“Hurry up, Mama,” said a voice out of the darkness, Edmund’s voice, “what happened, anyway?”
She clapped a hand over her startled heart and swallowed. She turned and saw in the candlelight three pairs of eyes. Johnny, Edmund, and Dickie all were sitting up listening to her story. Billy had jerked bolt upright, eyes bugging.
“In Heaven’s name,” she gasped finally, “don’t you ever give me a start like that again! I’ve scared myself half to death recallin’ this tale as it is!”
“I’m sorry. But what happened?”
“What happened was that I set my jaw and decided I’d have to have that baby without any help whatsoever, and hope no Indians came to set th’ house afire while I was busy. So I laid me down on the bed and commenced.
“Thank th’ Lord, though, as it happened, that newborn just sort o’ took over it all himself. It was just all over with, I don’t remember much about it, though I did all the things I knew to do. But it was just as if his mother’s womb was just ‘where he’d been,’ like, and he’d decided right then to move out on his own. He’s always been like that, ever since, as ye know.
“So when your Pa came home next morning with a deer, he found me with a red-haired, blue-eyed baby, and little Jonathan sittin’ there in bed beside us lookin’ utterly hornswoggled. And we named that newborn after my brother, who’s your dear Uncle George Rogers.”
“Jo jee got bo’ned!” Billy cried suddenly, clapping his hands and bouncing in bed. “Jo jee got bo’ned! Wif wightning, an’ Indians! Oooooo!”
“Just so!” she chuckled. “And with a start like that, why, he’s a one to be watched, wouldn’t ye say, boys?”
“Tell me how I was born,” said Dickie’s voice.
“No, me,” Edmund and Johnny said at once.
“Some other time,” she sighed. “One at a time’s enough, enough!”
JOHN CLARK HAD HIS OWN NOTIONS ABOUT HOW TO GET Billy’s mind off of George. “There’s two ways to chirk up a little’un when ’e’s got all downcast,” he said. “Give ’im something, or teach ’im something. I aim to do both.” And so at breakfast, he whispered aside to Rose the cook, and a few minutes later he got up from the table and went out to the pantry. When he came back in he was carrying a fat little black boy, purple-black as a plum, three years old, who was dressed in clean gray homespun pants and a patched but spotless shirt of indigo flannel. The chunky little fellow was looking around the room and half-smiling with wonderment at being brought into the dining room of the big house by the great master himself. John Clark stood at the head of the table while all the family looked at the child and smiled. One could not look at him without smiling; there was a droll, sly look about him that foretold the character of some great and funny rascal.
“Here we have Little York,” John Clark said. They had all seen him around. He was the son of Nancy, one of the cooks, and his father was thought to be a field hand named Big York, who steadfastly denied that it was so. “York,” said John Clark, “you know which one of these folks is my son Billy?” York licked his lips lavishly and rolled his gaze around the table, then grinned and pointed to him. Billy sat half-smiling, looking up in blue-eyed bemusement.
“That’s right,” said John Clark. “That’s Master Billy. Now tell me, York, how would you like to be Master Billy’s own particular man?” The child nodded vigorously and licked his red lips again, even though it was unlikely he had any notion what the words implied. It was plain that he liked the look of the little redheaded boy, and they had played together a few times in the summer, and so the words sounded good. “Well, then, you’re Master Billy’s man, from now on, York.” The family laughed and exclaimed their approval. “You two get to know each other, and be good friends to each other, and someday when ye learn how to do a few things useful, why, y’ll do ’em for Master Billy, eh? And does that sound all right to you, Son?”
Billy nodded, and said, “Thank ’ee, Papa.” None of the other boys had ever had his own particular bodyservant, but they understood. When they had been Billy’s age, the family had not yet become prosperous; there had been only one cook, and the few male slaves, except Cupid, had been field workers. Cupid had served as bodyservant for all the males of the family, and Cupid’s wife Venus had administered to all the girls.
