The Hollow Tree (12 page)

Holding tight to Rachael’s hand, Phoebe had gazed intently into her face, its pained expression evident in the light of the fire. Haltingly, she had confessed to Rachael that she had been sure, from the moment she had agreed to take Gideon’s letter to Polly Grantham, that she should not have done it.

“If I had not taken that letter, he would not have gone near the village; he would be alive and you would not be out here in the cold forest.
Anne was right, even though she didn’t know why. It’s all my fault, all of it.”

Phoebe had been trembling when she said those words, in part from the misery she felt at what she had done, in part from the relief of having told Aunt Rachael. Rachael had wrapped her arms around Phoebe and held her close.

“You must not believe that. It is not true, Phoebe. Gideon ought not to have been in Hanover for you to find him there. He ought not to have written to ask Polly Grantham to meet him. He ought not to have asked you to deliver his letter. You are not guilty of those acts. You ought not to have taken it upon yourself to deliver the message you found in the tree, but you were grieving, and Anne ought not to have blamed you for what happened, but she, too, was grieving.”

“I know, Aunt Rachael. I know how Anne is. Only,” Phoebe had said in a small voice, “I thought she would get over it and she hasn’t — she still believes it was my fault. And she believes that I am a rebel because Papa was.”

Rachael had sighed. “Try to be patient with Anne, Phoebe. Do you know, she is so like your mother. Your mother, my sister, was as pretty as Anne — that same fair hair and those same violet eyes, and, I fear, that same coquettish manner. And your mother, too, you may as well know, was inclined to think of herself before she
thought of others, but she was a loving soul and so is Anne. Anne loved her brother and, although you may doubt it just now, she loves you. I think that you and Gideon were anchors for Anne’s mercurial nature. She has not said so, but I think it grieved her sorely that Gideon did not find a way to see her when he stole into the village to see Polly. And then you left us in the night, without a word.”

Phoebe understood jealousy. She remembered how she had felt when Gideon had called Polly the dearest girl in all the world. But, as for Anne grieving over her departure, she did not quite believe that, not with Anne still calling her a traitor and refusing to speak to her. But she had said nothing. Instead she had taken from her sleeve the worn linen pocket containing the silk-covered paper that had brought her all this distance from home. She and Rachael had crouched by the fire, their heads close, and in the flickering light they had puzzled over the coded words directed to the General at Fort Ticonderoga, and together read the message about the Loyalist families from New York.

“But these are the people we came upon this very day,” Rachael had exclaimed, “Peggy Morrissay and her small daughter — the boy James you came with is her son — Abigail Colliver and her two little ones, and Bertha Anderson and her three. Just today. How strange!”

She had told Phoebe, then, how Elihu Pickens and his Committee of Public Safety had come to their door the night after they had buried Gideon — late, after they had all gone to bed.

“I feared they would come. So I had put by provisions and blankets, a few spare clothes, our family bible, a cooking pot and dishes. I packed them all in the big carved chest that was my mother’s — your grandmother’s. We had our ox and cart, and they let us take one cow. Your uncle Josiah has a cousin living just outside Bennington on this side of the mountains, so we went south along the Connecticut River to Fort Dummer, then west to Bennington along the waterways through the woods. We learned quickly to keep from the roads. That’s when we saw Peter Sauk’s sister wearing your cloak. We were too frightened to go near them and, I suppose, Peter did not know who we were.” Rachael shook her head sadly. “I wish Peter could have told you about me. He meant to try to see you,” said Phoebe. “People were not kind. It took two weeks. But Cousin Robinson was not pleased to see us. Being a God-fearing man and strong in the church” — Aunt Rachael had permitted herself a wry smile — “he took us in, but he said it would be impossible for us to stay. He saw to it that we were provisioned, but he kept the cow in payment. So we came north from there, keeping out of the way of villages,
keeping to the woods west of the high mountains. A few times we met people. Some were kind, even offering shelter in a barn or old cabin, but most turned their heads from us, and more than once people jeered and called us names. A gang of rowdies threw mud and stones at us — we were frightened. Even Jed and Noah were subdued! But the heart of Providence was with us, for the noise of their shouting startled a family of deer from the bushes and the villains went after them. Not far from the battlefield at Hubbardton, we came upon a skeleton with enough scraps of scarlet cloth and a silver gorget to identify it as having been a British officer. We-hadn’t a shovel with which to give it Christian burial, but your uncle read the service over it from the Book of Common Prayer and we prayed for its poor soul.

