“Howdy, Pappy!” smiled Stephanie.
Jonathan stared dumbfounded. “What on earth are you young uns up to?” he demanded. “An’ if it ain’t that meddler, Frohawk!”
“He was botherin’ again,” Stephanie told Jonathan.
“He’s on his way to jail,” said Rob.
“Mister Venable, I—”
Jonathan wasted no words shutting up Frohawk. “You can say your say to Colonel Bowman,” he said.
He turned to the travelers. “I thought I was moughty tired,” he explained, “but I reckon I’ll be downright pleased to finish this little job my young uns started. You can put your play purty up, Rob. I can tow Frohawk in with a rifle, I reckon. Steffy,” he added, “you run home an’ tell your mammy Jonathan’s back an’ brung a lot of company to supper with him. They’re aimin’ to settle.”
Back through the woods in the direction of the clearing they turned, Stephanie’s feet as light as seeds of milkweed floating through the air.
“So you’re the little missy your pappy sets such store by!” said the man walking back of Willie.
Stephanie did not answer right away, although she tried. The cat had surely got her tongue, she reckoned, for not a word could she pry out. She might have been Lonesome Tilly for all the talking she was doing.
After an awkward minute she found her tongue.
“Where’d you come from?” she asked. “All of you?”
“From hither and yon,” said the man. “Virginny and Caroliny. The Waxhaw and Great Peedee and the Yadkin. Your pappy gathered us as he came along, a-singin’ the praises of Kentucky County. That’s why it took him so long to get home. Seems like, as long as he was so close to the Back Country when he was at Williamsburg, he had to drop down to your old home place to fetch somethin’ or other to you. So we joined up with him. And here we are. Whatcoat’s my name,” he added. “Steve Whatcoat.”
Stephanie walked on a minute in silence. It seemed overpoweringly good, this prospect of neighbors come to face life with them in the wilderness. But there were things about it she wondered if they knew.
“Did you get your claims straightened out at the Land Office?” she asked.
“Yep,” Whatcoat said. “Bought ’em up in Virginny from a speculator that owns land all through here. Had to pay mighty high for ’em, but it was worth it, I’m a-thinkin’, to get a fresh start in a new country. Feller intended settlin’ out here hisself, but his wife wouldn’t come ’count of the red men. The six of us families, we bought up two thousand acres south of your pappy’s claim.”
“Then Frohawk’ll likely be hangin’ around your places, too,” she told him. “Till December, at any rate, unless Pappy can clap him in jail for trespassin’.”
The man laughed a loud, hearty laugh. “I reckon a little thing like Frohawk won’t bother us much,” he said. “We can make a law for folks like him.”
Stephanie turned to glance at him. He was tall and square-shouldered, and fair-haired like a woman, and he walked free and easy as a deer, but without a deer’s skittishness. A body could tell by the crinkles about his eyes and the way his chin was set well back atop his breastbone that he knew for a fact the earth was his and he’d always keep it—he and the little towheaded shaver riding on his shoulder opposite his rifle.
“Picked up some mighty good news at the Fort,” he told Stephanie. “Colonel Clark’s licked the Indians to a fare-you-well at Chillicothe, and not bein’ satisfied, he went on to Piccaway and let ’em have the rest of his powder. Not all the British bribes in the country could tempt ’em to come back now, I reckon.”
Stephanie’s heart fluttered.
“Is Colonel Clark back yet?” she asked. “And his men?”
“Not the Colonel. But his men are stragglin’ in.”
Stephanie could scarcely hear what more the man was saying to her. Noel might be home, she told herself, when she got there, but she passed lightly over the fact that he would have come by the path they were then traveling, and for certain nobody had seen him.
Stephanie reckoned she ought to be weighted with metal, like Rob’s Bird Head pistol, to keep her from rising up and flying. She felt like the mockingbirds that sang so hard they had to fly up and take a little turn in the air just to rest themselves so they could go on singing again. Steve Whatcoat with his towheaded young un on one shoulder and his rifle on the other was pressing hard at her heels, singing snatches of songs, calling back to his friends to look at this wonder and that. Looked like any minute he might have to take a turn in the air like the mockingbirds, too, thought Stephanie, it was so hard to keep his bigness inside himself.
