The Fields

by Conrad Richter

  “Oh, I reckon nobody would want to change his young ’uns for anybody else’s,” Sayward said.

  “If you’d like, I could help you sell your place here,” the town builder offered. “I might even take it in trade. After all, your husband and I would be associated together, and I have had a great deal of experience in handling property. Meantime you can come up and pick out the lot of your choice. You might prefer one of the brick houses we’re building. We expect to get a great deal of brick up the river.”

  Sayward’s eyes were far away. She saw the dark, impenetrable forest, that always stood in the back of her mind, dissolve, and red brick walls rise in its place. So it was true, then, she told herself, the red handbill town of her thoughts.

  “Thankee, but I never could go up ’ar to live,” she said in a low voice.

  “Why, ma’am, you just informed me you would like it!” the major protested.

  “Oh, I’d like nothin’ better,” she agreed. “Many’s the time I wished I could live in your town. The childer would have it easier ’ar. Likely they would get brighter like you said. Portius would have it a pile handier. But I never could give up and go. I’d feel ashamed to run off and be licked by the trees.”

  “Gross nonsense!” the major said energetically. “Now I must leave. But I’m coming back for these papers in the morning. When I do, I shall make you an offer. Your husband can make out a contract and we can all sign it. I move with dispatch. My last town, I bought the land Monday, laid it out Tuesday, sold the lots Wednesday and raised the first dwelling Thursday.”

  He rose to go. When Sayward opened the door for him, she saw her hayfield simmering in the sun. It lay bare and empty of humans. For a lick her heart nigh stopped beating. Then she heard her boys scatter around the corner like turkeys in the brush. They must have been up against the cabin logs listening.

  The major hadn’t ridden off ten poles till the three of them were at her. It was plain they had heard all that was said and reckoned their mammy foolish and stubborn as General Wayne’s one-eyed ox for saying she wouldn’t leave this lonesome place in the woods for town. Wasn’t their pappy Major Tate’s lawyer? That made the town as good as theirs already, and they wouldn’t give up. They hadn’t a thought to go back to the hayfield now. No, the hay, flax, wheat and corn could all go to the Diel. There they stood with their hearts pumping and their tow shirts a quiver. They couldn’t wait. They’d have given the clothes off their backs to hear they were moving today to a place called Tateville they never saw and that wasn’t even built yet. A hundred reasons they told why they had to go. Sayward didn’t need to hear. She knew by heart how it would be once they found out. Didn’t she mind plain as yesterday how her brother and sisters and even her pappy back in the old state wanted to go up West? Pennsylvany wasn’t good enough for them any more. They could hardly wait till they’d up and start. Only her mother didn’t want to go. She had her heart set on living her life back among friends and relations. But she had to give in and tramp all the way out here to die in the wilderness. Always Sayward had the notion her mam hadn’t enough spunk, and that’s why she let them have their way. More than once Sayward told herself that when she had young ones she wouldn’t let them twist her around their finger. But now she had a better idea of what her mam went through. You had to be pigheaded to set yourself against all the rest of your family and mighty calloused to say no when your own flesh and blood were pulling at your skirt, a begging with their mouths, and their eyes looking like they’d give up and die if you didn’t say yes. And right beside them stood your man watching grave-faced what you’d make up your mind to do.

  “We kain’t fool now. We got work to do,” she told them and led the way back to the hayfield.

  But in her heart never did she see how she’d get through the work this summer. Wheat was coloring up fast. It would have to be reaped, bound, shocked, flailed and the chaff fanned out. Then her flax had to be taken care of, pulled, spread, turned, ripped for the seeds, and that was only a start of the long “tejus” work before it could be spun. All the time corn and potatoes would have to be hoed and sprouts and weeds fought. And meanwhile the hay had to be made and put away. It was all coming in a pile. You couldn’t put off a crop once it was ready.

