CHAPTER THREE

IN AN HOUR, the sun came up clear and strong, melting the hoar frost as they rode toward the New River. They were following one of the settlement’s dim trails that linked with the broad buffalo-trampled Warriors’ Trace, leading to Cumberland Gap and the way over the mountains. Dark cedar and hemlock forest sealed the trail.

The horses plodded, saddles creaking, and Margaret regretted their slow going. The cows shuffled even more slowly. As the morning grew hot, sweat crawled down her back, and John’s coarse britches chaffed her legs. “Might we proceed a little faster?” she called to John who was riding ahead.

He answered with a shake of his head. Margaret surmised that because the trail was thin and stony, the horses might stumble at a faster pace, even fall, heavily laden as they were. Behind them one of the come-alongs, walking, began to whistle “Coming Through the Rye” till Alan who was riding near him, told him to hush.

Soon the trail became so rough they were obliged to ride in the New River, shrunken by the past summer’s heat; Jenny stumbled on an underwater boulder. On the bank behind them, the four cows bawled and refused to cross the water till a come-along struck them with his stick. Then they leapt in, wild-eyed, knocking against the horses. The splashing soaked Margaret’s long skirt. The coolness was welcome but soon her skirt dried and stiffened and she longed to hike it up but feared that John would upbraid her. Later in the day when he might be distracted by other duties, she would give herself that freedom.

Out of the river, John set an even slower pace. Margaret’s impatience was soothed by the salt smell of her mare’s neck as the day, toward noon, grew unseasonably hot. Sweat stood in drops at the end of each of Jenny’s dark hairs, then streaked and soaked in. Sweat crawled down Margaret’s neck under her kerchief and she swiped at it and then at a marauding fly. Her hair, tightly knotted up, began to prickle, and she smelled herself, sour and strong. She was grateful that the baby in front of her on the saddle slept, rocked by the mare’s motion.

Her saddle was ill-fitting, too high at the horn, and by midafternoon her thighs and woman place were raw. John glared when he rode back and saw she had trussed up her skirt to free her legs, visible now in his breeches.

“Cover yourself, woman,” he told her, but she did not. Here in this tangle of trees and water she was freed of his command as she never was at her own fireside. He scowled and rode on.

She began to sing. “In Scotland town where I was born, there was a fair maid dwelling, made many a man cry lackaday, and her name was Barbara Allen.” Riding near her, Alan, out of some vague sense of respect, did not hush her.

Now they were riding through a forest deeper and darker than any Margaret had seen. Many trees had been cut down for the Greenbrier Settlement and its adjoining fields, and she had never seen trunks as large as these; it would take four people, arms outstretched, to girdle them. She recognized black walnut, hickory nut, and chestnut, rare in the settlement, and remembered hearing that these trees had been planted years ago by the savages. From time to time, they had burned the saplings and the weeds springing up under the tall trees, and the soil under the horses’ hooves was dark with ash.

The baby grew costive in the afternoon, tuned up, then screamed full blast till Margaret snatched her up and laid her to her breast. Not enough milk to fill her and she began to fidget and cry again.

“Keep her quiet,” John ordered. “I have a thought we are followed.”

After that the thickets bloomed with eyes. Margaret had seen the vagrant Shawnee when they passed through the Greenbrier Settlement, stopping at a cabin door and standing there until a piece of corn pone or a chicken wing was laid in their hands, then passing on, each foot planted in front of the other. Once when they had stopped at her mother’s cabin, Margaret had stood close enough to smell them, smoky but milder than John’s bear grease and dried sweat reek.

The baby fussed a little while longer, then fell into a fretful sleep.

Coolness came as they passed under the shadow of a great limestone cliff. Boulders laying beside the trail were coated with bright green moss. As they passed out of the cliff’s shadow, they crossed an open space where enormous chestnuts stood guard, their exposed roots as thick as an elephant’s foot. Margaret had never seen an elephant, but there had been an engraving on the wall of her school room.

Now the trail climbed up a hillside. In the valley below, Margaret saw a throng of sycamores stretching their limbs to the sky. The sight chilled her; the bare white limbs looked like scoured bones.

Jenny shuffled through a thick overlay of last fall’s leaves and their pungent smell filled Margaret’s nose and throat. She unleashed her canteen from the saddle and downed a drought. The water was warm and tasted of the canteen’s tin.

In the afternoon Alan split off to hunt.

Evening came with a lessening of the heat as the sun lowered slowly behind a dark bank of trees. Soaking wet, the baby began to fret again. In spite of his promise, John had allowed no stopping to eat or care for the baby at noon, and when his brother Alan had frowned and muttered at the relentless pace, Margaret had remembered the long-simmering ill feeling between the brothers. She’d never asked to understand it, thinking it was something in the Paulee blood.

She loosened the soaked swaddling bands to give the baby some relief.

Agatha rode up beside her, hissing to calm the fretting. Margaret glanced at her sister, taking some comfort from her fair, round face, half hidden under her bonnet, and the hot glance of her small blue eyes.

“The first of our difficulties,” Margaret said, rocking the baby with one arm.

But Agatha offered no sympathy. “We are pilgrims, starting out,” she said, calling to Margaret’s mind the evenings during the winter past when, after the chores were done, they’d sat close to the fire, reading from The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Margaret fell into line. “From this world to that which is to come,” she quoted; she had memorized whole blocks, finding comfort although she was scarcely a Believer. The memorized sections were good to repeat to herself when she was milking their lean and fractious cow. That animal and the three others, now far behind them, were crashing through trees along the trail, prodded, Margaret expected, by the come-alongs.

Agatha took up the text. “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where there was a den and laid me down to sleep.”

