The Trees (5 page)

Now, Sayward told herself, there were only two left awake in the cabin. Oh, that red body on the hearth could lie there still as it pleased him. He could suck his breath in and out like he was dead to the world. But he couldn’t pull wool over her eyes. She was shy of believing that a woods Indian would drop off to sleep like a baby in a white man’s house.

The wind was coming up, driving sleet and hard snow like fine bullets against the cabin, hunting for holes, but it couldn’t get in. Sayward lay there thinking of all the folks she had heard about who had taken in strangers on some cold or rainy night when they shouldn’t. From the loft she could hear the young ones’ soft breathing. In her mind she could see them lying close together with their arms around each other. Achsa or Genny would be on the outside. That one would be the first a tomahawk would reach from the ladder.

Once or twice she caught herself breathing heavy and mighty near asleep. After a long while a shadow told her that their company was moving. She lay still as a log, save for her breath, watching through her merely shut lashes. He was raising up like a possum that had played dead. Now he looked
over at the bed with sharp black eyes. He took his knife out of his belt and Sayward’s hand found the axe helve under the leaves, sweating around it.

When she was a little tyke, Sayward recollected, Jary would tell her not to fret if an Indian came around the cabin. No, she could shut her eyes and go to sleep. Like as not the Black Hunter of the Juniata was outside in the bushes, watching over them like he watched over all mothers and young ones, and his ball never missed. But across the Ohio it had no Black Hunter. She would have to do this her own self. Should he climb for the young ones first, never would he know what struck him. But if he came first for her and Jary’s bed, then she would rise up and cleave him straight between the eyes like the woman back on Dunkard’s Creek in Pennsylvania. Oh, she wasn’t as big as Experience Bogarth who had hacked out the brains of one red devil and the insides of another and cleaved the head of the third who tried to push himself in the door when she would shut it. But if a lone woman could do that much, she could drive her axe in one shaved head so it would take Worth to pull it out when he came home.

She flexed her muscles ready to raise up and that’s the last she had to till morning. Now who would have thought this Delaware didn’t like her roast? That big heavy body had pulled a hunk of meat black with dried blood from his hunting shirt and
was cutting it in two on the hearth. Now he sat there big as you please roasting a piece to suit himself on a long sharp stick of kindling from the chimney corner. Oh, you could see he could hardly wait to gobble it down. He ate with the blood running down his chin, smacking his lips and licking his fingers. Then he lay down belching like one who had to wait a long time for a supper he liked, but now he was well fed and these white squaws with their burned cooking weren’t any wiser.

Sayward wouldn’t have felt surprised to find the door open and him gone next morning, but the snow was still coming down and that held him. Worth tracked in soon after with two deer-hides and a fine black fisher fox. He scowled a little to see the Indian sitting there on the floor. They talked a while in Delaware till Jary ran out of firewood.

“I tole you many a time,” Worth growled, “not to leave your axe out under the snow.”

Sayward took it from the bed of leaves while her father eyed her close.

“You sleep here with Jary last night?”

She nodded. The Delaware was watching too. His sharp black eyes ran from face to face for what he could read. He picked up the axe and ran his finger over the bit and you could see he was putting two and two together. Oh, you could see this was a joke to him, a young squaw taking an axe to bed against a stout, hearty hunter like he was. He
laughed silently, his nose and belly both shaking like bone jelly. He gave her back the axe and felt the girl’s arm and thigh.

“He don’t know no better,” Worth said.

The Delaware was like a big child now. He had to go over this joke till it was stale. But Worth didn’t laugh.

“I don’t want you takin’ no more Injuns in when I’m off,” he said darkly after the company was gone.

“I thought you liked Injuns?” Jary’s mouth was grim.

“I kin git along with them, but you mought not,” Worth said.

CHAPTER FIVE
BREAD

I
F
I had bread,” Jary complained that morning, “then I believe I could eat.”

The young ones stared at her, avoiding each other’s eyes. They had known for a long time that their mother was tottery, with one foot in the grave. What they didn’t know was that her sense was failing. Never had she talked queer before. It was a sign her other foot was shuffling mighty close to the bury hole.

