The Hollow Tree (13 page)

“He won’t hurt you,” she soothed. “It’s Bartlett. Go along, Bartlett.” She gave him an impatient shove. “Go find George.”

Bartlett paid no attention. He rubbed happily back and forth against her legs. Tibby was whimpering now, and Jed and Noah backed away nervously — but not far. They began to jog slowly around Phoebe and Tibby, coming closer to the bear at each turn. Two other boys had left their own camp-fires and watched, at a safe distance. Phoebe recognized one of them as Tibby’s brother, Johnny. In this fashion they all progressed towards the fire, where Aunt Rachael was bent over a big pot, cooking breakfast. People everywhere were stirring up fires. The scent of wood smoke, boiling fish, and dandelion-root coffee filled the chilly air.

There was a sudden commotion over at the edge of the woods by the carts. Someone cried shrilly, “Oh, God in heaven, whatever am I to do now?”

Aunt Rachael dropped the ladle into her cooking pot and ran. With Tibby still clinging like a burr, Phoebe ran too. A small circle of people had already formed around an old man lying on the ground. His eyes were closed. A boy was sprawled over him, a crutch held tightly in one hand. The other crutch lay broken on the ground, beside them. A woman with thin grey hair hanging loose around her anguished face
was standing by them. She was wringing her hands, moaning, “What am I to do? What am I to do?” over and over again.

A red-haired woman whom Phoebe recognized as Jem Morrissay’s mother was on her knees, lifting the boy. As Aunt Rachael moved in to help, bending over the old man, she glanced around the circle quickly and saw Phoebe.

“Here, Phoebe,” she said, “you take the boy.”

Phoebe looked from Aunt Rachael to the child in her arms. “You have to get down,” she told Tibby.

“Ain’t.” Tibby sniffed.

There was no time to be gentle. Phoebe wrenched the arms from around her neck. She held the surprised child by her waist and, nose to nose, glared into her eyes. “You get down and you stand here, still as a tree.” She plunked Tibby down onto the ground, and the child stood there, unmoving, and did not make a sound.

In three steps Phoebe was beside the boy. She put her arm out for him, and he took it and let her lead him away across the clearing to the pine tree where she had spent the night. “You can sit here on my blanket,” she offered.

He gave her a swift, distrustful glance and looked away.

“Do … do you think I mean to harm you?”
She felt the sting of tears behind her eyes. Even this child in pain distrusted her.

“It isn’t that. It’s my grandpa.” The boy gulped. Phoebe put her hand out to touch his thin shoulder. He flung it off. He propped himself against the tree and, under the guise of straightening his breeches, began to rub his weak leg.

“Jonah! Jonah! How come you was a-lyin’ on top of yer grandfer?” Tibby had not stayed where Phoebe had stood her for more than a minute. Her eyes were bright with excitement.

“How come you got to ask questions?” The boy turned back to Phoebe. “Please …?”

“But why was you?” Tibby danced up and down in front of him.

“Scat, you ugly little toad,” he muttered, all the while surreptitiously rubbing his leg.

Phoebe watched the boy anxiously. She saw that, while both his legs were very thin, the right one was also twisted. She could see, too, that his face, under the shaggy black hair, was as grey as his grandfather’s. She got down on her knees to look at his leg, although she didn’t have the first idea what to look for.

He shifted it away. “Don’t mind it,” he mumbled. “Please. Grandpa.” He couldn’t say any more, but the agony in his eyes said it for him.

“I’ll find out how he is.” Phoebe got to her feet. “Wait here.”

Jonah’s grandfather was sitting up, leaning against one of the carts. His face was still drained of colour, his breathing heavy, but he was struggling to get up while Aunt Rachael, Jem’s mother, and Tibby’s mother tried to get him to drink some fish broth. The grey-haired woman who had been moaning and wringing her hands was still lamenting. “Oh, how could God have visited this woe on a poor widow? Thrown out into the cold wilderness with only a crippled son and an aged father-in-law to protect me, and now the old man is sick.” Her voice rose. “Oh, dear God, how am I to manage?” She looked around her as if to discover someone to be responsible. Something in her pinched, discontented face told Phoebe that this woman always meant someone else to be responsible for what happened to her.

