Across the mountains, the first smudges of red appeared like small wounds on the heads of soft maples. Days shortened. Papa and my brothers cut and shucked the corn, and the crop was so plentiful, they ran out of room for it in the loft and had to build a cratch to stow it in. By the time all the grain was thrashed and the hay stacked, Mama, my sisters, and I had reduced the garden to pickled beans, pickled beets, pickled tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, pickled whatever-doesn’t-poison-you. And I reeked of vinegar.
Apple season arrived to save me from the kitchen. I was happy to relinquish the last of the preserving to Mama and my sisters and spend my time climbing the ladders braced against the fruit trees, plucking maiden’s blushes and Cooper’s russets from the limbs, while all around me, in the tall, browning grass, insects made a chorus with their racket.
Soon the second-best apples would enter the kitchen for drying or go to the mill for cider. The third-best, those poorer apples that had fallen to the ground or hidden themselves in the upper branches of the trees, would become butter, sauce, and yes: more vinegar.
But the fruits I selected first from each variety were the prime eating apples. These I picked cautiously, my cotton gloves protecting them from rough handling. Mama tucked the choice ones, stem up, in straw-packed boxes. They’d wait in the cellar for us, a welcome, raw sweetness to munch on when so much of everything else bore the taste of preserving.
I wondered how many of these apples would yet linger in winter storage when Gideon and I left home.
The first picking was a slow process, requiring meticulous care. I should have been happy to have Rachel Welds as a harvesting companion, for she was a stout worker, worthy of every bushel Papa would give her to share with the Weldses as payment for her assistance, and very gentle, never rendering an apple unfit for packing with rough pulling or heedless squeezes. But the girl created more noise than the insects did.
At first I thought I’d go mad listening to her prattle on and on about her baby cousin’s rash and the pelisse she was sewing and the best way to prepare a potato. Eventually, however, I learned to respond to her talk instinctively without absorbing a single word, murmuring in a vaguely consoling way when her voice turned fretful, obliging her with a surprised grunt when she subjected me to something apparently startling, and laughing absently when her tone tittered into happiness.
But when she described the trip she’d recently taken to Middleton, in the company of her aunt, uncle, and two of her cousins, and the stop they’d made at the Goodrich house after Mr. Welds had finished his business with a merchant, I found myself listening and prompted, “You stopped to see the Goodrich family?”
Rachel might have been silly, but she was also kindhearted, too much so to snub my abrupt interest. After hours of insulting her with ill-masked boredom, I deserved a rebuff, and she had every right to thwart me. However, she enthusiastically nodded, sending her pretty, dark ringlets in a merry dance around her face. “So Auntie Welds could deliver the cloth she’d woven and dyed. Mrs. Goodrich ordered it some time ago. The lady inspected the material; then, gracious as can be, she invited us into the parlor for tea and biscuits. I could hardly believe the sight that met my eyes.”
She paused dramatically, affording me an uncomfortable and (since this was Rachel, after all) unusual moment of silence for conjecture. I pictured the parlor door shooting open to reveal Mr. Long and the eldest Goodrich girl in a passionate embrace, or Mr. Long on his knee proposing to a simpering Miss Goodrich, or, at the very least, Mr. Long standing by the pianoforte and dutifully turning the pages of sheet music for the accomplished Miss Goodrich to play.
Lord knew, ever since Mr. Long and I had shared that warm exchange in Betsy’s Bower on Lammas Day, the man hadn’t spared three whole minutes for me. Maybe Miss Goodrich was keeping him too busy. I focused on the apple in my hand. “So what did you see?”
“A harpsichord!”
“Really?” Relief made me smile. “Yet another fine instrument. Don’t tell my mother. She’s always comparing me to the oh-so-great Goodrich girls with their superior talents.”
