Lorna was horrified. “Francis Applebaker!” Of Fish she asked, “Sir, do you speak of . . . the Horror?”
Fish nodded.
Francis’ patience was waning. “I’m not going to let this fellow cause the children to suffer fits of the imagination with his fables of—“
“Fables!” Fish was instantly enraged. “I’m trying to save their lives, you buffoon! I’ve seen that creature attack, seen it with my own eyes. I saw him tear a dozen Missouri Indians to pieces! He consumed their legs and hind parts, leaving nothing but naked bone below the waist, and then he tore apart their remains like a mad dog. If the heathens had been white men I would have given them a Christian burial. I can show you their remains if you need proof. If it wasn’t for my lantern shedding light like the wisdom of God that fire-fearing thing might very well be attacking now. ”
“Enough,” Francis said. He gave Lorna a gentle push toward the wagon, but she had planted her feet like a stubborn mule. He wanted to swat her rump to get her moving. Instead he lifted her up onto the seat of the wagon.
“My friend,” Fish said, “Forgive my temper. I am only concerned for your safety. You must not be in the woods at night at this time of year. We should be inside now that night has come. Please, reconsider and stay with us.”
Francis drew a breath and thought a moment. He could be rude to this man or make him a friend. In the Territory, a good neighbor could be the difference between life and death.
He put a hand on Fish’s shoulder. “Thank you, sir, but we must go on.
At first light we need to begin clearing land for a cabin which I hope will be as fine as yours. But I promise you that at the first sign of trouble we will come to you for aid.”
Fish was not pleased with this decision, but he could see that Francis’
mind was set. “Very well, but keep your horses ready, keep a watch, and keep a fire burning in the hearth. The Devil’s bastard hates fire, he does. Be safe, my friends.”
Francis climbed up onto the wagon and gave Fish a wave and then the Applebaker family continued traveling down the trail.
“He had a huge belly,” Molly said a moment later.
Stephen laughed so hard he fell over onto a sack of corn meal, that corn meal acting as a preservative for their limited supply of eggs. This caused Lorna to refresh her son’s memory on the torments of Hell suffered by inattentive and destructive little boys.
Francis was laughing as well.
“If you ever get so overstuffed I don’t know what I’ll do,” Lorna said, rubbing Francis’ firm stomach with a warm hand.
“Stop that,” he whispered, “I’ve got to keep my attention on the task at hand.”
Lorna gave him a mischievous smile, and then climbed into the back of the wagon to light a lantern. They set the lantern on a pole and soon saw the numbered sign for their tract of land.
Francis and Stephen quickly set up a small tent on level ground, using the canvas from the wagon and two of the arched ribs that held up the canvas. Molly was already asleep on a bed of folded blankets by then.
Lorna started a fire; their late meal was cornmeal mush fried in bacon grease. Thinking of Fish, Francis started a second fire thirty feet from the first. He wasn’t worried about bugbears in the woods. He was worried about Indians. Some were friendly. Some were not.
He carried his longrifle in one hand and a lantern in the other as he looked for the stream on his land. He found it beyond a heavy overgrowth of trees. The water was cold and sweet. When he returned he saw that Stephen had dug a shallow hole and hung a blanket on a branch as a screen for their privy.
Later, as Lorna, Stephen and Molly slept in the partially covered wagon, too unnerved by what Fish had said to sleep in the tent, Francis sat by the fire sipping coffee. As a boy he had never acquired a taste for the tea his mother and father drank. It was in the Continental Army that he first sipped the national drink. It was his only vice. “Better to have you drinking that than stinking of tobacco,” Lorna had once said. There was no moon, and the stars overhead were magnificent. After a while Francis dozed, sitting upright by the fire.
The next morning he awoke to the smell of oatmeal and more coffee.
Stephen was off getting fresh water. Lorna was quizzing Molly. Francis admired his wife for schooling the children at every opportunity, and he knew the children detested it. “I won’t have my son cleaning stables or toting a gun to earn his keep,” she once said, “and I won’t have my daughter raised as a pampered simpleton fit only for marriage, the kitchen and the nursery.”
The thought that his children might one day write their own correspondence and read books from cover to cover filled him with pride.
Francis knew his numbers, but he was nearly illiterate. Perhaps that’s why I’ve no time for the Bible, he thought. I can’t read the damnable thing.
“What document led to this former colony becoming a country?” Lorna asked Molly. “And be exact, young lady.”
“The Declaration . . .” Molly said, writing the words on her slate with a stick of chalk, “of Independence.”
Lorna checked the slate carefully, looking for any misspelled words.
The only words on that slate I know how to spell are the and of, Francis thought. If the boy doesn’t inherit Lorna’s brains I’ll have to make sure I teach him how to use his hands.
He saw Stephen then. The boy was waving to him, out of sight of his mother and sister. When Francis joined him Stephen whispered, “In the stream, da.” They moved through the overgrowth of trees together.
It was a dead Indian, caught up on rocks in a narrow part of the stream.
“He just come bobbing along like an apple as I was filling the water bucket,” the boy said.
The Indian was wearing the ragged remains of a tanned hide shirt. His face had strong lines, twisted by the horror he experienced as he died. From the waist down he was naked. The soft meat of his thighs, buttocks and privates had been stripped away, leaving naked bone.
“Unfortunate bastard,” Francis said.
Stephen reached out with a stick and poked at the dead man. “Do you think it was animals?”
Perhaps a bear could have caused the look of terror frozen on the Indian’s face, Francis thought, but animals would have eaten more. They would have ravaged the face, the eyes. Francis had seen more than his share of corpses eaten by wolves or picked at by birds during the war.
“Most likely,” he lied. “Help me get him out of the stream. We’ll find a place to bury him and ask your mother to say a prayer. And don’t say a word about his condition. If she asks, just say he was dead. No need to offend her sensibilities.”
“Bury him, da? I thought the red men were heathens?”
“I don’t know what they believe, if anything at all. But we should show our respects for a man who died, savage or not. If he’s meant to be laid in the ground, so be it. If not, at least he won’t be exposed to the elements.” They buried the man downstream before they asked for a few words from Lorna. Stephen kept Molly occupied by their camp while Lorna said a prayer over a mound of fresh-turned earth.
A short time later Lorna, Stephen and even Molly were clearing undergrowth from the place where they would build their cabin, while Francis took his axe and began felling trees. A little cabin now, and one day, a great house, Francis thought.
Two weeks passed without incident, and Francis had almost forgotten the warning from Fish. October was almost done. It was the evening of the 31st and Francis was relaxing on a stump that was now his nightly seat by one of the fires outside. Despite his lack of superstition he still kept two fires burning until they were all safe and secure in the cabin for the night. He liked to end his day with a sip of coffee under the stars. The air was chilly now and he could almost smell snow on the way. He glanced at the cabin, proud, and sore. There was an ache in his back that had never been there when he was young.