The Trees

by Conrad Richter

  She pitied any human tonight that wasn’t lucky as she was. She had got herself a man, one that would keep her sisters and brother in meat till their father got home. She had a wedding trip. She had seen the wide, wide world again. Now tomorrow she and Louie would set up keeping house for their selves in their own cabin. Then her happiness better hold still for a while, for she couldn’t hold any more. She would have her own roof over her head, her own bed for her and her man to sleep in, and her own place where she would keep that precious thing, fire, always smoldering under the ashes to blow up when she wanted to cook her man any tidbit his palate hankered for.

  Not many were lucky to start off married life with as much as she had. Her cabin was all built and her father had unknowingly fixed it up with his own frow and augur. She had two pots and trammels to hang them on. Louie had traded English silver for them the same place he got her cowhide shoes and green stockings. In one of her pots were the lucky salt and pepper she’d carry first over her own doorsill. She had a bag of meal and Sayward, she knew, would give them more bedding when the nights started to freshen.

  For the rest, the woods were there for the getting. It would not take her man long to whittle out quaiches or noggins, maybe even two-tined sassafras forks. She herself would go traipsing through the woods for gourds for water dippers and to hold grease and such. A few good clips with the the axe would give all the clean plates they needed. Louie said he knew a chunk of soapstone he could fetch home and cut legs in with his knife. Now soapstone makes the best griddle of all. Frying meat or meal will not stick to it. And when the snow started to fly, she expected he would tan them a bearskin to lay on the dirt floor in front of the fire.

  Oh, “her and him” would make their cabin a snug nest for themselves and for any young one they might find behind their chopping log some morning late next spring.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PUBLIC DAY

  A YEAR to the month that Sulie was lost in, they heard about Worth. A keel boat pusher fetched the word up the Ohio. A packer left it at George Roebuck’s. Talk reached the Luckett cabin that Worth was dead and some that Worth was living.

  Sayward took her time and went about her business. This would keep. When her sang roots were dried, she took a grist of them in her apron and went to the post. It was just her luck that George Roebuck had gone to Shawaneetown looking for a pair of fusils stolen from his warehouse cabin. The bound boy was waiting on customers. He weighed up Sayward’s roots. Then he put the salt she wanted on the steelyards, tapping the weight along the beam. Nobody had dare to walk across the puncheons while George Roebuck was at the steelyards, and the bound boy acted big as the trader. Twice he scraped salt off and once he put a pinch of the precious stuff back on.

  And that’s all Sayward got for her pains.

  “I kain’t tell you about your pappy,” the bound boy said.

  “Is he a livin’ or dead?” Sayward wanted to know.

  “I kain’t tell you,” Will Beagle kept saying. “George said he wanted to tell you hisself. You kin see him at the frolic.”

  Sayward held out her apron for the salt.

  “He better stop by the cabin then,” she told him with spirit. “We ain’t intendin’ to go out celebratin’ with our pap dead and buried.”

  The bound boy scraped up a few of the white grains he had spilled and licked them off his fingers.

  “You kin go,” he said without looking at her. “But don’t give out I said anything.”

  Sayward’s face did not change. Some said the settlement was giving itself airs already, taking notice of a public day in the middle of summer when work was plenty. But if they would give a frolic for Independence Day, Sayward wouldn’t have liked to be the one to stay away.

  She told Achsa that night they were going and Achsa was so tickled she wouldn’t give up till Sayward tried something Sally Withers told her. You had to swallow a dry thimbleful of salt before you went to bed, then whoever gave you a drink of water in your dream, that would be your man.

  “I got nothin’ for that,” Sayward said. “Salt’s too high and skeerce for such foolishness.”

  But Achsa kept after her till she let her put some in her mouth. And now she hadn’t dare drink any water till morning.

  Some time during the night she woke up with a powerful thirst. She thought it was some place else. Everything stood out like real. She dreamed they were all in a stockade dying like dogs for water. Sulie and Worth lay with them and all their guts were dry as powder. But none could go out with the kettle, for the Indians lay outside. A soldier in a coonskin cap with three brass rings cut himself a long Joe Pye weed. He stuck that reed through a knothole and sucked water from the run. When he was sucked full, he motioned to Sayward she could drink from his reed.

