Tree of Freedom

by Rebecca Caudill

  “Whew!” whistled Noel softly as he turned wide-open eyes on Stephanie. “Colonel Clark!”

  “Are you—sure, Noel?” she whispered, staring at the man.

  “Ain’t that Colonel Clark?” Noel asked of a buckskinned man nearby.

  “Yep,” answered the man. “Looks like he’s a-talkin’ to the wind, though, for all the volunteers he’s a-signin’ up.”

  “Colonel,” spoke up a man from the crowd, “I’d like the best in the world to join ye, but this is a job fer Colonel Bowman’s milishy. They’re paid to do hit. Besides, I got crops a-needin’ tendin’. I went hongry last winter, an’ I don’t aim to again.”

  Colonel Clark’s eyes bored into the man. “There come times when womenfolks can tend corn,” he said. “By themselves. And keep the clearings and the cabins. And as for the militia, I’m calling on you to volunteer. It isn’t merely a couple of outlying settlements that have been destroyed. It’s all Kentucky that’s at the mercy of red men.”

  “You’re not talkin’ to me, Colonel,” spoke up another man. Stephanie recollected she had seen him in the Land Office. Most of the menfolks she had seen in the Land Office were now a part of the curious crowd around the schoolhouse door.

  “I got nothin’ but land in Kentucky,” the man went on. “And when the red men leave for good, the land’ll still be here, I reckon. Same goes for the British.”

  “I ain’t even got land,” spoke up another. “I come all the way from the Monongahely to buy land and build me a cabin. And what do I find? All the first-rate lands sold to Virginians and bigwigs along the Atlantic seaboard who’ve never been nigh their claims. Let them that own the land defend it, I say.”

  It took Colonel Clark a minute to quiet the muttering so that he could be heard.

  “If it were only Kentucky land at stake,” he said, his dander up, “I wouldn’t be asking you to defend it. But the British and the red men want only one thing—to harry the Kentucky settlements till we give up. Make no mistake about it, they’ll be back, if we let them come. And if we lose our settlements, we’ll lose our liberty, too. If we lose Kentucky, then the British will be at the back door of our nation. And once they wedge the door open, they’ll file in. And that will be the end of American freedom. We’ll go back then to quitrents and taxation without representation, and all the rest of His Majesty’s insults. Don’t you see it’s more than the red men we fight?” he pleaded with the crowd. “It’s the whole system of British tyranny. And no matter how far away from civilization we are out here in the wilderness, we’re just as as much a part of a free America as Boston, or New York, or Williamsburg. It’s our war as much as it is theirs. War has come to us. We’ll have to shoulder our rifles and fight it out.”

  “All right. I go to fight the Indians and somebody else grabs up the land,” objected one listener.

  “I came here a-huntin’ land, not trouble,” muttered another.

  “But you found trouble!” snapped Colonel Clark. “When the trouble’s over you can go back to hunting land. But while the trouble’s on Kentucky soil, you’re going to help meet it. Every man of you here, able to carry a rifle.”

  Without another word, he brushed through the crowd and strode hurriedly in the direction of the Land Office, the curious throng muttering at his back, some of them following at his heels.

  From inside the blockhouse Stephanie could hear the colonel’s voice snarling like a hornet.

  “Close this Land Office! Lock the door!” he snapped at the astonished surveyor.

  “Who says to?” the surveyor asked.

  “I do!” said Colonel Clark. “And be quick about it!”

  The surveyor got to his feet. “But I have no authority to close the Land Office,” he said. “And who gives you the authority? Colonel Bowman—he’s in command here. He commands the Kentucky County militia.”

  “And I command Virginia troops,” retorted Clark. “And necessity gives me the authority. Put your books away! Lock up!” he commanded the dallying surveyor. “Post a notice on the door. And you land grabbers, get out of here! No more Kentucky lands will be sold till Kentucky is free. Things have come to a sorry pass,” he added, “when men can think of nothing but grabbing up land while life and liberty are snatched from under their very noses!”

  Sullenly the land buyers moved out of the blockhouse into the square of the stockade, like dumb critters before a whip.

