The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  “Won’t eat much pork, though,” he said, “not this year, because we don’t have a big hog drove yet. We’ll kill two hogs, that’s all. That’s not much pork, but it’ll give us more’n we ever had afore in this valley. And by next year, we’ll have a drove. We’ll have hogs enough to drive off to sell. A man can get easy money for hogs.”

  “Where?” Verlin said.

  Mooney was brought up short by the question. He looked at Verlin suspiciously, then glanced off through the woods. “You can always sell hogs in Morganton,” he said.

  “How you going to get them there?”

  Mooney swatted at a bee. “Huh,” he said. “You don’t know the first thing about it, I can see that. Drive them down there in a drove.”

  “All that way?”

  “All that way, that’s it. Cross the rivers. Have to.”

  The boys looked dubious.

  “You’re like those men in Morganton, Verlin. That’s all they know to ask—how can ye get the pigs down here? I say there’s a way. A man’s nothing in this world but hempen rope and will. A man don’t break. A man can find an answer to such as that. A man can come up here and make a big farm, get a big drove of hogs, get a flock of sheep—my lord, don’t tell me he can do that and then can’t get them to market.” He scowled at the boys.

  “We’re going to do it, you and me, and these others in this valley.” He grumbled and complained to himself about the doubters of this world, and the boys listened patiently.

  The bees were more numerous now, and were more angry. They were charging into the smoky bath, trying to enter the hive. Somebody had to go into that smoke and break that hollow log all the way open, Mooney knew. It was not a task he particularly wanted for himself. In Pennsylvania a boy always had to do it, though he almost always had to be tricked into it.

  “I tell you, Fate,” Mooney said, whispering to him so softly Verlin couldn’t hear, “I wish you was big enough to split that hive open yourself.”

  Fate studied him critically.

  “If you was older and stronger, you could go in there with the ax and land a blow at the side of that trunk that would knock it open. I sure wish you was eager and strong.”

  Mooney casually went over to a tree and contemplated the woods, and directly he heard the ax smack into the tree. He looked back, and the hive was opened and Fate was running for all he was worth, several bees flying after him.

  Mooney quickly pulled the black pot in close to the opened hive and scooped out honey by the handfuls. “Honey and hot bread, Verlin,” he said enthusiastically.

  Verlin got his hands into the gooey mass, too, and helped fill the pot.

  Fate came limping back and tried to pry himself a place before the hive. Mooney gave him room. “What you do that for, Fate?” Mooney said. “You might a got yourself stung, if you hadn’t been such a fast runner. I expect you outrun those slow bees, though.”

  Fate scrunched up his face and said nothing about his aches.

  “You boys come on now, afore we all get in trouble.” He picked up his rifle and the black pot and started down the hill. He looked back and saw Fate coming, both hands full of honey, eating honey as he ran. “You boys trip and you’ll get left,” Mooney called to them.

  They ran until they reached a brook, where they stopped to rinse off their hands.

  They went on through the high woods then, drunk with the sweetness of the honey, talking confidently, arguing, hurrying faster as they neared home.

  * * *

  On the morning when the first witch hazel flowers appeared, at a time when they often heard the thumping of the pheasants in the woods, both signs of coming frost, Mooney told the boys to pull the blades from the sorghum cane, and he went down the rows himself and selected from the tallest canes the best of the big brown tassels of seeds, which he took to the house and put in a gourd, to be saved until the future planting time.

  The boys pulled the blades, then cut armloads of the stalks near the ground and brought them to Mooney, who was busy contriving a press out of two oak boards. In the bottom one of the two he had cut grooves so that the sorghum juice would drip drown into the iron pot.

  There had been so much rain during the last part of the growing season that the yield wasn’t as large as he had hoped it would be, and his press wasn’t as good as a geared press, but the stalks gave up their sweetness, nonetheless; the sirup dripped into the pot in spurts as he crushed and turned and crushed again each hand of cane. The bees and flies and wasps gathered, coated themselves with juice; they fell onto the ground from heaviness, and into the pot of green liquid.