  Then she looked up and saw it was Portius Wheeler.

  Sayward told herself she would say nothing in the morning to Achsa about this. It just went to show how daft a dream could be, for the Bay State lawyer was the last one she thought of when she was in her right senses. Never had she passed a word with him. Folks called him the Solitary on account of him living out in the bush by his lonesome. Most times you couldn’t get any more talk out of him than a deaf and dumb mute.

  But they said he came of a fine family and when Jake Tench got him dram-drinking the bound boy said he could recite anything he had a mind to out of the Bible, the poetry books or the Constitution. Jake said they were going to grease him up for a speech on Independence Day.

  The morning of the frolic the three Lucketts went down the path in single file from the cabin. Wyitt tramped ahead, but when they came in sight of the folks gathered in Tull’s shellbark grove, he hung back like Worth used to do. Sayward felt for him. Only a boy, he acted like he had lived in the woods longer than a lamper eel in the mud and never could he learn how to be sociable with his fellows. Now it was no trouble at all for her. She took after her mother’s side of the house and liked neighbors nigher than the distance of a gunshot.

  She had almost forgotten how it felt to get among a passel of folks on pleasure bent. The young ones were making high jack all over the place, wrestling and fighting, racing and wading, swinging on creepers, every last one yelling at the other and none listening. Some of the men were pulling a flag up on a high hickory limb. Others were laying meat over a pit of white oak coals to roast. This was one time, they said, when the he’s would show the she’s how to cook. The women didn’t mind. They were glad to get out of it for once and go off to themselves yonder on some logs with nothing to do but lay their littlest ones on patches of moss and swap news among themselves.

  Oh, this, Sayward told herself, was the only time the woods looked pretty to her. Sooner would she see colored shirts and shortgowns among the green than any buck’s flag; sooner hear all these young ones fighting and swearing than the fattest gray moose cracking through the brush; sooner smell the soft pickled smell of human victuals in covered baskets and buckets mixed with the smell of the woods than a whole cabin side curing with beaver, otter and silver fox skins.

  Genny hadn’t come as yet. Sayward wondered if Louie could be mean enough not to fetch her. She couldn’t see Jake Tench either. George Roebuck was here but Sayward wouldn’t run after him. She had gone to him once. Now let him come to her, for he would want to tell it as bad as she would want to hear. For a long while she sat with the women, giving talk and taking it. When she looked up, George Roebuck was coming her way.

  “I had news from your pappy, Saird,” he said with the grave slant of his eyelids that meant serious talk, and the women hushed their gabbing and the littlest ones’ crying to listen.

  As a rule the trader was shortwinded in his post, but he took his time now with all the women watching. This wasn’t business but a time to be sociable. He had his leather apron off for Independence Day and blue stockings on like the gentry. He wasn’t a big man when you stood beside him. It was his bearing that made him seem so.

  “He’s away back at the Fre
nch Settlements on the Mississippi.”

  “He’s a livin’ then?” Sayward nodded.

  The trader’s voice sounded a little nettled that she took it so “cam.”

  “He sent word for you to write him a letter. He wants to know how you all are, and did you ever hear from your Sulie? He’ll pay the postage. I got the place he’s at marked down in my ledger. All you need do is tell him if you need anything and he’ll see that you get it.”

  “Worth must be a doin’ purty good out’ar,” Flora Greer put to him.

  “He’s skinnin’ plenty wild bulls, they say,” the trader answered shortly and walked off.

  It was strange, Sayward pondered after he was gone, how just word from her father fetched him up in front of her eyes. Away off yonder he was with his rifle, slouching in his gray buckskins through the street of the French Settlements by that grandaddy of rivers that was mighty far to see across. And dark as thunder on the other side were those herds of wild bulls that some called buffalo, a curious kind of beast that didn’t get up first behind and then in front like other cattle, but jumped to its all four legs from the ground.

