The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  He seemed to like a good deal of groaning, and she supplied that mechanically and would wrap her arms and legs around him as he liked, and feel finally the life flow come from him. At once the cart would stop creaking, and directly he would breathe and grunt his satisfaction, would roll off of her, would drop to the ground, and immediately would begin roaring out his orders to the men and dumping armloads of firewood onto the campfire and feeding the fires which burned night and day at the bases of the huge tree trunks, deadening them.

  Her life was lived for these few moments each night, not that she looked forward to them with pleasure but that they were the moments when she fulfilled the purpose her life had come to serve. Beyond this, nothing was asked of her or expected of her or accepted of her. Only the few minutes there in the wiggling, wriggling embrace of Tinkler Harrison—for that she was fed and clothed and given rain-free quarters. In the daytime she would stay near the camp or go into the new-forming cabin. Everywhere she was ignored, except that sometimes Lorry would stop near where she was and would speak to her and might even put her hand on her arm and squeeze her arm, and might even suggest that she sing a song, as in the old days in Virginia.

  Lorry felt sorry for the girl in those scanty times when she was not pondering her own predicament. Under the rule and whims of her father, she and her boys were oppressed, and she longed to get into the cabin he had promised to build for her, one off apart from his own place. “There’s no time yet,” he told her repeatedly, and would not have the matter discussed, but each day she brought it up again and began wearing him down, working her way with him, which she had learned as a girl she could do only with patience and persistence.

  * * *

  The snakes and bears were in their holes and caves asleep by now, and only the panthers and wolves among the wild things came near the camp, or near Mooney Wright’s lonely cabin. They came with gnawing hunger and cries that frightened the dog under the bed and sent his own blood chilling.

  In late January a blizzard from the northwest struck the mountain country, and Mooney brought the cow and one of the horses into the cabin for the night to keep them warm. They stood, thankful statues, huddled together like mates, their heads lowered, looking suspiciously from time to time at the ever-flickering orange fire before which their master squatted and murmured to himself, commenting on the rumble of the wind and the loud shattering sounds, like explosions, of frozen trees bursting on the mountain. The cabin trembled; the wind buffeted it and some of the chinking came out. The snow beat in about them.

  For two days he house-fed the animals and milked the cow and drank the milk. He cut off pieces of cured pork and roasted them over the fire. He mixed corn meal, water and a pinch of salt and baked the dough on a rock where it could simmer nicely and finally brown. He would unpeel it from the rock and break it so that the steam would rise from it, and he would eat it with warm milk.

  All the while his mind turned on the thoughts of what he was to do, and of the past, coming like mountain mist in morning, leading to this place, to this room, where he huddled with animals in winter. And he would murmur to himself, talking to himself, for he was lonely. Half of me is in the ground, he thought.

  When the storm lifted, he went down to the river, which was frozen over, was a gray sheet of ice. He took long walks along the riverbank and saw where the cold water from mountain springs washed down, making indentations in the ice before losing itself underneath. High above, the mountains were white; the world was white and without meaning to him.

  Two of the chickens died. The cold and the wolves had preyed on them. The comb of another of them turned black and fell off. The feet of one hen froze and her toes fell off. The snow fell, great flakes of snow half as large as his hand. How soft they are, he thought, and how bitter they sting.

  He hunted fresh game in the woods and shot a deer. The boomers chattered at him. Oh, so you want to talk, do you? he said to them. They were the only ones—they and the dog—who spoke to him of late. He saw gray rabbits with big eyes, looking at him wonderingly as they munched on ivy leaves.

  He breathed the coldness and the tingling freshness of the pine sap. The air was clean and alive with frozen soundlessness and cleanliness, and it pained the chest to breathe the air for long. He crept back to his fireplace and fed on deer meat and waited for a thought, some idea of what he was to do.

  One day a round-faced, lean-bodied hunter came by, leading two pack horses. He was going to Salem, he said. The storm had caught him, but he had holed up for three days and had lasted it out. Mooney, listening to him talk, had for him the same revulsion he had for most of this man’s breed. He was animal-like; he could talk now about himself and other people only in animal terms; he had slaughtered a thousand animals or more; his deerskin coat was stained yet with the blood of last season; he considered the functions of the body only in animal terms, and the accomplishments of his days in terms of stalking and trailing and slaughtering and skinning and devouring and stacking of green hides; he could walk the high trail of the mountains and not be much impressed by any cloud or tree or sight, for he was studying the tracks and spore of animals; he knew the marks on the trails but did not much care where the trail started or where it ended, except in late winter when he started home, his horses loaded down with two hundred pounds of hide apiece—deer hide mostly, but beaver, too; about him was the odor of sweat and of animal blood and fat.

  He talked of the fog, which he hated, for it made the animals appear bigger than they were, and it hid them too well, and hid even the traps. “It’s a deception,” he said. “It creeps up from the valley. Anything which creeps up at you is a deception, for what’s clean comes from the top, don’t you say?”

  “Aye,” Mooney said at once, wanting him to continue such a show of mind.