  When the pot was two-thirds full, he helped Lorry carry it to the fire. One of the boys fetched a long pole, and she stirred the sirup as it thickened. A green skim formed and she removed it, brushing it onto the ground. When the green skim stopped forming, she reduced the heat, and after a while a white foam gathered to the top. This she ladled off carefully and put into a bowl, to be twisted later into candy.

  “I declare, if I get the molasses too thick,” she told Mooney, “they’ll clabber on me and sour.” It was a complaint, a gentle complaint, for it was a pleasure to make sirup and she didn’t intend to get it too thin. Better to have it too thick, even though it might be gummy. The steam rose about her, dampening her face and dress. The bees buzzed everywhere, infesting the bath of stream, toppling into it as often as not, to boil in the sirup.

  She made two gallons of the molasses that day, and more the next, and put it in gourds to keep.

  On the third night of the molasses-making, which brought them to the end of their cane crop, they were in the cabin working with the pot of white foam, working it until it was thick enough to be cut. They were doing this when the pup began to growl and nose about the door. Almost every night the pup had barked, later to be answered by wolves from the edge of the clearing, or by a fox, but her growl tonight was not for wolves. She had come to have a rather casual growl for wolves, for she had found that Mooney was not much concerned about them, only annoyed with them. This was a different growl, and it indicated that a more dangerous animal was near the clearing.

  Mooney unlatched the door. He saw in the moonlight two good-size black bears, one of them moving around the black pot, trying to get the last bit of molasses out of it, the other licking molasses from the ground, licking even the two boards which Mooney had used for a press.

  He watched them as they tasted the green waste which had been scattered about. It had a bitter taste, Mooney knew, and addled the brain for a time. He watched curiously as the bears began to waddle about, seeking more of it.

  They found all there was. Then, either because of the effect of the herb or, more likely, because of their disappointment at having found so little molasses, they began to fight one another. They fought for several minutes, knocking each other down, rolling over on the ground, before one went away, walking off in a rambling manner. The other licked the pot again, then left in a different direction.

  The chestnut trees had released their harvest of nuts; the pigs filled their bellies with them, and the boys gathered them for the winter and fed them by handfuls to the two fattening hogs. Acorns, beechnuts and chinkapins rattled always across the forest floor, and the chipmunks and whistle-pigs gorged themselves until they were fat and wobbly.

  When the first warblers and thrashers stopped at the valley on their way south, Lorry and the boys pulled the main harvest of gourds from the vines, cleaned them out and set them to dry. On a dry day the flax was pulled and laid out on the ground; the weeds were sorted out of it, the flax was tied, and the boys stacked it in the loft of the cabin, near the loom and wheel.

  By now the frost had touched the mountain peak and was moving down the mountainside. The balsam forest didn’t change, nor did the slicks of rhododendron, but the trees below them took on tones of red and yellow.

  The wash of color flowed down toward the clearing, reached it in the sharpness of an early morning. And about them now the woods w
ere changed into a fairyland of color. The buckeye turned yellow and dropped its eye-shaped seeds. The box elder near the spring turned into a bank of yellow leaves and pods; the maple in the valley just to the edge of the clearing got red as fire and beside it a white oak turned into the color of old wine; the sourwood was a rich red, the red oak was orange, and the possums climbed higher every night into the persimmon trees.

  The salamander laid her eggs in the stream. The poplars finally turned from green to shades of yellow and gold.

  Mooney and Lorry pulled the corn. The boys hauled it to the newly made crib and stacked it away. It was safe now; it was stored beyond bears or seasons, and all that day the warmest elation possessed them. They pulled the corn leaves from the stalks and stacked them. Mooney uprooted the corn stalks, cut them into pieces with the ax and stacked them near the stable.

