The Hollow Tree (11 page)

“You got a name?” he asked.

It seemed so long since anyone had said her name that Phoebe looked at him in surprise.

“You must have a name.”

“Yes, I am Phoebe Olcott.”

“From over the mountains.”

“By the Connecticut River.”

“That’s a fair distance.”

“Yes.”

“Well, Mistress Phoebe Olcott from over the mountains, whatever brung you here, we gotta get on our way. But I’d sure admire not to be takin’ that bear — nor the cat, neither.”

“They’ll follow.”

“I reckon so. Let’s go.”

About an hour later, when the sky had darkened so much that Phoebe knew it must be late in the day, she heard the sound of voices in the distance ahead. Jem slowed. He motioned Phoebe to do the same. He pulled his hunting knife from its sheath, then, crouching low, looking to either side of him, he continued cautiously.
Phoebe was right behind him. As they proceeded, the voices grew louder, more distinct.

“I hear cows,” said Jem. He straightened his pace and, in a few minutes, they reached the edge of a large clearing. Phoebe saw several open fires with people collected around them, and carts and two or three cows at one edge of the clearing.

“There they are,” Jem said, “but there’s sure a lot more of ’em than I figured. Come, I see Ma.” He strode into the clearing. Phoebe followed nervously, suddenly not so sure of the kind reception she had anticipated.

A tall girl was standing by one of the fires about two feet away. She had her back to Phoebe, but something about the way she was standing, something about the set of her shoulders and her long light brown hair falling over her rose-coloured shawl made Phoebe’s heart lurch.

“Anne?” she whispered. “Anne Robinson?”

The girl spun around. Her mouth fell open. Her eyes went wide. “Phoebe!” she cried. And slid to the ground in a faint.

Anne

A
t the sound of Anne’s cry, Aunt Rachael came running. At once, she was on the ground, with Anne’s head in her lap, looking around wildly to see what had happened. She saw Phoebe. Her hand went to her throat. Her eyes widened. She half rose to her knees. Then her whole face lit up. At that moment a tall, stout woman appeared, carrying a pan full of water. She flung it into Anne’s face.

Anne sputtered, and struggled to her feet with Aunt Rachael supporting her. A moment later she caught sight of Phoebe. “You’re dead,” she cried. “I know you’re dead. We saw that squaw wearing your mother’s cloak. We
saw
her!” Anne’s voice began to rise to that hysterical note Phoebe knew so well.

Phoebe realized she had been clutching Jem Morrissay’s arm and let it go quickly. She took a
step forward. “It was Peter Sauk’s sister. I gave it to her. I … ” Her voiced trailed off. She was suddenly acutely uncomfortable. In the growing dark it seemed as though a hundred people had gathered around Anne. In the flickering light from the fires dotted around the clearing behind them, they looked menacing. “I … she … we exchanged our clothes. You see, I have her Mohawk ones.” Nervously she gestured towards her tunic, and moved close to Jem.

Anne seemed not to hear her. Clinging to her mother, water still dripping down her face, she cried, “You’re a ghost! I know you’re a ghost! You’ve come to haunt me because I said those things to you when Gideon …” She began to cry piteously.

“Anne.” Phoebe ran to put her arms around her weeping cousin. Anne shrieked at her touch and backed away. “Go away!
GO
AWAY!”

“For the sake of all that’s holy, stop that caterwaulin’. It don’t take but half an eye, and that one blind, to see this ain’t no ghost.” A short, stout man had come, elbowing people aside, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. He shook Anne’s arm roughly.

Anne stopped crying. In the sudden silence a child’s voice sang out, “That ain’t no ghost, that ain’t no ghost, that’s my brother.” A small girl detached herself from a red-haired woman standing just behind Rachael Robinson and
threw herself at Jem. He scooped her up into his arms and he grinned at the red-haired woman. “I brung you some more company, Ma.” He looked around at all the people. “Though I don’t guess you was lookin’ for it. She come from over the mountains, she says. Her name’s Phoebe Olcott.”

“She’s dead! She’s a ghost!” Anne’s voice started to rise again.

“No, I am not,” Phoebe said at the same moment that Aunt Rachael said, “That will do, daughter. You can see quite plainly that Phoebe is no ghost.” She drew Phoebe into her arms and held her close. “Thanks be. Thanks be to Providence for your safe return to us. Later, when we have had supper, we will talk. Now, child, come with me. Come, Anne.”

Phoebe turned to obey. The shock of seeing Anne and Aunt Rachael here was, if possible, greater than the shock she had had that morning when she’d found she could not give Gideon’s message to the General at Fort Ticonderoga. Her mind was spinning. What had happened? How had they come here, almost to the shore of Lake Champlain? Why? Even in the gloom she could see how worn her aunt looked and that her usually fastidious appearance was marred by a soiled gown. But she seemed so much the same kind, quiet, capable person she had always been that Phoebe felt comforted.

“No.” Anne stepped in front of her mother. She would not look at Phoebe. Her voice shook. “I wish she were dead. She should be dead. It’s her fault we’re all out here in the wilderness with no place to go. It’s her fault Gideon died. She’s a traitor — didn’t her father fight for the rebels in Boston? Didn’t she run away right after Gideon was killed? What is she doing out in the woods alone? Alone! Phoebe Olcott is too scared of everything that moves to come out in the wilds alone. I don’t believe she’s alone. There’s someone else, others like her, waiting to murder all of us. She’s a traitor like her father! Make her tell!”

For a moment the silence was so intense that the sharp howl of a wolf in the near distance was like an echo of Anne’s last words. It was too dark now to see faces clearly, but, by what light there was, Phoebe could see the people, shuffling, moving. She could feel them coming slowly towards her. She could hear their low muttering. “No,” she cried, “it isn’t true. Aunt Rachael, I am not! Jem?”