“Look, Saird, she got bread now and ain’t teched it yit,” Wyitt said, pointing to what Jary held in her hand.

Even Sayward had to think a minute what her mother meant. Then she recollected that it started back in Pennsylvania one of the times the meal bag had been empty. The young ones were tired of meat. They had cried for a change. They wanted
johnnycake and mush. Now Indian meal was something unhandy to get hold of in the woods, Jary told them, but if they were tired of meat, they could eat bread for a while. Bread was better than johnnycake or mush, everybody knew.

That opened the young ones’ eyes. So they had bread! Jary called on Worth to swear to it and he nodded his head shortly. Now bread, she told them, was venison, turkey and such. Only the dark flesh of bear, coon and such was meat. Bread was lighter and went in the blood easier than meat. And from now on she wanted to hear them call things by their right names, bread bread and meat meat. Even Worth had to say bread for venison, though for a while the word stuck in his throat. And now the young ones had grown so used to seeing bread on their mother’s trencher, they thought her weak in the head to be calling for bread and standing there with an untouched turkey wing in her hand.

What the young ones didn’t know, Sayward told herself, wouldn’t hurt them. But this was something too good for Genny to pass by. Sayward could hear her now up in the limbs of the hung elm with the younger ones still as possums around her. Genny had a knowing mind. And now she was telling them the bread their mother hankered for wasn’t turkey or venison. No, turkey and venison weren’t bread at all. Their mother had made that up. Bread was something settlement people had on their
trenchers. It was a little like johnnycake, only bigger and better. She and Sayward had tasted it when they were little tykes on a Conestoga visit. It made her mouth water now just to mind it.

All the others’ mouths were watering, too. They spat to the ground lushly with Genny.

“Ginny, go on!” they told her, but all Genny could tell them was that once on a time a chit of a girl had sat up to a shaved-board table. She was pretty as a settlement lady tricked out in her white church gown and neats leather shoes made over a cobbler’s last. And in her hands was a big piece of bread white as gray moose milk —

Sayward moved away. You wouldn’t reckon, she told herself, that that girl pretty as a settlement lady had been their mother. Not to look at her now, puttering around this cabin in her old walnut shortgown that hadn’t been washed since Genny’s fingers had taken it in again. And still it liked to fall off Jary’s bones. Oh, her mother’s days were numbered. The slow fever burned off mortal flesh like a fire cooked meat off a bone. All day it never let you rest. Jary had four stout girls to do all the cabin chores and yet her bare feet kept scraping over the earthern floor that had been damped and tamped and topped with white clay to match the daubing on the chinking. Talking did no good. It went in Jary’s one ear and out the other. Her hair kept sliding down the side or back of her head, coming
apart like a hanging bird’s nest in December. It made her look like she was in her second childhood and her mother only thirty-six or seven.

“I’d thin it out, Mam,” Sayward told her. “It’s a mortal weight to lug around. Hair kin suck your strength like a blood sucker.”

But Jary Luckett wouldn’t part with any of her hair. Not her. Once her hams had been plump as Achsa’s and her skin white as Genny’s, and Sayward’s breast were no firmer than her’s once were. All she had left that hadn’t shriveled up was her hair. When one of the girls tended it of a morning, it swept down from the bench over the earthen floor, heavy as China silk before it went to the loom. You couldn’t find a gray thread. No, she still had her hair and by Jeem’s cousin, she meant to keep it.

“They kain’t be much wrong with me or it’d a fell out,” Jary told them, gaunt and jandered. “If I just had some wheat bread, I know I’d pick up.”

Sayward had been shaving Worth to go to the Shawaneetown trading post. He sat a stool with his head thrown back against the trencher, the sides of his face yellow with soft soap made from game fat and white hickory ashes. Not a word did Worth say, but when Jary cast up twice that they had no bread, Sayward could feel his face settle into sharp grooves as if the lye had stung him. When he came in from renching off the soap at the run, his naked cheeks were flat as a man’s who has had enough of
a woman’s complaining for a while and is glad to be off to the woods.

