“Let ’em try!” bragged Rob, as bold as any Long Hunter, now that the red men were nowhere about. “Even if they caught folks in here unawares, the forters could last out the siege, I bet.”
He began pointing out to her all the handy things within the stockade—a second spring near the center of the square, a hominy block, a blacksmith shop, the firing platform built along the stockade.
“Did you see the schoolhouse?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “but who’s a-goin’ to waste time a-sittin’ in a schoolhouse like a bump on a log gettin’ book learnin’?”
Stephanie scowled at him. “Rob,” she declared, “you sure do take after Pappy.”
“There’s one thing they ain’t got,” said Rob, paying her no mind. “All these people comin’ an’ goin’ have tamped down the ground so hard, there ain’t a blade of grass inside this whole stockade for a sheep to nibble at.”
Stephanie laughed. “I’spect as long as you live, you’ll see things through a sheep’s eyes, Rob. Have you seen Brownie?”
“Right over there she is by the stockade,” said Rob. “She’s down, and she looks like she don’t ever mean to get up.”
“Maybe you’d better help me get her up, so I can milk her,” Stephanie told him. “Wonder what Mammy’s big hurry is?”
“She don’t like fortin’,” said Rob.
“How do you know?”
“I heard her whisperin’ to Pappy last night. Says she never smelled such a smell in her life as there is in this Fort, what with all sorts of human bein’s, and all manner of dumb critters bein’ shut up in the stockade ever’ night, and flies buzzin’ about a body’s vittles and musquiters fiddlin’ in a body’s ears.”
“Why, Rob!” confessed Stephanie, recollecting the welcome smell of wood smoke and broiling meat that had greeted them the evening before. “It smelled plumb good to me.”
“Stick your nose down close to that spring once,” commanded Rob. “The smell’s so strong it might’ nigh picks you up off your feet and carries you out over the stockade.”
Stephanie turned and looked at the spring, noticing for the first time the ooze of black, smelly mire churned up by countless hoofs, and refuse thrown carelessly into the water to rot.
“Well,” she said, sniffing from a safe distance, “it doesn’t smell exactly like our house in the Back Country.”
For a minute she was homesick for the clean spicy scent of Bertha’s herbs and barks and roots drying about the chimney—pennyroyal and horse mint, catnip and sarsaparilla and horehound, sassafras and spignet. No, she realized, Bertha Venable would never abide for any length of time such a smell as Harrod’s Fort reeked of.
“Mammy’s particular about the folks, too,” Rob reported. “Says the families may be all right, but the outlandish menfolks that are here buyin’ up the land ain’t our kind. Says the fastest we can get on to our own claim and get it surveyed, and build a cabin on it ain’t fast enough.”
“What did Pappy low to that?” asked Stephanie.
“He’s skittish about all these land grabbers, too, Pappy is. He’s goin’ to feel safer, he says, once he gets his hands on the surveyor’s deed. But he told Mammy she wouldn’t feel so high an’ mighty about the Fort if the red men started raidin’.”
“And Mammy?”
“Mammy says she’s a-reservin’ to herself the right to change her mind,” said Rob. “But unless she’s mighty mistaken, she ain’t fortin’. Nosiree! One night’s cured her.”
The deputy surveyor paid no attention to the fact that Bertha had worked herself into a sweat trying to shake the dust of Harrod’s Fort from her feet. He’d seen folks in a hurry before to get to their land. From the way they were pouring into Kentucky from every direction, he’d likely see a lot more before all of Kentucky County had been passeled out.
The dew was off the grass, and the wooded hollows were drenched with warm sunshine before the Venables finally filed out of the stockade and turned southwestward, Jonathan heading the line, with Stephanie at his heels. Behind Stephanie strode the deputy, leading his horse.
Stephanie, Rob, and Noel had fastened wide eyes on the deputy as he made ready for his day’s work. Into the saddle bags now across the back of the horse he had packed the instruments of his trade. In one side was his compass, carefully wrapped and fitted into a box. In the other side were his tally pins, each with a strip of bright red linsey tied through the ring, a batch of rings made of deerskin whangs to slip on his belt at every tally measure, a chisel and a timber scribe, a hatchet, a whetstone, a steel punch, and a rat-tail file. With the compass the deputy had packed away some clean pages of paper, his goose quill pen, and some pokeberry ink. Back of the saddlebags were his heavy, gangly-linked surveyor’s chains.
