Scattered Seeds (23 page)

“Nor could I. Her father should have accepted our offer to clothe her. Pride goeth afore destruction, Henry, remember that.”

Henry stared at his moccasins and rubbed his bruised flank. “Sit a while. Ye look rough.” He took the shovel from his father and started to dig.

Chapter 37

The soil proved more fruitful than the tree. Uncle William left them an anvil, a cauldron, a two-man saw, scythes, lengths of chain, a draw knife, pots and pans, bags of assorted nails and pins, and an impressive supply of bar iron, all of which they put to good use.

It took a week to repair the cabin’s roof and walls, and a day more to line the chimney with clay. Henry spent long evenings weaving willow branches into baskets and fish traps while Edward shaped and smoothed a beam into a yoke for the ox.

That animal was finally out of the house and chewing its cud in a barn, not a byre, constructed in a single day, thanks to fair weather and an ample supply of timber.

With the cabin and barn snug for winter and the ox restored to middling health, they divided up the remaining workload. Henry set his fish traps in the early morning, gathered firewood and nuts all day, and collected his catch in the late afternoon. This he cleaned on a workspace fashioned out of a hickory log along the field his father plowed from dawn to dusk. It was Henry’s job to watch for danger while filleting fish.

At times, he perceived the presence of an unseen observer. In those moments, he halted his work to scan the field’s perimeter. He sensed no malevolence from the entity watching them with increasing regularity, and in spite of the consistent unease, a month passed without incident.

By the first frost, the smokehouse teemed with drying fish and nuts, the barn loft held acorns and nettles for the ox’s emergency fodder, and all of their seed lay covered with loam in straight rows.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that the hard work exacted revenge on both of them.

Henry was considering their status while frying a trout at the hearth.

Father dozed in a chair across from him, worn out after a full day of chopping and carrying firewood in driving rain. Shadows hung in arcs below his eyes, as opaque as if stamped there in ink. Jagged peaks of bone replaced his round shoulders. He clasped his hands in apparent prayer, hiding palms covered with seeping blisters.

Henry flipped the trout. Its sizzle woke his father.

“M’what?” Father wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist, exposing his damaged hands.

“I said naught, Father.” Henry smiled. “Fish is done. Hand me your trencher.”

Father shook his head. “Not hungry.”

“Ye have to eat.”

“Just gonny check the snares and turn in early.”

His snares caught only a squirrel so far, which Henry stretched into two meals, three including the watery broth made with the picked carcass, though it hardly counted.

“I’ll be back in an hour.” Father stood and reached for his cloak. The color drained from his face, and he melted back down to his seat.

“I do nae think ye’ll be going anywhere.” Henry set down the wooden wedge he used as a spatula. “Ye’re ill.”

“Just a bit tired.” His voice was barely a whisper.

“Ye need to eat. Ye’re wasting away to naught.”

Father wobbled to his feet. “I will, when I get back. First—”

Henry caught him before he hit the floor. He stretched him out on the planks and tapped his cheeks, his concern rising at the hot clamminess he found there. “Father!”

Father moaned something incoherent.

While the trout burned in the pan, Henry dragged his father to their bed and covered him. He put water on to boil for nettle tea, then returned to the ill man’s side to lay a cool compress across his forehead. “Ye’ve been doing too much.”

Father’s glassy eyes rolled for a moment before focusing on him. Anguish and delight collided to paint an unnatural expression on his face. He reached up, pressed his coarse palm to Henry’s cheek, and slurred a single word. “Beth?”

Henry took his father’s hand. “It’s me. Henry. Your son.”

His father’s arm slackened, and his eyes closed.

Henry rose and paced around the room gathering up herbs and their scant brandy. “It’s no wonder ye’re sick, ye’ve worked yoursel’ into the ground, always digging, chopping, pounding, or pulling, e’en though ye ne’er healed proper-like from the wallop ye took to the noggin. Why would ye think it right to let the ox heal but not yoursel’? Where’s the sense in that? I knew this would happen, just knew it. I said ye should let me plow and carry, did I not, Father, but no, ye still think me a wain.”

He sprinkled dried nettles into a cup and added hot water and a few drops of brandy. “Now look at the state of ye, and just what am I gonny do if ye die of the fever, aye? Look where your persistence, your stubbornness, your obstinacy, your doonright bullheadedness has put us! I must say, Father, I’ve had enough of burying folk in recent memory, and—”

“Henry,” Father whispered.

