The Seekers (55 page)

“Besides, I was only teasing.”

“They don’t know that. You tease them too much and they’ll want to try—”

Uncomfortable silence.

“Try what, Jared?”

“Never mind.”

“Are you trying to say they’ll want to do what men and women do together?”

Jared actually blushed. “Do you know about—?”

“Of course I do.”

“How?”

Now it was her turn. “Never mind.”

“Damn you for an impudent little minx—!”

“Don’t you dare curse me, Jared Kent!”

“All right, I’m sorry. But you pay attention to what I’m telling you about—”

“Pooh! If any man starts to—to hurt me or something, I’ll just tell him he mustn’t. If he thinks I’m pretty, he’ll do what I say.”

He would have guffawed except for the fact that she was serious. He replied the same way. “You may be able to twine men around your finger when you’re twenty, Amanda, but it won’t work when you’re only ten. You mind what I say. Don’t lead them on.” She made a disappointed face. “Oh, very well.” But her eyes were still merry. She was entranced with her newfound power.
God help me,
Jared sighed silently,
I’ve forced her to learn too many hard lessons too early.
His familiar sense of guilt put him in a bitter and depressed mood the rest of the evening.

The keelboat glided on down the Ohio, and Jared found himself studying the terrain with a peculiarly intense fascination.

In the misty meadows and towering trees that moved slowly astern on both sides of the river, he saw primitive beauty. At the same time, the vistas of silent forest and shining river filled him with loathing.

Occasionally, on clear days, he glimpsed game onshore. Great prong-horned deer. Fat pheasants. Wild hogs. He began to understand why people would seek this new country, content to huddle together in small settlements of the kind the keelboat passed from time to time. The boat’s coming was always announced by a blast of an old bugle owned by a member of the crew. When the bugle pealed, men and women in the settlement ran down to the shore and held their children up to see the vessel. Jared felt sorry for the children—and the parents. The older people usually waved with great animation. But they had a lonely, haggard look about them. Perhaps that was why they waved.

There was a strange duality in Jared’s interest, a duality that didn’t escape him. The great forest did impress him with its stark splendor. He could tell the land would be beautiful the moment the weather warmed. He could visualize the greening boughs, the bursts of wildflower color—

Yet he hated all he saw.

He tried to find a rational explanation for that feeling.

On the surface, it seemed simple. The land had lured his mother and father with false promises of ease and abundance. They had found reality far different. The land had subjected them to the same hardships it worked on anyone who came to challenge its dominance. They had not been strong enough to endure, and they had been destroyed.

Jared loved the memory of his parents to the extent that it was possible for him to do so, knowing so little of them. But what had happened to them had happened in the past. It seemed insufficient to explain the loathing and unease that gripped him in the present.

One morning, unable to sleep, he went out on deck just as the light was breaking. He yawned and rubbed his eyes in the red dawn—and blinked suddenly at movement in the brush on the left-hand shore.

An animal stood there, its hindquarters concealed by a spray of ferns. Its great shoulders and head were fully visible. It resembled some huge, sleek, tan-colored cat. Its eyes caught the rising sun for an instant, burning like pieces of iridescent crystal—

Jared shuddered.

In its jaws, the cat held the remains of a smaller, darker animal.

A raccoon? A possum?

No way of telling. The prey was dead, crushed, nothing more than mangled meat and brown, bloodstained fur. Jared put the back of his hand against his lips, feeling the sickness rise—

With immense grace and power, the cat turned and loped away from the shore, and then Jared understood.

The land was like the cat. He and all the others who came to it were prey. Some survived. Some could not.

He was one of the latter. Bone-deep, he knew that.

Times beyond counting, Aunt Harriet had told him that he was what his parents had been: flawed. He had seen countless evidences of his own. Wasn’t the tremor in his belly, stirred by the sight of the bloody carcass in the cat’s mouth, just one more? He was the child of Abraham and Elizabeth, knowing with a certainty that he bore their weaknesses. Sometimes he tried to tell himself the conviction was irrational. Yet he believed.