The deputy strode through the woods like a critter born to them. Only one of his surveyor’s tools, his iron-shod jacob staff, he carried in his hand. In his belt he fastened an ax with which, on occasion, he slashed at undergrowth and grapevines to clear the way through the woods. In the bosom of his worn old shirt he carried some corn pone and jerk to stay his hunger if other food failed him. On his back was slung his long rifle. And in his head he carried a tongue loose at both ends.
Listening to his tales, thought Stephanie, was like watching Grandmammy Linney piece a quilt. Grandmammy, the winter before she died, took a heap of French scraps she’d saved of every color of the rainbow, and when she sewed them together and embroidered them with fancy French stitches, she had as pretty a crazy quilt as ever body set eyes on. The deputy took tales of every subject a body could imagine—bears and beavers, bald eagles and snow geese, copperheads and bullfrogs, log rollings and the Christmas shindig at the Fort on Corn Island where folks drank their fill of sling and danced the scamperdown and the double-shuffle till daylight—and when he got them all told and embroidered with his own fancy notions, he had Kentucky. And it was no more like Jonathan’s plain Kentucky of fine black land than a dusky, green-spotted, wide-winged moth was like the cocoon that cabined it.
Whenever there was a lull in the deputy’s talk, Jonathan turned to ply him with questions. Didn’t a corn-patch claim to Kentucky land like his’n outweigh every other sort of claim? Would there be enough land for all the folks emptying into Kentucky County?
The deputy knew all the answers, Stephanie soon learned. But out of his answers sprouted a new crop of questions—nettlesome questions that pricked her lively pleasure in this broad, rolling land of plenty, that dimmed her eyes to the yellow trout lilies dancing above their spotted leaves, and dulled her ears to the mortal sweet song the birds were spilling out over the rim of the dark woods. She wished Noel could be up front in the line so that he could listen to the deputy’s talk. Noel would lap it up like whipped sillabub. He’d know what to make of it all, too.
“Any red men been hereabouts lately?” asked Jonathan.
“Not down this way to speak of,” the deputy said, hacking his way through the underbrush while beady-eyed squirrels stared at him in astonishment from arching branches overhead. “They’re stayin’ pretty well on their side of the Ohio since Colonel Clark showed ’em at Kaskasky and Cahoky out in the Illinois country what a whuppin’ he’s laid up for ’em if ever they set foot on Kentucky soil again.”
“Governor Jefferson, looks like he showed good sense gettin’ the Virginny legislature to pass that Land Law,” said Jonathan.
Yes, agreed the deputy, Tom Jefferson was a smart man all right. The Virginia Land Law, passed the year before, in 1779, giving corn-patch claimants like Jonathan a title to their land was meant, first of all, to pour a little money into the Virginia treasury, said the deputy. Virginia was drained as dry as a creek bottom in a droughty year, carrying on more than her share of the war against England. The Land Law meant to be fair and square to everybody who wanted to settle on Virginia’s waste and unappropriated lands in Kentucky County, of course, said the deputy, but there were sharpsters a-plenty loose in the world who were willing to
do both Virginia and the corn-patch claimants out of their land.
Take the Transylvania Company, said the deputy. The Transylvania Company hired Daniel Boone to hack out a wilderness road and build a big fort at the mouth of Otter Creek. Then they called in delegates from all the Kentucky settlements—called it a convention—and wrote out a passel of rules for folks to go by. If it hadn’t been for George Rogers Clark, who had a nose like a bloodhound for smelling out trouble, the Transylvania Company would have slipped a rope in the shape of British-smelling quitrents about the neck of every settler coming into Kentucky. But lucky for Jonathan Venable, and everybody else wanting to claim Kentucky land as free men, Clark got on to the wildcat schemes of the Transylvanians and cooked their goose with the Virginia legislature. George Rogers Clark was a smart man, he said. A mighty smart man, if he could keep his head.