  He must be skinning more wild bulls than was good for him, Sayward thought, to send word for her to write him a letter. Certain he ought to mind that Jary had never got further with her and Genny than the alphabet. This was way back in Pennsylvania. More than once he had watched them on the sunny side of the old cabin where his hound, Rex, used to lie. Jary would chase the hound off and write a pothook in the dust with her finger. When Sayward and Genny had learned it by heart, she would rub it smooth and write another. The little “g,” Sayward minded, had a long tail like a squirrel, and so had some of the others. This tail curled back one way and that tail another. A body had to be smart to tell them right off and to call out when an “s” had a tail up and down and when it hadn’t. The printed “s” was easiest to mind because it looked like a trammel. The little “e” was only the cipher “3” turned around. Some of the big letters looked mighty foreign and hard to name. But Jary knew them all. She could make that old hound’s bed talk with fine spelling and even rhymes when she had a mind to.

  Yes, Worth must be getting up in the world to send such word to her. Perhaps he had taken some Frenchwoman for a wife and was shamed to own up in front of her that his oldest girl couldn’t spell out a letter. Well, in that case she would fool him. Just sitting here she could rig out in her mind a letter she would get some body to write for her. She would make it read fine as one of George Roebuck’s that the bound boy talked about.

  I seek myself and take my quill in hand to write you the news. Billy Harbison promised Wyitt a hound pup next time his bitch came around. Achsa is growed up. You wouldn’t hardly know her. Did you hear out where you’re at that Genny has a man? I guess you know who. She was married lawful down at the Ohio settlements. I am good as usual.

  Your obedient servant,

  Sayward Luckett

  By hokey day, if Worth dared her so big to write him a letter, she would take him up on it. He would be beat out, that’s what he’d be. He would show off that letter to every body he knew. But to himself he would puzzle now who had spelled it out so fine and who had known how to fold it up and write on the smooth side so strangers would know where it had to go? And who was sharp enough to put on a couple licks of red sealing wax so all the nosey men that passed it on couldn’t open it up and wear it out reading it for themselves?

  Now where, Sayward asked herself, could she get a proper body to do this for her? Mrs. Covenhoven could spell like copperplate in the low Dutch language, but Worth would have a hard time finding a Dutchman in the French Settlements to make it out. Buckman Tull, they said, had a good “handwrite,” but Sayward wasn’t asking any favor from the Tulls. George Roebuck neither. He would write it short to suit himself if he was busy, and she would never know the difference. No, she wouldn’t take it to him.

  “Well, I didn’t look for seein’ that one here today.” Mrs. Covenhoven spoke out suddenly.

  Sayward sat up and her eyes beaded a little as she caught sight of Jake Tench crossing the grove with Portius Wheeler. It perked her up to see how close he looked like he had in her dream. When last she saw him he was a dandy and no mistake in a ruffled shirt and his young face shaved smooth as a Quaker’s. Now he wore a tangled beard and woodsy britches and his roram hat looked wooly as the coonskin cap with three brass rings she saw in her dream. Here, she told herself, might be a body to write her letter. Could anybody sharpen up a quill and make it scratch down sightly dabs and curleycues, it should be a Bay State lawyer.

  By this time the woods were winking with pan flashes and echoing with small thunder. Those that had fowling pieces were shooting them off with as heavy charges as they durst. Powder smoke floated through the woods like a black fog. This was Independence Day for sure. Old Man Steffy marched around playing “Who’s Afeared?” on his fife like they played it at Bunker’s Hill, and those that had seen soldier service stood up plenty straight, sniffing the black powder like war horses. It spited Sayward that Genny wasn’t here when they joined in singing. At places where the others held back, Genny would have sailed on clear and true as a redbird.

  Buckman Tull and George Roebuck talked long and mighty earnest to the Bay State lawyer. Then Buckman quieted and addressed the crowd.

