to the Far Blue Mountains (1976) (34 page)

So we came back to the fort after our journeying, and with my own hands I carried on the farming of Slater's crops. He'd planted them well and cultivated them a mite before passing on, and it was no trouble to keep up the work he'd begun.

We were all of us growing into the land, finding our living from it, and learning where the berries grew thick upon the bushes and where the nuts fell and the pools where the trout loafed in the shadows.

Man is not long from the wilderness, and it takes him but a short time to go back to living with it, and we had the Catawbas to guide us. Peter Fitch took an Indian girl to wife, a tall well-made girl with four warrior brothers.

We went often to the far hills that spring, wandering deep into the mountains and living off the country, for there was always fresh meat for a man good with a gun, and there was no need to be belly-empty if you could shoot.

One day Kane O'Hara asked leave to be gone awhile. He took his musket and went over the mountains, and some said that would be the last of him, but I thought it would not and said so, but the womenfolk worried.

It was many weeks later when he came back, and when we saw him coming down the mountain, straight and tall as always, we saw he wasn't alone. Somebody walked beside him, and when he came closer we saw she was a Spanish girl from a Florida settlement.

"Kane," I asked, "did she come willing?"

"She did," he said, '"That you can ask her yourself. I took meat to her town, and I speak her tongue from a time when I was a prisoner there, and I broke some wild horses for them-"

"Horses?"

"Aye, they've horses; I made to fetch some, but hadn't nothing to trade for them and they are wary of letting them go. Toward the end they got suspicious of me and did not believe what I said. Only Margarita believed me and said so, and when I left she came with me."

He looked at Abby and smiled. "It is all right, Mistress Abby. We stopped at an Indian village where there was a priest, an Irish priest from the Spanish lands who was teaching the Indians the ways of God, and he married us, all fitting and proper."

"What of her folks?"

"We sent them word by the priest. He was stiff about a marriage without her father saying it was proper, him knowing the family and all, but a nudge with a pistol and a reminder that if he did not marry us we'd be wedded Indian fashion, and he came through shining with a proper ceremony."

When the year ended we went down the river again, all of us going this time, with Kin doing his own walking and Abby having her hands full with Brian ... named for her father ... whom she carried when Lila could bear to let go of him.

Kin walked along with us, and bawled when he was picked up to be carried and insisted he carry his own pack, so we made a small one for him.

One of our boats was gone when we came to them, but we took the other two and went down the river after a few repairs. There were more of us now but we knew the country better and knew woodland travel.

We built a raft to tow our load of furs, for it was large, and we'd more pearls, mostly gotten by trade with the Indians, and some by capture. There'd been fights with the Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Tuscarora, and one day a captured Shawnee told us there had long ago been a great bunch of white men who lived on a river across the mountains, but they had fought often with the Shawnee and the Cherokee, too, before the Cherokee came so far south. Finally, the white men had been killed, but some of their women had been kept by Indian men, and a few of the survivors had come to live with the Shawnee.

It was a long story, but there were many such, and from time to time we heard stories of white men who had been in the country before us.

We had come down all the way to the Outer Banks again when we saw a canoe coming toward us. It was Potaka again. He had a strange-looking creature with him, a long, thin man with a beard who kept saying over and over, "Barnabas, Barnabas."

And it was Jago, who had sailed with us on the fluyt.

The Indians had found him, months before, roaming in the woods, and had cared for him as they did all mad men, for so they thought him to be. And truly, he was wandering in his mind.

"Jago," I said, "I am Barnabas."

"You said to ask for you," he said simply, and was content.

That he had been through some terrible ordeal was obvious, and his body bore the scars of torture, most likely by Indians. And from where he had been found and what he could recall it must have been the Tuscarora ... but there was no certainty of this.

After he had rested with us, he slowly began to recover. Always a hard worker, he was no different now. Bit by bit we learned a little. He had been on a ship that somehow had been attacked by Indians when laying off shore. Some of the crew, including himself, had escaped. Some of the Indians had been carried out to sea on the ship, and when his own party ashore had somehow been separated, he had wandered in the forest, subsisting on nuts and roots until captured by the Indians. How he had gotten free of them, we could not learn.

For three weeks we waited, and saw no sail. Yet once again we enjoyed our sojourn upon the beach, and the change of diet provided by the sea. It was a pleasant, easy time. There was game in the woods and the fish were running well and the only Indians we encountered were friendly and inclined to trade.

Kin, I think, was the happiest of us all. He ran along the shore ... miles of almost straight beach, all open to sun and sky. He was brown as an Indian, tall for his age, and a quiet, serious child.

On our fourteenth day we saw a sail, but it passed us by. Several days later we saw another. Warily, it came closer, and through our glasses we could see a man studying us through his own spyglass. He took soundings, then anchored and put a boat over.

Several men took to the boat and, when nearing shore, one of them suddenly stood up and waved.

It was John Pike.

When the boat came closer he leaped over the side and came splashing to us, his face lit with pleasure. "Barnabas! And Mistress Abigail! It is good to see you!"

We welcomed him to our campfire and he sent the boat back for wine and ale.

"I have done well," he said after awhile. "The fluyt is now part mine and I also own another ship now, which trades abroad."

He held Brian on his lap as he talked. "Barnabas, if you'd like the boys to go to school in London, let me have them. I'd treat them like they were my own."

That Pike had done well was obvious. He was a man of business, prosperous, yet still adventurous. But he should have known I would not thus part with my sons.

