The Trees (4 page)

“You started a cabin or hain’t you, Worth?” she came out at him, her eyes cruel as death. “Or
maybe you take us for woodchucks with a hole in the ground?”

It was good to hear the old Jary. Worth flushed up through his beard. No more of the cabin was said between them. Worth ran a tallowed rag through his rifle and laid it carefully away. All day his axe hacked and slashed, hewed and chipped in the woods. It grew dark early this time of year. Sayward kept fires going for light. She and Achsa helped him lift the logs into place, locking saddle to notch and notch to saddle. After them came the rafters.

The days now were gray and cold. Sayward wedged in poles for chinking. The young ones carried white clay from the river bank for Genny to daub it. Jary helped. Worth was laying the rib poles now, turning the bows to the sky, for the weight of the roof would settle them straight. Soon as he got done at one end, the young ones scuttled up like piney squirrels, thatching it with shell bark that with the help of hides had to do till the black ash bark would run in the spring. If it turned out that they would stay, he would split out clapboards. Long top rib poles held the bark and hides down. They jutted out from the roof like steer horns, lashed to the under ribpoles with leatherwood and hickory withes.

“You better move in the shanty tonight,” Worth said late that afternoon.

All day a gray light like frost mist had hung and driven through the black butts and branchwork of the woods. Oh, this was winter now, anybody with half an eye could tell. As long as daylight lasted, the young ones fetched in fresh leaves from where the wind had raked them in windrows behind some bush or stump. Chips and log leavings they piled in the chimney corner. The chimney wasn’t topped off yet with sticks and clay, but it drew fire. It still seemed the middle of the afternoon when dusk moved over the forest and settled down.

“It’s snowin’,” Achsa called out when she came back in that evening.

“Snowin’?” Jary quavered pleasantly.

Sayward watched her mother’s eyes take a turn around the cabin. The firelight played sociable fingers on roof and rafters. The logs smelled clean, and the beds of new leaves made you sleepy. Everything was spick and fine as a newborn babe in a fresh log cradle. Piles of knobby hickory nuts and black and white walnuts lay hulled in a corner. Tomorrow or the next day Worth would take his old frow and split chinking boards for loft and shelves and puncheons for a trencher. Already he had an old windblown poplar log picked out.

The girl felt her mother’s loving eyes rest on each one of them. All, except that little brother back in Pennsylvania, were here together. They had a roof over their heads and a bag of meal hanging from the
rafters. A buckskin door weighted with a short green log shut out the dark and snow.

Her mother’s eyes were mortal young and warm tonight in their deep sockets. So they must have looked, Sayward reckoned, when she had moved in their first cabin along the Juniata. Three of her young ones were to get born in the world there.

CHAPTER FOUR
THE SQUARE AXE

O
NCE
they were in the cabin, they had creature comforts again. Worth set his gun up in a dark corner where he wouldn’t see it unless he had to and set to work splitting out three-inch puncheons and hewing them smooth with the axe. With these he made a trencher to eat off of, a bench to sit down on and a door with hickory hinges to keep out forest beasts. The bench wouldn’t set even on the rolling dirt floor and he bedded it in the tamped earth. But his stools were fine and steady any place you put them, for they had only three legs.

Still Worth wouldn’t say he had enough. No such thing. He’d work till he was black in the face, splitting out clapboards and laying them on the scalped joists for a loft. Before he was done, they all had to climb the ladder and see how snug and warm a place he’d made under the eaves where you
could lay of a night and listen to the rain on the roof over your head. Three of the young ones fought to have their beds up there with the woods mice racing over their legs in the dark and the chipmunks rolling walnuts and hickory nuts over the loft floor soon as it began to come daylight.

And still Worth wouldn’t stop. Not till he had worked out his mind. He had to make a last splurge. This would be a mortal handy thing for a house, something you had to pay tax on if you had one down in Pennsylvania. He steadied the logs with wedges, marked them with a straight edge and chopped out a hole, dressing it smooth with axe and knife. Over the hole he plastered a few cross sticks and fast to the sticks the marriage paper the Conestoga dominie had given them. Worth had always plagued Jary for lugging such a useless thing around with her. But now that he greased it with bear’s oil, he reckoned it might be of some account. It let the sun through like glass. Oh, then it was a sight to see in that dark cabin, a window light blazing up like it was a fire and making all the cubbyholes and corners plain as outside till you could see the marks the barkworms left on the logs.

Even Jary said it was a tolerable place to live. They had to blister their feet a long ways to get here, but now they were holed up snug and cozy as a bear in his hollow tree. Let the winter cut up his didoes. Let the king’s men come down from the
English Lakes if they had a mind to. They’d have a hard time finding the Lucketts in this shut-in place. The woods were wide and deep. The cabin stood hid in the trees like a piggin in a haystack.

But after some Indian hunters had foxed them out, Jary complained, what was the use of putting up a cabin fine as a fiddle if you let such kind make it a public house?

Down in Pennsylvania the whites were thick as dogberries and the few Indians left knew their place. Away back here the whites were scarce as birds’ teeth and the Indians plenty as dogberries. Their sharp eyes picked up Worth’s spent bullet patches and tracked him to his cabin where they drifted in with no more knocking than leaves in October. Their fusils they set in the chimney corner for the priming to dry and themselves on the floor under the bag of Indian meal swinging from a joist.

“Whoo-stink!” little Sulie cried, holding her nose with her fingers.

Worth gave her a clip over the head and told Sayward to make them some johnnycake. The warm smell of baking meal in the cabin soon thawed out their tongues. They swapped grave talk with Worth and felt polite hands over the window and the skins he showed them, blowing the fur expertly apart at the places it was thickest and finest.

