The Lost Wagon
Copyright© 2024 by Jim Kjelgaard
Chapter 3: The Destroyers
Joe was so weary of body and brain that the things he saw shimmered behind a haze that was born of no weather, but in his own mind. He was detached from almost everything, a lone being in a lone world, and the only thread that connected him with anything else was the smooth handle of the ax which he carried in his hand. The ax was real as it could be real only to one who had just spent eleven hours using it. At the same time, and while he reeled with fatigue, Joe counted his blessings.
Now the oats were high and the young corn in tassel. The family vegetable garden was thriving, the hay was not yet ripe enough for the scythe, and there were many more trees to cut on Joe’s sixteen acres of timber. Clearing all sixteen acres was a major task and one that Joe didn’t even hope to complete for several years because he could work in the timber only when there was nothing else to do. However, he intended to chop and trim many more trees.
He was exhausted, but the restlessness that had possessed him a month earlier was now gone, and for the present he was contented. Preparing the land to grow crops and planting them had been hard work. But now it was finished and when the crops were harvested he would be able to feed his family and livestock through the winter. All the surplus must be sold to satisfy Elias Dorrance. Yet, for the moment Joe harbored no special resentment against him. Bankers were necessary, and Elias had helped Joe when he needed help.
Carefully, as a man who loves good tools will, Joe hung the ax on its wooden pegs in the tool shed, and then took it down again to test both bits with his thumb. An ax had to be razor-sharp, actually capable of shaving, if a man was to do good work with it, and whoever put a tool away in good shape would find it in the same shape when he needed it again. Joe found the ax so sharp that he must have honed it after felling the last tree. He grinned; he was more tired than he’d thought because he couldn’t remember sharpening the ax.
He leaned against the tool shed’s wall, giving himself to the luxury of doing nothing at all. He watched Barbara, serene and lovely, going toward the pig pen with a pail of swill and he knew a moment’s sheer pleasure. He gave no thought to the incongruity of the scene, that anyone should be able to look graceful while feeding pigs, but felt only delight because he saw something lithe and beautiful.
Joe yawned. He had been very wakeful last night. Lying beside Emma, he had watched the moon wane and the first faint streaks of dawn creep like stealthy thieves out of the sky. Only then had he gone to sleep, and soon afterward it had been time to get up and go to work again.
He went to the well, drew a bucket of water, and washed his face and hands. Instead of going to the store tonight he would go to bed after the evening meal. The empty swill pail in hand, Barbara came to stand beside him and her slim figure was bent slightly backward, as though by a mysterious wind created by her own spirit.
She said, “You look tired.”
“Now don’t you fret your head about me!”
She smiled. “I will if I want to. How did it go today?”
“Good enough. How are the pigs?”
“Eleanor,” Barbara said seriously, “keeps shoving Horace out of the trough. She won’t let him eat.”
Joe said dryly, “Eleanor has the manners of a pig, huh?”
She laughed, and Joe looked at her red-stained fingers. He knew without being told that Barbara, and probably all the rest except the babies, Alfred and Carlyle, had spent at least a part of their day gathering wild berries. Plucking and preserving wild fruit was a job the women folk and youngsters could do, and it was inevitable as summer itself. Joe fell back on a stock question,
“Where’s Tad?”
“He went off in the woods by himself.”
“Didn’t he help you?”
“Oh yes. Mother made him.”
Joe grinned inwardly. Emma seldom raised her voice to any of the youngsters and she never struck any of them. But somehow she managed prompt and unquestioning obedience to any order she issued, and that was more than Joe could do. There was about his wife a mysterious force which was always recognizable, but which Joe could not explain. It was strange, he reflected in passing, that this force did not carry over into anything outside the immediate family. It was strange that the thought of leaving the house should be so fearsome when in other respects Emma was so sure of herself. But he brushed the thought aside, as he had brushed it aside each time it came to plague him.
Joe entered the house and kissed Emma, and for the moment his weariness lifted. He wrinkled his nose.
“Something smells good!”
“Raspberry preserves. We’ll try some tomorrow, but we can’t now because it isn’t done. We found good picking; some of those berries were as big as my thumb.”
A black kettle in which simmered the fruits gathered that day was pushed toward the back of the stove. Spicy odors filled the room, and Joe knew that, when snow lay deep on the ground, Emma would bring her jams, jellies and preserves from the shelves where she kept them and they would be a little bit of the summer back again. Joe remembered the delights of winter morning feasts when all had spread pancakes a quarter inch thick with jam, and he smacked his lips.
The four younger children, their hands stained like Barbara’s, rushed toward him and he braced himself to meet their charge. The youngsters hadn’t anyone except one another to play with and they always looked forward to his arrival. He plumbed his brain for a story to tell them or a little play to act out. Then Emma turned from the stove and spoke to the children:
“Your horses are trampling everything in the house and I won’t have it. Tie them up again.”
