The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  “I—” he began, but his throat closed on him. Muscles in his face and neck were working spasmodically. “I’ve come to the end of my life, Lorry, and all I’ve got is half a dozen slaves.” He closed his eyes. “I wanted this valley done proper.”

  She felt sorrow for him, but she knew him well, especially the hardness of him, and she fought against pitying him. He had ruled always with a swayless will; he had always been tough in his heart. Maybe he did have a softness there for her; he often had said it and sometimes had shown it, but he was not soft by kind, or dependable about it.

  “A pack of slaves,” he murmured again, “is all I have.”

  “I know it, Papa,” she said quietly, “but I’m not coming back down to the valley to join them.” She watched him as he understood, and with a shudder he went quickly through the door and to his horse and moved away.

  There was one other visitor Lorry knew to expect that day. She propped the door open and went to work, sweeping out and straightening, waiting for her. Not long had passed before her shadow appeared on the floor. It was Mina, and she gasped as if she had been struck by a sharp surprise. When Lorry looked up at her, Mina’s face was drawn and she appeared old—the girl only sixteen or seventeen, youthful beyond price; she seemed for a passing moment to be an old woman in her soul.

  “Why, law, I never have been so surprised in my life as to see you standing there, Cousin Lorry. Where in the world is Mooney at?”

  Lorry set the broom by the hearth. In her mind she sought a way to say it all, but none occurred to her, then she said, “Are the boys outside anywheres?”

  “I didn’t see the boys.”

  Mina suspected, Lorry realized, but she wouldn’t accept what she knew until she had to. “They must be down watching the horse and cow. Mooney’s gone to fetch my flock now. We’re house-tending together, Mina.”

  Mina accepted what she heard as if not a word had been said, and as if nothing now needed to be said by either of them. She swayed slightly, standing there in the doorway. “I’ll help you sweep,” she said. She moved quickly to the hearth, seeking something to do, anxious to hide her hurt. She took the broom and began to sweep, but abruptly she sat down on the bed. “I never have been so taken by anything,” she said.

  “Mina, he’s older than you.”

  “Why, I hope your husband don’t come back and find you here with him.”

  “Oh, Lacey’s gone by now, Mina.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “How do you know he’s not, dear? He went up to Kentucky, and most of those first settlers got killed there. I expect he’s covered over by leaf mold by now.”

  “I never thought with a man wedded to you that you could take another’n—”

  “Five years is long enough to wait. Five years is most of my youth, but look at you—you have your entire youth, and afore long a handsome young man will ride through this valley and tell you he wants you to be his wife and tend his house.”

  “Law,” Mina said, “I got a startled feeling when I saw you here.”

  First chance she got she went down to the spring for water, and she was gone quite a long while. When she returned she set the pail just inside the open doorway and was gone before Lorry could speak to her. Lorry felt like weeping to think of the hurt heart of the girl. Life seemed to fashion such painful shapes sometimes.

  Later that morning, Mooney got back. He didn’t ask about Mina, but Lorry told him the girl had come by and had gone for water. He said nothing. In the afternoon he returned to the valley house to get the table; he could use the planks for shelves, he had said. While he was gone, Mina visited the cabin again and brought a sheaf of wild flowers which she set in water in a clay jug just outside the door. She sat on the stone near the doorstep and talked for a while, watching the path to be sure Mooney didn’t come back and find her, for she wasn’t able to face him yet. She said she was never so pleased as that morning when she went to the pool of water she knew about up on the mountain and found that the sun was already warming it for her and was waiting for her.

