The Hollow Tree (17 page)

The silence was so sudden and so complete that a single blue jay’s call had the entire company looking up nervously.

The day did not improve. The children were too despondent even to fight. They sat in the carts, and almost the only sound heard from any of them all day was Tibby’s cough. She had not recovered well from the measles, she had, in fact, developed a deep, wheezing cough that seemed to get worse and worse over the next two days as the refugees moved steadily north through the woods and over the frozen brooks. It snowed and sleeted, and the wind blew colder, and, all the time, Tibby became more listless. And, every time the Robinsons’ cart went over a big tree root or the ox jerked, she shook with a paroxysm of coughing.

“That child is too ill to travel farther today,” Rachael told Phoebe. The others agreed and,
although it was only just past noon, they struck camp. There was no clearing, they were stopped on the path by a stream in a hollow so thick with huge pines that they had to worry about fires — nor were dry sticks easy to find. They crowded close together over three small fires. Over Joseph Heaton’s grumbling, his wife, Lucy, gave Phoebe one of their quilts for Tibby. Bertha Anderson brought her a small jar of raspberry cordial.

“Here,” she said, her voice gruff. “I was savin’ this to celebrate with when we gets to Canaday, but the poor little soul might better have it.” She thrust it into Phoebe’s hand. She bent down and put her hand on Tibby’s hot face. Tibby made no sign that she knew Bertha Anderson was there.

Phoebe tried to give her some of the cordial, but it was no use. She did manage to get two spoonfuls of hot water into her, but Tibby vomited them right back.

The other children gathered around silently, afraid to come too close, afraid to move away.

“Phoebe! Phoebe! Is she going to die?” Jed whispered in Phoebe’s ear.

“No.” Phoebe told him, her heart tight inside her chest. “No, she is not going to die. Of course, she is not going to die.”

That evening the refugees shared their corn-meal samp, flavoured with a few beans from the
dwindling supply. High in the pine trees the wind raged and the sleet pounded, but the evergreens were so thick they were warmer and drier than they had been for weeks. They spoke to each other that night with kindness. Even Anne and Charity Yardley did not whisper together like conspirators. They all knew that a greater enemy than wild animals or marauding soldiers stalked the land.

When it came time to settle, George, who had steadily avoided Tibby’s embraces from their first meeting, curled up beside her. Jonah lay on her other side. Phoebe sat with Tibby’s head in her lap all night. It was not enough. Through the night and the howling wind, Tibby grew sicker and sicker. Just before morning, without a whimper, she died.

The day dawned bright and still, but there was little brightness among the saddened refugees. Phoebe was stunned. She had really thought Tibby would get better. It wasn’t that she had been unaware of the danger, but some of the other children had seemed as sick as Tibby and they had all recovered. There was something else. Tibby, so noisy and so stubbornly demanding, had found her way into Phoebe’s heart without Phoebe realizing it. She realized it now.

As for the others, they mourned Tibby each in his or her own way. Jonah went limping
off alone. Jed and Noah wouldn’t leave their mother’s side. Johnny Anderson, the Colliver children, and Jeannie Morrissay formed a tight knot, and Betsy Parker shadowed Phoebe’s every move. Tibby’s was the first death. The awareness of this was in everyone’s eyes.

Bertha Anderson, in her blundering way, said to Phoebe, “I figgered if one of them orphans was to go, it would’ve been the other one. She ain’t nearly so strong, though she’s bigger’n what Tibby Thayer was.” She swept her heavy sleeve across her eyes and sniffed loudly. Phoebe took Betsy’s hand and held it tightly.

“Hush, now, Mistress Anderson didn’t mean to be unkind,” she said to Betsy later. “She’s so busy grieving over Tibby she hasn’t a moment to spare for you. You must not mind her. That tongue of hers runs around in her mouth like a cat chasing its tail.”

Betsy gave Phoebe a tentative little smile.

Jem and Joseph Heaton dug a hole in the soft earth where an old tree had recently fallen. There they buried Tibby’s body, wrapped in one of Bertha Anderson’s petticoats. To everybody’s astonishment, Phoebe’s uncle roused himself from his torpor and, in a clear, deep voice, read the service for the burial of the dead from his prayer-book.

