The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (6 page)

A woman of about forty with gray streaks in her black hair was bending over the well, working the wheel, which needed oiling and gave off a dismal shrieking that set a person’s teeth on edge. Off in the woods somewhere, I could hear an ax ring, a regular chunking, with now and then rests in between. It must have been seven o’clock; the sun had just blinked out above the tree line, looking as though it had maybe arisen too early, and didn’t feel quite up to scratch.

“How do, ma’am,” I said, stepping down. She stiffened up straight, like she’d seen the chief of the Cherokee nations, and stood studying me over, head to foot. By and by she said:

“Where in all git out did
you
come from?”

I opened my mouth to make up some kind of lie, but nothing came handy, so before I knew it I had told her the truth, with a little embroidery work dropped in here and there, to keep from getting rusty.

“A St. Louis packet, hey? And gold there, you say. I hadn’t heard of it.”

I said the gold was in California. “Out by the Pacific Sea.”

“That’d be a tolerable stretch, I expect.”

“Close on to two thousand miles.”

“Hush up,” she said with a crooked smile, not believing it for a second. In a little while she said I could come in, her man would be along directly; they were about to have breakfast, only she said they were fixing to vittle. They had been here in Missouri less than two years. She told me her husband was “Ioway-born,” and I never let on I didn’t know what that meant, but I guessed he was sick.

“He’s up in the woods cutting sprouts for a fence,” she said, leading me into the house, which was chinked-up logs inside the clapboards—a big room that looked like the remainders of a cyclone, and a loft up above that leaked straw. “The rabbits are so pesky
they’ve et everything except the rocks. Between they and the crows, I don’t know whether to puke or go blind.”

At this uncommon sort of complaint, I stammered out a few words that I hoped were sympathetic, meaning I hoped she’d think it over and decide to do neither one, and said I imagined it was a pretty hard area for farming, not knowing in the least what I was talking about but just aiming to hit on something agreeable.

She almost bit my head off. “Hard! You’d say so if you could see. The land ain’t fit to clear. I’m from across the river south of Grand Tar, and my family can grow a stand of corn, pick it, shuck it, store it in a silo and raise a litter of pigs while my husband’s getting his plough in the ground. No, if you want Missouri, take it and welcome.”

She was about the fullest of grievances of any woman I ever met, and to hear her tell it, it was all her husband’s fault. He didn’t like the Illinois bottom because he claimed the river swoll up every second year and washed the topsoil away. But I got the notion pretty soon that he moved across because he couldn’t stand her relatives’ jawing, and if they were as gabby and positive as the representative he married, he would have done better to settle in Peru.

“You can say what you like, he’s got his pints, but Ferd ain’t sociable,” she told me, and then she grabbed my arm and hissed, “Be quiet now—here he comes.”

All this time, I had to wrestle myself to keep from snatching and eating a string of onions that were hanging beside the fireplace, my stomach was so hollow after the walking and swimming. Even so, I was warmed up again and feeling better.

The man came in, stomping his feet, and glanced at the woman—who was throwing some knives and forks on a split-pine table—and then at me, pulling up short. He looked sour, and had a scowl on his face, which was deep-lined and pock-marked from the smallpox. “Who in thunder’s that?” he said finally, in what I supposed was the hospitable style of the neighborhood. She told him my story, getting it middling-right, although she said I was from Cincinnati,
and when she finished he showed it had affected him by remarking, “Humph.” It must have cost considerable effort, but he motioned me toward the breakfast table, and we had a loaf of salt-rising bread and something she called side-meat, but you couldn’t fool me on things like that—I had done too much trapping—and I spotted it for woodchuck.

After breakfast he said he reckoned I wouldn’t mind earning my keep, so he handed me a snaggley-toothed saw and took me up into the woods. There was a pile of about forty saplings lying there, the lower ends sharpened, and he said I must saw some more the same size and he would trim them up with the ax.

While I worked, he chewed tobacco and eyed me carefully, as if he had something on his mind. Presently he commenced to ask foolish little questions, like:

“Yore paw got any size to him?”

I answered that my father was a large man, husky and able, and with a temper to frighten a bobcat, because if this fellow was planning any deviltry, I wanted him to feel he might expect trouble later.