Rachel shrugged. She was sitting on a low branch of the apple tree opposite the one in which I’d similarly perched. She crossed her legs at the ankles and confided, “No doubt the Goodrich girls have added harpsichord lessons to their schooling, for there was never a family more passionate about the science of music. But I couldn’t like the new songs they took turns strumming for us. Tame stuff. Perhaps I’m too simple to appreciate such sophisticated entertainment, but I’d take one of the old ballads any day.” And with this announcement she sang, in just about the loveliest voice I’d ever heard, “‘On Friday morning he did go, into the meadow and did mow. A round or two, then he did feel a poisonous serpent at his heel.’”
“‘Springfield Mountain.’ Very nice. I like that one. Start it again, and I’ll sing harmony.”
From beginning to end, we belted out the tale of the mower fatally bitten by a rattlesnake. Our voices blended beautifully, and we grinned through every tragic verse, each visibly pleased with the other’s skill.
“How do you sing harmony like that?” she exclaimed.
“I’m not sure, really. I just can hear it.” I happily swung my leg and took a bite out of the apple I still palmed. Around the mouthful I said, “Your voice is extraordinary. I’ve never heard the like. Do you happen to know ‘The Children in the Wood’?”
She answered by humming the opening refrain.
And before I knew it, we completely forgot our apple picking in the process of testing each other’s recollection of all the ditties we’d ever heard. With relish we hashed out grim songs of painful death, jealousy, violence, lost love, betrayed affections, and even a particular favorite of mine about the murder of illegitimate children. Then we decided to skip the hymns in favor of the seafaring songs we knew: tunes about floods, shipwrecks, and piracy.
When we exhausted our common ground, she taught me two ballads I’d never heard, one about domestic trickery, the other about a streak of impossibly good luck.
I returned the favor by teaching her a song I wasn’t supposed to know. “Luke sings it all the time,” I said. “It’s called ‘Corydon and Phyllis.’”
“Let’s hear it.”
“‘Ten thousand times he kissed her while sporting on the green, and as he fondly pressed her, her pretty leg was seen. And something else, and something else, what I do know but dare not tell.’”
She laughed. “How deliciously vulgar. Sing it again, so I can try it.”
Her enthusiasm prompted me to reveal my familiarity with a few more bawdy tunes, including “Old Maid’s Last Prayer” and “The Female Haymakers.”
We were still in our apple trees, sticky from chomping on fruit between songs and making up a naughty verse to add to the already obscene “The Farmer’s Lass,” when the sun sank in a pool of violet. Twilight stole into the orchard, and Gideon called for us from the direction of the house.
We reluctantly climbed down from our trees and found our baskets, suspiciously light given the number of hours we’d supposedly spent harvesting.
But I didn’t regret the day’s poor pickings. As we returned to the house, hauling our fruit, we shared a last duet, choosing “The Deceitful Young Man” as our encore.
It was a great song. Not the least bit missish.
* * *
According to Mama’s almanac, “The moon of September shortens the night. The moon of October is hunter’s delight.” We were in the thick of October, and it was a hunting period, literally and in more subtle ways.
Though the sorghum squeezing and cider milling filled a good portion of our time, the harvest rush had ended. Mama resumed our school lessons, and Papa and my brothers enjoyed a vacation from work with fishing and hunting. A spell of Indian summer cooperated with the men’s ambitions. They left early in the morning and stayed out until the late afternoon, when a strange blue haze filtered the sunshine and made a dream of the flaming foliage and fli
ckering shadows. October drifted along as lazily as the leaves floated past us, and at the end of each day of sporting, the warm sham-summer wind carried cheerful whistles across the land and heralded Papa and the boys’ return. They arrived at the house looking relaxed and pleased, proudly bearing their day’s catches like scaly and furry trophies.
Perhaps his hunting successes emboldened Gideon. Or perhaps the three Weldses’ looming January departure gave him a sense of urgency. Regardless, my best brother set out to court Rachel, less bashfully than before and with more regularity.