  The sun set blood-red each day, and rose as brilliantly from upriver every morning. Autumn, Lorry thought, in these lush, water-fed lands, was more colorful than springtime. And the air was clear; there was no haze at all. One afternoon she was able to make out high on the mountain an elk standing near the crest of a rock, and on another day she pointed out to Mooney a herd of deer. Often of a day she would see ravens leaving the mountain peaks in dizzying flights, fleeing winter, swooping down from the high rocks where they had their summer nests. The crows were dismayed by their arrival and argued with them about it, but the ravens, as if to show their right to nest where they pleased, would fly in mated pairs into the air and do acrobatic stunts that ended in the clouds. Then from the clouds they would appear, and dip and twist, tumble, plunge, roll sideways in the air, and finally land near where the crows unhappily were perched on tree limbs, trembling.

  The winter wren moved down to the valley, too, and the white-throated sparrow came back to the valley. Winter was in the woods, but suddenly the coolness left and it was warm of a day. The violets bloomed again. Streamers of gossamers, woven by spiders and set loose on the wind, waved from the trees.

  At night the foxes barked at the moon. The owl sometimes kept them awake, too, and the wolves had gathered into packs and could be heard high on the mountain chasing down elk and deer. The trees dropped their leaves, and the streams were glutted with them, and the water in the streams would disappear under them, then appear again near the rocks, and would sometimes flow over a bed of them. A family of pheasants could sometimes be seen, Fate said, lying on colored leaves not far beyond the spring.

  Paul and Nancy Larkins worked on their cabin. Mooney helped them chop and cut, and Mina helped the boys gather rock for the chimney and hearth. A chill returned to the air, suggesting approaching bitterness. The groundhog sniffed the wind and went back to his den, there to stay until spring.

  “It’s time to kill the hogs,” Mooney said one night. He was sitting by the fire talking and waiting for that utter weariness which came to him before sleep. The boys had been quiet, listening to the wind and playing with the dog. “Which one you want first, Lorry?”

  “It seems to me like the red one is the fattest.”

  “I think so,” he said. “Might as well do the hard one now. You boys get poles and separate those two hogs in the pen tomorrow morning.”

  The boys watched him expectantly.

  “And don’t feed that red hog tomorrow, but give it water.”

  The boys nodded.

  “And don’t feel sorry for it,” Mooney said. “I’ve told you afore about making pets out of stock.”

  The boys pressed their lips together and stared at the fire.

  “They told me up in Pennsylvania that it’s a sign of bad luck to have pity on what you’ve got to kill. It’s not right to the hog, or sheep, or whatever. So drag saplings tomorrow morning and separate them two and just feed one, you hear?”

  He went outdoors and went down to the fattening pen, where the two hogs were. The boar heard him coming and began to grunt, so he spoke to him and the boar got quiet again.

  He looked down at the two big hogs, lying on their sides on the ground, too fat to want to rise. “How you, Poppy?” he said to the big red one, then turned away. It didn’t do to pity them, he knew that.

  Two mornings later he took his ax and went down to the pen. He removed the roof logs from the place where the big red one was.

  The hog got to his feet and looked up at him.

  “You boys go get the horse and chain,” he said.

  He spat on his hands and lifted the ax. Swiftly he brought the ax down, striking the hog between the eye and the ear, and the hog crumpled to the ground.

  He took the side logs out of the pen, hooked the chain onto the hog and dragged the carcass out. He bled the hog, then pulled it on up to the black pot, where Lorry was heating water.

  The water was steaming but not boiling. He tested the water the way he had learned in Pennsylvania: he dipped his finger into it quickly several times in succession, to see how many times it took before the water scalded his skin. It scalded him slightly on the third time, so it was all right, as he told Lorry. If it burned on the first or second time, it was too hot for hog-singeing and might cause the hair and bristles on the hog’s skin to set.

  He and Verlin lifted the hog and set its rear end into the water. He had a smile at the sight, for the hog seemed to be resting there, taking a bath, its front hoofs poking out.

  When the rear half was steamed hot, they put the head-half in; then he and the boys scraped the skin while Lorry emptied the pot.

  He cut through the skin and cleanly cut off the hams and shoulders. He cut out the spare ribs and side meat, and Lorry took each section as he gave it to her and laid it in the rinsed-out pot, which was set on the ground and was cool. He cut off the leaf fat and she put that into the pot. It came off easily, for the carcass was still warm. He gave Lorry the heart and she put that into the pot.