If he challenged the land, it would destroy him. That was why he and Amanda had to flee to New Orleans, to civilized comforts. It wasn’t merely a matter of being far from Boston. He probably could lose himself anywhere out here. But he would not—

He understood, on that scarlet morning, the real reason he hated the land.

He hated it because it made him afraid of himself.

Louisville impressed Jared as a prosperous, if faintly pestilential, place. A profusion of ponds dotted the forests of oak, hackberry and buckeye that surrounded the town. But Louisville proper was as lively as Pittsburgh, and the warehouses and docks testified to its importance in commerce. Kegs and barrels containing everything from whiskey and flour to corn and lard were piled high on the wharves. Chickens and turkeys squawked in great tiers of wooden cages. The river men who carried and handled the goods kept the taverns and bordellos noisy all through the night.

Jared found temporary work unloading and uncrating newly arrived shipments at a general store. The store’s signboard read
Audubon & Rozier, Merchants.
Mr. Ferdinand Rozier was the only partner in evidence. During the week and a half that Jared worked for Rozier, he learned that the man’s former associate preferred fine art to business. Audubon and his wife had moved down the river to Henderson a few years earlier. There, Rozier said, Mr. Audubon had no doubt abandoned storekeeping entirely, in order to make sketches and paintings of what interested him most—wildlife, birds, chiefly. Rozier laughed at that. There was no market for portraits of birds! He was convinced his former partner was destined for failure.

Rozier agreed to pay some of Jared’s wages in trade. Provisioned again, he and Amanda set off along the Cumberland Trail during a warm spell in early March.

In forty-eight hours, the weather changed. Sleet began to slant down from the sky.

The cousins were struggling along a heavily wooded stretch of road at twilight. Great tree limbs soughed in the wind. Within minutes, the sleet completely soaked their clothing.

They hunted for a farm that might offer shelter, but found none. They were forced to spend the night in the open.

The storm continued until the following morning. When the light broke, Jared’s head was hot and his eyes had a glazed look. Though not ill, Amanda was almost as miserable.

“We—we’ve got to hole up a while,” Jared gasped as he and his cousin started out. The whole world seemed gray, wet and forlorn. “Anyplace—I’m not feeling good—”

The sunny visions of New Orleans were gone. Instead, he saw only his cousin’s drawn face—or feverish imaginings.

Hamilton Stovall strutting through the main floor of Kent’s—

Stovall’s general manager dying in a welter of blood—

The printing house afire—

“Take my hand,” Amanda said, sniffling. Jared was terrified by the sickly whiteness of her skin. What if she caught a chill and died just because he’d dragged her all this way—?

They managed to negotiate another half-mile of road, passing a bogged and abandoned freight wagon. Jared’s eyes watered and blurred. The world seemed to consist of gargoyle trees against a sodden sky—

Suddenly Amanda exclaimed, “There’s a creek ahead!”

“I don’t see—”

“And a cabin!”

“I can’t make it out—”

“Here, hang on to me. I’ll lead you—”

It was the longest distance Jared had ever walked. Or so it felt. His head ached. One moment he burned; the next, he froze. After an interminable time, they reached the creek and crossed.

The water soaking his feet felt warm—another indication of how sick he was. As they stumbled across the dooryard of the cabin, a damp rooster scolded them from a small shed nearby.

Jared’s voice had a wheezy sound. “Knock on the door, Amanda—”

She did, loudly. In a moment the door was opened. Swaying, Jared heard a young girl speak. “What do you want?”

He tried to focus his eyes, saw only shifting gray shapes.

“Who is it, Sarah?” a woman called.

Before the girl could answer, Jared lunged forward. Not intentionally—his legs simply gave out. He fell toward the door, his hands scraped by the rough logs on either side. The last thing he heard was the girl’s shriek of fright.

Adding her wail to the commotion, Amanda threw herself on top of her cousin. Sobbing, she begged him to get up. But he lay motionless, his head and chest resting on the cabin’s puncheon floor, his legs extending into the yard where the sleet beat down.

“J
ARED?”

On the other side of the small fire he’d built at sundown, the boy rolled onto his belly.

“What?”

“Are you feeling all right?”

Jared peered through the flames at his cousin, who was even more wan and pinch-faced than she’d been just a few weeks ago. He tried to make his he convincing. “Yes.”

