Tree of Freedom

by Rebecca Caudill

  Stephanie wished she could look inside Noel’s mind and see what thoughts lay hidden there. She found it hard to hack out a road to the thing she wanted to ask him.

  “Noel,” she finally blurted out, “you aim to go back to Caroliny and help Francis Marion, don’t you?”

  “Somebody has to help him,” Noel said. “Else we’re goin’ to lose our chance. And then, apt as not, we’ll never know what it’s like to be a free people. We’ll always wish we could have known, but we’ll never know.”

  “If you want to go, Noel,” Stephanie said after a moment, “if you want to strike out today while nobody’s watchin’, I think you ought to.”

  For a distance Noel trudged ahead, making no answer. Then, setting down his kettle of eggs and shifting his heavy rifle to his other shoulder, he turned and looked at Stephanie. It was a caution the pleasure that lighted his face.

  “But it ain’t that easy, Steffy,” he told her. “A body can’t do much by his lonesome. When I struck out the other time, I knew right where I’d find a nest of patriots I could fight alongside.”

  “Do you mean, Noel,” she asked, feeling she had read none of his notions right, “do you mean you don’t aim to go and fight?”

  Noel smiled at the seriousness in her face.

  “Of course, Steffy, I mean to go,” he said, “when it’s plain where I ought to go to. It’s a long ways to Caroliny from here. It may be I’ll be needed closer to home before us patriots win our chance to govern ourselves.”

  “Do you mean you think war’s comin’ to Kentucky?” she asked.

  “It might,” said Noel. “Or Kentucky might go to meet the war. As long as George Rogers Clark’s loose, that can always happen. I’m just bidin’ my time.”

  “When that time comes, Noel,” she promised, “I’ll help you get away.”

  Again they trudged silently, each understanding the other.

  “My Tree of Freedom’s growin’ like somethin’ possessed,” Stephanie told him after a while.

  “So I noticed,” he said.

  “I wish I could do somethin’ for America,” she confided, “like you’re goin’ to.”

  “Well, ain’t you?” Noel asked. “Servin’ your country’s mostly honest work, Uncle Lucien says. And thinkin’ ahead. You’re doin’ your share to found a new settlement in America, only you want to be on your guard like the de Monchards, not to make any deal with slavery of any sort. There’s lots of slavery, Steffy, besides that you find in a black skin. And as for your chances, before His Majesty’s redcoats quit plaguin’ us, I ’spect you’ll have plenty of chances to do somethin’ for America. I aim to keep my ears open at the Fort today,” he added. “May be able to run down some later news about Charleston than the Pigots brung.”

  There was no salt to be had at the Fort, they soon learned, but Noel traded the eggs for powder. A pack train of salt had been brought into the Fort a week ago, they were told, but not a grain of it was left. People were elbowing their way into Kentucky so fast, and all of them needing salt, somebody ought to open up a trading post and furnish salt to the settlers, folks said.

  Talk of a trading post was only part of what Stephanie and Noel heard, however. Everywhere they went—to the spring for a drink of water, to the blockhouse to ask the surveyor if the preacher feller had been back to the Fort with his books, to William Poague’s workshop to watch the fashioning of black gum ox yokes—they heard talk of Kentucky land. It was like a camp meeting song, thought Stephanie, the first line of which had been given out their first night in the Fort, grown louder with every verse.

  Land was getting scarce, folks said. Oh, there was still plenty of mulatto land. But who wanted second-rate land? Supposing all the first-rate land was pre-empted. If a man had plenty of money, folks said, he could buy up land from holders of old treasury warrants and tomahawk claims by paying sky-high prices for it. Let land get out of the government’s hands, and looked like it turned to gold in the twinkling of an eye. If a feller had land, they said, he ought to hang on to it by the skin of his teeth, for as sure as ever this infernal fracas with His Majesty was settled one way or another, land values in Kentucky’d go skyrocketin’ higher than ever. And the smart folks’d be rich.

  Once in a great while they caught snatches of a different kind of talk.

