To Make My Bread (15 page)

At the place where Jim Martin's children had made a slide down the red clay bank he turned to the right for the trail up Possum Hollow. Before him was old Thunderhead. In the clear morning it seemed close, but he knew the mountain was far away and the trail to its foot upward. The weight of the sack he held with both hands pressed into the small of his back. It made the distance seem longer. He was measuring the distance with his eyes as he stepped on the log footway across Burnt Cabin Branch. Usually he could walk a footway with his eyes shut. On this day from the very beginning he had been in a daze. There were so many things to think about. They had accumulated in him for days and even months. In his own way he was trying to sort out experiences, and to find answers for certain questions that demanded his attention. With back bent under the sack and nose lifted in the air John walked the footway. And then one foot slipped. He tried to balance, but the heavy sack pulled him to one side. He sat down heavily on the log with a leg on each side. He looked around hastily to see if any of the Martin young had caught him in such a position. To his relief the woods were silent. Pulling himself along with one hand he got to the other side of the creek. It was not very high. In the spring when the snows were melting up above, the water sometimes reached the footway. The spring before, Jim Martin's baby girl had drowned just below. Jim was working over the branch, girdling trees for a clearing. The two-year-old girl was playing on the cabin side. He heard her call, but paid no attention. She must have tried to cross the footway; for Zinie, the oldest daughter, coming to look for little Jennie, found her body washed down against a laurel bush below the footway. The water was beating the body against the roots of the bush. As soon as Emma heard she brought John and Bonnie and stayed three days with Jennie doing everything to comfort her neighbor. She laid out the little corpse, and after the funeral cleaned the cabin and washed all the clothes. John and Bonnie stayed with the Martin young and learned all the ins and outs of Possum Hollow. They went to visit Granma Wesley who was bedridden and heard her talk about the fine coverlet she was going to make. Sam's wife let them look at the loom and put their feet on the treadles. The loom was as high as John. It seemed a huge and wonderful thing to him with its treadles that moved the upper part, and the strings that made it look like some large overgrown sort of a banjo.

At the Martin cabin John found Zinie in the yard with the latest baby on her hip. She stood sideways so the baby would be more comfortable. The Martins had a small porch to their cabin and Zinie leaned against it. She was nine and large for her age, yet the baby seemed big for her. He had a cold and as John came up Zinie took the end of his dress and wiped the nose clean. Her eyelids covered her eyes as if she was interested only in her bare red feet. But she saw John.

“Come in,” she said shyly, “and sit.”

“I've got to be getting along,” John told her.

Zinie shuffled her feet in the dirt. “Tell Bonnie to come over.” She spoke very softly. Her own voice seemed to frighten her, for when she spoke her face turned red so that the freckles stood out distinctly like speckles on a bird's eggs.

“You come over,” John said. He hurried past her up the trail. Just beyond was the chicken coop and to the side the pig pen with the one pig smelling the empty log trough with loud sniffs.

Up at the left he could just see the Wesleys' cabin through the trees. The shed for the loom stuck out at one side. It sloped a little down the hill and gave an unbalanced appearance to the cabin.

Over Thunderhead John stopped to rest on the flat part of the trail. The climb up the other side had been long and tiring. He let the sack of meal down and leaned against a pine tree on the upper side of the trail. Right before him a stream going down hill had cut a gorge in the side of the mountain. Trees and bushes grew down in the gorge. The tops of the trees came slightly above it and over the tops there was a clear view into the valley below. On the near side the floor of the valley was covered with trees that were bare of green except for scattered balsams and pine. Far over on the other side of the valley was the Frank McClure cabin. At the right of the cabin a small figure moved in the clearing.

As John watched the tiny figure a thought came into his head, worrying him like a bat that swoops down close to one's head and then vanishes in the same second that it has come. The tiny dot in the distance seemed insignificant and of no account. Yet it was a person like John himself, and to that person living was very important; just as to John the fact that he was alive was important. The thought darted away almost as soon as it came, and there was a blank. Then another thought came—about the cabin and Emma and Minnie. He had left Emma and Bonnie stringing apples they had sliced and dried on the roof. He supposed Minnie was still sitting by the fire with the baby in her lap. That morning Kirk had gone toward South Range, having heard they were making a clearing for a saw mill over that way. He hoped to get work.

