The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

“The snow don’t talk back to a person when you walk on it, didn’t you know that? It’s not like twigs and dry grass. I come to tell you that my papa is having a house-raising.”

  The smile changed on his face to a look of wonder. He gazed perplexedly about him, then tried to look as if he thought Ernest was doing the most natural thing in the world. “When’s it to be, Mina?” he said.

  “It’s this morning,” she said.

  He moved his feet about in the snow to keep them from freezing, for he wore nothing on them except deerskin, and that was little better than parchment. “This morning?” he said, considering that. He took the ax up again and stood there thinking about the matter. “I won’t be long,” he said, and went toward his cabin.

  Fate came close to her and watched her. She knew him better than the other boy, for sometimes Fate would go off into the woods, go down by the river, and she would come across him there, listening to the water, which he said reminded him of a long time ago, which was, Mina guessed, the thought-empty sound of days he had forgotten. The river spoke to him as it did to her of what she couldn’t remember.

  And maybe it spoke to him about his real father, whom he probably couldn’t remember except as a shadow in his mind.

  “What you want?” Fate said.

  “I come for help,” she said. “My papa is going to give a house-raising.”

  Fate accepted that information without show of interest.

  “You look so solemn it’s a wonder you don’t turn into a bullfrog, Fate. I never thought I’d see anything so sad in my life as you, except maybe an owl in a tree that’s been foot-tied to a branch. You got such dark eyes and black hair, you’re at least half an Indian.”

  He frowned at her suspiciously, then shrugged.

  “You’re like your papa, I expect.” She said that knowing it would bring him to terms, for she had twice before mentioned his father to him, and both times she had seen him start. He did so now, too, and looked at her so piercingly that she felt surprised at her own power. “I saw him yesterday,” she said casually, and the startled look on his face grew deeper and sharper, and she felt a pang of wonder in herself to have lied so blatantly; she was joking, that was all, fooling around. “He was upriver at the springs, near the webbing of the river waters.”

  “It’s not so,” he said.

  “He was riding a white horse. Did he have a white horse when you saw him last?”

  “Yes,” Fate said.

  “He had on a black leather jacket, like my mama says he always wore. He had on black homespun trousers, and his boots was cobbler-made.”

  The boy was in an agony of wonder that was strange to see, and she felt a pounding in her own heart to think she had such powers to confuse him. She wished she had indeed seen Lacey Pollard, that he would take Lorry back, take her to that valley cabin and leave the Mooney Wright place free again. “He was at a spring drinking water, and I got a long look at him. Black-haired, like you, and black-eyed. Is that the way he was when you saw him?”

  The boy’s anxious breath was moving in mist puffs from his mouth.

  “And there was a hawk come near to him, and I saw your papa smile, and his smile was white-teethed, of the prettiest teeth I ever saw. Do you remember how he would smile?”

  “Yes,” Fate said.

  “And his teeth was white?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was him then. And he said to the hawk, ‘Come get you a drink, too,’ and his voice was like a soft music string, and lo, the bird done it.”

  “No,” Fate said, biting his lip, wanting to believe but not believing yet.

  “I tell you it’s so,” Mina said, awed by her own words.

  Suddenly the boy moved to her, strongly lashed out at her, struck her, tried to strike her again in the face. She fell back, anger sweeping up in her. She turned from him, then swung back, pointed down the hill toward the laurel stand. “There he is, there, you see?”

  The boy turned. “Where?”

  “Did ye see him? There he goes through there,” she said, and began to run and slip and slide through the snow. She heard Fate start after her. “I see him,” she called, angry with Fate for striking her, which he had no business doing in this world, for she hadn’t meant to hurt him. “Through those trees through there,” she called.

  She heard the boy fall down. When she looked back, she saw him scrambling up again. Barefooted, he came running after her, eyes teared to overflowing, and she felt so sorry for him that she stopped and, when he came running up, took him in her arms and held him tightly to her. “I didn’t really see him, Fate,” she said. “Don’t tell your mama,” she said, ashamed of herself. “Will you promise?”

