Crockett of Tennessee Read online

  Rebecca went away from the table and back to the fire. David watched her with wide eyes. She kept her back to him, not turning. From time to time she moved her right hand up to her face, as if she was brushing strands of hair off her forehead … or perhaps wiping tears off her cheek.

  Wilson, who had observed none of this, was laughing and commenting in a whisper about some other absurd thing the drunks had said. David didn’t listen. He picked up his stick and knife and walked to the ladder. Climbing to the loft, he crawled onto his tick and pulled the blanket over him. Staring into the darkness, he listened as the drunks shouted back and forth, insulting each other’s total lack of understanding of poultry. There was a curse, the sound of something breaking, more curses, and then John Crockett’s voice, protesting and calling for peace. Obviously the drunks had, as was inevitable, come to blows.

  David rolled over and closed his eyes. Normally he would have been bounding downstairs to see the excitement for himself. Tonight he didn’t care.

  He sensed that whatever had been the nature of the discussion between his father and Jacob Siler, it was going to affect his life in some way—and he was just as sure he wasn’t going to like it.

  His mother gave him the news before breakfast the next morning. From the redness and swelling of her eyes, and the pallor and puffiness of her face, David knew she had cried long into the night. He accepted her words with the stoicism of a condemned man hearing the death sentence he knew would come even before his trial began.

  “Your father has bound you out to help Mr. Siler herd his cattle, David,” she said. “They came to the agreement last night. You will be paid as much as six dollars, if you give good service.”

  David swallowed before he spoke, to keep his voice from quaking. “How far will I have to go?”

  “Into Virginia.” She paused. “Hundreds of miles, by the time you return.”

  David stood in silence. His face revealed nothing, but inside he was struggling hard against the impulse to weep aloud. Bound to Virginia … it seemed an infinite distance to a young boy who had never been far from his home, and never away from his family.

  He looked up at his mother. It took only a second or so for Rebecca’s composure to shatter and for tears to come. She knelt, shaking and sobbing, and wrapped her arms around her boy, hugging her face against his chest.

  Part 2

  THE WANDERING BOY

  Chapter 10

  In a lowing, mud-pounding mass, Jacob Siler’s cattle moved down the dirt road and around the bend. David Crockett lingered at the curve and waved for a long time at his family, eyes stinging in the cold wind and wetted by the emotion of parting.

  There had been no time to gather his thoughts and mentally prepare for this separation. Hardly an hour had passed between the time David learned he had been hired out and the actual departure. He had bid a numb good-bye to his family, his brothers and sisters staring at him, expressionless, like he had become strange, or doomed. He didn’t like the feeling that gave him.

  Only Rebecca shed tears. John Crockett seemed gruff and cold, and revealed no emotion at seeing his twelve-year-old boy depart. David wondered if his father even cared—until John called him aside and unceremoniously presented him with a long oaken walking stick he had whittled out a couple of years before and had always used himself. David accepted it in silence, keeping his eyes averted from his father’s face. It was a brief but meaningful moment, John Crockett’s way of saying good-bye and Godspeed.

  David was touched, even though one contrary fact still loomed in his mind: his father had made no arrangements to bring him home. He knew it because he had already asked Siler if he was planning to return, and he was not. He was moving the cattle from his former home in Knoxville to a new home in Virginia. David could only guess that in making it home again, he would be on his own.

  “Boy, are you coming or ain’t you?” Siler yelled from around the bend. David gave a final wave to his kin, turned and loped off, not looking back again because he knew to do so would make him lose his composure.

  It came to his mind that this was a moment to remember forever: the moment that David Crockett went from being a boy to a young man out in the world.

  To David’s good fortune, the labor of cattle herding left little time for brooding, and as the miles dropped away behind him, his sadness lessened.

