A full minute passed before Jonathan made a move. Then he turned and stumbled across the dog trot toward the gate, muttering as he did so that if he had ever had any notion of a dulcimer bringing up the rear of the Venable train, he’d have stayed in the Caroliny Back Country the rest of his borned days and let the tax collector plague him right down to the burying ground.
“Steffy,” he said grumblingly, “if you’re a-takin’ anything, bring hit a-runnin’, whatever ’tis.”
In that single moment Stephanie knew what she was taking.
In the smokehouse she broke the cobwebs that sealed a warped old calabash. Reaching her fingers inside, she took one solitary apple seed of the many Bertha had saved, and dropped it into the deerskin pouch that hung about her waist, tracing in her mind as she did so the long, strange journey of the apples through which the seed had come. Bertha’s Back Country tree had grown from seed she had saved from an apple that grew on Grandmammy Linney’s tree in Charleston. And Grand-mammy Linney, when she was thirteen-year-old Marguerite de Monchard, had brought her seed from an apple that grew on a tree in the yard of her old home in France. The Trees of St. Jean de Maurienne, they were called, for the little French village from which Grand-mammy came.
Stephanie, hurrying back to the house, decided to keep her reasons for planting the seed a secret from every living soul but Noel. He would understand them, she knew, because they were akin to the notions he was carrying in his head as he set out for the wilderness of Kentucky.
2. Journey’s End
“Noel,” said Jonathan as the Venables assembled at the gate, “you bring up the rear an’ drive the cow an’ the pigs. Rob, the sheep are yourn to mammy. Steffy, you carry the kettle of salt. Mind you keep this here patch of deerskin tied over it tight. Here, Willie, you an’ Cassie, let me h’ist you into the creels.”
From that moment, day after day, from the first faint orange that blurred the east to owl light, the Venables were on the move, pushing westward toward the sunset in whose rays, somewhere, stood Harrod’s Fort. It seemed to Stephanie, when the mute, purplish peaks of the Appalachians frowned down upon them from terrible far heights and the narrow mountain passes shrouded them in green gloom, that it was a bold thing to have pitted the puny strength of the Venables against the lumbering mountain ranges.
It was like the shepherd boy David going out to fight the Philistine giant, the story of which Bertha had often read to the Venable young uns from an old Huguenot Bible, in strange words which they understood but which they never spoke. The Bible was packed away carefully in one of the creels, but Stephanie needed no book to conjure up for her the mighty mail-clad Goliath defying singlehanded the armies of Israel, and the young un David defying Goliath.
Pourquoi sortiriez-vous pour vous ranger en bataille? Ne suis-je point Philistin, et vous, n’êtes pas serviteurs de Saül? Choisissez Tun d’entre vous, et qu’il descende vers moi.
On they went, on and on, and on, trudging along the hatchet-blazed trails where others unknown to them had gone before and left a heartening sign for them to follow; moving spiritedly on the clean-cut buffalo traces; threading narrow mountain defiles; crossing swollen streams on clumsy rafts built by Jonathan and Noel of saplings tied together with grapevines; hiding in dense canebrakes at the sign of red men; and sleeping at night in the protection of steep rocks or fallen tree butts with their feet to the fire to bake the cold and damp out of their bodies.
When the journey was new, Stephanie’s feet had carried her over the rough, steep trail like a silken seed spun in the wind. After a month of climbing, however, her feet felt as heavy as the salt-filled iron kettle. Her yellow dress, trim in the waist and full of skirt, which she had worn day and night on the journey, was bedraggled with rain and dew, with sleeping on pine boughs and stumbling over rocks, with stretching flat on her stomach to drink from mountain springs, and with scrambling up steep slopes in search of the fiery leaves of wintergreen with which to stay her gnawing hunger, now that Bertha, in an effort to stretch their dwindling supply of meal, doled out ever smaller wedges of hoe-cake at mealtime.
“I’m so full of scratches I reckon I’ll have to be sewed up all over when we get to Kentucky,” she complained to Jonathan one May evening when the tallest of the mountain peaks loomed darkly behind them and they made their way through chinquapin thickets and hazel patches growing tightly in the open places of the foothills.
