The Trees (25 page)

L
ITTLE
did Sayward know what she had ahead of her this day. Now who would have expected the strange way things had of working around.

Life wasn’t easy like it used to be. No, Sayward had hardly anybody to cook or sew, dye or boil soap or chop wood for but herself any more. First to go had been Jary under the white oak, and then little Sulie never came home with the cows. Worth had to track off to the French Settlements. Wyitt took himself out to sleep in his half-faced cabin. Achsa was up somewheres around the English Lakes. And now Genny, who came home a while, was off again, working by the year over at Covenhoven’s. Oh, Genny had got fair to middling since
she had humans to live with again. Her arms and haunches had filled out plump and nice for her. Yes, Genny was real good now except she had got out of the way of singing. When folks asked, she said she couldn’t mind how the tune or words went any more.

By rights, Sayward told herself, she ought to feel she was in clover. Wasn’t it good to have Genny back in her right mind? Didn’t Wyitt keep her kettles in meat when he came home from the woods? Hadn’t she a stout roof over her head, more than one bed to sleep in and a run that never went dry just a piece from her door? What more could a body want? Hadn’t she done the best for her family she knew how? Now why couldn’t she sit down and take it easy?

By hokey day, she’d do it, too; if it killed her, she told herself. But little did she know what she had ahead of her this day as she went down the trace with Mrs. Covenhoven and Genny. Some might expect that Genny would have enough of hearing a man say how he would cleave to his woman till death did them part. But Sayward guessed that Genny would go as many times as a marrying came around, crying a little in the skirt of her shortgown, wondering to herself where Louie and Achsa were by this time and had Achsa her child? Yes, a wedding was an old story to
Genny, though it was new enough to the settlement. This was the first they ever had hereabouts.

The settlers came a long ways to Flora Greer’s cabin. The men that couldn’t get in stood up to one door, and the women and young ones that came late worked themselves in the other. For a long time Sayward had wanted to see these two doors in one cabin. Jake Tench said Flora had her first man put in the second door so, when she heard Linus coming in the back way, some other man could go out the front. Come to think of it, this was an uncommon cabin all around. Linus Greer hadn’t notched and saddled his logs one against the other but laid them full end on end and pinned, leaving a span of chinking between each log wide as the timber itself. It made a cabin look grand, Sayward thought, with white stripes as broad as the gray.

The bridegroom had plenty whiskey for the men in one new cedar keg and some that was watered and sweetened for the women and young ones in another. The wooden cups went round and round, but they couldn’t stir up much life, it looked like.

“It ain’t whiskey makes a weddin’,” Jake Tench said with his black beard at Granny MacWhirter’s ear. He ought to know, for he had emptied half the keg and was still sullen as a bear.

“Na, na!” she agreed in her deaf, toothless, old voice and bobbing her white-capped head. “What
ye need ain’t a halfways old man and woman that’s been a livin’ together since her man made a die of it up in the Western Reserve.”

“Not so loud, Granny!” Cora MacWhirter tried to hush her.

“Wha?” Granny raised her voice. “It’s true, hain’t it? They’re only married lawful because the squire got his papers last week. Oh, I’m nothin’ agin it if they want. But if this would a happened most places, some would a fetched along cow horns today to shame ’em.” She nodded triumphantly at Jake. “And if they had hosses, they’d have to use ’em a while with their manes and tails roached.”

Cora MacWhirter had taken off hastily.

“You go and talk as loud as you please,” Jake Tench said.

“Wha? Yeh. Sure I will,” Granny nodded. “When I was a bride, ye could hear ’em carry on over the mountain. Fourteen men raced two mile to be the one to take the black bottle out of my hand. One broke his leg over a log, but he had as good time as anybody.”

She sat there silent a while in her gray wrapper, alternately shaking and bobbing her head in answer to her own thoughts.

“Na, na!” she said. “What ye need for a weddin’ is a pair of younger ’uns. Two that’s never been in sin.” She chuckled and nodded to herself in approval. “Turtle doves is best. Many’s the time
I seed the gals take the bride up the loft and put on her bedgown and tuck her in. Then the men would fetch up the bridegroom and put him in with her.” Her alive black eyes danced around the group. “That’s a genuwine weddin’. None a these tame ways like some that’s come up since the Revolution. Once in a while ye take meat and drink up to ’em. Oh, ye don’t forget a time like that easy.”