  And there was Alonz Tidwell to distract him too. This was the simple drover who had gotten into the argument about poultry-raising the night before. He was a comical, loud fellow even when sober, and the pain of his hangover did not silence him. To David’s amusement, he was still fixed on the very topic that had led him to violence, arguing with the air about chickens and their raising. David gathered that Tidwell had raised chickens on the Piedmont of North Carolina for many years while his farmer father was still alive, and considered himself an unassailable authority on poultry. After a while he grew tired of talking to himself, and fell back to give David the privilege of his wisdom. It was clearer than ever today that Tidwell was mentally deficient. He seemed to David much like a child living in the body of a man. But whatever else he lacked, he did seem to know a lot about chickens.

  “You see a fat hen with a scrawny hind end, lazy and poorly at her feed and her comb all colored wrong, and her forevermore taking to the shade in the summertime and the coop when it rains, there’s your hen that ain’t laying her worth, David. Your name’s David, ain’t it? Thought so. Well, David, that hen’s your next dinner. All she’s good for. That fool back at your pap’s tavern, he didn’t know squat about hens. You hear him, David? Old long tall fool. I ain’t seen bigger a fool since the twentieth of last summer. I give him what he had due, by gum!”

  “How long will it take us to get to Virginia?” David asked.

  “Now David, your no-count hen, she’ll be the first to go to roost, and the last to leave it in the morning. I’ve seen it myself. You know much about hens, David?”

  “No. How long until we’ll get to Virginia?”

  “Long time, long time. It lies that way.” He pointed straight ahead. “That’s why we’re driving the cattle in that direction, you see.”

  “That makes good sense to me.”

  “Well, it does, it does, when you think about it. I’ll tell you anything you need to know. You just ask me, whenever you want to. Huh?”

  “I will.”

  “Good boy. I like you, David. You’re a good boy.”

  David smiled. Though Tidwell was as odd and mindless a fellow as he’d ever met, he was glad to be in his good graces. Out on the hoof, one never knew when one would need a friend.

  It didn’t appear likely that David was going to find a better friend among his companions. The other drover—the younger, sparer one who had stared so hard at Rebecca—was named Ben Kelso, and he didn’t like David at all. David didn’t care. He didn’t like Kelso either.

  For one thing, Kelso was a dirty-minded fellow, talking incessantly of women in terms David had scarcely heard before. Only David’s exposure since early childhood to mating farm animals, older brothers, and a few lewd tales he had overheard wagoners telling in the tavern, enabled him to understand all that Kelso talked about. To hear Kelso tell his own story, no greater conqueror of women had ever walked the earth. He claimed such a breadth of experience with females that David calculated out his carnal exploits, if authentic, must have begun about the age of six. Kelso’s boastful lies became even more tiring to hear than Tidwell’s chicken chats, but David wasn’t bold enough to tell him to shut up. Kelso had a bullying manner that intimidated him.

  As for Siler, he was far too much a figure of authority for David to feel friendly toward; besides, he resented Siler for being the one who had led him into this circumstance in the first place. Had Siler not come to the tavern, he never would have been hired out on a job he didn’t want.

  David kept his bad feelings about Siler prudently hidden, and as time passed, they actually began to be replaced by a more accommod
ating attitude. Siler seemed a decent soul for a kidnapper, which was pretty much how David thought of him. The first night of the journey, as they sat beside a roaring blaze, Siler told a little about himself. He lived near Natural Bridge, Virginia, was son-in-law to one Peter Hartley, a fellow early settler of that region, and the man to whose farm the cattle were being driven. Furthermore, Siler was, according to his own assessment, an excellent gunsmith. David wasn’t impressed with that claim until Siler brought forth a rifle he had made and let his employees examine it. David was no expert judge of guns, but he recognized much skill in the making of this weapon, a brass-mounted beauty with a Deckard lock and ornamental patterns artistically carved into the gleaming maple stock.

  “That rifle is as fine a one as I’ve done, I reckon,” Siler said, running his hand along the stock. “There’s only one that I’ve made better, and that was for an old neighbor of mine in Pennsylvania, name of Squire Boone. You’re bound to have heard of his son, Daniel, who made his name to famous up in Kentucky. I knew the Boones well, back in Pennsylvania. I daresay Daniel has fired that rifle I made his pap a right smart bit.”

