Tree of Freedom

by Rebecca Caudill

Hardly had the big trees closed around Willie when Stephanie began to wish he had not gone. A body never could tell what lay in wait for little shavers in the woods. A whole passel of things might happen to a young un besides having red men steal him and carry him off and keep him the rest of his days, and leave his pappy and his mammy and all his kinfolks wondering right down to their bury holes what had become of him. A rattlesnake with eyes like red-hot coals of fire and a body rising and falling like a gunsmith’s bellows, or a sluggish copperhead out looking for frogs, might fang him. A bear or a slinking wolf or a painter might make off with him. Eagles, too, folks said, sometimes swooped down and picked up young uns and flew straight to their nests in the tiptop of craggy mountains. The deputy said a bald eagle once, clean as a whistle, stole a little baby belonging to some folks settling on Otter Creek near Boone’s Fort.

  The sun was climbing high, Stephanie noticed. She sat on a big bald rock near the edge of the river with her feet dangling in the cool stream. The sun felt hot on her bare head. It warmed her tired shoulders through her cottonade dress, and made her sleepy.

  “Steffy!”

  From deep in the woods came Willie’s voice, so faint and smothered Stephanie could scarcely hear it. She stiffened with fear. Goose bumps broke out on her arms as she got to her feet.

  “Steff-ee! Come a-runnin’!”

  Through the woods she stumbled, afraid to go, afraid not to go.

  A stone’s throw from the river she spied Willie, making himself little behind a tree at the edge of a bed of May apples. It was plain to see that whatever was wrong, he wasn’t scared of anything.

  When he saw her peeping through the undergrowth, he made signs for her to come to him.

  “Looky!” he whispered, pointing to a near-by sycamore that stood dying of old age. “Up in that there hole. See?”

  Stephanie stared upward at the hole, twenty feet above the ground.

  “I don’t see anything,” she told him. She was about to tell him, too, not to scare her that way again, ever, as long as he lived, but he put his finger across his mouth as a warning to her to be quiet.

  “Keep a-lookin’,” he whispered.

  Stephanie fastened her eyes on the hole and waited.

  “Look out! She’s a-comin’!” whispered Willie, his voice smaller and more excited than ever.

  “I don’t see a thing!” grumbled Stephanie.

  “Sh-h-h! Look ’way up!” whispered Willie.

  Down through the trees to a limb of the sycamore plummeted a mammy wood duck, a slim, gray-brown bird with eyes bugged out with caution.

  “She shot out of that hole a while ago like a bullet,” whispered Willie. “She’s hidin’ somethin’ in there, I bet.”

  “Babies,” whispered Stephanie.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s baby time.”

  Cocking her head on one side, then on the other, the skittish duck rose from the limb, sailed straight for the tree trunk, and dropped out of sight into the hole. In a minute she was out again, and on the ground, prancing around, in the May apple bed, persuading in her high-pitched, wary, duck voice.

  “Pee, pee, pee, pee, pee!”

  Over and over she begged. Then she waited. Begged and waited.

  “That’s the way she was behavin’ when I called you,” Willie whispered, so low that Stephanie could scarcely make out the words he said. “I scared her, I reckon.”

  Stephanie, motionless, pursed her mouth as a sign to him to keep quiet. As still as shadows they stood, their bodies pressed close against the tree, waiting.

  Up flew the duck. Into the hollow of the sycamore she darted, then out again. Once more she dropped to the ground among the May apples and pranced nervously about.

  “Pee, pee, pee, pee, pee!”

  As they waited, her skittishness left her and she stopped her prancing. Standing shyly among the May apples, she began calling again, this time more plaintively.

  Stephanie nudged Willie. “Look in the hole!” she whispered.

  High on the edge of the hole balanced a little bitty ball of down, blackish and yellowish, blinking its eyes at the big, green, shady world.

  Willie leaned forward, but Stephanie held him back.

  “It can’t get down, Steffy!” whispered Willie, anxiety in his voice.

  “You wait and see,” Stephanie told him. “Little wild things can always make out. Just you be still and don’t scare the little mite.”

