by John Babb
“There was an Irishmen who set up a business sellin’ a hot bath and a shave. Miners get filthy dirty, and they’d spend money just to get a bit cleaned up before they went to Miss Annie’s place.” A wistful look slowly appeared on Jeremiah’s face. “Reckon I did the same thing myself. Anyway, the Irishman made his own pot full of money too.”
While Ben was in town, Abbie got an unexpected visit from Sarah Windes. Abbie could tell she was hot under the collar but nonetheless invited the woman inside. Sarah looked around the cabin, seeing curtains at the two windows, the well-made oak table and four chairs, the wash stand with the porcelain washbowl and pitcher, all of the cooking implements neatly lined up at the hearth, the cleanliness of the place, and the smell of sour dough rising. It just made her madder. Abbie was rubbing her nose in it, for sure.
Self-consciously, Sarah tucked greasy stray strands of hair behind her ears but was determined not to lose control. “You know how special me and my girls think Ben is, and we are doin’ our dead level best to have a happy family. But the boy has a stubborn streak that he musta got from his ma.”
Abbie forced herself to smile as she replied. “Ben is truly like his mother. But I would say he knows very well where he has a family and where he does not.”
That was enough for the pretense of manners to disappear. “Where you got my stepson? He told me he was comin’ over here. He ran off afore he finished his chores at my place.”
Abbie replied that Ben had gone to town and was doing something for her on the dock. Sarah knew exactly what was going on. “I need that boy over to my place all day long now that Mr. Windes has gone to Californy. You worked him all last summer fer your benefit, but that’s not gonna happen now. He’s either comin’ home with me to work or you’re goin’ to pay me fer his labor. I’d say he’s worth at least a half dollar a day. Jest remember, this ain’t the south side of the river. They ain’t no slaves over here.”
Abbie looked at the skinny, hardscrabble woman in front of her. She was tempted to say that it sounded very much like Sarah was suggesting that she owned Ben lock, stock, and barrel. “I believe Ben told me that he would continue to perform his chores at your house when necessary. But he wants to stay here with us while Daniel is prospecting.”
Sarah hated Abbie’s uppity language. Here she was again, putting on airs despite her pockmarked face. She’d have none of it. “I got a legal right to that boy. His pa left him with me and ordered him to do as I say. So what’s it goin’ to be—Ben or Ben’s pay?”
A small smile crossed Abbie’s face. “I’ll need to discuss this with Mr. Finnerty and Ben this evening.” She went to the door and held it open.
The meeting at Abbie’s house that evening was frustrating. Mr. Finnerty said, “Son, life is simpler when you plow around the stumps. Unless we’re willing to admit you’re bein’ paid wages for your work, Miz Windes can say we’re making you earn money for us. But if we say you’re being paid, the woman will lay claim to the money you make plus whatever you might have saved. If you stay with us, she can claim that we’re using you.”
Ben had no good options. He realized that if he stayed with Abbie, his stepmother might cause problems for her. She had been far too kind to him for something like that to happen, but he couldn’t stand the prospect of living under the same roof with his stepmother, let alone Ruth and Martha. He knew they would make his life miserable just for the pleasure of it, and doubtless it would be much worse with his pa so far away.
It was cold outside that night, so he laid his pallet by the fireplace. He slept very little but began to think about a plan. It seemed impossible, but the more he considered it, the more he came to the conclusion that his plan was his only choice.
The next morning he reported to his stepmother’s place and began working on increasing the size of the woodpile. Having heard the sound of an axe at work, in a few minutes his stepmother came out of the cabin. “I see you decided to get smart and do what yore pa told ye to do. One more trick like that and I’m goin’ to set the sheriff on Abbie.”
“I don’t think there’s a law against helping your aunt.” Ben turned his attention to the woodpile.