“You look funny.”

“I’m fine.”

She regarded him in stoic silence. He tried to recall when he’d last seen a smile on her face. It was in Kentucky, he decided. At the cabin on Knob Creek, below Louisville, where he’d collapsed from sickness and exhaustion in early March.

The cabin belonged to a farmer and his family. Jared and Amanda stayed with them almost two weeks. The famer’s wife put cooling poultices on his sweating skin, and brought him slowly out of his lethargy with generous helpings of food and attention. At the end of his recuperation, Jared was convinced he’d beaten the disease.

But now it was mid-May, and since leaving the cabin on Knob Creek, he’d suffered a similar illness twice more. It had shaken him with fever and chills, watered his bowels, left him limp—and forced them to stop for a day or so each time.

From the way he felt at the moment—weak and shivery—he might be in for still another attack. Apparently Amanda saw it coming too.

Across the fire, she locked her frail arms around her knees. Her shoes were splitting apart at the soles. The hem of her muddied skirt was ragged, and so was her fine coat. She stared dully into the darkness of the Tennessee woodlands beyond the perimeter of light.

She was the same young girl who had left Boston with him, yet she had changed. Almost without his being aware of it. It was more than a matter of growing an inch or so, more than the pronounced development of her figure. She no longer protested about the hardships they were undergoing. She shared the work of building evening fires. Sometimes lately, he gazed at her and thought he was looking at a grown woman. Her strength seemed to be increasing while illness drained his away—

Trees newly leafed rustled in the night wind. The cry of an owl drifted through the clearing. Unseen nearby, a small river purled over stones.

“I’m so tired tonight,” Amanda said at last, not complaining, stating a fact. “I’ll be thankful when we get to New Orleans.”

Bracing on one elbow, Jared shoved his long and dirty yellow hair off his forehead. As he did, he felt the clamminess of his skin. He tried to sound encouraging. “I’ll bet we make it before the end of June.”

“Those men with the wagons—the ones who came over on the ferry with us—”

“What about them?”

“They said there was a town near here.”

He nodded. “Nashville.”

“I think you should see if someone will put me to work while we’re there.”

“You
—
?”
He laughed, a kind of croaking sound.

She jumped up, tearing a burr out of her dark hair. “Don’t make fun of me, Jared Kent!”

“I’m not—” He forced a straight face. “But I’m the one who works.”

“I can wash floors and carry water just as well as you can! Besides, you’re sick.”

“I am not.”

Stamping her foot, Amanda showed some of the animation he remembered from another time—another world. “You’re fibbing. I can always tell when you’re fibbing—” She circled the fire to kneel beside him. “Do you know what I’d really like? To stop for good—so you don’t keep getting sick—”

“Amanda, the answer is no.”

“I’ve heard that till I can’t stand it any more!”

Jared sat up, trying to keep his temper. He held out his hands to warm them at the fire. His nails were cracked and grimy. His hair hung nearly to his shoulders. His cheeks were sunken, his good looks all but destroyed by paleness and the fever-glint in his eyes.

With a sigh, he said, “You know I won’t stop anywhere around here. This is the kind of country where Mama died.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that too. Over and over! I still don’t understand—”

“Because you’re too young. Let’s not argue. We’re going where life doesn’t demand so much of people. It’s warm in the south. New Orleans has soft air—balmy winters. I didn’t stop in Louisville for the same reason I won’t stop more than a couple of days in Nashville. I despise this country, and you’ll just have to accept that.”

Unsatisfied, she flounced back to her original place. “Oh, I don’t understand you, Jared. Why does it make any difference where your mama and papa lived?”

“It does, that’s all! You don’t know what this country did to them. I do. We’re going to find a better place.”

She shook her head. “You don’t make sense.”

“I’m tired—so let’s drop it!”

His anger produced another unhappy look from the girl. She started to reply, but didn’t. She sat down, arms crossed on her knees, her face stony.

Jared’s ears rang as he stumbled around the fire, feeling ashamed all at once. He dropped down beside his cousin, tried to cradle her against his shoulder. At first she resisted. But the loneliness and the chill of the spring night proved stronger than anger. She huddled close.