  His crying eyes stared at her, but he was not crying.

  “Fate?”

  He said nothing.

  “Don’t tell your mama Lacey Pollard’s back,” she said, and backed away from him, then moved around him, not going close to him, and hurried up the path to where she saw Mooney waiting.

  It took several days to cut enough logs for a cabin. They were of poplar mostly, for it was softer and easier to cut than other woods, and on the first clear day after the snow was melted, when the sun had warmed the ground and made it firm for working, the families met at Ernest and Inez Plover’s clearing.

  The men laid a pile of stones at each corner in order to put the house a few inches off the ground. The open space around the bottom could be stuffed with rock and clay easily enough, and would have to be until a floor could be made. They worked laying on the logs, worked at will, some of them moving from one corner to another, wherever the need took them. They built fast now. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Harrison said. He stopped at the corner where Mooney and the boys were working. “My, my, look at that,” he said to the boys. “Look at the clinch work on that. It’s dovetailed might nigh perfect.”

  Mooney moistened his lips and stared off at the woods, none too trustful of the old man’s praise.

  Harrison moved on around the cabin corner, nodding, clucking his tongue whenever he saw a place where the logs had not been fitted well. “It’s good work, though, all in all,” he said.

  The men had built the walls up to head height by the time the sun shadows of the girdled trees were short and pointed directly away from the river. Inez, Mina and Lorry called the men to noon dinner then, and the group met around a table which had been made of saplings laid between two piles of logs. Inez had killed a pig and had boiled chunks of the hams. She had used the washtub, which would hold ten gallons; she had made it half full of pork, cabbage and pot likker, which she dished up in wooden bowls and clay cups—in everything she had and everything Lorry had brought to the house-raising with her.

  The bread had been baked until it was brown as a pony, and when Lorry broke it apart, the steam swept up into her face, dampening it in a second.

  The men were hungry. They tore at the bread and drank the pot likker, tore at the pieces of ham in their bowls. A jug of milk was passed around; those who wanted milk drank from the jug. There was a wooden bucket full of spring water set at one end of the table with a gourd by it.

  That afternoon the work continued, and when the roof boards were overlapped properly and butting poles had been pegged in place to hold them, the cheerfulness that had been building up all day broke free. Everybody was happy, was smiling now at this glistening house, slick and fat, like a solid toy, for it was a small thing, especially when compared to the lofty trees around it. The children jumped with joy before the miracle of such a place. Almost at once there was music in the yard. Ernest had his fiddle and his strident tenor voice sang out.

  Come, Father, come, Mother, come riddle us both,

  Come riddle us both as one,

  And tell me whether to marry fair Ellen

  Or bring me the brown girl home.

  He was singing out, his voice carrying into the woods, and Inez went to the door opening and saw him clogging as he played and sang, and Tinkler was clapp
ing his hands to the music and patting his foot.

  That’s one thing about Ernest; he could sing and clog as good as anybody. He could cut the pigeon wing and ride a short loper with the best. She had married him partly for that reason. Her father had said a man with that much music in him was the devil’s own, so Ernest promised her father that he would smash apart his fiddle and live a life of righteousness, but it wasn’t more than two nights after they were married before some of his friends came by to party. They came right on into the cabin and called them out of bed. It was embarrassing for her, but Ernest got up at once and told them to turn to the wall while his wife dressed. That done, he took a bucket of bran and threw it on the cabin floor to make it smooth, and they commenced to dance.

  They danced for hours, seemed like.

  She saw Grover out dancing now with Lorry, and Mooney was flinging Mina around, and Mina was laughing. Inez wished she could join in, but she knew she was too big for carrying on that way herself.