  The way the British were stirring up the red men to raid Kentucky settlements didn’t look a bit healthy, agreed the men talking in front of the schoolhouse. Especially between Harrod’s Fort and the Falls on the Ohio, hardly a week went by without somebody getting scalped. Looked like the safest people in Kentucky were those who had built their cabins off in the woods by their lonesome, southwards of the Fort. The red men weren’t fooling with them. They were scouting for big game and lots of it. Colonel Bowman had sent out spies to ferret out what the British and the Indians were up to, the men said, and the news the spies brought back didn’t sound a bit good. The British might be trying to get even with George Rogers Clark for cooking their goose in the Illinois country, they said. Or they might be trying to draw off a lot of Virginia soldiers to defend Kentucky, so Cornwallis could make a quick killing of George Washington’s army. It was hard to tell what was going on in their minds. But whichever way the British were figuring, it looked like trouble. Now if only Clark’d come back from the Illinois country …

  Stephanie sharpened her ears at this talk of George Rogers Clark. No telling when Clark’d get back to Kentucky, said one man. Rumors were flying thick as milkweed seeds that the colonel had got him a dulce, the sister of the Spanish governor over in St. Louis. Love might make him hang overly long around the French settlements of Cahoky and Kaskasky and Fort St. Vincent.

  Near the doorway of William Poague’s workshop Noel and Stephanie came upon half a dozen men, one of them talking, the others nodding their heads as if what he said was gospel.

  Looked like the war was petering out fast, mighty fast, the man said. He was a queer mixture of a man, noticed Stephanie, half Tidewater, half buckskin in his loose-fitting linsey shirt and his unkempt blue breeches buckled at the knee.

  Every report out from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia looked gloomier than the one before, he norated. Back in January the Board of War had reported that, in spite of the fact the soldiers in the patriot army were half naked, it couldn’t rig ’em out with any more clothes. Not even buckskins. Why? No money. Back in March the Commissary General of Issues announced there wasn’t enough bread on hand nor anywhere in sight to feed the army ten days. Why? As usual, no money. And why should the Congress be reporting such gloomy news? Why didn’t it set things right, collect the money for clothes and food instead of sitting there in Philadelphia strumming such a sorry tune? Looked like Congress was a sorry mess of stew.

  And there was General Washington, said the man. It was hard to ferret out what was in the mind of Congress when they kept a man like Washington at the head of the army. A war was going on, to be sure, but General Washington wasn’t fighting it. He hadn’t fought a battle in two years. Looked like Washington’s army was about washed up, he said.

  The man would have said more, for he had got such a running start sledding the country downhill that it was hard for him to stop. At that minute, however, a man who was having a bridle mended in William Poague’s workshop, ducked his head under the low doorsill and joined the group.

  “You say the Board of War can’t clothe the army, and the Commissary General of Issues can’t feed it?” he inquired.

  The crowd fell back to make room for him. He was tall and dark, and his fine clothes that had the look of the Tidewater about them were wrinkled from long hours in a saddle. His manner, Stephanie noticed, was genteel and high-born to match his clothes, and as he talked, his keen black eyes bored through the bearer of bad news.

  No, said he, the Commissary General of Issues couldn’t feed the patriot army. There had been months when Washington’s soldiers had scarcely tasted a vegetable, or salt, or vinegar, but it wasn’t because t
here weren’t vegetables and salt and vinegar to be had. It was because farmers and merchants from one end of the country to the other, all up and down the seaboard from Massachusetts to Georgia, could get more money and hard money by selling to the British. Traitor money, the man called it. Judas money. The selling of a dream as old as man for a bag of turnips.

  And the Board of War couldn’t clothe the army, either, the gentleman agreed. George Washington’s army had never been outfitted properly. Sometimes Washington hadn’t been able to march his men because too many of them hadn’t enough rags to cover their nakedness.

  And Washington, true enough, said the gentleman, when he wasn’t just sitting still, was retreating. But if all General Washington had to do was fight the British, maybe he could get on with the war. Read some of Washington’s letters to Congress, said he, and a body would have some notion of what the General was up against.

  “Yeah,” sneered the first man, “I’ve heard the gineral’s good at writin’ to Congress. But what the country needs is a gineral who can fight. The billydoos mought be left to somebody else.”