Emma kept the baby with her at night. It slept in the cradle Basil had been the first to sleep in and John the last. Minnie slept in the other room with Kirk and John stayed in his and Granpap's bed across the room from them. He was pondering on those two. He knew what happened in the night, yet he didn't know. And he was curious about things he did not wholly understand.

Kirk had not come back when John reached the cabin. But a saddlehorse stood in the yard hitched to one of the apple trees. In the cabin Sam McEachern sat over the fire with Minnie. On one side of the chimney Bonnie held the baby while it slept. Emma was fluttering around the room doing nothing, just fluttering like a hen when a hawk is swooping around in the air above the little chickens.

When the boy had let the sack fall on the table Emma drew him out into the back yard. Her fingers dug into his shoulder. Out by the rough cow shed she faced him.

“If Minnie starts this,” she said, “there's bound to be trouble.”

He nodded. She was right, yet he hated her excited voice whispering to him.

“She's a fool, a plumb fool,” Emma went on as she usually did when she wished to speak, not noticing nor caring perhaps that John felt ill at ease. “I can bear her not helping and letting me wait on her like a nigger slave. But this . . .” She threw out her hands. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew the hog would go a-wallowing back to hit's mire.”

Emma's worried voice made the boy turn away from her. He turned away but because of her he felt strained and unhappy. His voice was casual and hard when he spoke.

“Ain't supper ready?” He had taken his time going and coming and it was almost time for the evening meal.

He was walking toward the cabin. Emma kept beside him. “How can I make any food,” she whispered, “with him a-hanging over the fire?”

At the door she stopped. “Don't ye tell Kirk anything,” she said.

Sam McEachern was already outside, getting on his horse. Minnie sat over the fire, her arms laid along her big thighs. At twenty she was already a large woman, but her round cheeks and wide blue eyes gave her face a babyish look. And she seemed to wish to emphasize this characteristic. For she had a way of sticking her little finger in her mouth when she looked at men that nearly drove Emma crazy. She did this even with John who was only eleven, and Emma suspected that John himself was half in love with her.

Minnie felt injured. She knew Emma had disapproved of her visitor and would continue to disapprove if Sam McEachern came again. Yet Minnie had come under the disapproval of so many people, one more mattered very little. It was what her pap had raised her on, disapproval and reproaches. So she had come to the place where she simply went along her own way. The others seemed to know so little about what happened in her. They could not understand that sometimes with one man, sometimes with another, the heat came up in her and made her dizzy and blind so she scarcely knew what happened.

It had begun with Sam McEachern when she was seventeen. Sam had seen her along the road on errands. Sometimes he spoke to her and sometimes he did not. But she could always feel that his attention was on her whether he stopped to talk or went past without a word. And she thought about him. One Saturday night he walked in the cabin door. He came in and gave her something she liked and took what he wanted; and they were both satisfied. It was like having a full meal.

Her pap had made her entertain Basil for Sunday visits. She had liked Basil, only Kirk was more interesting. Jim Hawkins disapproved of Kirk because he came drunk, so she had been forced to meet him up the mountain. There had been excitement in that. Now she had Kirk all the time and he quarreled if she talked of going to the settlement. He had become tiring to her except when she needed him.

Emma was stooping to put the pones of cornbread in the ashes on the hearth. She looked up into Minnie's face. The wide blue eyes stared into hers innocently. Emma had meant to speak but lowered her head again. She thought, “Much as Minnie's pap has dinged right and wrong into her she don't know it any more than a blind bat. Kirk will just have to keep her under his eye. He took the burden and hit he'll have to carry.”

Yet could she help but carry the burden with Minnie always at the cabin and Kirk away sometimes for days, hunting work? There had been none at South Ridge. But the rumors of a big saw mill coming kept going around. And each time a rumor told of a new location for the mill, Kirk sought out that location. And as if he smelled out Kirk's absence, each time Kirk went away Sam McEachern came riding to the cabin.