“Good enough,” John Clark said, and lowered the black child to the floor. “Ooof,” he said, “what a chunk of it you are! Now, York, you go round there and say hello to Master Billy.” York waddled around behind the chairs and went to greet Billy in the only way he knew how: with a hug. Billy beamed and hugged him back, a little confused by what this gift meant, but very pleased. He liked the way Little York smiled and smelled. “Come get your boy, Nancy,” John Clark said. “’Cause Master Billy’s got some work to help me do, if I’m to get this daughter o’ mine married and off my hands, isn’t that so, family?”
“OUR FATHER, HAVE MERCY ON THIS POOR BEAST AND MAKE his pain be brief, as it is Thy supreme order of things to feed the dumb creatures to the smart ones,” said John Clark, and, grunting the word “Amen,” he swung the maul with force and precision at the hog’s face. Chewk! Bone crunched between the eyes. Dick and Johnny got the legs and yanked the animal aloft before he could fall. And while Billy was shuddering with the shock of what he had seen his father do, they hauled a rope that raised the stunned animal up to hang head down from an oak spar over the slaughter pen. Nearby was a hewn-log butcher table, and a large kettle of water steamed over a wood fire.
John Clark was the only man his sons had ever heard of who prayed as he slaughtered. This prayer was of his own wording, as were all his prayers; John Clark was a man whose prayers were not ritual, but talks with his God.
“Now put the catchment under ’im,” he commanded, picking up the long butcher knife, old gray steel shiny only on the newly ground edge. “Come round here, Billy. Time ye learnt this.” Edmund slid a trough under the hanging hog as Billy crept reluctantly closer, his head reeling, heart pounding, afraid, for the first time, of his father. “Stand right here now and watch this.”
Holding the hog by a foreleg to keep it from swinging, John Clark thrust the blade into the animal’s throat, clear up to the handle. “Right in that spot,” he told Billy. “Then, ye move the blade thisaway to cut the big art’ry from ’is heart, y’ see? There! There it comes now.” A deluge of bright red blood gushed steaming into the trough in the chilly October morning air and Billy watched, terrified but spellbound. “Thing is, be quick,” his father was saying. “Want t’ get ’im bled ere his heart stops, y’ see? Some folk hang their pig up awake and squealin’ and stick ’im, but I never could do that. Besides, excitement taints the meat.” The blood gushed and spurted and Billy watched, feeling faint. Then it slowed to a stream, then a trickle. Billy was aghast that his father could stand to keep the knife in there and let the horrible blood bathe his hand. “Now while th’ knife’s still in, I cut the gullet,” John Clark explained, beginning to work the handle hard as if through something tough. “We’re goin’ to leave his head on, to put an apple in ’is mouth. There.” He pulled the dripping knife out. “Reach in there, and ye’ll feel what I’ve done. Come on, Billy my boy, don’t be delicate!” He grabbed Billy’s wrist and forced his little hand into the hot, wet, bloody opening.
It was too much. Billy screamed and began wailing. The older boys laughed, but they laughed weakly, because they could remember the first time they had had to learn this. John Clark did not relent. “Now ye feel that hard thing, like a tube? That’s what I just now cut. That’s this,” he said then, and with his free left hand he grasped Billy’s and placed it at his own gagging, keening throat. “That’s where it is in you,” he said.
The thought of it all, the pig’s gullet, his own, was just unbearable. Billy screeched and gasped and wailed and tried to escape.
His father’s iron hand suddenly began shaking him, till his teeth all but rattled. Loudly, but not angrily, the deep voice drove through the howling tur
moil of Billy’s mind: “I’ll not abide such caterwauling! Cease it, right now! There be things ye got to learn, and there’s no nice, girlish way to learn ’em! Can y’ hear me? STOP THAT SQUEALIN’! By th’ Eternal! They’ll think it’s you I’m slaughterin’. D’ye think Georgie would be proud o’ you now?”
That worked. Billy stopped struggling and his screams trailed off. Thinking of Georgie looking on had shamed him. He still sobbed, but he was no longer frantic.
“Now,” John Clark was saying, releasing Billy, “that’s better. Georgie learned this long before he could learn to survey land. Now, boys, scald ’im and scrape ’im.” They swung the carcass down and, grunting, heaved it into the steaming kettle. Soon then they had it on the table and were adroitly scraping off the hair with wide iron blades.
