Unlike the half-faced camp, our cabin’s fireplace is protected from direct assault by winter’s frigid storms, but its walls are still a sparse defense against icy gusts. Instead of slicing through loosely stacked poles, the wind whistles between logs which are not yet chinked with mud and grass. Snow drifts that pile up inside our open doorway eventually melt, making a mud hole of our dirt floor.
Mother’s nagging about these deficiencies has no effect on Father. He and Dennis spend the bulk of their time wandering the woods for game. Father gets something now and then, Dennis hardly ever. When not hunting, they swap stories in front of the fire, Dennis being more of a chatterbox than a storyteller. I devote the long winter nights to reading long passages from the Bible or Aesop’s Fables which come easier to me now, and in my head I act out portions that catch my fancy.
When the weather warms, Father finds new excuses to neglect our cabin’s needs. Extending the fence takes precedence over making a door or chinking our walls. I’m still not much good with the finer points of wielding an axe, so Father has me drag rails from the pile to the fence and lift them into place.
One sweltering afternoon near Independence Day of my ninth year, a party of strangers driving a large wagon comes by as I’m helping Father split fence rails.
I climb onto the fence and hail them. “How long you been on the trail?”
“Weeks,” one of them says.
“Where do you hail from?”
He grins. “Maine. North-most part of the country.”
“What’s it—”
Father cuffs me on the side of my head, knocking me to the ground.
I turn away to hide a solitary tear trickling down my face as Dennis crawls between the fence rails and helps me to my feet.
By the time I’m standing, Father has apologized to the strangers for my insolence.
I run to the cabin to check on Mother, who’s sick once again. Except for my feeble attentions, I’m certain she’d be ignored completely. Father is always preoccupied, and Sally is overwhelmed carrying Mother’s burden as well as her own.
Mother is in bed, her eyes closed. Frontier life has drained her. Father should have never made us leave our Knob Creek farm.
Her forehead, clammy to the touch, means the fever has subsided; her face is ashen. “How are you?”
She looks up at me and rasps, “Better, son.”
Her hand is cold, bony. My voice cracks. “I worry.”
“Ya shouldn’. I’ll be up an’ ‘bout soon.”
“I know.” Something tells me it’s not true, though.
“Abraham,” she murmurs, “fetch me some water?”
“Yes, Mother.”
After returning with a cup of water, I sit on the edge of the bed and watch her sip, her lips trembling. Mine quiver as well.
Mother whispers, “Abraham, I won’ always be here for ya … to teach ya right ‘n wrong. Promise you’ll be good. ’Specially, obey Father and be kind to Sally. Learn from books, even if it makes Father angry. Grow to be a fine man, a preacher or teacher, someone special.”
My throat grows raw. “But you’re not going to leave us any time soon.”
“We never knows the Good Lord’s intentions,” she tells me. “Jest do as I says.”
“Yes, Mother.” I lay my head on her frail chest and weep.
Father calls me from outside. I wipe my tears and kiss Mother’s forehead. He calls again, impatiently.
“Coming, Father.”
When I stand at the doorway, he stares at me. “Fetch some corn from the storage ‘n get down to the mill. Sally tells me the flour is runnin’ low.”
“Yes, Sir.”
I fill up two sacks with corn from the storage bin and tie each of them to opposite ends of a leather strap. After draping the strap over our old mare’s withers, I climb on board and goad her into a trot. When Father can no longer see us, I rein her in and recite Bible verses the rest of the way to Noah Gordon’s Mill.
Upon arriving at the mill, Miller Gordon—he’s a shadow of Mr. John from Knob Creek—he tells me the wait is long. A book I’ve smuggled in one of the sacks of corn fills my idle time until my turn comes near sundown. I hitch the old mare to the wheel arm of the grinding stone and sit atop a rail, coaxing her around the circle.
After a few turns, the old nag becomes sluggish and stubborn. Each time she passes my perch, she gets a smack on her rump and a goading, “Git up, you old hussy.” A couple of turns later, I swat her again, and as I’m saying “Git up—” she bucks and plants her unshod hoof into my forehead. Folks say I was unconscious through the night and presumed killed. Family and neighbors gathered in our little cabin to keep vigil, poor Mother not only sick with fever but stricken by grief.
Upon waking late the next morning, I jerk upright and blurt out the rest of my refrain “—you old hussy.”
The resulting deformity of my skull leaves my left eye unfocused and drifting upward—a constant reminder of my near death. My quickening from that premature mortality also endows me with an abundance of mental energies. Lengthy passages from Mother’s Bible come to me with greater ease, and the entirety of Aesop’s Fables rolls off my tongue without a single line misspoken. I remember almost everything without effort.