Stephanie glanced back at him shyly.
“Can you read?” she asked.
“You bet I can!” he told her.
“Would you—do you reckon you could learn me how to read?” she asked.
“You bet I will!” he said. “We’ll begin as soon as we get to your clearin’ and get a drink of water.”
“I already know my ABC’s,” she told him. “Mammy helped me learn ’em.”
“Then you’re just a whoop and a holler from knowin’ how to read already,” he said.
As they neared the clearing, Stephanie got a glimpse of her mammy through the trees, standing in the doorway with Cassie beside her, trying to see through the thick green woods. Prissie Pigot’s baby had been born all right, Stephanie calculated, and Bertha had hurried home, but she couldn’t find hair nor hide of a single young un she’d left there. Some day, soon, thought Stephanie, they would chop down all the trees, and hack a road right past their cabin so that a body could see plainly who was coming and going.
“Steffy!” said Bertha weakly. “Where you been? I called and called.”
Before Stephanie could answer, Steve Whatcoat, followed by all the men and women and young uns, all the creel-laden horses, the cattle, and the sheep, crowded into the clearing.
“’Pon my word and honor!” muttered Bertha. She stared at them a full minute. Then hot, salty tears broke out and ran down her brown cheeks and into the hollows made by her cheekbones.
“Pappy’s home, Mammy,” Stephanie told her gently, hurrying to her.
Bertha’s tears turned into a fresh then, and the miserable memory of long days and longer dark nights of waiting swelled it, and nothing, not even hot, burning shame at crying with so many folks looking on, could stop it till it had run its course.
“Pappy’s home, Mammy,” Stephanie said to her again. “He’ll be here any minute. He had to go back to the Fort for somethin’. And these, Mammy,” she added, pointing to the people crowding into the clearing, “these are our new neighbors.”
Bertha wiped her eyes on her apron and smiled at the neighbors. “Come right in and sit down and rest yourselves,” she said, with the sound of crying still in her voice, “while Steffy and I hustle about and get supper on.”
Toward sundown Jonathan came hurrying out of the woods as if his feet itched harder to get home than they had ever itched to leave it.
“Howdy, Berthy,” he said, his begrimed, bearded face lighted up with smiles like a shelly bark light in a daubed, dark cabin. “How’d you like the present I brung you? All these new neighbors?”
“You couldn’t have brought a finer,” Bertha told him.
“An’ here’s another,” Jonathan said, taking a little packet from his shirt bosom. “Turnip seeds. If we plant ’em now, in time to get the fall rains, we’ll be a scrapin’ juicy sweet turnips all fall. An’ here’s another.”
This time he took from among the plunder heaped around the doorway a deerskin bag rounded from its contents.
“Salt,” he said. “Enough to do all winter.”
Jonathan looked about him.
“Steffy, where’re you?” he called. “I brung you a present, too. If I can find hit.”
Again he looked among the willow withe creels, the bulging saddlebags, the black kettles crammed with odds and ends, and the bundles of bedclothes tied with tow string.<
br />
“Even looked up one of your old quilts, Berthy, an’ brung that along,” he said, lifting a quilt-wrapped bundle from the plunder and fumbling with the knot into which its corners were tied.
“Reckon I’m mighty glad I went to the trouble to get this for you, Steffy,” he went on, “seein’ as how you earned hit for chasin’ Frohawk off. You an’ Rob.”
Bertha stared at them.
“Frohawk?” she asked. “What do you mean, Frohawk?”
Before Jonathan would untie the knot, Stephanie, Rob, and Willie had to get out in the clearing and behave just as they did when Frohawk came snooping in and Lonesome Tilly put a good healthy fear in him with his copperhead.
“Frohawk’s bullet went right across here,” Stephanie told them, leading the way in the direction which the bullet had taken.
Suddenly she stopped, her face white, her blue eyes full of fire. Stooping down, she lifted the whip of the Tree of Freedom. Frohawk’s bullet had shot through it, leaving it dangling by a thread of the tender young bark, the scarred butt sticking out of the ground like any common sprout to be grubbed out with the grubbing hoe.