There was no sign from Jonathan that he heard her.
“Didn’t you tell us before we left home, Pappy,” she asked, “that when we passed that beech tree with ‘Peter Brumbach, 1777’ carved on it, we’d be might’ nigh in hollerin’ distance of Harrod’s Fort?”
“Did I?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes. Don’t you recollect you did?”
Jonathan did not answer. Skirting a hill, he began hurrying as Stephanie did not remember he had hurried since they left the Back Country, glancing now and then over his shoulder to see that the Venables behind him were keeping the file closed.
Stephanie hurried, too. They crossed a shallow creek, picked their way among thickets of alder and ozier and a grove of sycamores, and climbed the high slope of a hill. Halfway to the top, in an open place grown over with coarse buffalo grass and dewberry vines, Jonathan stopped, lifted his rifle from his shoulders, and let it slide through his fingers till the butt of it rested on the ground. Stephanie, glad of a chance to rest, set down her kettle of salt, and slumped on the grass at his feet.
“We’ll wait till they overtake us,” Jonathan told her.
Stephanie watched the rest of the Venables crossing the creek at the foot of the hill, her mother first, walking with a stout hickory stick. Bertha’s gray bonnet tied under her chin had fallen between her shoulders, and left her hair for the sun to shine on—hair that had once been rich buckeye-brown like Stephanie’s, and soft about her face, but was now the dull color of the grayish cottonade dress she wore.
Stephanie noticed how steadily her mammy moved along the uncertain trail. All the long, hard way from the Back Country she had marched along evenly, seldom hurrying, seldom slackening her pace, the slow sing-song pattern of her footsteps like the regular beat of the long ballads Noel had sung to Stephanie to the twanging of the dulcimer in the Back Country hayloft.
“Lady Ouncebell was buried in the high chancel,
Lord Lovill in the choir;
Lady Ouncebell’s breast sprung out a sweet rose,
Lord Lovill’s a bunch of sweet brier.”
Behind Bertha came the horse. He had grown up with a regal name, Rex, having been born when kings were less hated and Americans less headstrong; but by reason of the patience with which he carried the load heaped on his back, and the promise that in the Kentucky wilderness his lifelong lot would be cursed with breaking stump-filled new ground, and dragging logs, with carrying heavy loads, and being ridden to and fro, he had been rechristened Job by the Venable young uns. Jonathan had led him the first part of the journey. Now the horse followed in the train, without halter or bridle, his feet slow and steady, his eyes big and watery and patient.
Besides the heavy creels, Job carried a pack saddle strapped on his back, and a little cage of hickory twigs in which rode the rooster and the two hens Bertha was taking into the wilderness. In the creels rode Cassie and Willie, one on either side, sitting on the bedding with which Bertha had covered the tools and utensils. At that moment, both of them were dozing in the May sunshine, the tops of the creels laced securely about them so that only their heads showed.
Behind the horse came Rob. In the month of travel, however, Rob had come to mean to the Venables something more than a ten-year-old boy, for so closely was he companioned with the sheep he was mammying that Noel once accused him of bleating in answer to his name. But Bertha, noting how Rob by day watched out for grassy mounds where the sheep might fill their stomachs, and by night bedded them together and curled up against them to sleep, declared that there had never been a better shepherd boy, n
ot even King David himself, and that when they reached Kentucky and she could get at her cards, and Noel and Jonathan could make her a spinning wheel and a loom, he should have the first shirt from the wool on the sheep’s backs.
At the end of the train marched Noel, driving the four troublesome pigs and Brownie the cow. Noel’s rifle that he carried on his shoulder was every whit as long as he. On his back was strapped the dulcimer, now as silent a thing as a human being bereft of his tongue.
On the long journey Noel had made himself handy, and never once had he crossed Jonathan or riled him. But his steely, hurt eyes seemed to say to Jonathan, “You can lash me with your tongue and whip me with a hickory stick till the mountains fall into the sea, but you can’t make me leave behind one single jot nor tittle that I learned from Uncle Lucien. Not one.”