Weeks later, Father catches me reading in the middle of chores, my axe propped against a tree. He complains I’m lazy as a possum and whips me with a strap until my back is raw. A few days later he rips up one of my poems and grinds it in the dirt with his heel. In spite of being threatened with more lashes, reading books and writing verse are irresistible temptations. The more I read, the more Father’s ignorance embarrasses me. When I correct him on even a small error, he gives me the back of his hand, or sometimes his fist. Mother is too weary to protest.
As the chill of autumn blows through the prairie, milk sickness descends on us, taking our neighbor, Mrs. Brooner, as its first fatality. Uncle Thomas and Aunt Betsey are afflicted soon after.
About noon one day, Mother returns to our cabin—not much more than a skeleton now—exhausted from tending the sick. She nods at Father, and for once he seems to know her thoughts. He takes down a whipsaw from the wall and turns to me. “Come along, Abraham.” I follow him to the log pile and watch as he examines several specimens. He selects one and motions for me to help. We lift it off the stack and set it on the ground. Next, he picks up the saw and tells me to grab one end. First, I rub my clammy hands on my pants.
As we begin cutting the log into boards, I ask if we need Cousin Dennis’ help.
Father says to let him be.
My throat tightens. “Are Uncle Thomas and Aunt Betsey getting better?”
Father yanks on his end of the saw.
I barely hang on to mine. I don’t repeat my question, not wanting to hear him confirm what I dread to know—they’re already dead and Mother’s time is coming soon.
When we’re done sawing the first log, he chooses another that we cut into more boards. We repeat the process again until Father decides we’ve made enough, and he shows me how to bore holes in the planks. As I proceed, he whittles pegs from scraps he digs out of the trim pile.
Once finished, we assemble the boards into two long, narrow boxes. Tears trickle down my cheeks. The boxes remind me of the one little Tommy was put in to be buried.
I return to the cabin and sit on the bed beside Mother, taking her hands in mine. They’re cool. Her forehead is chilled, more so than the time weeks ago.
“Fetch me a pail.” She winces and clutches her stomach.
When I return with the pail, she begins retching.
Soon, Sally joins me at Mother’s bedside, and we help her sit up. My sister cups Mother’s chin and tilts her head back. Her tongue is white, as if it’s coated with milk. Sally shakes her head. Mother grimaces as we lay her back.
Over the ensuing days Mother’s condition worsens. Her tongue is now dark, nearly black. She has no control of her arms or legs. Her head wobbles when we help her sit. It’s been seven days since she left her bed. Cramping and dry heaving come regularly. Her bowels are empty.
Late that afternoon, she whispers for Sally and me to draw close. “Love each other and God,” she says. After a deep breath she adds, “Be good to Father.”
Sally and I cry.
Mother reaches for my hand, but her arm falls limp at her side. Her mouth quivers.
I move closer and turn my ear toward her lips.
She rasps, “Be … special ….”
I recall the promise she asked of me weeks ago.
Father comes into the cabin and stands at Mother’s bedside. None of us speaks for the longest while.
Mother strains to prop herself up on her elbows. Failing, she falls back on the bed, mumbling. Sally and I lean forward wanting to understand her words, but it’s useless. Her breathing becomes shallow, sporadic. After several minutes, she gasps one last time, then breathes no more.
Sally closes Mother’s eyes.
I lay my head on her hollow chest, choking back tears, begging her not to leave us.
Sally strokes my hair and whispers, “Shh ….”
Father hangs his head and shuffles toward the doorway. At the threshold, he stops and speaks my name without turning. He waits for me to follow him to the woodpile. As we saw boards for her coffin, I bite my lip, fighting back tears, but a trickle escapes, tracing the edge of my nose until it finds the corner of my mouth. My tongue tastes its saltiness. When Father thinks we’ve cut enough boards, I bore holes into them, and he whittles pegs. My head throbs as we cobble together the long, narrow box for Mother’s burial.
At Father’s instruction, I pick up one end of her coffin, and together we carry it into the cabin. My eyes are swollen and raw. I stumble, unable to see my way. At Mother’s bedside, I wipe away tears and focus on her ashen face. No longer is it contorted by disease. Her lips are cool to the touch of my trembling fingers.
As we lift her body, wrapped in a threadbare dress she wore most every day, she almost floats into the coffin— light, like the skeleton of a tiny sparrow that’s fallen from its nest and died. What reason is there to live on? If the milk-sick disease should claim me soon, it would be a welcome escape.
That evening we bury Mother alongside Aunt Betsey and Uncle Thomas in a dale not far from the cabin. Once the last shovel of dirt is thrown onto her grave, I kneel and erupt into convulsive sobbing.
