A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  In the morning the Cumberland ford was a battle of reason versus nature, or that was the way Brother Borden portrayed it. The water rushed along all incoherence while the men yelled for silence and demanded order, and trees broke and fell as animals pushed and pounded ground that was sticky and gnats flew into faces and mosquitoes bit flesh and the river before them flowed on unperturbed while nearby the first house made of brick in Kentucky sat on a small patch of ground as if it had been planted there and grown to full size. Someone had stopped here and refused to cross the river. Why else scratch out a living on such poor soil? The frantic travelers looked hard at the last civilized dwelling before the open frontier. It represented everything soon to be lost and they viewed it with various emotions: denial, anticipation, regret, and one by one the wagons descended the bank of the Cumberland River and miraculously, solemnly, with weighty majesty, each wagon took float while mules and horses pulled and swam and cows called plaintively and children screamed and mothers grabbed and held. There was a little ferry-boat crossing the other way. It was full of hogs going south to market and it would never hold a wagon’s weight, but the women turned their heads for a minute to watch and then dug their nails into their own closed palms as the wagons bounced and splashed in the miracle of water and Lavina thought that if only they could float all the way west without the drag of soil on their wheels, without any gravity, without this terror of being swept downstream, wagons capsized and children drowned, they might relish such a voyage. Someone was shouting to a cow stuck in a ridge of sucking mud. Gee on, Susie! When at last they had made it to the other side, the dripping vehicles lumbered slowly and surely one by one up the shallow bank as if ready to be released to hard land. They were creatures alive and on that new-found side of the river there was a sky-sized bed of shallow glimmering water clear as a mirror where people had gathered salt for a thousand years. Flat Lick was a favored hunting ground, according to Brother Borden, where elk and deer came to lick the clay, where the low standing water held a strong stink of sulfur, and a tired old tavern leaned over glassy pools that reflected its slovenly shape.

  They did not stop for anything.

  The wagons sloshed and slid and walking people had heavy feet.

  Martin was holding Beulah’s halter in his fist. Beulah was fidgety. Good girl, he said off and on. He was proud of the wagon he had created, its polished planks and its oiled canvas reflecting the brand new day. His wagon was water-tight! He said the words to himself in a whisper. Then he said: I built it, forgetting about Reuben. Forgetting every former upbraiding. He had reason to congratulate himself and to look forward. The undiscovered world ahead was going to be his.

  That morning they had passed a painted sign, nailed to a wooden cross:

  There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master. Job 3:17-19.

  Martin, a boy of thirteen summers, had time now to think while he steadied Beulah and kept an eye on his leash-tied bear and watched the untethered cows and the nervous tied pony. He thought about who was buried in that place they had passed. He thought that maybe nothing could be trusted on this trail where there might be a sudden cave-in or a gunshot or a wolf. Or an Indian was more likely! Martin had inherited imagination and he now compared this journey to the one his grandfather had made sixty years before. A wagon, a woman, some half-brought-up children. It was said that Daniel Boone had sometimes stopped at his grandfather’s cabin to smoke and talk. It came to his mind that Daniel Boone had once stayed alone in the wilderness for two long years, as the story went. People talked about that as some kind of feat. He’d killed a hundred and fifty-three bears was the boast, but the pelts got stolen by Indians, which served Daniel Boone right. Martin thought he was opposed to killing, although he couldn’t reason on how to live without doing it. He thought of Cuff’s mother falling, pawing and searching the air for her footing. He thought of the orphans Daniel Boone had left hungry in the forest. Killing just for fur, not for meat. He thought he might try living without tasting flesh but one person’s diet wouldn’t make much difference to the world.

  His thoughts seemed to him very deep and he went on thinking.

  35

  On the seventh day the wagons came to a halt on a rise and the travelers looked down at grass all the way to a green horizon. Never had they seen such infinite grass and it was anointed with millions of flowers like invitations to something limitless with flocks of turkeys overhead, wings open wide, and the end of all they could see so far in the distance that it turned into sky. The open vastness jolted these farmers, who had never seen such prevailing space. It stunned them and they climbed out of their wagons and fell to their knees so as not to appear undeserving in the Lord’s all-seeing eye. Martin could hear water muddling through the ground beneath him with a dark, prehistoric rhythm. He wanted to put an ear against the earth and decipher what it was saying. Talking water underground must be wise to all things. Except light. He thought about that. He thought of the school he might have attended in the fall, but a future of learning how to reason things out had been denied to him by his father, who had sent them away to fend for themselves and there was nothing to do now but live by imagining what he could never learn of true facts. Patton had studied Latin. Patton could remember things that happened in Rome and France. Patton was right in an argument because he knew what was true and false. Martin needed a dose of his brother’s cool confidence and now, walking along beside the wagon, he brought back in his mind the last trip they had made in the woods. Patton had brought the makings for several snares. His father had taught him this quiet skill when he was small. There was a time, he told Martin, when Pa could catch a grouse without hardly blinking. He was different then. Not like now.