  The baby duckling perched on the edge of the hole a minute, listening to its mammy, turning its downy head first to one side, then to the other. Then, all of a sudden, it gave itself a shove into space, flapped its little bitty wings as hard as it could, hit the ground, bounced like an India rubber ball, righted itself, and tore in a waddling run on its brand-new feet through the May apple bed toward its mammy.

  “I’m goin’ to catch it,” whispered Willie. “I can have it for a pet, ’stid of a kitten.”

  “You got nothin’ to feed it,” said Stephanie. “Look! Here comes another.”

  A long time they waited, watching the hole while thirteen ducklings, one after the other, clambered to the edge of the hole, screwed up their courage to leap the long leap to the ground, and waddled after their mammy in the direction of the river.

  “Help me catch just one, Steffy!” begged Willie.

  “The little tykes don’t like to be caught,” she told him, coming out from behind the tree. “They’re too tender. You better just get a coon for a pet, like Mammy said. And we both better get back to our rocks.”

  She squatted to pick some leaves of wintergreen growing on the other side of the tree, but with the dark, waxy leaves halfway to her mouth, she stopped short, her body taut as a bowstring as she noticed a slight movement among the bushes. Her feet froze to the ground with terror. Before she could leap through the May apple bed and run for her life, dragging Willie by the hand, a queer old man looking like some strange wild critter of the woods stepped out in full view.

  Willie grabbed Stephanie around the knees and began to whimper.

  “Hush!” she scolded, trying to think.

  At least, she told herself above the wild thumping of her heart, the man wasn’t an Indian. And he didn’t carry a weapon—neither a knife, nor a rifle, nor a tomahawk.

  As reason came slowly back to her, she noticed that the man wasn’t a mite taller than Noel. His white hair that needed hackling fell about his shoulders, and his long dirty-white beard straggled down his chest. His arms and his feet were bare, and the few clothes he wore looked not so much like hunting shirt and breeches as a queer assortment of patches and tatters of varmint skin he had grown on himself. He stood staring first at Stephanie, then at Willie, with eyes as soft as a heifer’s in his rusty face—eyes, Stephanie noticed, that seemed to have stayed young while the rest of him grew hoary.

  Suddenly Stephanie remembered what Noel had told her: “When you meet up with Lonesome Tilly Balance, just say ‘Howdy,’ natural like.”

  She thought of the baby ducks screwing up their courage. Skittishly she screwed up her own.

  “Howdy!” she managed to say, scarcely above a whisper.

  The old man said never a word. He had his eyes fastened on Willie, and even when he turned and padded away, critter like, on his bare feet into the deep woods, he gazed over his shoulder at the young un until he was out of sight.

  “Who was that, Steffy?” whimpered Willie, still clinging to her.

  “That was Lonesome Tilly Balance,” she told him, her voice quavery with fright.

  Willie began to cry. “Will he hex us?” he asked.

  “No. Don’t you see you’re not hexed?” she scolded. “He—he was just watchin’ the ducks. Same as you. He likes ducks, apt as not.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “Home, I reckon.”

  “Where’s his home?”

  “Over yonder on his claim somewhere.”

  “What’s he doin’ on Pappy’s claim then?” ask
ed Willie. “These here are Pappy’s trees. I don’t want him to come here.”

  Leading Willie by the hand, Stephanie hurried toward the sound of the chopping, away from the river. She’d better tell her pappy about Lonesome Tilly, she decided.

  “He didn’t hurt anything, did he?” she asked, feeling braver as the sound of the chopping grew nearer.

  “He might have,” said Willie in a tearful voice, crowding against Stephanie in his eagerness not to be left behind, and glancing fearfully over his shoulder now and then.

  “But he didn’t,” Stephanie told him. “Don’t go out huntin’ for trouble, Willie. You can plague yourself to death that way. Like as not, Lonesome Tilly’s as genteel as—as a high-born Tidewater gentleman, if you’re genteel to him.”

  6. Visitors

  Jonathan rested his arms from chopping while he listened to Stephanie’s tale of the queer old man she and Willie had come upon in the woods. Rob laid down his hatchet, Noel left his frow cleaving a log, and both came closer to hear.

  “Looks like that’ll be Lonesome Tilly all right,” said Jonathan. “Deputy said he don’t talk. As long as the old codger don’t hurt nothin’…”

  Willie burst out crying, his salty tears streaming down his face like a fresh.

