The Trees (14 page)

“Go on and eat your supper,” then he broke out. “I’ll send that king’s man off purty quick if he comes around.”

“Was he light or dark-complected, Sulie?” Achsa whispered up in the loft that evening.

“He looked like he slept with a hex!” Sulie snapped.

“You don’t need to act so high and mighty,” Achsa stuck up for him. “He was only a little tyke when the Delywares took him. He did no more’n what they told him. I wouldn’t mind gittin’ a good look at him.”

Before juneberries were ripe, Achsa had her chance. They were sitting down to supper. Sulie looked out of the door and saw those fancy buckskins with the red-lined collar that some called a cape coming up the path.

“It’s him!” she hissed.

Worth, his stool half way up to the trencher,
darkened. Most of the young ones stiffened. Sayward went calmly along getting supper on the table. She could stoop over a fire half a day and when she raised up, her back would be straight as before. Now, since nobody else offered to, she went to the door her own self.

“Your pappy to home?” the light-complected man outside wanted to know.

“He’s to home,” Sayward said shortly.

Her coolness never abashed Louie Scurrah. His hair might be curly as a young one’s, but his light blue eyes could get ice in them mighty quick. That ice said plain enough no girl or woman could keep him cooling his heels outside when he wanted in. He stepped onto the cabin floor and found Worth standing by the head of the trencher.

“How’re you?” Scurrah said, strong and pleasant as a basket of chips.

“Evenin’,” Worth answered him.

“George Roebuck said I mought come and see you.”

Worth only made a grunting sound.

“I need some’un to put a clapboard roof on my cabin,” Scurrah went on. “They said you had a frow and was handy with tools.”

Worth shook his head warily.

“I got no time to spare you right now.”

Sulie expected Louie Scurrah to flare up at that, for he was a fire eater if she ever saw one.

“I kin wait,” he said, nice as could be, taking no offense.

Nobody spoke right away. The visitor stood inside the door easy and pert as if he could wait all day. Around the trencher the young ones didn’t know whether or not to sit down to supper. The venison roast lay hot and smoking on its wooden platter. You could smell it all over the place. Oh, this was a hard spot for Worth to be in, for never did a woodsy turn a man away hungry from his door if he could help it.

“Rations are ready — kin you set down and eat?” he bid, but he said it so forbiddingly and gave such a cold glance through his beard that no man could mistake his unwelcome.

“Thankee,” Louie Scurrah said.

Worth motioned with his bearded chin for Achsa to give up her stool and squeeze on the bench. Then there were only the sounds of stools and bench legs being scraped up to the trencher and of air being drawn through wet, smacking lips and of hunting knives and wooden spoons on the split puncheons.

Worth ate with brief down jerks of his beard, stopping now and then to expertly carve out a fresh slice and hold it out on his hunting knife to some hungry body. Sitting in Jary’s place at the other end of the table, Sayward bulked strong and solid as Bar’s Hill that Sulie and Wyitt had fetched the
cows over this day. Genny picked finicky at her rations like she always did while Achsa kept raising her dark young eyes at this man in the red-lined collar across the trencher.

Sulie watched him too while her young jaws worked on the piece of deer meat her father gave her. Here he was sitting at their own table, the white Indian who helped burn some of his own flesh and blood. Louie Scurrah was only a boy then, they said, but he’d danced and howled around the stake bad as the Delawares. Some claimed Scurrah and Girty hadn’t dare to do any less in front of the Indians and that’s why they stuck burning sticks under that naked white man’s skin and helped run a red hot gun barrel into him and burned out his eyes so Crawford had to stumble around stark blind with the smoke coming out of his sockets. But they had done it, hadn’t they? And now one of that wizzen-hearted pair had his legs under their trencher, eating Sayward’s venison roast. If she had a knife like Wyitt, Sulie told herself, she’d reach right under this trencher where her pappy couldn’t see her and fix that white Indian!

