The Hollow Tree (5 page)

The Message

T
he note on Gideon’s shirt fluttered in the morning breeze. Someone behind Phoebe screamed. Fists pounded on her back. The screaming was in her ears, words she didn’t understand. She made herself turn around. Anne’s face was red and twisted, her eyes wide, her mouth wider, and her voice one high shriek. Anne’s fists came at her face.

“You did this. You and your father and his rebel friends! You did this. You miserable traitor. It’s all your fault!” Her screams rose higher and higher. Her fists pounded and pounded on Phoebe’s face, her chest, her arms. Phoebe was so stunned she could not even think to put her hands up to protect herself. The shrill, almost inhuman sound went on and on. “You did it! You did it! Go away from here and never come back! Go! Go! Go!”

Someone pulled Anne away from her. Phoebe raised her head. She looked around her at her cousin, at all the other people, with a feeling of such distance it was as though she had never seen any of them before, the tall woman standing so stiff and still, her face as grey as wood ash; the thin, trembling man, clinging to her sleeve, the little boys, their faces, so white, lifted to the lifeless body on the tree, the thrashing, screaming girl, her arms held behind her by someone’s strong hands; the silent crowd behind them. A shattering sob began somewhere inside Phoebe. She spun around, then ran as though the vengeance of God were chasing her along the road and down the hill. She stopped when suddenly she found the river at her feet. She threw herself down at the foot of the big willow tree. Great wracking sobs shook her until she had not the strength for any more. Then she crawled to the edge of the river. She splashed her face over and over again and then drank the clear, cold water. She drew a deep, shuddering breath. She sat by the water, trying to take in all that had happened, but all she could think of, all she could see, was Gideon’s body hanging from the Liberty Tree.

“If only I had said I wouldn’t take the letter to Polly Grantham,” she moaned over and over, rocking back and forth in an agony of grief and guilt. “I knew it wasn’t safe. He said that himself,
‘It’ll be my death if I am found.’ Oh, Gideon!” She put her head down on her knees and wept again.

Much later, and only gradually, she began to hear the sounds of the world around her: the soft chirping of finches and chickadees, the gentle washing of the river against the shore, the insistent chattering of a squirrel, the cawing of crows. She lifted her head and saw that the sun was well up in the sky. There was a stiff breeze, making the tender, supple willow branches sway and wafting the odour of fish from the river. Phoebe realized that she was cold. She tucked her feet under her and wiped the tears on her face with her sleeve. She looked up at the big red squirrel sitting on a low branch of the tree. His tail was twitching and he was scolding angrily.

“Hello, Constant.” Phoebe sighed. “Why are you scolding me? There’s naught in your house to fret about — not anymore. Look, I’ll show you.” She thrust her hand into the hollow. Her fingers touched something that was not Constant’s stash of nuts. Surprised, she pulled it out. It was a tiny silk packet — small enough to fit into a walnut shell, she thought. She reached her hand into the hollow again and felt around. There was another scrap of paper. On it was a note written in lead pencil. “If I am discovered, get this message to the Mohawk Elias Brant, in Hanover.” It was signed with the letter G.

Phoebe turned the packet over and over in her hands. “Small enough to fit inside a walnut shell,” she said aloud — or, the thought came swiftly and unbidden, inside the queue of a man’s hair. And there was the memory of Gideon the day he had marched proudly off to join a Loyalist regiment. The sun had been as bright as this day’s sun, shining on his brown hair, braided and tied with a plain black ribbon. Yesterday she had paid no heed to his hair, but that queue was clear in her mind now, and how the tell-tale packet she held in her suddenly sweaty hand could have fitted into it.

She realized then what she should have realized the day before (only the day before?). Gideon had been dressed in deerskin leggings and shirt, and not in uniform. “He was a spy,” she whispered. “He was. Oh, Gideon, why did you have to come here?” But she knew the answer to that, too. Whatever his errand may have been, wherever he’d been going, he hadn’t been able to keep himself from slipping through the woods to see Polly Grantham.

Phoebe looked down at the packet through the tears that would start up again. Almost without thinking, she pulled at the thread that held it together until it came loose. With trembling fingers she opened it. There were two sheets of onion-skin paper. On the top one was a message. It was addressed to Brigadier-General
Watson Powell at Fort Ticonderoga, in New York. Phoebe could not understand another word. She looked at it blankly. Then she looked at the second sheet of paper. There were perfectly plain English words on it: “Please offer protection to the three New York families living south of Skenesborough, near Wood Creek, the families of Loyalist soldiers Jethro Colliver, Septimus Anderson, and Charles Morrissay.” It was signed with an initial Phoebe couldn’t decipher. She stared at first the one page, then the other, in a kind of trance. She read the second page again. She studied the first page. Then it came to her.

“It’s in code,” she said. She looked around her furtively, fearing she might have been overheard. Quickly she refolded the papers into the tiny square they had been in and squeezed them into their bag.

What am I to do with this, she asked herself. First she thought she would tear it into bits and throw it into the river, because she didn’t want anything to do with this message that had been to blame for Gideon’s death, but the words “protection for the families” leapt into her mind. She thought of Deborah Williams and her children.