  And yet she felt sad to think of selling her place. Her pap had picked it. Of all the land around here, this was her choice, for they had come first. These woods hadn’t even a tomahawk-right when they came, save for Louie Scurrah’s cabin. Her pap had the pick of the whole country, and now she was a giving it up.

  She wished she could see it again before she signed any papers. She hankered to walk the bounds, for that was the dearest walk to anybody who owned land, tramping around your own ground, seeing how far it went. All the way out here it ran, you’d tell yourself. Now that over there was somebody else’s.

  She watched Resolve. He could handle the scythe good as she could. Guerdon and Kinzie had the two reap hooks. They hadn’t any more.

  “It has somethin’ I want to do,” she told the boys. “You work here till I get back.”

  Then she went off, a slow, heavy figure in the old, faded dove-gray, homespun short gown, moving along the run, past the beech stump spring and toward the timber. She could feel her boys look up to watch her. They were wondering, what was she after. Was she going in there just a short piece to do her business, or where was she heading for?

  “I wouldn’t go in the woods far, Mam!” Resolve called to her.

  “I’ll git you the rifle if you want!” Guerdon offered.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Sayward reproved them both. She knew what they were thinking. “I’ll carry no gun, and I’m afeard of no Injuns.” Then she went on into the timber.

  Back in the open fields, a small summer air had been stirring, but in the woods it felt still and close as death. She minded the first time her pap had fetched them to this spot and how her mam had to open her mouth to swoop in what air she could in this thatched-in, choked-up place. Raising her eyes she could see a mote of sunlight breaking through the roof of leaves a hundred feet up. That up there, she had thought, must be God’s earth, while this down here was a deep well, and they stood on the bottom. Oh, the woods looked open and bright enough when leaves first came out in the spring. But those leaves didn’t hold tiny and baby-green long. Every week they got bigger and thicker till they shut off the sky. By July they were heavy and dark-colored and they would stay like that till frost nipped them.

  That’s the way the leaves hung overhead now as she tramped her bottom land and the ground began to rise under foot. She tramped through the oaks and hickories with never a squirrel’s bark to break the solitude. God, but it was like the grave in here, and all the way to where Buckman Tull’s compass had told him to flitch the trees. Wyitt had held the rod. You couldn’t see any difference in the ground, but this was where her line ran. It was her ground up to here and Mageel MacMahon’s over there. Wasn’t it curious the way the Irish picked the hills for their places? They claimed it was for the lay of the land and the clear running springs, but Portius thought the smaller timber they had to fell on the hills had something to do with it.

  She had the strangest feeling here standing plumb on her line. Now she turned to follow that line north, past the old wolves’ crossing, past the fallen timbers with the “yaller” oyster shells growing out of the dead wood, past the briers and brambles to the stony point. Right in these rocks somewheres was her first corner. Buckman and Wyitt had piled rocks high as a boy’s head to mark it. Must be over there or back here, some place close around anyway. Yonder it set with some of the rocks down. If you stood on that rock pile in the spring, Wyitt claimed, you could see something, for this rocky point was where snakes holed up for the winter deep in the old earth, lying in knots, one wound harmlessly around the other. It couldn’t be they lay together on account of warmth, for they were down where it never froze, being neither hot nor cold.

  She better watch, she told herself, she didn
’t step on some other kind of “spotted sarpent” sneaking up to her on his belly as one likely had to the Coldwell woman and boy. Why, that showed how low in her mind she was lately! Many a Shawanee, Delaware or Wyandot had she met alone in the woods in her time, and never a fret, only a look, as she passed them the time, that they better not make a wrong move or they’d wish they hadn’t. But now she began to wonder had she done right leaving her three young boys alone back there in the hayfield. She hurried down her east line that ran through a “holler” dark as a pot, where water rose in the earth and her own ground oozed and boiled black under foot. This was ground once she reckoned would make corn and potato land some day. She crossed the trace that ran to George Roebuck’s and came out after while at the big buttonwood on the river. This was her witness tree, and it needed no Hitching, for its hollow shell could hold nigh as many folks as the meeting house.

