Tree of Freedom

by Rebecca Caudill

  “Family by the name of Isom had moved out there a month ago, they said. Man an’ his wife, an’ two brothers of his’n. Striplin’s, folks said. Had a cabin built an’ trees girdled, goin’ to do some late fall plantin’. Well, looks like they didn’t get much for their pains. Searchin’ party couldn’t find hair nor hide of ’em.”

  “What did they find, Jason?” asked Bertha.

  “Nothin’,” he said. “Not a solitary thing to lead a body to ’em, if they’re still alive. Jist a heap of red hot coals of fire whar the cabin used to stand.”

  “Maybe their cabin caught fire from the chimney,” Stephanie suggested. “Maybe they’re just campin’ out till they can raise a new cabin.”

  Jason sat silent a minute.

  “That ain’t exactly what I make of a searchin’ party not bein’ able to find hair nor hide of ’em,” he said at last. “Looks like hit’s a tale with a sorrier endin’. The searchin’ party did stumble on one clue at the edge of the clearin’,” he added. “But hit was a slim un. I traded some powder for hit.”

  He took from his shirt bosom a little bitty Bird Head pistol no longer than the span of his hand and held it up in the dim light for them to see. Rob bent close to study it.

  “Hit’s exactly the same notion as a flint lock rifle,” Jason said, “’ceptin’ hit’s pint size. An’ this here silver plate on the handle,” he said, pointing to the spot of metal on which the dim light fell, “has got some feller’s initials on hit. ‘M. R. B.’ some feller at the Fort with book learnin’ told me. But I reckon M. R. B. has rammed home his last charge of powder through this little trick of a barrel. Here, Rob,” he said, handing the pistol to him, “looks like you’ve took a shine to this purty. You mought as well have hit for keeps. ’Twon’t do me no good. Don’t reckon a man could shoot much with hit ’cept his own hand, mebbe, when hit backfires.”

  Rob’s joy in his possession was smothered quickly, however.

  “You put that pistol up on the fireboard, Rob,” Bertha ordered, “and leave it there.” Sensing his disappointment, she added, “Till I say you can shoot it. With two of our menfolks gone, I reckon I don’t care to have the last un tearin’ his hand to smithereens with a thing like that. Did you—you didn’t hear any word of Jonathan, Jason?”

  “Nary a word, Berthy. I shore didn’t.”

  “Did you hear any word of Colonel Clark? And Noel?” asked Stephanie.

  Jason drew a deep breath.

  “Colonel Clark didn’t find hit so all-fired easy to get recruits for his campaign against the red men an’ the British,” he said. “Know whar he’s been right up until lately? An’ Noel with him? Jist a-layin’ around in the Fort at the Falls on Corn Island tryin’ to get folks to join up. Oh, Noel, they say he was busy enough, all right,” Jason hurried to add when silence hard as stone greeted his news. “Folks say Colonel Clark took a mighty shine to him. Had him out a-helpin’ to recruit.”

  “Where are they now?” asked Stephanie.

  “They never left the mouth of the Lickin’ till the first day of August, folks said,” Jason told her. “Then when they got across the Ohio, Clark stopped long enough to build a blockhouse there. Now they say he’s finally got around to chasin’ the Indians after givin’ the rascals plenty of time to get clean away.”

  Stephanie got up from the stool where she was sitting and began raking ashes over the coals of fire left from cooking supper. She didn’t like Jason’s talk of Noel and Colonel Clark. She didn’t like the ugly tone in his voice, either. Apt as not, Jason wasn’t telling all he knew. At least, he wasn’t telling all he thought.

  “’Pon my word, Steffy!” said Jason suddenly. “I plumb forgot I had a present for you.”

  He reached inside his shirt bosom and took out a small object and handed it to her. “The surveyor, he said some preacher feller brung this book to Noel,” Jason explained. “An’ when I told him Noel was traipsin’ around the Ohio country, he ’lowed he’d send hit to you. Said you’d know what to do with hit.”

  Stephanie almost snatched the book from him in her haste to see it. She scanned longingly the words printed on the back of it, then uncovered the coals and laid a dry chip on them, and opened the book in front of the blaze. But the words were meaningless to her. Only the book itself had meaning. It was a thing that would light a thousand candles in Noel’s eyes when he came home.

