To Make My Bread (3 page)

In the cove as far as he could see on every side there were mountains. If he climbed Thunderhead with Emma and Bonnie and looked far away there were still mountains upon mountains. At times they looked so vast and heavy he would turn away from them and put his head to the ground to smell the black earth. If he turned clear around on his heel down in the clearing that was what he saw—hills reaching into the sky.

One day he stood outside the cabin in the hot sunshine. The sky was an even blue. It was a quilt with a yellow calico sun. On rainy days John and Bonnie sometimes played a silly game that Bonnie had made up. They sat on the bed across from each other and made a sort of cabin by holding a quilt over their heads. When their arms were tired they let the quilt come down and sat in the darkness, pretending great fear.

John felt that the sky was a quilt and the mountains piled up on each other were big children sitting close together, bent over, holding up the quilt with their shoulders. He wondered what would happen if the big children got tired and let the quilt loose from their shoulders, so it came down on the cove and covered the cabin and clearing. It would be dark. The dark would come suddenly as Emma had told him it came the afternoon before he was born. He thought, if the dark came down like that in summer, he would run into the cabin. Granpap would be there and could play the fiddle as he did on long winter evenings.

Granpap came back from his last trip that summer with money in his pocket. He gave most of it to Emma who put the nickels and quarters away in the gourd on the chimney shelf. John liked to stand on a chair and shake the gourd to hear the money clink. As he was feeling around on the shelf he found Granpap's rosin and put it to his nose. It smelled dusty and stale, not like new rosin just out of a pine. But he sniffed at it again.

“If I had the fiddle,” he told Bonnie, “I could play ‘Big-Eyed Rabbit.' ”

Bonnie looked at the fiddle hanging on the south wall and then at John. She did not believe he would dare to touch it.

“You wouldn't,” she said, and sucked in her cheeks making a rabbit mouth at him. Her proud wriggling nose angered John. He had not yet learned to make a rabbit mouth, and Bonnie knew she was superior to him. He felt that he must show her there were things he could do that she would never dare attempt.

He lifted a chair over to the wall under the fiddle. The rabbit mouth left Bonnie's face and she watched him with her mouth wide open. He saw her wonder and admiration and felt that everything was right again.

Down in the chair he laid the fiddle across his knees, and rubbed the rosin up and down the bow. The tow hair hanging across his forehead swung back and forth as he moved his arm. Then he took up the instrument and the bow, but found that he could not manage both. So he began tuning as he would a banjo. First he twanged a string timidly and turned a peg. The string whined at them. The first trial was so successful, the little whine that came from the string was so queer, he tried again. This time he was not so timid; and the second and third times the string hummed quite loud.

“Do it again,” Bonnie said. “Do it again.” She shut her mouth tight and made a sound through her nose like the fiddle. John curved his finger hard and brought it across the string. This was too much. With a snap the gut broke across and the ends curled back with tiny protesting whines.

“Now!” Bonnie said. She looked up at the door. Granpap was standing there. He had heard the sound of the fiddle out in the clearing. His anger was terrible. Bonnie held to the chair John was sitting on. She was afraid to move, though she would have liked to run away.

“For that,” Granpap said to John. “You can stay down and pull fodder when we go up for the logs.” He was really distressed, for a new string cost money and must be ordered by Hal Swain from the outside. In his distress and anger Granpap had hurt John in a most vulnerable place. The boy had looked forward so long to helping with the new room.

During the next day John sulked by himself. While Emma and Bonnie were grabbling potatoes, he sat on a corn row down in the patch. The stalks of corn hid him from his mother and sister. Each time he heard the ax bite into the wood up on the side of the mountain he felt grieved again. The sound came down clear into the cove. It came down one blow immediately after another, for Granpap had borrowed a second ax. The ax sounds came flat and mournful. They seemed to come flat across John's belly and make it ache. He sat hunched over and felt very melancholy and sorry for himself as he looked up at the side of the mountain where Basil and Kirk were working with Granpap. A tree cracked up there and began to fall. He saw its top move among the other trees. There was no breeze and all the other trees were still. Only this one swayed a little, then sank down gently with a sound like water falling over a rock cliff.

