Tree of Freedom

by Rebecca Caudill

  That night the Venable young uns did not climb the ladder to their pallets in the cockloft. Instead, they stretched on a buffalo skin on the floor, facing the door. Bertha lay down with them, on one edge of the skin, with her hand resting on the ax. Stephanie lay on the other edge with her hand on the frow. The hoe, the adz, and the maul she leaned handily against the door jamb.

  Until far into the night, the clearing blazed with intermittent light, the rain pounded against the shakes, and the wind whistled and blustered through the trees. The tall proud crowns of the oak trees bowed down in its wake, and sycamore branches snapped and crackled like whiplashes, and scraped against the cabin roof with sharp rumbling and creaking. It was as if the storm had pre-emption rights to their cabin and their clearing, thought Stephanie, and was trying to drive them out.

  As wide awake as a wary barred owl, hooting his eight wild hoots in the rain, Stephanie lay on the pallet listening, sleep as far away as Chiny. At every flash of lightning, she raised on her elbow and peered through the cracks, trying to see what made the noise outside that sounded like somebody running, trying to figure out if the scraping at the chimney was a war-painted body letting himself down into the cabin, or a painter clawing its way into shelter out of the rain.

  Beside her Rob and Willie and Cassie slept like three logs, but until the rooster crowed for midnight, she was still straining her ears, still popping up on her elbow every time the lightning, almost played out now, flooded the clearing.

  “You better get to sleep, Steffy,” Bertha said to her out of the dark.

  “I ain’t sleepy,” Stephanie whispered.

  “I reckon the red men ain’t no more overly fond of gettin’ their feet wet than white folks are,” Bertha told her. “Shut your eyes, now.”

  It was dawn when Stephanie opened her eyes. For a minute she lay awake, feeling logy in every muscle, threatening to doze off again. Then, like a sudden pain, she recollected. She wasn’t lying here on a pallet with her hand on a frow for nothing. The rain may have kept red men away in the night, but it wasn’t raining now, and this half-light was their favorite time for sneaking in before white folks were astir with all their wits about them.

  Quietly she raised on her elbow and gazed through a crack. The wind hadn’t died down yet, but nothing that she could see was moving about of its own accord. She turned and looked at Bertha. Her mammy was dozing, her face so pale against the black buffalo pallet it looked like a patch of moonlight on the floor.

  Later, as they ate their slim breakfast of eggs, Rob was out of sorts.

  “If you ask me,” he grumbled, “I’d say we ought to fort.”

  “Who’d tend the corn, I’d like to know?” Stephanie shot at him. “Varmints?”

  When the sun came up over the trees, it seemed to Stephanie the night had gulled them. The rain-drenched clearing gleamed and glistened. Although the corn had been jostled mightily by the wind, nothing else had been changed, nothing disturbed.

  Cautiously Stephanie went out into the clearing to milk Brownie, glancing furtively around her with each step. But everything was as it always had been at milking time—Brownie was safely tethered behind the cabin, chewing her cud and switching her tail at flies, the chickens were looking with beady eyes for bugs among the grass, the pigs were loping up from the woods.

  Stephanie wondered if what the man they had met on the way to the Fort had said was true—that the red men weren’t lurking around in the hills and hollers west of Harrod’s Fort. Maybe the runner hadn’t come to warn Bertha because he knew she was in no danger. And besides, she figured, a redskin would need a lot of prodding and urging by the British, and promises of many a barrel of rum, to persuade him to put Harrod’s Fort between himself and the Ohio River.

  “Willie!” she called as she came from milking. “Come here, you and Cassie.”

  They came running out of the cabin to her.

  “Would you two young uns like to be soldiers like Noel, patriot soldiers, and help with the work while he’s gone?” she asked.

  Willie’s eyes shone. He nodded his head. Cassie, watching him, nodded hers, too.

  “We have to save this corn patch,” she told them, looking down solemnly into their upturned faces. “We’ve gone without bread a long time now, young uns, but some day this field’s goin’ to give us bread—roastin’ ears, and hoecake, and mush for your milk, and hominy, and corn pone, just like Mammy told you.”