Supper over, he told Worth he wasn’t a king’s man any more. No, once he was big enough to know right from wrong, he had gone over to General Wayne’s side. And Worth was taking it for gospel and giving in to him like he always did if a body worked on him long enough. Even Wyitt
looked like he had taken the wrong sow by the ear and hadn’t had need to run from him the other day if he hadn’t wanted to. But Louie Scurrah couldn’t take in Sulie. He tried to make up to her once, asking pleasant as could be how she got home that night with the cows. Her black eyes burned back at him like a wolf pup’s. And when he laughed at her across the trencher, she made a face and bit her thumb at him.

She had no notion her father would do anything, but he pushed back his stool and rifted sternly through his beard.

“You kin go to your bed, Sulie,” he said.

She made no motion that she heard except that she kept looking at Sayward.

“Sulie!” he raised his voice.

She went for the loft ladder at that but her bare feet hung back from rung to rung long as they dared, her eyes measuring shrewdly how quick she could leg it up if he made for her. Once in the loft, she threw herself down on Achsa’s bed with her head by the loft hole.

“It’s too hot up here!” she cried. “I kain’t breathe!”

“Well, you kin come down if you mind,” her father growled.

She told herself she would never go down, not if she had to be nice to that bloody-handed turncoat. She could see him pull his tobacco pouch
from his hunting shirt and hand it to Worth. And her father was taking it like he hadn’t any spunk at all. Now they were lighting their pipes with a coal from the fire. She hoped Louie Scurrah would burn his fingers. Now they were sitting back in a corner talking, and the smoke was swimming up over their heads like a white river that flowed up hill. It circled around the cabin getting higher and higher. The cabin was Pennsylvania and the white river was the Juniata that had to go up over the mountains to get out to the sea. The loft hole was the gap it had to come through. Now it came to the gap and flowed over the riffles of the loft boards. Here it went by her house. She could lay on the bank and drink from it. But it wasn’t any of Louie Scurrah’s river she drank from, only what came from the clay of her father.

They were telling hunting stories now and Louie Scurrah was bragging how he hunted out of some fort for General Wayne. The Indians had it bottled up but he kept the garrison in meat. The Indians were up in trees watching. They ambushed every man who left by daylight and they wanted to get him the most because he’d gone back on their side. But he went out of the saddle gate by night.

“Once I got in the woods without their seein’ me, then I had as good chance as them,” he said.

He’d stay out till he got game. It was winter time and he couldn’t make an open fire at night or
they’d see it. So he dug a hole in the ground with his tomahawk deep as the crown of his coonskin cap. He called it his coal pit. He filled it with crosswise layers of roth. He kindled a fire in the bark with the back of his hunting knife and a flint from his rifle. He slept sitting up with the coal pit between his legs and his blanket around him. The fire under him kept him warm and on the coldest night he could blow it up till it made him sweat.

From her place at the loft hole Sulie could see her father and Wyitt looking at him now with new respect and Genny had moved across the cabin to listen. Louie Scurrah sat back easier and went on. Before he drew a bead on a buck he always put a bullet in his mouth. Then he’d load up quick to be ready if the shot fetched an Indian. He’d drag his deer to a tree to dress it with his back to the butt and his rifle leaning up handy. Oh, he had been an Indian himself and knew how to give them the slip. He’d pack the four quarters in the hide so he could sling it on his back like a knapsack and tote it to the fort. The Indians found his coal pits and what was left of his deer. They called him No-Man-Can-Kill-Him. Little Turtle wanted to swap him squaws and ponies for his rifle, but he wouldn’t part with it.

He crossed the cabin to show that rifle to Worth. Not every day, he boasted, could you see one with a raised cheek rest. The cheek rest had to be cut
out first, then the whole stock cut away from it. Sulie wanted to call out loud, what scalped white man did he take that off of? But her father would britch her for that. Genny was looking at the rifle. Sulie reckoned she’d look at it, too. She climbed down the ladder, but the raised cheek rest didn’t look like any great shakes to her, though the stock had a brass patch box and hunter’s moon inlaid in the curly maple.

