The Hollow Tree (16 page)

“Aw, I guess we all got the same troubles ’n’ I never had to come all the way over the mountain like you did. Did you have a farm over there?”

Jem’s telling her about his life seemed like a gift to Phoebe, so she told him about her loving but absent-minded, scholarly father and growing up by the college in Hanover. She started to
talk about Anne and the friendship they had once had, but Anne and Anne’s rejection of her were too present and she couldn’t. She found, though, that, in the dark, with only the firelight to illumine their faces, she could talk about Gideon — not about his death, never that, but she could talk about those days when, looking back, it seemed as though the sun was always scattering its light through the thick leaves, Gideon always bending over his plants, smiling up at her. She talked about listening to her father and his students discussing ideas until the light of dawn would show through the cabin windows. And in a very low voice she told him about her father believing so completely in what he called “the Patriot Cause,” and marching off to be killed for it.

“And you?” asked Jem. “What do you believe?”

Phoebe couldn’t lie. She wanted to. She wanted to tell him that she believed with him that the rebels were wrong. But she couldn’t. Her father’s words about justice and freedom had been so passionate.

“I don’t know,” she said unhappily. “I don’t know what I believe.”

“But fer some reason you ain’t talkin’ about,” he said after a long silence, “you up ’n’ come over those high mountains all by your lone self.”

“I wasn’t alone.” Phoebe grinned. “I had Bartlett and George, and we didn’t climb to the tops of those mountains, we went around and through the valleys.” Then, she told him about the afternoon in the tree with the cat and the bear. Jem laughed and his laughter woke Tibby and Sam, and Phoebe had to tell it again. When she’d finished they all looked over to where Bartlett slept with Arnie Colliver. But Bartlett wasn’t there.

“Gone again,” whispered Tibby around her bad throat.

“Again,” echoed Phoebe. “It’s true, he does go more and more.” She felt suddenly guilty that she hadn’t been paying more attention to Bartlett.

“Well,” Jem said dryly, “mebbe you got enough to do without havin’ to stop ’n’ think what some bear is up to all the time.”

“But it’s Bartlett and … and you can laugh if you care to, Jem, but Bartlett’s been a better friend to me than anyone in this entire world — except for Gideon, and … and Peter Sauk.”

Jem’s eyebrows shot up as they did when something surprised him. He gave a short, uncomfortable laugh. “I guess I done you no favour when I brung you to my ma.”

“Jem, your mother is nice.”

“That’s so ’n’ so are… ” Jem stood up. He shifted from one foot to the other. He pulled his
cap off and scratched his head. He seemed to want to say something, but, instead, he picked up a stick from the pile, threw it into the fire, watched while it sent sparks up into the dark night. “Leastways you’ve give up say in’ my whole name all the time. You sayin’ just ‘Jem’ sounds a might friendlier.” Without another word he walked off.

Phoebe stared into the dark night where he had gone. For a moment she had been sure he was going to say that she was nice too, and she was almost embarrassed by how happy that made her.

What happiness lingered in Phoebe’s heart left her the next afternoon. She had gone along the brook with a bark bucket she had borrowed from Jem’s mother. She had taken a few of those minutes when Aaron Yardley was telling the children stories to get away to wash herself. It was a cold day but clear and bright, and she had found a little rapids about a quarter of a mile around the bend in the brook and the ice wasn’t thick. She had plunged her face into the rushing current, scrubbed it and her hands with sand, and then made a fresh braid of the thick, dirty tangle that her hair had become.

Feeling quite cheerful about the world, she started back along the gravelly bank, carrying the bucket full of water, humming to herself. She heard voices, Jem’s and Anne’s. She heard
Anne say her name. She dodged behind a large rock, until they would pass by. They didn’t. They stopped only a few feet from where she crouched.

“How can you be friends with her,” Anne was saying, “playing nursemaid to all those children so that people will forget she is not to be trusted? Well, I will not forget. Not ever. I declare I never did trust her.”

“But ain’t she your cousin? Wan’t you friends?”

“Did she tell you that? No. No, we were not friends, not ever. How could you think that? I felt sorry for her. Poor, plain little Phoebe, as plump as a partridge and twice as timid. That’s what my brother Gideon always said but he was kind to her. If he could only know … ”

“Well, she don’t seem so timid to me. She come all the way over the mountains on her own.”

“It was because of Gideon!” Anne’s voice rose. “She ran away after he was hanged. She knew we’d find out it was her doing.”