  Martin had not been invited on such a trip since the murder of Cuff’s mother and yet he was uneasy about the quest for grouse, having no desire to kill anything. He had once gone with Patton on a trapping expedition and he often thought about those three days as the happiest time of his life, so he went off to the woods more or less trustingly, swinging his arms. When he whistled, Patton said: Sshh. Don’t scare em away. Maybe you’re still too nervous to hunt up your dinner.

  Hell no. I hunt things.

  Truth is Mama makes you anything you like.

  I cleaned the last chicken she cooked. By myself.

  Woman’s work.

  Well, I have things on my mind. Things you don’t know about.

  What things do you think about that I would even care to know?

  Just things. In the barn.

  Everyone knows she does it with Uncle Benjamin, Marty.

  Not with him, Martin asserted. But a sudden pain over his right eye felt like a strong poke from God.

  Patton was quiet for a spell. At last he said: I bet you don’t know anything.

  —

  Still. Patton made strange things normal. He would have made this journey feel more like adventure and less like exile. Why did Papa send him out to Missouri all by himself? Why did he steal my warrant? He should have asked, but he didn’t ask, he just took it. I could have gone with him; we could have been partners. I showed him that warrant I got, but I didn’t know he would take off with it. Martin put a hand on his bear, now ninety pounds of steely weight, and remembered the joke made at school. His papa’s a preacher so it’s said, goes to church but owns no land. It was just a dumb rhyme because the boys were all afraid of God’s representative. At school they stood up to sing and sat down to pray except for Clay Harmon, who did not do those things. Clay did not laugh at the store window when it was crowded with corsets. The two of them had walked back home from school a few times, three miles, and tipped their hats to babies and ignored everyone else. Clay was not afraid of Preacher John. He said his own father beat him every single night. Clay was good company. Sometimes they pretended that he was blind and Martin had to lead him by the hand down the walk-way in front of the stores. And n
ow Clay was at school and Martin was passing a rock that grew out of nothing and Brother Borden was naming it Castle Rock as if it was his to name. Brother Borden was like a bee in your sleeve but suddenly Martin felt that bolt of guilt again, right over his eye, because of being outside Emly’s house and not telling his father. He thought of how his pa would have beaten him with the strap if he’d told the truth because it was wrong to spy but now it’s my fault that everything’s ruined and we’re poor because I didn’t stop the men from running away and maybe some of them even got killed because Pa could have stopped them getting drowned and we’d still be in our house and I could still fix my rock dam with Franklin and walk home with Clay Harmon. There was all this space in Kentucky, but Martin was thinking too much to enjoy the immensity. It made him feel small and more than anything else, he missed Patton.

  They’d spent two days crossing creek after creek in the boiling sun with the men ordering animals and women and each other while the children clung to their places in the wagons and sometimes dared to dangle their hot little fingers in cold creek water. Martin was supposed to be one of the grown-ups, but he wanted to run in the grass even if it was pointless and he had the wagon and the animals and his mother and sisters to worry about. The cows were good. They stayed in the herd and mowed the grass as they walked, but Judy the pony was snarly and Cuff often pulled the wrong way and the girls were annoying and he wished they’d stop talking and let him think.

  The trail, log-corduroyed years before, made a bumpy bed for the big wooden wheels with their iron rims and this was the season of high water and sometimes they got stuck and people had to poke and dig and pull and sometimes a wheel cracked and held everyone up for hours. Mud is better than no place to live, Martin’s father had said, although mules and cows and horses got mired in it and it was hard to sleep on swampy ground. Martin was always sleepy and wet. He lay close to Cuff and took her heat in his skin. He wanted to shout at his mother: Where is my father who wouldn’t risk all this muck that never dries out or stops breeding flies and mosquitoes and bugs that are too little to be swatted? And my sisters are selfish and only care about gossip and Cuff is a tangle of burrs and knocked over the milk and chased a dog and chewed on the right rear wagon wheel and nobody noticed but what if the wheel falls off? The truth is oxen are better than mules, everyone says so but none of us has an ox to his name. They survive on nothing. Horses and mules can be ridden, sure, but they need better forage. A wagon pulled by mules can go thirty miles a day while an ox makes ten or twelve but the ox eats food horse or mule would never put teeth to and why should they? I wouldn’t pull this wagon. So oxen are dumber than mules, dumber than horses, dumber than me, if it comes down to it. And why is it so all-fired important to go over and over the details of how Sister Riggs brought her eggs in a barrel of cornmeal, or how the swinging bucket for butter is an idea that all ladies should adopt and Sister Borden would have it that pickles are the way to avoid the scurvy. She read it in a brochure from those New England people that mean to break up the country, sending abolitionists out to K.T. to make claims. So says Brother Riggs: They want to poison us on pickles. Sister Riggs made a dried plum pie rolling out dough on her wagon seat.