He was surprised when a bony hand grabbed him by the hair and turned him around. The slap was so hard it actually knocked him to the ground. “Don’t force me to do somethin’ you’ll be sorry for, ye little shite. Just one more smart mouth out of you, and you’ll find yerself in that cage yonder with Arthur! Maybe ye can keep each other company. Seems like you’ns belong together anyways.” She glared at him, hoping to see him bawling his eyes out, but when he stood up and simply squared his jaw, she turned around with the flicker of a smirk on her face and stalked back into the cabin.
Ben suddenly realized that being put in the cage might be a very real possibility—that it might even be her plan with his pa gone. He knew she wouldn’t dare say something like that if his pa were around, but he had no doubt whatsoever that she was capable of doing it in his absence. That kind of punishment truly scared him. As the morning progressed, he realized he needed to speed up his planning before he ended up in the cage and couldn’t do anything about it. If only there were a way that he could talk to his pa. He shook his head in frustration.
Rather than the oak and elm that he usually worked on to build the woodpile, Ben exclusively began cutting cottonwood and pine. Those woods were much softer than oak and a great deal easier to cut. The problem for the final user was that the wood burned very fast and would not sustain heat for any length of time in the fireplace. It wouldn’t take long before his stepmother and her daughters exhausted the pile. After he was gone, it wouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks before his stepsisters would be forced to cut wood in order to stay warm at night. He couldn’t help smiling grimly at the thought of it. He’d almost like to stick around just to see that happen.
At around midday he switched to working in the garden, and he quickly realized the ground was too hard to make any real progress in digging it up. However, he really had no desire to truly expand their garden space, so he simply used a hoe to cut away the visible vegetation at ground level. By dusk, it appeared that he had made some headway on increasing the size of the plot, but in reality the ground had not been turned over at all, and would quickly fill with weeds in the spring.
He spent a few minutes at the well cleaning up, and when he entered the cabin, he could tell that they had already eaten supper. There was a bowl sitting on the table with half of a cold potato, a few brown beans with congealing bacon fat floating on top, and a biscuit. He realized his dinner was simply what was left over from theirs. He couldn’t help but compare the happy atmosphere and good food at Abbie’s house with what he saw before him, but he’d learned to keep his mouth shut and eat what was before him. The thought sprung involuntarily to mind. The woman would make a wart grow hair on it.
He knew the best way to get up early was to drink extra water right before bedtime. He calculated a couple of dippersful from the well would do it, and he was right. His bladder woke him about an hour before sunrise. He couldn’t help but notice Arthur standing in his cell, watching him, as he slipped out of the house with an old tow sack. The ground was hard and crusty under his feet, so he decided to take a hatchet with him in case the earth over his little bank was frozen. Ben walked down the lane, turned west up the road for a quarter mile until he had passed the cemetery and then entered the woods. The moon was about four days past full, so it was still up above the tree line and provided some illumination. He preferred doing this on a black night, but it couldn’t be helped.
A gray fog began to descend in the woods, and he had to be careful that he stayed on course. Despite the poor visibility, he was still cautious in approaching his cache, stopping twice to listen before moving on. He found the downed tree just as he remembered it, pulled away the briars, and tried at first to dig with his hands. There was more moisture there in the woods, and the ground was frozen, so he used his hatchet to knock away the top co
uple of inches of hard soil and then finished the job with his hands. His money was just as he left it. A smile of relief crossed his face.
He laid a handkerchief down beside his tin can and counted out exactly 370 dimes then tied them up as securely as he could in two kerchiefs and stuffed them in his pockets. He left the remaining coins in his bank, put it back in the hole, and covered it up so that it wouldn’t look any differently than it had when he started. He pulled the briars back over the spot and stood up. The fog was thinning, and daylight was now coming fast enough that he needed to get away from there as quickly as he could.