Later, he took us aboard his ship. He lingered for several days, taking on fresh water, trading with Indians and with us, and catching a supply of fresh fish as well as some game from the forest.

To Abby and Lila he gave some bales of assorted dress goods, and to me, canvas, tools, and seed for grain and vegetables. He had planned well, and what we might have thought of needing, he could supply.

On the last day, Jeremy Ring said suddenly, "Captain Pike, I would be pleased if you'd fetch your Bible."

Pike looked up, surprised, at Jeremy.

"I want to get married," said Jeremy quietly, "to Lila."

Astonished, I looked at her. She was blushing, her head hanging.

"Lila!" Abby exclaimed. "Is this true? Why didn't you tell me?"

Blushing furiously, Lila said, "I didn't know. He didn't ask me."

"You knew how I felt," Ring said.

"Yes, yes, I did." She glanced at him, suddenly shy. "I did."

"Well, then?"

"Yes ... I will. Of course, I will."

The ceremony was brief, and we all stood on the shore with a light wind blowing, ruffling our hair and blowing the women's skirts, and Captain Pike read from the Bible.

When it was over I said to Pike, "You'll send the news? You know the Icelanders?

They will take the word of Lila's marriage to Anglesey. Tell them she has married a good friend and a good man."

"I will that."

"And John Tilly? What of him?"

"Why, we're partners! I thought I had told you. He commands the fluyt when she's at sea. We trade in the Spanish Indies. It's risky, but we've some friends who like to profit a bit in the trade themselves, and although we have to avoid Spanish warships we make a good thing of it."

"Slaving?"

"Not us. The Arabs and the Portuguese have that business, and we wish for none of it. They intrigue with the warlike African tribes who sell them their prisoners ... the ones they themselves used to enslave or kill.

"But I am a free man and would see all men free. John Tilly believes as I do, so we have no conflict. Slaves are not an easy cargo. I prefer sugar, rum, or timber ... fur if they can be had."

He sat on a hummock of sand. "You have been to your mountains? And what lies beyond?"

"More mountains, and then lowlands again, and lovely timbered valleys and meadows. These I have not seen, but the Catawba tell me they are there."

"There is much fighting among the Indians?"

"An Indian boy is not a man until he is a warrior. To be a warrior he must fight, take scalps, count coup. And they do not forget old enmities."

At last he got up. "Now we must sail. This coast makes me nervous, too." He looked at me with keen, thoughtful eyes. "You will stay here? Raise your boys here?"

"Now, at least. When they grow older we will see the bent of their minds."

He took my hand, then started to leave. He had gone several steps when he stopped and turned.

"Barnabas? Do you remember Delve? Jonathan Delve? He was with you awhile, I believe?"

"What of him?"

"Around a year ago he came down to the coast and was taken aboard a vessel as a castaway, he and several others. He told the ship's master of a valuable wreck of which he knew. When he got the captain ashore, some more of his men were there and they ambushed and killed the captain and several of his crew. Two escaped."

"So?"

"He took the ship, and since has become a pirate and a dangerous man. It is reported that when drinking he talks often of you. For some reason you are on his mind."

"We will be careful."

Pike walked away over the sand, and I stood and watched him go. He had ships at sea, a reputation as a successful man, no doubt. Would I trade that for what I had?

I would not.

Feeling better, I walked back to Abby. "We will go home now," I said.

Chapter
30

Where go the years? Down what tunnel of time are poured the precious days?

We are young, and the fires within us burn bright.

All the world lies before us and nothing is too great to be done, no challenge too awesome.

Then suddenly the days are no more, the years are gone, and the time that remains is little, indeed.

Kin has grown tall, as fine a woodsman as I know, and as good a man. Brian is the thoughtful one. Each book I have he has read and reread, and soon, I know, he will go from me to a wider world. Regret is in me that he would leave, yet happiness, too, for he has his own life before him in a bigger world if not a better one.

Yance? What shall I say of Yance? His heart is pure, his strength the greatest of them all, I think. Yance is strong, he is rough, he is always wrestling, fighting, climbing, doing, changing.

He is a good son, faithful to his mother and to me. To his brothers, he is loyal. Yet he acts before he thinks. He is a bundle of muscle and impulse, a swift runner, a dead shot with any weapon, and a dangerous man because of it.

He listens when I speak, and he obeys. Yet sometimes he acts before I have a time to speak.

And then there is Jublain ... named for my old friend but called Jubal.

He is the truly quiet one. A ghost in the woods, he moves like a shadow, and lives much with the Indians. He is gone for weeks, then comes and squats against the wall and listens to the talk and is gone again.

To me he gives love and respect, to his mother, adoration, and that is as I would have it.

We none of us know how far he has gone or what he has seen, for he rarely speaks of it. Sometimes stories come to us ... an Indian from the west once came among us, looking for him. Jubal had been gone for weeks, and the Indian told us by sign language that Jubal had been far beyond the great river that divides the country in two ... we had not known that.

Kin has no wife, nor has Brian or Jubal. Yance does, of course. He went far to the north last year and came upon a colony that had settled there several years before. For days he scouted about, watching the people go about their work. He had done the same at Jamestown when he grew old enough to go so far from home, for Raleigh had at last planted his colony and my boys used to go down to the place where they were and lie in the woods and watch them to see how they lived.

Yance had done the same at the place in the north, the place they were calling "New England."

That group landed in 1620 ... thirteen years after the Virginia colony was finally established at Jamestown. Yance had been curious, as were all the boys, for the tales they heard from their mother and me, as well as the others of our group, were not enough. Only Yance went so far north.