  * * *

  Theirs was such a little cabin that it seemed like there wasn’t room for everything to have its place. They made a ladder to the loft and put some of the goods up there, and Lorry got to pestering things, sweeping and cleaning and adjusting and asking him for new wall pegs, which he provided by boring into the dried wood with the auger and whittling locust pegs and jamming them in. She hung up her clothes and the boys’ things, too. She had strings of dried apples which she put up, and strings of beans and peppers. She had bunches of herbs she had gathered in Virginia, and little cotton bags full of seeds. The bags she had made herself years before, even before she married Lacey Pollard, and she had dyed them different colors. One was for wheat and another for rye; one was for flax and another for cotton; one was for peas and another for beans; one was for pumpkin and others were for marigold, bleeding heart, and zinnias. She hung up Mooney’s shot bag, powder horn, and wiping tow.

  She had two skeins of linen thread, one scarlet and the other black; she had a skein of wool just waiting for the needle. She hung all that up, and when she was done, Mooney was astonished at the place, for it was colorful as a flower and smelled of seeds and cloth and of the beans cooking in the iron pot. It had the odor of wood burning and of good leather; it had the odor of corn bread baking in the skillet.

  She was up before the break of day, fixing the fire. Then she sat by it and washed herself and combed her hair. Mooney lay in bed and watched her and wondered about her. He still didn’t know her well, not the different ways she had and various smiles and frowns and sighs. She flitted away from his knowing about what she was thinking; with a smile she avoided his knowing. Always working, and good work, too. Never tired, until maybe at night, when she would sit by the fire and moan just once or twice, or sigh. This was after the boys were bedded down in the straw ticks in the loft and he and she were alone. Alone and quiet, listening to the cabin mostly.

  Once her hair was rolled into a knot, she would wash, then go to the spring and bring a pail of water. She would put the water on to boil, and as she did that, she would tell Mooney what sort of day it was, whether clear or cloudy, warm or cool. Then she would go out again and directly she would start milking; he would hear the milk striking the sides of the pail.

  Soon he would say, “All right, boys, get up now.” He would hear them start to move about.

  She cooked meat for breakfast, and whatever eggs they had from the chicken flock. They had no bread, and there was no salt, but nobody complained, though sometimes he would start talking about what they would have to eat as soon as he could get a proper start on that farm.

  She parched coffee beans better than anybody Mooney had ever known. She had made for herself a little rock oven in the fireplace, over to one side, and inside that oven she parched the beans until they were brown as chestnuts. She would grind them on a block, just as she did the corn, and would boil them to get all the best strength out, and serve the coffee black and hot.

  The family would sit down on logs, for they had only the one chair as yet, and Mooney would break the sweet potatoes, if there were fewer than four, and would serve the food to each person.

  They rarely talked, except about the work that was being done or was yet to do, about the need for a spring house to keep milk in and a smokehouse to keep meat in, about the need for furniture and shelves, about the need for getting a stronger pen to keep the sheep in, for the wolves came closer, seemed like, every night, and howled their hungry-bellied sounds, and one night Lorry thought she heard a panther moving about, slinking around the outside of the house, and the dog began growling deep in its throat, fearfully.

  In the evening, after the dishes were put away, she would take to the paths and find sallet greens, find poke, cut young green shoots from the wild grape vines, pick leaves of herbs she knew were safe, blue root and dock, for example, and mix them together and cook them with meat in the pot.

&nb
sp; She was a good hand to wash clothes, too. Mooney swore a man could hear her using the battling block in the next valley. He made her a place under a laurel tree for her boiling pot, which he had hung on a stout pole. She would make a fire under it, fan the fire until the steam came up; after a while she would lift the clothes from the boiling water and lay them on a half log he had smoothed for her. She would take hold of a poplar paddle he had cut and whittled for her, and steadily beat them clean. Then she would wash them again and spread them on bushes to dry in the sun. She would come back to the cabin, the dried clothes in a wicker basket she had made one night out of hickory splints he and she had whittled out, sometimes carrying the clothes basket on her head, come into the house smelling of hickory smoke.

  It never did rain whenever she was washing or drying out clothes, Mooney noticed. She had nature in her control, too, he guessed, and he told her that one night and commenced to laugh. She frowned faintly, not understanding, he guessed, for work came natural to her; she and the work she did were part of the same thing. She smiled finally; she had to, for he insisted on laughing about it. She smiled and went back to crushing corn into meal with the hominy block and pestle.

