“Yeah, yeah,” the others said.
The preacher wiped his hands on his pants and took the poke out from his waist. He poured the contents on the cloth where I had mixed the dough. The gold glittered like crumbs of light.
“Whoo-ee!” the men said. “That’s the real stuff.”
“Why don’t we divide up now?” one said.
“There’ll be no dividing till the end.”
“How do we know you ain’t hiding some of the gold?” one said.
“You don’t know,” the preacher said.
I took up the kittle like I was going for water and slipped out of the firelight. I hoped all eyes would stay on the gold.
“Ain’t that stuff pretty,” the men kept saying.
I darted into the first laurel bushes I come to and walked as quick and quiet as I could. It was that time of evening when everything is shadows and you’ve not got your night eyes yet. It’s hard to go straight in a laurel thicket because you’re bending over so much and they’s nothing to keep your eye on ahead. You can’t see nothing but the limbs all around, and it’s hard to look through laurels leaves even in winter time.
I thought I was going toward the creek where Realus was waiting, but after I’d gone far enough to be there I still didn’t see no creek. I kept pushing limbs out of my way and running further, and still they wasn’t nothing ahead but more laurel bushes. I stopped and listened and all I could hear was my breathing, and the men hollering back at the fire. I didn’t hear any creek water.
I thought about calling for Realus, but what if they was to hear me? Above the laurels the stars was coming out, but they didn’t help me. I tried to figure out where I had gone wrong. I must have circled back away from the creek. It couldn’t be that far away unless I had gone in a complete circle.
After the long walk the night before, and working all day, and the worry and fear we’d had, I must have been awful tired. I felt dizzy and couldn’t think, looking around at all the dark bushes. It was like I had sunk into some hole of laurel. I was no closer to the Holsten than I had been the night before. In fact I felt even further from the peaceful life there.
Suddenly I parted two bushes and come out into an opening. And I heard the sound of creek water. They was a man standing by the bank, and I thought it must be Realus, though he didn’t have no horse. But just when I got near him I could see and smell it was the preacher.
“Why, looky here,” the preacher said. “You’re not trying to run away again are you?”
“I was going to get water for the tea,” I said. The kittle was still in my hand. I wondered if I could hit him with the kittle.
“All the way through the laurel thicket you was going for water,” he said.
“A woman has to answer the call of nature,” I said.
“A woman has to answer the call of her nature,” the preacher said.
I started to step around him. I thought I might be able to run off into the dark bushes again.
“I ain’t going to let you go,” the preacher said. “You’ve been sent to me by the Lord and I ain’t going to let you get away.” He grabbed my arm in his powerful hand. I could smell his tobacco and his sweat.
“The Lord ain’t give me to nobody but my husband,” I said.
“But he ain’t your husband,” the preacher said. “You ain’t married at all. I’m going to be your husband.”
I swung back the kittle and hit him hard as I could. But he seen it coming and throwed up his arm to stop the blow. Except he went down like he had fainted, like his legs just give out.
Then I seen your Grandpa with a stick in his hand. He had hit the preacher from behind just when I slung the kittle. I was so shocked I stood there in amazement.
“Let’s go,” Realus said. “Let’s get away from here.”
“He’s got some gold. He owes us some gold,” I said.
“I want to forget about gold,” your Grandpa said.
I bent down over the preacher’s body, sickened by the smell of sweat. I felt in his pocket for the poke of gold. But it wasn’t there. Instead I found a handful of sand and pebbles that felt like nuggets and I pulled them out.
“Leave the gold be,” your Grandpa said. He took my hand and pulled me along the creek to where the horse was tied.
“We ain’t got no time to waste,” he said. “They’ll come looking for the preacher, and for us. If they can’t find the gold they’ll follow us to the Holsten.”
“The poke of gold is back in the camp,” I said. “I seen him showing it to all the men.”
“We still have to hurry,” Realus said.