“Did ’e cwy? Did Jo jee cwy?” Billy gasped out. His bloody hand felt hideous and sticky, and the greasy steam was nauseating.
“No, he didn’t.”
“I sowwy I cwied. Don’ tell Jo jee I cwied, Papa, huh?”
“I won’t tell ’im.”
“Jo jee bwave, he di’n cwy,” Billy said wistfully, feeling unworthy.
“That’s right, he was brave, he didn’t cry,” John Clark said, then he chuckled. “But he surely heaved up his breakfast! Ha, ha!”
“Jo jee did? Jo jee puke up?”
“He did for sure, son. And you didn’t. And believe me, vomit’s a sight messier’n tears.”
Billy suddenly felt a lot better about himself. The older boys were watching him and smiling sympathetically.
“I cried, too, Billy,” Dick said.
“I,” Johnny told him, “cried and puked.” They talked as they roped the pink, hairless carcass back up onto the spar.
“So did I,” Edmund admitted.
“Not to mention, y’ also beshit your breeches,” Dick snorted.
“I didn’t either!” Edmund’s face went as red as his hair.
“Aye, but ye did,” his father reminded him.
“Well, just that first once. I butcher all the time now; everything I shoot I clean.”
“No right man likes doin’ this, Billy m’ boy,” said Mr. Clark. “But we have to know how, ’cause we have to provide for family. God knows how many animals you’ll do this to as the years go by. But it’s as God meant it. That’s why He put meat-bearin’ animals here in Creation. Only thing a sin about this would be to enjoy it. Now ye watch and listen close, because I’m about to show ye how we take the guts out without dirtyin’ the meat. This beastie’s going to be the feast at Annie’s wedding, y’ see! And he’ll also be sausages, and lard, and puddings, and scrapple, bacon, and chitterlins, and soap, and brush bristles, and candles, and a blow-up ball toy, and all kinds o’ good things for family, y’ see? For as we say about a pig, Providence shows us how to use everything but the squeal—and we’d save that up for dancin’ music, if we knew how to catch and presarv it. Waste is a sin, t’ my mind, Billy, though somehow they don’t harp on it in the Scriptures. Especially is wasted life, be it swine or man.”
Thus he talked on, as he pulled the pig’s short tail and carefully cut a circle around the anus, then sliced open the carcass from there to the throat and removed the varicolored guts all in a slimy, sliding piece, teaching precepts and morals as he worked, and the boys worked with him and listened, and it was as absorbing almost as a story, so interesting, though not entirely understandable, that even the gleaming guts didn’t make Billy feel sick.
John Clark could not help talking about the meanings of all the things people did, because God’s intents were plainly there within everything that lived and grew and moved and died. And his wife, good Ann, was likewise—though, being a Rogers, she could say these things better, in his opinion. The Rogerses were real talkers, and they were firm in their faith, and they believed in their own thinking. Ann’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was John Rogers the Martyr, who had been locked in a dungeon of St. Andrews Castle back in Scotland two hundred years ago, and then burned at the stake, for being so bold as to believe in God in his own way. All the Rogerses took pride in that ancestor, and seemed to live as if they felt him looking over their shoulders. John Clark appreciated that in their family—after all, he had some of that Rogers blood in him, too—and he was profoundly content in having got Ann Rogers, the most beautiful Rogers daughter, as his bride those long years ago. Not one day, in almost a quarter of a century since, had he ever regretted that choice. Many of the marriages among the gentry that he knew had been marriages for advantage, for fortunes or connections or breeding lines, and if a husband and wife came to loving each other truly, so much the better. But John Clark had adored Ann Rogers from the moment he had seen that fresh, tall, pink-and-rose thirteen-year-old squinting at him in the summer sun twenty-five years ago, and her good character had only deepened and broadened his adoration for her over the years, till now he could not even imagine being without her. “If something took ye away untimely,” he had told her once when she was having trouble with a childbirth, “I shouldn’t even want to live on.” And he had meant that.
