The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  Also, he liked to sit by the river because the turbulence of its waters responded to the turbulence of his mind. He had an orderly mind, but an active one. It was always busy with plans, either for the valley or for his kin and neighbors. He could not let his ideas about the settlement rest, could not sleep except that he dreamed of his planning, so that day and night he was planning always.

  He could envision great open fields rich with corn and later on with wheat and rye. He could imagine that a mill could be set not far from his house on the river. He could hear the blacksmith hammers ringing out, and tinkers coming by with their wares, and a potter making jugs. He could see in his imagination a little church with a four-sided steeple, set near a big hickory tree over near the road. He had heard it said that a church should not be set under a nut tree, for the falling of nuts would disrupt the services, but he had always found diversions during religious observances welcome, and should the church also be used as a school, the nut tree would help the scholars master their powers of concentration.

  He could imagine all these measures of progress for the settlement, but he knew they were no nearer realization this spring than they had been last. In fact, the settlement was in worse shape.

  The pack of wolves had scattered the stock, costing him in cattle and oxen and hogs, costing the German the hog he had, costing Mooney Wright some of the best of his swine. The wolves had even cost Harrison one of his horses, which had run down to the river, had found itself on ice, had slid on the ice, still standing on its hoofs, and had skated across it. Nobody saw the sight, but the marks were on the ice next day. The horse had ended up in the twisted limbs of overhanging trees on the water’s other side, where it smashed itself beyond repair.

  Chickens were lost, geese were scattered, except for Ernest Plover’s, whom even the wolves had ignored, and for days the populace had been out seeking and driving home what was their own, what was left, for the wolves continued to prey on the defenseless animals.

  Small and poor was the settlement now, but Grover need not talk about that in Morganton next time he went to advertise the place, Harrison thought. They need not know in Morganton that Ernest Plover had done little to clear his land, that he was not a settler but a stream fisherman and would be of little asset to the community. It bothered Harrison no end to think any man would be so lazy a being, so profitless, and for the wolves to pass Ernest by, not to touch a single hair on his underfed stock’s back, even so much as to take a chicken from his mangy flock, was the final note of irony. It seemed that there were devils placed around the land of lazy men which guarded them. A pestilence; Ernest’s presence in the valley was a pestilence.

  But Grover need not say that in Morganton.

  Nor need he talk in length about the German family. Nicholas Bentz’s losses had taken the gumption out of him and had made him into a hunter, a wood rover, a man who was rarely home. He had no hogs at all now, and no sheep or beef cattle; he had no hope, he said, of a crop, unless he harvested hides, or unless he kept a flock of turkeys.

  It was enough to drive a strong man down to see the way he let his clearing go and piddled about with wild turkey eggs he had taken from woods nests.

  Nor need Grover talk in Morganton about that group of inbreds beyond the river, which kept bringing up more and more goods from the lowlands, and more and more children, so that the woods across the river was infested with youngins and odors. With that many children, a hole should be dug and a privy built; the woods could not absorb so much daily contribution. And consider the weak-seamed quality of the men. Charley Turpin was a big talking fool, as Tinkler saw him, a wastrel. Amos, who was Mildred’s husband, was the laziest man Harrison had ever seen; Amos was lazier than Ernest Plover, for he was not alert in any way, not even in his laziness. He could not discuss, as Ernest could, the advantages of idleness. The other man, Frank, was not able to do more than clear a little land now and then, for his wife was thin and easily tired, and he had to think about the welfare of all that big, husky, whiskey-drinking brood. He was, however, a more secure person than the others, and was as reasonable in his manner and direct in his statements as the others were unreasonable and unkempt. He did much work, though not nearly enough to stem the tide of chaos around him.

  The only one in the valley who was working was Mooney Wright.

  Harrison leaned over and kneaded his hands roughly. He was wary of Mooney. Mooney was a strong one, not subject to weakness at all. He had done only one grievous act, in Harrison’s mind. He had taken Lorry and the boys from him.

  For a man to be jealous of his daughter was a damnable thing, Harrison thought, though he realized he had been jealous of Lorry for years. It was to her that he had let his heart go out, yes, back when she was a small thing.

  If a man could keep a daughter small, he thought, could halt her growth, it would be possible for father and daughter to maintain contact with family affection. But such could not be. Lorry grew up, married that unbridled man, who had what Harrison called a singing in the heart. He had little interest in daily work there, Tinkler knew that; he might as well have filled it with singing.

  But fortunately the man went away and did not come home. Drowned, shot, beast-killed, Indian-slaughtered, who could say?

  He had written home only once. He had asked Lorry if she could find a way to Watauga with a party, or if he should come for her. Harrison had held the letter secret for two days. He had it within his power to deliver the letter or destroy it. He thought it all through. A weak man, he decided, would deliver the letter and lose his daughter; a strong man would destroy it.

  It was painful to destroy it, for it would pain his daughter, the one he loved. Always he had found it difficult when she had been little to bring himself to lick her with a switch, and he had not done it but twice in his life, for it hurt him so, and hurt him for days, but look here, what sort of licking would it be to a woman’s heart to destroy this letter? How many days would that hurt her, and hurt Harrison? How many years, remembering what he had done?

