The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  “Gone to stay?”

  “No. He goes and comes. I don’t know where he is. He’s always bobbing up in a surprise. He told me he plans to be back inside of a week, but he’s been gone more’n that. They might have caught him for something and be holding him.”

  “Is he wanted for something?” Mooney asked.

  “They’s a plenty of husbands after him,” she said.

  Mooney smiled.

  “He’s got people that hates him, and people that loves him. They’s just the two kinds, and he lives atween them all the time.”

  “When’s your own man coming back?”

  She didn’t move for a moment. It was as if she hadn’t heard him ask, but directly she said, “I’ve give up on him.”

  “He’s not coming back?”

  She leaned forward over the fire. “He left me with six youngins to tend.”

  “Just walked away one morning, I guess.”

  “Evening,” she said.

  He waited for her to go on, but she said nothing else. “Some of us are going to make the drive to Morganton,” he said, “and I’ll ask for him there.”

  She said nothing.

  “People come in there from all over. We can find out where he is, if he’s not changed his name.”

  She said nothing.

  “I can send out letters to Virginia, if you think he might have gone north.”

  “He’s not up there,” she said.

  “Uh huh,” he said easily. The fire needed wood, and he put some on it, laying the pieces on carefully. “I expect you know there’s people wondering about where he went, and the talk might mark the youngins, for he didn’t take a horse and I’ve heard he didn’t take a gun or a knife. You say he left of an evening, which is not a wise time to be leaving a settlement.”

  She looked up at him, and he saw the worry reflected in her face, the weariness with the work she had endured all her life in growing up, in marrying, in bearing, in chopping and cooking and cleaning up; it had been a burden to her, and now even the calamity of her husband not appearing around the house, even that, which was suffering in itself, was the cause for added complaints.

  “I wouldn’t say anything about it,” he said, “but when it comes time for the drive, everybody totals up what they’ve got and what has to be done. If there’s a man missing, they want him found, or looked for. You can’t let a man disappear into the woods and not ask.”

  “Do they think I done it to him?” she said.

  He studied the fire. “It’s not often talked about,” he said. “But since Charley’s gone so much, they might believe Charley of it.”

  “No,” she said, “he wouldn’t do it. There’s nobody more loyal to his friends. I wouldn’t want it even said that he done it.”

  “Then tell me this—do you expect Charley to come back afore we get ready to make the drive?”

  “When is that?” she said.

  “Whenever we get the stock in order and the mast is on the ground. We need colder weather. The stock won’t lose so much weight then, and the rivers are not so high in the fall.”

  “Well, I don’t know where Charley is, or when he’ll be back. He told me he’d be gone a fortnight, but it’s been a month and he’s not come home.”

  “Did he know where Amos went?”

  “No, he don’t know.”

  “Then he’s not gone after him.”

  “He’s not, no.”

  “Then he knows he’s not down there to be found. If he knows he’s not down there, it appears he might know where he is.”

  The words fell without hurry, and she didn’t deny or turn from them, but slowly she sighed, a deep, longing sound, full of weariness. She rubbed her nose and gazed thoughtfully at the fire. “You better go on home now,” she said.

  He waited as if he hadn’t noticed the solemn threat in her manner; then he got up slowly and went directly to his horse and mounted. He saw Frank coming along the path from downriver, and he waited until Frank was close. Frank stopped when he saw him, stood in the path trying to decide who he was. Evidently he couldn’t see well at a distance. “Amos?” he said, and began to run forward. But when he saw who it was, he stopped on the path awkwardly, as if he had lost an idea he had had.

  * * *

  Mina wanted to go to Morganton in the worst way; she wanted to leave this place of heart losses. She talked with Mooney about it, and he said he feared she couldn’t go. She talked with the young German about it, asked if she could help with the turkeys, and he said it wouldn’t be fitting. He knew her going would cause a commotion in his family, that was the truth of it. He didn’t want that, for he and his father and mother were getting along all right now.

  She pestered Jacob into showing her how to cut a wood handle; she fastened a long leather strip to it and tied to the end a piece of bright-red cloth which Florence let her have. This made a fine turkey whip, and she learned to snap it. She could turn a turkey easily; she could make a turkey walk in a circle until it was dizzy and lay down. But Felix said she couldn’t go.

  So she made a hog whip and learned to crack it. She got so she could snap a leaf off a bush with it from ten paces. Mooney said he had never seen it done better, but he said she couldn’t go. “You stay here and help tend the settlement,” he said. “A drive’s no place for a woman to be.”

  She was furious. She said she wanted to escape this lonesome place.

  Jacob hated to encourage her to leave, for she was the brightest person anywhere around, but he knew she needed some experience to take her mind off of Lacey’s death. “You would be safer with the women,” he told her. “You wait until we try to get all this stock across that broad river; it’s more dangerous than you think.”

  “I aim to be there to find out,” she said. “There’s nothing here for me but breezes, and the limbs all over everything.”

  They were up at Jacob’s place, sitting in front of the door looking up the valley.

  “It’s time you got a man, all right,” he said. “You’ll dry up afore long, if you don’t have one.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Oh, women need to have loving, or they get crafty and dry-skinned. Get sharp of tongue.”