  Willie squinted at her. He’d been tormented with hunger so long that the thought of bread set all his senses tingling.

  “We’ll have bread enough to last all winter,” she told them, “if we keep the enemy away from this corn.”

  “Red men?” whispered Willie, staring at her from frightened eyes.

  “Shucks, no!” scoffed Stephanie. “The enemies of the corn don’t wear tail feathers and war paint. You know that. The enemies of the corn right now are Brownie and the deer that come snoopin’ around every day. Later there’ll be crows and squirrels nibblin’ and peckin’ at the ears. Rob’s been keepin’ an eye on the enemy, but Rob’ll have to help with Noel’s work now, and you two’ll have to be the soldiers that defend the corn.”

  She studied their upturned faces.

  “Can you?” she asked.

  “Sure!” Willie promised her.

  “Sure!” echoed Cassie.

  “Better stay here close to the cabin door, young uns,” she told them. “And if you see a sign of anything movin’ in the corn, or in the bushes—anything at all—run call Mammy or me, quick.”

  She glanced at the Tree of Freedom as she went into the cabin. Looked like before it was big enough to put forth a single blossom it was bearing some of that costly fruit Noel talked about, she said to herself.

  Days passed before the Venable young uns could persuade themselves to talk in their natural voices, or to go about the clearing without shying at every quick sound.

  “We could at least go to the Fort and see what’s happened,” Rob grumbled one day.

  “Looks like the red men’d have been here long ago if they’d been comin’,” Stephanie assured him. “Anyway, Harrod’s Fort’s between us and the red men, and recollect how eternal great big it is. You said so, yourself.”

  “Looks like a body can’t waste any more time waitin’ for red men,” said Bertha. “Not with all we got to do. Rob, you’d better snare me some pigeons this mornin’. Steffy, you hoe the taters and chop out the corn once more. And young uns, look sharp.”

  There seemed never light enough between sunup and sundown to do all the things that needed doing. The wool had to be carded, and spun on the new wheel Noel had made for Bertha before he went away. All about the clearing a body could hear the song the spinning wheel sang as sometimes Bertha, sometimes Stephanie stood before it, stepping three steps back, and three steps forward, over and over, drawing the roll from the spindle point, then winding the thread on the spindle. It was a little whirring song without a tune, but contented and cheery enough to make Stephanie forget the dark thoughts that bolted through her mind now and then like a pain.

  When at last the wool was spun into thick skeins, it had to be dyed. Cautiously through the woods went Stephanie with an unwilling Rob to gather butternut bark for dyeing yellow, and pithy green walnut hulls for dyeing brown, and gray lichens for dyeing a soft rusty shade that put a body in mind of a robin’s red breast.

  “I don’t know why we have to traipse all over creation huntin’ dyestuffs,” complained Rob, “when Mammy’s got no loom to weave cloth on.”

  “Won’t take Pappy and Noel any time to make Mammy a loom, once they get started on it,” Stephanie told him.

  “How do you know Pappy and Noel are ever comin’ back?” asked Rob.

  Stephanie didn’t answer him for a minute. She thought she heard a queer little tone in his voice—the tone of a young un who wanted mighty bad to see his pappy and who was nursing all kinds of worries in his head and hiding them behind big, sassy talk.

&nb
sp; “You can’t let yourself think they won’t come back, Rob,” she said to him gently. “You got to hold on to thinkin’ they’ll be back as hard as you hold on to a limb when you’re skinnin’ a cat.”

  When the dyestuffs were collected and Bertha set her dye pot to boiling, Stephanie rigged out the ash hopper for its winter work, bringing marsh grass and packing it in the bottom of the hopper for a strainer.

  “The next time you take ashes out of the fireplace, Rob,” she said, when she finished her work, “you can put them in the hopper. We’ll be ready to make hominy as soon as the corn ripens.”

  Rob, however, didn’t answer her. He started down the hill toward the river, plucking a sharp blade of wood grass as he went and blowing a shrill blast on it between his tightly cupped hands. Stephanie looked after him with concern in her face. This blast on a blade of grass had been her answer from him more than once in the last few days, now that they were no longer afraid to breathe because of the red men. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what ailed Rob. Looked like if it was lonesomeness and worry working at him, he’d take a different turn. Now, if Noel were home, or Jonathan, he wouldn’t act so biggety.