But Jary eyed the emptying grainbag with ropy
mouth and angry, rebellious eyes. Never had she been the one to take up with the red people. No, Worth was as much Indian as anybody she wanted to know. All the Delawares, Shawanees, Ottawas and the six nations of the Mingos she ever saw were different from her people as a night dog from a hound. Oh, whites weren’t sinless, especially in the woods. Some went around bad as Indians holding a grudge. But they couldn’t hold a candle to their red brothers when it came to paying it. If Indians couldn’t get back at the white persons that harmed them, they’d take it out on some handy white women or poor young ones they happened to meet up with that had nothing to do with it. They’d hack off their scalps likely with some brains hanging to them and set their pitiful hair up on a pole and prance around poking firebrands at it and bragging and carrying on like they had licked General Wayne and his whole army.

No, Jary had little love for Indians in general and these digging in her meal bag in particular. If the Shawanees raised corn like Worth said, why didn’t they stay at home and eat their own? It rankled her to have to sit by helpless and see them coming this way as long as her meal lasted and eating what was meant for her young ones. And when Worth told Sayward to shake the bag for the last dust of meal to feed some that had been feasting on her plenty before, Jary flared up. She took that meal bag and
sat on it, her mouth tight. Her eyes dared them all to come and get it, and Worth too, if he reckoned he could.

Those red hunters from Shawaneetown didn’t stay long after that.

“There you go, a makin’ bad friends,” Worth told her when they had left. “They feed me when I go to their place.”

“You got no business a goin’ to their place,” Jary’s eyes flashed at him. “You got a family to come on home to.”

“They mought not be good enough for you,” Worth said. “But they are for me.”

The only sign that Jary heard him was her sewed-up mouth. He began to get mad as she.

“If the Injun has any ornery tricks, who do you expect he learned them from but the whites?”

That was too much for Jary.

“Bosh and moonshine!” she flared out at him. “Injuns was a scalpin’ and massacreein’ and torturin’ and burnin’ up their own brothers long before they ever heerd of a white person. They brag their own selves how they killed off all the Injuns that used to live around here. Did you ever hear of an Injun payin’ even a fi’penny bit for land like the whites?”

Worth would say nothing more. There was no use trying to get the best of Jary. You might as well try to head off a gadd or talk back to a whaup.
His eyes retreated ominously into his beard till you couldn’t see much more than the whites. In the morning he took his gun and Sarge and did not come back that night. Next day it started a cold rain.

On toward dusk they thought they heard Worth coming and Sulie ran to open the door. A Delaware stood there with the firelight licking on his wet face and on the silver wheels in his ears that were stretched down halfways to his shoulders. He was ugly as sin, bedraggled in his matchcoat as a wet turkey hen, but in he tramped big as some redcoat major. The water ran off him in little streams and when he got to the fire, he shook himself like a dog. The drops rained all over. He sat himself down by the warm hearth to dry. You might have reckoned this was his own cabin, and his squaw and young ones could be mortal glad to see him home again.

Jary had stared after him with a tight-mouthed, angry look. Now she turned to Sayward.

“If I had my way,” her eyes said, “I’d a seed him in the river first. But what’s a body to do — turn him out in the rain?”

Sayward was sitting by the trencher when he came. Now she went on about her business, working a doeskin with her hands. They had taken the hair off with lye from fire ashes and tanned it with oak bark liquor in a log trough. Once the hide was
worked soft, Jary would lay it on the trencher and cut it out with the cabin knife, and Genny’s nimble fingers would sew up a shirt for Wyitt. He had some squirrel ready that he wanted it trimmed with. Every morning he made the rounds of his log and sapling snares, hoping for a mink or otter skin Worth could trade for buttons when he went to some post. Oh, with black fur trimmings and horn or pewter buttons, Wyitt was going to be a dandy and no mistake.

When their caller got too hot in front, he turned his side to the fire and Sayward had a good look at him. She had never seen this one before. His nose was big as a red Conestoga potato. It even had eyes like a potato. Put that nose in a dark place like a cellar, and it looked like it would grow white sprouts. But nobody could sit bigger at the hearth.

Sayward had nothing for the way squaws gave in to their men, waiting on them hand and foot, giving them the notion they were lords of creation. About all these men would turn a finger to was war and hunt. Let them kill themselves a fat deer, would they fetch it in? Not them. They’d hang it up on the nearest tree where the wolves couldn’t get it and march back to camp with nothing but their fusils over their shoulders: No, their squaws could come out and skin it and fetch it in.

For all she knew, this one here had plenty meat hanging out in the woods right now. It looked like
it, for mighty little of theirs did he eat that evening, though she had roasted it to a turn. Worth hadn’t come home and he wasn’t likely to any more tonight, for when Sayward went out, the rain on the door log had turned to ice. It was a black world but tomorrow, she reckoned, would be a white one. And then they would have a new job getting rid of their company, for if there was one thing an Indian hated worse than getting out in the rain, it was getting out in the snow.

“You kin sleep up in the loft tonight,” Sayward told Genny. “I’ll lay with Mam.”

Genny had plenty to say to that. She wouldn’t have a savage who never washed from one summer to the next sleeping on her and Sayward’s bed. But Sayward shooed her up the ladder and that was an end to it. When the Delaware was out, she pushed the axe under the leaves where she and Jary would lie. She piled logs on the fire to give light till morning. Then when he came in she barred the door and lay down beside her mother in her shortgown. If this fellow had any red cronies hanging around outside, he would have to get up to let them in.

Overhead in the loft she could hear the young ones restless and wakeful. But Jary could doze off the minute her head touched the bed leaves. She lay there on her back with her mouth open. Her quiet snoring served to quiet those in the loft. Little
by little their whisperings and turnings played out. After while the clapboards overhead lay silent for all the firelight that ran back and forward across them.