There were many opportunities for him to do so. Rachel spent a great deal of time at our farm, largely by my request. We were getting along quite well, and I guiltily wondered how much of her previous chatter had been inspired by nerves, a jittery attempt to lighten the heavy mood my unfriendliness had perpetuated. She generously never mentioned my former coolness—not that we suddenly took to conversing like chums. Rather, ever since the two of us had discovered our mutual, if rather questionable, passion for tavern tunes, we simply sang.
These duets happened whenever work brought us together. We sliced apples for the splint drier and paddled the big pan of boiling sorghum syrup to the tempo of our songs.
At first, Gideon and the rest of the Winters listened in bemusement. In October, on the evening of my seventeenth birthday, when Rachel joined us for a special celebration, she and I entertained the gathering with exuberant singing. The next day, Mama, smiling through a wince, suggested we might try sounding a wee less cheerful while crooning about the gruesome murder of the innkeeper’s daughter at the hands of her jealous highwayman lover. But since Rachel and I assiduously avoided the tawdrier tunes when others were about, the family got reconciled to our little concerts and even began requesting ballads.
Sometimes Gideon would take advantage of a lull in our singing to sidle in, sharing with Rachel a towel full of the late raspberries he’d discovered in some woodland thicket or bringing her a pretty songbird feather.
He was less successful, however, when he brought the whole dead bird, and not even the assurance that he hadn’t actually killed the hummingbird convinced her to handle the ruby-throated creature.
One afternoon, after the men returned with their catch of fish for our supper, I listened in silent amusement as Gideon tried to enthrall Rachel with his clever rabbit trap, showing her the reed that held up the trick door, pointing out where the bait would hang, explaining how to trail the lure, then vividly describing the lightning speed with which the bent reed would trigger the shutting of the front. His voice practically vibrated with coaxing enthusiasm.
She was conspicuously unimpressed. After listening with a frown and gnawing on her plump lower lip, she murmured, “I can’t like the deceitfulness. It seems kinder, somehow, to just shoot the unfortunate thing.”
“A man needs more skill in snaring than he does shooting.”
“But then you leave the poor animal alive in its little coffin—for who knows how long—until you get around to finishing it off. That’s cruel.”
“It’s got plenty to eat while it’s stuck in there.”
“What if the sad animal left its young in a hole? They’d starve without her. You could be killing a mother rabbit and, as a result, her babies, too.”
I finished scraping the scales off a fish and shook my head. “Murderer.”
He scowled at me and shuffled off with the bunny killer cradled in his arms.
Rachel shrugged and went back to teasing out the tiny bones along a fillet. “You know, Harry, October’s passing quickly and it will soon be wintertime. Maybe we ought to consider what we can do with some Christmas carols.…”
It was peculiar watching how coolly Rachel received amorous advances from not just Gideon but also Luke, Matthew, and her handful of bachelor suitors at meeting. I suspected she didn’t plan on committing herself to anyone when she’d already promised Mrs. Linton she’d join her in the Genesee Valley.
One time, however, she confided, “I haven’t heard from her recently.” A little frown creased her brow. “Months, actually. And yet I’m sure she still needs me. Her children are a trial, and Mr. Linton”—Rachel sighed—“well, he’s a bit high-strung, too. You know, the missus was a great support to me when my parents took sick, and I swore, if the opportunity arose, I’d help her in kind. When she first left, she begged me to join her, and now that I have the opportunity, I feel obligated to do so. I can’t disappoint her at this late stage in our plans.”
“I’m sure your Mrs. Linton would understand if marriage prevented your going.”
“Perhaps,” she murmured, then changed the subject.
Middleton wasn’t going to keep Rachel, either because of her promise to Mrs. Linton or because she had no excellent reason to stay. One thing was clear: She hadn’t pledged her heart to Gideon or anyone else in these parts, at least not sufficiently to alter her inclination. Of course, she didn’t yet know that Gideon (who was still keeping his pioneer plans to himself, lest Luke decide to share them) would be following her in that direction. And that I would be, as well.
That was the plan, though I persisted in questioning it. My uncertainty kept me mute on the topic.
