Across Five Aprils (2 page)

“I know. Well, there’ll be other trips this summer, Jeth.”

Shadrach started to climb back into the wagon as he spoke; then, changing his mind, he turned back and placed his hands quickly on Ellen’s shoulders. “Try not to worry,” he said quietly.

The caress brought sudden tears to her eyes. She and Jethro stood watching as he drove away; when the wagon disappeared in a clump of trees at a bend in the road, Ellen turned back to her work slowly as if overwhelmed by a deep weariness.

“The Lord knows what news he’ll bring back,” she said. “There may be war in the land at this minute fer all we know.”

Jethro was depressed by her somber mood, but not by the imminence of war. He had listened to his brother Tom and their cousin Eb, the two younger of the grown boys in the household, and their excitement had found its way into his blood. Dread of war was a womanly weakness, he had discovered, evidenced by his mother’s melancholy and the tears of Jenny and his brother John’s wife, Nancy.

“I heered some of the big fellers talkin’ the other night, and they said the war, even if it comes, will be no more than a breakfas’ spell. They said that soldiers up here kin take the South by the britches and make it holler ‘Nough’ quicker than it takes coffee to cool off fer swallerin’.”

Jethro spoke hurriedly, almost sure that the words would anger his mother and vaguely realizing that he wanted to anger her a little for spoiling the brightness of the morning by her obvious sadness.

She had a way of closing her eyes briefly when exasperated as if to reject for at least a second the existence of a folly that she was bound to recognize later. Her hoe jabbed deeper and more sharply into the brown earth at her feet.

“They’re foolish young ‘uns, and they’re talkin’ without a spark of reason to guide their words,” she said angrily. “It ain’t that I don’t love ’em—big talk or not,” she added, “but I’m fearful of the day when they face their comeuppance. I’m fearful of the time when I’ll hev no boys left but you—and the three little ones up on Walnut Hill.”

Jethro squirmed inwardly. If there were going to be tears and talk of the children who had died the summer he was born, he wanted to escape. And since one didn’t easily escape from his mother in the midst of planting a half-acre of potatoes, he searched hurriedly for a way to turn the conversation.

“Did ever I tell you, Ma, of an old feller that give all the people of the earth their comeuppance?” he asked brightly, knowing that she was always proud to hear of the things he’d learned from Shadrach at school.

“I reckon you didn’t, Jeth, not that I’m able to recollect.”

Jethro straightened his shoulders a little under the weight upon them.

“Well, ma‘am, there was a long time when people allowed that the earth was the big kingpin amongst all the stars and things. They thought that the moon and sun and all the stars went ’round the earth and maybe kind of tipped their hats as they went by. Shad says that most everybody went on believin’ that fer years till finally there come along this man I’m tellin’ you about. He was head and shoulders smarter than the run of the mill, and after he’d watched the sun and moon and stars fer a long time he set down and he done some figgerin’. Well, when he got through figgerin’ he showed it to some other fellers and there it was, plain as anything—the earth
wasn’t
the big kingpin at all. He allowed it was jest a little old star chasin’ ’round the sun with a pack of others, some of’em a lot bigger than us. Shad says that some folks took that news real hard; it kind of let the wind out of their sails all of a sudden.”

“That ain’t in the Scriptures, is it, Jeth?”

“I don’t reckon so, but it’s in one of the books Shad brought out from Philadelphy.”

His mother looked thoughtful. “The Lord God created the earth and all upon it, Jeth. I don’t like to hear that His work warn’t of the best.”

“But don’t you see, Ma, He created the sun and moon and stars too—some a little bigger, others maybe a little purtier. Seems like people on earth believed
we
had the best diggin’s jest because we wanted to believe that—because it made us feel important—”

“You ain’t watchin’ to keep the ’tater eyes facin’ up, Jeth,” Ellen said quietly, pointing with the tip of her hoe.

He stooped and turned a cutting over. “Guess I kind of got carried away with my own noise,” he said flushing.