“There now, Charity Yardley.” Jem’s mother patted the distraught woman’s hand, her own cheerful, round face creased in a sympathetic frown. “He’s comin’ along right smart.”

“Oh, dear God, all the way from Bennington I knew, I just knew this would happen. I told him to stay back, he would have one of his spells, I knew he would. They wouldn’t have troubled a feeble old man like him.”

“Like as not the old man’s paid his way lookin’ after the kid,” a voice muttered behind Phoebe. She recognized Jem Morrissay’s deep
voice. She wanted to turn, to say something to him, but she remembered the disgusted look he had given her the night before, after Anne had told everyone about her father being a rebel, and she didn’t want to see that look on his face again.

“See here, woman, we got no time for such carryin’ on. Stiffen up!” Tibby’s large mother pushed both Rachael and Mistress Morrissay aside with a sweep of an arm. She stood in front of Charity Yardley, her hands on her hips.

“You can count on Bertha Anderson to give a body what for,” Jem Morrissay said with a chuckle in Phoebe’s ear.

Encouraged by that chuckle, Phoebe turned her head to smile back at him, but as she caught his eye he frowned and shouldered past her to help his mother with Jonah’s grandfather. She felt as though she had been slapped. Jem’s eyes had darkened with scorn. He still doubted her, still believed she had lied to him.

She started after him, then halted abruptly. There was no time for talk. There was Jonah. She ran back across the clearing to reassure the thin little boy, still propped against the pine tree, craning his neck in an effort to catch sight of his grandfather. Tibby was with him. So were Jed, Noah, and the two other small boys she had seen before the accident.

“Phoebe! Phoebe! You got George, you got George!” Jed was doing his best to climb up into
the pine tree where George was perched, his tail swinging back and forth ominously.

“You’d best leave him, Jeddy. Jonah, your grandfather is all right. Mistress Morrissay and my aunt Rachael are looking after him. I collect you may be hurt worse than he is. I think someone had better look at your leg. My uncle Josiah has a little knowledge of medicine.”

“There’s no need.” Jonah flushed. “I’ll be right enough.”

“But not right enough for walking this morning.”

“No, Miss.” He paused then went on in a low voice, “and I don’t rightly know what Ma’s going to say, either.”

Phoebe thought about Mistress Yardley and said nothing. She did not know what to do for Jonah. She knew to use puff-ball spores for wounds, feverfew for fevers, jewel weed for ulcers, sweet flag for coughs and the like, but she could not cure his distress. She did not know what to do for herself either. It had seemed simple that moment by Lake Champlain when she had decided to follow Jem, to find his mother and Mistress Anderson. Now she would go with them, and with her aunt and uncle and her cousins, to the British Fort St. John’s in Canada. She would deliver Gideon’s message there. Even though it was too late to save the Andersons and Morrissays and Collivers, it might not be too
late to deliver the coded message to General Powell, or to whoever was in charge at Fort St. John’s. She would not break faith with Gideon.

And in Canada she would be safe from the kind of people who had tortured and murdered their neighbours, who so cruelly uprooted families, who had hanged Gideon. But last night. Last night! These people, these refugees who had been treated so badly by the rebels, had looked at her as though they wanted to hang her. How could she travel to Canada with them? Jem had been right when he’d said she must be addled — addled with grief and the stubborn need to deliver Gideon’s message! But if she wanted to reach this fort, even though it might prove as unpromising as Ticonderoga, she had no choice but to travel with people who considered her an enemy.

Not all of them thought she was an enemy, not Aunt Rachael or Uncle Josiah or Jed or Noah. Maybe not Tibby’s mother. And here was this bony, black-haired boy with his large, fierce dark eyes. He couldn’t be more than nine or ten years old. He was hurt, crippled, his mother had said, and she did not want to look after him. But who would look after him? Would he quietly fall by the wayside and die when no one was paying him any attention? Could she leave him to that fate?