  “If this is the way it’s goin’ to be,” muttered one man, “I mought as well saddle up and ride back to Caroliny.”

  “Let any man try leaving!” Colonel Clark snapped. “I’m posting sentries on every road out of Harrod’s Fort. They have my orders to take the horse and the arms and the powder and lead from any coward who thinks he’s running away from Kentucky. This talk of buying up Kentucky land,” he spat out disgustedly, “when Kentucky has been stabbed in the back! Kentucky needs every man, every rifle, every keg of powder and every morsel of food as she’ll probably never need them again. You’re blind that you can’t see it. You’re blind that you can’t see how dark it is all over America!”

  His eyes seemed to rest on Stephanie and Noel.

  Stephanie nudged Noel. “He’s talkin’ to us,” she whispered.

  Noel drew her off to one side and started wrestling with the voice inside him.

  “I might join up, Steffy,” he said, “only—only—”

  “Only Pappy told you to stay home and look after things,” she finished for him. “But I can tend the corn as well as you. Colonel Clark said so. Mammy and I’ll get along till you come back.”

  “But Pappy—”

  “Don’t you recollect what else Pappy told you?” Stephanie interrupted. “He told you no matter what shape that old geezer Frohawk turns up in, you should take care of him.”

  “What’s that got to do with this?” asked Noel.

  “This is just Frohawk in another shape,” she said, “comin’ to claim what he’s never sweated for.”

  Seeing her words made little sense to Noel, Stephanie looked in another direction for arguments.

  “Looks like Kentucky’s got to do her share before the patriots earn that chance to make their own government,” she prodded Noel. “Now’s the time you’ve been waitin’ for. You got to use it.”

  Noel drew her farther from the crowd that they might talk without being overheard. Stephanie could sense the battle going on in him, a hard-fought battle between the forces that bade him stay and keep a promise and the forces that bade him go.

  “I—I—” he began.

  Stephanie looked at him steadily. “I reckon this is my chance, too, Noel,” she said.

  After much argument, their plans being made, they set out toward home. Halfway between the Fort and the clearing, they separated, according to plan. Stephanie, on her guard against red men, started hurriedly through the woods toward the Venable clearing. Before the woods closed in about her, however, she turned and looked over her shoulder to see Noel staring after her, as if his mind wasn’t yet at the sticking point.

  “Skedaddle, Noel,” she called, “before Colonel Clark leaves you behind!”

  She waited a minute to see him go. Then she herself turned and ran through the woods toward home, realizing for the first time that she was still carrying a kettle filled with sarvice berries.

  11. Waiting

  Through the woods hurried Stephanie, her eyes searching through the dimness, her ears keen to every snapping twig, every throaty croak of rain crows, every rustle of leaves in the trees, her mind a ferment of explanations to give Bertha about Noel’s going away. It was hard to keep her mind on so much at once, and to recollect, to boot, that dark was bound to overtake anybody who loitered overly long in the woods. Already it seemed uncommonly dark, although there must have been two hours of sun in the sky when she and Noel left the Fort.

  Oh, but it was scary traipsing by her lonesome through the green gloom of the woods! Along the path she raced, with hair-raising thoughts crowding in on h
er—thoughts of half-naked, painted red men, egged on by the British, with burning and scalping and stealing in their wild eyes, and paid for their meanness with trinkets and fiery British rum. Thoughts of a loud-mouthed cannon hauled up into a clearing, the look of it terrible as it threatened to belch fire. Thoughts of families, close-knit, being ripped apart, young uns from their mammies, and mammies from pappies. Thoughts of the long road to Detroit. Thoughts of the decrepit and the little whimpering, toddling young uns and the ailing being swiftly clubbed for slowing down the march.

  A body could mighty nigh paralyze herself with thinking about red men, Stephanie scolded herself. If she didn’t want to go bereft of her senses the way the deputy said some folks did, she had better think about something else—about Colonel Clark burning inside and out like a lightered-knot torch. About Noel. About her Tree of Freedom.

  After a while, light began to sift through the woods—grayish, ghostly light with no sun in it. She wasn’t far from home now, Stephanie realized, her feet light with relief.

