The Which Way Tree

by Elizabeth Crook

  Me and my father then carried in wood and stoked the fire. We carried Juda to the bed that was hers and his and put her on it. She was dirty from when I had drug her along, and she was covered in flour, as it was everywhere in the house. My father did not worry that she had wanted to keep the bed fresh and clean. He said, No matter about that now. He covered her over and I was relieved to see it happen. It was hard enough to have her there without having to look at her too. Or that is what I thought at the time. It would not be long before I thought different about it, being as it is somewhat better to look at a hard thing directly than to know it is in your presence and not know exactly what form it might be in, which is what nobody ever knows of those who has passed.

  My father went out and saddled the mare at the shed and rode up to the door, and come in and taken Samantha in his arms, and carried her out and off they went, though not too fast, as she was complaining a good bit about the pain she was in.

  And then commenced my long wait of watching that shape there under the blanket. It was a colorful blanket made of squares sewn together. It did not have any holes. And yet it was like my eyes was seeing through it to what was there beneath, which was Juda. I knew where all the cuts and lacerations was on her body. I knew her eye was gone. I knew all them details, and yet questions do set in. I thought she might be in a altered condition under the blanket, as the act of becoming a spirit might involve some adjustment. She might be a puff of air under there, or might be turning white. Her eye might be growing back and be able to see through the bedcovers and look at me. Or the lost parts of her might be trying to sneak in the house to join back up with the rest. I recalled how just that morning she yanked my head around whilst she tugged the ridding comb through my hair. And now what was she in charge of. Not a thing I could think of. She was a lump under the blanket and not moving at all, however I will tell you the firelight at moments made me think she was. I kept thinking she would rise up out of that bed and have at me again. It was hard to believe the days of her shoving me around was over. I did not bank the fire, but kept it stoked, and burned most of the wood and nearly our whole stash of cobs, and kept the house warm, and moved about, and then finally got in my bed and pulled up the blanket over my face. But she had more power over me than ever. It frightened me to my bones. To say it was a long night is to not quite reach the fact of the matter.

  When daylight come, my father and Samantha arrived back home on the mare. Samantha had her whole face wrapped up and she was as limp as a water weed in the saddle in front of my father. He was holding her on. His face looked blue, and he was quite weary. It was cold out.

  Help her down, he told me.

  What did they do, I asked him.

  Stitched her up, he said.

  Was it terrible, I asked.

  Yes, he said.

  He would not talk about it.

  Did they have laudanum, I asked.

  They give her plenty, he said.

  I put the mare away and my father seen to Samantha and got her in the bed. Two soldiers from Camp Verde rode out midday to help my father and me dig Juda a grave beside my mother’s, not too close to the creek. They was United States soldiers, being as this was before the Sesesh took over. They was stationed there at Camp Verde to watch out for Indians. Afterward we hitched the mare and drove the wagon over the grave a few times to tamp it down, and then we set a pile of stones on it to keep the wolves and coyotes from digging it up. The soldiers was nice enough. However, my father did not want to converse much under the circumstances and they went their way.

  We made our peace with Juda’s passing and got on with our days. Samantha’s face healed up, but it was a mess. The marked side would get your attention. There was stripes from her mouth to her ear where the claws had ripped it, and crisscross marks left behind from the stitches. My father was extra kind to her, and required nothing of her, and acted like she looked fine regardless that she didn’t. He was bereft about Juda and had a hard time.

  Samantha used to cuss that panther. She got it in her head in a strong way that it would be coming back. She was fixed on this topic and would not be talked out of the notion. She waited day and night for the panther, and I do not mean idle waiting. She was at the ready. It was spooky almost.

  It aims to finish off what it started, she said. It aims to be the end of me and you both.

  You leave me out of it, I told her.

  And here is the piece I can’t fully account for. She wanted the panther to come. She tempted it to do so. At times she would get hold of my father’s rifle and load it in secret, and sneak out in the night, and run off toward the creek like she done that night when the panther come through the dark in pursuit of her. Me and my father awoke on occasion and seen her go out. We kept a eye on her from the door and seen her stop at the edge of the trees, and swing around in a hurry, and aim the gun like she heard the panther running upon her from behind. A time or two she fired the gun, and my father gone out and told her to come on in. Was it out there, he asked her. Did you see something, honey.

  He would not take issue with her, no matter what.

  One time, in the dead of winter, about a year after the panther killed Juda, I seen Samantha go out in her nightgown the same as she done that night. She was some taller by now but no bigger around. She got on her hands and knees, like she was prey, right there at the spot where it knocked her down that night. It was like she was waiting for it to jump on her.

  I swear on a heap of Bibles it’s coming, she told me on many occasions.

  We ain’t got a heap of Bibles, I said. We ain’t got one, even.

  She would go on telling the tale of how the panther killed Juda. She would not forget any aspect about it. She could recall the terrible noises the panther had made. On one occasion she said, It come last night whilst you was asleep. I sniffed it on the wind. I heard it yowl from afar.

  Why was the goats so quiet, I asked her. Go find remains, and I will believe you.