“Jonah,” she said, “do you think you might
be able to walk if you were to use your crutch for your good leg and lean on me for your poor one — until the poor one is a bit better and your other crutch is mended? You might keep pace with everyone, then, mightn’t you?”

“No, he mightn’t!” cried Tibby, “No, he mightn’t!”

“Why ever not?”

“Can’t lean on you. You gots me to look after.”

“No, I haven’t. You have your mother to look after you.”

“Ain’t my mother. I’m a orphant. Pa got strung up ’n’ Ma died in the fire. Miz Anderson took me up. Me ’n’ Betsy Parker a-cause her pa’s off in the war ’n’ her ma’s dead, too.”

Phoebe sat down. She looked at the hurt, angry bit of a human being standing before her, fists clenched, wispy hair hanging around her thin face, pale eyes full of tears she would not shed.

“I am an orphan, too, Tibby. So I’d be glad to have you come along with me when we start walking.”

On the Move

A
unt Rachael was more than willing to share the family’s breakfast of beans and corn-meal samp with Jonah and Tibby. Not so Jed and Noah. They were happy enough to have Jonah by their fire but objected loudly — and in unison — that “that little girl should go be with her own mama.” And Anne — Anne walked away and refused to eat breakfast “with the traitor clothed like a squaw.” Phoebe was desolate, not only because Anne despised her but because of how she looked. Anne, who had always managed a bit of lace on her white kerchief, a bit of bright ribbon for her hair, had no kerchief tucked into the neck of her blouse; her gown was dirty and there were tears in it. And Anne’s hair, which had always been freshly washed though she had to help herself to the water
heated for the laundry to do it, now hung in limp, dirty hanks, and there was no ribbon.

Phoebe looked towards the carts, where her cousin stood facing away from everyone, her back hunched miserably. In that one moment she couldn’t help but think that Anne despised herself, too. The moment passed, but it left a kinder feeling towards her cousin, a feeling of sympathy she hadn’t been able to manage the night before when Rachael had pleaded for it. She turned back to her aunt and uncle and the boys in a better mood. Uncle Josiah had returned from his morning wash in the brook. He smiled vaguely at Phoebe, but did not seem to recognize her. With a pang of horror, she understood what Aunt Rachael had meant when she’d said Uncle Josiah was “badly shaken” by what had happened. He had retreated into himself, where he could not be reached.

She wanted to comfort him, but she couldn’t think how. What she could do, if she meant to make herself useful, to become someone to be trusted, was look after Tibby and Jonah along with Jed and Noah. She left Bartlett and George with the children and went to see Bertha Anderson. She offered to keep Tibby by her throughout the journey to Fort St. John’s.

“Well, I declare I don’t mind if you do.” The big woman’s face eased into an expression that was almost a smile. “Here, then, you’ll need her
duds, such as they are, and I expect I’ll need to give you a bit of vittles so’s the mite can eat. Mind, it’s fer Tibby Thayer. I ain’t supplyin’ the what-fers for that Yardley lad I see you took on. Them Green Mountain folk can look after their own.”

As she talked, Bertha Anderson rummaged among the bundles in her ox cart and came up with a small shawl-wrapped parcel, and a tin bucket into which she put a few handfuls of corn-meal. “There. Now you passel that out good ’n’ careful on accounta it’s all I got to give you. And, if you’re some kind of rebel spy, which I suspicion you ain’t on account of your auntie bein’ such a good woman, and you causes harm to that mite, may God Almighty see you gets what’s comin’ to you. I got no special love fer that bothersome Tibby Thayer, it’s true, but her ma ’n’ pa was God-fearin’ folk, rest their souls, and I don’t want to see her bad done by.”

Phoebe mumbled a thank you, took Tibby’s bundle and the tin bucket, and hurried away before Bertha Anderson could give her the other little girl, whose name she thought she remembered as Betsy. It’s a whole village full of names to remember, she thought as she went to find Mistress Yardley.

Charity Yardley, without a word, extracted from the belongings in her cart a pair of breeches, a shirt, one thin wool blanket, and a faded red
Monmouth cap. “And he’ll have to make do with the stockings he has because the old man needs the spare pair.” She sniffed. “Oh, I am sore beset.”