“Look what he’s gone and done to my Tree of Freedom!” she stormed. “If I could lay hands on him again—”
“What sort of tree?” asked Steve Whatcoat, bending over her to look.
Stephanie explained, trying to cover up her outburst. It was just an apple tree she had planted, she said. A sort of special one. One she had set great store by.
“Well, never mind a little prunin’ like that,” Steve Whatcoat consoled her. “Come another spring and your tree’ll grow again. Give us a good long fall, and chances are it’ll be a-growin’ new twigs and leaf buds before winter. You can’t hardly kill a tree that’s got good roots in the ground. And from the looks of this apple sprout, somebody’s given it uncommon good care.”
Everything was all right then, Stephanie told herself. A body couldn’t kill freedom any more than he could kill a tree if it had good, strong roots growing, she reckoned. No matter what passed over the land and possessed the people, you couldn’t kill freedom if somebody gave it uncommon good care.
“Whar’d Lonesome Tilly go?” asked Jonathan.
“Apt as not, he skedaddled back home,” said Willie.
“Then you skedaddle after him,” said Jonathan. “Tell him we’re havin’ a little gatherin’ at our house tonight. Tell him we got salt, an’ our new neighbors have brung enough corn meal to last the winter an’ to feed all of us on journey cakes tonight. An’ tell him he’s our special invited guest—him, but not his copperhead,” he added. “One of these days soon, Willie, we’ll hack out a trail to Lonesome Tilly’s cabin. Then you can ride Job when you go expressin’ to Tilly’s.”
A puzzled look clouded Jonathan’s face. “Whar was Noel while all this was goin’ on?” he asked. “Whar’s Noel now?”
“Noel’s with Colonel Clark, Pappy,” Stephanie said, looking at him steadily.
“What!” thundered Jonathan. “You mean to tell me that boy run off after I told him p’int-blank to stay home?”
“Noel didn’t run off, Pappy,” said Stephanie. “He went because Colonel Clark had to have him. He was doin’ what you told him to do.”
“What d’you mean, doin’ what I told him to do?” barked Jonathan.
“Don’t you recollect you told him what to do in case Frohawk came meddlin’?” asked Stephanie. “You told Noel to take care of him. Well, way we figured it, Frohawk, and King George, and six hundred red men and British generals draggin’ a cannon through Kentucky County and scalpin’ right and left are all the same thing. The British and the red men showed up first, so Noel went to help Colonel Clark chase ’em.”
Jonathan stared at her. “Sounds jist for the world like Noel,” he said.
“Noel was doin’ his duty the way he saw it,” said Bertha.
“But somebody’s been makin’ out here,” Jonathan said, looking about him at the chinked walls of the cabin, at the clean rows of corn, at the newly girdled trees. “As good as any man.”
“That was Steffy,” spoke up Rob. “And am I glad you’ve come home, Pappy! There ain’t nothin’ Steffy won’t tackle, and then she tries to make everybody pitch in and help. And it ain’t no use tellin’ her when she’s licked. She just can’t understand.”
Jonathan looked down at Stephanie, proud and gentle at the same time.
“I reckon hit was wuth all the trouble I took, goin’ out of my way to collect that purty for you,” he said.
Turning back to the plunder, he unrolled the bed quilt and took from it the gold-and-walnut-framed looking glass that had belonged to Marguerite de Monchard when she was Stephanie’s age.
“Thought hit mought spruce up the wilderness a mite,” he explained, putting it into her outstretched hands.
16. Home Is the Soldier
Steve whatcoat was so anxious to set foot on his new land that he beat the birds up the next morning, and roused everybody else as he stirred about the clearing, unhobbling horses and loading them. After breakfast, when the settlers cut out through the newly girdled woods to the south in the direction of their land, the Venables went with them. Besides his rifle, Jonathan carried his ax and the maul, Rob carried the frow, Bertha took along coals of fire in a covered kettle, and Stephanie took the preacher feller’s copy of Pilgrim’s Progress so that Steve Whatcoat could help her with her reading if ever he took a minute from his chopping to sit down and wipe the sweat off his face and rest.