The rest of the day people spent drying out their sodden clothes as best they could by the
three small fires, baking bannocks, and preparing to start out the next morning by first light.

Around sundown that evening, Phoebe sat alone by the grave, remembering Tibby saying to her, “You got me to look after,” remembering, too, Bartlett clinging to her, letting her know, in his own way, that she had him to look after.

“And now you are both gone.” She rubbed the tears from her eyes. She remembered something else: that last afternoon with Anne and Gideon. “War is so romantic,” Anne had said. Phoebe’s tears came, then, in a torrent she could not rub away.

She became aware, after a time, that someone was standing beside her. She looked up. It was Jem, carrying a small roughly carved cedar cross he had made to mark Tibby’s grave. He sat down and put an arm around her.

“Oh, Jem, I don’t think anything worse than this can happen. I really don’t.”

The Prisoner

E
arly the next morning, when all the others were barely stirring, Phoebe went looking for something that might do for flowers to put on the grave. She broke the soft ends from a few cedar branches. Shivering in her blanket, she crouched down in the snow by a small rock pool in the stream. She was concentrating on finding a sharp stone to break the ice so she could wash, and didn’t hear the whistling until it was quite near.

Someone was whistling “Yankee Doodle.” Within seconds a young man appeared through the trees. He was dressed in a fringed deerskin hunting shirt and leggings, with high moccasins on his feet and a fur cap on his head, and he had a rifle over his shoulder. His whistling stopped abruptly when he saw Phoebe. They stared at each other.

Phoebe recovered first. She stood up slowly. Images raced through her head of the men she had run from with George and Bartlett, of the soldiers who had held the refugees at gunpoint while they stole their provisions. She would not let him see that she was afraid. She spoke without a quaver. “I am not alone. If I shout someone will come.”

“I don’t aim to do you no harm, Mistress. I’ll just get myself gone before your friends get here.” He gave her a little smile and turned to go. Too late. The sound of feet on the ice along the brook’s bank was loud and clear. The young man started to run.

“Stop!” roared Joseph Heaton. He raised his gun. Jem sprinted through the trees, threw himself at the stranger, and brought him down by the knees. They tussled briefly, but Jem had the advantage of surprise and Joseph Heaton with his gun at the ready.

“You took me fair and square,” the stranger conceded when Jem had taken his rifle and forced him to his feet. “But I got no quarrel with you, nor, I figger, do you got none with me.” He looked over at Phoebe, a rueful expression in his dark eyes. “I wasn’t about to offer no injury nor no insult to your sweetheart.” Jem flushed. It took Phoebe a moment to realize what he’d said. Then all she could think was, What a notion! How that will anger Jem.

“Never mind that,” barked Joseph Heaton. “You just best give out what you’re a-doin’ here, and right smart, too.”

The young man said his name was Japhet Oram and that he’d been working for his uncle up on the Onion River but was on his way home to see his sick mother over the mountains in Bellows Falls, on the Connecticut.

Phoebe listened in silence as he told his tale. She knew he was lying. It wasn’t just the momentary hesitation before he said Bellows Falls, it was the way he talked. There wasn’t a settler in the whole Upper Connecticut River valley, her father had told her once, “who you can’t identify by his speech.” Japhet Oram did not speak with the clipped words or broad vowels she was used to hearing in Vermont. He had a slow, drawly accent, not one she had heard before. There was something else. Despite his hunting clothes and his ragged brown beard, he looked more like a soldier than a woodsman. It was the way he moved, and it was his black hair tied back in a neat queue. He looked like Gideon the day she had discovered him in her house in Hanover.

She said nothing about her suspicions. Japhet Oram didn’t look to be any older than Jem — or Gideon. She didn’t trust Joseph Heaton, and she wasn’t sure Jem could stop him from shooting the boy where he stood if he thought he was a
rebel spy. She thought, not for the first time, how Joseph Heaton reminded her of Elihu Pickens and the men on his Committee of Public Safety back in Orland Village. No, she would not say anything.

