and right away the bells slacked off and hung mighty still. Cows and young ones all stared. What they saw looked like a Shawanee with his rifle on ahead. The cows
didn’t want to go at all now and Wyitt’s shock of sandy hair raised up defiantly at this body who knew no better than stand in the path and scare his cattle.

He had to lay the gad on hard to get the cows started again. They moved a little closer by fits and starts. Sulie could see now it was a white man standing easy and pert as if he didn’t care if he turned your cows off in the brush or no. The rifle stock under his arm was of curly maple striped crosswise like a tiger cat. It was finished up fine with brass and Sulie reckoned Wyitt would stop to stare at it. But Wyitt’s eyes were working on something else. Then she saw it, too. Through the trees faint gray smoke was rising like a wraith from the old chimney of Louie Scurrah’s cabin.

“Whose cows are them?” the stranger wanted to know.

“Covenhoven’s,” Wyitt fetched out, not looking at him.

“I heerd it had a settlemint here.” The man looked from one to the other with his light blue eyes. He was a stocky fellow, not as big as Worth, but his back was up and his chest out like a young cock pheasant. Any body could see you didn’t want to cross him. “Covenhoven, you say your name is?”

“My name’s Luckett. So’s her’n,” Wyitt answered him.

All the time he was edging sidewise to get by and after the cows that had pushed through the brush. Behind him Sulie was doing the same. She had her head down and a body might expect she was out of her wits. But nobody could have measured the distance better so she was just out of reach of his grab. One move from him and she would dive in the brush like a rabbit. After that the wolf could run her hard as he liked but he would have to run harder than she could.

In a minute she was past him and, though she kept her face down, she hadn’t missed a lick about him. Her father’s hunting shirt was a loose frock that came half way down over his hams. More than once she had seen him work it on stiff and cold of a morning. It had sleeves full enough to make her a shift apiece, and it folded part way around itself when it belted. That’s the way it was meant so the bosom had slack to stow away bread and jerk to eat and tow to clean the rifle barrel so the lead could sing true. But what this Scurrah had on was a shirt tight and fancy, caped and beaded, fringed and trimmed with fur that might have been mink and might have been, for all a person knew, the trimmings from the scalp of some poor white girl who had hair soft and brown as Genny’s. The shiny buttons likely were melted down from pewter out of some great folks’ cabin he and his Indians burnt. And his cape was lined with raveled cloth red as the
humans’ blood that had run plenty times from his knife.

“Is he a follerin’?” Wyitt asked when they were past a ways.

“I kain’t hear nothin’,” Sulie didn’t turn her head to see. If it was Louie Scurrah, he could track them like an Indian and it didn’t matter where he set his foot down. He could come through dead leaves and you could no more hear or see him than a catamount that has hair growing on the balls of its paws to shush its noise.

“We’re off from him now,” Wyitt told her. “You don’t need to be afeard.”

But if Wyitt wasn’t “afeard,” what was he gadding the cows so hard for? They went skyting and belling up hill and down. Their heavy bags bounced this way and that. Mrs. Covenhoven would give them jesse for churning buttermilk. No, neither of them could get out of these woods fast enough tonight. Covenhoven’s log barn looked mighty good pushing gray and round out of the trees. Mrs. Covenhoven’s round, pocked face was almost pretty as she came sailing out with her two cedar milking buckets on her arms.

“Don’t say nothin’,” Wyitt warned under his breath. “And don’t you run home till I’m ready.”

Sulie waited first on one foot and then the other while he put down the walnut bars, letting the bawling cows in the stumpy barnyard.

“They must a smelt a painter tonight,” he told Mrs. Covenhoven, grave as a man. “You couldn’t hold them back.” He put up the bars. “I guess now me and her’ll go to our supper.”

He and Sulie walked off together, straight and sober in the owl light. Once they were out of sight on the other side of the log barn, their bare legs raced through the nettles and sweet anise on the path to be the first to tell at home.

Worth listened to them a while.