The happy youngsters returned to the game, obviously a game of horses that they had been playing, and Joe felt a swelling gratitude. It would be nice to rest, and Emma had known it. At the same time he felt a vast admiration for his wife; she had relieved him of any more responsibility without offending the children. It went to prove all over again what Joe had always suspected; for all their supposed fragility, and despite the fact that they were allegedly the weaker sex, women had strength and power about which men knew nothing. Strength and power, that is, when it came to dealing with their children. Regarding other things, though, such as making a sensible move in a sensible direction—but again he brushed the thought aside. He sank into a chair, and with a real effort managed to keep from going to sleep.
“How was it today?” Emma asked.
“I had a good day.”
All things considered, he had had a good day. There was much about ax work that he enjoyed. An ax in the hands of a man who knew how to use it ceased to be a mere tool and became a precision instrument. To an ax man, an ax was much like a good rifle to a hunter.
“Are you going to cut more trees?” Emma asked.
“I’ll work in the timber until the hay needs cutting.”
That was all they said but that was all they had to say because the rest fell into a precise pattern. When the trees were felled and trimmed some would be split into rails for rail fences and the rest used for firewood. As soon as snow eliminated the danger of forest fire the brush would be burned. That was always a minor festival. The whole family turned out for the brush burning. The children watched, fascinated, while leaping flames climbed skyward through crackling branches. Then, while Joe raked the unburned branches together and fired them, Tad and baby Emma built a snow man or a snow fort for the delectation of the rest. It usually ended with Emma and Barbara serving a lunch beside still-glowing coals and Joe always saved enough branches so everyone could have a dry seat.
Emma went to the door and called “Tad!” and as though the eight-year-old were on some invisible leash that attached himself to his mother, he appeared out of the lowering night. His seal-sleek hair proved that he had already washed at the well, but no mere water could suffice for Tad now. His face and arms were laced with deep gashes from which blood was again beginning to ooze, and there were fang marks on his upper forearms.
Joe said in astonishment, “What the dickens happened to you?”
“I caught a wildcat!” Tad said gleefully. “Caught him right in a snare I set myself!”
“Don’t you know better than to fool around with wildcats?”
“It’s only a little one,” Tad said, as though that explained everything. “Not hardly big enough to chew anything yet. Got him in the barn, I have. I’m goin’ to tame him.”
“Get rid of him,” Joe ordered.
“Aw, Pa!”
Joe was inflexible, “Get rid of him now! One thing we don’t need around here, it’s a wildcat!”
He caught up a lantern, lighted it, and with Tad trotting protesting at his heels, stamped out to the barn. The wildcat had already seen to its own liberation. Tad had put him in one of the mules’ feed boxes, covered it with a board, and weighted the board with a rock. The imprisoned cat had worked the board free and slipped away.
“Blast his ornery hide!” Tad ejaculated.
Joe said sternly, “What’s that you said?”
“You say it.”
“So you can too, huh? Get this, don’t let me ever again hear you say anything that even sounds like a cuss word. And no more wildcats.”
“It was only a little one.”
“You heard me!”
Tad’s face was stubborn, a little sullen. For a moment he said nothing and Joe repeated,
“You heard me!”
“Yes, Pa.”
Joe lighted their way back to the house, blew the lantern out before he entered and hung it on a wooden peg. The gesture was automatic, and brought about by a lifetime of necessarily frugal living. One never stinted his family, himself, or his animals, in that order, on food. But one never wasted anything at all that cost money. Though the circuit-riding Reverend Haines often thundered to those of his flock who lived in Tenney’s Crossing that money was the root of all evil, Joe had never believed that. Money was simply the hardest of all things to come by.
For once hardly savoring the food—and Emma had an almost magic touch with the plainest of viands—Joe ate because it was necessary to eat. Only vaguely was he aware of Barbara’s keeping a watchful eye on the chattering younger children; of Tad, sullenly disappointed and still rebellious but not letting that interfere with his always prodigious appetite. He seemed closest to Emma, in whom everything else always seemed to center, and he knew that she was watching him while she worried about him. Before very long he would be asleep.
The youngsters slid from their chairs and went back to the bits of string they had been playing with. Obviously, for the time being, Emma’s sadirons were horses because they were all tied at different places around the room. They wouldn’t need him tonight, and Joe excused himself.
“Reckon I’ll go see if the sky’s still in place.”