  Stephanie found her gaze straying often toward the woods through which the trail led to Harrod’s Fort. It seemed a queer thing Jonathan wasn’t back long ago from Williamsburg, and Noel from the Ohio country. The way Colonel Clark had talked, a body’d think he’d overtake the red men in one night, or two at the utmost, take their prisoners away from them, chase them clean out of Kentucky, and be back at the Fort by suppertime the next day. But Jonathan didn’t come, nor Noel.

  June faded into July, and the long, sultry days of July crept at a terrapin’s pace across the corn patch and the cabin. It was easy enough to fill the tedious hours with work, but it needed noise, thought Stephanie, to drown out the lonesomeness a body felt without Jonathan and Noel, and the anxiety that gnawed at a body when the woods gave never a sign that one or the other of them was on his way home. The deputy said there was a place along the river bottom where a body could holler and raise nine echoes. But this waiting was like calling over and over and over, and raising nary an answer.

  Well, Stephanie reckoned, if what they needed was noise, menfolks’ noise, there was only one way to get it.

  “Rob,” she said one morning as he came up from the canebrake carrying two rabbits he had speared with a sharp-pointed stick, “would you help me girdle some trees today?”

  “Mammy told Willie and me to catch her some fish for dinner,” he said. “Anyway, what you goin’ to girdle trees for?”

  “Corn and trees can’t grow in the same ground,” she told him. “And I keep thinkin’ how pleased Pappy’ll be when he comes home to see the clearin’ pushed back into the woods just the same as if he’d been here. It’ll look so—so improvement-like.”

  Rob looked at her, and this time a body could actually see the worry working in his face. He raked his bare toes through the dirt a minute. “Reckon Pappy’s ever comin’ home, Steffy?” he asked.

  For a second her courage failed her—a brief second, until she remembered the Tree of Freedom. “Why, any day now, I look to see Pappy comin’ in,” she said, “and Noel, too.”

  “I never saw such a girl for believin’ things that ain’t there to believe,” Rob told her, scornfully. He called Willie, plucked a blade of grass, blew on it, and started toward the river.

  Stephanie brought the ax from the cabin, and walked along the edge of the corn patch to the woods on the south side of the clearing. The corn was tall now, so tall that it hid a body standing between the rows. It hid her from the cabin. Maybe she shouldn’t venture beyond the corn by her lonesome, even so far as the edge of the woods, she told herself, though never once had they come across a sign of red men. The deputy said whenever red men raided, a few stragglers got separated from the main body and stayed behind to do devilment. But George Rogers Clark had fanned his army out far and wide through the woods like a net, she reckoned, and scooped all the stragglers into it.

  She would take the trees as they came, she decided, beginning on an umbrella tree that stood in the corner. Swinging the ax high, she struck the butt first in a downward motion, then upward, cutting through the smooth gray bark into the soft-grained wood. First down, then up, steadily as the harvest fly beating his drum overhead, she swung the ax. But the chips that flew were little chips, not big thick ones such as her pappy or Noel could bite out with the ax. Nor was the noise she made the big, hearty, hefty noise her pappy made girdling trees. Still, it was a noise, and big enough to bring Bertha, holding Cassie by the hand, peering around the edge of the corn.

  “Whatever are you doin’, Steffy?” Bertha asked.

  “I just thought,” explained Stephanie, punctuating her words with swings of the ax, “it’d pleasure Pappy to find the land cleared a little farther back.”

  Girdling trees was slow work, she found. The ax bit easily enough into the soft trunks of the whistlewood trees and the box elders, the bee trees and the Indian bean trees, but the red oaks and the bur oaks, the steel-gray beech trees and the coarse-grained sycamores were tough and stubborn, while from the butt of the hop hornbeam the ax glanced and shivered as if it were trying to bite into iron. It wasn’t the girdling that mattered most, however, Stephanie consoled herself when there seemed little to show for her blistered palms and her aching arms. It was noise. And noise aplenty she made.