“
You
look stout enough,” he observed after a while. I nodded and kept on sawing, wondering what was next. It had turned into a kind of game, and went along like this:

“Often sickly?”

Then, after my no, a few chunks of the ax, a pause or two to spit, and:

“Weight how much, did you say?”

I told him, and in a minute he inquired, with a sharp look: “Much of an eater?”

“One of the poorest eaters in Ohio—they used to complain about it at home, and give me tonics to fat up.”

Chunk, chunk, pause, spit, chunk.

“Don’t favor meat, I suppose?”

I said I never cared for it, hardly ever touched it, only a piece now and then to thicken my blood, but I’d take a piece to oblige him, if he preferred it, and many thanks for the offer.

“Tain’t no offer,” he said, and then he asked:

“Did much ploughing with a mule?”

I was enjoying myself now, being convinced that he was an outright lunatic, though harmless, and I rattled on, as overblown as a rooster.

“Very little,” I said. “Back home in Cincinnati my father was the county sheriff, and I mostly helped out with the hangings and such.”

He chunked away for several minutes, stopping to spit at a beetle, which got out of there in a hurry, and asked:

“Say he reckons you drowneded?”

I was sure of it, I said, but it didn’t matter because I intended to push right on to St. Louis and find him. In a way, I was telling the truth, because I knew my father had a letter of introduction to a friend of my mother’s family, a Pierre Chouteau, who was one of the biggest traders in St. Louis, or so they said.

“Maw expect you back soon?”

“Not so you could notice it—we were counting on two years at least.”

He seemed satisfied with these answers, and we worked until noon, when we went back to the house and had some more side-meat, this time with compone and collards. In the afternoon we carried down the saplings, and he loaded me up till my knees buckled, after which he kept asking me boneheaded things like: “Tired?” “Wears you out, does it?” and “Appear to be much of a heft?”

I
was
tired by now, and it was in my mind to damn him and his saplings to perdition, but something about him, a shadow of meanness in his dark, broody face, made me think this mightn’t work out very well. The more I mulled him over, the better convinced I was that he had something up his sleeve, so after supper, as soon as they mentioned how late it was, I volunteered to get a fresh bucket of water. Once outside, I streaked to the well and raised two or three wails from the wheel, then tiptoed back and peered in the window, listening hard. They had their heads together, as thick as three in a bed.

“I can easy get him bound out, Agather,” he was saying. “The
judge’ll take my word against his’n, and besides that, he’s counting on my vote. We need somebody on the place, and this boy’s stout I put him to the test. He ain’t real bright between the ears, but if it’s hauling you want, why teach a jackass to sing? He’ll do, or I’m mistook—it’s the chance of a lifetime.”

So that was it! Here I’d been playing him for a dunce, and he’d been using me for bait, all the time. He was going to apprentice me, and bind me out to him for maybe seven years, the way they did, and I’d have to like it or lump it.

As soon as I could, I said I was ready for bed—they had given me a blanket and told me to sleep in the loft on the straw—but the woman picked up the bucket and says, “I thought you went out for water.”

Confound the luck, in my anxiousness to overhear them, I’d forgotten to fill it. The man flashed me a suspicious look, and they exchanged a glance that gave me goose-pimples, but I spoke up and said, “I stumped my toe coming in, and the water splashed out, but I thought there was enough left to drink. Here, I’ll get some more.”

“Leave it lay,” he said; then he added irritably, “Git on along up—there’s work to be done tomorrow.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. I skinned up the ladder and made a show of slapping down the straw and scrunching up a bed. Then I heard one of them blow out the lamp, and I waited for them to begin breathing heavy, so sleepy I was near about dead. But they were restless. Twice I could hear them talking, and once I heard the man get up and drink out of the bucket.

Suddenly I snapped awake—the moon was up; I had dozed off for no telling how long. I was in a sweat for fear I was too late; that I would be an indentured servant and punished by law if ever I broke away. I crept to the trap door—all dark below—and started down the ladder, skipping the fourth rung from the top, which was loose and creaked—I’d counted on the way up—and padded silently across the room. If Ferd had had trouble getting to sleep before, he was making up for lost time now. His mouth was wide open and he was dredging up noises that sounded like a pig stuck in a rail fence.
The woman, a shapeless lump beside him, was having a dream, something about how hard the ploughing was, for I heard her threaten to take a spade to Gomer, which was the name of their mule.

