The Seekers (19 page)

Trudging and scattering corn, Abraham said in a listless voice, “I suppose they were Shawnee again.”

Young Daniel nodded. “Goin’ back to their towns north o’ here, I reckon. Pap says General Wayne never should of ’lowed them to hunt in the treaty lands. Only makes ’em resent what the gummint took away—and crave it worse every time they travel through.”

Too tired to enter into a discussion of Indian policy, Abraham kept walking. A few spatters of rain landed on his bare shoulders. Although it couldn’t be later than four o’clock, the silver-gray clouds sweeping out of the west were rapidly bringing near-darkness. The wind had turned gusty. A little less than half a mile away, the surface of the Great Miami showed white riffles.

When the rain began to fall harder, Abraham swore and closed his seed bag. “We’d better wait till morning to finish, Daniel.”

“All right,” the gangly boy agreed. “Be back right after sunup.”

“You want to rest in the cabin till the storm’s over?”

“I would, but Pap’s waitin’ for me to unload them tools we brung up from Cincinnati.”

“I really appreciate your help, Daniel.”

“Oh, hell, it’s nothin’.”

“I couldn’t get by without it and you know it. I only hope to God I can raise four good acres this year, and give your father half.”

“Mr. Kent, he don’t expect you to settle up right away.”

“Well, I’m going to, Daniel.”

Abraham was sincere in his promise to repay Clapper the only way he could. Yet repeating the pledge depressed him too.

Even if four full acres of corn matured, half of the yield would barely keep the little family over the winter, while the other half would hardly make a dent in the various debts he’d run up at the small store Daniel Clapper had established near the fort, simply by partitioning half of his large cabin and hanging out a sign.

Daniel was embarrassed by Abraham’s sober expression. Without understanding its cause, he tried to dismiss it with a wave. “Folks got to help each other, Mr. Kent. Otherwise none of us’d make it, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Abraham said in an absent way.

“See you in the morning.”

Running, young Daniel disappeared into the trees west of the cabin. As Abraham watched the boy go, he noted that all the smoldering stumps were being drenched by the rain. He’d have to relight them tomorrow. Another chore—

That was the extent of life out here: chores. Seven days a week, indoors and out. The rigors of it had stripped all the fat from Abraham’s body, thickened his muscles noticeably. But he felt tired every waking minute.

He put on his linsey shirt, grimacing at its wetness. He picked up his pouch, horn and flintlock, taking care to shield the lock in the crook of his arm. Burdened with those items plus the two seed sacks, he tramped toward the cabin.

Under the protection of one of the big girdled trees, he watched the clouds sailing out of the west and reflected on the understated truth of young Daniel’s parting remark. Without mutual assistance, few settlers could survive the first year or so in the new land.

Abraham and Elizabeth had been fortunate in several ways. He often forgot that in his weariness and frustration—

Repairing the ark struck by the sunken log had been fairly easy, thanks to the help of some coarse-talking but genial boatmen who had come upstream, sail raised to a freshening wind, an hour after the accident. Elizabeth had indeed lost the baby, and been weak for more than a month. But the tragedy hadn’t destroyed her ability to bear, thank God. The evidence of that was in the cabin.

On their arrival at Cincinnati, Daniel Clapper, that odd, cheerfully pessimistic man of small education and large wisdom, had declared that he and his brood might as well open their store at Abraham and Elizabeth’s destination, because it was “probably as good as anyplace else—in fact just the same as anyplace else.”

So the Kents and the Clappers had ridden the thirty-odd miles north along the Miami in a hired wagon pulled by Clapper’s two horses. On their property, the younger couple found the blessing of a half-faced camp, ramshackle but serviceable during the first weeks. People at the Fort Hamilton settlement said squatters had been on the Kent land the year before. But the squatters had moved on out toward the Wabash River country. No one in the settlement even remembered the squatters by name.

Leaning against the girdled tree and watching the rain fall, Abraham recalled that first hard summer and autumn. He particularly recalled his desperate rush to hoe a few holes in the ground between the trees and plant a small amount of corn to tide them over the cold months. The corn not only failed to grow, it failed to sprout.

