Ruth shook her head back and forth, the tears now washing unchecked down her face. I sniffed and dabbed my eyes on my sleeve.
“Be still and silent when you’re told to.” Mr. Walter’s voice got caught in his throat for a moment.
“I want to go home,” Ruth whispered. “I want to go home with you.”
“Keep home in your heart, where no one can steal it.” He kissed her forehead. “Keep Serafina and me in your heart too, and in your prayers. You are our sweet girl, darling Ruth. Nothing will ever change that. Hold us in your heart and you will never be alone.”
CHAPTER X
Thursday, June 28–Thursday, August 23, 1781
ALL I HAD EVER HEARD OF LIONS, BEARS, TIGERS, AND WOLVES NOW RUSHED ON MY MEMORY, AND I SECRETLY WISHED I HAD BEEN MADE A FEAST TO THE FISHES RATHER THAN TO THOSE MONSTERS OF THE WOODS.
–JOURNAL OF SCOTSWOMAN JANET SCHAW AS SHE TRAVELED IN THE SOUTHERN COLONIES
THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER WE fled Riverbend were painful hard on our bodies and our spirits. The air clung to our throats like hot wax as we skirted the edges of nameless swamps. Our clothes dripped heavy with sweat. Battalions of troublesome insects drew blood, despite our coating our skin with mud and fanning ourselves with palmetto leaves. We were all of us afflicted with every sort of misery and fear.
But nothing felt as bad as the fact that Ruth would not look at me.
She’d take food from Curzon and put her boots back on if he asked her to. (She had rarely worn shoes at Riverbend and did not like the feel of anything on her feet.) When sadness overtook her and the tears ran down her face, she’d let Aberdeen pat her on the back gently. She stuck as close to him as a thistle in lamb’s wool. He was the only one allowed to hold the chicken basket when Ruth had to answer a call of nature. If I stepped too close, she’d stop dead, crossing her arms over her chest and refusing to move until I walked away.
In the first days I worried that the fatigues of the journey would be too much for Ruth, that we’d have to slow down or take days of rest. But she endured the hardships as good as any of us, without a word of complaint. Her tenacity impressed me so much that one day I tried to compliment her on it, to explain what a remarkable lass she’d become. She turned away from me, but I followed her, determined that she should know that I was proud of her. She closed her eyes and covered her ears. When I tried to pull down her hands–gently–she spat in my face and ran to Aberdeen.
Curzon drew me away from them. “Come help me with the fire.”
He needed no help, of course, but I followed him all the same. We collected dried pine needles and twigs in silence, then crouched next to a bare spot of damp ground.
Curzon pulled his flint and steel striker from his haversack. “She needs time to accustom herself to you, to all these changes.”
“’Tain’t natural,” I whispered as I piled a handful of the needles on the ground. “She treats me like her worst enemy.”
“You won’t change her sentiments by being forceful.” He struck the flint shard against the small steel bar. Tiny sparks flew but did not catch. “You’re making the matter worse.”
He was right, though I was loath to admit it. I was in the company of my sister. I had what I’d wanted, what I’d sacrificed everything for, but nothing was the way I’d thought it would be.
“What if she doesn’t change?” I asked.
“Patience,” he said, continuing to hit the steel.
“I have none.”
He spoke harsh. “Find some.”
Every day that had passed, Curzon had grown more and more short tempered. The reason was painfully clear. He had stayed with me only because of his debt. I’d saved him from certain death in a British prison back in New York, so he, in turn, had vowed to help me find my sister. Now that the debt was paid, our time together would soon end. He wanted me to get along better with Ruth so he could leave us without worry.
The thought of him leaving caused a curious ache within me.
A spark finally caught in the needles. I bent forward to blow on it gently, but it went out.
“We’re lucky Deen is with us,” Curzon said. “Let Ruth turn to him; they’re friends.”
“I’m afraid she’ll run off with him.”
“Now you’re talking like a looby.” He scowled as he poked at the needles.
“They’re too damp,” I said.
He struck the flint and steel together again. “No, they’re not.”