  Remains are yonder, she said. Just yonder.

  I went in search of them to prove her wrong, down one side of the creek and across to the other. My hair stood up on end when I about stumbled upon the carcass of a buck stashed under a pile of leaves. Its tongue was ate out and its belly a shambles. I looked for the paw prints near it, and did not find even one. I begun to believe the panther was a banshee.

  You find any proof, she asked when I got back.

  Nope, I told her. Not a hair.

  She called me a liar and said she knew for sure it was coming around to get us.

  Chapter 5

  Dear Judge,

  I might of gone on too long in the portion you are about to read which I am sending you now, as I might of got carried away. We have been having a good spell of rain that keeps me and Samantha cooped up in the house and I would rather write to you than have to talk to her. She will talk your ear off if you allow it, and she has got no one else here other than me who is tired of listening.

  Also this time is the first I have been asked to write something other than measurements and I am having a good time at it. As I told you in Bandera, I have read books before. I was taught a thing or two by a person named Tom Wellford that my father sent me to learn from who lived down the river near Dr Ganahl and used to teach a few boys. He used to call me his best student by far. I was sorry he left when the war started.

  Whilst I was last in Comfort I bought more paper and quills. I spent my own earned money to purchase them, as I was reluctant to ask Mr Hildebrand to give me five more pages for free. If you would see fit to reimburse me in the future I would appreciate it, as this report is composed at your request, though there may be more to it than you need, in which case a full reimbursement would not be fair nor expected and I will accept that fact without complaining about it, as fair is fair.

  They was not cheap.

  I hope you are having good travels and keeping yourself safe these days. I hope the reports I posted have found their way to you with no troub
le. There has been three of them besides this one. I will need more ink, on account of this pot is about empty. If you could afford me a steel nib pen I would have a easier time of writing and I believe you might have a easier time of reading.

  Mr Hildebrand said to tell you hello, on account of he has met you. Mrs Hildebrand give me more strudel. She insisted I have it. It was hot from the oven. She said Tuesdays is when she makes it and it was Tuesday. She give me the piece for free.

  Yours kindly,

  Benjamin Shreve

  MY TESTAMENT

  I estimate it was four or five years after Juda passed that the Sesesh begun to rise up against the government and torment the Germans who was of a different opinion. I felt bad for so many Germans getting beat up and set fire to and such things, although they was not always the friendliest people. But my father said, Stay out of it. Neither him nor me had a word to say about any of it. We kept our mouths shut. He was tolerating me to come along to work in the shingle camp, where we went about our business, which was enough work to tire us into not caring much one way or the other about much else. Some time passed that way for us, but when things become hot and the Sesesh taken over Camp Verde they put their Yankee prisoners in the canyon across the way, and those had to be fed. That cost us a lot of our game. We had to ride some distance to hunt.

  My father said, Stay away from the canyon, it’s dangerous to go near there.

  The Sesesh called it Prison Canyon but we called it the canyon, as we had never called it nothing but the canyon.

  However, I ventured close and spied prisoners down there and seen they had kept theirselves busy digging holes in the walls and cobbling up shanties of sticks and rocks on both sides of the creek and making a whole town down there that was quite tidy. I heard a good deal about how the prisoners was hungry, but my father said, There is no way to fix the matter. Leave it alone. It is not your business.

  I thought, What does he know. Not everything. So I snuck up and threw down a ear of corn to see what might come of that. I heard voices and a harmonica down below. When the corn went tumbling down, the harmonica stopped, but the voices kept on. I could tell they was discussing where the corn might of come from or who might of tossed it.

  Soon there was scrabbling noises that went on for some time, and then up comes a book and lands in a big cactus. I picked it out of the cactus and took a look. It was a fat book, and I seen it was called The Whale. It had on it a picture of a whale. I had never laid eyes on one but I knew that one ate Jonah and I figured this was a good chance to learn more. So I took off with the book.

  I showed my father when I got home and he said, What in the world was you thinking to go so close with the pickets there.

  But he liked the book a good deal. He was not as good of a reader as myself, so at night I read pieces of the story to him and Sam. Do you mind if I call her Sam at times here in this report, as that is what I often call her, and it is extra work to keep writing her name the long way.

  We had a tin candle lantern that I could use to read with at night after work was done. Before I knew it, I read the whole thing and it was quite a tale. There was a great deal about rigs and harpoons and whatnot. I have not been to visit a ocean but figured things out and got the gist of it without a great deal of trouble. Also I could see how Ahab acted the way he did about the whale, as I seen how Samantha acted about the panther.

  Also I knew what a peg leg was like, as there was a peg legged Mexican who worked at the shingle camp. He was a good horseman. He could mount with his peg leg in the stirrup just as if it was a actual leg.

  In the meantime I gone back and tossed another ear, and got me another book, and another. I tossed soap and candles and salt and pepper and other things I figured was needed. There was times I tossed and got nothing. But most times something come up. As I told you in Bandera, I have read four books and that is how I come by them all. They taught me a good deal that I did not know about some places I never went and feel sure I may never go in my lifetime, if they do even exist.