  Well, those were two of her corners. Now she needed no line to guide her, for the river was her boundary. Down here was a place to get gourds in the late summer. You sliced off the tops for lids, pulled out the guts and had all the piggins and pipkins for your shelfboards you wanted. Her cabin must lay yonder, but in all the tangled wilderness of leaves and vines, she couldn’t see it. And she couldn’t see her third corner either, when she got there. This was at the riffles where you thought you heard voices calling of people long since dead and gone. The June flood must have washed her scabby, red-birch witness tree out. Well, the floods would never wash out the rocky bed of the riffles, and that could be her corner, with all the watery voices as her witnesses.

  She hated to turn west again to the melancholy gloom of the swamps. She passed the old beaver gats where on a summer night you could hear raccoons making funny noises chewing and swallowing the frogs they caught. These were the dim, sunken places, where the butts leaned this way and that, finding it hard to hold themselves up straight in the soft mud. Their roots stood out like bull spiders. She tramped on through a herd of great ash trees stretching up and up. Oh, the ash was the finest of all butts, clean and straight, and not so coarse as the oak. Some were smooth as a board on one side and nobody knew why. But they were a God’s own trial to cut down and burn. Yonder at that old Indian mound was her last corner. Here she turned north to where she had first met her bounds.

  She had tramped clean around her place now. She had come back to the line where she started. She had made a square circle and all that lay inside was “her’n” and Portius’s. She turned down the path slowly now, and when she came from the woods she stopped. It was something to tramp all that way in the dark forest and then come out in the brightness of your own fields. On this rise she could see the whole improvement, her log cabin and barn, the log school and meeting house, but the mortal best were her fields laying cleared, green and golden in the sun.

  She stood there a while for she knew every patch of ground she had opened to daylight. That strip of potatoes was the first piece she ever planted. She could still mind herself walking barefoot in the soft, worked ground that day and how the corn grains she dropped in the rows had seemed drops of gold and rubystone to a woodsy. Yonder beyond the potatoes stretched her field of flax, high as her breasts and level as standing water. The sky-blue flowers had faded now and seeds were forming in the boll. Her own hand had sown it this last late April and her little girls had weeded it in May. No heavy boot dare tramp those tender stalks down. Her girls had to walk barefoot and face the wind so the plants they trod would be helped by the blowing air to rise again. Across from the flax she could see her meadow pasture running down in the woods, a long narrow piece a little too wet to plow, curving with the run so that your eye couldn’t find the sheep at the far end, for the forest turned round it like a ram’s horn and shut them in. And yonder was the hayfield she left a little while ago, with mowed red top, sweet grass, clover, wild teas and thorny dewberry vines all curing together in the sun. She could hear her boys a fighting and quarreling. It was good to know all was well with them while she was off.

  But her favorite patch was the one standing closest to her now. Only last week the stalks were still green and supple. Most every day she had come here to feel the heads and watch the wind run through the field like water. Sometimes the waves minded her of silver fire weaving this way and that. The shadows were the smoke following after. Sometimes they minded her of ghostly forms passing through, strange shapes turning this way and that. You couldn’t see them, but you could the paths they made in the green. One day last week the wind came from the east. The waves that time rose from the bottom, and then it looked like a waterfall running up hill. Oh, ever since those stalks had stayed so fresh and green through the cold winter she had the feeling that something in that wheat was alive and everlasting.

  Now those scabby heads had filled and hardened, and the whole patch lay “yaller” as a sovereign in the sun. She sat down on a stump just inside it. Her head was as high as the stalks. Her eyes could watch the furry, bent-down heads. They turned so easy this way and that, making a soft, gentle, brushing noise in the wind. That was the scaly beards rubbing against each other. The soft, musky smell that wheat had getting ripe came around her like a cloud. It was like a fine dust of flour with the beards ground up. Those licks of beard on the air were so small you couldn’t see them, but they stuck in your throat. You would hardly believe that field had barrels of flour in it a hanging on the stalk. It was the field of life, that’s what it was. When they reaped it, she would bind up a sheaf special and keep it for harvest home in the meeting house this fall. Afterwards she would hang it up in the cabin like the Covenhovens had one in their best room. It would look like a picture on the wall.