The young ones watched him pull his spring furs from trees and stretchers and work them in a pack with his knee. Jary came shuffling out.

“I wa’n’t a sayin’ that at you, Worth,” she said apologetically. “You got your faults but nobody can make you out a poor provider. Few has better meat than us. Most times we have venison a hangin’ up. Then you give us special treats like gadd or duck. But a body that’s losin’ flesh is like one that’s a luggin a young’un. It hankers for queer victuals.”

Worth strapped up his pack with whang leather thongs.

“I mought be off five or six nights,” he told Sayward.

It took no more than a long day, the girl knew, to tramp to Shawaneetown where Hough had a log house, a squaw wife and goods for the Shawanee and Delaware trade. Where Worth aimed to go with his pack of skins that would keep him five or six nights she couldn’t make out, unless it might be Bannock’s Mill on the Ohio. It came to her the Shawanees once said it took three days to go and three to come.

The same notion must have crossed Genny’s mind, for she bent down and whispered to the younger ones who licked their chops and pushed up around their father, their eyes bright on him as
young coons’, their lips shut tight so he wouldn’t see their mouths water.

“Well, what do you want?” Worth demanded of them.

They nudged little Sulie, for she was his favorite.

“We don’t want nothin’, Pap,” she said, pleased as all get out, but before opening her lips she had to swallow a mouthful of spit.

“Git off now before I take a gad to you!” he stormed at them. They scattered like a covey of Conestoga field quail, but not very far. Worth came in the cabin and fooled around like there was something he wanted to do or say before he went. Seemed like he couldn’t fetch it out, for he looked beat as he went outside where the hound leaped up and tongued at the sight of powderhorn and rifle.

“You git back and stay back!” he ordered harshly.

Young ones, older ones and sad-eyed hound stood together on the log step or by it and watched him go down the path. After a little the spice bushes cut off his legs, and he seemed to be just head and shoulders swimming through the brush. Slowly the great butts of the woods swallowed him up. But for a long while Wyitt held on to the loose neck of the hound so he wouldn’t go after.

“Now nary me nor Mam nor any of you’uns knows where he’s a goin’,” Sayward told her sisters
and brother. “Maybe he don’t know right hisself yit.”

But that evening when they were all in bed, she thought she could see her father lying out in the forest with no more than the shelving back of a rotten log to keep him warm and the pack of furs under his head for a pillow. And next morning when gray showed through the oiled paper window light, she had the notion he was up this long time, hunched forward on the trace, making tracks for whatever place he was going. A night or two afterwards she dreamt she saw him sleeping under some strange roof, snug as a mouse in a mill, while a soft dust powdered his buckskins like fine, dry snow.

Till it was over, she wished he had gone only to Shawaneetown. The third evening Jary coughed like it was spittle in her windpipe, and when she fetched it out, it was heart’s blood. Sayward reckoned it would have filled a wooden cup but she had no chance to measure. Her mother went to the door and spat it outside and next morning it looked as if a hunter had cut the throat of a buck there. When the others got up, Jary said she expected she’d lie abed that day. She made as though nothing had happened, but the face on the pallet was white and waxy as the corpse plants that come up under the beech trees. You could tell by looking at her that, had she tried to stand on her feet today, her legs
would have buckled under her like wild cherry whips.

Sayward didn’t look for her father till the sixth day. She was down in the cabin alone with Jary tonight, for Genny couldn’t stand the sight of blood and Sayward had sent her up in the loft. The fifth night she heard Sarge get up. His nails rattled across the hard dirt floor to the door where he growled. Settlement folks claimed the night air was poison and night swamp air gave you the shakes, but Sayward had left the puncheon door open a crack in the hope that Jary could catch her breath. The girl reckoned some beast was around, drawn by the firelight shining out in the forest, for it couldn’t be Worth. A man would have to own lynx eyes to hold to the trace through the pitch-black woods night. Every step it had branches lying in wait to gouge the eyes out.