A Reckoning Read online

  Throwing on his jacket to cut the risen wind, John pushed at the door, the sun streaming in and casting his shadow in the doorway as if that were all that was left, and he set off across the early May grass, leaving the cabin his father had built with the help of a murdered slave. John was part of its story but a small part, and his chapter was done. First to the old well, abandoned when the water turned rank, but holding cold memories in the damp dark, memories of a fallen sparrow, a lost bucket, a thousand visits, a kitten’s howl. And that patch of raspberries that had lent themselves to Elizabeth’s desserts because as a very young man he had loved her for a little while, his brother’s wife. Had Benjamin been amused by that? Big half-brother had waited and watched. Big half-brother had laid his traps. But Mother Ruth should be visited in her grave under the apple tree that sheltered Dickinson ghosts.

  He looked at his field and remembered her wrestling there with the plow. Salvation through action. Grace through labor. He’d preached it on hilltops, in valleys. He’d preached in forests and spiritual deserts. What we do has consequence. He looked now at the subtle grasses furtive but stalwart, remembering how Benjamin had started with two grown men brought by Elizabeth to her marriage. Lend me your faith and I will bring us wealth. They had found two wives for those men, for such is the Lord’s mandate. In this fashion they had built up human stock and John had found a granny to take care of the babies so the young mothers could work in the fields and soon there were acres and acres of cotton and Benjamin’s growing family to be fed, and his own as well and the crops to be harvested, the soil to be worked. Each of us must live, after all. Blood brother, that land.

  Behind the great house, the barn was almost as old as his father’s cabin, its fine roofline a matter of family pride. Who in the future will appreciate this? he wondered. Even now, he could smell the strong perfume of hay. The barn all his now and he allowed himself to stand before its gray walls, its thick beams, its shingled roof and fine tamped earthen ramp. We have made something to last.

  The wagon had been rolled out from the place it had stood this past month being resurrected. The mules had been yoked; the bear had been leashed and the pony tied. All were gone but for his mare, who pawed at the ground when she heard her rider approach. Sound of familiar boots, scent of familiar skin. He was coming, bearing rope in his hands. I need your back, old girl, he said, and he climbed up the gate of her stall in his boots and swung the rope over a beam.

  32

  Reuben was holding the button fallen from John’s cape. Cape made of wool from some animal he had raised. Preacher? Them wagons movin now. Better go on down.

  Go away, old man. I sent you away! Days ago.

  Two weeks it was. Reuben pointed at the rope coiled around John’s thin neck. What that for? He held out the button like an offering.

  John sat on his mare, rope encircled. He took in air for another long minute and thought his last thoughts. You could get picked up, Reuben! The sheriff’s coming any minute. He’ll drag you off to the jail. Get away from me or they’ll find you with my dead body.

  Who want old Reuben? Can’t do nothin but pick up a button. Livin off scraps. Taters and roots. Where you spec I should go off to, Preacher? Walk up North on my bare feet?

  That’s right. You got the freedom letter. Don’t you understand that much of something? Where’s your mule?

  Don’t like his bony back to hurt my bongs.

  John blushed. He hadn’t had this much conversation with one of the workers for months. Years. Actual conversation, this was, and he said: You’d do well to take care of yourself as I said that day when I explained it to all of you in the barn. Don’t you remember what I said? You are responsible now for yourself. Nobody else will look after you.

  Member you sayin bout that. But we b’long ta some bank up the North is the true fact you never said. That the true fact that the north bank own us. So we not your to make free. We not free we runaways. Reuben opened the gate and entered the stall one step at a time, watching the rope. An you never said the truth of it that we be stolen goods.

  Now you listen here to me. John wanted to be finished, to leave this piece of earth besmirched by his brother where an old fool slave should know better than to bother a preacher’s last earthly minutes. He wanted to pray, to think back.

  Missus Lavina sittin up high on the wagon seat waitin.

  No. She isn’t.

  Wagon made by a boy not yet bearded for a papa who told him to do it.

  All right. What of it?

  A wind come up and if them wagons get blowed off the groun you not there to see it. You the preacher spose ta comfort and save. Reuben looked up at John with an expression of misplaced faith, as if the sight of his master might bring him to tears.

