by John Ehle
The procession passed the German’s place, and Lorry saw Nicholas and his woman waiting near their cabin, and Felix holding a long whip. She saw Mina turn in at their trail and ride up to where Felix stood, and together they went on through the clearing toward the turkey roosts.
Nicholas took corn from a leather bag and tossed it onto the ground, took out a whistle of wood and blew on it a shrill loud sound, and the woods above his clearing trembled, the trees seemed to shed a weight and to bob up and down in the air. A wave of turkeys came out of the woods and moved around the two horses and down past the pens. A great gobbler stepped to the lead, moving not fast, walking with high steps and pride, and the others fell in behind him. Nicholas threw out more corn and more yet as the turkey flock bobbed and bubbled as if in a broth, and he moved toward the road as he clucked his tongue at the master gobbler, which followed him. As the flock moved out, Mina and Felix worked slowly along the sides of it, clicking the red tips of their whips, encouraging the stragglers.
The master gobbler stopped at the edge of the valley road. “Come along, mister,” Nicholas said, scattering corn before him. The gobbler looked at the road, at the long procession, then at the women and children waiting in the field. Behind him the mass of turkeys waited.
“Come along, mister,” Nicholas said gently.
The master gobbler lifted his head higher, and seeing nothing dangerous immediately ahead, stepped out proudly onto the road.
The drove was stretched out for a long way now, pack horses and carts and stock. Lorry could not see the front of it from where she stood, but she knew it stretched on past the creeks which fed the river, and that it was moving toward the range road. Far off were the whip sounds and the cries of the boys and the deeper voices of the men, and the rumble and murmur of the herds.
She walked along with Florence and Inez. They passed Harrison’s clearing, and she saw Belle out in the yard with the Negro women. Lorry waved and Belle waved back.
Inez said, “I want to come to see your place, see your springhouse that’s forming.”
“Come on now and we’ll cook dinner,” Lorry said.
“With all my youngins?” Inez said, pleased as could be.
“Bring them. We’ll entertain each other,” Lorry said.
The children jumped up and down, and Inez consented. “I don’t have much to bring,” she said.
“We’ll find something at home,” Lorry said.
That night she lay awake on the bed, lay beside Florence, who was asleep, and thought about the drive. She tried to decide in her mind how much stock was there, how many horses and carts. At the front rode her father, she remembered. Then came the horses and cattle, Grover following. Behind him came a Negro, leading the sheep, walking near the ram, a crook in his hand.
Behind the flock of sheep came four oxcarts loaded down with corn and supplies, a Negro man and two boys tending them, keeping them in line.
Then came Mooney, mounted, showing the way for the drove of swine. With the drove came Fate and Verlin and Frank’s boy.
Then came the geese, with Ernest Plover in command.
Then came Mildred and Charley Turpin, then Frank and two oxcarts.
Behind them came Nicholas Bentz, and behind him came the master gobbler, leading the large, murmuring proud flock, and at the end came Felix on foot, leading a pack horse loaded with corn, and with him, mounted proudly, was Mina Plover.
Over and over in her mind Lorry recalled the order of the drove. It was the valley’s fat and offering; it was the best they had of all they had made. From the shadow of the mountain moved now the valley’s strength and wealth.
Be kind, she thought. “God, be kind,” she murmured.
The valley waits, she thought. The mountain waits. There is no sound of the wind tonight. The mountain from far off can see the glimmer of their campfires on the ridge beyond the river. The house does not creak tonight.
Here all is well. Be well with them, she thought. The wood burning in the hearth is red ashes now; it glows on the wooden walls. The ewes and cow are quiet. The day is done.
Then sleep, she thought. The cradle rocks. The night has deeply come.
25
Lorry was down at the spring the next afternoon when she heard a horse coming from the valley road. She waited, watching anxiously, until a horse and rider came into the clearing. She saw that it was Fate, and he was riding Mooney’s horse.
She put down the pail and ran up to the cabin. “Where’s Mooney?” she asked as Fate dismounted. She was glad to see him but was worried, too.
“With the drive, still. They sent me back for corn for the stock.”
He didn’t look at her, and he fussed awkwardly with the bridle, she noticed. He and the horse were caked with dust and dirt. “Your grandfather took enough corn for everybody.”
“He went on ahead,” he said. “There was an argument last night. The German asked him for more corn for his turkeys, and he began talking about Germans he’d known in Virginia, said he didn’t trust them.” Fate was disgusted with the whole thing and didn’t want to talk about it.
She was disturbed more than she wanted him to know. She went down to the spring and got water. When she came back, Fate had hitched the horse and was sitting on the ground, his back against the cabin. She put the pail down beside him and he took the dipper and drank thirstily.
“What happened then, Fate?” she asked.
He stared out at the fields, and finally he told her in a tired voice that Ernest Plover had sided with the German, making Harrison all the more angry, and Mina had sided with her father, and Harrison had tried to take her horse away from her. In the end Harrison had taken all the corn and moved his cattle, horses and sheep on ahead, making his own campsite. “The others sent me back for eight bushels of shelled corn,” he said.