As he moved away, he failed to see in the early light that everything on the floor of the woods was covered with a light frost—except for the imprints of his footsteps and the area where he had been kneeling and working on the ground. Dawn was already breaking as Ben emerged from the woods behind Abbie’s chicken house, heard the hens stirring and clucking as he passed by, and hollered out to the house. Meanwhile, back in the middle of the woods, a figure was trying to follow the trail in the frost before the sun rose high enough to remove the evidence.
Abbie came to the door, wrapped in a blanket, and invited Ben inside. He asked if they could talk in private, and Abbie replied that Mr. Finnerty had gone squirrel hunting with his dog, so they could talk inside, out of the cold.
Ben got her fire going and told her what he wanted. “I need to ask you a big favor. I’d do it myself, but it would cause too much talk, and word would get back to my stepmother. I need you to take this money,” he handed her the bundles of dimes, “and go to the bank today. Exchange the dimes for five of those five-dollar gold pieces and twenty of those Liberty half-dollars. And don’t tell anybody that the money belongs to me.”
“My goodness, Ben. What are you going to do with all that money? Why don’t I just get a couple of dollars for you and you hide the rest?”
“Abbie, please don’t ask me just yet what I aim to do. I promise I’ll tell you before I spend a nickel of it. And one more thing—I’ve heard that some people hide money in their shoes or their boots. I’ve got two extra dollars here for you to buy me an extra shirt and a pair of stout leather boots. Get them a little bit big for me. I can stuff the toes with something until I grow into them. But I need you to sew a cloth pouch on the inside of those boots that’s big enough to hide this money in. I have another ten dollars in dimes that’s still hidden, but when I get it in a couple of days, I’ll keep that in my pocket.”
Abbie looked at him hard. “Where are you planning on going, Ben? I know that’s what you’ve got on your mind. But where is an eight-year-old boy going to go?”
He knew there was no point trying to evade the direct question. “I aim to catch up with pa on his way to California.” He hurried to explain. “When it’s just him and me, we have a fine time, but I can’t abide the thought of living with my stepmother ’til he comes back.”
They heard steps on the porch outside and Mr. Finnerty came in. “Ben, I figured you might be here. I think you’d best come with me. You’ve got a problem!”
Abbie spoke up, “What do you mean, Sean?”
Mr. Finnerty saw the money on the table. “Did you leave any of your money in the woods? If you did, I don’t think it’s there anymore.”
Ben jumped up. “How do you know about that?”
“Me and my dog saw you buryin’ something in the woods back in October. We been keepin’ a lookout on the place ever since. But this mornin’, you was coming out of the woods just as me and my hound was going after a squirrel. I was afraid you’d been out to your hiding spot, so the dog and I decided to slip on over there. The more times you go to a secret place, the more likely it is that it ain’t gonna stay no secret. You left tracks in the hoarfrost, so it was easy to see that’s where you’d come from. When we got there it looked like the briars were pulled aside and some digging had been going on. There were two sets of tracks coming from the cemetery, and one set headed here to the house. Then there was a set of tracks headed back in the direction you came from. Let’s eat ourselves a biscuit and then we’ll walk down there and investigate.”
“Shouldn’t we go now before the frost is gone?”
“You needn’t worry. My dog can track whoever it was after the frost is long gone.” When they walked up on his hiding place, Ben immediately knew he’d been found out. He dug into the ground a second time that morning and quickly found his can. He knew it was going to be empty, but he shook it anyway. It did not rattle.
He saw something shiny in the dirt and uncovered a lone dime. He dug some more, hoping others were there. They weren’t. One dime was all that remained of the ten dollars he had left in the can earlier that morning. He berated himself for being so stupid that he had not taken all his money when he had his hands on it. What made him think it was a good idea to come back a second time for the rest? He would lose money on other occasions throughout his life but would never forget this ten-dollar theft as long as he lived.
Mr. Finnerty called to his hound and led him a few steps to the north, where he had seen tracks in the frost earlier. The dog’s long ears hung almost to the ground and waved rhythmically, providing an updraft that allowed him to sort out evidence with his nose. Mr. Finnerty spoke again, and the red bone enthusiastically sniffed and snorted as he worked the area. Quickly he barked, moving toward the cemetery at a fast pace. The dog cleared the west side of the cemetery, crossed the Plank Road, and turned right.