All morning John hid himself in the cove. When dinner was ready inside Emma called and sent Bonnie to look through the corn patch. John was not there. He had gone to hide out like a dog when it is sick.

Early next morning the little boy was in front of the cabin, lolling carelessly on the woodblock. He pretended that he was indifferent to everything and everybody. But underneath was the hope that if Granpap saw him he would say, “Come, John.” Granpap did see him. But he and the boys went by without a word. Even Kirk who usually had some word for John was silent. He was at the moment wearing the red bird feather John had found in the woods and given him for the band of his old felt hat. But he did not say to Granpap, “Take John.” He walked past without looking.

The evening before John had seen Granpap eying the corn patch that he had not touched. If it was necessary to work the corn patch he would do it. Then they might give him some notice, when they found he could work like any of them.

So he worked all day at the fodder. And when he saw the strips tied to the corn stalks that evening and knew that his arms and hands had done the work, he felt proud.

“What are you scared of?” he asked himself when he thought of begging Granpap to take him up next day. “He can't kill ye.”

The next morning he walked up to Granpap. To his own surprise instead of begging he lifted up his face that did not reach to the old man's belly and said, “I'm a-going with you to-day, Granpap.” His mouth was stretched in a wide grin, but there was no real laughter in him. He was really afraid.

Granpap turned away to eat his breakfast. And John felt the same weight on himself that he had felt on the first day. He had tied the fodder. His arms ached from stretching up to the corn stalks. And it was no good.

Granpap finished his coffee and got his ax from the corner of the cabin. John watched him. He was going away without a word, like the day before. Of course John had not finished all the corn, but half of it. At the door Granpap turned his head and said, “Come along, Son,” to John. It was as if he had been holding the ax over John's neck to chop it off, and had suddenly lifted it away. John rushed after the others and followed them up the mountain in the fresh morning air.

For several days after this they chopped down the trees and lopped off their branches, making them into good, even logs. While Granpap and the boys took turns in whacking at a tree John played in the woods with the two dogs. He was hunting bears, and each time the dogs caught a scent, or pretended to, John followed them, and joined in their excited search. Sometimes the dogs lost the scent or simply got tired of playing, or John felt they were going too far from the sound of the axes. Then he would call the dogs and go back to Granpap, for he must be there to watch each tree when it fell. He liked the moment when Granpap and Kirk or Basil, whichever one was helping, stood away from the tree. There would be a still second. Then the crack of the wood breaking in half came. John was never tired of hearing that sound and feeling the excitement that came when the great tree fell straight down the slope. It swished against the air and its branches brushed against the branches of the other trees that were still intact. Down the broken tree came and slid away from the trunk before it came to rest on its under branches a little distance above the ground.

When there were enough logs cut they began hauling them down with a steer hired from Swain. The boys chopped out a runway in the bushes where the trees were thinnest. The steer was hitched to one end of the log by chains. With a long branch of sweet gum tree for a whip, John walked just behind the ox and yelled, “Get up, there,” in his deepest voice. The chains clanked as the brown and white beast stooped and strained to pull the log that bumped over the uneven ground. When it caught on a bush or stob Granpap and the boys lifted and heaved it over. At the runway John came back and helped the others push the log around into place for going down hill.

Here the whip was of no use. Kirk got hold of the halter and held back to keep the ox from going on its head. Granpap and Basil took the rope tied to the other end of the log.

“Get behind,” Granpap said to John. “And when I say pull—pull the rope like all hell was after ye.”

Looking down between Granpap's legs along the log John saw the ox plant its feet in the soft earth of the mountain; and each time its feet braced, the hindquarters came up slowly. At a slippery wet place Granpap called, “Pull!” and the boy braced his feet deep down against a stob of laurel bush, and as he bent over, like the ox his hindquarters came slowly up. He watched Basil and Granpap, and just as they did, he let the rope go from his hands gradually, so the log would not slide down on to the backside of the steer.