It was a bad omen for the drive on its first night out, Lorry knew, but she said nothing about that. She sent Fate to tell the news to the valley women, and to ask them to meet at Harrison’s house.
By late afternoon they were there with their children, and they went to work shelling the sent-for corn. They used Harrison’s cribs, thinking nothing of it, and even made baskets out of billets he had stored in his plunder room. When the work was done, they stayed around the place, speculating about the weather, which was cloudy, and about what progress the stock might have made that day, and they began asking Fate questions.
As best he could, Fate told them what he knew, how on the day before the stock had been resentful of the morning hours, had sought ways to turn back or to leave the wearying trail, but that by afternoon they had got trail-broken pretty well, and a fair amount of distance had been gained. He told them about the singing, with the drovers and drivers making up verses as they went along.
Move on, boy.
You ain’t no chicken on a nest.
You’re a pig, boy,
And got no right to rest.
And how some of the stock would step in time to the music.
Called on a pig to tell me a tale,
He told me the story of a boar named Martingale,
Sou, boy, sou, boy, sou, boy, sou.
He had more pigs born to his name
Than he could count or the sows could tame,
Sou, boy, sou, boy, sou, boy, sou,
Go and try to do like Martingale.
The women looked askance at the song, and acted as if they were offended by it; Fate wasn’t at all certain why they might be offended.
Two hours before dark, he told them, the stock had been driven into the woods, where they could look for mast. The carts and pack horses were brought up and somebody had to help Mildred to dismount, for she was even more dismal of manner now than she had been in the valley. The geese came wearily down the road, Fate said, and Ernest sang to them and made light with them.
It’s been a dusty road
and a long hard day,
And you look plumb tan
though I know you’re gray,<
br />
Down under, down under.
“Everything was as even-minded as you please,” Fate said, “until the German asked Grandpa Harrison for the feed, and maybe Grandpa was tired, or maybe all along he hadn’t planned to help with the drive—” Fate didn’t know. He told them again about the argument, breaking off abruptly and with embarrassment, and everyone knew that there was more to the story than he had said, or wanted to say, and the women looked at each other uneasily.
Late in the day, when the corn was shelled and bagged, ready to be put on the horse, Fate wanted to go on back, for he said the corn would be needed the next morning. Lorry didn’t want him to leave, though, and she dissuaded him from going right away. Several of the women made corn bread and poured milk, and they waited around hoping to hear more about the drive from Fate.
They stood in the yard or sat on the porches at Belle’s house and ate what they could find. The children clambered over the sheds and played alongside the river, and at dusk they gathered in the main room of the house, the women standing around the walls and children sitting on the floor. Fate found himself once more called upon to tell about the day before. The women interrupted now and then, asked about this man and that, this boy and the other, asked even about certain pieces of the stock. Frank’s wife asked about a certain boar and Inez Plover wondered about her geese flock. All of this was most casually done, but it was not casual, either, for it was a tense circumstance. They seemed to be resting, to be at ease and relaxed, but they were on nerves’ ends, each aware that most of their next year’s hopes, and maybe their life hopes, were on the range, somewhere high up beyond the river.
“What happened after the argument?” Frank’s wife asked, after Fate had recalled again all he could think of.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was off with the stock,” he said, but he lied and he guessed they knew it.
“Was there more trouble?” she asked.
“No,” he said quickly, and realized at once from the silence and their expressions that he should not have answered so quickly. He guessed he was trapped into having to tell about something when he didn’t understand all of it, for it had to do with Mina and something Ernest had said, and Fate knew it was embarrassing and anger-causing without knowing what it was, or whether he should tell it or not. He glanced at his mother, and she seemed wary, suspicious of the idea of his continuing, but she didn’t tell him to stop. It was as it had been when he had started to go on the bear hunt; she had not told him to go or not to go, and now, as then, he took the more adventuresome way.
“It was when Frank and the German was cooking supper,” he said, “and we was looking for wood to burn and going after water. Mina’s papa come into the camp and said he hoped we’d have a pig to eat, and somebody said for me and Verlin to go get one of his’n to kill, but he said not to go, and he fell out of sorts with the idea and with us and everybody. ‘Go get his best ’un,’ Frank told us, but we didn’t go. Then Mina’s papa got to fussing at Mina, talking about the horse she had to ride while he had none, and talking about Grandpa Harrison. This was after Grandpa was gone to his own camp. Mina’s papa said he was glad he didn’t have any of Grandpa’s blood in his veins, and said he had allus wished his wife hadn’t borne a child at all, and he didn’t know how it was that they was all girls unless there had been some way that Mina’s mama knowed to change the thing with a stick or some other way.”
Inez Plover, who was standing at the back wall, groaned and shook her head angrily. “He’s a vile man in his ways,” she murmured.
Fate was embarrassed, for he hadn’t told all that Ernest had said, about how he guessed his wife had long fingers and could reach into herself and yank the little boy’s peckers off, which is exactly what he had said, and Mina had got angry and told him to hush such talk. Fate didn’t dare say all of it.
“He’s not got kindness in him for his own young,” Inez said bitterly, and the German woman nodded, as if she had known such men and such evil before.