  John bent over the neck of his mare and pushed the old man hard in the ribs. He pulled the rope up over his head and then, seeing Reuben sprawled on the floor, reached down to pull on one old, withered hand and Reuben stumbled to his feet. Now you tell me this. Where is Emly? You tell me that! John commanded. Then I will get you a buggy for your mule. Tell me what happened that day when…

  Reuben looked up at the preacher and narrowed his eyes.

  Who got her, Reuben?

  Tennessee man name Lucas come here that day. What I know of it.

  John stared at the corner of the barn where Emly had asked him to sign his life away, remembering the hour, the light it had offered, and his heart, which even now beat defiantly. I could have…I might…

  Reuben stood by the horse, his back up straight. Heard Mister Benjamin say it.

  John laughed. And happiness flooded through him and old Reuben was cupped inside his arms astride the horse as they left the barn to find the old man’s mule. Not another gate falls open but then this lovely sky.

  33

  The Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, that natural mountain passage that pins the corners of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee to one point on the map, was the only route west. This was the road the wagons would take, driving at a pace so slow that none of them seemed to be moving but rather wavering in the eternal present, unready to cross that steep divide into a future no one could grasp. The gap, a cleft between peaks cut by rivers and beasts a million years ago, was no fit place for a vehicle. Widened by Daniel Boone in the pay of a land-grabbing company owned by a man named Henderson, the ruts and bucks and billows would soon make the wagons unfirm.

  Lavina was suffering an unparalleled guilty grief. Had she made the decision to leave in too much anger and haste? She looked ahead at the boundary of mountains and longed to turn back.

  Beyond Big Stone Gap lay the peaceful valley of Powell, where the Dickinsons and others in the train had bought and held on to and sold away hundreds upon hundreds of acres of land for the past many years. Sixty years for the Dickinsons, more than for anyone else in the train. Whether planted or plowed or forgotten, a field is the skin of the world, flesh of the earth, curried and fed by women and men and beasts. Seeds saved and planted, seeds dropped and blown. Shit of the horses and birds. Wheat and corn and flax transposing and now Lavina had turned from it, all of them, each of them, never to see it again. Her eyes traced the contours of the nearest field and then moved along the outline of Wallens Ridge, which she’d first visited with John when they were newly married and he brought her out to see the wonders of her new world, both of them mounted on horses; she was then nineteen. He said he had invented it all for her, that none of it had existed for a minute until he’d met her and prayed to the Lord to make a place seemly enough for her wedding trip. He said that she sat a horse better than any of the local girls and she had brushed-back hair that was unraveling and looked at him with appraising eyes because he was enough in those early days and for a long time after.

  There now was Sounding Gap, which the Shawnee revered as sacred because of a cave where they hid their women during battles with the Cherokee. Or so it had been told to the bride along with the added fact that this was the land the
Natives claimed as their hunting paradise. And Lavina had told her new husband that she would prefer a Heaven where there is no meal to be caught or killed or cooked. She would prefer a Heaven where the business of survival is finally put aside, and he had reached across the space between their mounts up there at the top of a windblown hill and made the sign of the cross on her lips.

  The wagon train would spend the first night near the small town of Rosehill. Hoping to engage her children in their adventure, Lavina told them that the station there had been built before their grandfather left Pennsylvania and that he surely visited the place in its fatal innocence after he stopped in Jonesville to buy his first six acres. She wiped her eyes thinking of the father-in-law she had never loved because although he was soft of voice and manner, he was never good or loving to John. Daniel had blamed both of his sons for imposing slavery on the land he had won for them and yet, while he forgave Benjamin, he expected John to be a better man because he had not had the misfortune of losing his mother in early childhood. Benjamin would always need to compensate for his loss, Daniel reasoned, but John had a God-fearing mother and no excuse for moral weakness. In Jonesville, Daniel had bought land from Frederick Jones and there Daniel and Ruth had favored Benjamin so obviously that it caused people to wonder what John had done to earn their disregard. John had perhaps taken up his ministry in order to reassure the neighbors, but parental love was even then withheld, which seemed cruel to Lavina, who had vowed to treat her children equally in spite of her tenderest feeling for Patton, who was the first to survive her birthing bed and had a gleam in his eye from the very first minute of life. Now she was taking the other three children to find that brother, taking them in the company of a group of exacting Methodists bedded down around the Rosehill Station’s fallen logs, women keeping to wagons and men lying underneath or beside those wagons with weapons close at hand. Muskets, rifles, hoes, and rakes. They were nervous and not far from home. The old family rifle was stowed under the wagon seat, but she had never fired a gun and thought Martin would not be up to the task. The gun had been put there by John as a remedy for his absence. Meanwhile Martin had his small knife. He kept it in a pouch at his waist.

