The twentieth stroke was the final one. Michael Flynn put his foot against the trunk and pushed hard, and the tree began to topple—slow, uncertain, then sure as death once the weight of its branches began to pull it down. He looked around as it fell; where was Angus? Just like the boy to put himself in its path, daydreaming, and then no doubt everyone would point their fingers, the madman Flynn, pinned his own son beneath a tree. But the boy was off the other direction. Good.
This one was too small to use for building, maybe one log out of the main trunk, maybe not even that. Had to be cleared anyway. This was going to be the garden plot, good level ground, well watered, although right now it was covered in briars and clumps of grass. The soil was sandy but could be improved.
He had it all in his mind. The spot where his tent was pitched—that was where the cabin would go. It was shady, set back a little from the river, but close enough to fetch water. Between the cabin and the river, the garden. He would fence in the house and garden, and then downstream he would build a barn and a hog lot.
Damn hard way to make any money. So be it. If the Irish colony had lasted through the war, he would have had friends to help him and men to spend time with. And he would have had Aideen. But what point was there to looking backward? It just opened the door to tears and mourning, and what use of that? Bemoaning fate was for fools.
His mother had been a great believer in fate, the poor girl, or God’s will as she called it. Same thing, all meek acceptance and praying for the strength to take the kicks. She would have stayed in Ireland to starve, their lives whittled down a little smaller every year, until famine or the landlord’s man finally took them all.
His father was the one who had gotten them out and to America, with him as just a boy no good for anything, not even as old as Angus there, and his brothers yet to be born, in the grimy hold of a ship bound for Wilmington, and the only good thing about the darkness of the ship was that it kept them from knowing just how filthy their conditions were. His father’s notion of God’s will included the prospect that God might will a man to take himself in hand and make a better life by his own sweat, and from Wilmington to Pittsburgh to St. Louis they did just that. Not a better life that one could tell from outward appearances but in tiny ways, always through hard labor and thrift, and when his father had died under a collapse of railroad iron in 1855, Flynn had imagined that he might have died happy, knowing he had left behind a houseful of sons to care for his widow and the prospect of grandchildren to carry his name into the next century.
The idea had been for Michael, the oldest, to travel to Father Hogan’s colony, claim the land, clear it, then bring Aideen, then his mother, then the brothers one by one. Landowners. Who would have imagined them landowners? But then the diphtheria took his mother, the war scattered the boys, and Aideen was lost to something, the letter didn’t say what. Starvation from the raiders, that’s what he figured. He’d done it himself in the march to the sea, taken the last bag of cornmeal from a family and turned them out to root. Was it any wonder how much hate they all felt?
The next tree was a good big one, some kind of big-leafed thing. He wasn’t about to pretend to forest knowledge; a tree was a tree. Flynn’s Army blues were soaked with sweat, top and bottom, but he hefted his axe to swing. He paused.
“Angus!”
He hated the harsh sound of his voice, like the sound of a barrel being dragged over rocks. But, by God, that boy was a trial. Always off piddling at something, tossing sticks in the river.
“Angus!”
“Here I am.” Walking up with a snakeskin in his hand. Enough to make a man sick, handling snakes.
“Jesus is Lord, boy, where did you get that thing?”
“Found it.”
“Found it I know, but where?”
“Down by the water.”
“Well, throw it away. It ain’t clean.”
“It’s just a little old skin. Probably a garter snake.”
“I told you once.”
The boy laid the snakeskin carefully in the grass. Flynn knew he would be coming back for it when his back was turned.
“Come on. I have work for you.”
He pulled a hatchet from the pile of tools he kept in the clearing and led Angus to the fallen tree. “Chop off these limbs and drag them over there. Make a pile.” The hatchet was too big for the boy’s hand, so Flynn showed him how to hold it with both. “Stand across the tree from the limb so you don’t glance off and cut off your leg,” he said. Seeing Angus’s frightened look, he quickly added, “Just a joke, lad. You’re not going to cut anything off. I’ll be right here.”