The troubled look Noel wore was, to Stephanie, the one real hardship on the long journey. Morning, noon, and night, it was heavy on her like a load she couldn’t lay down. Not even when she whispered to Noel about the seed of the apple tree one evening did he thaw out completely, but she could see he was warmed by the knowledge.
Watching Noel cross the creek with the sun shining on his thatch of sun-bleached hair, Stephanie recalled the Back Country wrangling between her brother and her pappy—a wrangling that was as prickly as a thorn bush, and as hard to grub out. She remembered the day, late in the fall just passed, when Jonathan came home from a summer sojourn in the Kentucky wilderness, bringing with him a treasury warrant signed by Governor Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky land commissioners, guaranteeing him four hundred acres of Kentucky land on which he had planted a corn patch the year before. Come spring, announced Jonathan, as jubilant as a spring robin, as soon as the weather broke and a body could get through the mountain passes, the Venables would strike out for Kentucky before the tax collector could make his rounds and start snooping in the Venable smokehouse and down the Venable potato hole.
Sitting there on the Kentucky hillside, Stephanie recollected every word her pappy and mammy said that fall day back in their log house on the banks of the Waxhaw.
“If we’re goin’ in the spring, Jonathan,” Bertha said, “then now’s a good time to let Noel go to see Uncle Lucien in Charleston.”
“What would Noel be doin’ that for?” Jonathan asked.
“You don’t need him here,” Bertha said. “The winter’s work won’t be the same as if we’d be stayin’ forever in the Back Country. We won’t be takin’ a whole passel of things into the wilderness, so there’ll be nothin’ in the way of goose yokes and hoe handles and scythe handles for you an’ Noel to whittle at. Noel might as well be learnin’ the useful things Uncle Lucien can teach him. Readin’ for one thing.”
“Berthy,” declared Jonathan, “you’re a-goin’ to ruin that young un. Wantin’ Uncle Lucien to teach him to read! Look at me! I can’t read. But show me a man, point out to me jist one man who can bark a squirrel as clean, or chop down a tree as fast, or stave off starvation any better than I can. That’s all Noel or anybody else needs to know in the wilderness. Besides,” he added, “there won’t be nothin’ to read in Kentucky.”
“We don’t aim to let Kentucky stay a wilderness, do we?” Bertha argued. “Readin’ might come in handy some day. And now’s Noel’s last chance to learn.”
“You’re jist a-ruinin’ that boy, Berthy, I’m a-tellin’ you,” Jonathan warned. “Puttin’ high an’ mighty notions in his head. An’ your Uncle Lucien’ll jist add the crownin’ touches.”
It took a week of rain to win Jonathan to Bertha’s way of thinking, Stephanie recollected. After seven days of downpour with seven Venables shut up in the house and nothing of importance to occupy the menfolks, Jonathan said if Uncle Lucien could teach Noel anything at all, it would be better than having the boy mope around in the chimney corner all winter.
Noel came home in March, carrying strapped on his back a little instrument with a short neck, three wire strings, and four heart-shaped holes carved two above and two below its slim waist. He had made it with Uncle Lucien’s help.
“What’s that thing?” inquired Jonathan.
“A dulcimore,” Noel told him.
“What’s hit for?” Jonathan demanded.
“To make music,” Noel said.
“To think that a boy of mine’d be packin’ that thing around ’stid of a rifle!” Jonathan raged. “Hit’s a crownin’ disgrace! I don’t want to hear a solitary string plucked in this house, Noel. Nary a one. D’you hear?”
Noel didn’t pluck the strings in the house. But out in the stable loft where he hid the dulcimer, he sat on the hay with the instrument across his lap, and as he twanged the strings with a stubby piece of leather, he sang to Stephanie all the songs he had learned from Uncle Lucien. Stephanie, her red lips parted, her blue eyes opened wide, sat entranced with the strange, sweet strumming. It was a low and lonesome sound, like the moaning wind in the piny woods, to match the words Noel sang.
“There was a little ship and she sailed upon the sea,
And she went by the name of the Golden Willow Tree;
As she sailed upon the lone and the lonesome low,
As she sailed upon the lonesome sea.”