  It was with relief, too, that she stopped at the edge of the clearing and saw the cabin standing as she had left it, and Willie playing on the doorstep with his coon as peaceably as if he had never heard of red men. In the sky dark thunderheads were boiling up, blotting out the sun, and all the leaves on the trees, even on the trembling popple trees, were hanging still as death.

  “Mammy!” shouted Willie, spying Stephanie. “Here comes Steffy with the salt!”

  “There wasn’t any salt, Mammy,” Stephanie said, when Bertha met her at the door.

  “Well, I reckon you didn’t need to lug all them berries home,” Bertha told her. “You could have given ’em to somebody that’d ’a’ relished ’em. Where’s Noel?”

  Stephanie wet her lips. She swallowed hard. Why, she scolded herself, hadn’t she thought up an answer to that question?

  “Willie,” she said, “it’s goin’ to rain, ain’t it? You run find Brownie so I can milk her before it storms.”

  Willie gathered up the coon in his arms and started toward the spring.

  “Noel’s gone to war, Mammy,” said Stephanie, in a low voice.

  Bertha stared at her, the tinge of color in her cheeks blanching out. Even her eyes that always looked like velvet looked now as if the pile had been brushed off. She swallowed so hard a body could hear her plainly.

  “Gone where?” she asked, her voice a little whisper of hollow sound she made with her lips.

  “With Colonel Clark, Mammy,” said Stephanie. “To run the Indians and the British back where they came from.”

  Bertha’s hand pressed against the door jamb was drained of color, the knuckles a row of whitened stumps.

  “Have red men—”

  “They were over on the Lickin’ this mornin’,” Stephanie told her. “They had a British cannon and every last one of ’em had a rifle the British had put in their hands. And they took Martin’s and Ruddell’s without ever firin’ a shot. That’s what we heard at the Fort.”

  “The folks?” Bertha managed to whisper. “What happened to the folks?”

  “The red men are takin’ ’em to Detroit,” Stephanie told her.

  “Lord ’a’ mercy!” muttered Bertha, staring at Stephanie. After that, she said not another word.

  The sight of her mammy standing in the doorway, pressing her hand against the door jamb as if she needed something steady to hold to, scared Stephanie more than ever the thought of red men had scared her. Bertha looked as if a spell of sickness had been coming over her for a long time, and it had now struck her just when Stephanie was counting on her most. She put Stephanie in mind of a piece of faded white silk. She wouldn’t break any place, Stephanie reckoned, when things going on in the wilderness snapped her taut. But all the bright sheen had dulled in her mammy, all the sizing had damped out in the wilderness air. Bertha hadn’t looked that way all in a minute, either, Stephanie realized suddenly. It was a wilderness sickness that had been growing on her, like a twisting, winding supple-jack getting a stranglehold on a pine tree.

  “The Indians have all gone now, Mammy,” Stephanie told her, her voice as gentle as if she were quieting a sick young un. “They’re scared teetotally to death of Colonel Clark. He’s just come back from the Illinois country. Noel and I saw him at the Fort. He’s startin’ tonight to chase the red men clean out of the country and take their prisoners away from ’em. It was the British that put the red men up to this rascality. They paid ’em to do it. Knives and trinkets and whisky they paid ’em. But Colonel Clark’ll make ’em sorry. He needed lots of men to help him, so Noel had to go, too. And while the menfolks are gone, the womenfolks must tend the corn and stave off starvation next winter, Colonel Clark said.”

  So wrapped up was Stephanie in trying to make her mammy understand, in trying to bring back some color into her face, she didn’t notice that Willie hadn’t gone for the cow but was hanging around within earshot, lapping up every word she said.

  “Are the red men comin’ here, Steffy?” he asked fearfully.

  “No, Willie, not if Noel can help it.”

  “Are they, Mammy?” whimpered Willie.

  Rob had come to stand beside his mammy in the doorway, his brown eyes burning in his white scared face, while Cassie, clutching her wooden doll in one hand and clinging to Bertha’s skirt with the other, puckered up her face.