But the Transylvania Company was just a drop in a piggin to all the speculators in the world who at that minute were making sheep’s eyes at Kentucky, said the deputy. One company had been organized in England to grab up Kentucky land, he said. Another land company up in New York was doing its dead level best to persuade the Continental Congress to pass a law requiring Virginia to give up her western lands. Did anybody need to ask why? Hardly, said the deputy. While Virginia was down on her knees in a financial way, it was a mighty good time for New York to do her out of her western lands. And who could blame New York? There wasn’t a man living who wouldn’t like to cut himself off a slice of rich western lands. Hadn’t old Ben Franklin and his boy tried to get a grant of western lands north of the Ohio a few years before? And George Washington—wasn’t he pretty well fixed? And Patrick Henry. Governor Henry had himself fixed for life with all his western lands. He himself, the deputy said, had pre-empted a thousand acres and was saving for more.
“Looks like Tom Jefferson, since he took over the governorship, has set out to reform the whole system,” said the deputy.
“All I ask of him, I reckon,” said Jonathan, “is that he let folks alone. Jist let ever’ feller govern hisself.”
“That’s all mighty fine,” warned the deputy, “as long as things run along to suit folks. But let people head into trouble, and right away they begin to wonder, where’s the government. And between you and me, Venable, Kentucky’s likely to see a heap of trouble before ever’body’s got the piece of black land he thinks is a-comin’ to him. Ever’ patch of land I survey, seems like I spy another loophole in that Land Law.”
“Money scarce through here?” asked Jonathan.
The deputy halted at a branch flowing through the woods.
“Depends on what you mean when you say ‘money,’” he said, as he waited for his horse to drink. “If you mean that Continental currency they’re coinin’ at Philadelphy, the woods is full of that paper. But it won’t buy a thing. Not a dawgone thing. One dollar specie in Kentucky today’s wuth five hundred dollars Continental paper money. I reckon the Virginny legislature was pretty smart when it said this Kentucky land had to be paid for in hard specie. I hear over in North Caroliny where you come from a feller has to take Continental money if it’s offered him in exchange, else he’s considered an enemy to the country and dealt with accordin’. Folks are runnin’ away from their debtors, I hear, to keep from havin’ to accept the wuthless paper.”
“I reckon hit ain’t quite that bad,” Jonathan told him. “Though hit was bad enough when we left, an’ worsenin’ by the day.”
“Feller in here from New Bern just last week said the North Caroliny legislature’s talkin’ of raisin’ the tax rate to twelve pence a pound valuation in that state,” said the deputy, “and levyin’ all sorts of special taxes on single men, and slaves, and Dunkards and Mennonites and Quakers.”
“I ain’t heard that,” said Jonathan.
“Said North Caroliny hadn’t been able to keep her delegates in the Congress at Philadelphy except by fits and starts, because the treasury’s as empty as a young un’s stockin’ the day after Christmas. And North Caroliny’s the cow’s tail when it comes to payin’ for this war.”
“I reckon hit is,” agreed Jonathan.
“Ain’t much British money left through here,” the deputy went on. “Now, if you’re lookin’ for real money that’ll stand anybody’s acid,” he added, reaching into his shirt bosom and taking out a pouch, “you want this here coin.” He held up a Spanish milled dollar.
“Some of these others ain’t so bad, either,” he said, as he emptied the pouch into his palm and displayed one at a time a Portuguese Joe and a Half Joe, a Spanish doubloon and a pistoreen, and two silver wedges of coin. “This here’s the new Kentucky currency,” he laughed, holding up one of the wedges. “We needed change, so folks took to dividin’ Spanish dollars into eight bits for change. These two bits are wuth quarter of a Spanish milled dollar.
“Looks like the Spanish have got the soundest money circulatin’,” he went on. “And the soundest government, judgin’ by the way their empire’s spreadin’ like fire in a canebrake all up along the Mississippi since they took over from the French. Money’s like a pulse. You can always tell if a government’s healthy or ailin’ by what its money’ll buy in the market. And when you try passin’ off some of that Continental paper in Kentucky, you learn double quick how bad off the Continental Congress is. It’s campin’ in the buryin’ ground, I’d say, with one foot danglin’ in a bury hole.”