Henry knelt and took his hand. “Aye, Father, I’m here.”

“Shut yer yap, would ye? Ye whine worse than an auld fishwife.”

Henry bit back a laugh. “Then stop scaring the life oot of me by calling for Maw.” He tilted the cup of tea for his father, who took a sip.

“I did nae.”

“Ye did. Ye touched my cheek and called me Beth.”

“If I did, it’s only because I mistook ye for a woman—”

“Father, come now, drink more tea.”

“Always yammering on . . . not right in the head sometimes.” He spared Henry further offense by falling asleep.

Henry threw more wood on the fire and picked up the knife they kept on the mantel. He turned it over in his hand. They needed red meat, and he planned to get some, even if it meant waiting beside a deer trail all day tomorrow.

He pulled the brush off its peg and ran his hand along its smooth shaft before sawing off its bristled end.

“There. It’s a hand brush now.” He tossed the severed brush head onto the floor, knowing his father didn’t hear him.

Curled wood shavings sprang away from his tomahawk as he shaped the shaft into something that accommodated the knife.

Perfect.

He tethered the blade in place with a strip of deerskin cut from the scrap Lemuel Tanner had been too proud to accept.

He shook the memory of Clara’s naked breasts out of his mind and glanced at his father, who shivered in spite of the fire and blankets.

Ye can deny it until the cows come hame, but I heard ye calling for Maw.

Whose name would Henry call in his delirium? He immediately regretted thinking the question, which he longed to leave unanswered, but her name circled around him like a deerfly waiting to inflict its painful sting.

How different this cabin would be with her under its roof. A woman’s presence changed everything. It made a house a home, a hard lesson he learned early.

“Ye’re not the only one who misses Maw, ye know.” His jaw muscles twitched, and tears pricked his eyes. He could still hear the brush of her petticoat on the floor.

A noise outside startled him.

The ox!

He jumped up with the makeshift spear and unbolted the door. The rain had stopped, but not before turning the creek into a torrent that breached its banks. The traps below the falls would be lost, along with the seed planted in the lowest corner of the field.

Seed. Why is our fate always entwined wi’ that of seed?

Over the roar of the creek, he heard knocks and bangs from the smokehouse. He lit the pine torch they kept near the door, glanced back at his father, and stalked outside.

The night was chilly and the land saturated. The mud sucked his moccasins off his feet as he headed for the smokehouse, and he did not stop to retrieve them. Muck oozed between his toes as he charged ahead, the tomahawk’s shaft slapping at his thigh.

Probably a ’coon or a ’possum.

He tightened his grip on the spear, determined to teach the miserable thief a lesson.

Hold it.

He stopped.

We could use some fur for mittens and hats.

He stalked forward. This could work in their favor. How bad could a raccoon or an opossum taste, anyway?

His pulse quickened when his torch illuminated the smokehouse. Its door lay in splinters on the ground. He froze and struggled to identify the bulky shadow filling the doorway. It was too large to be a raccoon, larger even than a wolf.

He took a step forward, his heart in his throat, and shouted, “Get oot of there!”

His words had no effect. The thief was either distracted by its avarice or deafened by the roar of the Cocolamus.

Boards clattered inside the smokehouse.

The drying racks. Our fish.

Rage boiled over and sent Henry running at the shadow, spear poised to strike. He howled and scattered a flock of turkeys roosting in the pines.

When the shadow backed out of the smokehouse and rose up on its hind legs, Henry dropped the torch. He drove the spear into the creature’s belly, realizing only then that the intruder was a bear.

The injured animal roared and swatted at him, its claws tearing at his left forearm and knocking him into a puddle.

He rolled away, coating himself in cold mud. Before the torchlight died, he caught a final glimpse of the bear thrashing its head above the spear. He pressed his hand over his injured arm and groaned.

I’m done for.

The bear would eat him, but not before scattering his entrails. Crows and vultures would pick him clean.

Calm washed over him in what he expected were his final moments, and it surprised him that he did not whisper Mary’s name, nor his mother’s.

“Father.”

He pictured the sick man and found the strength to crawl.