Your Grandpa said that since they knowed we was bound for the West they might follow us on the main trail. Best to cut to the north and go a more roundabout way. It would be harder to go through woods on Indian trails and buffalo trails, but it would be safer in the long run.
“We left some of our pots and pans back there,” I said after we had gone a mile or two.
“We’ll buy some more,” he said.
“They ain’t no stores in the West,” I said.
“They’s traders that come through and will trade anything for fur,” he said.
The moon come up later and we could see the trail ahead better. But everything seemed stranger even than it had the night before. The mountains looked like a whole other world from the one I knowed. I got my second wind, for we must have walked ten miles before we stopped to sleep on a high-up place, right against a cliff where you could look out on the country below, blue in the moonlight.
“They’s liable to be a rattler in this rock,” I said to Realus.
“They won’t be stirring for another month,” he said. The pebbles I had got from the preacher’s pocket was still clutched in my hand. I poured them in a rag and tied it up before we went to sleep.
Children, the sad facts of life are always sad. You can look at anything in a certain light and it will break your heart. Something that seems perfectly ordinary, going smoothly, will suddenly taste like ashes and swill. I’ve always been the kind of person that could be overcome by the sadness of everything, for a while. Suddenly the luster and firmness will fall away, and everything shows its naked ugliness.
The day at the gold diggings took some of the vigor out of me. I was relieved to get back on the road, but our mood wasn’t the same anymore. Maybe it was the loss of sleep for two nights, and all the work and worry around the preacher’s gold mine, and the hard walking. I had been keyed up for too long.
They was something different about your Grandpa the next day too. Or at least it seemed to me he had changed. Maybe it was the fatigue and disappointment of the long day’s work in the mud, and the fight with Sarse. He was tired and fretty that day. He’d stop on the trail and listen, and if he heard somebody coming he’d draw the horse off into the trees and I’d follow. We hid there until whoever it was passed.
“I don’t want nobody telling which way we’ve gone,” he said.
“But they know we’re headed toward the West,” I said.
“But I don’t want them to be certain,” Realus said. “They might follow us.”
“Daddy wouldn’t do that,” I said. “He wouldn’t take the time and trouble. He will give up on me first.”
“Don’t want people to know about my business,” your Grandpa said.
So we avoided settlements and stands and taverns, whenever we come upon one. We never even stopped at houses. You never saw such places as we went through. It’s a good thing I was a strong girl. We climbed up steep trails and down steep trails. We wound around the sides of mountains under rock cliffs and we surrounded swamps full of mud and briars. Places the growth was so thick we walked in the creek to avoid the tangles. We’d see a little cabin in the distance and your Grandpa would lead us way around the clearing.
“Them people don’t care if we’re on the way to the West,” I said. “They might invite us to stay the night.”
“You never know who they might be,” he said. �
�I’ve heard of people that lived along the road and made their living by robbing travelers. They might kill us just to see what we had.” He seemed to grow more suspicious as we went along. Before, he was the kind of man that trusted people. And now he was afraid that everybody was going to rob us. He hadn’t seemed like hisself since we left the gold mine. But I think it was his concern for me. To have a young wife made him afraid. Men don’t have much confidence in women, and it makes them nervous to be responsible for a wife or daughter. Men feel women expose them to danger.
“They sure is a lot of high mountains protecting the Holsten,” I said.
“That’s why the land is cheap for the taking,” your Grandpa said. “Otherwise the place would be all settled.”
It come up the spring rains a few days after we left the gold diggings. I never seen such rain, and we was right in the middle of it. When you’re exposed to rain for hours it seems to soak into your bones. Everything we had got wet. After a day or two it was like the rain had washed all the strength out of my body and soul. The rain just kept coming down like a waterfall, and we got slower and slower. With my hair and clothes soaked, and my feet in the mud, I felt like a poor shivering dog.
