The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

The mountain wanted the old way still, and he who changes what is ordered and old and set is a man who grasps the lion’s jaw.

She longed for his presence. Maybe that was love, she didn’t know. She had heard love sung about often, and told about in the passages her father sometimes would read in the Bible, but she didn’t know what was love and what was longing, and what was the wanting not to be lonely, which she had now and had often.

They knew what was expected of them now, and what could be expected of the work horse and of the chain and of the fires and ax, of all the tools and stock they used. The family was a machine of matching, meshed cogs. It was not that the family was making a machine that they could use; the family was the machine. The family and the clearing and the crops and the stock and the tools were part of the same thing. The family and the place were the same thing and could not be separated one from the other. One could not understand the family without knowing about the land and their work on it and plans for it, and one could not know the land with any real understanding without knowing this family of people. They were dusty with the land; the grit of the land was in them. Their work, which was done together, was the chief meaning of their family lives. “We’re making way here,” Mooney said. “Going to do well afore it’s over.”

It was only man that was always moving, trying to get more than he had.

A person becomes part of what he does, he thought, grows into what grows around him, and if he works the land, he comes to be the land, and owner of and slave to it.