  And the world announced itself. The rhododendrons were opening beside them; the azaleas were ready to burst; the birds were finding each other after a long winter of waiting. The bluebird, the waxwing, the cowbird, the flycatcher were settling down, folding up wings in newly built nests. Sounds of the night. In the morning, the world would have the scent of beginnings and the twirl of birdsong would be overpowering, but in the dark they were dreaming of what they had left rather than what was to come.

  Lavina’s back ached from the tension of driving the mules and the thin mattress she had packed brought no comfort. She missed the man who always lay beside her, although how could she ever forgive him for abandoning all of them? She missed her old bed and the door she could shut between herself and her children. Gina was lying with Electa, who was breathing hard to defy her mother’s hope of conversation. I am sorry, Lavina wanted to shout. All this fear of tomorrow, and none of us far enough from home to forget our losses and there is your poor brother, who sleeps on the ground with a bear.

  Above them an unreadable sky.

  To the stars through any difficulty, was her thought.

  In the morning the wagons reassembled in the same pattern as the day before and Lavina saw that her permanent place would be at the rear. Was it for lack of a husband that she was thus located? Was it for his betrayal in not coming or hers for leaving him behind? In any case, it seemed unseemly cruel, since skirmishes by bandits and Indians usually took place at the back of a train. But Lavina was outnumbered and as they moved slowly westward, she gazed up and up at the Cumberland barrier a thousand feet high, its sharp sides chalk white in bright sun like huge mirrors waiting to fool them into turning back. They were twenty miles from home. Men were calling to one another, horses were stamping and whinnying. Mules brayed and the cattle began to low and quiver at the sight of the hard wall of rock ahead. It was general, the foreboding, and there was no heart not quietly beating a rhythm of terror. On the right hand the sheer face of the clean precipice and on the left a sheer drop into Tennessee. Only a few of the men had ever climbed this trail twisting over sharp boulders and slick ridges, a trail barely wide enough for one wagon, which would need sufficient brakes, and there was never a sufficiency of anything except shouting and cursing and braying and bawling as they began very slowly to climb and one wooden wheeled thing slammed back into another, wheels sliding, animals pushed aside, a child tumbling out, a rending scream.

  All around the travelers meanwhile, breezes were blowing in newly leafed trees, bushes were bursting into flower while birds called out challenges. What pinned those loaded wagons to the earth as a cold wind came out of the east and the oiled tops flapped and wagons careened and one of them veered and tumbled over sideways and had to be unpacked, righted, packed again? The gap was too narrow and far too steep.

  Lavina studied the line of white-topped wagons ahead. The men were making decisions without consulting her while her mind held thoughts of capsized cargo, broken yokes, and fallen mules. Dead. Children. She heard a shout and her milch cow bawled. All of them hunted by hovering fate.

  Oh what have I done?

  John?

  She looked at Martin and gave the signal to release the brake. He was so small against the wagon, his head barely reaching the billowing top. Last in line.

  Last to climb. First to be buried if all else failed.

  34

  At the top, the Cumberland trail led straight down to the tangled ravine where a spring flowed through prickly laurel just come into flower. Descending, the wagon creaked and leaned and went slowly, slowly until the trail gradually leveled out in shoulder-high grass and thick canebrakes. It followed the line of Yellow Creek out of loyalty to the work of Daniel Boone, who had manfully cleared it, and it held promise and compromise every inch of the way. What if they scalp us? Gina asked, walking beside her exhausted sister and stumbling on her small, blistered feet. Carry me? Please?