  And what if she found out?

  No, he thought, that mattered not so much as her leaving now for a far-off place. And if she found out, she would forgive him for destroying it. A woman forgave any man, even her father, for an act of love.

  The big fireplace in the Virginia house was at the end of the dark-wood parlor. He tore the letter up and put the pieces in the red ashes. It was all simply done, and she was standing not more than five feet away, talking with her mother, saying that she wondered if Lacey would be back by spring.

  So it was done. He had done it, suffered it all, gone through the fire to do it, had done it for love.

  He had suffered for many months, even years for it. Only the strong knew what suffering was. The weak never found themselves in the strong webs; the strong man was the one who found himself day and night bound and struggling, so that the work he did, the plotting and the owning and the buying, the decisions he made—and in a large family there had been many to make—were often hard-fibered. Yes, hard, like old roof boards that were cupped, bowed at the edges. But that was the way of life, wasn’t it? Did anybody who had lived with the land and grubbed tree stumps in his youth, who had traded close and won out and in the end had come to be a rich man, did anybody who had made his way by his own craft, fighting against nature, which was the tough antagonist, and against other men and women, did he see the sweetness in gentleness? Gentleness was an unkindness, often as not.

  He stared heavily at the current. He clasped his hands tightly, lowered his head until his jaw rested on his chest. His lean, thin arms twitched with mosquito bites that he did not feel, would not feel, for the pain of the flesh was not a deep pain to him.

  Mooney had built new doors on his stable, Harrison had noticed. The horse would never be able to knock it down. That door he had built was half a foot thick. He had six leather hinges holding it, and he had three sapling poles to put across it of a night. It was made of white oak and was pegged, the G
erman said, twenty-eight times.

  Think of that. Think of the work. But think also of the passion of the man. A man can be judged by his passion, Harrison felt.

  Mooney had brought his ewes into the house to bear that spring, had brought his two big sows into the house to bear—had swine in the house, but he had told the German he could not afford to lose a single piece of stock now.

  Yes, he was in danger of being a pauper, like the rest, in spite of his work. Maybe they would all go down before these mountains. Destitute. A pestilence of sickness might come on them next, for they were ill prepared to heal themselves. And not a new hardworking settler had arrived all that spring, no good additions to help fight back the beasts, no buyers to pay for land, no leaders newly arrived to give hope and direction to the wearying enterprise.

  He worried about his vanishing dreams for this valley. He sweated in the sun, his pure watery sweat dropping to the ground to seep from there, he knew, into the greater body of pure water flowing by.

  He rode that same morning up the river trail to the end of the settlement and surveyed the broad, flat lands, wood-coated, deep-earthed. Strong men could clear it, year by year they could dig it out, work it into trade. He rode on up the ridge a ways to see what shape the trail was in. The winter had dealt unkindly with it, but it would do; it would have to do. Disuse had merely hampered its smoothness.

  He came back into the valley, past the creeks which fed into the headwaters of the river, and on down to the valley floor. He stopped at the German’s house, hopeful that the man had changed his ways and was cutting brush and stubble from his fields. He saw the woman chopping in the cornfield, the boy working in a nearby row, the little girl kneeling in the earth pulling up weeds. “Where’s your man?” he called.

  The boy turned aside, as if the question had burned him; he went to chopping harder at the ground. He was a good worker, a strong boy with big thighs and rounded shoulders on him. Muscles were there, but the boy’s eyes reflected inward more than outward; he thought on what he saw more than he saw of it, and he thought on what he did more than he did of it, as if the world that was outside himself were not as real or consequential as the world inside his own skin.

  “Is he about?” Harrison asked again, moving his horse closer.

  The woman pulled her bonnet lower over her face. “He’s off hunting,” she said, and said no more. He could not get another word out of her.

  At Plover’s house he tied his horse and went close to the cabin. There was odor of family living about it, of sweat and the smell of the pigpen close by. The corn needed hoeing, he noticed. He saw the children everywhere. Mina was standing at the other side of the woodpile.

  She came around the woodpile toward him.

  “Where’s your mama?” he asked.

  “In the house,” she said.

  It was strange for her to come to meet him, he realized, for usually she went the other way whenever she saw him approaching. On impulse he moved past the woodpile to see what it might be hiding, and so he came upon the startled German, Nicholas.

  Nicholas stood awkwardly.

  “You owe me on your land,” Harrison said, “for you’ve not met a payment since you bought it. Are you earning it?”

  “I’ve been out hunting deer,” Nicholas said. “I stopped by here.”

  “I see, I see,” Harrison said curtly, not fooled by that. Impetuously his mind moved on, now that he had light to see by, and solved some of the riddles of the settlement. “There’s not a family that has as much stock now as they had when they first come here,” he said, “and yet you’ve been courting, have you?”

  “Watch what you say!” Nicholas said.

  “I’m not afeared to say what I think, never have been. I say courting, do you want me to say more?” He glanced at the girl, who was standing self-consciously to one side, scratching at her leg with her bare foot. “Ernest,” he shouted. He walked to the door of the cabin, but he would not go into the dark place and risk disease. “Ernest!”