  When they found a ewe dead one morning, killed by a wildcat and the meat mostly eaten, she knelt by Mooney without him saying a word to her, and they cut and tore the skin off and together washed it in the branch; then they cut the wool from the skin. Death wasn’t natural to anybody and picking a skin that had been torn by a cat wasn’t natural, either; Mooney didn’t like to do it, but they did it together. Then they sheared the other sheep and got a nice pile of wool, and she called the boys and they went down to the brook and made a little dam out of rock, so that they had a place to wash the wool. She came back up to the cabin with the wool and emptied it into the tanning trough, a half log which Mooney had hollowed out. She carried water and filled it and put a handful of soap in it, and she put the boys in the trough and told them to tromp the wool.

  Every morning and afternoon for an hour or two, they tromped the wool, cleaning it for three days, changing the water each day. And no sooner was the wool dry than she was making dye. She said wool should be dyed before it was spun. She mixed indigo, bran, madder and lye, boiled them in the iron pot, and she set the pot beside the hearth to keep warm—but not get too hot—until the dye was ready to come. Then she dipped the wool time after time, until she had a deep blue color.

  “If I had bay leaves and some dye flowers dried out, I could make yellow and green colors,” she told Mooney, apologizing for making only the one. But she knew blue was as pretty a color as there was. When she had most of the color out of the dye, she hung the wool on pegs to dry, and it was soft, ready to be spun. She put it on a shelf he made for her, to be kept until winter, which was the weaving time.

  One night he told her how he felt about all this, not in words that endear themselves to a woman’s heart, but quietly he said he didn’t know what he would do without her.

  “I hope you won’t have reason to change your mind,” she said. “You say you’d miss the boys if anything happened to them, or might miss me, but I’ve a right to thank you for your work and what you’ve done for them and me.”

  “I’ve not done much,” he said.

  “I never saw a stronger man. And I’ve never known you frightened. At night when the wolves howl out in the woods or even in the clearing, you stay steady.”

  “They’re scared animals,” he said.

  “The boys would get pained with fright down at the valley cabin, but up here they’re calm now, and I’ve got so I rest more, too. I lie quiet in bed because you lie quiet, and I know if anything goes wrong you’ll know it.”

  As white as could be, her fingers were, he noticed, as she clutched her hands. “I’ll do what I can anyway,” he said.

  The cold weather came, but the work continued. He broke the helve of one of their two axes, and he went about making another one. He found a piece of wood he liked, one which would have the staying power he needed. Some said ash was the best, but a man in Virginia had told him hickory wouldn’t snap like ash when a man swung it into a tree. They had always used ash in Pennsylvania, but he got a hickory sapling six inches through the middle, and found a length of it that was free of catfaces or snerles.

  He worked with the grain, sharpening his knife on a stone time after time, whittling down from the big wood to the narrow helve, smoothing it out, taking his time.

  When it was smoothed right to fit his hands, he fitted on the axhead. Then he cut a wedge of pine. The pine would catch hold, he knew; no wedge was better than pine.

  The boys needed shoes, so he made them shoes. He had a piece of leather, which was big enough for the two boys. He traced out each boy’s foot on the cabin floor and carved a last out of poplar, one for each foot. He cut soles to fit the marks on the floor, then cut top leather for the tops and, using the poplar last, he was able to peg the two pieces together properly, using maple pegs, which would go into leather easily but, once the leather was soaked and swelled, wouldn’t come out. A man would have to split the leather to get one of them out.

  He used whang leather to sew the uppers together; he had a piece which he had made out of the hide of a groundhog. He cut thick threads of it and waxed them well. Then he cut leather insoles to fit into the shoes. “You’ll need these shoes, boys, when we go up on the mountain hunting or to pick berries.” So he told them. They didn’t need them around the house at all, and they wouldn’t need them on the paths, but they would need them at places where the paths ran out.

