Crockett of Tennessee Page 16

  The day was warm but not hot, and the steamy humidity that was the annual torment of Tennesseans was lower than usual. Time on the road passed swiftly. By the time David was within a mile of the Crockett tavern, his nervousness had faded to a pleasant tingle of tension, as his anticipation of handing his father the note grew.

  When he reached the tavern, he saw three wagons parked outside, and several horses lodged in the stables behind the place. A new woodshed and smokehouse stood near the stables, additions made since he had been here last. There was no one outside when he rode in. He was dismounting in front of the log building when the door opened and his youngest sister, Sally, now about nine years old, appeared and eyed him up and down. A big smile erupted, and she yelled back into the tavern. “David’s home, Mama! Pap, come quick—he’s come home again!”

  David smiled and knelt as his little sister ran to him. He swept her into his arms and hugged her close. By now others of his family were emerging. His mother, her hair much more gray than it had been last time, was the next to wrap her arms around him. Her shoulders quaked as she began to weep.

  “Mama, Mama, don’t go crying on me! I want to see you smile!”

  He patted and loved her for a few moments, then lifted his face and found himself looking into his father’s eyes. John Crockett had aged even more visibly than Rebecca; he looked more weary than David was accustomed to seeing. David gently broke free from his mother and went to his father, hand outstretched.

  John Crockett took the hand, and held it rather than shook it. His fingers explored the calluses, felt the leathery, hard texture of the palm. “That’s a working man’s hand,” John said. “It tells me you’ve done well what you’ve been doing. Is the Quaker pleased with you?”

  “Yes, I believe he is.”

  John nodded, smiling with one corner of his mouth. He pulled David closer, put his arm around his neck and gave him a rough embrace. “Welcome home, David. I’ve missed you, son.”

  David had to fight back tears. He hadn’t expected such a show of affection from his father. “I’ve missed you too, Pap.” He had come prepared to say such a thing as a mere politeness. As he said it, he realized it was true. Even though life at Canaday’s house was easier and better for him, part of him had missed his family and home. Even his father.

  A loud, gruff voice called from inside the tavern, asking for more peach brandy. A second voice cried for a replenishing of biscuits. John Crockett, grinning widely, yelled back, “Keep your patience, hang you! You’ll have your fill! My boy’s come home!”

  Together, the Crockett family entered the tavern, and David thought that of all the homecomings he had known, this was certainly the finest—and the best part was yet to come.

  John Crockett’s eyes became hollow and sad when he looked at the piece of paper David had just handed him. The meal was long past; the family and the patrons had all gone to their beds. Only David and his father remained awake, seated by the big stone fireplace. Midnight was approaching.

  “His note … God. I reckon he’s sent you to collect it.”

  “He handed it to me before I left,” David replied.

  John’s hand dropped; the note slipped from his fingers and fluttered to the floor, where he stared at it. “I can’t pay it, David. God help me, I can’t, much as I wish I could. There’s no money to speak of, no more than there ever has been.” John slumped and looked older. He gazed over into the corner like some grizzled ancient in his dotage.

  “Pap. Pap, look at me a minute. I want to tell you something about that note.”

  John Crockett’s gazing eyes didn’t flicker. The presentation of the note had put him into a brood.

  “Pap,” David said again. This time the sad eyes, surrounded by weathered crevices, shifted up. No other part of the man moved at all.

  “Pap, I didn’t bring that note for collection. It’s a gift for you. It’s paid in full.”

  “Paid.…”

  David grinned. “That’s right.”

  John sat up straighter. He bent and picked up the paper again. “But how—”

  “I worked it off for you, Pap. Just like I worked off that note Abe Wilson had on you. Mr. Canaday agreed to let me do that. That’s what I’ve been doing these past months. Working off that note.”

  “But I never asked … why did you …”

  “I did it because I wanted to. I knew you needed it paid, and with me right there, able-bodied and all, it just seemed the right thing to do.”