“Your brother was hanged? She didn’t tell me that.”

“Yes, he was, and it was Phoebe’s doing. She’s a rebel, I tell you. I don’t care what my mother says, Phoebe tells lies. Her father was a rebel.
He
got himself killed at that battle in Boston, so she was waiting, she was just waiting
for her chance to make us suffer. It is her fault we were hounded from our home to skulk through this horrid wilderness like hunted animals. It is all her fault and I hate her!”

Jem mumbled something. Phoebe heard their footsteps move off on the rough ice and gravel. She crouched there, motionless, thoroughly miserable. Lies. They were not her lies. She stood up, blinking back tears, and stepped out from behind the rock. Then, before she could realize what was going to happen, Anne had turned and was hurrying towards her, her head down. There was no time to get out of her way. They bumped into each other. Anne slipped and fell into the icy rapids.

“Oh,” she shrieked, “Oh, you!”

Jem pushed Phoebe aside, reached down, yanked Anne from the water, and turned to Phoebe. “What happened?”

“Spying!” Anne was gasping. “I told you! She was spying. She wants to kill me now!”

“Don’t tell me now, you’ll fetch pneumony. Come on, run.” Jem put his arm around Anne and, holding her close, rushed her towards the camp.

She hated Jem. Phoebe was full of such cold anger she didn’t think she would ever care again what anyone thought of her. She hated Anne. She started up along the brook at a furious pace. Two small boys burst through the trees onto
the patch in front of her. Johnny Anderson and Arnie Colliver.

“He does! He does so!” Arnie was shouting. “He likes me. He likes me better’n you. He lets me sleep all over his fur.”

“He’s jest nice, that’s all. Phoebe told me he took a real likin’ to me, and anyways you’re a-scairt of him. I seen you jump back.”

“I ain’t a-scairt. You’re a-scairt. Jest like your pa.”

“My pa ain’t a-scairt of nothin’. He’s off fightin’ with the Royals. You don’t even know where your pa is!”

“I don’t care! I don’t care!”

The next words were lost as the shouting disintegrated into cries and grunts, flying fists, and kicking feet.

Phoebe dropped her bucket and pushed in between them. An arm grabbed her from behind and pulled her back.

“Let ’em be.” Jem’s voice was gruff. “They gotta fight out their feelings.”

“They’ll kill each other.”

“Not them.”

Phoebe did not want to let them be. She hated fighting; it frightened her. She did not want to stand beside Jem either, but since he wasn’t moving and she couldn’t leave the boys, she stood where she was, her back stiff, and said nothing.

The fight went on. The boys rolled over and over on the ground. They pounded. They kicked. They grunted. They cried. Blood spurted from both their noses. There was a scream of pain. Jem pushed Phoebe aside and lunged forward. He pried the boys apart. He hauled Johnny up by what was left of his jacket collar. Arnie tried to get up and fainted.

Phoebe ran to kneel beside him. “Jem, there’s something wrong,” she whispered.

Before Jem could say anything, Johnny threw himself down beside Arnie. “I killed him,” he sobbed. “I killed Arnie.”

“He ain’t dead,” said Jem, “he’s just fainted. He’s likely broke somethin’.”

With a groan Arnie came to. He tried to sit up, but Phoebe put her hand on his chest and held him still. He looked up at her so trustingly that the anger that had consumed her such a short time before was dissolved.

Jem was right. Arnie had broken his arm. Lucy Heaton, who said she had set dogs’ bones and, once, a horse’s leg, set the bone, splinted it with two sticks, and wrapped it with a length of Arnie’s mother’s petticoat. Whisky from the flask she shamed her husband, Joseph, into contributing helped as anaesthetic.

And so the number of children by Phoebe’s fire increased by one. Johnny Anderson, who now loved his friend Arnie as passionately as he
had hated him earlier in the day, had to be carried kicking and screaming from Arnie’s side by his determined mother. He was soon back. Although he slept by his mother and ate the corn porridge she made for him, he spent his days with Arnie. Mindful of his stricken face when he’d realized that Arnie had broken his arm, Phoebe could not send him away. Bertha Anderson decided Johnny was unlikely to get measles now. And so he stayed.

When Jem came by the next morning on his way to check his snares, Phoebe was sitting with Tibby’s head in her lap, Betsy Parker clinging to one arm, and she was trying, with the other, to adjust the cloth that was wound around Arnie’s splint. Jem grinned. “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,” he recited, “only you ain’t so very old ’n’ you ain’t got a shoe to live in. But you sure got
so
many children. Here, Arnie, let me see that. I know how to wind them things.” Jem knelt beside the boy and began, with deft fingers, to rewind the cloth.

