“I’m sure—I’m sure much obliged,” Noel muttered.
“Not at all,” said the surveyor. “And tell your pappy not to worry.”
Hurriedly Noel and Stephanie turned and walked across the square and through the big gates of the stockade, no longer paying mind to land speculators and land-hungry families and their comings and goings and doings. Outside the Fort they began to run as fast as Noel could run with a long rifle on his shoulder, never stopping for breath until they were deep within the woods.
“Reckon what book the preacher feller’ll bring, Noel?” asked Stephanie, sensing that the notion was almost too grand to be bandied about in words.
“Maybe Pilgrim’s Progress,” said Noel. “I’d sure like Pilgrim’s Progress. Uncle Lucien told me about that one.”
It was like a secret that they took from some hiding place and looked at for a minute, then hid away again. Not another word did they say about the book.
“I sure wish we had a deed, carryin’ it to Pappy,” said Stephanie after a while. “He’s goin’ to be mighty uneasy when we tell him what the surveyor said.”
“He’ll worry till he gets his hands on the deed, for certain,” agreed Noel. “But supposin’ the surveyor had given us a deed, Steffy. It ain’t so simple as that.”
“What d’you mean, Noel?” she asked, feeling afraid. Noel carried dark knowledge in his head, always, she reflected.
“Do you know who owns this land, Steffy?” asked Noel.
“Virginny, of course,” she said.
“And the Virginny legislature passes a Land Law statin’ on what terms a man can buy Kentucky County land, and how much he has to pay for it. We’ll even say nobody else claims Pappy’s land, and he gets a deed to it. All right. But how did Virginny come by the land?”
“Virginny—Virginny’s always had it,” said Stephanie, not quite sure of her ground. “His Majesty granted it to her.”
“That’s just it,” said Noel. “His Majesty granted it to her. But what’s to keep His Majesty from takin’ it back, if he wins this war? If the British win this war, Steffy, His Majesty and not the Virginny legislature’ll tell Pappy what he can have and what he can’t have. His Majesty’ll tell Pappy how much he’s goin’ to be taxed and what little he can keep for himself. He’ll tell Pappy when to bow and scrape before his bigwigs, and we’ll never get our chance to know what it’s like to be free and to make our own laws and run our own government. That’s why I wanted to join Marion, Steffy,” he confided. “That’s why I want to join him more than ever now. There ain’t many men seein’ straight in this country right now. Don’t you know that’s what the deputy’s talk added up to?”
They walked a long way in silence before Noel spoke again.
“Folks are too busy scandalizin’ the Continental Congress,” he said. “They’re all tryin’ to get their hands on hard Spanish money. They’re grabbin’ up Kentucky land while it’s cheap, but doin’ precious little to keep it free. Folks are too blind, Steffy, and too scared. They’re a little hexed, a lot of ’em are. And not one in a hundred of ’em, I reckon, has ever thought what it’d be like if we win our chance. Or, for that matter, if we lose it.”
Fear settled heavily on Stephanie. In the Back Country she had occasionally picked up a scrap of talk that terrorized her. Savannah taken by the British … houses looted … patriots shot … Old Man Carpenter standing and shaking his head when British soldiers tried to make him take the oath of allegiance to His Majesty.… Old Man Carpenter hanged.… Cornwallis bringing three thousand men from New York.… Cornwallis pounding at the defenses of Charleston.
Now Noel’s talk terrified her in the same way.
“What’ll happen to us, Noel?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows. I only know Kentucky ain’t free yet, not for all the warrants in the blockhouse.”
“Can we do somethin’ about it?” she begged him.
“Some day,” he promised her. “Wherever people are chained, there’ll come a chance some day to break the chains, I reckon. That’s what Uncle Lucien says.”
“Whenever that chance comes, Noel—”
“Whenever it comes close enough, I’m a-goin’,” said Noel.
Stephanie felt suddenly very proud of him. The faith with which she believed in him was every whit as stout as the faith with which he believed in Francis Marion, and in the cause for which Marion, under orders from General Washington, commanded a few stragglers who believed, while most of the world doubted.