  No sooner had Jason finished his tale than Bertha began putting Prissie to bed, and giving her a noggin of stout hot tea brewed of white slippery elm bark. Prissie sat on the edge of the bed sipping the tea and, in the flickering light cast by the chip Stephanie had laid on the fire, looking clean out of her head with terror of the dark night. It was just such unbridled fear as that, Stephanie thought, that might have turned Lonesome Tilly into a queer woodsy critter. Supposing, she said to herself, Prissie Pigot lost her reason in the night? But that, she scolded herself, was no proper thought to take along with a body into a dark night.

  Bertha began settling the young uns on the pallet beside the potato hole.

  “Steffy, I reckon you and Rob can watch till the rooster crows for midnight,” she said. “Jason and I’ll get up then and watch till daylight.”

  “I can watch, too,” pleaded Prissie, afraid to go to sleep.

  “You leave the listenin’ to the rest of us tonight, Prissie,” Bertha soothed her. “You curl up there on the bed now and go to sleep. You need to get your strength back for what’s a-comin’.”

  Drawing the stools up near the door, Stephanie and Rob sat down on them and began their watch, whispering to each other now and then to keep themselves awake, peering often through the cracks into the dark clearing.

  Prissie Pigot jerked so hard in her sleep she shook the bed, and every little while she cried out like a young un that’s been whipped.

  “We’ve got a job tomorrow, Rob,” Stephanie whispered.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Chinkin’. We got to chink this whole cabin, you and me,” she told him.

  “You and me!” snorted Rob. “Why, Steffy, that’d take us a month. Two months. It’d take us a whole month of Sundays.”

  “We’ll begin, anyway. Tomorrow,” she told him.

  “Why don’t we wait till Pappy comes home?” asked Rob.

  “Pappy might—get home awful late,” she explained. “It’ll be a whole sight safer when the holes are all chinked up, and, besides, the night air’s bad for a body. Even if it takes us a month of Christmases,” she added, when Rob grunted to show what he thought of her notions, “we’ll begin.”

  “What’ll we chink with, I’d like to know?” he asked. “You’re not a-sendin’ me after marsh grass.”

  “There’s plenty of chinkin’ right here in the clearin’, I reckon,” she told him. “Chips and such.”

  “Even the clearin’ ain’t safe, Steffy,” he complained. “If the red men got as close as Isom’s cabin, they’re just too close to the Venable clearin’ to be lettin’ on like there’s no danger.”

  “You don’t know it was Indians at Isoms’,” she said.

  “You don’t know it wasn’t,” he sassed back at her.

  When the morning chores were finished, Stephanie took a look at the cabin walls, and stifled a sigh. The cabin had never seemed so eternal great big, the cracks between the logs so like a wide yawn when a body is sleepy. They’d begin at the bottom crack, she announced.

  “Let Willie and Cassie and the Pigot young uns gather chips,” Rob told her. “Somebody’s got to watch for red men. I’ll do the watchin’. We’ll die of old age before we get this done,” he added.

  “You may,” Stephanie told him tartly. “I don’t aim to.”

  She turned from studying the cracks and looked at Rob.

  “When we get the chinkin’ done, Rob, I’ll help you catch some butterflies and mount ’em,” she promised.

  “Willie can catch the butterflies from now on, I reckon,” said Rob.

  Stephanie felt crushed, like
an apple somebody has stepped on with a heavy foot.

  “Oh, come on, Rob,” she begged. “It won’t always be this hard. You got to look ahead a little.”

  “You sound just like Noel,” Rob told her. “You’re gettin’ to be as bad at drummin’ up big notions as he ever was.”

  “You shut up about Noel,” she ordered. “Else I’ll duck you in daubin’.”

  When Jason heard what they planned to do, he told Prissie the Pigots might as well stay a day or two longer, and he’d help with the chinking. By that time, if the red men hadn’t showed up, chances were they’d gone back across the Ohio where they belonged.

  With Rob and Stephanie, he went to the river for clay, the three of them lugging kettles full of the heavy daubing up the hill. Then he cut down saplings to lodge in the cracks while the young uns gathered chips to mix with the clay. All morning Jason and Stephanie worked, filling the cracks, making the cabin warm against winter. And dark. It was a sight how dark the cabin was getting to be, now that the cracks were being filled with daubing.