Phoebe watched him covertly. Was she to take his banter for friendship? If he wanted to be friends with Anne and was willing to listen to those lies, she didn’t know that she wanted his friendship. She felt so uncomfortable in his presence that she could hardly speak to him. As for Anne, she didn’t want anything more to do with her. The rage she had felt at hearing Anne say
those terrible things to Jem had gone, but she could not bear to look at her now. She remembered a line in a story her father had once told her about a bitter, stubborn old man who became a hermit. “The iron had entered his soul” was how the line went. Well, the iron has entered my soul, thought Phoebe, and I don’t care.

The measles epidemic was passing. Even Tibby Thayer seemed to be over the worst, and everyone agreed that it was urgent they move on. Snow hadn’t melted from the ground in weeks, and the ice was thickening on Axle-Broke Brook. They had been camped there for two weeks. It felt like two years to Phoebe. As Jem said, she was like the old woman in the shoe and she was tired of it — and sometimes resentful. She would awaken in the night, reach automatically for a stick to put on the fire, and think about Gideon’s message in its pouch in the pocket tucked into her sleeve. I’ll never deliver it to that British general, she thought despairingly. And she had no time for Bartlett or George, not that they had needed her attention. George left Jonah only to go hunting, and Bartlett — she hadn’t realized it until Arnie insisted — Bartlett had disappeared.

They were eating their supper of beans and bannocks, huddled in their shelter, wrapped in blankets against the cold, the night before they were to break camp.

“We can’t go without Bartlett.” Arnie’s eyes were full of tears.

“He ain’t been here fer two days,” said Jonah.

Phoebe didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t leave Bartlett out in the woods alone. Jem’s eyebrow went up and he laughed when she said that. “Phoebe, you know bears sleep the winter through ’n’ there’s been snow flyin’ for quite a time. I expect he stayed here a lot longer’n he should have on accounta he didn’t want to leave you, ’n’ mebbe the little ’uns, too, but I expect now he’s gone off ’n’ found himself a cave to sleep in.”

“I don’t know,” said Phoebe slowly, “I guess I didn’t want to think about him wanting to hibernate.” Then she realized something else. “But, Jem, he will stay there all winter and, by spring, I’ll be far away in Canada. He’ll never be able to find me.”

“Did you expect to keep him all his life, like a cat?”

“I never thought about it. But will he be all right without me? When he wakes up, will he be lonesome?”

“He’s a bear, Phoebe, ’n’ he’s gonna be all growed by spring. Growed bears get along fine in the woods by their selves.”

“But, Jem, I’m the only family he knows. He was still with his mother when she was killed.”

“But, Phoebe. You’re a good mama ’n’ there oughtn’t t’ be a soul in all this rackety company who ain’t grateful for it, but you ain’t a mama bear ‘n’, what’s more” — he grinned — “when Bartlett comes outta his cave next spring, it ain’t his mama he’s gonna be lookin’ fer.”

Phoebe knew what Jem said was true. Bartlett would be looking for a mate in the spring. But Bartlett. Bartlett was … Bartlett. Could he just go away like that and leave her? Her father, Gideon, Anne. Now Bartlett was gone.

“I know,” Jem said ruefully, “he’s been a better friend to you than anyone else. Well, mebbe the rest of us gotta be better friends to make up for him bein’ gone.”

“Phoebe, Phoebe, do you mean Bartlett’s not coming back?”

“No, Jeddy.” She tried to smile at her small anxious cousin.

“But.”

“No, Arnie.”

“Bartlett’s gone to bed for the winter. Hold your jaws, all of you!” Jem said impatiently.

The children quieted, but they chose not to believe him. They took turns until late in the night calling him, watching for him. When morning came and Joseph Heaton, with much stamping and swearing, had managed to get his cart across Axle-Broke Brook, and the rest of
the company started to follow him, the children set up such a howl for Bartlett that everyone stopped.

Old Aaron Yardley promised them a bear story — about hibernating. They didn’t care. They would not be consoled. It was Joseph Heaton who got them going by bellowing at the top of his twangy voice that “every last bear in the dad-blasted Republic of Vermont will be on our tails on accounta they can’t get no sleep with this caterwaulin’ goin’ on!”