The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

The air was clean and alive with frozen soundlessness and cleanliness, and it pained the chest to breathe the air for long. He crept back to his fireplace and fed on deer meat and waited for a thought, some idea of what he was to do.

he knelt near the hearth and watched eight little biddies run about in early exploration, their ruffled-feathered mama cackling proudly, as if she had brought into the world a mighty brood.

even in the wealth of spring, he remembered the harshness of this country. It is a cunning place, he thought, a place of dangers, after all.

His right to be there was that he was Belle Harrison’s father.

To his surprise, however, Ernest refused the invitation. He who had come to beg for land and had accepted it would not come to share supper with the old man. Tinkler went away, unable to figure it all out, not realizing that Ernest Plover never asked for help unless he was in need of it, and never accepted help unless he had first asked.

Work to do—that was the same as saying there was living to do, and planning to do, and birthing to watch over.

On the morning when the first witch hazel flowers appeared, at a time when they often heard the thumping of the pheasants in the woods, both signs of coming frost, Mooney told the boys to pull the blades from the sorghum cane, and he went down the rows himself and selected from the tallest canes the best of the big brown tassels of seeds, which he took to the house and put in a gourd, to be saved until the future planting time.

it again tonight or tomorrow night. A boy learns by trying, and when he’s tried and not done well, he can be taught easier. A man can’t teach a boy much that the boy’s not tried to do for himself.”

it’s chancey to talk about another person.”

A man can do that. A man as big as me is accustomed to doing his work that way, accustomed to telling stock what to do, to wade in on anything and lash out, moving whatever is in his way, cutting down or plowing up. A man works that way, but I needed to show a difference here, for the boy wasn’t a piece of stock or land. He was a man, not grown yet, but accustomed to his own way, and I wish I had gone about it differently.”

They had come to be a family, she thought, more here than in Virginia, more here than she had known a family could be part of itself, safe unto itself, in a house that smelled of cooking and herbs and wool and wine vinegar, each one in its special season, as the family made for itself comfort and protection. All that lies about us is foreign to us yet, she thought, but here we are, come together, and closer will we come.

We are set in the world, Nicholas thought, we are set not adrift as on a sea, for the sea supports whatever floats on it; we are adrift in the air and move like dried leaves whisked about, subject any moment to the falling to the ground, to age-olding, to the open grave or leaf-molding.

She remembered what her mother had said once, that a woman could show her love for a man in so many ways, in the cooking and sewing and stock-tending and helping in the fields and comforting that she does, but a man couldn’t express it so easily, for he had fewer ways.