The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

“Yes.”

  Mooney nodded, accepting that without surprise. He shifted his gaze to the woods, then back to the boy. “I got a knife,” he said, taking it out and holding it on his palm.

  The boy studied it.

  “Your papa’s knife like that?”

  “No. His’n is wood-handled.”

  “Have you got it on you?”

  “No, it’s to home.”

  Mooney put away his knife, and even yet no sign of surprise crossed his face.

  Mooney said nothing to anybody about the matter. The time to worry about the disappearances of people and possible crimes was the time when the settlement tried to break through to the lowlands; that was when all things were counted, when all affairs were settled, when whatever hope they had as a community was either realized or thwarted. It was toward the drive that Mooney had set his mind and work, and almost every night he and Lorry and the boys discussed it.

  Other than a member of the family, the first person he talked with about it was Jacob. Jacob had little to send on a drive, but he had a cart and an ox, which would be needed, and he was a strong man, unfearful of such an expedition. Mooney and Verlin encountered him and Fate on the path one day, the two of them having just got in from hunting, and Mooney brought up the subject.

  “You planning a drive?” Jacob asked, knowing he was; Fate had told him all about it many times.

  “I want to take my stock down there,” Mooney said.

  “How you plan to get so much stock across the streams?”

  “A wagon. Rafts. Whatever floats.”

  “You have to carry right much corn if you drive a drove of hogs.”

  “I figure my horse can carry eight bushel of shelled corn.”

  “Eight bushels is not much. You can carry much more in a cart.

  “That’s so,” Mooney said.

  “You’ll need a plenty. And you’ll need to have enough men, too, to get the rafts over the river.”

  “I know,” Mooney said.

  “I’ll risk my stock, if you get enough men. Fate and me can help you.”

  His bringing Fate into the situation gave Mooney and Verlin a start. There was a long quiet, then Verlin said he would like to go, too.

  “There’s room for two boys on a drive,” Jacob said at once. “We’ll need two drivers for fifty or sixty hogs.”

  “Somebody has to stay to help Lorry,” Mooney said.

  “Florence can stay with her.”

  “Florence might not want to be put out.”

  “She don’t care, so long as I take her cow down to your place so she can milk it. So long as she can milk twice a day, she don’t care about anything else. And Mina can stay at your place, if there’s more need for a person. Mina can shoot as straight as a man.”

  “Mina can shoot?”

  “I’ve taught her to shoot. And Florence can shoot. She’s shot a plenty of things in the past, when they come after her stock.”

  There was quiet; then Mooney said, “I don’t think too much of women’s shooting.”

  There was quiet again and Verlin said, “I’d like to go, I’ll say that.”

  Jacob said, “I told Fate he probably could go with me on my drive.”

  Mooney crouched on the path and drew the outline of a pig in the dirt, then brushed it off. “We’ll take them both,” he said.

  Verlin sighed. Relief came to him, and he couldn’t hide it. Jacob didn’t move a muscle in his face, and Mooney was still bending over, working with the dirt; nobody could see his expression. Straightening, he said, “How much weight will the hogs lose, do you suppose?”

  “Fifteen, twenty pounds apiece,” Jacob said. “Those that ain’t lost entirely.”

  “The last time I was in Morganton, cotton was seven cents a pound and hogs was half that. At such a price, if I had my hogs down there, I could get a hundred dollars for them right now; I could get enough to buy flour, sugar, coffee, powder, a candlemaker, lord knows what all. And next year I could make such progress that afore long this place would be finished. And more settlers will find us, if we open up the way. But we ought to make it now, for it won’t come another time. If we don’t make it now, we’ll be more lean by this time next year than we can stand to be, and the cutting down of trees and clearing wasn’t nothing and the rearing of houses wasn’t nothing, and the birthing of the stock wasn’t nothing, and the deaths of the people wasn’t nothing, for it all passed for nothing, so we’ll take both boys and your cart full of shelled corn, and take your drove and mine, and we’ll go to Morganton. And by God we’ll get to Morganton, too, for if we don’t, we’ll have nothing.”