  “You’ve worked half a year just because … you’ve been working for no pay, son?”

  “Well, I reckon I was paid. It was just put against the note instead of into my pocket, that’s all. I can go back now and work for straight money, if Mr. Canaday will still have me.”

  John held the note in both hands like it had become some rare treasure. Silently, he pivoted in his seat and dropped the paper into the cold fireplace. “Paid off,” he said. “Paid off, by gum!”

  “Know what you ought to do, Pap? You ought to strike fire to that thing. Watch it burn.”

  John nodded, grinning. “Yes indeed. Yes indeed I should.”

  He took down his powder horn and sprinkled a few grains onto the paper, then took down his precious Brown Bess musket, which hung in an honored position above the wide mantel. He cocked back the flint and fired a spark onto the gunpowder, which flared brightly, setting the note on fire.

  Father and son watched the note curl in flame and crumble to ash. When it was gone, David glanced sidewise at his father, and saw tears streaming down his face. The feelings toward his father that David had in his heart at that moment were perhaps the most tender and affectionate he had ever known. All the sweat, strain, labor, and personal poverty he had experienced in Canaday’s employ seemed minor and unimportant. His father’s happy tears were the best wages he had ever been paid.

  David slept well that night, and all his dreams were good ones.

  Chapter 21

  David did not linger at the tavern. He had an unarticulated fear that to remain would risk allowing some unhappy word, a minor disagreement, or the odd case of bad humor on someone’s part to come between him and his father. He wanted nothing between them. His working off the note had done much to bridge the distance that had always gaped between father and son, and this was a bridge he wanted to stand forevermore.

  Rebecca was quite unhappy to hear David was leaving so soon. But he explained to her his financial need, running his hands over his clothing, old and very tattered. “I ain’t had a new suit of clothes in Methuselah’s age, and I ought to go work until I can afford me some. I’ll come back again to see you, soon. Maybe I’ll even be able to buy me a horse before long. Then I could come right steady.”

  “I wish I had something to give you,” John Crockett said. “After what you done, I feel I owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing.”

  “What did David do, Pap?” Sally asked.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Rebecca said. “For now, I want to put a good meal into my son’s belly.”

  A finer breakfast couldn’t have been found in the dreams of a starving man. David put away biscuits and pork and gravy and apple butter in great quantities, and as soon as his plate was empty, Rebecca would refill it. At last he pushed away from the table, waving off her continuing offers, and made ready to go. There was more tears at his parting, but they weren’t bitter, instead were loving and prideful. David rode away, feeling very much the family hero.

  It so happened that a traveler who had spent the night at the inn had also left, traveling the same way as David, though with almost an hour’s lead. David noted his horse’s tracks on the road before him. They looked steadily fresher as he advanced, indicating he was catching up on the man. This wasn’t surprising. The man had been tremendously fat, and rode a swaybacked horse that looked too old to still be among the living. A poor beast, laden with such a bulky human cargo, could hardly be expected to move very quickly.

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nbsp; So David kept an eye out for the man as he went on. A few miles from the tavern, he was surprised to see the swayback horse, still saddled, come meandering back toward him on the road. Strapped to the saddle was the fat man’s bag, and a rifle wrapped in cloth. The fat rider was gone. David pulled to a halt, sensing something was wrong.

  Dismounting, he stopped the swayback, stroking its mane and talking softly to it. His hand touched wetness in the mane; when he pulled it back, he was shocked by the sight of fresh blood. Aghast, he wiped his bloodied hand in the dirt and brushed off the clots, then looked more closely at the horse’s mane.

  No question about it: the horse was not itself injured. The blood must be human, no doubt that of the rider.

  Tethering both his horse and the swayback, David began walking up the road. He had not gone an eighth of a mile before he found the fat man lying on the roadside, very still and unquestionably dead. Blood had streamed from his nostrils and was beginning to dry in a crust around his mouth and on his chin and neck. David backstepped away from the corpse. Unceremonious loss of the big breakfast his mother had served him was a distinct possibility at the moment. When he had a better grip on himself, he advanced again and knelt beside the body.