Soothed by Agatha’s voice, the baby found her thumb and slept at last.

“Please God we’ll find a den to crawl into before dark,” Margaret said.

“But you don’t believe in Him.”

“Necesse est,” Margaret said, the only scrap of Latin she remembered.

Agatha sighed. “I’ll settle for a fire and our buffalo robes spread close to it.”

“I shook and beat and aired the skins before we left, but it did no good. They will make good bedding except for the nits.”

“They’ll bite like all the sins,” Agatha said with a small laugh.

As darkness began to shroud the trail, John called a halt. Alan came back from the woods, empty-handed; they were still too close to the settlement, the woods had been picked bare. The two women dismounted and hobbled their horses. The come-alongs gathered the cows. They ladled out a few handfuls of cracked corn from one of the sacks, then fell to work assembling a sort of corral from fallen timber, herded the cows in and fed them. Watching, John nodded, satisfied.

Having decided to take the milking by turns, Agatha began, and soon had a brimming pouch of milk, more than they could use that night or carry, but essential to ease the cows and stop their bawling. The travelers took turns scooping milk from the leather pouch.

In the middle of the bare place John had chosen for their camp, Alan made a big fire with branches, twigs, and fallen leaves. John grumbled when he saw that in the windless air, the smoke was rising straight up, a sure sign of their presence.

The two women threaded bits of flesh from the fat plucked hen Alan had brought, roasting the meat on hickory sticks held close to the flames. The meat sputtered as it cooked, slinging sizzling drops into the fire. Margaret sniffed up the smell with pleasure.

Agatha took six biscuits out of her saddlebag, and Margaret dressed them with drips from her pot of precious honey. It was a feast, she declared to herself, seeing the long limbs of the men as they ate, stretched to the warmth of the fire, their leather boots beginning to heat and stink. She liked knowing that she and Agatha were surrounded by four good men, although she hardly knew the two come-alongs. But they looked hardy, backwoods boys who had long since learned to build fires, dress a horse’s galls, stuff saddlebags, herd cattle, hunt, kill, and skin—and probably a good deal more. Perhaps even how to use their flintlocks in an attack, although Margaret noticed they had left their guns in a disorderly pile at some distance, along with their bags of black powder and bullets. She calculated how long it would take to reach a gun, load it, aim, and fire—too long to be of much immediate use, she thought.

John’s and Alan’s guns were scrambled with the rest. She remembered that John had said the treaty—she’d forgotten the name—had ended the long years of trouble with the Shawnee. Still, she murmured to Agatha, “They’ve left their weapons at a distance …”

Agatha shrugged, but John, overhearing, ordered the youngest of the come-alongs, a fair-haired boy named Daniel, to fetch his flintlock, powder, and bullets and lay them close by. Margaret wondered why John had chosen the youngest who, unskilled, might take a while to load his gun.

Noticing that she was looking askance at his choice, John explained, “I’ll learn him.”

Margaret said nothing.

Agatha gathered up the remnants of the meal while Margaret stripped and changed the baby, who for once lay quietly, looking up at her with pale eyes that would darken to gentian blue with time, if she lived. Margaret dried her with a rag before tying her up in fresh cloths and swaddling her. Before the fire was out, she had spread her buffalo robe, nestling the baby in a fold, then placing her saddle at the head. Jenny whickered, almost near enough to reach for a nuzzle. Her saddle’s crupper was too high to use as a pillow, but the curve of it gave Margaret shelter as she said her prayers:

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

The words, learned when she was a tiny child, were comforting, even though she didn’t know and couldn’t imagine who this Lord might be.

John, stretched nearby, reached out to touch her foot with his by way of goodnight.

He was soon snoring, but Margaret, still awake, stared into the dark trees. The fire was shedding a little light from its last embers, and the shadows of the tree seemed to be marching, single file, toward the huddled sleepers. Margaret reached for her housewife and took out the almanack, her vial of pokeberry ink, and her quill pen.

Leaning on her elbow and slanting the almanack toward the firelight, she opened it to the first page.

She read, “A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years are scarce ever to be spent,” printed under the portrait of Mr. Franklin with the crease atop his nose.

Margaret had never seen twenty shillings all together in one place, and as to twenty years, her first twenty-seven had been spent at full speed.

She wrote in the small blank space under Mr. Franklin’s words, “Started out, rode all day, raw and chafed, baby restless.”

She turned back to the bare front page, just inside the cover, where she had written dates and lines.

JULY 3, 1779

My babe born four a.m. with Mother serving to help me. Midwife Susan Brown came in, her herbs did little. Sore nipples, little milk, rubbed with strong sassafras tea, some relief.

JULY 21

Baby poorly, croup nearly took her, Mother’s potions pulled her through. John came in with big deer. Full moon.

AUGUST 8

Husband asked if I am prepared to travel. Baby cured of thrush. D. Boone passed by, taken by Shawnee two months previous in the Ohio Country, carried to their town on the Scioto River, received good treatment, adopted into the tribe, named Big Turtle. Speaks well of the Shawnee, talks of starting West again in September.

AUGUST 15

Still terrible dry. Corn crop burned up in the field. Neighbor James McKinley shot a buffalo, first one seen in many months. John says they are gone here, we will find them when we journey West.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1779

D. Boone stopped by again, calling for a group to leave for Cumberland Gap. Annie and Foster Williams gave their assent, then Babs Tucker the widow woman and Mark Thompson. Baby feverish but recovering. John told me we are to leave September 23, the day after Boone’s departure. I wondered at our not going with his group. Husband said he preferred his own party.

It was enough. She closed the little book and returned it to her housewife with her ink and pen.

John was snoring louder. At last, she fell asleep to the drone.