  He pulled the hide off the carcass, what was left of it, and told the boys to grain it before it hardened, then he went up on the side of the hill and sat down near the grave and rested, for he was tired. He hated worse than anything slaughtering stock.

  When he got back to the cabin, there was the smell of fresh pork coming from the hearth pot, and Lorry had a bowl of honey on the table. She had taken some of the dried corn and had milled it. A pone of bread was on the heat rock, and the promise of the place, of the farm and of the valley and of the family, came to him, and he welcomed it. They fell to eating and ate all that was cooked, and talked in pleasure about what they had.

  That afternoon they tended the stock, and it was evening when they carried the pieces of pork up the loft steps and laid them out on a board. Salt was rubbed into the hams and shoulders until the meat sweated and caked the salt. The slabs of bacon, which weighed forty pounds apiece, were cut into three parts each and were salted and stacked. The hams, which weighted over twenty pounds apiece, were placed skin side down next to the shoulders.

  When this was done, at the last light of day, they stood back and looked on at the sight, at the white meat which had pink in it and which looked gray because of the whiteness of the salt. “It makes you feel wealthy,” Lorry said.

  “Those hams and shoulders look like little animals cuddled down for the winter,” Mooney said.

  “How long will they stay like that?” Verlin asked.

  “Forty, fifty days,” Mooney said. “The colder it is, the longer they stay. They get the salt in them to the bone, then they can’t spoil.”

  “Not ever?” the boy said.

  “For years, anyway, especially if you smoke them when they’re cured.”

  “I like it smoked might nigh as well as plain,” Lorry said.

  “No need,” he said, “no need to smoke them here, though smoking keeps the flies off.”

  “It’s a pretty sight,” she said. They stood there looking at the store of meat, until at last they went down the ladder and ate another meal of fresh meat, field beans and hot bread.

  That night a bear came to the clearing and
ate the scraps that were left. The boys had hung the pigskin on the side of the crib, and the bear sniffed about that. Mooney shouted at it from the door, trying to scare it away, and the bear turned toward the cabin, bewildered by what he saw— a yellow-lighted doorway, open like the mouth of a giant animal, and in the mouth a creature as thin and sharp as a snake’s tongue.

  The bear growled and tore at the pigskin.

  “Get gone, get gone,” Mooney said angrily.

  The bear woofed and ignored him.

  “Hold that dog,” Mooney told the boys. “Don’t let her get free.” Both boys had ahold of her.

  The bear waddled off to the side of the crib and stopped there, but it looked back at the cabin, then began to sniff around the crib.

  “He’s still hungry for meat,” Mooney said. “You boys bury what we have left of that other hog tomorrow, you hear?”

  “The bears will still smell it,” Verlin said.

  “I don’t need advice right now,” Mooney said.

  The bear backed away from the crib, then went close to it again, struck it a mighty blow with his paw, and the sound of the blow echoed back from across the river. He sucked at his paw, then struck the crib again, and the side of the crib trembled.

  The horses began to move about inside the shed, frightened now, and to press against the shed door. The sheep moved in their pen, seeking a way out.

  Mooney raised his rifle to his shoulder, braced his arm against the doorjam, and fired.

  He closed the door and Larry bolted it with a pole. He went to the bed quickly and began to load. The bear struck the door with his paw, and the door trembled in its holds.

  The bear struck the door again. Chinking fell from behind the logs on that side of the cabin and the door flew open. The bear started forward and Mooney fired from beside the bed. The bear hurtled backward, for the shot hit a bone. At the same moment the young dog tore loose from the boys and moved toward the bear, leaped against it, trying to grab hold of its jaw with her mouth. There was a heap of bear and dog tumbling about in the yard. The bear got up and started back for the house, but Lorry threw a lighted piece of firewood at it, and the bear turned and started across the clearing, the dog snapping at it. Mooney took up the ax and ran after them, calling to the dog, but the dog went on.