He backed away from her. “You sure musta been laughin’ at me talkin’ about the things you rebels done to us,” he said bitterly. The angry whispering from the crowd was louder. A man stepped forward, a stick in his hand. Phoebe felt as though her heart would stop beating. She grew icy cold.

“No!” She swallowed hard. “Anne? Aunt
Rachael?” She stopped, her mouth too dry to form words.

Rachael came swiftly to her side and put her arm around her. She turned and faced the crowd. “We are all in this same sorry state,” she said. “It is no time to be turning on our own. Don’t we all know how that feels? Phoebe is no traitor. I know she is not.” She looked around at the other people, her arm tightened protectively around Phoebe’s shoulders. “Come, we must get you something to eat and a place to sleep. No one will hurt you.”

“Mother!”

“Anne, we will have no more of your hysteria tonight.”

Anne said no more, but the look she gave Phoebe made Phoebe slip closer to her aunt, and all night that look would give her nightmares. She let herself be led through the hostile crowd to the fire beside which Jed, Noah, and their father were all sound asleep. Still shaken, she was standing, gazing bemusedly down on all their faces, when someone cried, “Bear!” She looked up to see Bartlett lumbering towards her across the clearing as fast as he could, with George trotting along beside him. She heard a child scream. She saw men priming their muskets. She ran.

“Don’t!” she cried. “He’s an orphan. He won’t hurt anyone. Please, oh, please don’t.”
She threw herself to the ground beside the bear. She was no longer afraid for herself; all she could think was that no one was going to kill her bear.

Amazingly Jem stepped forward. “Let the bear be,” he said gruffly. “Go ahead and shoot that wingein’ cat if you wants to, though,” he muttered, as he took his little sister’s hand and walked away. The crowd fell apart into tired families huddled by fires kept burning high enough all night to hold the wolves and catamounts at bay. But not the nightmares.

Camp

P
hoebe woke just before sun-up the next morning. She sat up and looked around her. She had been sleeping on a bed of pine needles under an enormous pine tree. It stretched its thick green branches over her, keeping away both the wind and the snow that had sprinkled the ground in the clearing beyond. Between the stumps, at a little distance from one another, small knots of people slept around the embers of camp-fires. Aunt Rachael, Uncle Josiah, and the boys were huddled together under a quilt a foot or two from where she sat. Anne was wrapped in her cloak with her back to them.

Even in the dim light Phoebe could see that there were not nearly as many people as there had seemed to be the night before. She counted seven camp-fires, including the Robinsons’, and there looked to be no more than twenty-five or thirty people.

She shuddered, feeling again the terror she had felt when those people had moved slowly towards her in the night’s half dark. They all hate me, she thought. They think I’m a rebel and a spy. I must leave, I mustn’t stay with them. Near her, Rachael stirred in her sleep. As dim as the light was, her features were clearly discernible and they looked so careworn, so sad, even in sleep, that Phoebe knew she could not leave, not without a word, not again.

“How they must be worrying about you,” Peter Sauk had said. And last night, before she could roll herself in Katsi’tsiénhawe’s blanket beside Bartlett and George, Rachael had pulled her into her arms.

“What Anne said is true,” she had whispered. “We all thought you were dead,” and Rachael Robinson, who had not wept for Phoebe’s father or for Gideon, not where anyone could see her, had had a catch in her voice and, even more astonishing, had kissed Phoebe on her cheek. Aunt Rachael was so reserved that the only time Phoebe could remember her actually offering physical signs of affection was when they had stood together by Gideon’s coffin and she had put her arm around her.

Anne had refused to talk to Phoebe or to look at her. When her mother gave Phoebe a dish of the boiled beans she had cooked for the family earlier, Anne had walked away and not
returned until she had lain down to sleep — at a conspicuous distance. But, despite the fatigue that wearied them both, Phoebe and Rachael had talked long into the night. Phoebe had realized, as soon as she had settled safely by her aunt’s camp-fire, that she must tell about coming upon Gideon in Hanover and about the message in the hollow tree that had sent her across Vermont’s Green Mountains to Fort Ticonderoga. When she had come to the end of her story, Rachael had said nothing for such a long time that Phoebe had feared she would say nothing, ever, about what she had been told. It was not so. In a low voice, heavy with tears, Rachael had said, “There was never any dissuading Gideon from whatever he determined to do, not from the moment he was born. How well I remember him — he was only three then — stubbornly refusing to eat your mother’s fine gingerbread that he loved when we wouldn’t give any to our old beagle because sweets made him vomit. But Gideon managed, when no one observed, to feed his portion to the dog, who was soon violently ill. What was important to Gideon he would do, and he never stopped to consider the consequences. He would go off into the woods for his plants no matter what else needed his attention. He would go off to fight for the King against your uncle’s deepest convictions — and mine. And he would come home to
see his Polly, no matter how risky it was. I should have known, I suppose I did know, when he went off to war, that he would never come home to us.”

She had taken Phoebe’s hand. “I know that God means us not to succumb to life’s trials, Phoebe, but sometimes life’s trials seem more than a body can bear. The loss of that dear boy …” Rachael’s voice had become so low Phoebe had hardly been able to hear her. But the voice had strengthened and there had been a note of humour in it. “He was most certainly a wilful soul, our Gideon, and” — she had squeezed Phoebe’s hand — “so are you. I cannot fathom what was in your mind to set: you out over the mountains alone, without confiding in a soul about what you had found or what you meant to do, you who were always so much a stay-by-the-fire child. Why, Phoebe? Why did you not tell us?”