  Out of the remainder of the piece of hickory he had used for the handle, he made a chair. He cut the posts out of the green wood carefully, keeping the posts back from the fire so as not to dry them out; then he cut rungs out of a dry piece of oak and pushed them into holes in the posts. The posts drying out would shrink tightly around the rungs so that they never would come out. He did the back slats the same way. Once the chair was driven together, he put little pegs through the posts and tenons; then he and Lorry went into the woods and cut hickory bark. They split out long withes, shaped them carefully, and wove a bottom for the chair. “We’ll make another’n come spring,” he said, “when the hickory bark slips easier than now.”

  7

  Cold weather came with a sudden snow and caught Ernest Plover unprepared. The great tree on which he had spent some time hacking away stood yet, and his rickety camp huddled nearby, water-sloshed and mud-mired. An array of children, geese, the red ox, the weary dog exasperated with the folly of human beings, all these had various living, sleeping, eating, working habits. The cart had disassembled itself, claiming finally its right to rest, but the children were continually active, yelling, singing, crying and laughing.

  Except now that it was cold, there were grumpy dispositions, and questions were asked even by the children concerning why they had no cabin. The lean-to which Ernest and Inez had made the previous summer fell in on them the first night of snow.

  Ernest, faced with catastrophe, moved to meet it in a straightforward way. He sent out word by Mina that a house-raising was to be held at his place forthwith. Mina raced to her uncle Tinkler’s place, but she didn’t get more than half the message said before he asked how many logs had been cut and skinned for such a house. She had to admit to him that there were too few for even a small place. In truth there were sixteen, she said, which Mina and Inez had cut themselves.

  “My Lord in Heaven,” Tinkler complained, impressed by the dimensions of the failure. He told two of his Negro men to let his own house-building be, for he was putting up walls on his big place now, and to get on to Ernest Plover’s place. For every tree Ernest personally cut down, they were to cut down two. If Ernest didn’t cut steadily, they were to come on back home. “Cut the logs to sixteen-foot lengths,” he instructed them, “and don’t bother to square them up. We’ll need to get the Plovers into some sort of shelter afore the youngins die in the weather.”

  It hurt Mina’s
spirit to hear him talk so freely and bluntly about her folks. She had rather live in her father’s house, even if it didn’t have a roof on it, or even walls to hold a roof up, even if it were a lean-to and that caved in, than to live in his cabin, or in that fancy mansion he was making now, which was nothing more than a prison to put poor Belle in.

  She hung around the Harrison cabin site, there near the river, and hoped to get a glimpse of Belle, but Belle stayed inside in the dark. Those that had seen her—and Mina’s sister Fancy claimed she had— said she was pale as fresh milk in a white-clay pot.

  There was the sound of chopping by the time she got back to the road, and she felt good listening to the thudding sounds as they bounced back from the far mountain, muffled somewhat by the snow, which was on everything and made the tree limbs droopy, and covered the little bushes and the flower places. She started up toward Mooney Wright’s place to ask him for help, an eagerness alerting her, as it did most ordinarily when she knew she would see him soon. She longed for his presence. Maybe that was love, she didn’t know. She had heard love sung about often, and told about in the passages her father sometimes would read in the Bible, but she didn’t know what was love and what was longing, and what was the wanting not to be lonely, which she had now and had often.

  She went up to his cabin and saw him out chopping wood. She stood patiently nearby, even though the snow frosted her toes, and waited, wondering when he would see her. When he did, he smiled so readily that she was pleased more than she wanted to show. “I never saw in my life a man maul pieces of wood so sturdily,” she said. “It’s as if the devil was hiding in ever’ one and you was bound to cut his head off. You got so many logs stacked up there to burn that you’ll char the house to a piece of wood coal afore you come into spring again. It’s a wonder there’s a tree standing on this lot.”

  “You come on me quietly, Mina.”