  “Too bad Noel couldn’t ’a’ been here doin’ somethin’ useful like this all the time he was tryin’ to drum up an army for Colonel Clark,” Jason told Stephanie, as he smoothed the daubing into a crack with a paddle he had whittled out of a piece of ash.

  Stephanie had nothing to say to that. She thought a-plenty. A body could read what she was thinking by the straight line of her lips, by the clouding of her blue eyes, by the way she worked like ten beavers.

  “Tell you one thing, Steffy,” Jason went on, glad of a chance to clear his chest of a matter or two. “Men think twice afore they pitch in an’ fight these days. Here we been a-fightin’ the British five years—five long, endurin’ years, an’ ever’ day we retreat jist a little bit farther from victory. Way the fightin’s goin’ now, some army’s goin’ to draw up in a straight line one of these days, an’ pass over their guns. An’ from the looks of things, hit ain’t a-goin’ to be the British.”

  Still Stephanie didn’t answer.

  Jason daubed a while longer, then let into whistling.

  “Hit’s too bad Noel ever tuck up with Clark,” he said, at the end of a tune. “Clark’s all right. But he ain’t on the winnin’ side. An’ lots of folks, Steffy, who ain’t on the winnin’ side, apt as not, ’ll end up in jail somewhars for their pains.”

  Still no rise out of Stephanie. Jason took a kettle and went to the river bank for more clay.

  “If you know what I mean, Steffy,” he said, when he set to work again, “Noel’d ’a’ done a sight better if he’d stayed home an’ minded his business.”

  Stephanie looked at him, her chicory blue eyes crackling with anger. “Noel was mindin’ his business, Jason Pigot!” she snapped.

  Stephanie was glad when, the next morning, the Pigots left. Oh, she knew she was beholden to Jason Pigot. He and his rifle had stood between the Venables and the red men. And for all her big notions, Jason had done most of the chinking.

  But to have to listen to him claiming scurrilous things about Noel was worse than eating puckery persimmons.

  14. Frohawk Again

  As soon as the Pigots had gone, Stephanie took the ax and went cautiously to girdle trees, but her eyes kept straying in the direction of Harrod’s Fort. The woods to the east were enough to drive a body out of her wits, she thought, hiding as they did behind their dark, green curtain the fate that had overtaken her pappy and Noel. More than two months ago the woods had swallowed up Jonathan. Surely, if ever he was coming home from Williamsburg, he ought to be home now. It looked like one of these days a body would have to quit pretending, and say to herself he would never come back again. Something was keeping him forever.

  She let the ax head rest on the ground, and leaned her weight on the handle. A hot August wind was fanning the dark green leaves, a mocking wind that plagued her with the things it hinted but kept secret from her.

  Lifting the hem of her skirt, Stephanie buried her face in it, and cried and cried.

  After a long time, she stopped her sobbing, and wiped her red, swollen eyes on her skirt. It was no use to watch for her pappy any longer, she told herself, turning to the east woods once more as if to say to the mocking wind that she understood.

  Her eyes didn’t see the woods, however. They fell instead on the Tree of Freedom that grew between the woods and the tasseling corn. It was no longer a gray-green sprig, but a sturdy whip of a sapling beginning to branch, its dark green glossy leaves shining in the sun. It seemed to mock her, too, but not as the woods and the wind in the tree crowns mocked her. It shamed her that she stood there crying into her skirt. Hadn’t she made a promise to Noel that she would take his place about the clearing, that on the day he came home he would find things done in their season, it seemed to say to her.

  Noel would be mighty ashamed of her if he could see her now, she told herself. So would Jonathan. And what would Grandmammy Linney think if she could peep through the corn and catch her standing there with tears running down her face like a fresh? And Bertha, she reckoned, would feel plumb deserted at such a sorry sight.

  Setting her mouth grimly, she lifted the ax and whacked at a tree with all her might.

  The crying made her feel better. The ax, she realized, felt lighter as she made up her mind to watch the woods a while longer for her pappy, and to keep her promise to Noel no matter what dark shadow fell across the clearing.

