The Trees (12 page)

She listened. All sound of pursuit had gone. She was alone in her secret bower. It had been warm running. The sweat seemed to stand over her body in fine beads. With a deft motion she slipped out of her single garment and lay white and cool on the ancient brown carpet of the place. She lay on her young belly with her chin propped up in her hands, looking out into this bright new world the like of which she’d go into some day. This was the door through which her true love would step in her life. He would carry no long woods rifle like her father but a fine government musket. No buckskins would he wear but bright green regimentals or those of blue and gold. He would take her by her lily white hand and lead her out of these dark woods. Not on foot would they go but riding a horse like the Covenhovens’ or a river boat like
George Roebuck’s pole batteau. And when they got to the settlements they would stop. Here they would live where folks smoothed their stools and trencher with an adze. On toward evening she would dress like the other women and sit on her street porch to see those that went by. When she got tired she could lie on a lounge with a panther skin coverlet. And on the Sabbath she would prank herself out in a fine check apron and go to church.

All afternoon she lay in this mortal sweet place while a pheasant stretched its neck this way and that above a log, trying to make out this white patch on the brown ground. It strutted up and down with its neck ruffed and its tail spread out, and all the golden spots on its feathers stood out brighter than they ever did on the birds that Worth fetched home in his hunting shirt. The pheasant got close as it dared. Then it clucked like a settlement biddy and ran to put trees between itself and this white thing before it rose.

It was dusk when Genny came down the cabin path, shy as a young she-fox. Through the open door she could see the bound boy and the young ones fooling in the cabin. Sayward and Jake were gone. After while they came through the early darkness together from the direction of the post. Genny felt herself harden toward Sayward. She didn’t see how her eldest sister could do this and then go about getting supper like nothing had happened.
Once in a while Sulie or Wyitt would come to the door and yell “Ginnee!” but Genny never stirred from her bush.

“She’s a hidin’ out’ar behind a log,” Achsa told them.

Only when Jake and the bound boy had gone down the path with their shellbark flambeau bobbing in the black night did Genny come in.

“You’ll git no supper now,” Achsa jeered.

“I ain’t a hungry,” Genny said.

Wyitt fetched a lick of something yellow and sticky from the shelf and laid it in front of her on the trencher.

“Will Beagle brung it fur you but you wouldn’t wait.”

“What fur thing is it?” she wanted to know.

“It’s a present he give you.”

“What’s it good fur?”

“It’s a kind of sweet bob. It comes from Chiny or some far place,” he said.

“You kin have it,” Genny said and turned away while the others fought for it.

Neither would Genny eat any of the cold leavings Sayward offered to get for her this evening. That night she lay far from her oldest sister as she could in their bed together. It felt almost like she was laying down with Jake Tench herself. She twisted first on one side and then on the other but she couldn’t sleep.

“What’s a ailin’ you?” Sayward broke out at last.

Genny turned her back.

“You needn’t talk to me after what you done.”

“Now I done something and don’t know what it was,” Sayward complained.

“You know good enough,” Genny told her. “Jake Tench!”

She could feel Sayward shake with quiet laughter.

“Don’t you fret about Jake. He mought make free with a Shawanee wench but he kain’t with me.”

“He mought marry you,” Genny said.

Sayward’s voice hardened.

“Not him,” she told her shortly. “Nor any other man where spits in my fire when I got bread a bakin’.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
CORPSE CANDLES

T
HIS
would be a strange summer, Worth gave out. All signs the past winter had been hindforemost. It had black frost early in October that the axe couldn’t chop the ground. And by New Year the little white butterflies ran on their wings through the naked woods. A dogwood bloomed on Old Christmas. Genny wanted to break off some branches and fetch them in the cabin for a nosegay, but Worth said sternly any tree that blossomed on the wrong side of the year had no good in it. Bees and flies that were foolish enough to come out now and suck its honey would die.

Up on the other side of the world where the North Pole stuck out of the ice like an old chestnut stub, it had plenty of winter. More than one evening they stood outside looking up through the bare branches at the Northern Lights. The
Shawanees called them Dancing Ghosts, but any white person knew it was only the midnight sun shining on the ice and snow. Red fingers kept clawing up to the middle of the heavens. One time they were here and one time yonder. Yes, it had plenty winter up in that far place, but by the time it came down here, the snow in the clouds had melted to rain. The trees stood black and dripping when they should have been white and froze stiff as pokers.

After most every rain the sun came out like April. Snakes crawled from their dens deep down in the red shell, and hoppy toads jumped from under your feet. You couldn’t tell when spring came except for the leaves. Long before the turn of summer the woods were chockful of tiny things that buzzed and flew. Mosquitoes whined around your head like a water sawmill, and millers you didn’t see as a rule till late summer came in clouds out of nowhere. The river was white with them.

“It was a black winter,” Worth said. “Now we’re a gittin’ a white summer. No human knows how this’ll end up.”

It looked to Sayward that even years printed in an almanac must have off ones. Gray squirrels sometimes gave black ones. Once in a while you heard of a white crow. Worth had shot a deer one time pale as an ermine weasel. But such meat was tainted and he didn’t fetch any of it home. Some
said you could see a white deer running through the woods on the darkest night. The spoiled flesh glowed and glirred in the dark like fox fire.

Most every day now the white fog smoke lay over the bottoms. It came, Worth said, out of the wet ground and it fetched up with it all the fearsome swamp poisons. When water sinks in the ground it cleans itself of rot and stink, let it be green beforehand as a spotted rattlesnake’s venom. So long as it keeps on sinking, it doesn’t hurt any, not even the eels and slimy things that live in the mud, for the earth is deep and has fires down in the middle to burn out what is foul. That’s how spring water comes out sweet and clear. But once swamp water is drawn back out of the ground, then it fetches all the poisons with it and everything that sucks breath has to watch out.