  “In a man, too, his noblest parts are at the top.” He considered that, gazing into the fire. “But I more enjoy the parts that are below,” he said finally.

  He left one morning early, and Mooney went back into the cabin, shut the door and hovered to himself in his despair.

  In February the winged elm grew hazy-brown with bloom, and the ghostlike shade took over the borders of the clearing. In March one morning he awoke to hear a thousand birds, all sorts of birds, a noisy, shrill commotion, and he went outdoors, pushing his long brown hair back from his bearded face, and saw great flocks of robins and bluebirds.

  Alders came to budding life and shook out their tassels; small, dark-purple violets appeared. The tops of the maple trees put out red blooms, shading the budded spicebush near his spring. Azure butterflies darted about. The tiger beetles haunted the trails. Lizards moved in frightened dashes here and there. The brown thrasher, the rusty blackbird, the cowbird, the chipping sparrow took their places in a profusion of life awakening, and he would come into the clearing and stare about and listen to the noises, not echoing noises, not fearful either at this season, but vibrant, lively sounds, which were out of sorts with his own distraught temper.

  The bears began to shake off the heavy sleep which had occupied them since late December, and emerged nervous and anxious. He watched one of them come from a cave up back of the house and shake himself, peer about critically at the white-lighted world, look up at the trees, which as yet had only flowers and half-grown leaves, which let the sun through. Blinking, shielding his eyes with a paw, growling and woofing at the treacherous light, he waddled into a thick rhododendron slick where the ground was shaded and darker and where he could awaken with less bright-pain.

  The sweep of spring crept up the mountain. It moved from the valley’s forest of elm, sweet gum, ironwood and sycamore to forests of yellow birch, mountain ash, spruce and fir. Even while snow covered the mountain’s top and lay along the ridges that jutted out from its sides high up, trout lilies were gathering strength into their blooms down next to the river. A few days later, near the top of the clearing, he saw trout lilies bloom, and a fortnight later he saw them high on the mountainside and knelt
beside them, cupped one in his hand as Imy would have done, and blew gently into the petals.

  The mountain country came into life again, slowly, then with a swish of color and action that caught a spark in him, too. He awoke each morning to the first light with a fresh expectancy and lay smelling the newness of the air. A sugar air, he thought; do you smell it, Imy? Sometimes he thought of her as being in the cabin, or as being with him when he milked, or with him as he built the pen to protect the sow and her new litter, and it was to Imy that he talked, as well as to the stock, when he knelt near the hearth and watched eight little biddies run about in early exploration, their ruffled-feathered mama cackling proudly, as if she had brought into the world a mighty brood.

  He would take long walks. He would throw a rock at a cuckoo and mock it with his deep voice and name it silly bird, for he knew not one bird name from another. He stalked along the paths thinking that nobody except Tinkler Harrison owned as many birds as he, or animals either, or fish most likely. Creatures slithered away from him as he came by. Nobody owns as many lizards and snakes either, he thought, or spiders or spider webs, and he would chuckle to himself in this mad, busy world. Striding on, he might walk upriver to the breeding places of the creeks, or would stop at the spot where the old man had started his clearing, where the Negro men worked of a daylight, chopping and burning their way toward a spring planting.

  Or he would walk up back of his own small clearing onto the side of the mountain, to where the rock ledges started, and there he would watch the duck hawks rise from their nests and flash silver their wings, and he would often come across a pheasant on the path, its tail feathers spread, neck feathers ruffled, body puffed, strutting up and down before another bird, no doubt his lady, shaking his head now, dipping it almost to the ground.

  Or he would walk the boundaries of his holding, which Harrison’s men had marked with gashes on the boundary trees. Or he would walk the clearing he and Imy had made, and he would feel softness come back to the earth, a freshness come to it as if it wanted seed, was ready to be done finally with autumn’s ripeness and winter’s death.

  But even in the wealth of spring, he remembered the harshness of this country. It is a cunning place, he thought, a place of dangers, after all.

  Rarely in spring would a family move from an established location to a new, untamed one, for they would not have time enough to girdle trees and plant crops for the year. They could ordinarily be counted on to arrive in fall or winter, after they had made their harvest. The family of Ernest Plover, however, had a way of doing most of what it did somewhat differently, and Ernest never quite achieved any schedule, either one which he set for himself or one which others set for him.

  He arrived in the valley at planting time, and moved unannounced onto that portion of the land which lay just to the north of Tinkler Harrison’s cleared fields and to the east of Mooney’s, which lay on the first gentle slope before the mountain increased itself sharply. He settled, then, on poor land to start with, not on flat valley land, and he declared that he would make his fortune there.

  His right to be there was that he was Belle Harrison’s father.

  He arrived in mid-morning of a clear, sunny day, walking at the front of a procession which included a long string of tow-headed children, all of them girls. Immediately behind him waddled a red ox, a weary, heavy-breathing creature even at the start of the day; the ox seemed to be no more securely jointed than the cart it pulled, on which were bundled and stacked the worn-out possessions of this bedraggled band. The cart, warped and swollen from the river crossings, had been made out of twisted wood to start with, out of puncheons and the like, and one wheel had been lost along the way somewhere. A sapling pole had been substituted, and on the pole the cart noisily scraped along.