“Any chance of a feller pre-emptin’ a thousand acres of land before hit’s all gone?” asked Jonathan. “Or the price skyrockets?”
“It all depends,” said the deputy, clucking to his horse as Jonathan cut out through the woods again, “on whether or not you can scare up four hundred dollars specie to pay into the Virginny treasury. That’s the government price for a thousand acres. Any feller that can lay his hands on four hundred dollars somewhere, and swap it for Kentucky land, ’ll be mighty rich some day. But a body can’t just beat four hundred dollars of anybody’s money—British or Spanish or even Continental—out of the bushes. If you had corn to sell now, Venable, you’d strike it mighty rich. Feller come into the Fort last week with five bushels of corn and sold it for two hundred dollars a bushel. Folks nearly scalped him, they was that starved for bread. Happen to know old Tilly Balance out your way? Lonesome Tilly, folks call him.”
“Heard of him,” said Jonathan.
How queer, thought Stephanie, that her pappy had never mentioned to the Venables that they were to have neighbors in Kentucky.
“Some say he’s hexed,” said the deputy. “One feller come into the Fort t’other day and said he’d seen Lonesome Tilly crossin’ Salt River on steppin’ stones nobody else could find. And another said he seen him one day runnin’ along in the tops of trees for all the world like a squirrel. And Jim Snodgrass, he says he’s seen Lonesome Tilly charm a rattlesnake till its rattles was as limber as water. But I’ve never heard tell that he put a spell on anybody. Just quare. Quare as a buzzard squattin’ out here in the woods by his lonesome. Don’t say a solitary word. You say there’s a spring on your land, Venable?”
“Right down close to the river,” said Jonathan.
“We might as well begin surveyin’ there,” announced the deputy. “A spring’s a sort of natural landmark.”
On through the woods they went, the warm, still air of May close about them. Stephanie, trudging along, busied herself with trying to ferret out the reasons why her pappy, after his summers in Kentucky, had harped all the time on the blackness and the fatness of the land, and had said so little about the sullying shadows that crisscrossed it like crow tracks crisscrossing new-fallen snow. But her pappy had never had a nose for smelling out trouble before he got to it, Stephanie realized.
Shadows or no shadows, however, land sharpsters and red men or no, Kentucky was every jot and tittle as fine a place as Jonathan had claimed, she could plainly see. The air was heavy with the sweet, heady smell of wild grapes in bloom. Pawpaw trees and hickory nut trees and chestnut trees were everywher
e, and never would the Venables go hungry, if a body could believe all the tales the deputy told of turkey flocks so huge they blotted out the sun when they flew, of bears and deer and elk so thick they trampled one another down. And as for buffaloes, there were so tarnal many of them critters, the deputy said, that some folks shot them just for the hump, and some for the tongue, and some for no reason at all but to see if they could hit a target in the eye, and left the rest a-lying for the buzzards and the carrion crows.
But it wasn’t going to be the pleasantest thing in the world, Stephanie reckoned, having a hexed old man living on the edge of the Venable claim.
4. Deed to the Land
A little less than two hours by the sun after leaving Harrod’s Fort, Jonathan Venable came to a sudden stop.
“Well, folks,” he announced, “here’s the Venable claim. Here’s whar I cleared for my corn patch two years back.”
Stephanie set her kettle down and looked about her, a qualmish feeling boiling up in her stomach, as if she had lost her foothold and had turned a somersault off one of the high Appalachian peaks. This wasn’t the Garden of Eden she had brought herself to imagine after seeing how her pappy’s plain, homespun words in praise of Kentucky needed a passel of embroidery stitches to make them match the wide, bouqueted earth. This was nothing but a little bitty square of land crowded on every side by ancient oaks and popples, choked with sprouts and whips and tall weeds, and with little to bear witness to Jonathan’s sojourn in the land except a few girdled trees.
“Who made corn in the year 1778,” the surveyor had read from the warrant. The Land Commissioners had set great store by that corn planting, making it the cornerstone of Jonathan’s right to the land. But nowhere was there a sign of the unharvested crop.
“Well, Berthy?” said Jonathan.
For a minute Bertha stood at the edge of the clearing, gazing at the river that showed through the tree butts on the west, locating the spot where a spring bubbled out of the ground.
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