She’d sooner look at Genny right now than any rifle. Never had she seen her sister so mortal pretty. Her hair was soft and brown as a pine marten tonight and her skin white as a town lady. Even Achsa kept staring at her, but Genny didn’t take notice. Her bright eyes watched this Louie Scurrah in his pewter buttons and hunting frock with the soldier cape. She listened to all he had to say, and when he told how he hadn’t the heart to kill a she-panther and its kits he saw playing together like humans one day, she leaned forward.

“Ahh!” she came out soft-hearted before she knew it.

“If you’d like a painter kit, I’ll git you one some time,” Scurrah said, looking across at her.

Genny shrank back on her stool and reckoned shyly she’d like one if her pappy and Sayward wouldn’t mind.

Sayward didn’t say she would and didn’t say she wouldn’t. She sat in a dark corner working the
buckskin for Wyitt’s new britches soft and pliable in her hands. You couldn’t read her face, but Sulie remembered she was the only one hadn’t gone forward to make a fuss of the rifle. The little girl felt a sudden burst of tenderness for her oldest sister. She went over and sat close beside her on her heels.

“How long till you go back up West?” Worth said.

“I aim to settle down,” Scurrah told him. “They say it has a lawyer here from the Bay State. I want to see him about rights to my track out yonder. A purty place if you’ve seed it.”

Sulie’s young lip curled but Worth nodded gravely. Scurrah filled his pipe and passed his tobacco again to the older man.

“I’ll stop by some day. One of your young’uns mought show me where he lives at?”

“The boy’ll take you and welcome,” Worth nodded, stuffing his dark clay.

“Thankee,” Louie Scurrah said, touching his pipe with a bright coal so that the glow lighted up his bold young features. “If he’s off with the cows, maybe Miss Ginny here kin show me?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE WHITE MAGNOLY

W
ORTH
told Louie Scurrah he needn’t go home for a bed this night. No use doing that. It was a good ways out there through the woods after dark. Here was room on his own bed. Why didn’t he sleep here and go on home tomorrow by daylight? And Louie said he might take him up on it.

Worth nodded his beard. It did him good that the younger man came in so often. These treeslashing-and-burning squatters he couldn’t go, but Louie was a woodsy like himself. He relished it when they sat back together and lighted up their clays and talked. Wyitt and Genny would pull up stools and listen. Last week Louie showed Wyitt how to make him a gigging light and spear. Today he threw down a spotted doe-fawn he had knocked
over the head for Sayward to make a fawn roast. Oh, he wasn’t a bad fellow for one raised by the Indians so long as you didn’t give him fire to eat. This afternoon when Sulie kept at Genny and Achsa to go visiting the MacWhirters like they planned, he said he’d go along through the woods for company.

Sulie and Achsa came home about dark.

“Whar’s Ginny?” Worth wanted to know.

Sulie looked up meaningly at Achsa.

“Him and her run off from us!” Achsa bawled in her heavy voice.

Worth looked in the fire. There were things he wanted to ask about this but he felt uneasy in front of Sayward. He ate his supper and when it got late and they hadn’t come, he tapped his clay bowl and went outside. It must be close to full moon. A faint ghostly light drifted like fine smoke under the trees. He walked down the path to the river where he could look out. The moon lay upside down like a gold sovereign in the water and all the little riffles threw off yellow sparks. Yes, tomorrow night would be full moon, and he didn’t know as he liked it. The old saying stuck in his mind. Women were dull in the dark of the moon, but when the moon was full they were bold and free.

“I’m a goin’ to bed,” he told them gruffly when he came back to the cabin. “You’uns better go, too.”

“Maybe after dark they went to the Harbisons’,” Wyitt stuck up for Louie.

“I expect,” Sayward said easily, “they’re just afeard to come in while it has light in the cabin.”

The fire had hardly died down to coals when you could hear them nibbling on the latch string like a pair of wary young coons on the bait in one of Wyitt’s snares. They came in on their toes.