“It all comes from these plagued squatters!” Worth stormed. “The trees they burn make smoke. The smoke makes rain. And the rain draws out the fog.”

The livelong day now you could hear some new squatter’s axe or saw in the forest. Some hailed from Kentucky and came poling up the river with their six-foot rifles sticking out of one end of their boats and a half-wild hog sticking its snout out of the other. A few came off Zane’s trace from the old states, beating what stock they had through the bush. It hadn’t a cabin, Worth said, that didn’t
have some body sick in it. The swamp pestilence hung in the air night and day, and most everybody had it. Portius Wheeler, the young Bay State lawyer who bached somewhere beyond the post, gave out calomel pills till he didn’t have any for himself, and now he shook on his bad days like any person who never went to school a day in his life. The Indians came for miles to see George Roebuck shake. When the trader felt a spell coming on, he took off his leather apron and stood in his bare chest and back and shook till the fever stood out on him.

This was the only time Sayward heard Worth speak Jary’s name in a year. Jary, he said, would know what to do if she were alive. Jary always had her teas and herbs hanging in the cabin to doctor with when one got sick. She’d be piling covers on when they had their chills and dosing them with hot teas to get their fever over with. But Sayward felt glad her mother wasn’t here. She wouldn’t like to see that worn out body with one foot in the grave huddle against the table or log wall and shake till God Almighty would take a little pity and say she had enough.

She only wished she had had the sense to ask her mother how she used to make her moss and lemon tea. Moss lemonade, Jary would call it. Not a lemon did Jary have or see since she married Worth Luckett, unless it was the time she went back home on a visit, but you’d swear she had cut up a whole
yellow fruit that had come across the sea in a frigate from Spain. Leastwise that’s how Sayward and Genny reckoned a lemon would taste. Cold or hot, nothing could cool your fever quicker. And if you set it in the run to chill, it turned into moss jelly for an ailing person to eat with the spoon. Just to think of it made a body’s mouth water. But the only part of the receipt Sayward remembered was that you had to wash the moss through five waters. What moss it was and what you did then was forever buried now under the big white oak.

Taking all together, Sayward thought they were luckier than most. They had their shakes every other day. Never were they all sick and down at the same time with nobody to tend them or cook their rations. Some were always up and around while the others lay in their beds. Achsa and Wyitt minded their sumach poison worse than their shakes. All night you could hear them squirming and scratching up in the loft. When Sayward found they were raw to their middles, she made Wyitt show himself to Worth and Worth took a mess of sang roots to Roebuck’s to trade for salt. Salt was mighty dear to have on the table but for medicine he reckoned it wasn’t too high. When he came back, Sayward took those two out and made them strip themselves. Then she sopped water that was salty as the sea on their legs and middles.

She told herself she hadn’t noticed up to now
how Achsa had been filling out. If she had to do it again, she’d have taken her out by herself. Not that it mattered for Achsa to see Wyitt, for Achsa had washed him more than once when he was little. A boy was nothing much to look at anyway. Now a girl almost filled out into a woman was different. But Wyitt never even looked at Achsa. He couldn’t hold still long enough for Sayward to sop the rag on a second time. The first touch of that salt on his raw parts and he would run up and down the path for all he was worth, hollering at the top of his lungs, yelling anything that came into his mouth till the pain let up enough for Sayward to get close to him with the rag again.

But Achsa stood like a brown Shawanee and never let out a screech although she was scratched open the worse. And that, Sayward thought, was how it must have started. If Achsa had run and hollered and let the poison out like Wyitt, she might have been all right. All she did was shut her teeth and drive the poison in. Oh, it fooled them for a while. Sayward blamed herself she didn’t catch on sooner. She might have ciphered it out next day. As a rule a body with the shakes could be down ready to die one time and not long after be up and sassy as a jaybird. But Achsa didn’t get up after her shakes next day. She said she felt tired and expected she’d stay in her bed.

And that was the last time she ever had the
shakes. She lay in her loft bed a spell and by the time Sayward fetched her down to her and Genny’s bed, she was that gaunt her bones stuck out. Sayward boiled May apple tea and made her drink it scalding hot but it never fetched out a lick of sweat.

Next day she felt a little warmer and the next. She wouldn’t take the tea now. She just lay and shut her teeth and her eyes sulled up at you defiant as a young Indian’s. All she wanted was cold run water and that she couldn’t have.

“Give her cold water and you’ll kill her,” Worth warned. “I mind when Jary was down with the fever, the Lancaster doctor wouldn’t let her have a drop.”

Although it was a warm day in the woods, he kept a brisk fire going in the cabin to burn the air clean for the sick. Every time Achsa moaned for water, his lips moved. By evening Achsa was the hottest Sayward had ever felt a body. The heat reared up and struck you in the face when you only came near her. Worth said he couldn’t make out how flesh could get that hot and not fry or burn.

All through supper Achsa called for water.

“God Almighty, come down through the roof boards and fetch me some water!” she yelled once.

It made the young ones thirstier but Worth touched no water for himself this night. At last he pushed back his stool and said that before it got too dark he’d take himself down to Roebuck’s for
a speck of tobacco. Sayward knew he had plenty of tobacco in his minkskin pouch. He just couldn’t sit by all night while Achsa bleated like a doe for water and out in the run gallons of it were running to waste.

When he went he motioned Sayward outside. He told her she better expect the worst. One night last week, he saw corpse candles. Not often had he seen such things in the summer time. Mostly they came in a wet spell in the late fall, for that was just before the winter season when old and young mostly died. These summer lights were over the old beaver gats. It had two of them bobbing up and down like fast to a string. He might have sneaked up close and seen faces in them. But he didn’t want to know beforehand on whom Death had fastened its mark.