  It wouldn’t hurt to have a little noise in the evenings, either, she decided. Not after dark, of course, when a body had to put his whole mind on listening for any sound out of the ordinary. But at sundown, she told herself, it wouldn’t hurt to rest from her chopping, and sit on the doorstep, and make a little lively noise.

  Going into the cabin, she stood the ax beside the door, climbed the ladder to the loft, and lifted Noel’s dulcimer from the peg on which he had hung it.

  Willie and Cassie stared at her, wide-eyed, as she sat on the doorstep with the dulcimer across her lap, and cautiously twanged a string.

  “Pappy said not to play that dulcimore,” Willie told her.

  “He didn’t tell me not to play it,” Stephanie said.

  She tried out this string and that one, holding her fingers on the slim neck of the instrument as she had seen Noel hold his. Little by little, awkwardly at first, and so gently it made her think of the wind lolling in the Back Country piny woods, she fashioned a tune.

  “Come here, Willie,” she called. “You and Cassie.”

  “What do you want?” asked Willie, as they stood in front of her.

  “I’m goin’ to learn you and Cassie a ballet,” she said. “You sing with me now.

  “All in a misty mornin’,

  Cloudy was the weather,

  I meetin’ with an old man

  Clothed all in leather.”

  She sang softly as she plucked the strings. The sound her voice made and the sound the strings made weren’t always the same sound, but it was a good sound, she decided. Willie and Cassie, with eyes fastened on her, and with smiles of pleasure spreading over their faces, mumbled the words uncertainly after her.

  “Mammy!” called Steffy as Bertha came up from the spring house with a piggin of milk. “Listen to this. Sing, now, young uns.”

  Boldly she plucked the strings this time, and the three of them raised their voices.

  “All in a misty mornin’,

  Cloudy was the weather,

  I meetin’ with an old man

  Clothed all in leather.

  With ne’er a shirt upon his back,

  But wool unto his skin,

  With how d’ye do,

  And how d’ye do,

  And how d’ye do again.”

  Now and then Stephanie glanced at her mammy’s face. Maybe the sound of singing would make the tautness in her mammy give a little, she hoped, would untie some of the knots inside her worried mind. But she wasn’t prepared for the thing Bertha did at that moment.

  Bertha
set the piggin on the hominy block as if she aimed to rest herself while she listened. First, she smiled. When the young uns reached the chorus and began to curtsey stiffly to each other as Stephanie had taught them, she laughed aloud. That was just like a miracle in the old Huguenot Bible, thought Stephanie. But when they started on the second verse, Bertha pitched in and sang it with them, keeping time with her foot like a fiddler at a shindig.

  “I went a little further

  And there I met a maid,

  Was goin’ then a-milkin’,

  A-milkin’, sir, she said.

  Then I began to compliment,

  And she began to sing,

  With how d’ye do,

  And how d’ye do,

  And how d’ye do again.”

  “Tomorrow, young uns,” Stephanie said to Willie and Cassie, as they finished the song, “I’ll learn you a ballet called ‘Here Come Three Dukes a-Ridin’.’”

  The next day, decided Bertha, the beans were ripe for picking. Not a great many of them, of course, but enough for a mess for dinner. All morning long she boiled them over a fire in the fireplace, seasoning them with pigeon meat.

  “I reckon they won’t hardly taste like beans,” Bertha complained, “without salt meat for seasonin’. And no salt either. Bear’s meat would do if we had it.”

  A sudden worry lodged in Stephanie’s mind. It had been almost a month since Noel had gone away. Supposing they had no rifle to kill deer and bears for the winter’s meat, and no one to shoot it.

  Oh, well! They’d find some way. Jason Pigot had a rifle. Rob could go across the river to Jason’s cabin, and ask him to bring the Venables a bear when he went hunting. Looked like the Pigots would come over some time, she thought to herself.

  Despite the bland seasoning and the lack of salt, the beans were enough to put new life into a body. A dozen times while they were boiling, the young uns lifted the kettle lid to sniff. But when, finally, Bertha dished them out and the young uns stood ready for them around the table, Stephanie laid her sassafras fork back on her wooden plate, the beans untouched.