One night we found a cave and started a fire with some dusty pine wood somebody had left there. Mostly the wood outside was too wet to catch a spark. We’d had to eat whatever we had raw. It was such a relief to get to the cave and cook some corn cakes and a possum Realus had killed. We roasted the possum on a stick. I missed my pots and pans that had been left back at the gold camp.
It seemed like the rain would never stop. I put up sticks in the cave and dried some of my clothes. Everything had a musty smell. It was like the world was going to melt and rot, even if it didn’t wash away. The woods floor was covered with mushrooms and moldy patches, mostly these mushrooms that look like jelly and slimy cups.
Children, that was the first time in my life I thought I was going to take the miseries and the all-overs at once. My bones felt sore and the rain on my head had give me the headache. And I felt a cold coming on in my throat and nose. Everything was going wrong, and we still wasn’t to the Holsten.
“How much further is it?” I said.
“Petal, I wanted to surprise you,” your Grandpa said. “But we’re already on the Holsten.”
“How long till we get to your place?”
“Maybe in a couple of days, if the rain stops.”
That cheered me up a little, even with my headache. We built a kind of ditch at the mouth of the cave to keep water from running in from the rocks above. They wasn’t nothing to set on but an old log the Indians must have pulled into the cave. I sorted through everything we had left. We had just a skillet and a kittle, one knife and two soup bowls.
While we waited for the rain to stop, Realus carved me three spoons out of maple. And he made a spatula of oak for turning hoecakes. He killed a turkey and a deer and we eat plenty. I rubbed deer grease on the new spoons and spatula to season them.
Realus sorted through the tools he’d took off the horse. He had left his shovel at the digging and the other tools had rusted in the rain. He went down to the creek and got the flattest rock he could find and sharpened everything, the grubbing hoe, the ax, the adz, the saw. And then he rubbed grease on the metal.
He was afraid that all the rain, and the heat of the horse, had made some of his seed start sprouting. We opened the bags and picked through the grains one by one. Sure enough, some of the corn and beans had started to swell and crack. We picked out all the cracked ones and set them aside. Maybe we could plant them first and they would still come up, if we could get to the place and clear some ground quick enough.
We stretched a cloth on four sticks and put the rest of the seeds on that, hoping to dry them enough so they would stay tight and hard. The danger was the fire would warm them and they’d start to swell even more. Didn’t seem like nothing was going right. It was a good thing we was young and in love because older people couldn’t have put up with so much. Every day we waited for the sun to appear, but it kept raining.
“This is Noah’s flood again,” I said to Realus. “It’s going to last forty days and forty nights and we’re going to be drowned if we don’t climb a tree.”
“Maybe it’s the end of the world,” your Grandpa said, trying to joke but sounding sadder than he intended. The truth was, we had started to feel it was the end of the world. It didn’t seem the sun would ever show again, or that we would get out of that dark, musty cave. That night I cried. I just couldn’t help myself. I’m not the crying sort of woman, but the bottom seemed to drop out of everything. Something just went inside me, and I found myself sobbing. I was ashamed of it, and that made me cry worser.
“Now, now,” Realus said. But he didn’t know what else to say.
I cried myself to sleep thinking I had run away from home with a man that didn’t know what to say to me. We was lost in the wilderness. It was like the Lord had forsook us in that damp cave. I thought I would die of consumption if we stayed there.
When I woke that next morning, the first thing I noticed was how quiet it was. It was like a noise, but the noise was silence, and birds was out in the woods. The light coming into the cave was blinding. We hadn’t seen the sun in many days.
“Realus?” I said. But they was no answer. I got up stiff from lack of sleep and crying, and stumbled toward the mouth of the cave where I heard a crackling. Outside, your Grandpa had a little fire going, and tea boiling in the kittle.
“How about some hot tea?” he said.