“Two days ago, by the Lemon Fair River south of here, we met Charity Yardley, her son, and her father-in-law, Thomas and Margery Bother and their boy, and Joseph and Lucy Heaton — all Vermonters from near Bennington who’d suffered the same fate as we. We decided to join forces, hoping that the old adage ‘safety in numbers’ would prove true. Only this morning, we came upon the refugees from New York. They had suffered much. Two of the women have husbands fighting with Loyalist regiments. The third’s husband has been dragged off to
prison. One of their brothers was hanged before their very eyes when he would not divulge the whereabouts of his landlord to a troop of rebel soldiers, and a neighbour was tarred and feathered.”

“Aunt Rachael” — Phoebe was close to tears — “I should have been with you. I could have helped you, I could have helped with the boys. It must have been so hard!”

“What is done, is done,” said Rachael firmly. “Now, Phoebe, we have talked enough, and wept enough, for one weary night. Let us have a prayer and then we must sleep.” Together they bowed their heads while Rachael thanked God for Phoebe’s return to the family, asked His blessing on their journey, and prayed for Phoebe’s father, for Gideon, and for the others who had died in the war.

Phoebe had not slept at once. She had lain beside the sleeping bear and cat, listening to the wind in the high branches of the pine tree, to the long cry of a wolf, the bark of a fox, a screech owl’s insistent hooting, thinking about all she and Rachael had said to each other. Now, in the morning, she was thinking again about all the Robinson family had suffered. She was not entirely reassured by Rachael’s telling her that none of what had happened was her fault. She knew she would carry to her grave, even if she lived to be a hundred, the conviction that if she
had not taken Gideon’s letter to Polly Grantham he might not have had to die, and that Aunt Rachael, Uncle Josiah, Anne, and the children might still be living at home in Orland Village. Anne’s hysterical words still ran over and over in her head, the words she had screamed when they stood by Gideon’s body hanging from the Liberty Tree, the words she had screamed only last night: “It’s your fault! You’re one of them! You should be dead!”

One of them. And those other people, those Loyalist families she had failed to save, and the Vermonters, too, thought she was a rebel, a spy. If they really thought she was a spy, a girl who wasn’t quite fifteen years old, mightn’t they hang her as quickly and without question as those men had hanged Gideon? She swallowed back a sudden lump of fear and clenched her fists. How they hated rebels for what they had done. How could they not? But she was not a rebel — or a Loyalist either.

I don’t know what I am, she thought unhappily.

She made herself take a slow, deep breath and, when she had calmed herself a little, she sat back against the tree and surveyed her surroundings. In the morning light she could see that the clearing was small, not more than fifty yards across, an open space between a brook and a spruce-and-cedar swamp to the east, a low hill
rising protectively to the south, and the woods through which she and Jem Morrissay had come to the west and north. Filled with those great tree stumps, the clearing was obviously man-made, probably by someone meaning to settle, Phoebe decided, but likely discouraged because it was so swampy.

At the hill edge of the clearing was a narrow path leading north. Beside the path there were four ox carts. Near them, four oxen and two cows stood impassively on the frozen ground. Phoebe looked down where Bartlett and George slept by her side. There was comfort in the quiet animals, so unconscious of the trouble people made for themselves.

In the soft dawn light, the jagged stumps were blurred at their edges. The thin snow and the frost on the tall grass, and the dry leaves on the sumac and honeysuckle by the verge of the swamp, glistened as the first rays of the sun touched them. Nearby a woodpecker began his rattling peck-peck-peck. Holding herself motionless, Phoebe looked for him in the tamarack tree by Aunt Rachael’s head. She couldn’t see him, but she did notice that the tamarack had lost its golden needles. Winter was not far off.

A frail-looking old man got up from his fire on the other side of the clearing and hobbled into the woods. Bartlett groaned and rolled over onto Phoebe’s feet. George rose, yawned,
stretched, glared at Bartlett, and walked off. Phoebe needed to go off into the woods to pee, too. And wash. She yearned for Aunt Rachael’s copper tub in front of the kitchen fire, although, she realized, with some surprise, that she had gotten so used to living in Katsi’tsiénhawe’s leggings and tunic that she hardly felt dirty any more.