  She propped a piece of a log up and sat down on it. She sat just inside the door because it was such a comfort to be indoors at last. One of the Negroes had a barrel he had turned upside down, and he was beating on it, and Ernest was still singing and calling out. It was a thumping music more than anything, and she bet it carried over this whole country, up to the very top of the mountain. There were probably elks up there right now wondering what on earth was happening.

  There went Harrison, trying to clog. Why, he was too old for it. And now he had the hand of Fancy and was pulling her into the fray. Why, law goodness, Inez thought, he was making a fool of himself.

  Her own foot patted with the music, and her body moved in time and tempo with it.

  Then over the sound of the music came a new sound, one to chill the blood, to stop the singing and dancing, a tremulous woman’s voice, a creature voice close by, crying in heart terror.

  All got silent in the clearing.

  “My Lord in Heaven,” she heard Grover say. She saw Fancy kneel down, awed and watchful.

  There was such quiet now that Inez could hear her own breathing. Even the wind was still. The men squatted on their haunches, their lips pressed tight, their eyes squinting as they watched the full shadows. Then once more the beast cried, and far off across the river another of its kind answered.

  One by one the men turned from the sound, embarrassed by their show of fright. Ernest laid his fiddle aside. One by one the family groups, the men with their rifles and the women carrying pine torches, went off toward home in the night.

  * * *

  Harrison was building his big house now; that was the work he had set aside for winter. It was to have three chambers, one opening off another, for Harrison didn’t like hallways.

  At Mooney’s place, the main work was clearing more land. Mooney’s brush fires were now as big and steady as Harrison’s. Some of the logs burned for weeks. “Haul in the limbs and stack them between the logs,” he would tell Verlin and Fate. They knew what was expected of them now, and what could be expected of the work horse and of the chain and of the fires and ax, of all the tools and stock they used. The family was a machine of matching, meshed cogs.

  It was not that the family was making a machine that they could use; the family was the machine. The family and the clearing and the crops and the stock and the tools were part of the same thing. The family and the place were the same thing and could not be separated one from the other. One could not understand the family without knowing about the land and their work on it and plans for it, and one could not know the land with any real understanding without knowing this family of people. They were dusty with the land; the grit of the land was in them. Their work, which was done together, was the chief meaning of their family lives.

  “We’re making way here,” Mooney said. “Going to do well afore it’s over.” He talked often about the place they were making. And he rarely left that place. “Work to do,” he would say to the boys. “Let’s stay with it now.” Work to do—that was the same as saying there was living to do, and planning to do, and birthing to watch over.

  The winter passed this way, with working and building, with the making of a plow of an evening, with the clearing of land, even as snow lay around the brush and atop the laurel bushes. “Wrap them strops around your shoes to make them warm, boys,” Mooney would say, and go on working.

  They made a lambing shed up back of the cabin. They cut logs for a corn crib, which they would need the following summer. They cleared land and burned brush and kept the fires blazing and generally made ready for a big planting in the spring. They suffered losses of stock, but none that new birth in the spring wouldn’t replace, until one morning when Fate found the dog dead, slit open in the night by a bear.

  The ground was so cold they could not bury it deep, but they did as best they could. They put the dog near Imy’s grave, and marked the place with a rock. The dog had not been a brave one; the noises and threats of the wilderness had frightened it from the start, but it had been friendly and had given warning to them countless times. It would be more difficult to get along in this wild country without the dog to scent and hear and see for them.

  1781

  8

  He turned the earth that next spring, earth that had never been turned before by a plow. It turned black with humus, but it was rocky, too, and the tree roots were damp and tough and protective.

  He taught the boys to plow. Both of them had big bodies, and Verlin, who was big-boned, was strong as a young ox. They were able to weight the plow sufficiently if they worked together, so that was the way he taught them, and they managed, hanging to the plow handles, almost riding on the plow to hold it down and in the row, pushing and grunting and fighting forward, helping the horse all they could.