As I set there on a rock with my hair damp and dirty, sipping from the mug your Grandpa handed me, it seemed like I was being raised from the dead. Children, it’s the best advice I can give you, that if you just keep going things will get better. It may take a long time, and seem like they’s never going to be no improvement. But I’ve seen it happen many a time. A few hours before I thought we was going to die in that smelly cave. And here the sun was out and the woods fresh as the day of creation.
Soon as we drunk the tea and eat some corn cakes, Realus said he was going to catch fish for dinner. “It’s too wet to travel right now,” he said. “Fresh fish will give us strength.”
“Then I’m going to wash my hair,” I said. I knowed it would make me feel better if my hair was clean. It hadn’t been touched since I left home.
I went to the bags we had piled in the cave to find the gourd of soap. The bags had never dried out completely, and smelled a little sour. I had to dig through all kinds of odds and ends to find the gourd. And when I did find the soap I suddenly thought of Mama. Me and her had made it from lye water and beef fat. We made it on the full of the moon like you’re supposed to if the soap’s going to be pure white.
I took the gourd down to the creek and knelt on a rock and washed all the smoke and grease out of my hair. As I worked the soap into my hair, I remembered Mama doing that for me. Beautiful as it was going off into the wilderness with the man you loved, it was hard to have no other woman to talk to. And I thought, society is people helping other people. That’s why people stick together, because they need each other’s help. Otherwise things falls apart, and you are back to the mud and animal level.
I had the intensest longing to go back home as I soaped my hair and rinsed it in the cold creek water. I thought of the church and school and blacksmith shop. And people coming over for parties at Christmas time, and the suppers we had after singings. It seemed the most precious thing was a community you could learn from and help out. I thought of the way when somebody died all the women brought plates of beans and chicken. I knowed I would go on with your Grandpa to the clearing, but for the first time it come to me what I had give up. The young is ignorant, and they learn something best by having to do without it.
Your Grandpa caught a whole mess of trout, and I fried them in the skillet before we loaded up the horse and headed down the trail. They wasn’t really a trail, but we felt stronger, full of fresh fish and tea. It’s a
mazing what a belly full of hot food will do for your outlook. When we finally got going, the walking was easier than before. They wasn’t hardly no trail, but the brush seemed to open up for us. They was always a way between bushes and saplings, though you couldn’t see it at first.
“Why ain’t we seen no Indians?” I said.
“Indians only come through this country on hunting trips,” your Grandpa said. “Or in war parties.”
That relieved me some. I was in no hurry to see Indians.
“But we ain’t seen no settlements either,” I said.
“I told you it was a long way from anybody else,” your Grandpa said. “I don’t want neighbors to dispute my boundary lines and argue about where the church ought to be.”
“But where will we get a granny woman when we need her?”
“We’ll find one when the time comes,” he said.
“What’ll we do if we need to borrow some salt, or some fire?”
“This is the land of make-do,” he said. “Make do, or do without.”
I liked it when your Grandpa put it like that.
“One more day,” he said. “And we’ll be there.”
“We’d better get there,” I said. “If we want to plant anything.”
Children, I wish I could tell you about my first sight of the house place. Maybe it was tiredness that made everything look so pretty. When you’re tired enough, you get a little out of your head, like you was drunk. So tired you’re light-headed.
We had been walking so long, and had been lost so long in the hollers and laurel thickets, and holed up in that rotten cave, that the prospect of having a roof over my head and a bed under my back seemed like the promise of paradise. People will talk about heaven as some city of gold and pearl, where they sing and play their harps all the time. And some people talk about paradise as a place of pure light and happy ghosts floating around. But I think heaven is whatever you need most at the time. If you’re hungry enough, some hot biscuits and honey seems like all you need of glory. And if you’re cold, a warm spot by the fire seems like Abraham’s bosom. And when you’re sleepy enough, just a pillow can feel like the sweet milk of mercy flowing in your veins. If you’re sweaty and dirty enough, a good bath to relax and clean you up can seem like grace and the best of bliss.
The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts Page 6