Other people began to stir. A big woman covered by an enormous green surtout stood up over near the ox carts, the woman who had thrown the water over Anne. She jammed a broad-brimmed felt hat onto her head over the bedraggled mob-cap she was wearing and at the same time began at the top of her voice to order the small children stirring by the ashes of her fire: “Johnny, go fetch a jug of water. Betsy, let that child be. What are you a-bawlin’ about, Tibby? I declare you was give to me jest to see if I was good enough to be made into a saint.” It was not only a loud voice, it was a rough voice. It woke everyone in camp. One of the children began to cry. The woman yanked her to her feet. She looked over at Phoebe.

“Here, you, bear girl,” she shouted, “come and give a hand with this kid. You might better make yourself handy. We got no time for slackards on this here jauntin’ party.”

Phoebe was too surprised to refuse. She took a quick look at where Jed and Noah still
slept, then hurried across the ground to the woman’s side.

“Take her,” the woman commanded. “Just lift her up ’n’ cart her off. I ain’t got time to be watchin’ what them kids is up to all the time. Spy or no spy, I don’t figger you’ll harm the little ’uns. Now you, Betsy, you mind.” She reached down and pulled another little girl from where she’d been hiding in the folds of the big, green surtout. Phoebe took the wailing child by the hand.

Not ceasing to wail for an instant, the child darted a ferocious glance at Phoebe and snatched her hand back. Phoebe picked her up and she began to writhe and to wail louder. But Phoebe was bigger, and the weeks in the woods had made her not only thin, but strong. She carried the child to where her kicks would not land on someone’s head. “You’ll do, now,” she said, and set the child on her feet, but she kept a firm grip on her hand. Tibby — that was what her mother had called her — was small and probably not more than three or four years old, but she was wiry and she was determined to get away. Phoebe held tight, relieved that, in her struggle, Tibby had stopped crying.

“Come. We’ll go find water and wash the tears from your face.”

“Don’t ’ont to.”

“Do you want to go back and fight with your sister?”

“Ain’t my sister.”

“Well, do you want to go fight with her anyway?” Phoebe was losing patience.

“Ain’t goin’.”

At that moment Jed and Noah Robinson came charging towards Phoebe, their arms outstretched. They grabbed her, each by a leg, all but throwing her to the ground.

“Phoebe!” shouted Noah, “You don’t know where we’ve been! You don’t—”

“It’s like Robinson Crusoe in your book, Phoebe,” Jed’s excited words drowned out his brother. “We was—”

“We was riding in the cart and then we walked and walked and we—”

“We saw Papa’s cousin. He—”

“He was a sour old man and—”

“But we didn’t stay there because we liked the cart better, but Anne cried and cried and—”

“And I’m glad to see you and we are all together.” Phoebe barely managed to talk above them. She got down on her knees and hugged them both.

“Yes, but we thought you was dead. Papa said a lot of prayers, and Mama said you were with Gideon, and Anne said she—”

“And Phoebe, Phoebe, Gideon got ha—”

“I know, Jeddy, I know.”

“Mine,” said Tibby. She gave the boys a hard shove, one and then the other. “Mine,” she
repeated. She wrapped her arms and legs around Phoebe. The boys thought this was a good game and began to climb on Phoebe’s back.

“Boys!” she tried to make her voice stern, but she was too glad to see them, and she laughed. She reached behind her to pry them loose. Finally she found the word that worked. “Breakfast,” she said, and the boys slid off her back. She stood up. Tibby was not so easily shaken loose. She locked her legs around Phoebe’s ankles, her arms around her knees.

“Have done!” Phoebe demanded, but Tibby was so small and so spindly, her arms and legs no thicker than the rungs of Aunt Rachael’s keeping-room chairs. Dressed in an old grey linsey-woolsey skirt that had obviously belonged to a much bigger child, a man’s weskit that almost came down to her ankles, and a tattered shirt, she was so pathetic Phoebe could not be too impatient with her.

“You are a bindweed, Tibby, to wind yourself about my ankles. How can I walk?” Tibby stared at her, unblinking.

Noah took Phoebe’s hand possessively. “This is
our
cousin,” he declared. With his other hand he tried to pull Tibby away, just as Bartlett came and shoved his cold black snout between Tibby and Phoebe’s legs. Tibby shrieked. Frantically she tried to climb up Phoebe’s legs. Phoebe lifted her into her arms.