  “Maybe you know what General Washington complains about!” snapped the gentleman, his black eyes blazing clear back in their sockets. He looked exactly the way Noel was going to look some day when he found his tongue and could speak out what was inside him, thought Stephanie.

  “Desertions, for one thing,” said the gentleman. “As long as three years ago Washington warned Congress about desertions. Too many Europeans in his army—Germans and Irish and British. Every three out of four deserters that turned up in Philadelphia the winter Washington quartered at Valley Forge were born the other side of the Atlantic. Last year in the Eleventh Pennsylvania Regiment, the Old Countrymen outnumbered the American-born two to one. Why, half of all the regiment were born in Ireland!”

  The first man tried to get in a word, but the gentleman gave him no chance.

  “And who else is in Washington’s army?” he flashed out. “Loyalists. Prisoners of war. Convicts. Deserters from the enemy. Bounty jumpers. These are the men the states have sent to Washington. They’re the men he’s supposed to save the cause of freedom with. The rag-tag of the country. Give General Washington a decent-sized army of men who know the difference between freedom and tyranny, and who care, and he’d have Cornwallis whipped by morning. But he’ll hardly get that kind of army when the rest of the country’s interested more in getting its hands on money, and on black Kentucky land, than it is in freedom.”

  The man was like forked lightning, thought Stephanie, making everybody cower.

  “The recruiting officers are not to be blamed for the sort of men they send General Washington, either,” said the gentleman. “Naturally, the recruiting officers are hard put to it to supply an army when the citizens of a country can’t see beyond their own tight, safe little world. It’s not only Washington’s army,” he flashed out. “It’s the American people—you, and I, and everybody else—that’s about washed up. And that fine dream of freedom we had back in 1775 is about washed up with us. We may have health enough within ourselves to save our cause. I don’t know. The chances are we’ll have to have help from somewhere else. Maybe the French’ll be good enough to loan it, though lately the French have talked out of both sides of their mouth. They’re coming to help us, they say out of one side of their mouth. They’re sending men, and ships, and hard money, they say. And out of the other side they’re saying, maybe they’ll make a separate peace with England. Any half-wit knows what a separate peace between France and England means—England with most of the seaboard bottled up and able to hold on to it. Spain claiming all the Mississippi country, right up to the Appalachians. That means Kentucky, too. Kentucky’ll be under Spanish rule, if France makes a separate peace. And that nightmare, gentlemen—Kentucky under the flag of the Spanish gold diggers—is all too real since the British took Charleston.”

  Stephanie saw Noel’s face go as white as the blossom on a bloodroot. His steel-gray eyes were fastened on the gentleman who stepped back into William Poague’s shop with as little fuss as he had stepped out of it.

  Quickly Noel followed him.

  “Did you say—when did Charleston fall, Mister?” he faltered, standing in the doorway of the shop.

  The gentleman, seeming to see Noel for the first time, fastened his black eyes on him like a burning light. Yes, he was the spit and image of Noel grown up, thought Stephanie, except for the color of his eyes and his hair.

  “Charleston fell to the British on May twelfth, my boy,” he said.

  “Have you—any more news?” asked Noel.

  “Not much that’s good,” said the man. “A fistful of patriots hiding out in the swamps and hills. They’ve a little ammunition, I hear, and pluck that’s forged of iron. You know how they fight, maybe—hit and run, hit and run. It hardly seems possible that’s going to defeat the well-fed, well-trained, well-equipped British army. But at present, it’s the only thing we can do.”

  “Do you think—do you think American freedom is actually washed up, Mister?” asked Noel. “Like you said awhile ago?”

  A slow smile lifted the veil of cloud off the man’s face.

  “Not, my boy,” he said, “as long as you and I are alive.”

  Glancing at Stephanie, he added, “You and I, and your sister.”

  Outside the stockade Stephanie pressed close behind Noel.

  “Who was that man, Noel?” she whispered.

  “Pshaw! I didn’t think to ask his name,” said Noel. “It’s queer, but seems like I know him mighty well, just the same.”