  “He’ll hex you, Pappy!” he sobbed.

  “Aw, apt as not, he’s like a snake, Willie,” offered Rob. “He won’t hurt you unless you step on him.”

  The next morning, as the Venables stood about the clearing eating squirrel meat and the heron eggs Rob had found in a nest of sticks in a thicket near the river, Jonathan turned to Bertha. “I reckon the rock pickin’ can wait till Noel can get at hit,” he said. “Hit mought not be safe for young uns to get out of earshot till we figger out this Lonesome Tilly.”

  “There’s plenty young uns can put their hands to closer home,” Bertha assured him. “I ’lowed I’d take the clothes down to the river this mornin’ and wash ’em. Steffy can help me, and Willie, you can watch Cassie and keep her out of the river.”

  It was hard for Stephanie to blot Lonesome Tilly out of her mind. As she stood knee-deep in the river, dousing Noel’s faded linsey shirt in the water, she kept recollecting how like a scared little wild critter, a ground hog or a coon, he had padded away into the woods. All morning he stayed in her mind, dulling her pleasure in the sound of the ax as logs were notched and made ready to skid into place on the wall of the cabin. Were the Venable young uns likely to be running across him every time they went into the woods looking for huckleberries or chinquapins, chestnuts or possum grapes, she wondered. And suppose one of them, unbeknownst, crossed the old man, got his dander up? What would happen then?

  When the sun was near the middle of the sky, Bertha sent Stephanie to the clearing to broil the pigeons Rob had snared in the woods that morning.

  “You’d better run with her, Willie,” Bertha said. “Cassie can play here on this big rock while I finish the washin’. I can keep an eye on her awhile.”

  Stephanie put Willie to gathering chips and dead twigs to lay on the coals of fire while she went to the spring for a piggin of water. No sooner had she dipped her piggin into the water, however, than she heard Willie shouting.

  “Steffy!” he screamed. “Steffy! Come a-runnin’! The chickens have scratched up your seed!”

  Water from the piggin sloshed on her skirt and drenched her bare feet as she ran up the hill toward the scene of the planting, but she was unmindful of her wet skirt slapping against her knees and clinging to her bare legs.

  “Oh, Willie!” she scolded, tearfully, as she set down the piggin. “Why didn’t you shoo ’em away?”

  “I did,” declared Willie. “When I saw ’em.”

  It was no time for complaining, Stephanie realized.

  “Help me look for the seed, Willie,” she commanded.

  Side by side they squatted on the ground. Hawklike they studied the disturbed leaf mold while Stephanie raked her fingers lightly through it, back and forth, back and forth.

  “Why didn’t I bring more than one seed?” she moaned, as a film of tears curtained her eyes. “What ever possessed me? I could have brought a hundred just as well.”

  Suddenly she stopped her searching, wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, and looked at Willie grimly.

  “Which chicken was doin’ the scratchin’?” she asked.

  “Josephine, I think,” Willie told her, indicating the speckled hen which they had named Josephine because of her coat of many colors. “Anyway, she was stretcthin’ her neck and swallerin’ when I looked,” he added.

  “Don’t tell things you didn’t see, Willie,” warned Stephanie.

  “I ain’t tellin’ things I didn’t see,” he said.

  Stephanie studied Josephine a minute.

  “Help me catch her, Willie!” she ordered.

  “What you goin’ to do with her?” he asked.

  “Take that seed away from her,” said Stephanie, grimly.

  “How’re you goin’ to do a thing like that?”

  “Don’t ask questions,” Stephanie blurted out at him, impatiently. “Just help catch her.”

  Ordinarily, catching the chickens was as simple as picking them up from underfoot. Now, however, Josephine, suspicious of their wariness, stopped her singing, dodged Stephanie’s grasping arm, and ran for her life through the underbrush into the woods.

  “Catch her, Willie! Catch her!” yelled Stephanie.

  Away they tore through the underbrush, Stephanie scurrying around the hen to head her off, Willie guarding as well as he could all ways of escape to the rear. Step by step they hemmed her in until, at last, Stephanie grabbed her by the tail.

  “Hold her!” she said to Willie, as she thrust the panicky chicken into his arms. “Sit down on the ground and hold her tight by the feet. And whatever you do, don’t turn loose.”