  He had not spoken such a long speech before, and he was trembling when he stopped. He was close to tears, too, not of weakness but of a strong power trying to break through him. “You might not want to remember I said all that,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Let’s go home, boys,” he said.

  He talked with the German about what he planned. The German had nothing to take, he said. He couldn’t take turkeys, and that was all he had. Mooney let him think about the matter, reason it out, come to see finally that he had to drive what he had, even if it was only a flock of turkeys.

  The German woman was astounded at their decision; in a flurry of German words and gestures, she questioned it, and Nicholas, with a long-suffering kindness which had come to be his response to her, let her talk.

  “I’ll risk all I have,” he told Mooney later.

  Ernest Plover was fishing when Mooney and Verlin found him. He was sitting on the bank, whipping out a line and snagging a fish now and then. The idea of going to Morganton caught his imagination at once, and for a while it appeared that he took himself to be the leader of the enterprise. It was only when Mooney asked what stock he had that he grew quiet, became once more a poor man sitting on a riverbank. “I got not a thing,” he said, “except half a dozen pigs.”

  “What about geese?” Mooney asked.

  “There’s a flock that Inez tends, hoping for a feather mattress.”

  “Can you take a share of them?”

  Ernest decided he could take some of the geese and a few pigs. “I put one condition on my going, though,” he said. “That Tinkler Harrison won’t be permitted to join.”

  Proudly he made his terms. He put his few pigs and geese, and the slight strength he had for work, against the riches of Harrison.

  “You better give me a few days to think that over,” Mooney said quietly.

  The only man across the river who had much stock was Frank. He told Mooney he realized the valley had to make the trek sometime, so might as well be soon as late. He had fifteen hogs he could bring, he said, and he and his oldest sons would come to help out. Charley Turpin would come, too, he supposed. “Charley will say he will, then will say he won’t, then will say he will,” Frank said. “It’s going to be a matter of luck to have him say he will at the right time, but I know best how to handle him.” He spoke of Charley as if he were a little boy who needed gentle care.

  Tinkler Harrison was the last one to be contacted. Mooney rode to his house one mid-evening and found him gathering a few pigs to be altered. Harrison had heard about the drive from Grover, who had talked with Nicholas, and he was resentful because he had not been asked his opinion earlier.

  “No,” Harrison said, “I’m not going to send my horses and sheep down the road with a flock of geese; I’ll not send a fine stand of cattle through the wild country with turkeys showing the way. The German is addled about them turkeys. My lord, it’ll take two weeks to drive them all that distance.”

  “The German either gets his turkeys down there, or he’ll be a pauper afore it’s over,” Mooney said.

  “I don’t much care what comes of him, for he’s not doing nothing now but setting eggs,” Harrison said.

  “Each person ought to take what he has,” Mooney said. “We can all get there if we go together, but no one of us can get there alone.”

  “I can,” Harrison said.

&nb
sp; “You can’t build a settlement here if you go alone.”

  Harrison looked sharply at him, angered by him. “Somebody said you’d even gone across the river to them cross-river people. What they got to take down there?”

  “Frank has about fifteen hogs.”

  “That’s not worth thinking about.”

  “And they have two men and a boy to help us.”

  “Two men?”

  “Charley Turpin and Frank.”

  “You taking Charley Turpin on a drive? My lord, I never thought you’d be so thoughty as to include him on a drive. What you think he’ll do?”

  “He’s got some strength.”

  “I wonder about this settlement. I have since it started. Seems like nobody here has mind enough to build ary thing, except me and my folks, and now you’re talking about taking them out into the lowlands. Well, that’s work, a drive is work, did ye know it?”

  “I know it.”

  “And it brings out weakness in a man who has weakness in him. No, I’d better go alone in my own time, take my own stock and my own men. I got precious little need for Charley Turpin and the German’s turkeys.”

  Mooney let the argument rest there. He stood around, saying nothing for a while; then he said, “Not much of a settlement building up here, is there?”