Father mutters, “Come along. There’s work to be done.”
Sally follows him, stopping for a moment to kiss the top of my head.
Weeks pass without Father speaking a word about Mother’s death. He spends much of his time in the woods, often alone but sometimes with Dennis. Regardless, there’s little meat on our table. Preparations for the winter are also ignored; our cabin still lacks a door, and the gaps between logs remain unchinked.
Sally rises each day before dawn and works long into the night, cooking, cleaning, and mending. She says little, except making an occasional complaint that she can’t manage the household alone. I keep the fire fueled for her, and fell trees or split logs to bury my grief.
When the skies darken, turning daytime into a near-night, torrents of rain beat on Mother’s unmarked grave, threatening to wash her body up from the ground. On those occasions, I sit on the sod above her, railing against Heaven, praying to whatever God there is to keep her safe from flooding. In the evenings, under the dim light of the fire, I painstakingly etch out a letter to Rev. Elkin, a preacher Mother knew back in Kentucky, and implore him to attend to her proper burial as soon as he can brave the wilderness and come to us. Her body could be swept away by flooding before her soul is delivered safely into the Almighty’s hands.
The misery of another winter taunts us like a panther toying with its prey, and we still have no answer from Rev. Elkin. I take up an ax and devote the short hours of daylight to felling more trees and splitting firewood. Father is more distant and brooding than ever.
We are often hungry, except for Sally, who no longer has any appetite, and we’re always cold. At night, Father and Dennis sit at the table bantering about matters of little consequence while I lie by the fireplace reading Mother’s Bible. Sally huddles in the corner under layers of animal skins, her sobs mingling with the moans of icy winds blowing through our cabin.
By spring, our strength is nearly dissipated, and our spirits are crumbling. Then one sunny afternoon, Rev. Elkin arrives to preach a sermon at Mother’s grave. Some twenty neighbors join in prayers for our family and for Mother’s soul, but the warmth of the moment is soon gone.
During the planting season, I lack the energy or the will to challenge Father, so I put aside my reading and writing, and tend to chores. He fills my idle time with trying to teach me his trade of carpentry. He says it’s a son’s calling to follow his father’s footsteps. My heart’s not in it. Father grows frustrated and invests no further effort in my apprenticeship. He leaves undone the cabin door we were making, and I become little more to him than a set of arms for wielding an axe.
Soon after the corn sprouts, Father slaughters our meager herd of pigs—a bear has already feasted on our cow. After he cures the meat, he sets out down the Ohio on a rented flatboat, intending to sell the pork. Since pork fetches a better price than wild game, he leaves none of the pork for Sally and me to eat. Besides, he tells us, he won’t be gone long, and our supply of corn meal and cured game should be sufficient during his absence.
If need be, he says Cousin Dennis can hunt, notwithstanding his lack of skill and the continued scarcity of game. Much of the wildlife perished in the unending winter that lingered over the world for an entire year before we left Knob Creek. Back then we didn’t know why summer never came, but now folks say it was due to the mountains that exploded half a world away—somewhere called the Dutch East Indies.
Once Father is gone, my days are filled with wandering the woods, writing poetry, and reading. When Sally asks, I grind corn by hand into flour and keep the fire going. Sometimes the embers die out, and I make more smoke than fire getting it restarted. Sally cooks as best she can and cleans. Dennis makes himself scarce, scouring the woods for game to little avail. When not hunting, he often boards with one of our neighbors, leaving Sally and me unattended.
As weeks stretch into months, Sally demands more help from Dennis and me. Dennis scowls and reminds us, “Men hunt. Women and children keep the house and tend the crops.” He turns and struts away.
She calls after him, “The least you can do is make us a door for the cabin.”
He shouts over his shoulder, “It cain wait ‘til your pa gets home.”
Sally stomps into the cabin, muttering about its naked doorway.
I lumber down to a stand of cornstalks, peel back a few husks, and find the kernels withered and pale. Just the same, I snap off the ears and hold them in my shirt. The harvest goes quickly as planting was sparse.
I carry the crop up to the cabin where Sally is sitting at the table, trembling and crying, her face buried in her hands. I drop the corn on the table in front of her and lay my hand on her shoulder. “What’s the matter?”
She looks up at me. “Father’s not coming back. I’m convinced of it.”
“He wouldn’t abandon us,”
“No, but something might have happened. This is wild country.”
I search her face for any hint she can be consoled.
She drops her head. “He could have been killed by Indians. Or eaten by a bear or wolves.”
I stroke her hair. “He can take care of himself.”
She pounds the table and screams, “Abraham, he’s never been gone this long before. What are we going to do for food if he doesn’t come back?”
“He’ll come back, and if we run out of food before he does, Dennis can hunt.”
