The Kentucky Trace: A Novel of the American Revolution

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37 3 The early sun was sending long yellow rays into the pines above, but the narrow creek valley was buried in a cold, foggy twilight. He checked Kate; she knew home with her stable and Beau the fine stallion were less than two miles up the creek; but this was no place for fast traveling. The creek valley was so narrow there was scarcely room between rock ledges and creek water for the trail. Worse, the rocks underfoot were slippery with their covering of yellow-red mud. Last year the mud had been mostly black with washed-away topsoil; this year yellow-red; next year redder as the hard rains gouged out the plowed-up soil of his hillside cornfields down to the clay and rock bones of the earth. His fields. This creek would never again run clear and clean as when he and Sadie had settled here less than two years ago. He cursed Sadie, her corn that went mostly into her still to come out as whiskey to sell now for cash or keep for the “by then” when they’d have a tavern “like Papa.” Sadie lived in the by then; some day there’d be a big road up the creek valley by their place with crowds of passersby stopping in; by then if they saved and worked and built a tavern “finer than Papa’s” they’d be somebody. That last was kind of pitiful: the only way to be a somebody was to be born a somebody. Sadie didn’t know that. Yellow-hided, weak-kneed, he had come to the place at the insistence of 38 Sadie and her parents. They owned the land and were deeding it to Sadie as part of her dowry; she must go live on it. He hadn’t seen the sense of moving to this out-of-the-way hole in Clinch Mountain. He loved rough backwoods, but not for farming. He owned a lot of land as he was often paid with as much as a third of the boundary he surveyed. Any parcel of it was better for farming than Sadie’s. He hadn’t understood her real reason for moving until about six months after their marriage; they’d have no neighbors here—or so she’d thought—and so nobody around could know how long she’d been married. He dismounted, led Kate up a steep rocky bank around a waterfall, waited until he saw that Cleo with a light pack was making the climb with no trouble, then remounted. Past the waterfall, the valley widened and the creek became a shallow, sluggish stream bordered by swampy soil filled with willows and lush weeds. Kate was hurrying along when she stopped so suddenly Leslie swayed in the saddle. He couldn’t get her to go on in spite of sweet talk and reassuring pats. She kept trying to back off. He dismounted. She never acted this way without good reason. He walked ahead, looking carefully on either side the trace until he saw, half-hidden in swamp grass and weeds, the bleached rib cage of some large animal. Long since picked clean by buzzards, bleached by sun and rain, the skeleton had been there a long while, but not when he left home. Jumping from hummock to hummock of grass, he got far enough to see a horn sticking out of the water. It belonged to one of the two cows Sadie had brought with her. Snake bite, he guessed. He’d told the woman when she’d started driving the cows down here because the higher woods were too dried up for grazing that the swamp was dangerous with water moccasins. He was glad it wasn’t one of his horses she’d put down where while he was gone, but why in thunder hadn’t Jethro buried the animal? He forgot his vexation over the unburied cow when, past a clump of willows, he could look up and see what the few people who knew about it called Collins Place. He was ashamed to have his name tied to it. The two-story log house with kitchen in back sat on a rolling piece of hillside with a fairly level bench below and another above; everything dull 39 brown and gray, for the sun came late to the valley and left early. Riding on, he kept glancing...