  “What you goin’ to do with her, Steffy?” asked Willie again.

  Stephanie had no time to answer questions. Running into the woods, she borrowed Noel’s hunting knife, then found among the household goods still heaped near the pine-bough pallets Bertha’s steel needle, threaded with a coarse linen thread, lying in its small basket woven of grasses.

  Hurrying back to Willie, she sat down beside him, turned Josephine upside down in his arms, and clenched her own hand over his small hand that held the hen’s feet.

  “Like that, Willie,” she told him. “Make out you’re a vise, and don’t let her move a claw. Now, grab her around the neck with your other hand and hold her head back.”

  “I’ll choke her,” objected Willie, taking the hen gingerly by the neck.

  “Don’t choke her. Just hold her tight enough to let her know you will choke her if she gets sassy with you.”

  “What if she flogs me?”

  “Let her flog! Anyway, only settin’ hens flog. Josephine’s too giddy to set and have a family.”

  Without more ado, Stephanie parted the feathers on Josephine’s lumpy craw, gritted her teeth, slit the craw with Noel’s knife, and emptied its contents into her skirt.

  “Ugh!” squirmed Willie.

  “Hold her!” warned Stephanie.

  When she had satisfied herself by poking her finger about in the craw that nothing remained, Stephanie took the needle and neatly overstitched the slit.

  “What if you kill her?” suggested Willie in an awed voice. “What’ll Mammy say when she’s dotin’ so mightily on eggs? An’ little bitty chickens?”

  Over and over Stephanie stitched, a frown puckering her pointed face. Even when she finished, and cut the thread with Noel’s knife, her blue eyes were clouded with fear of her own rashness. Gently she smoothed the feathers over the slit, and watched anxiously as she took the hen from Willie’s hands and set her on her feet.

  For a moment Josephine stood dazed—a long, anxious moment while she looked undecided as to whether she should live or die. Finally, she shook herself hard as if trying to wake up from a bad dream, and walked unconcernedl
y across the clearing.

  “She sure is a tough old bird!” decided Willie, watching her.

  Now that anxiety over Josephine had passed, Stephanie and Willie turned to the moist contents of the craw lying in Stephanie’s lap. Bugs they found, dead and halfdead, and the seeds of grasses.

  “There it is!” cried Willie. “See? That bug’s got it!”

  There, true as the gospel, was the seed of the Tree of Freedom, still satiny brown and none the worse for its misadventure, wrapped in the crumpled legs of a beetle.

  “You can help me plant it again now, Willie,” Stephanie said, “and this time I aim to pile brush on it so high that no thief on chicken’s legs’ll ever get in scratchin’ distance of it.”

  Hardly had they covered the seed with leaf mold once more when out of the woods from the direction of Harrod’s Fort came walking a stranger. Stephanie got to her feet, her heart pounding fast. He was not a buckskin, she noticed, such as a body might expect to meet up with in the wilderness, if he met anybody at all, nor a redskin, nor queer-looking like Tilly Balance. Nor did he look like a high-born Tidewater gentleman, though he wore the clothes of a gentleman—breeches buckled at the knees, low buckled shoes, long stockings, a long bright blue broadcloth shad-bellied coat, a satin waistcoat, a flowing cravat, and a low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat.

  “Howdy!” said the stranger, as he came across the clearing. His voice was raspy, like the sound of a rat-tail file on metal. His dark face was deeply pock-marked, and his small, hard eyes bored straight ahead of him like gimlets.

  “Howdy,” muttered Stephanie.

  “Run and fetch your pappy,” ordered the man, jerking his head in the direction of the chopping. “I have business with him.”

  Stephanie hurried into the woods, Willie at her heels. At her summons, the Venables came traipsing into the clearing, Stephanie crowding close behind her pappy, Rob and Noel following with hatchet and frow, Cassie clinging to her mammy’s hand, and Willie hanging on to her skirt.

  “You Jonathan Venable?” rasped the stranger, eyeing Jonathan. “My name’s Frohawk. Adam Frohawk.”

  “Howdy,” said Jonathan, cold as an icicle. The other Venables strung out in a line beside Jonathan and stared at the outlandish stranger.