  “I never heard such talk.”

  “Only thing that keeps a woman from sliding to hell is that a man sometimes is willing to comfort her.”

  “Law, listen.”

  “You take a woman that gets much older than you without a man to tame her spirit, to help her along so she can stand herself, and you’ve sometimes got to tame her like a wild thing, for she gets clawing-mad at nothing, gets mean.”

  “You can’t scare me with fool talk. I know when you’re telling a lie.”

  “I’ve known women to jump off high places, crush themselves to escape their own meanness, when they didn’t have a man to tend them.”

  “I thought they was in cages,” she said.

  “They’re let out to feed,” he said.

  “If you don’t let me go with you, when Charley Turpin gets back, I’m going to take my things and move to his cabin and marry with him.”

  “I wouldn’t even joke that way.”

  “Or I’ll marry Grover and get to be like Belle.”

  “No, no.”

  “No, no, you say, but who else is there in this valley?”

  “Don’t marry Grover.”

  “I’ll marry that German boy then; is that what you want?”

  “He’s got a mean mama. She’s a crow turned human, so keep away from him.”

  “Him and me can get us a pallet for the floor,” she said, “and a cook pot, get a gun and an ax and a nest of turkey eggs.”

  “Lord, I never heard of such,” he said. “It takes money to get a gun and an ax. Nothing’s free in this world. A gun costs forty dollars; an axhead costs more. You ought’n to depend your life on one ax, either, for you need two, and need an auger and lots more. A man and woman could live in Philadelphia for less cost if they’d let our kind stay
there.”

  “What’s it like up there?” she said.

  “You’ll never know and it won’t hurt you,” he said. “They don’t like our kind.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t take communion all the time. In Philadelphia they’re allus kneeling at a bench. And you ought to see the men there, with their frills and collars on, wearing of perfume.”

  “Law, I’d die. Perfume?” She drew her knees close to her breast and hugged them to herself. “I declare, I’d go plum crazy over such pretty men as that.”

  “Wigs on, all powdery white, and sweat dripping out from under them like sulphur springs. Tight britches on so ever’ woman in sight can see what they’re hung with, as if somebody might be apt to deny they got nothing at all if it wasn’t in evidence.”

  She shivered with laughter. “I want to see them,” she said. “Maybe one of them would let me live with him. What do they raise?”

  “Raise?”

  “What stock?”

  “House cats. That’s all they got, and dogs that can’t sniff beyond their own noses. You wouldn’t want to live with one of them. Lord, he wouldn’t know what to do with you anyhow, unless maybe he’d let you help perfume him of the morning.”

  She giggled. “How many times you ever been there?”

  He cleared his throat uneasily. “Never heard tell of one of them plowing nor working. They sit there and collect the tariffs and talk kind about the English. Good God.”

  “Jacob, you ever been there?” she asked again, watching him carefully.

  He fidgeted with his hands. “No,” he said.

  “Law, you talked like you’d been standing on the street corners all day, and you’ve not even saw it. I suspect those men are strong, have swords and hatchets to protect their women with.”

  “What the hell would I be doing up there, tell me that.”

  “I don’t know, but you talked so grand, like you was a member of the parliament. You talked like you knowed what everybody was doing, so I expected to find that you had been a leader amongst them.” She and Jacob talked this way often, fussing at each other, criticizing the ways of others and worrying about their own.

  She even asked Grover if she could go with him. She stopped him on the road and talked with him about it. He said his father hadn’t yet agreed to go, and if he did go, would have all the help he needed.

  She crossed the bench one morning to Charley Turpin’s place to see if he was back. He wasn’t, so she came across the bench and went home, tossing stones at every bird she saw along the road. She was depressed, for a fact. If she could get to a settlement where there were stores and a church and school and order to daily life, she might find a place for herself.

  She sat down by her father’s fire and wondered what she was going to do. Ernest arrived directly carrying a mess of fish, and she asked him if she could help drive the geese to Morganton.

  “Takes a man to do a man’s work,” he said.

  The only work he could do, as she knew, was carry a bushel of corn across the bench to get Mildred to sprout it for him, for he wouldn’t even sprout it for himself. He could carry anything across that bench if whiskey could be made from it, but that was all he could carry, that and a string of trout up from the river.

  She took the fish down to the creek and cleaned them; then she and Inez laid them on a sapling rack over the fire, and the children gathered around to watch.

  After supper Mina went down to the river and sat near a field of rushes and wished Charley were back and would sing with her. She felt lonely as could be in her life now. She needed somebody so much she sometimes cried to herself.

  She might be able to trail after the drove, she knew, but she remembered the time she had tried to make her own way on that lonely high road.

  She picked up a rock and tossed it into the stream. She watched as the ripples circled out from it on all sides. She was about to throw again, when another rock struck the water at about the same place.

  She looked toward Charley’s cabin. He wasn’t in sight. She turned, and there was Mooney standing beside her, looking down at her. “Law, I thought it was a ghost a throwing rocks,” she said.