  David had heard of Boone, whose name had been lent to his Kentucky settlement of Boonesborough, as well as the later-formed Boone’s Station. And not very far from David’s birthplace had run Boone’s Creek, so-named because Daniel Boone had hunted along it a good quarter of a century before David’s birth. Lots of folks in what was now Tennessee had known Boone well, either through meeting him during one of his frequent hunts or during the time he had lived within what was now the state’s borders. David was impressed that Siler had known Boone’s family all the was back in Pennsylvania. He admired Boone’s reputation. Attaining fame almost solely on the basis of exceptional woodsman’s skills was a feat few achieved. It seemed to David that fame and greatness would be pleasant possessions to hold.

  He certainly found little potential for fame, greatness, or pleasure in the cattle-driving business. This was troublesome work, monotonous when all was going well and grueling when it wasn’t. Siler was running about a hundred head of cattle he had fattened on grain and clover pasture during the summer at Knoxville. They lumbered along toward Virginia with Siler guiding the herd behind a steer he led from horseback. David and the other two had to make do with walking, carrying big beech switches with the brown leaves still intact and using them to shoo the cattle along and keep them together on the road. There were a couple of trained dogs that helped herd the cattle too, though sometimes these caused trouble by attracting other dogs along the way, and these would bark and frighten the cattle. Twice, there were small-scale stampedes that sent the drovers scrambling through the woods and fields, regathering the scattered herd.

  Here and there along the road were taverns, ordinaries, or farms where the cattle could be pastured and grazed at night for a fee. If Siler happened to be in a good, open-pursed mood, he would put the drovers up in a bed—all three in one, usually—and even pay for grain to be given the cattle. Other times when he was feeling stingy, he would have his drovers sleep outside with the cattle, or would even trade off some of their labor for a few hours the next day to pay his grazing fee. David found himself occasionally performing jobs as diverse as fence-building, hog-slaughtering, and barn-building, all for strangers who had given them board and their herd pasture.

  All this continual exertion made changes in David Crockett. The daily walking strengthened his legs, lengthened his stride, bettered his wind. He had been thin to start with; now he became even more lean, but it was a healthy, muscled leanness. He felt light and taut, like he could spring right across a tall fence if he took a mind to. Though he despised much of the work he was involved in, especially the extra duties done in lieu of paying grazing fees, he realized he was becoming a better specimen of a boy because of it.

  Often they shared the road with other herds, occasionally cattle, but more often hogs. Massive herds of swine, several hundred head in size, sometimes a thousand, and once—awesome to see—they came upon a herd of about four thousand hogs. David had never seen or smelled anything like it. A swine herd that size was unusual, though such came along from time to time. Hogs were actually good travelers that held up well on the road, though they only could make eight miles or so a day, where cattle could make fifteen or even twenty.

  Seeing different country in the company of other than his kin made him think less about his home back at the tavern and the gentle arms of his mother. Only when he contemplated the miles piling up behind him did he feel significantly homesick. This usually happened at night, when he crawled into his bedroll. A time or two he might have cried, if not for fear that Ben Kelso would hear and deride him before the others.

  The closer they came to the end of the journey, the more impatient David became with the plodding cattle. He was eager to reach Virginia, get his pay, and head back home. He anticipated the prospect of returning to the tavern with money in hand and success to his credit. He would bask there before brothers and sisters, a calm and enviable young man who had traveled far and seen the world.

  “I wish these cows would sprout wings and fly,” he said to the simpleminded Tidwell. “I’d get a-holt of one’s tail and let him fly me right to Virginia, then I’d take my pay, buy him from Mr. Siler, and let him fly me back again.”

  Tidwell, very easily amused, cackled at the fantastic words. “A flying cow!” he said. “You hear that, Ben? David here was saying he wished that—”

  “I heerd him,” Kelso said. “Don’t see nothing funny in that.”