Her eyes lighted a little. “Well, you done me a favor—tellin’ me things I ain’t never learned and givin’ me somethin’ to ponder over. It ’mazes me, Jeth, it does fer a fact, the way you kin recollect all the things Shad tells you and how you kin put them from his way of talkin’ into mine.”

She hoed in silence for a minute and then paid him the great compliment of going back to his story.

“Did you tell me what the old feller’s name was, the one that done all the figgerin’?”

“His name was Copernicus. I kin even spell it fer you if you’re a mind. Shad made me learn how to say it and spell it too.”

“Sounds like a furriner.”

Jethro nodded. “I allow,” he agreed.

Ellen sighed. “Seems like furriners is allus stirrin’ up somethin’. Well, the pot can’t call the kettle black—look what we’re stirrin’ up amongst ourselves.”

She was back to the problems of the times, and Jethro knew that he could not tempt her away from them. For months he had moved along the edge of the furor that raged among the adults of his family, of the neighborhood, and even of the church. He knew that there had been fights in the neighborhood, anger and triumph over the election of President Lincoln in the fall of ’60, but he supposed, if he thought of it at all, that this was the natural behavior of people interested in a vague thing called politics. He had heard talk of tariffs, of slave states and free ones, of a violent old man named John Brown, and during the past winter, of states seceding from the Union. But it had just been talk to him, and the only part of all the talk that held any interest for him was the conviction among all the men that war was sure to break out sooner or later. It hadn’t broken out yet, however, and some men were swearing because the President had not declared war, while others were saying, “Jest let Ol’ Abe fire on the South and watch Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee—yes, and maybe southern Illinois—tumble over on the Confederate side of the fence.”

He knew a little about wars. The Revolution, of course. The
American
Revolution, Shadrach had pointed out, and Jethro had been amazed that there was ever any other. He liked stories of wars. There was a beautiful one described in one of Shad’s books in which an ancient king watched ships fight in a place called Salamis Bay; there was another exciting story of a battle in which small, fast ships with the lucky help of a violent storm had played Old Ned with a proud and mighty navy. He wanted to tell his mother about that one, how if the battle had gone the other way, both Ellen and Jethro Creighton might well have been speaking Spanish as they planted their potatoes that April morning.

She wouldn’t have liked that though; she was suspicious of people who spoke a different language. Well, one learned when to speak and when to keep one’s tongue between his teeth. Jethro was not going to talk to his mother too much of either languages or wars, but he knew that, as far as the latter were concerned, he was one with young Tom and Eb when they hoped that war would come soon. War meant loud brass music and shining horses ridden by men wearing uniforms finer than any suit in the stores at Newton; it meant men riding like kings, looking neither to the right nor the left, while lesser men in perfect lines strode along with guns across their shoulders, their heads held high like horses with short reins. When the battle thundered and exploded on all sides—well, some men were killed, of course, but the stories of war that Jethro remembered were about the men who had managed to live through the thunder and explosion. Matt Creighton’s grandfather had lived through the Revolution; Matt himself had survived the Mexican War; and Uncle Billy Jeffers, down the road, was still alive to tell tales of the War of 1812. Jethro, forgetting the lecture to his mother on the inclination of people to select beliefs that bring them most satisfaction, never doubted that if Tom and Eb got their chance to go to war, they’d be back home when it was over, and that it would be shadowy men from distant parts who would die for the pages of future history books.

Death, however, was neither simple nor lightly brushed aside when it struck home. Jethro frowned; he didn’t like to think of his sister Mary’s death, but some memory had been touched off as his thoughts wandered. Let a few hours of work go by and let one’s body begin to weary a little—then the thoughts that had been all of beauty and spring a while before started turning to things that were better forgotten. He had not forgotten though; he’d been only seven that winter of ’59, but the memory of the tragedy would always be sharp and terrible in his mind.

Mary had been as pretty as Jenny, only blond and more delicate. Jethro remembered that it was a bitter night and that he had stood with his nose pressed against the cold windowpane watching Rob Nelson help her into the wagon before they left for a dance over toward Hidalgo. What happened later he’d pieced together from loud outcries and scraps of conversation deep in the middle of the night.