“Yes, they are.” I stood up. “I’ll go back and find something drier.” I brushed dirt from my skirt. “And you’re wrong. I’m certain they’re planning to go off on their own, though it would mean death if they did.”
“Don’t conjure disaster,” he grumbled. “Just find tinder.”
* * *
We walked in the hours just before sunrise and just after sunset, resting during the middle of the day and the middle of the night. We moved steady and quiet except for the occasional sound of Ruth sniffling back her tears and for the clucking of her chicken, which rode like a queen in the basket she carried. Half of the time Curzon took the lead on the path, half of the time ’twas me. Whenever we came across clean water, we’d drink all our bellies could hold, fill the gourds Missus Serafina had put in our haversacks, and move on. When the time came to rest, we’d scout a ways off the trail, make beds of moss or pine boughs, and try to sleep. I always took the first watch. Curzon took the second.
Years of dangerous, shared travel had heightened our senses. Curzon and I both noticed the instant when the bats overhead vanished, or when the smell of a distant cook fire reached us; we noticed the snap of broken branches, or the sudden swirl of the mist rising off the swamp water that heralded the approach of a large creature or a rowboat. We’d signal to the others and move off the path, sometimes wading deep into the foul water, holding our haversacks above our heads, until we were sure it was safe. The first time this happened, Aberdeen scorned us, for there had been no danger. The second time–after a frightful trio of banditti passed by–he apologized.
The land itself became our enemy. The heavy miasma that hung in the air was crowded with ghosties and restless haints bent on terrifying us. Thunder-gusts would suddenly boil into violent summer storms. Once we saw a spear of lightning set fire to a cypress tree so close by that we were forced to run from it.
But the moon waxed fatter, and that made our navigation northward easier. The night it shone bright and full, we walked a good fifteen miles, by my reckoning. After that, it shrank as if it were being whittled away by a sharp paring knife, until there came the night of no moon, in which we traveled barely two miles. Before we slept that night, we ate the last of the dried meat.
The goods that Missus Serafina and her husband had given us were so useful that I suspected the others whom they’d helped run for freedom had succeeded in their quest. We had hooks for catching fish, a small pot for boiling water, and peas and grits stored safe in extra gourds. Along with flint and steel, we had two knives with fresh-honed blades, small blankets, three needles, and a quantity of good thread. We still had our small collection of coins but had vowed to hoard them until we reached the place where we’d settle. Even if we had been inclined to buy something, there were no markets or tradesmen in the swamp.
Hunger was a stern master. After we ate up the grits, peas, and meat, we collected whortleberries, mulberries, and chinquapin nuts, which we ground into a paste. Aberdeen proved a deft hand at catching catfish with a hook attached to a braided length of thread. One night he surprised and captured an opossum. Roast opossum tastes much like a well-fed pig.
Ruth’s chicken, now named Nancy, produced one precious egg each day. We took turns eating it. On those days with no food other than that egg, we’d crack it into the pot of boiling water to share between us four. The chicken itself would have made the best meal imaginable, but Curzon and I agreed to consider that only if we were truly desperate. Long as most days brought fish, berries, or nuts, Nancy would live, for she alon
e could stir Ruth out of her deep melancholy.
* * *
Living in a city or a town, you accustom yourself to the names of the days and the activities they promise. Sundays are church days. High Street market in Philadelphia is open on Tuesdays. The oyster sellers in New York are best visited on Fridays. The days grow into weeks and then months as recorded in an almanac or noted atop the page of a newspaper.
In the wilderness days shed their names. The only measures that have meaning are the phase of the moon and the degree of emptiness in your belly. How much strength remains in your legs. How much sorrow crowds your heart.
I thought I knew how to shoulder the burdens of journeying. I’d certainly been tired before. I’d walked so long that I’d fallen asleep only to wake as I was tumbling to the ground. I’d walked until the blisters on my calluses grew blisters of their own. But I’d never known such bone-crushing fatigue as I did in those endless weeks of north-going. My mother used to say, “Heavy hearts make heavy steps.” I wish that she would have told me the remedy for that.