By custom, all men in the district came to raise the Kents’ cabin in September of ’97. Since that time, Abraham had taken part in six three-day cabin raisings for others.

During the winter of 1797-98, Abraham spent almost all of his remaining money for provisions to tide them through until spring. He bartered a clock Elizabeth had brought from Boston to obtain the rifle they needed for protection. A number of settings of fine china were surrendered to storekeeper Clapper for a pair of cheaper pewter plates, seed and a plow. Abraham knew Clapper was getting the bad end of the bargain. No one out here would purchase that exquisite china off Clapper’s shelf.

The last of the money paid for Henrietta Knox, who delivered the milk he and Elizabeth learned to drink sour, although they abominated the taste. There was no way to keep milk sweet for long; storing it in a crock in the cold, clear spring at the back of their property only retarded the souring a few days.

The following year, ’98, Abraham had, laboriously cleared a two-acre plot, planted it and harvested the corn. Half the crop was ruined by a disease that blighted the ears as they were forming. But at least the family had some food for the winter. The baby, born in the fall with the help of a local midwife, took its nourishment directly from Elizabeth’s breast.

Under the bellies of fast-flying clouds, Abraham saw a wedge of birds streaming north. Plump and tasty passenger pigeons. When they stopped to roost, you could practically knock them out of the lower branches with sticks. Abraham watched the birds longingly. A cooked pigeon would have been a welcome change from their diet of corn mush and sour milk.

The movement of the birds against the strangely luminous gray-and-silver sky drew Abraham’s mind back to the conversation with Daniel Clapper just before the ark hit the sunken log. Abraham had changed his thinking since then. He believed Clapper was, in part if not entirely, correct. The desire to see the other side of the hill
was
rooted in discontent, whether it took the form of a yearning for wealth the east denied, a second chance to repair a wrecked life, misery generated by crowded conditions in the cities—or even plain, cussed boredom.

In his case and Elizabeth’s, the goal had been escape from Philip’s domineering influence. Abraham could admit that freely to himself now, without shame. He
was
ashamed of his desire to see the Boston house again. He never revealed it to his wife.

Still, it was odd, he thought as he watched the gray rain pour down on his newly planted field—odd that unhappiness was the motive force behind so many people moving west. And by God—they were moving west by the thousands!

Just this past March, he’d gone to Cincinnati with Daniel Clapper and his son, to help them transport an unusually large stock of new staples and implements back to the store. Cincinnati was no longer the tiny frontier outpost Abraham remembered. It had boomed since the Kents and Clappers passed through in the late spring of ’97. Population had spurted to over five hundred, not counting the Fort Washington garrison.

What astonished Abraham most was the river traffic. With boats tied up everywhere, pushing off at all hours only to be replaced by new ones coming down the Ohio, the river town actually looked more crowded than Pittsburgh. Almost all the transients were heading further west. Americans, Abraham concluded, were the damnedest bunch of perpetual malcontents civilization had ever seen.

As he strolled the packed, noisy piers, observing families as well as young bachelors armed only with hunting rifles preparing to set out, he recalled Daniel Clapper’s dour prediction that most of the travelers would never find the ideal life they sought. Yet they took pleasure in haggling over flatboat passage, and spoke glowingly in the taverns of all the freedom and promise of the bountiful land waiting out ahead—

That country just
had
to be more attractive and comfortable than the coastal belt, where a swelling populace was growing more and more alarmed over the undeclared naval war between America and her former ally, France.

From time to time a letter written by Philip or Peggy—a letter months in transit—expressed the Kents’ open hostility to Philip’s native country. The letters were further signs of how Philip’s conservatism was hardening into unqualified pro-British sentiment.

The French Directory had been angered by Jay’s treaty with England, the letters reported. And despite President Washington’s specific warnings in his farewell address against all alliances with foreign nations except those alliances of the most temporary, expedient nature, Minister Pinckney had gone to Paris along with Commissioners Elbridge Gerry and John Marshall to attempt to secure a treaty guaranteeing friendship and, more important, commerce.