Out in the smokehouse, I borrowed some matches and a piece of sowbelly, and with my blanket over my shoulder and some shoes on at last—a pair of buckskin moccasins that didn’t seem to be working but were too big and needed rags stuffed in them for comfort—I lit up the hill and on into the woods. I wanted to take his shotgun, but I didn’t think it would be polite, and if there was one thing my mother was a stickler on, it was to be courteous and mind your manners while you were in somebody’s house visiting.

So I took his hatchet instead, which was stuck upright in a stump. While we were sawing, the day before, I’d pumped him about the way to get to St. Louis, and he took me back a piece and pointed out a wagon trail to St. Genevieve, which he said was about halfway, “give or take a hundred miles,” but I imagined this was a joke. The trail was grown up with tree shoots, and the ruts filled in with weeds, but he said it was traveled a-right smart in the summers. It would have been used more, he said, except that when they busted up the river pirates around Cave-in-Rock and Natchez, some of them drifted up here and were always accommodating and would cut your throat without charge.

This was travel news on about the same level as Ware’s
Guide
, but I hadn’t any choice, so I struck out, wishing I knew what time it was. Unless I misjudged my late host, he would rip around in the morning, and cuss, and of course blame everything on his wife, and maybe give her a couple of licks; then he would follow up the St. Genevieve trail for about five miles, mostly to avoid working. After that he would lose interest. So if I could do ten miles before dawn, I was safe. Or anyway, that’s what I figured.

The trail was in the deep woods mainly, and sometimes hard to see, but once in a while it came out into a mossy glade of scrub evergreen, and then it was bright and pretty in the moonlight. Even in the big woods the paleness sifted down, because not all the
trees had leafed out yet, and the ground was speckled with light. Very little sound except an occasional hoot owl, and the rustle of small animals—night-prowling possums and coons, along with foxes hunting them and a soft wind that swayed the trees and breathed through the high-up larch boughs, lonely and sad, like spirits flying by.

I made good time, and wasn’t scared, only at bushes crackling too near at hand. I thought I must have walked for two hours, and was so sleepy I’d begun to stumble. It was cold, too. This wouldn’t do, so I knew I’d got to take a nap. At the next open place, I went off a hundred yards or so, keeping the moonlit clearing in view, then made a small fire in the shelter of an oak, well out of sight. Rolled up tight in the blanket, I lay down and melted into the leaves.

“Turn him over! Shake him up!”

“It’s only a boy.”

“Never mind that—prod him out of there.”

I sat up, then sprang to my feet, stupid with sleep, but with an icy grabbing of my heart, too.

They were an old man, hatless, with tumbled gray hair, two younger ones—a tall, sallow fellow dressed in gambler’s black, neat even here in the woods, and a beefy, yellow-haired brute with as ugly a face as you’d be apt to meet ouside a jail—with a pale, black-haired girl of eighteen or nineteen. They were mounted on poor-looking horses, the girl riding double behind the beefy man.

“Well, you had to investigate, now you know the long and short of it,” said this last. “Put a ball in him and let’s be along, else he’ll describe us for sure.”

“Hold your tongue,” replied the old man in what I thought was a very careless tone, considering the difference in their ages and size. “If I was you, Shep, I wouldn’t try to think. You haven’t had the experience.”

The old gentleman got down—he was taller than I thought, and straight as a slat. He said, “Now let’s have a chat, sonny. What are we doing out here in the woods, eh? Don’t be afeard. Speak right out.”

My teeth were chattering at the talk of shooting me, but I had begun to take heart a little, and felt brasher.

“I’m mighty glad you found me, sir. I was lost—I got separated from my Uncle Jessie and the others. They were on their way to
Memphis to see Uncle Jessie’s stepbrother. Merle, that runs the brewery.”

“Hold on, hold on—you’re running away with yourself. Who’s this Uncle Jessie? Why ain’t you home with your maw and paw?”