  Behind the cart came a single brood sow, walking slowly, heavily, disdainful of her companions. Behind her came a few small pigs. A dog with dripping tongue and one lame foot was nearby. He stopped often to scratch and to look about disinterestedly at the countryside.

  Inez Plover, the sister of Tinkler Harrison, was much larger than her husband. She was a heavy-bodied, big-boned woman, who wore a raggedy linsey-cloth dress which had been dyed blue originally and which now was faded gray from many washings and wearings, and which had holes in it near the hem where she had snagged it on bushes or where she had removed a piece of sound cloth in order to patch a hole that could not with any sense of privacy be left unrepaired. She led by a piece of vine a cow, humble and shriveled, bony of body and inordinately tame and kind, to which had been strapped two boxes, one full of chickens and the other full of geese.

  There was in this procession not the slightest sign of human sadness, not, anyway, on Ernest Plover’s face. Ernest bounced as he walked and was alert to the ways of birds and beasts and stock, his eyes darting from one study to another with ever-changing interest. He would turn now and then to glance at his long string of daughters, and would comment to them about something he had seen. The girls, too, were alert. All of them were light of coloring and were startlingly, freshly pretty, with sharp, neat features and slender arms, long legs and shiny skin. Their blue eyes seemed always pleased and their mouths were ready to smile and laugh, and there was a playful, devilish look in the face of the largest one, who was sixteen and was named Pearlamina.

  To Ernest Plover the arrival was auspicious. Any new start was a golden opportunity. Prior experience had shown that this attitude was deceptive, for he had made many new starts and never achieved fortune of any sort, but he persisted in his faith, until now, poverty-struck, lean and resourceless, he was forced to turn to his wealthy brother-in-law, who was also his son-in-law, for assistance. His associations with Tinkler Harrison in Virginia had been woeful. His farm had been near the Harrison plantation and he had got early in his debt for land and stock and goods and money. He had been unable to pay anything, so he had come near losing the little he had left and would have lost it had not the old man married Belle, the oldest of the burgeoning troupe of daughters. Earlier, the old man had kept Ernest in his bond by many subtle ways. He had, for example, permitted Ernest to borrow bacon in summer, when Ernest invariably exhausted his supply, to borrow salt in winter, when Ernest found he had too little money to purchase it at the store, to borrow tobacco whenever Ernest found his pouch empty, which was often. In bits and little ways the old man had kept Ernest in his debt.

  When Harrison left Virginia, Ernest soon found the ways of the independent man were endlessly complicated and full of snares. He encountered the need for planning, which he had no talent for, and before long he lost what was left of his land and house and shed and stock—or all of his stock that anybody else wanted. The loss was his fault, he reasoned, not because he had been unable to make proper plans and allowances, but because his star was unlucky. Fate had for him no helping hand, no smile at all, as it had for other men.

  Even so, he received life as a pleasing adventure, deeply saddening but marvelously worthwhile, a miracle spread upon the earth, a mystery which he never sought to solve, for the glory was in its complexities. To him life shimmered brightly as it evolved and slithered out of the future and went on off.

  Another explanation for his failure, he announced, was that his wife had borne him nine children, every single one of them a daughter. “My lord,” he could be heard to complain whenever he had whiskey enough to drown his happiness. “My lord, I have no one to help me with the plowing and the caring of the stock. My lord, I am inundated with girl-children, ever’ one of them with her mouth open, waiting for food. They was born with their mother’s appetites, that’s certain; they have eat me out of house and home, have robbed my land from me, have filled my house with bellowing and crying and such screechy noises as only a foundry ever heard afore this, and if I make so bold as to touch my wife, or even look at her with any sort of foolish longing, she bears another one. I don’t have to prick her; all I have to do is look at her, and she balloons out.”

  Onl
y when he was drunk did he emote in such fine fashion and declaim his suffering; when sober he was most friendly and evenly disposed toward the features of his life.

  He arrived on this certain sunny morning, his brood with him, and set to work making a lean-to shelter. He laid a fire, then waited for Tinkler Harrison to scent the smell of cooking foods or hear the bark of the old dog. Ernest would not even go to see the old man himself; let the old man’s curiosity fetch him to the camp.

  By mid-afternoon he heard Harrison’s horse on the trail, and directly the horse and rider appeared, Harrison peering ahead suspiciously, unhappily sensing who was present, knowing full well from the tracks left on the trail that a busted cart had come up that way, drawn by a lame ox, and that any number of barefooted children had trooped past.

  “Lord, help me,” Harrison murmured, dismounting, placing his hands firmly on his hips, staring at Ernest and Inez, who was sweaty already from the smoke from the open campfire on which she was trying to cook dinner. “There are eight river crossings to get to this valley, and yet you done it.” He seemed to be impressed, but he was irritated, too, for his dream for the valley had not included such men as Ernest Plover, who had sound intent and even harbored a quaint nobility of spirit, but who never succeeded at anything.