The commissioners were outraged by a request for an outright bribe to be paid to foreign minister Talleyrand, in return for consideration of the requested treaty. The bribe wasn’t to be paid directly, of course. It was to be funneled through three intermediaries tactfully dubbed Messieurs X, Y and Z. All but the most illiterate passing along the Ohio had heard of—and by and large approved—the ringing toast that had become a catch-phrase. The toast had been given Minister Pinckney after his furious refusal to pay Talleyrand, and his return to the United States:

“Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!”

That was a sentiment Philip Kent heartily endorsed in his letters—especially as it applied to postrevolutionary France. He was pleased, he wrote, that a Navy Department had at last been created. He was delighted that
Constitution
and the other frigates had finally been completed, and launched to oppose French harassment of American shipping.

Most of the settlers Abraham talked with in Cincinnati weren’t articulate about the question of war. But they were quite aware of its possibility. Thus they had an added incentive to get as far away as possible from the vulnerable seacoast.

Perhaps some would end up at a destination that satisfied them. Or perhaps they’d pretend that was the case, anyway, so as not to confront their families—or themselves—with the sad truth of their error.

A few might actually better themselves. But no gentle Edens awaited them, Abraham was positive of that. The fact had come home to him long before the Cincinnati trip. It had come home to him as he lay beside his wife during the summer and winter nights, his body hurting so badly from physical labor that he literally couldn’t sleep.

Something else struck him in Cincinnati—struck with the power of a revelation. He and Elizabeth were just as much prisoners of their surroundings as they would have been had Abraham taken a place and done Philip’s bidding at Kent and Son.

Thousands were moving west but they could not. They had mortgaged their lives to twenty acres along the Miami River, and were consumed by the challenges of daily living: food, shelter, the Indian threat—

Survival.

He and Elizabeth would never see another place. At least not easily. Clapper said it made no difference—one was identical with the next. Still, what Abraham was denied, he somehow coveted.

After the excursion to Cincinnati, he began to think of the twenty acres in a new way. No longer was the land a haven. It acquired quasihuman characteristics in his mind—especially when he tramped to Fort Hamilton for supplies and wound up accepting too much of Clapper’s corn whiskey. Then the land became a true opponent. A captor whom he could and did curse aloud—

Even basic survival on the land was still in doubt. Abraham was succeeding, but only marginally; and that success would have been impossible without the cooperative spirit that tended to tie the settlers together, each helping the other.

The preceding autumn, for instance, Abraham had worked all night many a night at husking bees, since no man could husk a large corn crop alone. He had lent his time and his strength to those cabin-raisings, in return for the help he had received with his.

Yet even with human allies, he found the land a formidable foe. Many—like the vanished squatters who’d built the half-faced camp he and Elizabeth had originally inhabited—lacked the will and the wits to win against it. Abraham had done his best; given the struggle everything for nearly two years—and all he had to show was a meager four-acre plot, and no guarantee of a good crop on that.

It might be different if Elizabeth were stronger physically,
he thought.
Tougher mentally
—

But as he stared into the heavying rain that hid the river and extinguished the last of his burning stumps, he admitted she was not. He’d have welcomed an occasional smile of pleasure at his small accomplishments; a word of encouragement about the tasks still to be done. Elizabeth seemed incapable of giving either. Somehow it doubled the rigors of his work.

A noise on a nearby tree branch diverted him from the gloomy meditation. He spied a fat squirrel perched where the limb joined the trunk. He found squirrel meat in a pot pie not too unpalatable. So he raised the Kentucky rifle to his shoulder slowly, and aimed down the acid-browned octagonal barrel. The trick was to avoid hitting the squirrel and destroying the flesh. Instead, Abraham would try to bark him.

The rifle exploded. Smoke curled. Chief began to snap and run in a circle as Abraham grimaced—it couldn’t be called a smile. His ball had flown true. Smacked the thick wood where the branch met the tree. The concussion had spun the squirrel to the ground, where it now lay stunned.