“Whenever the time comes for you to go, Noel,” she promised, “I’ll help you.”
5. Lonesome Tilly
Long before sunup the next morning the Venables rose from their pine bough pallets, stretched themselves, and set to work. Noel went to the edge of the clearing to call up the pigs and the chickens, to count the sheep, and unhobble the horse.
Some day they would fence in a pasture for the critters, said Jonathan. And after a year or two when they could raise enough corn to fatten pigs, they’d build a rail pen to keep the troublesome hogs in at night. Until the Venables got a shelter over their own heads, however, and vittles on their table, dumb animals would have to run free and forage through the woods. But their freedom was as studded with danger as a skunk cabbage was studded with spots.
As long as the wolves had plenty of deer for breakfast, dinner, and supper, and baby fawns for light snacks between meals, Jonathan reckoned the sheep would be safe. But nobody could tell when a bear might pounce on one of the pigs, wrap him in his forelegs, and make off with him, running like a man, through the woods. The deputy said he once saw a bear running two-legged that way, toting a wriggling pig in his forelegs faster than a man could follow.
Stephanie untethered Brownie and milked her in a corner of the clearing. She sighed with relief as the last of the pigs came loping in answer to Noel’s “Sho, pig! Sho, pig! Pig! Pig! Pig!” and turned her thoughts to other matters.
“I aim to plant my apple seed today,” she told Noel.
“Whereabouts?” he asked.
“I haven’t decided,” Stephanie told him.
“Grandmammy’s tree was planted right beside the door of their old house,” Noel told her. “It was bloomin’ when I left Charleston. Steppin’ outside the door was like steppin’ out into a perfumed cloud. And the bees were poppin’ in and out of that tree like popcorn.”
“My tree’ll bloom that way, too,” said Stephanie. “It sure will be a pretty sight, won’t it, bloomin’ here in the wilderness every springtime? But I don’t aim to call it ‘The Tree of St. Jean de Maurienne,’” she added. “I aim to call it ‘The Tree of Freedom.’ Your kind of freedom.”
“A Tree of Freedom’s apt to grow bitter fruit,” Noel told her. “Sometimes mighty costly fruit.”
“I know,” said Stephanie.
All the Venable young uns knew from Bertha the story of the bitter, costly apples Marguerite de Monchard’s tree had borne.
When the de Monchards fled their country and their biggety king, Bertha told the Venable young uns, because they refused to forsake their religion and make slaves of their consciences, they thought it mighty poor grace to begin enslaving others as soon as they found refuge in a new world, as many of the Huguenots who had fled France before them had done. The de Monchards looked on with sickening heart as broad rice fields turned the simple holdings of their Huguenot neighbors into estates, as fashionable country seats strutted up where simple Huguenot cottages had stood.
Had the liberty-loving Huguenots tended the rice and swept the mansion floors with their own hands, well and good, Bertha said. But no, they bought black men and women off the auction block in Charleston. In time a Huguenot came to be known by the number of slaves he owned. Black gold, he called his slaves. The black men and women bent their backs in the hot, swampy rice fields, and swept the mansion floors, cooked the vittles, and shooed the flies off their Huguenot masters and mistresses, while the sting and the black sorrow of sla
very seeped into them like a poison.
The de Monchards were a stubborn lot, Bertha told her young uns. Proud and stubborn. It was told of Marguerite that one day she and her pappy went walking through the Charleston market place, and heard an auctioneer’s loud, raucous rigmarole, parading the salable qualities of a big Gambian Negro standing chained on the auction block. The Gambian was as strong as a brute ox for field labor, barked the auctioneer; he was docile; he had had the smallpox; he was already branded with two circles, one above the other, on his right buttock; he ought to bring not a shilling less than fifty pounds; if cash were offered, he might be had ten per cent cheaper, and rice and indigo might be used in place of specie.
Marguerite de Monchard was sixteen then. At that point in the transaction, it was told of her that she broke through the crowd of buyers and bystanders and, standing before the auctioneer, screamed at him that he was no better than the tyrant who ruled France, and that wherever he went, deep, black shame ought to go with him that he could traffic in human beings as if they were cattle.