  The four ewes bore lambs that spring. Lorry brought the lambs into the cabin and tended them there until the weather warmed. There were six in all, and they were awkward with youth, but as pretty as a song, Lorry said, and she made a shepherd’s crook from a piece of water-soaked maple and often tended them herself, letting them romp about in the yard and play, or go into the woods at the valley edge of the clearing and eat green shoots, the ewes with them, the ram leading the way. But of a night they were locked up securely, for the foxes liked them, and they were the favorite food of the wolves.

  The hens hatched three nests of eggs and marched their broods about the cabin yard, the mother hens puffed up with pride and anxious to oppose dangers, the small yellow biddies darting to their mother when called, slipping under her full wings as she squatted over them to protect them. But the weasels and snakes began to get them, anyway, and each of the three shaggy mother hens was worried frantic, trying to save her brood. One afternoon a weasel attacked a hen. A cry went up, a squawk that startled everyone, and Lorry, who was the closest to the cabin, took a gun and ran fast as she could and found the weasel tearing at the bird. Lorry shot, and the weasel, spurting blood, rolled over and over on the ground.

  She and the boys tried to round up the biddies, for they had fled in all directions. The boys came back with a biddy in each hand, the creatures trembling yet from the shock of the warning squawk their mother had made. There had been eight of them that morning; they found six by nightfall. They put them in a chicken coop and fed them crushed seeds and water.

  Mooney had brought two bearing sows into the valley, and the previous year they had borne fourteen pigs. They had crushed four by accident, bears and other animals had taken four, and a bear had killed one sow, so there had been only eight swine in the herd at breeding time. The sows were young, so they bore small litters this spring, but they were active in defending them. Also of help this year was a strong log pen just below the house, downhill of the spring, where they were able to protect themselves very well. However, twice soon after the spring births there came fierce squeals, and Lorry and Mooney arrived at the pen only to see a black bear leaving with a pig. At night, too, almost every night, they would hear the squeal of the
hogs or the baas of the sheep, and Mooney, complaining about the loss of their dog, would go outside with his rifle in one hand and a pine torch in the other to scare off whatever creature was bothering the stock. He would come back to the cabin, often with a tale of loss, but he never complained about trying to start farming in the place.

  When the earth was warm, one night he got out what corn had been put by for seed, and the boys counted it. Lorry had taught the boys in Virginia to count and write their names, and they could make out most words and could figure, given time to do so. She used the counting of the corn seed to test their learning. Mooney that day had begun marking rows in the ground, cutting roots out of the way with the ax, he and Verlin working the rows past the stark, girdled trees which dropped dead limbs from time to time. He had cleared land enough for forty rows, and the question Lorry gave the boys was how many hills must go in each row to use all the 3,255 corn seed. The boys tried to work out that puzzle, and they could not, though they squinted and frowned and looked mind-heavy about it. Lorry got weary talking to them. “Just go on up to bed,” she told them. “I don’t know how either one of you can farm or carry on trading at a store if you can’t figure better’n you can. I told you in Virginia you were going to need to know figuring, but it appears you can’t do more’n look at one another and admit confusion. You’ve counted up thirty-two piles of a hundred seeds each. Now two seeds are going in a hill, so you’re going to need exactly half that many hills. Now you just go to bed and see if a dream tells you how many hills are needed for a row.”

  She sent them to bed, then she and Mooney sat by the fire and solved the problem themselves.

  The next day they worked the ground up loose for each hill. Into each hill they put two corn seeds and one bean seed. At one place in every other row they put a pumpkin hill.

  This field lay above the house, not far from where the apple trees were growing.

  Below the cornfield they planted two long rows of cabbages. Below these they put in two rows of sweet potatoes. Below the cabin, in the place corn had been planted the year before, they plowed a patch of land for flax, and they harrowed it, using tree boughs, dragging them over the land. They cast the flax seeds one mid-afternoon before the evening rain.