  He couldn’t figure out what had killed the man. The blood made him wonder if someone had struck him across the face, but the nose didn’t seem damaged and there was no bruising. It seemed he had simply started bleeding and died. David had heard before of people who died from bleeding inside their heads. Probably that was the case here.

  Fright suddenly gripped David. What if someone should come along and find him with the corpse? They might think he had struck and killed the man. He stood and ran back to his own horse, and leaned against it, very shaken up and panting for breath. Glancing around at the swaybacked horse, he pondered what to do. Surely he should tell someone about it … but what if they didn’t believe him? What if they thought he was trying to cover his own guilt? He hadn’t ever dealt with anything like this before.

  Just then he noticed again the rifle tied to the sway-back’s saddle. Despite his fear, David became very curious. Lately he had developed a fascination with rifles, and longed to own one. The fact that the peaceable Canaday didn’t think too highly of firearms only made rifles seem more alluring.

  David looked back and forth. No one on the road … surely it wouldn’t hurt to look at the rifle. He could always put it back just as it had been. Moving quickly so he wouldn’t have time to change his mind, he went around the horse, loosed the rifle from its ties, and laid it down on the road. He unwrapped it, and what he saw made him whistle softly in admiration.

  This was a rifle indeed! Big-bored, brass-mounted, with a gleaming curly maple stock … it was remarkably beautiful, a weapon to take a man’s breath away.

  David picked it up, admiring the heft of it in his hand. David lifted the rifle to his shoulder and looked down the long barrel. The feel of it was perfectly natural. With a rifle like this in a rich patch of forest, a man could bring down an abundance of mighty fine game.

  He lowered the rifle. A feeling of sick dread waved through his belly as he remembered the corpse; the rifle had so distracted him that for a moment he had forgotten it. Despairing and uncertain, he knelt to wrap the rifle again, then paused.

  A most unexpected and enticing temptation loomed before him. It would be so easy to take the rifle and simply ride away. No one would ever know, and he would have a fine weapon that otherwise somebody else would probably steal anyway. It wasn’t right, but …

  For the rest of his days, David Crockett never revealed to anyone the facts of that morning. But when the struggle with temptation was done, temptation was the victor. David rode on, leaving the unknown dead man on the road and the swayback horse wandering. He took the rifle with him, as well as a powder horn and shot bag he found in the saddlebags.

  It wasn’t really stealing, he rationalized to himself. After all, the man was dead. He didn’t need a rifle any longer. And David Crockett did.

  Canaday lifted a brow in silent displeasure when he saw David bring the rifle in. At best, Quakers considered rifles a necessary evil, and ornamented, fancy rifles such as this one did not seem fitting to them. Muttering a disdainful comment about a “decorated instrument of death,” Canaday asked David where he had obtained it.

  “There was a man at my father’s tavern who sold it to him a while back. Pap was so grateful for me working off his note that he gave it to me.” Remarkable, how hard it was to lie to John Canaday. David felt that the old man could look right through his eyes into the heart of the falsehood.

  But maybe not, because all the Quaker did was purse his lips firmly, exhale loudly through his nostrils, and say, “If I find thee are taking part in shooting matches, I will not be pleased.”

  David waited several days for news of the dead man, and for the truth to somehow come creeping out of the shadows to reveal his taking of the rifle. It never happened. For a time his conscience bothered him, but eventually that faded too.

  Word came later of a man found dead along the road, apparently the victim of bleeding in the brain. A natural death; no suspicion of murder. No one had known him, though inquiry revealed he had spent a night recently at the Crockett establishment, and nothing was found among his few possessions to identify him. He had been buried in an unmarked grave near the place his corpse was found.

  For a few days David worried that someone would come along looking for the man, and recognize the rifle. After a couple of weeks passed and nothing like this happened, David’s worry eased. Then he found a new one: What if his father should show up for a visit and ask about the rifle in front of Canaday? David’s lie would be revealed. In time this concern faded too. Why, after all, should he expect his father to come visit him? He had never done anything like that before.