  She tried to imagine the look in Noel’s face when he saw the book Jason had brought from the preacher feller. It must be Pilgrim’s Progress, she decided. Noel had told her the story as Uncle Lucien had told it to him, and the picture in the front of the book of a man trudging along toward the sun, with a book in one hand from which he read and a staff in the other with which he walked, and with three birds flying along overhead to keep him company, seemed to fit the story.

  In the evenings Willie and Cassie stood around the doorstep begging Stephanie to play the dulcimer, but she spent part of the time poring over the pages of the book. Noel would read it to her when he came home, she told herself. But what if Noel didn’t come for a long, long time?

  Her helplessness pricked her like a thorn. If Noel didn’t come soon to read the book to her, she’d learn to read it herself, she decided.

  “Mammy,” she begged, holding the book open before Bertha, “can’t you help me read this?”

  “I wish I could, honey,” Bertha said gently, understanding the hunger in the blue eyes. “I could, I reckon, if it was French. But English words I never learned.”

  “Nary a one?”

  “Nary a one,” said Bertha.

  She went into the cabin to light the fire for cooking supper, but when she got it burning, she came out again.

  “I reckon I could teach you your ABC’s, Steffy,” she said. “They’re the same, whether you’re readin’ in French or in English. Knowin’ your ABC’s won’t tell you exactly what the words are, but it’ll help. And maybe you can ferret out the words yourself, once you know how to spell ’em.”

  Willie and Cassie crowded around, peering over the edges of the book, as Bertha pointed out the letters, beginning with A.

  “Reckon a body has to write ’em, actually to learn ’em,” she said. “And maybe together we can make out some of the words.”

  “I wish I had a page of paper out of the surveyor’s book,” sighed Stephanie, “and his goose quill pen and some of his pokeberry ink.”

  But a page of paper, she decided, was a flimsy excuse to stand between her and her knowledge of the ABC’s. Finding a big chip in the clearing, she whittled it smooth with Rob’s knife, then found a chaired piece of wood, and began copying the letters. As long as she could see, she sat on the doorstep making rings and curlycues, and little bitty pothooks and ash hoppers, whittling them off, and making them again. Cassie and Willie bent over her, watching her progress, as pleased as if she were playing the dulcimer.

  Stephanie reckoned she knew how a seed felt now, its dry, hard skin
bursting with the stirring of a pale green shoot feeling its way outward and upward through the dark earth to the sunshine. She felt the same way. A tender green shoot of knowing how to read was breaking right through the dark brown dullness that was her mind, and making its way to the light. Some day she could read anything she could lay hands on—books, kings’ grants of land, tax laws, land laws, anything a body held out to her, she would step right up and read it off. Why, when Noel came home, she reckoned she’d read Pilgrim’s Progress to him, instead of listening to him read it to her.

  A week later Jason Pigot came tearing up the hill from the river, bareheaded and barefooted, his eyes like the eyes of somebody who has met a ha’nt in the woods. Stephanie, milking the cow in a corner of the clearing, stared after him.

  “What’s the matter, Jason?” she called.

  Jason, however, did not hear her.

  Setting down her piggin, Stephanie hurried toward the cabin.

  “Berthy,” she heard Jason panting at the door. “Prissie says—can you come—right away quick?”

  Bertha was spinning, the big wheel whirring hard against the nippy autumn days that would be on them before long now. She stopped her pacing back and forth, and put her hand on the wheel to slow it.

  “I was thinkin’ it was time you came,” she said.

  Deftly she rolled her thread up and laid it on the standard, then reached for her bonnet that hung on a peg on the wall.

  “How’s Prissie doin’?” she asked.

  “She’s mighty bad off, Berthy,” Jason answered, begging her with his panicky voice to be quick.

  “You don’t s’pose …”

  Bertha hesitated a minute in the doorway, trying to settle some matter in her mind.

  “Is it safe, Jason, do you reckon, to leave the young uns here?” she asked. “Or had I better take ’em all along?”

  “There ain’t no signs of red men about, Berthy, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Not since the Isoms got scalped.”

  “Run hunt Cassie,” Bertha said to Steffy. “I’ll take her with me, I reckon. Tell Rob to help you around the clearin’ while I’m gone, and tell Willie to pick me up some shelly bark. I’ll try to get back before dark.”