“We ain’t settin’ you free just on your say-so,” snarled Joseph Heaton. He grabbed Japhet Oram’s arms, pinned them behind his back, and held them there. “Who’s to say you ain’t a soldier of that dad-blasted rebel John Stark or Israel Putman? And who’s to say you ain’t a rebel spy? We ain’t settin’ you free.”

“See here,” Japhet Oram began, but Joseph Heaton paid no attention. He swivelled around to face Phoebe. “What’s more,” he snarled, “we ain’t lettin’ no one else set you free, neither.” There was a look of such intense ill will on his face that, involuntarily, Phoebe backed away from him.

“You keep the gun on ’im,” he barked at Jem and, pushing his captive before him, disappeared into the forest.

Phoebe felt sick. The look on Joseph Heaton’s face had frightened her. “Jem?” she said uncertainly.

Jem had started after Master Heaton. He swung around. There was no warmth in his blue eyes now. “I don’t think you’re a spy, Phoebe Olcott. Not anymore. You know I don’t. But I’d give a whole pound sterling if I had it to know
what you ’n’ that Japhet Oram was talkin’ about.”

“We weren’t … ”

There was no use explaining. Jem did not wait to hear. Phoebe pulled Katsi’tsiénhawe’s blanket more tightly around herself, and stood, irresolute. She did not want to go back to camp. She did not want to think about Japhet Oram and what might happen to him. She looked down. She had not moved from the rock pool, and there, staring bleakly back at her, was her reflection in the clear black ice. “I do not want to think about you, either,” she told it. She lifted her braid of matted brown hair and dropped it with a sigh. She looked at her tired, thin face, the hollows under eyes that were bigger and darker than she remembered. “I guess nobody could call me a plump partridge now,” she said.

Back in camp Joseph Heaton had tied his prisoner’s hands behind his back with a rope and was peppering him with questions. “Where were you? What’re you
really
doin’ out here? Why ain’t a stout young feller like you in uniform? Where’d you get that rifle? It ain’t commonplace around these parts.” And on and on, until Charity Yardley said, acidly, “Master Heaton, if you are hoping for answers to your questions, you might give the young man time to respond.”

With that, everyone had something to say,
something to ask. He told them his family were Loyalists. He told them again that he was going home to visit his mother. Nothing Japhet Oram could say would satisfy Joseph Heaton. “We knows you rebel spies. The general at Fort St. John’s is goin’ to be some happy to get a-hold of you,” he crowed, “I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if they wasn’t willing to offer a nice reward.” Almost everyone else wanted to let him go free. Bertha Anderson said she saw no reason why “half-starved folk like us should feed a healthy varmint like him,” and, for once, Charity Yardley agreed with her.

Then Anne came forward to stand in front of their prisoner. “Don’t you let him go.” Her face was contorted with rage, her voice was shaking, her fists were clenched. “Don’t you let him go. If he is a spy he must hang. Hanging is what happens to spies.”

The look of sick terror that came over Japhet Oram’s face was one Phoebe did not think she would ever forget, or the way his glance darted frantically from one person to another. In that moment she knew she would have to set him free. For a split second their eyes met. She did not dare look at him again.

Joseph Heaton’s arguments won out. Japhet Oram was to be taken along to Fort St. John’s. The snow and cold winter winds, Tibby’s death, and now the capture of a man who might be a
spy, gave the refugees a new sense of urgency. Quickly, they set to preparing the morning meal and assembling their possessions. While the cornmeal stir-about was being rationed out, Phoebe slipped away to the hillside where they had buried Tibby. She knelt by the cross Jem had made and laid there the bunch of cedar she’d been clutching since she’d gathered it by the pool. She prayed for Tibby’s soul. Then she said, “Goodbye, Tibby Thayer. You were an odd, cross-grained little creature, and now the good Lord has taken you to be with your mama and your papa. I hope you are happier there than you were here.” She wiped the tears from her eyes. She stood up — and saw Jem a few feet away.