  The Yellow Creek basin was known as the warriors’ path for good reason, since the Shawnee and Cherokee had met here to trade and hunt and make war on each other. Now the old trail led into a ravine where a sulfurous stream lost itself in deep grass and the wagons moved along its meander for one day and another and another twisting awkwardly all the way to the Cumberland River while oak, elm, pine, and poplar brightened the slopes that surrounded them warranting better things. They were moving west and north. The Cumberland ford would constitute the first test of their buoyancy and they were duly frightened and ill prepared. Who could know which wagons would float and which would sink? Who had taken such a chance before, trusting family and worldly goods to the vagaries of tar-caulked wood? The travelers spent the night before the crossing praying together, wholly exhausted, getting little sleep, hearing the river rush through undergrowth, counting belongings and frights. Some of them missed Preacher John by then, having forgotten his poor excuse for sending them off unescorted. Some of them said he would surely, certainly, definitely appear. This was the sort of thing he enjoyed, a sudden appearance after testing their faith. He would not fail them. He had ministered to them for twenty years. He had made them into a flock of believers in the word of God. He had christened them and instructed them and buried their children and parents. He had eaten at their tables and visited their sick. Preacher John, Brother John, would not abandon them for long. It was only a test. Soon he would come as a shepherd to keep them safe and escort them onward.

  Brother Borden, who was new to them, insisted on telling everyone the history of every place they touched. This place had been purchased from the Cherokee by that man named Henderson, the very man who hired Daniel Boone to cut a way through Kentucky. Henderson bought a good half of it from those Cherokees, Brother Borden affirmed, in exchange for ribbons and guns and English pounds. Made himself rich, which is
what men do in the West, where we are going, although the Shawnee never admitted to Mister Henderson’s right to such sacred territory. I tell you the ugly facts of it. It was always Shawnee versus Cherokee. And yet, where are they now? Brother Borden was sitting on moist ground at the river’s edge as he told the story. He’d lifted a rocking chair down from his wagon and set it between two granite rocks. Now the chair was sinking into land Mister Henderson had bought with a ribbon, and a small group of believers had gathered to listen to history and later to sing. Because Lavina did not know Brother Borden, when he smiled at her, she made no response. In her situation, a smile would be misinterpreted. She watched her children stand by the rocking chair to hear that the Shawnee chief Dragging Canoe had promised revenge on all future settlers. Brother Borden said: Why, even now, scalpings are pretty regular. They grab hold of your hair…But Lavina hurried across the ground, tall, angular, shoulders held back, and said: There now. That will do. And she was stunned by the thrust of anger she felt, as she had been stunned by the anger she discovered while lying in bed the night of her husband’s defection. It was new to her, this surge of unbidden rage; she was meeting a piece of herself she didn’t know. But a man who would frighten little children with stories of scalpings should be ashamed! In the dark she could feel the blood in her neck and face. There was the river at their feet and there were perhaps angry Natives ready to maim and kill and Lavina went back to her wagon and unfolded a guidebook with its biography of Daniel Boone and its description of the road he had cleared all the way to the Falls of Ohio. A land of brooks, of water, of fountains and depths, of valleys and hills, of wheat and barley. She studied the ragged campsite and wondered when the guidebook would prove itself. Wheat and barley! She wondered if John had any idea what this trip would entail in the way of hardship and admitted to herself that he knew perfectly well. He had traveled this area once before, in his youth when he had been converted by Bishop Asbery, his lifelong hero. He certainly knew how wild and unruly and unwelcoming a place it would be for his wife and children and yet he had coldly sent them away. Like Hagar, she thought, and then she thought that Patton might well have been killed by now, eaten by savages! John had always insisted that Patton would meet them somewhere along the trail. But where? There were no boundaries or even locations in this unsettled landscape. Nevertheless, John had promised. He had said things were arranged with Patton by mail, but there was no evidence that Patton received John’s letters. He had never replied. And, if they were reunited, it would be without John, who had broken the family into unequal parts and given up his role as protector and provider. Minister of the Lord no longer, but oh, if she thinks too much, she will begin to question everything.