Confirming Ben’s suspicions, the dog went straight down the road, turned left at the lane into the yard of the Windes’ cabin, stood at the front door, and barked. Mr. Finnerty held back, not wanting to get in the middle of the fight that was about to occur, but willing to stay close enough that he could rescue Ben if things got out of hand with his stepmother.
Ben went into the house with a seething fury, but it only took a second to realize that only Arthur was at home. He saw a bonnet on the floor with three briars embedded in it. He thought it was Ruth’s, but really couldn’t swear that it didn’t belong to the younger girl. He picked it up and took it outside to show Mr. Finnerty. “I guess this proves your dog knew what he was doing. These briars probably got stuck in her bonnet when she was stealing my money.” He bent down, let the dog sniff and snort over the bonnet, and gratefully scratched the hound behind the ears.
Ben went back in, looked in all the spots that seemed like logical hiding places, and came up empty. For some unexplainable reason, he was suddenly able to look at the place with new eyes. The cabin was very plain, possessing none of the woman’s touch he saw in Abbie’s home. Instead of a decent table and chairs, there were two backless plank seats, and the table consisted of three boards nailed to an upright pickle barrel. The cabin was just dirty. The two windows were so smudged that it was difficult to see anything outside clearly. He couldn’t really remember ever seeing it looking neat and bright. Discarded sleeping pallets were always in a disheveled pile on the floor, and as usual, dishes were sitting all day in a pot of once hot water. There was a small bit of butter on the table, with what appeared to be the eager footprints of a mouse tracking across it.
He realized there could be no delay in his departure now. The morning’s activity had served to convince him there was no turning back. Then he remembered the barbering equipment—the comb, scissors, and looking glass. They were exactly where he recalled that she kept them. He picked up his blanket from the corner where it had been thrown aside and wrapped the barbering equipment and the few clothes he still had in the cabin inside. He retrieved an iron skillet from the hearth and a sturdy knife from the table, putting them in his sack.
He felt guilty when he realized Arthur was watching him and almost decided to open his cage. Instead, he retrieved a gallon of molasses from the almost empty pantry and placed the entire jug inside Arthur’s cell. At least he could make him happy for a little while!
He walked back outside. “If I know those three, they’ve gone to town to spend that money just
as fast as they can.”
“Ben, you might as well forget tryin’ to get that money back. Missus Windes probably thinks they got all the money you had. Maybe you’re ahead of the game to have her think that. If she figgered you had more money, she’d try and take that from you too. And since you live with her, ’tis likely the sheriff would have to side with her. Be sure you ain’t giving them any real good reason to figure out you been back home this morning. It’ll probably be tomorrow sometime before she gets curious enough to come lookin’ for you, and by then it’ll be hard to find where you might be.”
And so, Ben Windes walked away from his pa’s home with his birthright—a hatchet, skillet, knife, mirror, comb, and a pair of scissors.
As he heard his sister, and the din of the bickering voices of her daughters approaching the cabin, Arthur cowered in the back of his cage, protectively holding his jar of molasses close and noisily sucking the last sweetness from his grimy fingers. His long hair and beard, now gummed with molasses, stuck to his ragged shirt, and his eyes flashed wild with pleasure. That boy, his only friend, had shoved the large, wide-mouthed jug into his cage, and left. Arthur wanted to thank him, but like other times, he forgot the words.
Arthur knew the others would want his jar, so he ate quickly. As his sister and the girls opened the door to the cabin, a puzzled look crossed his face, and his bowels growled with an oncoming rush of pain. Immediately, a smell greeted them that would remain fixed inside the closed walls for days, as Arthur—grinning as he stood half naked over the pot—relieved himself of his burden.