In the first weeks of our journey my mind raced with notions about rebraiding the memories that might join Ruth’s heart to mine. I dreamed of cooking her oyster stew and berry cobblers, and singing the songs our mother had taught us. I ached to tell her all I could remember about Momma and about our father, who’d been killed when she was a baby. But the moon grew full again, and her manner toward me did not change, not even by the smallest bit. I said “Sweet dreams” whenever she lay down to sleep. She always turned her back to me without a word. Instead of the loving sister who’d walked through hell to rescue her, Ruth saw me as the loathsome stranger who had stolen her away from her heart-kin, Missus Serafina and Mister Walter. That hurt me more than anything I’d ever suffered in all of my life.
I longed to talk this over with Curzon, but as the miles passed, he grew as silent and distant as Ruth. His manner to me, on the rare times he did speak, had become formal, as if we’d just met each other and knew not what to discuss. I might have put his strangeness down to hunger or an imbalance of humors, even a mild, remitting fever, but he was always ready to talk with Aberdeen and went to great lengths to cheer Ruth’s spirits by carving her small birds intended to keep company with Nancy Chicken.
It was only me he avoided.
* * *
After weeks of walking, the swamplands slowly turned into woods thick with oak, walnut, hickory, and ash trees, and mercifully free of alligators. Some nights the air grew cooler, which made travel easier. As the moon waned again, the oak forests became dotted with pine, laurel, willow, beech, and birch. We spotted wild turkeys and parrakeetos, and often heard partridges in the brush, but could never figure a way to catch any of them.
As we drew farther away from Carolina, Curzon and Aberdeen took to conversating more when we paused to eat or sleep. Their confabs were quiet but so tense you could near see sparks flying. They were arguing about the war. Aberdeen favored the British on account of Lord Dunmore’s proclamation that runaways who reached British lines would be freed. Curzon, of course, sided with the Patriots. He tried to convince Aberdeen that a country that declared all men to be created equal was a country more inclined to free its slaves. Aberdeen laughed at him.
I stuffed moss in my ears and tried to sleep.
For three nights we passed through a pine barren, an eerie, stinking landscape of enormous, scarred trees that wept tears of sap. We came across a friendly chap there, name of Huntly, who had liberated himself and his wife from a farm in Georgia after the Savannah battles. He was living rough, earning a bit of coin by collecting pine sap and tending the tar-burning kilns, which gave the air its stink. His wife lay buried by a laurel tree with their baby boy, born dead after his mother labored three days and nights to bring him into the world. Huntly said his wife died of a broken heart hours later.
He offered to trade us an old axe for Nancy Chicken. We turned him down but gave him that day’s egg, which he enjoyed mightily. Using a stick, he scratched out a map in the sand to show us the safest way through the rest of the barren, detouring us around a collection of unsavory folk. Then he offered to marry me, should I be so inclined to stop my journeying.
I thanked him politely and declined his offer.
CHAPTER XI
Friday, August 24–Sunday, August 26, 1781
ONE OF THE MEANS OF PREVENTING INTERMITTENT [FEVERS] IS WARMTH. PERMIT ME TO RECOMMEND IT TO YOUR WHOLE FAMILY, IN CLOTHING, BED CLOTHES, AND IN LARGE AND CONSTANT FIRES.
–LETTER FROM DR. BENJAMIN RUSH TO ABIGAIL ADAMS
WEEKS OF HARD TRAVEL HAD weakened and wearied us all. Ruth had been limping for days on account of a twisted ankle; though, of course, she would not let me tend to her. Curzon had a ragged cough, and my bowels had declared rebellion. Added to all that misery was Aberdeen, that half-witted looby, that fool slubberdegullion, who had begun to doubt our course. He suddenly wanted us to head west, away from the war and everything that wanted to chase us. He and Curzon argued the merits and weaknesses of his plan ceaselessly, dogs scrapping over a meatless bone.
I feared that if Aberdeen left, Ruth would follow him, but I knew that the scrawny lad would more likely listen to Curzon than to me. I strode ahead on the path, my gaze flitting from tree to tree like a sparrow, hoping to spot an apple tree heavy with ripe fruit. I fought a yawn and lost. Curzon had taken to making each day’s journey longer and our time for sleeping shorter. ’Twas another sign of how anxious he was to be quit of us.