  “We’re lucky to have a speaker this Independence Day. I don’t know as I need make you acquainted with him, but I’ll call his name. It’s Portius Wheeler, Esquire, and he hails from Massachusetts State, the same as my sister and me.”

  He and George Roebuck helped Portius up on the butt of a big log, and Jake Tench grinned from ear to ear as he stood handy by to catch him if he swayed too far and fell off. But once the Bay State lawyer was up, he stood steady as a brown forest hawk watching from some high chestnut stub. Only a burning in those gray-green eyes showed the brandy. Across the clearing Sayward saw the gaze of some Indian hangers-on fixed on him like on a chief’s face.

  “Patriots! Friends of the republic!” he began in a voice astonishingly deeper and stronger than his size. “I see a few soldiers present. I judge it only fair to warn them —” here his eye flashed around — “that the subject of my oration will be, Hail to Civil Law, and Death and Damnation to Military Domination.”

  Buckman Tull flushed up and some of the older soldiers scruched around on their logs or from one foot to the other. But Sayward felt a little tremor run through her. Oh, he was “afeard” of nothing! There he stood daring and double-daring most all the men in the grove, for the biggest part of them had seen army service one way or another and were prouder of it than a savage of his scalp stick.

  “Some of the military say,” Portius thundered, “let’s take Canada by arms. God forbid! If our American eagle wants to scream, let it scream over the fields, forests and workshops of its own white and red peoples for civil equality and justice!”

  Oh, he could fetch out things that made the hair tingle at the back of your neck. Before he got half way through, some were firing off their rifles and fowling pieces already to show that they were with him, and Jake Tench had stopped grinning and was yelling loud as anybody.

  Never had Sayward the chance to get a long look at Portius Wheeler up to now, and today she looked her fill. Of all the humans in these woods he was the strangest. What was he doing away back here where it had no call for lawyering? He didn’t tramp the woods to hunt or fish. He didn’t give a lick to trade. All he asked, they said, was to be left by himself in his cabin of buckeye logs that were easiest for a greenhorn to cut to length, out near the Fallen Timbers.

  Once in a new moon, the bound boy told, he used to come down to George Roebuck’s to ask for a letter that had never come. He didn’t come any more, and what was to be in that letter and whom it was to come from, not even George Roebuck knew. Some thought the Solitary looked for money and some for pardon of a crime done back in the Bay State that preyed on his mind like the killing of a brother. But most believe
d that if that letter ever dropped out of the furry cap of some Ohio settlement runner, it would come in a woman’s “handwrite.” And this was Sayward’s notion.

  Today as she looked over his tangled young beard and woodsy britches and the bitter look in his eye, she thought that whoever that Bay State woman was and whatever she might be like, with her fine rings, her store scents and whalebone stays, it was time she sat down and wrote Portius Wheeler his letter. And she better do it soon.

  What he said in the rest of his speech she didn’t recollect for thinking of him and her letter. But she minded his toast. Speechmaking done, they had all hunted logs for their dinner. The women said the men hadn’t done so bad with the meat. Anyhow they had plenty for all, venison, bear flesh, turkey and pigeons. Jake Tench went around with a jug for toast drinking. Sayward felt glad he didn’t call on one of them. A Luckett would have hemmed and hawed and come out with some foolishment.

  But you could tell George Roebuck had done this before.

  “Long corns and short toes to the enemies of the republic!” he called out, and the men whooped and whistled.

  Buckman Tull gave the shortest.

  “The flag!” he said. Most every body yelled the hardest for that, especially the young ones, and Billy Harbison pulled on the rope till Old Glory and its fifteen stars waved fit to kill.

  But Portius Wheeler gave the best, Sayward thought. He held up his wooden bowl and she reckoned how he looked like Captain Loudon who lived in the brick mansion house between her granmam’s and Lancaster town.

  “Northwest Territory!” he spoke, quiet as could be. “May we love her as a wife, but our home state as a mother!”

  Most of the grownup faces went bleak at that, and plenty eyes watered as if here in these strange dark woods they could see for a minute the sunlight of those faraway places where they had been born.