  Through the woods they hurried, saying little, scarcely noticing the squirrels that scampered overhead or the startled deer that high-tailed across their path, or the minnows that swirled in the branch, so wrapped were they in their own long thoughts.

  Stephanie heard Willie’s excited voice ranging the woods in all directions as they came in sight of the clearing.

  “Mammy, here comes the salt! Steffy, come and see what Lonesome Tilly brung me! Come and see! Hurry, quick!” he yelled.

  “There wasn’t any salt, Mammy,” Noel told Bertha, but in the hubbub nobody seemed to remember salt as they followed Willie to a sapling at the edge of the clearing to which, by a whang of deerskin, was tied a baby raccoon.

  “Lonesome Tilly brung it!” repeated Willie. “He brung it to me, my own self.”

  Stephanie squatted down and patted the little gray, scared mite, and ran her fingers gently along the black streaks that patterned its face.

  “Did he say anything?” she asked.

  “Nary a word,” Willie told her. “Just brung this little coon to me, specially to me, and left.”

  “How’d you reckon he happened to know Willie wanted such a thing?” asked Bertha.

  Stephanie looked down at Willie and smiled. “Just by lookin’ at Willie, maybe,” she said.

  9. Express to Governor Jefferson

  The next morning the Pigots got together their belongings, reloaded their horse, untethered their cow, and headed across the river to their claim. Jonathan put a bridle on Job and helped to set them across the stream, while the rest of the Venables looked on from the river bank.

  Stephanie watched as Jonathan crossed the river for the last time, with one of the Pigot young uns riding in front of him, the other behind. She watched the Pigots line up on the far bank of the river in the order in which they had filed out of the woods into the Venable clearing so short a time ago—Jason in front, his rifle on his shoulder, leading his horse; Prissie next, carrying the baby in her arms, the smaller of the two Pigot boys at her heels, holding to her skirt; the older of the two behind, driving the cow with a leaf-tipped switch. Wasting no time, Jason headed into the woods, but Prissie turned for a last look across the river, raised her arm, and waved.

  “Come over soon!” she shouted.

  “You folks come back!” called Bertha.

  Silently and swiftly the green leaves closed about them and they were
gone, pushing the rim of Kentucky farther into the West, while the Venables climbed the hill to their clearing.

  “I think I’ll go to the Fort,” Jonathan announced, as he led Job up to the clearing. “I aim to see if I can get wind of this Bedinger, or Frohawk, an’ find out what they’re up to. An’ hit jist mought happen I’d run into a pack train of salt, Berthy. Noel, you’d better shear the sheep today, you an’ Rob.”

  As soon as Jonathan disappeared in the direction of the Fort, Noel and Rob set about the shearing. Together they caught the sheep and lifted them, one at a time, to a short log that served as a shearing block.

  Stephanie stood at the end of the block, her steadying hand on the overhanging head of the sheep. Though the critters panted from fright, and twitched when Noel raised welts on them or nicked so deeply with the shears that blood trickled out on their shorn hides, they never made a sound. They put Stephanie in mind of the verses Bertha read from her Bible about the Lamb of God.

  Il l’interrogea donc par divers discours; mais Jésus ne lui répondit rien.

  The washing of the wool fell to Stephanie. Taking Willie with her, she went down to the river and, tucking her long skirt above her knees, she waded out knee-deep into the water, dragging after her the creel in which the wool lay in long thick folds.

  Up and down, back and forth, she swished and doused the creel, separating the matted wool to let the clear water run through it. Now and then she tore a cocklebur or an embedded stick-tight, a Spanish needle or a chain of beggar ticks from the strands. When at last the wool was clean and faintly yellow, Noel helped to carry it to the cabin, and spread it on the shakes to dry in the sun.

  “Mammy,” asked Rob as the young uns ate their vittles in the clearing at dinner time, “recollect what you promised me when we were crossin’ the mountains? About the first shirt?”

  “Yes,” said Bertha. “I recollect. I’ve been wonderin’,” she added, “who’s goin’ to get the second shirt.”

  “I am,” piped up Willie. “I helped wash the wool.”