  “He’s fishing,” one of the children said.

  “Inez!” he shouted.

  She came from the back of the cabin, hurrying, clutching her dress in her hand to hold its hem out of the way. “I didn’t know you was here,” she said.

  “Inez, are you going to rear your children to go sleeping with every man who moves about them?”

  “What you mean?” she said, glancing uneasily at Nicholas and Mina.

  “I want that girl to get herself to my place and stay there. If you won’t care for her and protect her, I’ll see that she’s properly protected, both from herself and others. I’ll not have my kin go common.”

  “No,” Inez said sharply, “she’s not yours, so let her alone.”

  “Inez, you’ve asked me to save your family many a time, and I’ve done it.”

  “You’ve been more than kind—”

  “Because you’re kin and I respect blood ties, I’ve done it. But I’ll not permit that girl to stay here with that man. Do you hear?”

  Ernest came through the woods. He came running up the path as hard as he was able, and stopped at the edge of the clearing. He had heard some of the talk, and he surmised at once what it was about. He stood there licking his lips, glancing at Mina, then at his wife, then at Harrison.

  There was a spell of quiet; even the birds were silent. Then it was Ernest who spoke. “You’ve got her sister over to your house now. I think you’ve made her your wife. Well, you’ll not get another’n. I’d rather have her sleeping with the stock.”

  “You are a common sort of animal,” Harrison said sternly.

  “Common is as common thinks he is.”

  “Well, what do you think you are?”

  “I think my own thoughts, never fear,” he said.

  “I want you to remember I have done more for you than any man alive.”

  “And look how we’ve prospered. You’ve helped me to stay and suffer.” He moved closer to Harrison, spoke directly into his face. “I’m in your debt for making me a pauper, for I remember yet when I had land of my own, and stock, and a place of my own, and it was you who took it from me.”

  “You couldn’t pay. Later I sold you this land. Do you want it, or do you want me to take it from you now?”

  “Why, it makes no difference what I say to that; you wouldn’t have me gone. I’m the only one left with life enough to squirm when you step on me.”

  They stared at each other until Harrison turned away, moved past Inez and went to the place where he had tied his horse. He looked back, looked over toward the German, who turned, embarrassed and humbled, and stumbled away into the woods.

  A weak man, Harrison thought. He mounted, and without glancing again at the family, rode out of the clearing.

  For a moment the spell of his anger held sway over them all. Then Inez began to weep. Long sobs came from her, and Ernest looked at her with tenderness, but he didn’t move to her or say anything to her. Mina came over to her and put her arm around her.

  What to do, what to do, Ernest wondered. Had he done right or not? He didn’t know, but he had pride left, surely, and pride would have its say. He supposed he had not been wise, but how was he to be wise when he was in a country strange to him? This was not his proper place.

  What was his place? he wondered. Where was his world? He had sometimes stood on the riverbank and told himself: Deep down in the cold water is your world; a rock lashed to your feet is your clothing for that world. To enter it you need only to climb to the place above the rapids, where the pool is, where it is always calm, so it must be deep, and there bury yourself and leave a world that is not your own and find a garden, long fields already cleared and cribs already filled, a new place in which a weakness in a man is a matter for a word or chide, not a break through which the terrors of the world flow in.

  14

  She was never so surprised in her life. It was a sight to think of him standing there outside their house and talking so fierce, and shouti
ng at her mother as if her mother didn’t have but one ear in her head, and scaring the pants off the children. He had done more harm to her soul in one morning than had been done by anybody in twenty years—or seventeen years old, she guessed she was. It was so bitter to think back on it that she couldn’t hardly walk straight down the road. It was as if the weight of the whole sorry morning was squared on her shoulders.

  Her father had told him off, though. She hadn’t thought he had a courageous bone in his body, and she guessed he didn’t have but that one, the one he saved for old man Harrison.

  Come prancing around, sneaking past her to the woodpile. And that German man had gone off into the woods, so shamed he probably wouldn’t come back that way again.

  For noon dinner that day they had some fish and rabbit cooked in the same stew. It was enough to turn a body’s stomach. She ate a rabbit leg, then got her things together, which was nothing at all, and walked off down the road, for she knew well and good she wouldn’t find no worse place to live at. Except old man Harrison’s.

  But even if she had to go live there, he wouldn’t dare touch her. She’d cut his head off with a knife if he come around her. She’d tromp him silly. He’d think he’d got a hold of a wildcat that’d been eating green berries.

  She walked past his field without paying so much attention as to count the cattle out pasturing. She walked past the German’s place and didn’t look up that way either, for she could see out the comer of her eyes that the German woman was there, leaning on the doorpost, staring. Mina walked right on out of the settlement and up the trail, patches of dust rising from around her with every step. “ ‘Oh, for a glance of heavenly day,’  ” she sang, kicking at the dust with her naked toes, “ ‘To take this stubborn stone away.’  ”

  Birds rose around her from the trees. She guessed she had scared them off their nests. “ ‘And thaw,’  ” she sang, even louder, “ ‘with beams of love divine/This heart, this frozen heart of mine.’  ”