  But then my father got the fever and passed, and that was the hardest time of my life. I will not dwell on it here, as I do not care to remember how terrible a time it was. Also, it is not what you asked about, although not much of this is.

  It was a hard time, is all I can say. Me and Samantha dug the grave and buried him ourselves. I could not ride down to the shingle camp to get help, as Sam did not want to be left on her own with our father when he was passed. We thought it was not a good idea for her to ride with me for help, as what would we say if somebody said, She is a runaway slave, take her. In times before, we had our father to vouch for her, but that was not the case any longer. We was on our own to vouch for ourselves. This worried us a great deal. She was but eleven years old at this time and I was but thirteen and we was supposed to get on.

  I built him a coffin the best I could. We got wore out digging the grave. The ground was nearly froze, as it was winter. We cried the whole time. We dug it between the graves of my mother and Juda, and tromped on it some, and put rocks on it to keep the animals out, the same as we done to Juda’s. So there was three mounds of rocks and a rather sorrowful aspect to the whole place, as there was now more dead there than the two of us amongst the living.

  When people got wind of the fact my father had passed, I had a offer to live with a family in Fredericksburg who said I could stay with them and work for room and board. But how could I go off and leave Samantha. She had got a sorry hand to play as a half Negro girl orphan. The only Negros we come across on the roads or nearby was slaves, and I did not want her taken for one of them. There was good people down the road and a Mexican family on Privilege Creek that known us and said they would help her out, but when they come to our house she did not want to go with them and did not want to be apart from me. Diphtheria had broke out and done in a bunch of children, and despite that Sam was a older child than most of them that passed of it, I feared her coming down if she was not looked after. She was not a healthy looking girl.

  So it was just her and me on the place. We had goats in a pen and chickens and the sow and a few pigs that lived in the creek bottom. We had a garden, but it was not much, and Sam did not tend it in the way she should of. We had a few rows of corn but mostly the varmints ate it. I had my father’s mare and his rifle. The mare was a trail pony that had got herself branded by a previous owner and then taken by Comanches and left on the trail half done in with hardly a hide to speak of, as it was whipped off. My father had estrayed her in the proper way and nursed her back to decent health but she was fairly wore out. If I so much as laid a hand on her rump she would swing around and bite a chunk out of any part of me she could get hold of. She was fine for a ride to Comfort or the shingle camp however, so I got around and kept on doing some work at the camp, as the men there was good to me.

  I also had a double barrel percussion pistol, smooth bore, that I got in trade for some work. It said Gasquoine and Dyson on the locks and Manchester on the barrel rib. The sidelocks and hammers was engraved with designs. It was a far cry from a six shooter but it could blast a hole in things and it was a nice looking piece. However, powder was hard to come by, on account of the Yankee blockade, and the worth of what we could get was chancy, on account of most of it come from saltpeter made of bat shat dug out of a cave in New Braunfels. I never was sure if it would go off or not.

  It was the summer after my father passed that I gone for the hunt where I seen Clarence Hanlin picking the pockets of the eight dead men on the Julian. I come home from that and thought about it a great deal. I heard it was Sesesh out of Camp Verde that done it. I did not talk with Samantha about any of it, because she already thought too much about things, which in her case was mostly the panther. So why trouble her with hanged men.

  It was a few months later on from seeing Hanlin on the Julian, when Samantha was twelve years old, and I was fourteen, and winter come on, and the wind was blowing a gale, and dark was a thing we dreaded, that the panth
er called on us again.

  For six years, Sam had been waiting in a way that was eager. It seemed sometimes that all she did was wait, and watch for that panther. There was a kind of a hesitant manner in which she would venture out, with a glance to left and right, and a kind of a sudden way she would swing around, like she heard something coming, and a way she would try out her fears by going out in the night.

  Under such circumstances as these you might think the panther’s return would be no surprise to either of us when it did come back. To the contrary, it was a shock. It was like death, in that way. A person might have it fixed in his mind that death must call on him sometime, but that time will startle him nonetheless.

  That night it was quite windy. Samantha and me was alone in the house. The wind bothered us a great deal. November had begun uncomfortably cold, and the ground outside was wet from a rain that come and gone the night before. We was closed up in the house and had us a fire going, but it was a small fire on account of I did not want Comanches to see the smoke. The wind come down the chimney and messed with the flames, and the noise of it made us uneasy. We felt mischief was afoot. We did not know in what form it might be, if in the fearsome form of Comanches or other assailants, and we did not know who would come to our aid if we was visited by evil. The Sesesh at Camp Verde was no more than a ten minute ride from our house at a good pace on a good horse, but we did not have a good horse, and I did not trust the Sesesh, as I seen what mischief they done on the Julian. There was many a Sesesh that was good hearted, I hope you will not mistake me on that. But I am sure you know of that gang of thugs called the hangerbande who might hang any fellow sixteen years or older who would not join the cause. They was a harsh, unruly lot, and I feared they might arrive to my door unexpected, and say I was grown enough, and demand I go with them.