Toward midday they had several logs alongside each other on the trail. The steer, freed from the chains and watered at the stream below, bent its forelegs and lay down with a long grunt.

Granpap was satisfied with the morning's work. He lit his pipe and gave Basil and Kirk a share of tobacco. He hoped in another year they would have a steer of their own. Somehow money went fast and it was hard to save up for a beast, when there was so little to begin with. And Granpap liked folderols. He liked to bring candy from Swain's on Saturday nights for the young ones. Once he bought a ball for John, and Emma scolded—when they needed meal, she said, and coffee.

But they had a cabin and the land around it. Nothing could take that from them. Granpap looked down the trail to the cabin. The lower props were already up for the new room and this was something to have pride in.

He remembered when he had lost his own cabin and land and how he had felt of no account.

“You're free men,” he said to the boys, “so long as you've got your own potato patch and house and a gun. The house might not be fine. When I was down in Georgy I saw some fine places with windows you could see through, and the houses painted. But I wouldn't swap them for what we've got if I didn't own.”

At fourteen Granpap ran away from his stepfather. He went over South Range to the outside and joined up to fight in the war that was going on out there. He was big for his age and the Confederates were glad to get him.

“I wouldn't change with anybody,” he repeated. “Long as I'd got my piece of land and a roof.”

Basil was sixteen, almost grown, and he understood about Granpap. The old man had let someone cheat him out of the Kirkland land so that in the end he had nothing. And Basil thought, “Granpap couldn't keep what he had. And this isn't his. It's McClure land.”

Basil did not know that at the time he was cheated Granpap had oiled his shot gun, ready for Tate, the man who cheated him. Then word had come that Jim McClure was dead and Emma wished for him to come. Perhaps because he was getting older and perhaps because of Emma, Granpap changed the form of his revenge. He loaded a gun with small shot and when the occasion rose, as it did while Tate was climbing a trail to the big still on the mountains, Granpap, hidden behind some bushes, filled Tate's backside with shot.

He could still enjoy a secretive chuckle when he thought of that time. For Tate had been obliged to lie in bed face down on his fat belly. And when he got up, for many days he was forced to stand at the table to eat. And while others were sitting comfortably in chairs by the fire, he whose comfort had always come first must stand up and nurse his sore backside.

B
Y
November the new room was finished. Frank McClure and Jim Martin came over to help with splitting the logs and laying them. There was a passageway between the two rooms with a split-log flooring. Inside the small place were two beds in opposite corners. Emma's bed in the other room had a head board and foot. It had belonged to the Kirklands. These were built in. Granpap had nailed two posts to the floor the right distance from the wall and enclosed them with split logs on three sides. Underneath small saplings nailed close together made the bottoms.

“If the dogs don't get too many fleas in them, you'll sleep sound,” Emma said to Granpap. They were looking at the beds, and watching while John and Bonnie brought in dried grass for mattresses. The boys had gone to Swain's for cotton to fill the new quilts.

John leaned against the bed nearest the door and spat on the floor. He was close to being a man.

“Bring in some more straw,” Granpap said to him. “Hit's got to be high as your belly and higher.”

“I wish,” he told Emma, “we could have a window in the other room with glass.”

John, just going out the door, stopped to listen.

“Pap,” Emma said sharply. She had seen that wishing look in Granpap's face before and when he had too much to drink there was no telling what he might do. “We've got doors,” she said.

“There was one in a book at Swain's,” Granpap went on. “Hit costs s' little.”

Emma caught her breath. Granpap could not understand how they needed money for food. A man did not watch the meal get lower in the bag and wonder where money for the next lot would come. He didn't see the slab of fatback get smaller until there was just a greasy end left for boiling with cabbage. And then no more.