  “Let it go, let it all go. What can a man do?” Harrison’s crafty eyes looked up at Mooney; then he closed them, as if hiding them from view.

  “The German will lose out, Ernest Plover will lose out, Jacob’s not farming anything to speak of, the cross-river people can’t build anything to speak of. That leaves you and me.”

  “And we ain’t working close,” Tinkler said.

  “You say you want to build a settlement, but you don’t want one, seems to me. You want to make a single farm, and that yours. You would as soon see all the rest go down. If you plan to make a settlement here, you have to take part in it as a whole thing.”

  The old man abruptly started back to the house. Mooney followed, even though he knew there was no reasoning with him. Harrison stopped at the door and looked off across the fields. “Let it go,” he said. “I’m too old and tired now.”

  “Then all the work goes. And Imy’s death was for nothing. And Paul’s. And whatever it was Lacey Pollard got killed for, that was for nothing.”

  “What did he get killed for?” Harrison said, watching Mooney.

  “For his boys. That’s what I see in it.”

  “Do ye?” he said, considering that. His eyes brightened. “You ain’t going to let Ernest Plover go on your drive, air ye?”

  “I plan to.”

  “And what’s he to do?”

  “Maybe he can drive the geese down.”

  “Maybe him and Charley Turpin can have a party at ever’ river crossing. My Lord in Heaven, you got a team for yer drive. Ye got nerve to come to me and ask me for help.”

  “I’m asking, in any case,” Mooney said.

  “I’ll do no more, nary nother bit,” he said.

  Belle was standing just beyond the door, trying to hear it all, Mooney saw.

  “No, no,” Tinkler said. “I’ll stand out there by the river sometimes and see the flow go by and say that’s the way all I ever saw goes by. My hopes for Grover is in the flow. My hopes for my two older sons is in the flow. My hopes for my first wife has gone by. My hopes for Lorry is all up on that hillside with the hogs and the bears. My hopes for Belle has all gone to the flow, for she don’t bear and she don’t serve as good company any more, except that her and Grover makes eyes across my own table, across her husband’s and his father’s table. My God, it clobbers my soul.”

  A pity, Mooney thought, that he had not died by now and cleared his head of his thoughts.

  “All my hopes for this valley is in the flow. I thought maybe Lacey Pollard could set it right again, but he’s dead; he got caught in the flow. And I come to see as I get old that life is too much for any of us, and all of us will end up in the flow.”

  He went into the house. He went on across the main room and opened his bedroom door; Mooney saw him lie down, fully clothed, and close his eyes.

  Mooney was about to mount when Grover appeared beside him. “Belle sent me,” he said. “I talked to her, and we’ll go.”

  “You’ll go? You and Belle?”

  “No, not Belle. I’ll go.”

  Mooney considered that. “To Morganton?”

  “Yes. I’ll take the men and stock down.”

  “You can’t do that, can you?”

  “Yes. We’ll go.” He turned to leave.

  Mooney caught his arm. “I want him to go, too.”

  Grover shook his head angrily. “He’s an enemy of all of it, afore it’s done.”

  “I want him to go, too,” Mooney said. “I want him and Ernest Plover and Charley Turpin and the German and you and Frank to go. There’s nobody on that drive strong enough to go, but we’ll all go.”

  “I don’t know how to make him decide, for he won’t change—”

  “Yes, you know,” Mooney said, “you and Belle. Talk to him, force him to consent. You can force him to consent as easy as you can work around him and take it all from him.”

  “No, I don’t want to do it that way,” Grover said.

  “You’d rather tie him up and take it all from him, I know, but I’m telling you to make him go with us. That’s harder, but you tell Belle, and the two of you make him go.”

  He and Lorry wrote on their cabin door the records for the coming drive.