I cannot leave those other families to that fate. I cannot. I must take this to Elias Brant, she thought. But then she remembered that Elias
was no longer in Hanover. All the Mohawk students had gone to fight with the British. She had heard Gershom Lake and John Barber talking about them in front of the blacksmith shop one evening when she and Anne had been walking home from a day’s quilting at Mistress Shipley’s. “Wal, you can’t expect loyalty from no Indian,” Gershom was saying. He had sneered at them as they walked past. “Never mind them savages.” He’d looked sideways at Anne. “It’s them others. Anyone with kin fighting for those damned redcoats had better have good friends on the right side of this war.” Anne had tossed her head and sniffed, and the girls had walked on. Phoebe had thought about her father’s Mohawk student Peter Sauk, who called her Little Bird and had brought her moccasins his mother had made. She wondered if he might be fighting somewhere with Gideon. He would be a good friend to Gideon.

But, like Peter Sauk, Elias Brant had gone off to fight — he was not in Hanover to take Gideon’s message.

What was she to do? Take it to Aunt Rachael? What could Aunt Rachael do? But the only answer she got was the sound of Constant, the squirrel, nibbling intently on a beechnut she held tightly in her paws. “And it
is
my fault. I should never have taken the letter to Polly. Never. I knew, I just knew, he meant to see her.”
She put her head down on her knees again, her heart in turmoil.

At last she grew quiet. “Well” — she sniffed — “I’ll just have to take it to Fort Ticonderoga myself.” She sat up straight. “But Fort Ticonderoga is on the other side of the mountains. It’s on the other side of Lake Champlain. In New York. I can’t go there.”

From somewhere inside her the words came: “Yes, you can. You can do it for Gideon. You can show Anne you’re not a traitor.”

“I’m not a traitor! I know I’m not a traitor,” Phoebe cried, answering that voice. “I’m not a rebel and I’m not a Tory. I don’t know what I am. Just because Papa was for the revolution, do I have to be? Oh, Papa, why did you have to go off like that, and now Gideon.” She broke down again, the tears streaming down her cheeks into the collar of her dress.

“I don’t know what I am and I can’t go over the mountains all by myself.”

“Then who will do it?” asked that voice. “I don’t know,” she answered. Back and forth, back and forth went the argument in her mind until she put her tired head down on her knees once more and fell asleep.

The sun was setting when she woke. She remembered everything. She shivered from the cold and from the bleakness, but she felt more peaceful. Somehow, while she slept, a decision
had been made. She knew what she had to do. Stiffly she stood up. She kilted up her skirt and put the message in her pocket. She smoothed her clothes with her hands, then undid her braid and did it up again. She washed her face and drank again from the river. Then, with new purpose in her every move, she went to Gideon’s canoe, still pulled up on shore where she had left it the night before, shoved it into the water, and set out across the river.

Back in her own home, she searched for the rough map one of her father’s students had once drawn for her of New Hampshire and Vermont. He had wanted to show her his home on the Onion River, near Lake Champlain, and the way he had travelled to Hanover along the military road leading from the lake over the mountains to the Connecticut River. She had stored it in one of the desk’s cubby-holes. The map was not where she had always kept it. The only thing in the drawer was the tinder-box her father had forgotten to take with him. She picked it up. Then she realized that the map must have been the paper on which Gideon had written his letter. She took from her pocket the scrap with the hastily scribbled note he had left in the hollow tree. Sure enough, on the back of it were the lines showing the Connecticut River, where the White River emptied into it, and the easternmost part of the military road. She stared at it, heartsick.

She searched frantically through the desk, under it, around the room, but the other half of the map was nowhere to be found. “Now what will I do?” she asked aloud, as though she hoped someone would appear by a miracle to answer. The miracle occurred. Gideon’s voice came into her head as clear and sure as it had been that day in the woods so long ago, when she’d asked him where Trout Brook began.

“All you have to do to get across the mountains, Phoebe,” he said, “is follow our brook west, because that’s where it comes from. I mean to follow it one day, all the way to Lake Champlain.” Then he had laughed.

“And now it is I who will go to Lake Champlain.” Phoebe spoke the words softly, like a promise to the memory of Gideon still so alive in this room where he had paced and paced only a day ago.

She did not weep as she thought this. There did not seem to be any tears left. A calm had settled over her — not the cold calm she had felt when the certainty of Gideon’s death had come to her, but the calm that came of absolute determination. She knew what she was going to do and how she was going to do it. She wished she could leave without going back to the Robinsons’ house. She did not want to lie to Aunt Rachael, and she could not tell her what she meant to do, because Aunt Rachael would
certainly stop her from going. And she could not bear to face Anne, but she needed her mother’s warm cloak and something to eat. Taking one last look around the room, Phoebe went outside and latched the door carefully after her.

I Will Need to be
Very Brave

D
usk was deepening by the moment. The last of the rosy sunset hung over the deep green hills across the river, and the moon was not yet up, when Phoebe started down the Hanover hill. It had snowed a little, and a wind was coming up. Holding her shawl tightly around her, she hurried to keep warm and to keep from hearing the scuffling of wild animals in the wet leaves. She didn’t mind the pigeons cooing in the branches overhead or the plaintive sound of a late whip-poor-will somewhere in the trees, but the thought of wolves and wild cats made her shudder. Then, halfway down the hill, she heard a twig snap behind her. Someone was following her. She raced the rest of the way down the hill, jumped into the canoe, and pushed off from shore.

Out on the river, well away from shore, she stopped paddling and forced herself to look back. There was no sign of anyone. There were only the branches of the alders and willows swaying silently in the wind. She rested back on her heels in the canoe and let the current carry her for a moment until she realized that she could soon be a mile down river unless she started to paddle. She looked into the deep, black water. She jumped and almost lost her paddle when she heard a beaver slap its tail somewhere along the river bank. How was she ever going to face the unknown wilderness for days and days — and nights — when she was this frightened of the part of it she knew so well?