“Ruth!” Aberdeen suddenly yelled.
I spun around. The boys were kneeling next to Ruth’s twitching form, sprawled on the ground. She’d been seized by a fit.
I ran as fast as I could, cursing myself with every step for walking too far in front. By the time I got there, the fit had ended. Ruth lay still, eyes closed, her breath coming regular. I saw no blood nor sign that she’d hurt herself in the fall. If she were still a child, I’d have cradled her head in my lap and spoken quiet and sweet to her until she’d come back to herself. Fits confuddled and sometimes alarmed her. But I hung back, unsure of how she would react to me. It was Aberdeen who brushed the leaves from her kerchief and cupped his hands around her face, her eyes still closed.
He looked up at me in horror. “She’s burning up!”
* * *
We made camp right there.
At first it just seemed a pestilent fever. Ruth slept deeply but woke if pinched hard on the neck. Each time I roused her, Aberdeen or Curzon would get her to drink water until she slipped back into sleep. She had a few more shaking fits but never opened her eyes. Her body gave off the sour smell of illness, as if the fever were slowly burning its way through her. She slept an unnatural sleep all that night and the day after that.
This was my fault, all of it.
I should have stayed by her side no matter how much it vexed her. I should have slowed the pace of the journey. No wonder Ruth couldn’t abide me. I was a wretched, impatient, horrid sister. I knelt next to her, bowed my head, and prayed without cease, but it did not seem to help.
At dawn we moved her to an abandoned shack near a stream. It was more of a hovel than a shack: three leaning log walls with a few roof beams but no roof, and a fire pit instead of a proper hearth and chimney. The boys engineered a sort of roof by laying densely leaved ash and oak branches over the beams. I covered the far corner of the hovel with pine needles and dry leaves and then spread a blanket on top of it all so Ruth could lie in a spot both soft and dry.
She did not notice. The fever had pulled her down to insensibility. She lay like a rag doll, not moving at all if pinched.
After some discussion we left Aberdeen to keep watch over her whilst Curzon and I scouted a bit farther afield, both to measure the safety of the place and to look for food. He looped around and around the hovel in ever-growing circles and found no sign of other people. I moved back and forth between the stream and the hovel, bringing water, wild grapes, and a handful of grubs for Nancy Chicken
.
On the last trip I ranged as far upstream as I dared and was rewarded with the blessed sight of a willow tree. Willow bark could bring down a fever and strengthen the sick.
Thank you, Lord, I prayed as I cut the slim branches. Thank you for your protection and wisdom and guidance. Thank you for this wonderful tree and that remarkable shack. Please forgive my . . . well, forgive me for everything that I’ve done wrong, including ending this prayer in haste. Ruth needs me. Amen.
Aberdeen had a fire going by the time I returned.
“Any change?” I asked as I scraped the bark from the twigs.
He shook his head sorrowfully. “She hasn’t even moved.”
“Are you feeling feverish?” I asked him. “Pain in the belly? Does your head hurt?”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”
He watched as I brewed a pot of willow bark tea, then tried to get some of it into Ruth. She would not wake enough to swallow. I dared not pour it into her mouth for fear she would choke.
“Seems like we might be here awhile,” he said.
“Nay,” I lied, trying to mask my fear. “She’ll be on her feet again tomorrow.”
He looked at me for a long moment without speaking. A fever that came on this hard and fast could be fatal; everybody knew that. I might lose her again. I might lose her for good.
“A wash-down always makes a sick person feel better,” I said hoarsely. “Can you fetch more wood for the fire?”
Soon as Aberdeen left, I tore a strip off the bottom of my shift, dunked it in the cooling tea, then gently washed Ruth’s face. The rag was quickly stained with weeks of dirt and sweat. I rinsed the rag, then cleaned her neck. Heated more water, then washed her arms and her hands.
Aberdeen returned, built up the fire, and fetched more water. Once it was ready, I untied and pulled off her left boot. Her foot smelled hideous. It was so filthy that it required another two pots of water to clean it proper.
Ashes Page 5