  Then, one day, a wagon rolled up in front of Canaday’s house. David was outside at the time, chopping and stacking firewood. He stood, sweating and breathless, and stroked the hair out of his eyes as he watched. For a moment all his fears came to life again; he felt sure that this arrival was linked somehow to the rifle.

  The driver of the wagon helped the lone passenger climb down. David couldn’t see the passenger clearly from where he was, so he stepped around the woodpile and took a look from there.

  The passenger turned, and he saw the face clearly. His knuckles tightened to whiteness on the handle of his axe and a strange, hot feeling surged through his entire form. He instantly forgot all about the rifle.

  He did not realize it at the time, but David Crockett had just taken the last step from boyhood to manhood, and his life would be different from now on.

  She was a stunning beauty, perhaps the finest female David had ever seen. Her name was Amy Sumner, and she had come from a place called Chestnut Creek in Surry County, North Carolina. She was the daughter of John Canaday’s half brother, and a Quaker … though around this latter status there hung some mysterious scandal that David was not privy to. All he knew was what he overheard by eavesdropping: the Westfield Monthly Meeting of Friends had “disowned” her for some offense that in the Canaday house remained unspoken.

  David, naturally, was curious about this mysterious offense, but not especially so. He was no Quaker, after all, and Quaker problems were not his concern. It was the young lady herself who had him intrigued.

  In other times he had known bursts of mild infatuation, quivers of excitement in the presence of attractive young female neighbors, and so on—but never anything to compare to this. Amy Sumner, with her wide, dark eyes, her thick, deep brown hair, and pale, freckled face, was a permeating, devastating, thrilling presence in the household of John Canaday. David could think of nothing else. In his imagination he played out scenes of walking with her, holding her hand, running his fingers through her hair, kissing her upturned lips, feeling the bright heat of her admiration for him, her deep love.…

  Reality, to his sorrow, was quite different from his fantasies.
Amy showed no signs that she disliked David. In fact, she hardly seemed aware of him. That was the problem. He hungered for her attention, and she seemed content to let him starve.

  He became acutely conscious of his appearance, and of his ragged clothing, which he attempted to mend with a needle and thread borrowed from the Canadays. He washed his hair and tried to keep it neatly swept back, and when no one was looking he would rub his face to accentuate the natural redness of his cheeks, a feature others had praised in the past. None of it made any difference. Amy Sumner was blind to him, except on those rare times he managed to force her attention by speaking to her.

  Even that was difficult. David couldn’t make sense of it; he had never had much trouble making conversation before. Around Amy, however, his throat would grow tight, his voice almost as shrill as it had been in childhood, and his mind numb. Everything he said to her sounded ridiculous as soon as it was out, and before long he would be slinking away, ashamed he had even tried.

  Further muddying the waters was the odd way Canaday and his kin acted around Amy. They had little to say about her, and seemed protective, secretive. Sometimes David had the impression that big plans were in the works, but nothing was ever confirmed to him. Many times before he had actually felt like part of the Canaday family. Circumstances at the moment, and the closure of their ranks around Amy Sumner, with him on the outside, reminded him he was not really part of them at all.

  This made for unpleasant feelings, and for the first time since his coming to Canaday’s, David began to think that perhaps he might be better off going somewhere else. The thought never progressed very far. As long as Amy Sumner was here, so too would be David Crockett, watching her longingly from the shadowy land of exile into which her inattention had banished him.

  Frustration grew and blossomed into a sense of self-disgust. Soon it was evident to David that he would not be able to put aside his deep feelings for Amy Sumner. He was sick of his own inability to convey those feelings to his intended—because by now she was nothing less than that. He loved her so deeply he couldn’t imagine not making her his wife. After all, he was freshly turned seventeen years old, a man by most frontier standards, and certainly old enough for a wife.