  David glowered at Kelso, thinking how everything about the fellow aggravated him, from his voice, to the way his hair stuck up from his head like dried grass in a wintry field, to the way he swaggered and talked and bragged. This kind of despising was a novel experience for David, who never before had met someone whose very presence and manner could anger him so.

  One time near the journey’s end, when no inn was nearby and they had camped for the night near the herd beneath the open sky, David was lying in his bedroll near the fire, huddled on his left side in his blankets and examining the piece of silver Uncle Jimmy had given him. He was so absorbed in watching the firelight glimmer on the nodule that he didn’t hear Kelso sneak up to him. Kelso’s hand shot over, and suddenly the silver was in his grip, not David’s.

  “Well now!” he said. “What we got here? Looks to me like—” He stopped. His taunting tone vanished. “This here’s silver! Real silver!”

  David was already up, hand extended. “Give that back, Kelso!”

  Kelso backed off, looking at the silver with the fire of greed burning in his eye. “Where’d you get this?”

  “It’s mine! It was give to me by my uncle!”

  “Give to you? Well, then it didn’t cost you nothing. No real loss if you lose it!”

  “Give it back!”

  “What do you care if I give it back? It didn’t cost you nothing!”

  Siler was out among the cattle, out of earshot. Tidwell, who had been asleep, wakened and sat up sleepily. “Something wrong, Kelso?”

  Kelso paused, then grinned devilishly. “Surely is, Alonz. David here is trying to steal this silver piece of mine.”

  That surprised David so much that he gaped silently for a few seconds. “That’s a lie!” he bellowed, turning red. “That silver is mine!”

  Tidwell said, “That’s the truth, Ben. I seen him looking at it before. You better give that back. Mr. Siler wouldn’t want you taking it from him.”

  Kelso sneered scoffingly at Tidwell, but was not willing to defy him. Even if he was sadly lacking in intellect, Tidwell was much bigger and older, and potentially dangerous if he got mad. Kelso exhaled, then turned an angry eye on David. He extended the silver toward him—then yanked it back suddenly.

  “Yes sir, I’ll give it back to you, David!” Kelso said, eyes twinkling. “I’ll put it right over here for you, where you can get it!”

  He strode over to the herd and behind a grazing cow. H
e knelt and picked up a short stick, then deftly he flipped up the tail. Suddenly he inserted the silver into the rectum and poked it in several inches with the stick. The cow lowed and moved forward, resisting this most unexpected invasion, but Kelso kept pace with it, then led it back. He wore a big, smirking grin that sent a cold chill of fury down David’s spine.

  “There! You want your silver, Dave, you come fetch it! It’s tucked right up this here cow fundament, safe and sound!” Kelso laughed uproariously, and tossed the manure-fouled stick at David, just to watch him jump to avoid it. It was too much to take. David couldn’t hold back tears. Fury drew them out, a pure and almost holy fury. If he had held a knife in hand right then, he would have murdered Kelso on the spot, whatever the penalty. To his good fortune, the very fury that overwhelmed him also saved him from rash action, freezing him in place as effectively as stark fear sometimes freezes a soldier at the point of greatest danger.

  “What are you waiting on, Davy? Come get your silver! Just lift the tail and finger it right out! Easy as picking your nose, and I’ll bet you’ve done that aplenty!”

  Tidwell rose, swore, and lunged forward. Kelso’s eyes went wide with sudden fear. Tidwell strode over to the cow, pushed Kelso aside very roughly, and with a deft probe of his forefinger brought the silver out again. Then he reached over, yanked Kelso to him, and began wiping the dirtied silver and his equally dirtied finger on Kelso’s sleeve.

  Kelso cursed and fought, but Tidwell was too much for him. “Now Kelso,” Tidwell said, “you know this is only fair. You’re the one who’s brought it on yourself, you know, by being so sorry and mean to my friend David.”

  Only when the silver was clean to his satisfaction did Tidwell stop wiping. He pushed Kelso aside and took the silver nugget back over to David.