Even when the words were livelier, as they often were, the strumming was sad as a funeral.
“I swapped me a horse and got me a mare,
And then I rode from fair to fair.
Tum a wing waw waddle,
Tum a jack straw straddle,
Tum a John paw faddle,
Tum a long way home.
“I swapped my mare and got me a cow,
And in that trade I just learned how.
Tum a wing waw waddle.…”
Sometimes Noel held the dulcimer across his knees without plucking the strings while he told Stephanie all that he had done and seen and heard at Uncle Lucien’s.
Charleston was the hub in the war for freedom in the South, Noel told her, and Uncle Lucien’s house in Charleston was the meeting place of South Carolina patriots who sneaked in at night, right under the noses of the British, and made their plans. They vowed to fight for their freedom, old Uncle Lucien the loudest of all, as long as one of them had breath in his body. If the British took Georgia, the patriots dared them to lay hands on Charleston, Noel said. If they should take Charleston, the patriots would make for the backlands, join Francis Marion, hide out in the swamps, and plague the life out of the British.
It was more than freedom the patriots were fighting for, Noel said, as Stephanie listened eagerly. If once the patriots could wrest their freedom from the British king, they could form a government of their own, in which there would be no kings but only men, and all men would have equal rights, and every man would have the duty of the government resting on his own shoulders. Such a government, Uncle Lucien had told Noel, was an old, old dream of many wise men, but not yet had men been able to throw off the yokes that confined them, or break the chains that bound them so that the chance to form a government of free men might be theirs.
Now, in America, Uncle Lucien had said, men—plain, honest men, buckskinned men and Tidewater merchants, Massachusetts farmers and Philadelphia lawyers and Virginia planters, shoemakers and coopers, surveyors and builders of river flatboats, and keepers of ordinaries—were about to wrest from a king that chance. If the chance was theirs, they could make a pattern of free men for all the world to live by.
If the chance was theirs! Uncle Lucien, Noel said, harped on that till a body could mighty nigh feel his ankles straining against chains that were bound to give way, so mighty was the force against them. Let the patriots hold together a while longer, Uncle Lucien urged the little band hiding in his Charleston cellar. One winter longer. One summer longer—a summer ghastly, as summers always were, with fever and ague and smallpox. Their chance would come—if they held together just a little longer.
If only he had a rifle, Noel had told Stephanie, making her giddy with his courage, he’d go back and fight alongside the patr
iots.
It was a rainy April night, Stephanie recollected, that Jonathan glanced up to the big buck antlers above the fireplace and saw his rifle was gone. He caught Noel before the boy had gone far, and whipped him soundly.
“This here rifle’s aimin’ to go to Kentucky, Noel,” Jonathan said as he laid it back in the arms of the antlers. “Hit’s got a job to do, feedin’ us an’ clearin’ the land of varmints an’ makin’ Kentucky fit for livin’. See you leave hit whar ’tis. An’,” he added, “see you stay with hit. You’re needed in Kentucky a whole sight worse than them red-hot patriots in Charleston need you, or George Washington, or that bunch of scoundrels in that Continental Congress in Philadelphy that think o’ nothin’ but taxes. D’you hear?”
Noel had answered nary a word.
“D’you hear, Noel?” Jonathan shouted. “Answer me.”
“Yes,” said Noel, and wrath boiled up in his gray eyes like thick, dark molasses boiling up in a vat.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, Pappy.”
“Can’t figger out what’s a-goin’ on in your head,” went on Jonathan. “Except I mought ’a’ known your Uncle Lucien’d plant some foolishness there, jist like I told your mammy he would. Here’s our chance to move clean away an’ leave all this arguin’ an’ wranglin’ an’ fightin’ an’ taxin’ behind, an’ get rich to boot on land that’s as black as your mammy’s skillet. Tell me, Noel, what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothin’, Pappy,” answered Noel, “from where you’re standin’.” Then he had drawn up inside his shell like a terrapin that somebody has stepped on, and he had never come out, not even when Jonathan traded the last of his tobacco crop for the second-hand rifle Noel carried on his shoulder. Stephanie wondered if he ever would come out.
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