Annoyed men, who couldn’t hear the auctioneer’s description of the Gambian above her outburst, caught her and handed her, furious and outraged, to her pappy. Slowly the two of them made their way out of the tittering crowd and across the market square, Marguerite sobbing as she went.
That night the de Monchards made an agreement. They would go to the slave market themselves the next morning, they decided, and pay in cash for as many slaves as their money would buy, and give such slaves their freedom.
It was a long story Bertha told the Venable young uns of the slaves whose freedom was purchased by the de Monchards. But in the end, Bertha said, the de Monchards got licked for their pains. When their money was gone, they found most of their friends gone, too, while the dent they had made in the institution of slavery was so little a body couldn’t see it even with a spyglass trained on it. Then they packed up their belongings and started north in the direction of the Tar River in North Carolina, where, they had heard, freedom-loving folks called Quakers had settled. They would seek asylum and new fields to cultivate among the Quakers, they decided.
Lucien, however, stayed in the old home because he was keeping a school for boys in Charleston, and he had a notion he might deal slavery a few blows in the schoolroom. It was in the Quaker settlement on the Tar that Grandmammy Marguerite had married Grandpappy Linney.
“Grandmammy’s tree cost her a sight, I reckon,” said Stephanie, picturing the sunny, pleasant French village of St. Jean de Maurienne which the de Monchards had had to flee, and the spacious, broad-verandahed South Carolina houses, the broad, low-lying rice fields, and the many black slaves on which they had turned their backs. “But Mammy’s tree in the Back Country—it wasn’t so costly.”
“Sometimes freedom’s like a light you have to keep a-tendin’, day in, day out,” Noel said. “Nobody tries specially to blow it out. But it gets dimmer and dimmer if somebody ain’t always tendin’ the oil. That’s what Mammy’s done. She’s tended the oil. And the wick. Why do you think she dinged at Pappy all summer to let me have a little schoolin’ when Preacher Craig norated around that he’d teach a school on the Waxhaw fall before last? And why do you think she outtalked Pappy, and sent me to Uncle Lucien last winter? Know what Governor Jefferson’s doin’?” he asked. “Uncle Lucien says he’s talkin’ up free education for everybody.”
“What’s free education?” asked Stephanie.
“Schools where the scholars don’t have to pay.”
“But somebody has to pay,” said Stephanie, recollecting the goose feathers Bertha had traded to Preacher Craig in exchange for Noel’s brief schooling.
“Oh, everybody’ll pay all right,” Noel told her. “Everybody that has property, that is. Property owners’ll be taxed for free schools.”
“Taxed?” said Stephanie. “Well, Pappy sure ain’t goin’ to take to that.”
After breakfast, Stephanie took the grubbing hoe, and on the east edge of the clearing turned up leaf mold, and crumbled it with her fingers to make a cool, black bed in which to lay her apple seed.
“What you plantin?” asked Willie.
“A Tree of Freedom,” Stephanie told him.
“What kind of tree’s a Tree of Freedom?” asked Willie.
“A tree that grows sometimes sweet apples, sometimes bitter ones,” said Stephanie.
“Humph!” sniffed Willie. “You’re gullin’.”
That morning Jonathan began cutting down trees for the Venable cabin.
“Shucks, now!” he said, as he picked up his ax. “If a body jist had a passel of neighbors, we’d get this cabin up in three shakes of a sheep’s tail.”
Every Venable knew, however, that Jonathan would be skittish if he had enough neighbors to help raise a cabin. A few neighbors he liked, and after a long spell of lonesomeness, he warmed toward folks the way a freezing man warms toward a fire. But if, on some winter morning when all the leaves were off the trees, a body, by standing on a rise of ground, could look a far piece up the river and down the river, and see blue smoke curling from half a dozen chimneys, then Jonathan would likely begin to complain that he felt crowded. Then his feet would begin to itch, and nothing would cure the itching except a week’s hunt in the woods by his lonesome, and looking out over wild country where no white man had ever set foot.
The Venables working by themselves could raise a cabin in a couple of weeks, but not the sort of cabin Bertha wanted. A puncheon floor Bertha wanted, and a window, a cockloft, and a chimney made of rocks.