There were six cabins to build. Before the menfolks could begin, however, they had to scatter out in the woods and find game for their dinner. Shouldering their rifles, they disappeared, leaving the womenfolks speculating on the likeliest place to build the first cabin.
Stephanie sat down on the root of a tree and opened her book, but she found it hard to listen to the womenfolks and, at the same time, to make good sense of the words,
As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a Man cloathed with Raggs.…
Looked like a hill was a mighty pretty place to raise a cabin, said one woman. Then a body could see far and wide. And the dog trot would always be a cool place to sit and churn, or to string beans on a summer morning, or to lean back against the wall and rest in the shade after dinner.
But if she built on a hilltop, another woman told her, she’d spend her whole enduring life lugging things up the hill to herself. If she built in a holler, all the world would come down to her. She favored living in a holler, she said. She’d rather rest more and not look so far.
An hour later, the argument was still running as the menfolks came back with their game—three turkeys with long, bronzed, limber necks dangling; a passel of squirrels; and a deer, skinned and cut up in the thicket where it was shot.
The rest of the day the woods rang with the sound of the ax as men chopped down trees and chipped away bark, notched the big logs, and split the shakes for the cabin roof.
While the men worked with ax and maul and frow, the womenfolks broiled the turkeys and the thick dark steaks of venison, and made rich stew of the tender squirrels over a fire built from the coals Bertha had brought. And everywhere there was talk, talk, talk—little high-pitched talk of young uns hunting wintergreen in the woods, the quiet, even talk of womenfolks, and the loud shouting of menfolks as they dragged logs to the cabin site and skidded them into place on the walls.
Sometimes Stephanie shut out all the sounds but the sound of talking. It put her in mind of a camp meeting song, with everybody joining in. Or of the psalm from the old Huguenot Bible:
Vous tous, habitans de la terre, jetez des cris de rejouissance a l’Éternel.
When the sun went down, the first cabin was almost finished. Then the Venables got together their implements, Stephanie picked up her book from a bed of moss where she had laid it, and they started
home.
“We’ll be back in the mornin’, bright an’ early,” promised Jonathan. “Reckon the next cabin’ll be ’bout a mile farther on, won’t hit?”
“Not quite so far,” Steve Whatcoat told him. “’Bout three quarters of a mile, we figured. We aim to settle pretty thick through here. ’Twouldn’t surprise me if some time we’re a thrivin’ town, like that new settlement at the Falls. Or New Bern. Or even Charleston.”
“Don’t forget to cover the coals tonight,” warned Bertha. “We can carry coals from this fire to the next clearin’.”
“Pappy,” asked Rob, when they were deep in the woods, “can I go huntin’ with your rifle in the mornin’ before we begin choppin’?”
“I was jist a-thinkin’, Rob,” said Jonathan, striding along at the head of his family. “Seein’ how you did so much with a toy pistol that wasn’t even loaded,” he added, “I’m anxious to see what you could do with an honest-to-goodness rifle.”
“Rob don’t need a gun yet, Jonathan,” said Bertha. “There’s plenty of time for guns later.”
“Tell you what, Rob,” said Jonathan, paying no mind to Bertha. “This winter we’ll do a lot of trappin’, you an’ me. We can sell the furs down the Mississippi. Maybe we could make us a flatboat, or pick us up one for a song from settlers comin’ down from Fort Pitt to the Falls, an’ float hit loaded with furs down the river to New Orleans. Soon’s we sell the furs we could buy you a brand-new rifle. How’d you like that, huh? Seein’ New Orleans whar ever’body talks in French an’ wears their Sunday clothes ever’day, an’ pickin’ out your own rifle?”
There was nothing, thought Stephanie, nothing in the whole, enduring world that Rob would like better than stalking varmints in the winter woods and setting traps for them along the river banks, than floating down the Big River with his loot of furs loaded on a flatboat, and with sometimes a strange, far-off, beautiful city, and sometimes a rifle, shining in his eyes. There was nothing her pappy would like better, either, she thought. It was the medicine he would give himself when, some winter morning, he saw blue smoke curling up from the neighbors’ cabins.
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