He returned to felling his big tree while Angus started on the limbs of the small one, too smart to grumble but moving slowly. All right, the boy was small and hungry, but he couldn’t expect to sit in the tent or wander the woods all afternoon. Flynn let him cross the river to his precious schoolhouse in the mornings, but after noon, by God, there was work aplenty—not just clearing the trees, but building, gathering rocks, turning soil. At that age he had been picking rags off the streets of Pittsburgh and selling the bundles to the neighborhood ragman, bringing the pennies home to the family. No room for loafers.
The more he thought about the work ahead, the harder he swung the axe. He felt as if the tree itself was his enemy. Bring it down fast and hard, no holding back, no stopping for thought. By God, old Sherman had been like that. It had been a pleasure to serve under Sherman. Swing the axe, never slack. And the next thing you knew, the tree was down and you were moving to the next one. Hit hard, then harder, then harder yet.
But this tree was hollow, and the weight of its limbs began to pull it down before Flynn was ready. He called out to Angus, who scampered away as the trunk splintered about five feet up and fell toward the river, opposite to where he wanted it to fall.
“Damnation!” Flynn spat out. No logs for the cabin out of this mess, just more dead wood to be cleared away. What the hell.
Perhaps the crash of the tree had obscured the sound of his approach, or perhaps the man was just exceptionally quiet, but suddenly Flynn became aware of a man on horseback who had appeared in his clearing. He was a small man, slender with thin black whiskers, and he seemed to have come from the north, working his way through the brush alongside the river. Tied to his saddlehorn was a rope; the other end of the rope looped in several secure knots around the neck and shoulders of a thin sow.
“Afternoon,” said the man. Flynn nodded.
The man looked around. “Didn’t know you all had expanded across the river.”
“If you mean that colony of characters over there, they didn’t,” Flynn said. “I’m on my own hook here, bought forty from ’em.”
“I see,” the man said. Flynn could tell that he was eyeing his Army uniform. “This was Harp Webb’s land, before he died.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Flynn said.
The man rested in his saddle and gazed across the river. “I expect you wouldn’t. You don’t sound like you’re from around here.” Flynn didn’t reply. “I’ll sell you this pig,” the man said at last.
“You come by it honest?”
“It was wandering in my woods, and it ain’t got no notch in the ear, so I figure it’s mine,” he said. “I was going to take it to my cousin’s, but I’d just as soon not make the trip.”
Flynn walked back to look at the sow. It was a young one, two or three, he guessed, and seemed healthy. “Maybe,” he said.
“Five dollars,” the man said.
“Five dollars!”
“Hogs has gone up.” The man continued to gaze across the river, paying no attention to Flynn.
“Maybe they have, but it don’t matter to me if I ain’t got five dollars. Three.”
“Make it four, then.”
“All right. Hold on.” Flynn walked to his tent and crawled inside. His knapsack was at the far end, rolled up in blankets; he unwrapped it and removed four greenbacks. No need to count the rest of the roll; he knew there wasn’t much left.
“You ain’t got any gold certificates?” the man said. Flynn shook his head. “Well, I guess I’ll take it. Don’t trust this paper money, though. You people won the war, you get to make the money.”
“You fought on the other side, then.”
He shrugged, and as if in sympathy his horse shook its shoulders as well. “I did indeed. All up and down this part of the state. Arkansas, too. I was a major by the time it was all over.”
“Not regular Army, then.” The man didn’t answer. Should have figured him for a guerrilla, Flynn thought. “Well, past is past. I’ll buy your hog.” He untied the ropes around the hog, which immediately dashed off into the underbrush as soon as it was free. “Well, shit.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” the man said. “Just put out some corn and it’ll come back to you.”
“You keep looking over at the colony,” Flynn said. “Ain’t you going over there?”
“Don’t know,” the man said. “I’ve got history with them. Like you say, the past is past, but I don’t care to open things up if I don’t have to.”
“So what’s your history?”