To all these fancy notions Jonathan raised objections. First of all, it was a piece of foolishness, he said, to build so fine a cabin unless he had a deed to the land on which he aimed to build it. Then, there wasn’t time to raise a regular Tidewater mansion, he told Bertha. Time was short, considering all a body had to do before winter overtook them. It was enough to get four walls up and a roof over their heads.
“And, besides,” he added, “a puncheon floor’s a hotbed of splinters. The young uns’ll be nussin’ festered feet all winter.”
“What are you aimin’ to do with the skins from all the bears and buffaloes you aim to kill but lay ’em on the floor?” Bertha asked him.
“And a rock chimney!” Jonathan complained. “Mud and sticks are good enough for most chimneys around here, I notice.”
“A rock chimney ain’t tinder like a stick chimney,” Bertha reminded him. “And anyway, it ain’t as if the river bed wasn’t choked with rocks to be had for the pickin’ up.”
Jonathan gave in grudgingly.
“You can leave the chinkin’ out of the walls,” Bertha said, thinking to lighten the labor of raising so fine a cabin with so few hands. “Fall will be time enough to daub the cracks, I reckon.”
As long as they slept on the pine bough pallets and cooked their vittles in the clearing, it seemed to Stephanie they were only resting in their long, weary journey from the Back Country, and any morning they might reload Job and head west again. But the first log laid flush against the rectangle of earth which had been cleared of every kind of growth, and raked clean as a floor, was like a Venable taproot working its way down deep into the black Kentucky earth, and holding the Venables firmly in that spot.
With Jonathan and Noel taking turns, a chop, chop, chop, slow, but steady as the ticking of a clock, enlivened the words all day long, as the ax bit out of ancient tree butts great white chips smelling sweet of sap. Popple trees and oak trees Jonathan chose for the walls of the cabin, and oak for the floors, while he marked for shakes to cover the cabin a straight-grained oak whose bushy crown seemed to be brushing the clouds across the sky. Jonathan put Rob to work hacking the bark off the felled trees with a hatchet. Stephanie and Willie he sent to the river to hunt chimney rocks.
Willie wasn’t a sight of help, but he filled out the letter of the wilderness law Jonathan and Bertha laid down for the Venable young uns. A young un under no circumstances was to go by his lonesome into the woods, Jonat
han said. Never. Nor out of earshot of the clearing. Two must go together. There was no end of bears in the woods, and the wilderness could still hide red men. It didn’t matter a piny woods Tory, said Bertha, how sure and certain a body was that the Indians had all been driven north of the Ohio, nor how much confidence the deputy placed in the man named George Rogers Clark. It paid to be cautious, at least as long as Clark was off traipsing about the Illinois country where the deputy said he was.
“Two sets of eyes are sharper than one,” Bertha summed things up. “And two sets of ears are keener than one.”
“But two sets of legs ain’t faster than one, Mammy,” Rob told her.
“What are your eyes and ears but leg-savin’ devices?” she asked him.
Stephanie and Willie traipsed down the steep slope to the river and took a long look across to satisfy themselves that red men weren’t hiding in the cane and the willows on the far bank.
“It’s big, flat rocks we want, Willie,” said Stephanie. “You be the spy and hunt ’em out, and I’ll come along and capture ’em.”
Along the river northward they went, Willie in front, wading in the shallow water along the bank, pointing out likely chimney stones. Stephanie waded after him, lugging to dry land such of his findings as appeared likely for a chimney, and piling them in a heap. Rob and Noel would carry the rocks up the hill when Jonathan was ready to build the chimney.
“How about knockin’ off for a rest, Willie?” Stephanie asked, when she had built six piles of rocks.
The notion suited Willie.
“Right back there in the woods is a big patch of wintergreen,” he said. “Pappy and I found it the other day. I’m goin’ to get some for us to eat.”
“You can’t go by your lonesome,” Stephanie told him.
“But it’s right through there,” he pointed. “You can might’ nigh see it from here.”
“Well,” said Stephanie grudgingly. “I reckon. As long as we can still hear the ax. But don’t be gone long. And holler if you want me.”
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