He rose from the table and stepped outside into the pleasant summer night. There was only blackness, unrelieved by any hint of moon or star light. Tad’s dog came to wag a welcoming tail and sniff, and even while Joe petted the dog he thought that Mike wouldn’t herd stock and he wouldn’t hunt except with Tad. Therefore, in a land where everything had to earn its keep, he was useless. But young ones had to have something and Tad liked his pet largely, Joe suspected, because Mike could whip any other dog, or any other two dogs, in the whole country.
Joe breathed his fill of the night air, went back into the house, and for a few moments idly watched his four younger children at their play. Emma and Barbara were doing the dishes and, with a trace of sullenness still lingering about him, Tad sat at the table cutting a new sheath for his knife. Joe leaned against the door jamb and drowsed for a second. He seemed to be back in Tenney’s store, listening to tales of unlimited land and unlimited opportunity in the west, and he saw his children with those opportunities before them. Joe shook himself awake.
He felt numb with fatigue as he took off his clothes and methodically hung them up. Though there were nights when he liked to stay late with the men at Tenney’s store, tonight sleep was more inviting. But for a few minutes he lay wide awake and he knitted his brows because he was troubled about something. However, it was nothing he could clearly define and after a while Joe forced it from his mind. As soon as he did, he fell into a sound slumber. When he awakened, gray dawn again lingered behind the curtains with which Emma had draped the windows. Not for another three quarters of an hour would the rising sun change the gray to gold, and for a few moments Joe knew sheer contentment. Restful slumber had driven away the exhaustion and physical aches of the night before. Beside him, Emma still slept soundly.
Then, out in the lightening morning, Tad’s dog barked. Emma came slowly awake, and turned to smile at him.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning, darling.”
He moved a little nearer, feeling the warmth of her body against his. Joe remembered his youth and bachelor days as a somewhat fruitless period, and he had not reached fulfillment until his marriage. Their life had never been easy. But it had always been good and this was one of the best parts of every day. For a little while they could be together in complete idleness, each happy because the other was near. They were rested and refreshed, ready to cope with the problems, big and small, that the day might bring. But in the morning, just before they arose, the big problems seemed small, and the small ones trifling.
“What’s the dog barking at?” Emma asked drowsily.
“He’s probably found a varmint out in the field. I’ll go see. You rest a while yet.”
Joe slipped out of bed, stretched luxuriously, stripped off his night shirt and put on his clothes. He went to the door, swung it open and stared stupidly at what he saw.
A rangy black steer stood in the center of the trampled corn patch, chewing placidly on a stalk of corn that projected like a green stick from its mouth. A herd of varicolored cows and steers were foraging listlessly or switching tails in what remained of the oat field. The vegetable garden lay in ruins. Though most of the cattle had filled their stomachs and were now contented to digest the rich fare they had eaten, a few calves and yearlings were still cropping eagerly at anything green that remained.
Joe’s immediate reaction was a vast weakness, as though his body were no longer a solid thing but a liquid mass. He wilted like a melting candle, everything that had gone to make him suddenly dissolved, and only the feeble flame of a sputtering wick remained to prove that there ever had been anything else. Then he braced himself and fought back.
His whole life had been a struggle, with the odds tremendously against him. He’d been close to the breaking point only a month ago, when the desire to go west had swept around him like a flame, and he’d been forced to blot it out and forget it. Forgetting it had left him curiously empty and deflated. But he’d pulled himself together and knuckled down to the job of making this crop a good one. Now the crop lay before him, destroyed. A seething anger began slowly to gather in Joe’s chest, and he held on to the doorframe to steady himself.
Emma appeared at his shoulder, and when he looked at her Joe saw that her face was pale. She said nothing but her comforting arm slipped about him. Joe said inanely,
“They’re Pete Domley’s cattle.”
“I know.”
Joe exploded, “I’ll—!”
He wheeled, went back into the bedroom, and took the rifle from the pegs where he had hung it. His brain was on fire, so that priming and loading the weapon were mechanical functions which he knew nothing about but which he did well because he had done them so often. Not seeing anything else, aware only that destroyers had come to take that which rightly belonged to Joe’s family, he leaned against the door jamb and took careful aim at the black steer. His finger tightened on the trigger when Emma’s voice cut through the red mists that seethed in his brain.
“No, Joe!”
She looked almost ill, but there was desperation in her words that was far more effective than any physical barrier. She spoke again.
“It is not the way.”
The red rage that flamed in his brain burned less hotly. He lowered the gun so that its stock rested on the floor, and looked from her to the destroying cattle. Then sanity reasserted itself. He put the rifle back on its pegs and said dully,
“I’ll drive them away.”
Joe strode toward the cattle with Tad’s dog at his heels. He was well aware that it was futile to drive the raiders away for there was no more damage to be done. Yet he knew that the cattle did not belong where they were, and since there was no one else to chase them, he must.
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