It had been true then and it was even more true now. He had worked like a titan all his life, and every effort he had made, from topping tobacco plants to shaping horseshoes on a forge, had been for the betterment of their life. He knew too that every effort she had made, from the labor of weed-hoeing to the labor of childbearing, had been for that same purpose. And raising their children to feel and understand all God’s intents was also for the betterment of their life together, because it would not be a good thing in life to be ashamed of offspring.
And so now John Clark was saying, for the benefit of these offspring working near him: “Aye. The wasting o’ lives is man’s worst sin. War!” he snorted. “D’ye know how many precious lives are wasted in that abominable business? If one slayin’ is a murder, what’s a thousand a day? Lives wasted because men are too vainglorious to sit face to face and talk things out! My boys, I remember a day a thousand died! Back in ’55, ’twas, when that war was on against the French and Indians. Some militia rode in one day, some bandaged, all thirsty and sooty, they rode up to our house in Albemarle, goin’ home from a lost battle. They told us how the Frenchmen and savages had ambushed General Braddock’s whole army in the woods near Fort Pitt, and killed a thousand of ’em. A thousand, boys! One thousand Christian Englishmen, all slain in one day! Think on that for the wastin’ of life! I swear that was the worst day I’ve ever had in all my days, when I heard that news. I got sicker than anyone ever got a-slaughterin’ a pig, I’ll tell ye so.” His lips were tight, his eyes darkening with the memory. Then he went on:
“Now, hear me. Sometimes, like when Georgie comes home, and everybody wants t’ know, ‘have ye kilt any savages yet’ “—he glanced up from his meat-trimming at Edmund, and Edmund’s eyes dropped—“well, it doesn’t please me to hear a question like that, though I know that’s what everybody wants to hear of. And I know, too, someday it might be George or an Indian, who’s ever quickest, and let us pray then that it’s George who’s quickest. But I’d rather hear him say what he said, that he’s befriended an Indian, than that he’s killed one. For an Indian’s a far higher creature in Creation than is a hog like this, or even a calf, or a pet dog. Indians pray, did y’ know that?” He looked at them one by one, then bent over his knife and went on. “Indians pray. George told me about that Logan’s religion, told me after you all were a-bed. Said for all he knew, that savage’s god was the same one as ours, but just by a different name. Now mind you, I allowed as how I thought that was probably not so, and I told George I thought that was pretty loose thinkin’. Nonetheless, that Indian prayed, and lived reverent, George said. So even an Indian, with his unredeemed and misguided soul, does have a soul. And so, to think it’s sport to kill Indians, why, that’s to condone the wasting o’ life. And I’ll have none of it in this family, hear me now, all of you.” Edmund blinked his downcast eyes and worked harder over the pile of entrails before
him.
One disapproving look from John Clarke was more effective than a whipping. He had never had to lay a switch on any of his sons, and only once had he had to knock one down—once when George had been having a red rage. John Clark did not believe in whipping. Once long ago on the way from Port Royal, seeing a sheriff administering a public whipping upon an adulteress, John Clark had got down from his wagon, snatched the whip out of the sheriff’s hand and looped it around his neck, at the risk of being arrested and whipped himself. A person’s body is the home of his sacred soul, John Clark believed, and not to be punished or damaged by another. Thus, war was an abomination before God. “In war,” he said now, “all men red or white are but meat left to rot on the field where they fell. Man is offal, and only the buzzards are fed. Kings and soldiers call that ‘glory,’ to the disgrace of the very word!”
Now his sermon veered off onto another tack; he had reminded himself of something else. “Seducers of womanflesh are the same,” he said, with one of those sad, accusing glances now at Johnny. “They violate the temple of a woman’s soul, and make it but meat. And use the word love like soldiers use the word glory.” Johnny’s forehead reddened, both with shame and indignation. But he did not protest; after all, how could his father know that Johnny’s loves were real? That he was passionately, totally in love with the mysterious soul inside each shapely body he caressed? But John Clark, who had loved the same woman all his life, only said now:
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 5