Sally laughs, her voice strained by bitterness. “Dennis is useless,” she says. “Just like Father, he’ll wait ‘til our stomachs are knotted with pain before he picks up a gun to hunt. And when he does, he’ll come back empty-handed as always.”
My heart sinks. I am ten years old. Dennis Hanks, ten years my elder, is more of a child than me. If the survival of this household is on my shoulders, we’re doomed. I walk to the uncovered doorway and stare at the horizon. I can’t even make a door.
In due time, Father returns, but he doesn’t stay long. Having sold all our pork, he’s off to Kentucky to find a new wife. Now it’s November, and the weather is turning foul. If winter’s fury holds off for a week, it’ll give him time to make it to Kentucky and its comforts.
Sally and I are not so fortunate. Our food stocks are low, and if we were fortunate to have a gun, I’m unskilled at hunting. I’m more useless at setting traps. One day as I’m making my usual trek to the creek to draw water, the skies unload a torrent of rain and sleet. In my haste to escape the storm, one of my boots gets lost in thick mud. The sole of the other is already worn through.
On seeing me stumble into the cabin, Dennis teases me. “Got yer head in them clouds again, Abraham? If ya come down here with the rest of us, ya might notice ya got one boot missin’.”
My feet sting from the cold. “Not funny.”
Dennis stands, shaking his head. “Off to the Turnhams to see if theys got spare vittles. When I git back I’ll give ya a hand makin’ some mocksakins.”
Shivers run through me. “How long will you be?”
“Be goin’ huntin’, too.” His eyes widen. “Plan to git a big deer, so likely be gone a while.”
Sally glares at him. “Well, be quick about it. Pickins getting mighty slim.”
He grins. “A week, maybe.”
Days later Dennis still hasn’t returned, and Sally and I wake to a smattering of snowflakes flying about in an icy wind. Hoping to beat the storm, I rush out in bare feet to gather kindling. By the time I return to the cabin, the snow is up to my ankles, and my toes are nearly frostbitten.
A few nights later, during another fierce storm, Sally sets two half-full cups of gruel on the table. “This is the end of our corn meal,” she says, wiping a tear from her cheek. She drops onto her stool and bites her lip.
“Dennis is bound to scare up something soon.”
“He’s as lazy as Father.” She laughs and points to the neglected doorway. She and I already tried hanging animal skins to keep out the storms, but the pelts were no match for winter’s merciless assault.
I gaze about the cabin. Our woodpile is exhausted, and a mound of gray ashes in the fireplace is all that remains of the once glowing embers. Snow blows through our uncovered doorway, and a bitter wind howls through the still unchinked walls, sounding like a horde of ghosts.
After licking the final scraps of gruel from our bowls, Sally and I huddle in bed, covering ourselves with animal skins, both of us quivering from the cold. Her body quakes from crying, as well. I nuzzle closer to her and whisper, “Shh….”
She turns over and faces me, wiping away tears. “You know it’s all Father’s fault—even Mother’s dying.” She mutters, “If he hadn’t brought us here, chasing after such foolish dreams … we were happy in Kentucky.”
“I know.”
She buries her face in my chest and continues weeping. I wrap my arms around her and rehearse in my mind the scolding I’ll give Father when he returns. In time her quaking ceases, and her whimpering gives way to quiet, rhythmic breathing. My heart aches for her. She’s my only remaining love.
Sleep is the only relief we have from the pain in our stomachs and the fear in our hearts. At dawn, our aching returns, but neither of us has energy enough to rise. In time our bodies become weary and surrender to numbness. Instead of leaving our bed to tend to the necessities of toilet, we lie in our own piss. For the ensuing days, the only blessing we can count is that our need to relieve ourselves is lessened by the emptiness of our bladders and bowels.
When Father finally arrives with his new wife and her brood in tow, she gathers Sally and me to her side and smoothes our lice-ridden hair. She’s smaller than Mother had been before her sickness, but she’s sturdy as an oak. I gaze at her face, sweet and calm as an angel, her eyes warm and blue like the summer sky. Her gentle hand makes me forget my aching stomach. Winter’s chill evaporates from my half-naked body.
Many times since Father left us to court the widow Johnston in Elizabethtown, I’ve wondered if a stepmother would make life less miserable, or more so. I’ve thought of Heaven with its golden streets and mansions, and wondered whether it would be better to die. Our new mother directs Father to gather wood for the fire, and she attends to bathing Sally and me. She dresses me in her eldest son’s clothing, and Sally dons one of our new mother’s own dresses. Once we’re refreshed and spanking clean, she prepares a feast from provisions brought from Kentucky and food Father gathers from our neighbors at her insistence.