The Trees (8 page)

The young ones’ tongues were loose enough now. Before they got to the top of the first hill, little Sulie turned her face, smart and sharp as a young coon’s, over her shoulder.

“We got a winder light at our place!” she yelled back at them.

But when she had stood down there, she hadn’t opened her mouth, neither she or any of the young ones. You might have thought they never had laid eyes on other white people.

“Well, kain’t you say something to that boy?” Sayward had complained to Wyitt.

Not that it did any good. All he and the stranger boy could do was scowl at each other over the ox’s rump. She didn’t know what they’d have done without that ox. She tried to scrape up some talk with the boy’s pappy but with a woman he was froze stiff as steelyards. Most of the time the Lucketts had to just stand there, first on one leg and then on the other, visiting with their eyes, waiting till a proper time had passed before they took their leave, saving their opinions till they got out of earshot. And when it went too long without a word, she or one of the girls would talk to that ox, running their hands down his soft neck. Oh, he was the most sociable one there, reaching out his snout for the fresh sassafras leaves they picked for him and
talking a soft “Mmm-mm-mm-mm,” deep in his gullet when they would neglect him. The beast’s eyes were mild and patient as summer but you could see a world of power lay in his thick neck and the wide flare of his horns.

Now if it had a woman down there, Sayward thought, things might have been different. A woman would have been glad to see girls and young ones out here across the Ohio. Such wouldn’t have lacked for words to talk, bidding them sit down on a log and maybe giving them a bite to eat to show them a hearty welcome. It would have been a comfort to look in a woman’s face today and hear woman’s talk. But it had to be enough just to know a second place in these dark woods was now marked with the sociable, human slashes of the axe. Their own cabin didn’t look so lonesome any more when they came back to it standing by itself under the trees.

Worth heard about it from the young ones before he got in the house that afternoon. They told him all that had happened and some that hadn’t, quarreling over how it was and wasn’t. Supper done, he looked up at Sayward.

“Don’t he have a woman?” he wanted to know.

“I didn’t ast him,” Sayward said shortly.

Worth had a look on his face as he pushed back his stool. Most times Sayward could read her father’s face like Jary could a book, but this look she
didn’t recollect seeing on him before. Now what, she wondered as she lay in her bed with Genny that night, did he have on his mind?

One day not long after she heard Sarge bark and after while the bass mumble of men’s talk. When she went to the door, there sat their settler neighbor and Worth on the chopping log together. The ox they must have left down the river, but he and his boy had come up the foot trace mighty soon to see what the Luckett place looked like. And now that he was here his hair stood up curly all over his head like he was astonished with what he saw. It came over Sayward this must be Sunday for his boots had been freshly charcoaled and his linsey shirt was clean, though his neck and tow britches looked like neither had seen water for a long time.

His boy stood around like a lost sheep. Oh, Sayward told herself she would feed that man and boy well today, for they had no woman folks to look after them like Worth and Wyitt had. She would pick those wild pigeons and bake a deep pigeon pie in the kettle. The four youngest ones could squeeze together on the bench at the trencher. She called Genny to help. Genny told her those freshly blacked boots made her feel half naked and that’s why she had stood off a little ways with her bare legs hid by the bushes.

After dinner it rained and the young ones had to stay in the cabin. The two men moved their
stools back against the logs and filled the place with smoke from Worth’s tobacco, telling where each hailed from in the old state and how he had made his tracks through the woods. The neighbor called himself Mathias Cottle. He was a little fellow who sat up big as one should who owned a cow and a mare back on his brother’s place along the Youghiheny. But he was too full of twist and go to sit still long. His hands like those of a body with more pressing business on his mind kept cutting on the floor little squares out of a stick from his pocket. And all the time Sayward could feel his bright black eyes watching her chore around the cabin as they had watched her bare legs that day down at his improvement.

“Is her married?” he asked after while.

“Her?” Worth repeated, a little surprised, looking at Genny who was fair-skinned like Jary as a girl.

“Her!” little Mathias said, pointing his knife blade-foremost at Sayward, and she felt a strange sensation as if that blade had painlessly pierced one of her strong breasts.

Worth stared stupidly at his eldest daughter, and by his face she judged what he thought as if he had blurted it out, which he was like as not to do. He was beat out that here in this Northwest Territory where men were scarcer than birds’ teeth, a
man with an ox, a mare and a cow had looked on her for marriage. Now Sayward, he always said, was more like Jary’s sister, Beriah who could throw any boy head over tincup. The Conestoga settlement boys looked up to Beriah and told her their troubles, but when it came to walking home with a girl after meeting, it hadn’t been Beriah. No, she could go home safe alone for no man or beast would dare molest her. The girls they saw home safe, bundled up with after, and stood up in front of the dominie or squire with in time were the cunning little wenches who held their ears shut when it thundered and pressed close at the rattle of small vermin in the bushes. Once Worth had said he wondered if a strong-minded, hard-waisted girl like Beriah wasn’t like the third sex of the bees that did all the work and were neither male nor female.

“She’s not married,” he shook his head.

“Is her promised?”

“Not to my knowin’,” Worth said.

Little Mathias jumped up and went outside where they could hear him priming himself with water from the gourd at the run. He came back in and tramped up and down and it was plain when he started to talk he was full of words to tell.

“Yesterday I says to myself, Mathias, do ye need a yoke of oxen back here? I says, no, I got a ox. I says, do ye need yer mare and cart? I says, no,
they ain’t no roads back here for a mare and cart to go on. I says, Mathias, do ye need yer cow? I says, no, I ain’t got a little bitty ’un wantin’ mush and milk. I says, Mathias, do ye need a woman back here? I says, by Jeems’s cousin, that’s what I need! I kain’t cut down all these yere trees by myself.”