  “Now, listen,” Stephanie said to them, her voice loud in her ears, making her feel certain of herself in spite of the fears that gnawed away on the inside of her. “The red men were over on the Lickin’ this mornin’. The British got ’em to come. But they’ve gone now. And Colonel Clark’s got up an army to strike out after ’em and give ’em the best whuppin’ you ever heard of for their meanness. But what kind of army would it be without Noel? Noel had to go and help, of course.”

  Cassie smiled up at her, and Willie listened to her as if it was the gospel she was norating. But she couldn’t tell off Rob that easily, she realized. She could stand there and norate till the cow came home how not a red straggler was left behind to burn out and scalp and kill cattle and steal horses, and how Colonel Clark and Noel were going to have the Indians and the British whipped in three shakes of a sheep’s tail. But Rob was born with horse sense. He eyed her knowingly.

  “You’d better go for Brownie, quick, Rob, before the storm breaks,” she said, looking at him grimly, as if she dared him to say what was in his mind.

  Right away the storm was on them. Forked lightning danced in the clouds, wind assailed the trees and bent them low, and thundergusts rumbled and bellowed over the clearing and jarred the cabin.

  Bertha began herding the young uns inside. This having to do something quickly seemed to put back into her some of the sizing Stephanie’s bad news had taken out of her. Not the sheen. Only the sizing.

  The rain drove Brownie into the clearing. She bawled at the door of the cabin until Stephanie, during a lull in the downpour, ran out to milk her.

  Hurrying into the cabin with her piggin of milk, Stephanie found Bertha trying to cook a bite of supper over the coals in the new fireplace, while rain beat down the chimney and choked the cabin with smoke. Bertha, Stephanie noticed, was trying to make up her mind to broil the last of the turkey meat Noel had brought her.

  “Rob can catch some fish tomorrow, Mammy,” Stephanie told her, reading her thoughts. “We can live on fish till Noel gets home. Or Pappy’ll be here any day now and we’ll have fresh meat every meal.”

  “I could bring in fresh meat if I had a rifle,” boasted Rob. “I don’t know why Noel had to take his rifle when he went off and left me with all the work to do.”

  “You couldn’t shoot anything with his rifle,” Stephanie told him. “You have to be big enough to carry a rifle and aim it before you shoot it.”

  “I don’t know why you think Noel’s so all-fired smarter than anybody else!” he shot at her.

  Stephanie stared at him through the smoke. She meant to give him a job to do, but chan
ged her mind.

  “You come with me, Willie,” she said, starting toward the door.

  “What to do?” asked Willie.

  “Help me bring in all of Pappy’s tools,” she said.

  “What tools?”

  “The ax and the adz. And the frow and the grubbin’ hoe.”

  A hoe couldn’t be shot like a rifle, she was thinking. But at close range, it could send a man reeling. So could the maul. Better bring inside the cabin and have handy every tool they could find leaning against trees or hooked over the middle log of the west cabin wall.

  “Bringin’ a hoe in the house is bad luck, Steffy,” Rob told her as she made her way through the door, her hands full of rough-handled tools and implements. “You know that.”

  “It’d be worse luck to leave a hoe out on a night like this,” she shot at him. “You fill up every kettle and piggin with water,” she ordered. “Have ’em handy in the loft, just in case.”

  “I don’t have to take orders from you,” announced Rob.

  Now, what in tarnation had got into Rob all of a sudden to fill him so full of sass and make him so bold in the wrong places, Stephanie wondered. Didn’t he know how quickly red men could set fire to their cabin, and how water must be handy to douse on the flames? Or didn’t he care?

  “Go along, Rob,” Stephanie heard her mammy saying. “Do as Steffy tells you.”

  Night brought the wildest storm that Stephanie could ever recollect. The door was bolted with the stout oak bar and double-bolted with a heavy puncheon, and the window was shuttered tight. But through the unchinked cracks in the wall gusts of rain blew and swirled, and rain dripped steadily down the chimney, threatening to blot all life from the red coals Bertha had covered with the ashes. Half a dozen times Stephanie bent over the hearth, anxiously raking through the wet ashes in search of live coals, and recovering them with dry ashes. To let the fire go out now would be a sorry thing, she knew. Not in all of Kentucky County would there be dry kindling enough to start another, she reckoned, after this second epistle of Noah’s fresh.