  Jacob 13 hog

  Mooney W. 39 hog

  Harrison 50 hog or mor

  Frank 15 hog

  Amos wife 4 hog

  Ernest P. 6 hog

  Mooney W. 19 sheep

  Harrison 30 cattle or mor

  Frank 4 sheep

  Ernest P. 15 geese

  German 200 turkey or mor

  Harrison 30 sheep

  Harrison 5 horses or mor

  It was late summer when Mooney went cross-river to talk with Mildred. He found her watching over a small still, boiling mash. The steam from the mash went into a copper tube which was cooled by spring water, and drops of raw whiskey fell from the tube into a pot. She had heated the boiler so much that all the steam was not condensing; much of it was passing out of the tube and blowing away, an alcohol-laden mist. “It’s that oak wood,” she complained to Mooney. “If I had a red beech tree, I’d have a better fire.”

  “That’s so,” he said, sitting down nearby.

  “I get so tired of doing this,” she said.

  “Is this the first or second run?”

  “Second run,” she said.

  He put his finger under the spout of the copper tube and licked the whiskey. “Whose corn you using?”

  “That German’s. He brought over four bushel and I agreed to make him two of them in whiskey and charge him the other two for the doing of it. He’ll get eight gallon out of his part, and that’s enough, he said, to keep for medicine and snakebites.” She wiped her face with the sleeve of her dress. She had smoke splotches on her face and sweat from the fire. “If that boiler was to give out, I reckon we’ll starve to death, for I don’t have nothing else to do with. My corn was eat by bears, and Frank can’t seem to do much better, though he’s got a few hogs in the woods, but his’n and mine and Charley’s don’t amount to so many when you think about three families having to make a curing. I don’t know what’s to become of us over here this side the river.”

  She spoke gently. She liked to talk, Mooney knew, and she was quiet-natured and, though she gossiped and liked to tell stories about others, or about herself, she didn’t interfere in another’s affairs or criticize others.

  “How’s your little baby girl?” she asked.

  “She’s loud,” Mooney said, and smiled. “She’s got a pretty face, as pretty as I ever saw on a little’n. Has a round face like a Lutheran preacher.”

  Mildred shook her head in wonder. “Ain’t they nice?” sh
e said. For a moment tears welled into her eyes; then she became brusque. “But they’re all as mean as their pap underneath.” She glowered at her own children, who had come close now. “Can’t you youngins play to yerselves without hanging around me all the time?” she said sharply. They drew back a short ways.

  “She got almost no nose at all yet,” Mooney said. “A little button on her face is all it is. And her chin’s not nothing yet; it wobbles when you put your finger agin it and shake it. But when she gets to bawling, it’s time to go.”

  Mildred laughed.

  “If a wild thing’s young made as much racket as a human being’s, they’d be discovered and killed off in a season. You couldn’t keep a baby in a hole in the ground like a fox, or in a cave like a bear, or in a hidden nest like a bird. You have to build a house with thick walls to protect them. And they take so long to get grown, too. A bear takes a year and a half, two years. A baby takes more’n that to get ready to bark at you from the crib. A hog bears eight, then, twelve pigs, each one tiny, but they eat big and soon they sprout strength and end up a hundred and fifty, two hundred pound, and still they’re not but a year, two years old. That’s what I mean. It takes a baby fifteen, twenty years to get that big, if she ever gets that big. So it’s strange.”

  “They live longer’n stock does,” she said.

  “That’s so,” he said.

  She picked up a turkey wing and fanned the fire with it. The boiler was bubbling now, making protesting noises. She shook her head worriedly as she studied it. “There’s that little mean man,” she said, noticing Harrison across the river in his yard. “Never see his woman in the yard more’n once or twice a season. She must be white as a cotton sheet by now for lack of sun.”

  “Do you ever speak to her?” Mooney asked.

  “Don’t see her to speak to her. She used to have a flower in a clay pot, and she would set it in the doorway for sun and water it with a gourd dipper. But I ain’t seen it here lately. Charley told me once she was Mina and Fancy’s sister.”

  “That’s so.” He tested the whiskey again. “Charley Turpin wasn’t home when I come by,” he said.

  “No, he’s down the mountain some’ers.”