He flashed his eyes at Sayward but she was listening to the rain on the roof, aware that her own sisters and brother sat in a row on the bench in the firelight staring at her with respectful eyes. What the stranger boy thought she couldn’t tell, for he stayed by himself in the chimney corner.

Sometimes Worth Luckett was set in his ways as a pignut tree, and sometimes you could get no more out of him than an Indian. But it was plain that this was an unusual occasion and not lightly to be set aside. A man for his oldest girl had never showed himself before and might never again, anyhow not one with a cow, a mare and an ox to his name.

“You hear what he had to say, Saird?” he asked her.

“Oh, I heerd him all right,” Sayward told him mildly.

“Well, kain’t you say something?”

“I hardly knows him yit.”

“You don’t need to live with him tonight.”

She gazed at her father curiously.

“Oh, Pappy,” she thought, “you might hate just
a lick to see me go, for Genny is mighty young to take over a cabin and cookin’!”

She tried not to read her father’s mind too hard, for she would hate to think he had reasons of his own for wanting her married. A year and a half was mighty long time, she knew, for one like Worth to be fixed and settled in one place. But she wouldn’t like to think that all that held him now with Jary under the ground was having to get meat for his young ones’ bellies and skins to tan for their feet and trade for their backs. If she had a man it might change all that. He could off and forget to come home and they would be all right. Never would they starve or go naked, for their married sister would take them in. He would be free as a bird to wander. He could see those far places they told about where the deer had strange black tails. He could skin the striped tiger cat and the queer mountain ram that some called the bighorn. Even could he cross that far river they said was a river of flowing mud and see those Indians with blue eyes and hair yellow as a panther’s. And when he tired, he could rest in the Spanish Settlements of the Illinois and listen to the women whose talk, they said, was like singing. Oh, he would console himself by telling in his mind what presents he would fetch them home from these foreign parts: a gold ring for Genny’s white finger; a comb carved from a turtle’s back for Achsa’s black hair;
a lump of blue gold to lay in Sulie’s small hand. Presents for all would he have in his hunting shirt when he came back. But it wasn’t likely he would come back, Sayward thought, for some Spanish woman who sang when she talked would get him.

“I heerd you say,” she said politely to little Mathias, “about a goin’ to the Youghiheny this fall after your stock and fixens. Hain’t it some nice woman you know down ’ar?”

“Oh, it has plenty down ’ar. I know a fine one and her name’s Maggie Bradley,” he said.

Sayward nodded at him.

“Why don’t you make her your lawful wife and fetch her home with your stock and turnip seed? I’d like to see a nice woman away back here.”

Little Mathias looked at her but couldn’t make her out. No, you could see he thought she held herself not good enough for a man with a cow, a mare, a cart and an ox when all her father had was a cabin with a paper window. It made him stand high as a little fellow could. When the rain slacked off, he and his boy went friendly home.

They were hardly over the door log till Worth turned on Sayward.

“What’s got over you?” he grunted.

She took down a gut of bear’s oil to fry some dodgers for supper, for the company had eaten all the bread, waiting till little Mathias and his boy were plenty out of hearing.

“I’m a standin’ up with no Tom Thumb,” she told him.

“You mought not git another chance,” Worth said.

“He mought be the first,” Sayward told him. “But I have a feelin’ he ain’t the last.”

She stood there mixing meal with meat scraps, a forebearing, independent figure with the firelight playing on her long yellow braids and muscled legs that were bare above the knees.

Her father watched her through his brushy eyebrows.

“Next time I go to Hough’s, I’ll fetch you back goods for a new shortgown. You’re too old to be a runnin’ around any more like some young Injun with his backside stickin’ out.” He spoke gruffly but Sayward could see the respect in his eyes.

He meant it, she knew, but when he would remember there was no telling. So she pieced a hem on her clean shortgown that week and went down to the river to wash. The river was the oldest road through the forest there was. Big yellow butterflies traveled it all day. Now and then slow, green and gold gabby birds or some swift water birds flew up or down. The wind liked to use it, too, but this day it was calm. The only ripple in this smooth stretch moved straight across where she stood. It was like a swimming stick with its head sticking up but she knew it was only a water snake
getting tired of one side like Worth and coming over to the other. Well, she would send him back where he belonged.

She waded in driving a flock of water bugs in front of her and stopped in some sandy shallows fetched down by a run. Here it had two or three old water logs on whose mossy top it was handy to lay your clean clothes and your gourd of soft soap. River foam had piled up in between the logs, dark brown behind and light in front. It would take a miller’s bag to hold it all but little Sulie could hoist it to her back and never know it was there.

She pulled her dirty shortgown over her head and laid it on the logs. Nothing could be pleasanter than to stand here without a stitch on and feel the sand come boiling up between your legs and the whole river pushing at you downstream. Bubbles rose. Some claimed they were the breath of catfish and lamper eels in the mud, but Worth said it was the old earth herself breathing from some hollow place. The limbs covered her over here like a green roof. Down in the amber water she saw a picture of her naked body shaking soft and delicate as a young tree in the spring wind.

A porcupine nosed out of low leaves along the bank and stood peering at her with its beady black eyes.

“Go ahead and look all you like,” she said to it.
“I wouldn’t trouble to duck myself from a porkypine.”

She tied her braids up over her head and scrubbed her body well with grease and sand, rinsing it off in the fresh current. Then for a while she stood to dry, inspecting with matter-of-fact criticalness her strong breasts and hams.

Yes, she was a woman now, she told herself, a white woman in this country of the men of the Western waters. It was good enough being a woman. She didn’t know as she’d change it now, had she the chance.

CHAPTER EIGHT
SETTLEMENT