Jake went over to the keg only to find it empty. He sent it off with the bound boy to Roebuck’s for more. He wasn’t sulling now. His beady black eyes had a secret look in them. He said something to Billy Harbison and they stood a long while side by each. When the bound boy came, the other men mustered around the keg and listened with their heads together.

“What’s Jake up to now?” Mrs. Covenhoven asked the bound boy.

“Oh, nothin’ much, I reckon,” he said, wiping his sweaty face with a sleeve. But he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“It don’t look like nothin’ to me,” Mrs. Covenhoven told him out of the sharp side of her mouth.

After a while Mary Harbison came scuttling over.

“Did you hear the deviltry afoot? Jake’s a hatchin’ out a new match. Two that’s never courted. They say they’re a goin’ out in the bush to fetch in the Solitary and see if Idy’ll have him.”

The women looked at each other and Idy Tull acted like she would swoon.

“I could have married more than him if I had wanted to!” she called out to all who would listen.

Sayward turned her back and stood watching Sally Withers nurse one of her twin babes that already were getting too big for one woman to lug around. The other kicked and screeched to have to wait on the second table. It did Sayward good to hear it drown out Idy, for what was more natural in a cabin than a baby crying. The greedy little shaver. It would have plenty left when its sister got through. A woman’s breasts weren’t the foolish doodad they looked like. No, they had more sense than some humans. If one babe came, that one had plenty and running over. If two came, they still had a dug apiece. And if three came like she heard of already, they could all three take turns without getting starved out. An old maid like Idy Tull might have a hard time filling the hard little bellies of three at one time. But a stout, hearty girl like herself could make out, and some to spare. Never would she have to step down in favor of some old tame mooly or gray moose cow.

She turned back now and listened to the women. Some reckoned this was going too far but most allowed Jake Tench would go through with it. Flora Greer thought it a sin and a shame. It was making high jack of mighty serious business. Decent
women should step in and stop it, that’s what they should. Sayward kept on listening and never said a word, no not a word. If it had a woman here who would stop it, she didn’t know her. There wasn’t one but who could hardly wait to see what would come out of this.

Sayward walked herself outside. The Greer improvement was on a hill. With the trees cut, she could look out fine. It was toward evening when the air clears like springwater and she could see down to the post and away out over those lonesome waves of woods that swallowed up the Solitary’s cabin. More than once since Genny was back with humans again, Sayward had thought about Portius Wheeler still living out with the bears and panthers. When first he came, he was a dandy with a whole casson, they said, of shirts and fixings. The last time Sayward saw him, he looked like an old bushnipple. You would never have reckoned this shaggy woodsy in shoe-packs and an old brush-whipped roaram was the young Bay State lawyer.

Oh, a man might stand it a little longer than a woman out in the woods by his lonesome, seldom seeing a human face save his own staring up at him from some wild run; seldom hearing a human voice save his own croaking back at him from some wild thicket. But sooner or later the woods would get him like they had Genny.

Hadn’t she seen with her own eyes two solitaries
back in Pennsylvania! One, they said, had been cheated by his own brothers. He lived in a house of rails he stole from settlers’ fences. You could wind him like a fox when he passed. He had greasy white hair, was bent nearly double, and never would he lift his eyes at you when he went by with a load of pumpkins on his back and all the young neighborhood hooting after.

The other lived somewhere in a cave. He had been a fine clerk in a counting house when he was young. His family came and tried to fetch him back to town, but he said he had turned his back on the world too long. To most folks he never returned the time. When he had the notion he would stop and talk to Granpap Powelly in his gunsmith shop. He would take hold of Granpap’s wamus in front with his two hands and all the time a spittle of tobacco juice bubbling between his lips and coming out fine as mist in Granpap’s face so he’d have to wash it off after the Solitary had hunted his cave.

No, Sayward didn’t reckon this notion of Jake Tench’s such a sin and a shame. If he could talk the Solitary into coming out of the woods and taking a woman, the Solitary couldn’t be much worse and he might be a good ways better off.