  He sat down near her on the ground. “Not many ghosts about here,” he said. He threw another rock into the water. “I’ve been across the river, asking if they’re getting their stock ready to go. Mildred says she’s going with us.”

  “A woman is going with you?”

  “Yes. She says she killed Amos.”

  Mina’s mouth opened to speak, but she was too surprised to utter a sound. She sat there dumbly looking at him.

  “She says she wants to be tried in a court. It ought to clean her sins and worries, she says.”

  “I wouldn’t think she’d kill him. They was—”

  “She says she got mad with him in a fight over near Charley’s cabin, and she was so hasty she used a knife on him, more by chance than meaning.”

  “I want to go along to look after her,” Mina said suddenly.

  Mooney shook his head.

  “You’ll need help with her.”

  “That’s maybe so,” he said, “but not a man on—”

  “I could watch after Mildred and the turkeys, too. It’s not seemly for a woman like Mildred to be with such a drove of men, even on her way to a hanging, and not have another woman to protect her. And you and me has been in each other’s way for a long time, and you know I have a right to be lonely, and a right to ask a favor of you.”

  He considered that. He sighed and took her hand, which was small in his hand as he looked down at it. It was almost as leathery and tough, too. He lifted it and rubbed her fingers against the stubble of his beard. “All right,” he said, “you come along, too.”

  24

  There were four yards of linsey left, and Lorry cut them into two parts and made shirts for the boys to take on the drive. She worked in secret, while they and Mooney were out of a morning.

  She had a piece of ewe’s wool, enough to make Mooney a shirt if she made it sleeveless. Under his hunting shirt, it wouldn’t matter about its being sleeveless. She dyed the cloth brown and sewed it with linen thread.

  She helped Mooney of a night make boots; she drove birch pegs into the thick sole leather. They made a supply of whips, too. The sound of the whips was all Lorry heard for several days, while the boys learned to crack them loud and aim accurately.

  The knives were sharpened of a night. Lorry had a knife she said the boys could take, for Florence had a knife she would bring to the house with her. But the boys argued about which one of them could carry it, so Mooney and Lorry decided it would be better to leave it at home. The same problem came up with the gun. Lorry said they could take her gun, but the boys couldn’t agree. “One can carry the gun and the other the knife,” she said, but they got to arguing about that, too, and felt miserable, so she put her gun on the wall and told them to let it be. “Seems like brothers could be more friendly,” she said.

  “They don’t have strength to carry a gun,” Mooney said. “They’re going to be running after stock all day. Going to be so tired they’re going to go to sleep walking.” He liked to joke with the boys sometimes. “Time you get them hogs to bed, you’ll both be so thin your ribs will stick out so much a man can play music on them.”

  The boys would chuckle and carry on whenever he talked to them like that.

  “Give Ernest a stick and he can make a skinny boy sound like a tune.”

  Fate began laughing.

  “Get you two and get Frank’s boy laid out down in Morganton and let the music flow, have a big party down there with boy-music for the show, and have cider and whiskey to drink. You laugh now, but you wait.”

  They laughed and made fun, and felt good because the drive was about to begin. Mooney was never more hopeful. He got so he would court Lorry often, joke about something, mention how good the meals were and how her dress was pretty-colored. He would ask what she planned for the cabin, ask if sh
e wanted a new one. “We can use this place for a kitchen and build one to live in nearby,” he said. It was as if now he were confident that they would win out before long.

  The settlement was alive with excitement. Even the stock moved expectantly. The women stored firewood and rations, and practiced shooting; they could be found firing the gun often of a day, getting powder burns on their hands and faces.

  Rain began to fall on the day before the drive; Mooney paced the cabin and told the boys it wouldn’t rain for long. “It won’t do more than settle the road dust,” he told them. At mid-morning the rain stopped, but the day was overcast yet. He saddled the horse and led the way down to look at the river to see if it had risen much. Lorry watched them leave, quite willing to let them go, though she knew what they would decide. Nothing except a cloudburst would delay those men and boys now; they would go if they had to wade neck-deep in water, for there was no event they had looked forward to as much as this one. Everybody was expectant—except Mildred across the river, who was said to walk as if in a daydream, to speak of poor dead Amos in reverent tones and to testify often about how good a man he had been.

  Lorry went up to the field and got a pumpkin from under the fodder pile. She brought it back to the house and cut it into chunks. She was dropping them into a pot when she heard the horse coming back. Then she realized it wasn’t as heavy-hoofed a horse as Mooney’s, and she went to the corner of the cabin to see whose it was.

  Her father came into view. He was pale and frail, and his coat was buttoned tightly about him. He held to the saddle as if afraid he might fall off. He called to her as he dismounted.

  She went back into the cabin and was dropping the remaining pieces of the pumpkin into the pot when he came to the threshold and stopped. She knew he was looking at her, but she paid no attention to him.

  He sat down in a chair, gripped his small hands together; he rocked the cradle with his foot and touched the baby’s chin where she had slobbered. He sucked his teeth and looked about sleepily, critically, fretfully. “Belle sent me,” he said finally, and sat back in the chair and crossed his legs. “She wants you to come to the house and stay with her for this journey time.”