Strangely, the singing compounded my uncertainty and reluctance. Most of the old tunes Rachel and I sang I’d learned from my brothers. They were family songs.
And then there was Mr. Long. Our banter after meeting and during his occasional visits had resumed.
The last Friday of October marked a particularly playful exchange. Rachel and I were making apple butter. This required eight hours of stirring and sweating over the cast-iron kettle. We were singing, as usual, when my neighbor showed up with some neatly penned verses—“to add to your favorite ditty,” he clarified with a wink. “Mistress of the Tavern,” under Daniel Long’s influence, not only trounced every rowdy patron, but demonstrated a singular talent for concocting her own delicious liquor. In addition, this indomitable woman never, under any circumstances, “submitted” to anyone: not her father, not her husband, not even President Madison when he made the mistake of trying to convince her to become his secretary of strong spirits. Mr. Long loitered for a while to hear us try the new lyrics and wasn’t at all vexed when I failed to make it through a single verse without succumbing to laughter.
He and I were back to our old selves … though now somehow different selves. The pleasure I took from our encounters got so great that he frequently sprang as my first thought upon waking and lingered as my last thought before slumber. Indeed, throughout the day, whenever a horse cantered into the yard, I rushed to the door to see if it was him.
At times, however, my desire to stay in this place came from nothing more than the place itself. October passed, and the trees, robbed of their foliage, poked out of the mountainsides like brush bristles. The fields looked dead, lacking their thriving crops and, as of yet, unimproved with a whitewash of snow. And every day, for all of the first half of November, I awoke to a harsh wind slapping the house. But such bleakness only served to make the fire curling under the stew pot that much more welcoming and Mama’s steaming sassafras tea that much tastier and, in the loft, Betsy’s and Grace’s sleeping frames that much more delightfully warming. I was missing home already, and I hadn’t even left.
I carried my premature nostalgia to the woodlot. For the first time in a long while, I lacked my singing friend; Mrs. Welds had a weaving order she needed Rachel’s help filling. Cider milling and pressing kept Mama and my sisters occupied, so I spent five days in the middle of November on my own, doing my best to beat the squirrels in nutting. The recent high winds had shaken the treats straight out of the trees. I gathered from the ground big baskets of chestnuts and walnuts and returned home at dusk each day with my fingers stained dark brown from the juices and stiff from the cold.
Clouds shrouded the last day of my nutting. The trees encircled me like endlessly layered shadows, and the first snow began to fall as I trudged toward the house. The flakes
swirled, large and light as down feathers. When the woods finally thinned, I stood at their scrubby edge and marveled at the sudden winter scene. Heavy gray swallowed the mountaintops, and snow fringed every available branch. It laced the fields, lined my trail, and veiled the air.
I hunched over my basket and set forth into the wind. Dusk settled around me. Yet the snow resisted the approaching nightfall and gleamed. By the time I reached the house, it had completely frosted the roof. Smoke wafted out of the chimney, and the window by the door beckoned with a golden light.
I shivered, more from a wave of bittersweet longing than from the cold. It was a beautiful sight, familiar and strange and magical at once.
Home.
CHAPTER NINE
When I entered the house, I paused for a moment on the threshold, the blowing snow and languishing light of the day behind me, the no-less-beautiful firelight before me, the nut basket heavy in my arms, and my heart heavy with love—love for hearth and home, for kin and neighbor. One neighbor in particular. In fact, I was so bursting with exquisite feeling that had anyone inside greeted me at the door, I would have kissed him on the spot.
As it was, although the family sat talking among themselves at the dinner table, only Matt acknowledged my entrance, and that was merely to look up from his plate and order, “Close the door. You’re letting in snow.”
So much for the ties that bind. I set down the basket. “And hello to you, dear sibling.”
He grunted.
While I turned to shut the door and latch it, Papa sighed, “Please don’t leave the nuts in the middle of the room.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I said through my teeth, collecting the basket.
The Beloved Wild Page 6