He staggered to his feet and ran, his left arm flapping uselessly. He was certain the bear was right behind him, swatting at him. It wasn’t. It was fleeing in the opposite direction, dragging the brush shaft and their precious knife through cattails and skunk cabbage.

Chapter 38

Henry stripped off his shirt and tossed it in a bloody heap next to the hearth. The garment was good for nothing now but char cloth and spare threads, same as his old neckerchief. On the meatiest part of his forearm, two gaping lacerations kept time with his throbbing heart. He daubed them with a wad of linen and considered his treatment options. He could close the gashes and bind his arm, but that idea didn’t sit right with him. In some cases, cuts needed exposure to air and freedom to drain impurities.

His father would know for sure.

He knelt, still pressing the linen against his injured arm, and tried to rouse his father.

Father’s eyelashes fluttered. He parted his parched lips, but a guttural moan was all he could manage, deep as he was in the throes of extreme exhaustion.

Henry stared at the bulge on his father’s forehead, that rosy marker of a probable swollen brain. He rose, determined not to disturb him again. He would clean and dress his own wounds and leave it at that. His blood had carried most of the dirt away already. A wash with soapy water would do the rest of the job, and if it didn’t, if the cuts putrefied, then he would use what remained of their precious paste. If that failed him, he would have to do the unthinkable: expose the wound to maggots, if any could be found in the growing chill.

He moved to the hearth and sank onto a chair to sulk, his eyes fixed on the pot of water still steaming from its earlier boil. Their winter food supply destroyed, and by a bear of all things, an animal that should be hibernating now. He lamented the loss of a torch and their knife, but above all, he would miss his moccasins. Would they ever know anything but misfortune?

He ground his teeth together.

Where are ye, oh Great Jehovah?

He waited for an answer, some great epiphany, knowing it wouldn’t come.

Ye see our plight. Why do ye allow our continual suffering when it’s in your power to help us?

Perhaps boredom led God to trifle with men for sport. His sullenness turned to annoyance, and then to rage.

Is it pleasurable to hand us naught but sorrow? Are we playthings to be poked and prodded until we are in tatters? Is the game to see how long we will last before we canny take anymore?

He slid the pot of water closer to his bare feet, not caring if he scalded himself.

Suppose I just disavow ye? How would that be, aye?

He dipped a soaped cloth into the water and wrung it out.

Nay, sir, no more prayers from Henry McConnell.

He heard God then, or at least he thought he did, although the voice was his own.

If I am disavowed, then who are ye insulting?

He placed the steaming rag across his wounds and laughed aloud in spite of his pain, or maybe because of it.

Disavow me indeed. Abusive as they are, your very thoughts are a form of prayer.

“Right, Jehovah,” he whispered, as suds trickled down his arm to drip from his fingers, “I shall submit my all. Would that make ye less keen to torment us? If it’s prayers ye want, then it’s prayers ye shall have.”

He prayed, and somewhere between wrapping his arm in clean linen and shrugging on his good shirt—the only one left to him now—his prayers turned genuine, even fervent. He pleaded for mercy and aid, weeping as he begged for his father’s recovery, for Mary’s safety, and for Donald’s wellbeing, wherever he was. He prayed for himself also, that he might heal well enough to carry the burden until his father recuperated.

An unforeseen lightness of spirit punctuated the completion of his prayers. He felt unburdened, refreshed . . . spiritually recovered. Jehovah had heard. Jehovah would answer his ardent prayers. Things would change for the better now.

He made nettle tea, then knelt to pour a sip of it through his father’s lips. Nay, sir, he would not let a bear beat them. He would find his moccasins at dawn and gather up what remained of their food. Everything would be dirty and wet, but an hour or two would set matters to rights, or at least well on the way to rightness.

Wrapped in determination and his father’s cloak, he opened the door to a brightness that twinged his eyes and stole every scrap of his fortitude.

It had snowed on the heels of yesterday’s lashing rain. Pine boughs, already heavy from the soaking, had snapped during the night. They lay in contorted mounds, identifiable only by twigs and needles protruding feebly from a foot-high blanket of snow.

Henry looked down at his naked toes, already dusted white by the driving wind. His moccasins, those valuable saviors of tender feet, lay frozen in the mud somewhere beneath the snowfall, along with one of their torches and all of their winter stores.

He fell against the doorframe, his chest heavy and aching.

So much for fervent prayers. So much for Jehovah’s mercy.