  Along with such items of contention as oxen and mules and pickles was every family’s notion of what not to carry inside their wagon. The Dickinsons had a piece of the family apple tree put to root in a layering pot. Lavina had put the pot under the mother tree until the wagon was ready. But why on earth carry that heavy pot when it will take up space and die anyway? Sister Borden had argued.

  Because I am sentimental, Lavina had replied. The big old apple tree had made a burying place for the family and now it was going traveling.

  36

  Lavina was in a state she did not recognize. She noticed the light around her wagon as if it came without source. One minute the wagon was ordinary and the next minute it was full of radiance. She was divided from herself, part of the light and then not. She saw that the women and children stayed out of the wagons to lessen the load but she had the driving to do; it had to be done. She was, therefore, not quite woman. She was apart. How could she trust a mere boy to handle the bulk of their lives, which was now balanced on four wheels? She had problems to solve while the other women looked for flowers and mushrooms and walked hand in hand telling life stories. She had never walked hand in hand with anyone, not even her children. If this family is broken it will mend, she thought, but she did not believe what she told herself and she felt the absence of John, although he had sent her into so much danger and uncertainty. How could he do that when they had been so close? How could he appeal to his congregation to follow him and then abandon them? Our little Gina is frail! I have to keep up her strength when I have none for myself. If anything happens to Gina…the thought kept her up at night, worrying. Men have their rhythms and no wife is at ease to ask, but finally, after thinking it through, Lavina decided she must have failed John in some vital way. He had therefore stopped caring for her. Perhaps, being older now, she was less ideal although her beauty had been replaced by experience. A face changes. A body too, and a voice. But the mind expands. How much did he notice? The breasts were fallen, but did he much care for breasts? The walk becomes a shuffle eventually. Soft skin becomes a hide. There was no one to ask about her appearance but she tasked herself to take up the company of the women around her in order to ease her doubts and she went to them in her loneliness when they rose before dawn, started the fires, put on the kettles, stirred the oatmeal or johnnycakes, and prepared another meal for the midday halt. With them, she put the oldest children to milking the cows while they ground coffee and mended torn wagon tops. They erected privies using a wall of blankets and she felt less alone with herself.

  Later she sat on the seat of the wagon and held the reins. The mules would follow the other wagons, but they must be driven over obstacles and kept on the narrow path. On Sundays, they stopped to observe the Sabbath. It gave the women a chance to wash clothes and parts of themselves and on one occasion they stopped to take rest at a tavern, Sister Borden insisting that they all needed a break from their exhaustive routines. She had come up from Tennessee to join the train and her opinions were openly stated. So, late in the afternoon, men, women, and children filed into the shabby tavern, which offered hot food, a fireplace, and a few cots in an unheated back room. The innkeeper told stories while wandering among his guests, hoping to keep them settled and entertained. The travelers were captive listeners and that evening they were regaled with a story about the famous Harpe brothers, who had murdered a tavern guest.

  Lavina was sitting in a corner by a narrow window but she had it in mind to speak to Mister Ferris about his story, which should never have reached the ears of the children, when she suddenly remembered that this was the very place John, at age twenty-one, had met the famous Bishop Asbury and asked to be baptized. Ferris Tavern! She supposed John was running errands for Benjamin even then, as he was doing when he met her at Redbanks Inn. She rubbed a finger along the sill of the cloudy window and wondered if the bishop, a tall man with flowing white hair, had touched that same sill after making the sign of the cross on young John’s smooth forehead. She bent hers down to the sill and thought of her husband’s purity at that time. Virginal he had been, if a man can be so called. Those were the years when John wore the stark black clothes that Asbury wore, trying to model himself on the man who’d converted thousands. But John’s fervor was never mystical. He dabbled in politics, he joined the Masons, he voiced worldly opinions. Lavina realized now that she was glad of her husband’s disabilities. Who would marry a saint? She was glad of John’s hands that knew the dirt of farming when he wasn’t preaching. It was the John of daily toil she had loved best. She gazed around the tavern at her fellow travelers, some of them already nodding on the hard benches, and wondered if she had changed as much as John had changed. A tavern! Who was Lavina in such a place? One half of her felt the hurt of abandonment and the failure of her marri
age. But there were two parts of Lavina, one hurt and one freed.