The Trees (28 page)

When all was done for now, the men started acting the fool. Somebody ran John Covenhoven’s horses over Jake’s whiskey keg, smashing it up, and Jake had to go for more. It came out afterward that George Roebuck had nothing but barrels when Jake got there, so Jake went back where he had seen Buckman Tull’s hog and killed it, skinning it whole, tying together the few broken pieces and taking the bone from the root of the tail for the neck of his hairy bottle. But George Roebuck guessed whose hog that was when he saw it and would give him no wet goods to fill it. Oh, George didn’t want to get mixed up in any trouble. He knew Buckman would eat fire when he found out what happened to his boar.

Back at the burning bee they never missed the whiskey. Those that were begrimed went around blacking the other faces. The women screeched and the boys ran after the yelping girls. They blacked the white spots on the oxen and even the faces of the littlest ones lying in a row on Sayward’s and Portius’s bed, though some of the mothers got mad as hops. As soon as one body got blacked, the others gathered around to laugh and rally him on how he looked. Then one would grab and hold somebody else for the rest to work on. Sayward didn’t know half her neighbors any more unless she
looked close. Before they got done, she felt she was a blackamoor and this was a blackamoors’ frolic.

“You won’t have no soap left till they git through, Saird,” Mary Harbison felt for her.

But most of the men went home black-faced and black-handed. They said they’d go while it was still daylight and scare the insides out of any Shawanee they met on the trace. It was too mighty cold and windy anyhow to sit around the fires and swap tales tonight. Sayward and Portius would have to keep rolling the leavings together as they burned apart.

Portius said much obliged to each family as it left. Sayward felt beholden to them as much as he did to see all their logs piled up and the long rows of fire eating at them. But she hadn’t the gift of gab to say it. Portius was the one for that. Not many could make words talk like he could when he wanted to. You could see they all liked Portius. Their faces would light up at him.

“Good night to you!” he would call what she couldn’t, for wishing a body good night would be too much putting-on coming from a woodsy.

“Don’t burn yerselves up, Portius!” Jude MacWhirter, who had the biggest family in the woods, yelled back. “But we got room for ye if ye do.”

Sayward and Portius stayed up that night, taking turns tending the fires. For a long time those log piles burned. Sayward boiled lye from the ashes
and black salts from the lye, and Portius took them to Roebuck’s to trade for silver which he would trade later on for seed and blacksmith-made grubbing hoe irons. He himself would make the handles. By the time it thawed and set in raining, all that was left of their summer fallow were plenty stumps, a few charred butts too big to burn up in one winter and gray patches on the ground where the fires had been.

Next time John Covenhoven came over, Portius told him how a man named Vergil gave a rule in a book for testing your ground. All you need do was dig a hole. If the dirt you took out went back in with room to spare, your ground would grow most anything. And Big John, not to be outdone, told Portius the rule that when a man could go out in his fields and put down his britches and the air would not feel cold on his bare parts, then it was time to seed corn. He said as soon as it dried off a little now, he better plough and drag their patch for them. He would fetch his team over next week. It took a pile of geeing and hawing to sidle around the stumps and charred butts with his shovel plough. But when it was done and the seed put in, the ground lay quiet and waiting around the cabin.

It was no ordinary day when the wild ground gave birth to its first tame crop. The wind stood off. The clouds hung like summer. The tender sky came right down in the clearing, softening everything
with a veil finer than spider skeins. A little ways there in the woods, Sayward knew the air still hung chill and dim. But here in the clearing, the four sides of the forest held summer in like the banks of a pond. Flies and beetles hummed in the bright warmth. The soil breathed up a sweet rank smell of sprouting and growing. And here and yonder the first tiny green shoots of the baby corn had pushed overnight through the black ground. You could just make out the faint, mortal young rows bending around the stumps.

Sayward and Portius could see now to grub out the wild sprouts without hurting the tame crop they planted. Before they got far, Jake Tench came out of the woods. He took a paper from his hat and said Buckman Tull had left it at the post for him. You knew he’d had George Roebuck read it to him but now Portius had to read it to him all over. It said that Jacob Tench had with malice aforethought killed and skinned Buckman Tull’s boar, and now he had to answer for it Saturday evening in front of Squire Chew.

You might expect that Jake would be in an ugly mood, but Sayward never saw him more pleased with himself. Here he was in the middle of a lawsuit where he would have to brag under oath to all who came to hear him how quick and slick he had skinned that hog.

“I want you to lawyer me, Portius,” he said.

Portius stood there straight and telling in his buckskin britches as a Bay State lawyer in brown velvet small clothes.

“Come in the house and we’ll talk it over,” he said with grave restraint.

When they had gone, Sayward chored on by herself. Her grubbing hoe kept cutting off the woody sprouts. You could look back now and see the corn rows plain, with nothing to hide or choke them. Oh, those corn grains had been drops of crinkled gold that could make more of themselves just by lying and rotting in the ground. She had made Wyitt take his rifle and watch that the squirrels and other vermin hadn’t dug them up. Early next fall when the ears were pushing, he’d have to sleep here in the patch with his hound pup to keep off the coons and foxes.

She grubbed deftly, moving among the dismembered carcasses of the trees, a strong woman’s figure with a single garment on, her feet bare, her calm face bent over the sweet-smelling earth. This was a mighty different world than a woodsy like her knew. Folks of this world didn’t need to wander off to the woods for wild crops and beasts. No, they had their own tame crops and beasts at home. Give her and Portius time, and they would have their tame beasts, too, to give them milk and hides and a sweet kind of tamed meat they called beef.

She found she was singing tunelessly to herself
far back in her throat like some of the married women did when their hearts and hands were at peace. Her voice fitted in with the humming of the flies and the droning of the woods beetles. Oh, it was hard beating back the woods. You had to fight the wild trees and their sprouts tooth and nail. But life was sweet sometimes, too.

Only yesterday she had seen a golden fly at the dogberry flowers. Portius said that was a good sign. Where the honey bee went, the white man’s fields and orchards weren’t far behind. Soon the small singing birds would find their way to these corn and wheat patches. They would wake up some fine morning and hear a robin redbreast in the dogberry.

Let the good come, Sayward thought, for the bad would come of its own self. Never again would they see the face of their little Sulie, for if she wasn’t dead, some Indians far off in this vasty Northwest country had her. But a young one of her own was on the way, and if it came a girl, they could call her Sulie and look on her face. That’s how life was, death and birth, grub and harvest, rain and clearing, winter and summer. You had to take one with the other, for that’s the way it ran.