  Oh, if she wanted to sell this place, never should she have walked the boundaries today. Going through the deep woods like that and coming out in the cleared fields just made her see how much she had done here. Her fields lay around her house like a bright star with its points running into the dark woods here and yonder, following the richest and easiest-cleared land. She hated to disappoint the boys and Portius. But never did she see how she could sign any paper giving up this place she had made with her own sweat and hands. Come to think of it, the work didn’t seem quite so hard any more. With her boys a helping, she reckoned she could get through.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE NETTLE PATCH

  IT was Kinzie’s fault in the first place. He came home without Star and Boss. Oh, he heard their bells all right. They were in the big swamp beyond the nettle patch. He had Covenhovens’ black-and-tan hound along. That swamp was a rich treasure place to a hound’s nose. He ran so far ahead you couldn’t see him. But when they went in after the cows, it sounded like something came for the dog through the brush. It made a monstrous racket. What it was, Kinzie didn’t know, but the hound popped out a yelping and hid behind the boy.

  Then it was that Kinzie reckoned he better come home and get the rifle.

  “You let your hands off that rifle,” Sayward said. “Guerdon can go back with you. Why, that rifle’s twice bigger’n you are.”

  “I kin handle it, Mam,” Guerdon promised.

  “You mean you can let Kinzie shoot his self with it. When he’s big enough he can have it.”

  “Uncle Wyitt had it when he was ’leven,” Guerdon threw at her, but he didn’t wait for an answer. It would do no good. She would never let them have it. Resolve was the only one she’d trust it to, for he was her favorite. Well, maybe he was just as well off. That rifle would be mighty heavy to tote all the way out there and back. He’d just as soon carry the corn cutter. Will Beagle made it and said you could lay an Indian’s guts on the ground with it. Guerdon took it down from its peg in the log barn and went out the far door, keeping the barn between him and his mam so she couldn’t see what he carried. She’d be liable to make him put even that back.

  Once they got to where Kinzie heard the noise, it was thick with brush and dark as candle time. The vines in here had butts like trees. It had places you had to wa
tch out or the quicksands would get you and other places called prairies where no butts grew, only grass and weeds. But if it had any heavy, thrashing beast in the swamp any more, it kept mighty still now that he had the corn cutter. All Guerdon could hear were the sweet lonesome notes of the swamp robin and the faraway bells of Star and Boss. He and Kinzie had to go through the bull laurel to get near them. It was something to see in June, the flower bunches big as your head and waxy white in this dark place. Now why wouldn’t those ornery cows come home? The flies were bad in here as around the house. Besides Sayward had them build a fire outside the house in fly time. The cows would stand in the smoke to get away from the pests and when the smoke moved, they moved, too. They had as much sense as a human. Some said that when cows didn’t come home, it meant a spell had been cast on them. Then they forgot they ever had a stable to stand in or a mistress to milk them.

  Guerdon halfways believed that. He was on ahead now. They were out of the bull laurel and in the nettle patch. He was all sweated and those nettles burned like fire when they touched him. He bent down to crawl the path under and between two big stands of nettles. He should have looked where he set his hand. He heard Kinzie holler behind him but it was too late. He thought he felt a nettle sting the end of his second finger. When he looked down, there the “spotted sarpent” lay. Oh, never had he seen anything so fat and ugly. It almost made him puke to see it and think his hand had reached down by it. Now he had the mark of the beast burned on him, and already the poison was a spreading in his veins.

  “Did it git you, Guerdie?” Kinzie was hollering to him.

  “Oh, it got me all right,” Guerdon said.

  “I never heerd it rattle,” Kinzie called.