Emma had seen Kirk eye the horse tracks when he came home. Because he did not ask whose they were she suspected that he knew. He was drinking more and more. Sometimes he came back at night with bleared eyes and his hair matted as if he had been sleeping for days on the ground.

One afternoon Minnie and Sam sat by the fire a long time. They were very quiet, and Emma sitting across the hearth felt something rise up between them. Then before her eyes they got up and walked out of the cabin. They looked as if they were walking in their sleep. Emma was close enough to touch them as they passed, but she was surprised into sitting still. She sat there for a moment until she heard them walk into the other room. The sound of their feet in the other room roused her. She got to the door and stood there looking out. Now there was no sound from the other room. The cold wind came across and blew through her. Those two were over in the other room under Kirk's roof. And she knew. She was Kirk's kin, and it was a McClure roof. Emma suspected that the McEacherns had sold Granpap out. They had money. Sam came back from outside with “nice” things for Minnie that she hid away from Kirk. There was a string of beads and a blue silk waist that Emma had seen.

She had kept it all from her son. In spite of herself Emma had taken this burden and she had to carry it.

“Bonnie!” she said. “Put down that baby and go up the hill for the cow. John, you go with Bonnie.”

John was warm by the fire. “It ain't milking time,” he said.

“Go up, both of ye,” Emma said. “Or I'll lay a hickory on your hides.” It was not the threat of the hickory, but the heavy sound of Emma's voice that picked them up and sent them through the door to the cow trail.

Emma walked to the side wall. Over the trunk just below Granpap's fiddle, lay his gun across two crotches of a tree. Emma lifted the gun off its supports, and looked to see that it was loaded. Back at the door she stood leaning lightly against the post with the gunstock under her right arm pit and the barrel pointing down. She looked careless and indifferent, as if she were wondering if the clouds across the top of Thunderhead would bring some rain.

The steps sounded again in the next room. Her left hand came down on the gun and she bent her arms so the stock rested in her shoulder. Minnie came first out of the passage and turned to enter the cabin from the yard. She drew back in the face of the gun and gave a little grunt. Emma stood aside.

“Come in, Minnie,” she said evenly. “I don't aim to hurt ye.”

Minnie sidled to the wall outside and held to it. Emma was looking at Sam McEachern. She edged back in the door. Sam was a big powerful man and if she was too close to him he could take the gun from her hand.

Sam stood before her with his smile that Emma did not like beginning to spread out on his thin lips.

“What's the matter, Emma?” His voice was soft as lye soap. Emma pointed the gun straight. Sam looked at it inquiringly. He was not a coward.

“Yes, hit's loaded, Sam,” Emma said. “And I'll give ye time t' get on your horse and ride out of here. But no more. And ye're not to come back again.”

“Now, Emma,” Sam began, “I ain't done nothing.”

“Walk out of here,” Emma said, “and get on your horse.” She put her finger on the trigger and aimed at Sam's big breast, on the left side.

“I've got one, too,” Sam said and took a revolver from his pocket.

Emma heard Minnie groan. She did not flinch from Sam's gun. If he shot her, he did. Her business was to get Sam away from the cabin.

“Your time's most gone, Sam,” she said.

“What I hate most,” Sam said, “is an interfering woman.”

“And what I hate most,” Emma took a step forward, “is a skunk. You get on that horse, Sam McEachern, with no more palaver.”

Sam dropped the revolver in his pocket. His big face screwed up at Emma and his small tan-bark eyes blazed at her.

“A man can't fight a woman,” he said and walked off. Emma kept the gun on him until he was beyond the cottonwood tree and going up the Ridge Trail. When he turned into the thick trees she lowered the gun.

“Come in,” she said to Minnie who was blubbering against the wall. “I wouldn't hurt ye, Minnie.”

K
IRK
came back next day. When Minnie was out of the room and he thought Emma was not listening he said to John, “I met Fraser on the road and he told me, ‘Look out for Sam McEachern.' ”