When Sayward came back in the cabin, Idy Tull was still carrying on. Oh, she had the chance for attention now and wouldn’t give up telling how she’d never take the Solitary. Sayward listened,
drawing down the corners of her mouth. Idy might be stuck-up and bighead, but she was an old maid. She wouldn’t let any man slip through her fingers at this date, let alone a Bay State lawyer. No, she’d jump out of her shortgown for a man who could read and write like herself. And the Solitary would have nothing to say once Jake Tench and his pack had him in tow and skinful of grog.

Now Sayward reckoned she had heard Idy enough. She moved up where the men hemmed in that pretty white and red staved cedar keg.

“You kin fetch him to my cabin, Jake,” she said strong and knowing her own mind. “I’ll marry with him if he’s a willin’.”

Oh, Sayward needed no one to talk for her. She could fend for herself. Genny and Mrs. Covenhoven hurried after as she went firm and stout-willed out the front door. Mrs. Covenhoven looked sober when they caught up outside a ways and Genny had a scared look on her face.

“Now don’t you fret, Ginny,” Sayward calmed her as she stooped to take off her shoepacks and make herself comfortable in her strong, bare feet on the path home. “I ain’t afeard a this. I had my mind on him this long time.”

“I only hope, Saird,” Genny murmured, “the full moon ain’t got you.”

Sayward turned her face to the east as she
stooped. Here in the open hill patches Linus Greer had cleared, she could see a blob of yellow moon rising from the woods, and it was round and full. That gave her pause, for the moon can bend humans to strange ways. You could always tell on Jake when the moon was full or near it, for then he’d act the fool the worst, bellowing crazy jokes to folks half a mile off through the woods.

Could the moon have worked on her tonight? In her mind drifted something the bound boy said once of the time he heard a voice in the woods near the Fallen Timbers. He was picking blackberries and crept through the bush till he saw the Solitary sitting alone at the open door of his hut. He had a book in his hand and was reading it out loud in that lonesome place. The words at the end of every line made rhyme, but the bound boy couldn’t make out a lick of it. When he got back to the post, George Roebuck told him that Portius Wheeler had books in Latin and Greek that nobody but himself could read, and it must be the bound boy had been listening to one of those.

Sayward straightened up with her shoepacks in her hand. She wouldn’t take it to heart if the moon worked on her or not. She had set her triggers for Portius Wheeler and freely would she be his wife, for no man with such fine booklearning should bury himself out in the bush.

Jake must have talked to Squire Chew, for the
squire came in good time though you could see he didn’t think much of it.

“You certain you want to go on with this, Saird?” he asked her.

Oh, she might be sinful and out of her head, Sayward told herself, but she would go on with it. And when she saw the bridegroom that Jake and his cronies fetched to the door, she felt she had done right, for it made her mad some wilful body hadn’t the sense to do this long ago. His ruffled linen shirt was pied with doeskin patches. His home-seamed buckskin britches had got wet and stretched some time or other till he had cut the legs down to suit. Then they had shrank and dried hard as iron, and now they clapped like clapboards when he moved. Oh, you would never have told this bushnipple for a master hand to read out of a Latin book or climb a stump and give speeches to a crowd or jury.

There he stood shaggy as a bear that for a short while would mind most anything Jake Tench told him. His high forehead was held gentle and tender to one side, but his eyes could still flash young and gray-green out of his briery beard.

“Don’t crowd him so close!” Sayward told them angrily. “He ain’t a greased hog. He kin come in without you a helpin’.”

They fetched him in near the chimney corner and had him stand where the bridegroom ought to
be. Squire Chew gave a kind of hard-put look around, then fixed himself so the firelight fell on his pages, for Sayward had no candles. Jake kept close. You might have reckoned he was the one getting married. Portius stood there taking no more notice of her than that York State bride and bridegroom took of each other, the ones Mrs. Covenhoven told about, who as soon as they were man and wife walked one out of one door and the other out of the other, and never did they see each other again except mayhap on the far side of the earth where they were still trying to get farther off from the other.

From where she stood, Sayward couldn’t see the wedding company, for they were behind her. All she could lay eyes on were Genny and Mrs. Covenhoven tending the meat at the fire so it wouldn’t burn on them. But she could feel that a good many waited uneasy for the time when the Solitary would have to speak out. Hardly a word had he said since they got him here. Would he make his vows when the time came or would he get balky as an ox and shame her? Or might the grog thicken his tongue and cause him to say some untoward thing that folks would always laugh and say behind her back?