“They tried to kill me, I tried to kill them, that sort of thing.” The man looked down at Flynn, and his gaze was cold. “Funny thing. A year ago I would have killed you by now.”
“Or vice versa,” Flynn said.
The man shrugged. “Something like that. Anyway, I don’t look behind me. But I don’t like to stir things up, either. Maybe I’ll just ride down to the riverbank and take a look.” He twitched the horse forward over the scattered branches. Flynn, axe in hand, wondered whether to follow or to return to his work; he decided to follow. He would need to cross the river and borrow a bucket of corn anyway. The rider paid him no mind.
On the riverbank, the man sat still on his horse behind a clump of bushes, gazing impassively across the quiet water. Flynn could hear the voices of children.
“Angus,” Flynn said, quietly, for he knew the boy was near. Angus appeared at his elbow.
“Go up to the ford, cross over, and borrow a bucket of corn from Mr. Turner. Careful when you cross back. Keep it dry.”
“Turner made it through, eh?” the man said, not looking around. “Still in charge?”
“He made it through. Made captain, too, or some such, I’m told. But I wouldn’t say he’s in charge. I don’t think he came through with a whole mind. He just tends his crops nowadays. If anyone’s in charge, I’d say it’s the missus.”
The man squinted appreciatively. “Wouldn’t surprise me. That lady has more gumption than most of the men I’ve known. Well, enough of this.”
With an imperceptible touch of the reins, the man urged his horse south along the riverbank.
“Ain’t no trail down that way,” Flynn said.
“I know. But there’s a way through.” He stopped and looked back at Flynn. “That Daybreak colony is good people, even if they have funny ideas,” he said. “Get to know them. And tell them Sam Hildebrand said hello.”
“So you’re Hildebrand the raider?”
The man turned his horse and faced Flynn squarely. “I am.”
“I have a question for you, then.”
“All right.”
Flynn noticed that the axe in his hands felt strangely heavy all of a sudden. “Did you raid that Irish colony south of here, forty, fifty miles? Out past Doniphan?”
Hildebrand’s face was still. A squirrel rattled leaves somewhere nearby. “No,” he said.
They faced each other. Hildebrand finally broke the silence.
“How many men you figure you killed in the war, Irish?” he said.
“I have no idea. I march, I shoot, I sleep. I put a bayonet in a few, so them I guess I know. The rest, who knows? Half the time, your rifle don’t even go off when you’ve got a man in your sights. I don’t know.”
“That’s for the best, I suppose,” Hildebrand said. “A man doesn’t need to know that kind of thing. Me, it’s eighty-six. Eighty-six. Most of them with my own hand. Rifle, pistol, rope. Knife. So I guess when I go to Hell, I’ll have eighty-six devils ready for me.” He turned his horse to the south again. “Good luck with your acreage.”
Flynn measured the distance between them and knew that if he tried to take Hildebrand off his horse with the axe, he would be dead with twenty feet still to go; the man was bound to be armed, even if he couldn’t see the weapon. But he could smell out this rebel’s lies as sure as sunset. He didn’t raid the Irish colony? In a pig’s eye. For all Flynn knew, he had just bought a hog from the murderer of his own Aideen.
A blindness passed over him for a moment, and he felt he was dashing toward the retreating horse, leaping over its tail with the ferocity of those eighty-six devils, cleaving the man’s head from his shoulders in a mighty swing. His eyes rolled toward the sky and he heard himself breathe. But when he looked around again, he was standing in the same spot, the axe still heavy and unbloodied in his hands, and Hildebrand was gone.
He turned and strode back to the fallen tree.
By evening he had felled five more trees and cut them up, with half a dozen new logs to go to the cabin and a great mass of limbs to use for fencing and firewood. As he cleared, he had come across a big cedar tree, and beneath the cedar tree a mound of earth and a wooden gravemarker, painted with a man’s name in black ink. Cunningham. So he had not only bought a farm, but a graveyard as well. So be it.