It seemed that a crowd of young toughs from the south of the county had broken uninvited into the dance, waving whiskey bottles and shouting drunken insults at the guests. As things began to look more and more dangerous, Rob found Mary’s wraps, and they were starting for home when a drunken youth named Travis Burdow saw them leave and followed them on horseback.

Rob told Matt Creighton how he had urged the team, hoping to get to Ed Turner’s farm where he could get help, because he knew that Burdow was armed. Rob had succeeded in getting as far as Turner’s driveway when Burdow, seeing that his game was about finished, rode up beside Rob’s team and fired a pistol over the heads of the horses. The frightened animals bolted through a rail fence, overturning the wagon and kicking themselves loose from the tongue. Mary was dead when Rob and Ed Turner pulled her from the wreckage.

The countryside was in an uproar the next day when news of the tragedy got around. Matthew Creighton was held in high esteem by his neighbors, and the senseless killing of his daughter stirred up a rage that was heightened by the fact that the whole Burdow family was commonly despised throughout the countryside as a shiftless lot with a bad background.

The grandfather of Travis Burdow had come from somewhere farther downstate, and when he moved into Jasper County he came hurriedly, in order, so the story went, to escape a mob of citizens whose anger during years of petty thieving had exploded over the theft of a team of horses from a prosperous farmer. Whether the story was true or not, suspicion and dislike settled upon the family, and thirty years had failed to dissipate it. The Burdow children were nicknamed “Jail Burd-ows” by taunting schoolmates and persecuted in a hundred petty ways. Dave Burdow, father of young Travis and son of the alleged horse thief, was a sullen, silent man who shunned people in general and accepted their insults as a matter of course when he was forced to deal with them. His sons, for the most part, were much like him except when liquor quickened their courage and defiance. The shot that Travis Burdow fired over Rob Nelson’s team that night was a shot fired at a society that had kicked a boy from childhood on because he bore his grandfather’s name.

And so the anger of the mob at Mary’s death was doubled and tripled because a Burdow was responsible. By late afternoon, a crowd of fifty or more armed men stopped at the Creighton cabin to tell Matt of their intention of hunting Travis Burdow down and hanging him on the spot. But Matt Creighton had intervened, and it was a mark of the respect he commanded in the community that the men listened as he stood for an hour in the icy afternoon pleading with them to keep their hands free of further bloodshed.

Jethro, understanding the situation more fully now that he was older, wondered at his father’s intervention that afternoon. His own sympathies, even on a spring morning eighteen months later, were with the angry men as they prepared for the manhunt. He wondered. He had great confidence in his father, but his sense of justice was hard put to accept the fact that Travis Burdow had been allowed to escape the consequences of his drunken crime. It occurred to him that he felt the same way toward his father as he did toward Abraham Lincoln—why should the President waver so long? Why should he refuse, week after week, to start the great explosion which the young men wanted to get started and have finished before the year was well into the summer? Jethro had to admit to himself an uncomfortable feeling of anger for both the President and his father; they had not shown the hard, unyielding attitude that he admired in the talk of Tom and Eb and their friends.

He sighed suddenly and deeply at his perplexities. Ellen noticed the sigh and glanced at him quickly.

“Be you spent, Jethro?”

He shook his head. “No, I’m doin tol’able. I was jest thinkin’ about things.”

“What kind of things, Son?”

“Fer one thing I was wonderin’ why Abe Lincoln can’t make up his mind about war. I wonder—is he like Pa? Is he so aginst hevin’ blood on people’s hands that he’s afeared to start a war?”

Ellen stopped her work and stood for a moment without speaking, her rough brown hands resting on the handle of the hoe.

“He’s like a man standin’ where two roads meet, Jeth,” she said finally, “and one road is as dark and fearsome as the other; there ain’t a choice between the two, and yet a choice has to be made.” She shook her head. “May the Lord help him,” she whispered. “May the Lord guide his hand.”

The sounds of morning were all around them as they stood silently in the middle of the furrow. From the fields across the creek came the monotonous shout to the field horses; up at the house Jenny’s voice came clearly, pleasant as the sound of a little bell ringing.