“He said Mina didn’t respect him,” Fate told the women, “or if she did, she would let him ride her horse the next day. He said he was an old man, too old to walk. The German boy said he couldn’t take the horse, for Mina had been helping all day with the turkeys and needed a horse, and the German man said the same, and the German boy and the German man got to arguing about which one of them should protect Mina from her pa. ‘Ye honor yer father,’ her papa said, ‘and yer days are going to be long. The Bible says it. Honor yer father and mother and your days will be long on the face of the earth. That’s from the Bible word for word.’
“And Mina said, ‘It don’t say nothing in the Bible about riding horses.’
“And her father said he was going to ride her horse the next day. They went on fussing about it until the German boy told him to be quiet, and then he got to fussing at the German boy, asking him if he liked Mina and if him and Mina had ever—if him and Mina had ever gone off in the woods together—if—” He stared before him at the far wall of the room, and the women were like waxen statues waiting for him to say the words they knew Ernest Plover would have said, waiting for the words to give them the right to their full fury and anger, but Fate didn’t say them. “And the German boy leaped across the fire, scattering the bean pots and dusting the bread, and he got ahold of Mina’s papa’s throat and choked him and bit him on the shoulder—”
Inez groaned. “I knowed he shouldn’t a gone so far off.”
“And it was all that the others could do to haul them apart and hold them off of one another, and Mina’s papa got to crying and talking about both the Germans wanting Mina. Then the murder woman started talking, reciting a poem she must a made up in her head, and she sat there by the fire near the turned-over bean pots and said it all, telling in verses about how she had killed Amos and how now she had walked a lonely road ever since.”
There was a pause. The women watched Fate; every eye was on him, for nobody dared look, even in a glance, at the German woman, or even at Inez Plover, or to see the reaction of anybody else. All the little Plover girls were silent, too. Only Lorry didn’t look at Fate; she looked down at her lap, where her hands were folded tightly.
“Where was Grover at all this while?” Belle asked.
“He was with Grandpa,” Fate said. “They was off at the other camp.”
“Did anybody go to visit that camp that night?”
“Mooney did,” he said. “And when he got back to where we was, he was upset, but he said nothing to any of us, and we had a party going then and singing going on, and everybody was having a time. Mina and the young German danced for a long time, and then they went off into the woods together, and the German’s father went looking for them soon after that, and Mina’s father went off to try to find Mina’s horse and hide it for the night.”
“Who was watching the stock?” Florence said. “Was Jacob caring for what went on?”
“Nobody was watching the stock so much as each other,” Fate said honestly. “And Mooney told me to bring his horse back down here and get the pack saddle on it and get corn shelled, for he said Grandpa wouldn’t give us another bit of corn or nothing, so when dawn come this morning I rode as fast as I could here, and I’ve been here ever since and ought to be going back now.”
“If they was fighting so much last night,” Florence said, “they might be warring all the more by now.”
“They was tired, that’s all,” Belle said.
Lorry helped Fate lift the baskets into place and lash them to the pack saddle, the one which two winters before they had helped Mooney and Verlin make. “You take care,” she told him.
He shrugged, as if he had no fear of that long road, of that darkness, though he did, he certainly had fear inside himself of all that way and what beasts might be on it, and also fear of what he would find when he reached the camp itself.
“You take this rifle,” she said, handing it to him.
He took it, for he needed it, he knew. He felt better
with it.
“It’s loaded, so take care,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. They were standing there by the horse in the darkness, and he felt her hand on his arm, and then suddenly she was drawing him closer to her, so close he almost smothered, and he clutched at her, held to her, and then as suddenly she stepped away from him. “Help him and Verlin to come home safe,” she said from out of the darkness.
“Yes,” he said, his throat closing on him even as he spoke, and he turned the horse and started up the little trail toward the valley road. Some of the Plover girls, going home, had to make way for him, and Fancy said something to him, but he hurried on, and above him he saw that the moon was being covered up by clouds, and over to the west a bank of clouds was rising, maybe storm clouds, and even so, he thought, even now they were up there on the ridge, bedded down for the night, with a storm rising on them.
26
It was misty the next morning when Verlin awoke. He reached over to awaken Fate, for normally he had to awaken Fate of a morning; then he sat up, startled to find that Fate wasn’t there. Then he remembered that Fate had gone on back to the settlement.
He yawned and stretched. He saw that Mina wasn’t at the fire; neither was Felix. Maybe they were off watching stock, or maybe they were off in the woods together, for the night before he had come upon them standing close together, their arms round each other, on a rocky place which overlooked the east valley. He had started to speak to them and call them in to mind the stock, which they should have been doing, when he saw the German standing not far away, also watching them, so Verlin crept to the fire again and let them be.
He put new logs on the fire now to dry and burn, and went into the woods. The stock was moving about, dissatisfied with the strangeness of the place. A wind suddenly gushed in on them, fresh and stinging, and whipped the tree limbs. A thunderbolt broke and rolled in from the west valley, not loud, not sharp, either, but rumbling ominously, and Verlin saw Jacob loom up out of the fog as if the noise had called him. “Where’s the lead boar?” he asked.