He nodded to himself as if approving a statement of good sense, and opened the door. Then he stopped dead.
On the doorstep was a small basket, beautifully woven in colored strings. Inside it were three warm new-laid duck eggs, a loaf of pale yellow corn bread, a handful of nuts and a leaf wrapped around some dried fruits.
John exclaimed and looked out at once toward the forest where the trees were thick at the edge of his felled patch. Nothing moved. There was no skirt of buckskin flicking out of sight, no gleam of dark oiled hair.
Suckahanna? he called. His voice was low, he had spoken in nothing but a low whisper for so many weeks he thought he had forgotten how to shout her name. He tried again. Suckahanna?
There was no answer. A jay shrieked and a wood pigeon clattered in the branches as it flew away, but there was no other sound.
John bent and picked up the basket. Surely this was a gift from her, seeing his door closed, guessing how low this country had brought him? He took the basket inside and set it down by the fireplace, and then, feeling his desire for food rekindled at the sight of the eggs, he went quickly down to the river and filled his cooking pot with water.
He set the eggs on to boil but he could not wait for them to cook before tasting the other food. While they were bubbling in the pot he broke the bread and ate it, and then cracked the nuts on the hearthstone and ate the sweet kernels. The juices rushed into his mouth, the taste of a food which was not corn flour porridge was so strange and desirable that the corners of his jaw suddenly pained him sharply, as if he had bitten into a lemon. It was passionate desire for food, for a new taste. When the eggs were boiled John broke off the tops, so careless that he scalded his mouth, and ate the whites and sucked the yellow yolks down in great desirous gulps. The yellow tasted like blood, he could feel the strength of it coursing through him, making him wholehearted again, courageous, enterprising, making a pioneer out of a man who moments ago had been a lost boy.
My God, I was hungry! he said. He took the last piece of bread and ate it, relishing the slightly sweet taste of it and the pale yellow color. Then he took a handful of the dried fruit and put it in his mouth. At once his mouth was filled with flavor as strong as sherbet, as sharp as redcurrants. It was a fruit he did not know, wrinkled like raisins but as sharp-tasting as sour greengages. John held the sweet mass in his mouth and sucked it and sucked it as the sharpness and sweetness poured out of the dried skins and into his throat.
My God, I was hungry! he said. He took the last piece of bread and ate it, relishing the slightly sweet taste of it and the pale yellow color. Then he took a handful of the dried fruit and put it in his mouth. At once his mouth was filled with flavor as strong as sherbet, as sharp as redcurrants. It was a fruit he did not know, wrinkled like raisins but as sharp-tasting as sour greengages. John held the sweet mass in his mouth and sucked it and sucked it as the sharpness and sweetness poured out of the dried skins and into his throat.
He sat entranced, his mouth pursed around the flavor, as if nothing in the whole world could be as good as this moment when he was fed at last, after months of hunger.
When he had finished his meal there were only a few of the fruits left over. He had eaten everything else. I should have saved some, John thought regretfully. I am as greedy as a savage to pour it down my throat and not save any for my dinner. Then he realized that he could not have stopped himself from eating. He simply would not have had the willpower, and that without the strength from the meal he could not have gone on.
And now I shall check my fish trap, and I shall clear a patch of ground and plant some seeds, he said determinedly. Thank God I have the strength to do it.
First he loaded the fire with the broken branches, remembering the wisdom of the rule that he should always keep the fire in. Then he went out of the cottage and left the door open behind him so that the cool, clean wind could sweep in and blow away the stench of him living like a dog, sleeping like a dog, and never getting clean. He went down to the river and stripped off his shirt and his breeches and left them piled under stones in the water while he waded into the icy river and washed. When he came out, shivering with cold, he pulled out his clothes and rinsed them roughly until the shirt was evenly pale gray instead of dirty and stained. Then he wrung them, still favoring his hurt hand, and shook them out as he jogged back to the house on bare feet. The fire was blazing. He upended the cooking pot and balanced a couple of sticks so he could spread the wet clothes before the heat. Then he went back outside, bare-arsed, wearing only his jacket for warmth, and started to break up firewood.
When he had made a good pile he stacked it and then went inside for his spade and pick. He paused for a moment looking over his land, his new land. It was no hunger-born illusion that the forest was creeping back. Long trails of vines were moving in like snakes across the cleared patch, speckles of weeds were springing like a green plague across the clean soil. Nothing would stop this earth regenerating. By felling the trees all John had done was let in the low-growing plants, which were colonizing the clearing.
John marked out with his eye a line that would run parallel with the front of his house and stop before the doorway. It would be a vegetable bed with young tobacco plants interspersed with eating plants. Salad vegetables would be quick to grow, and he had seed potatoes, turnip, carrot, leek and pea seeds as well. Other planters up and down the river, with laborers to work for them, some of them enslaved, some of them free, had taken the risk of planting nothing but tobacco, assuming that they could buy everything else they wanted, all their food, all their building materials, all their clothes, from the profits of one cash crop. Men like that had died in the early years, or begged from the Indians and called it trade, or gone barefoot into town and pleaded for charity. But when the tobacco grew, and the price of tobacco started to rise, the gamble for some of them had paid off. John thought of the little cottage gardens that his mother had told him about, in the village of Meopham, where every house, however small, had a patch of ground behind it which grew food to keep the worst of the winter hunger away. John realized that he was reduced to a level that his parents had congratulated themselves on leaving behind; but then he thought more cheerfully that perhaps this was his starting place, as Meopham had been theirs.
He hefted the pick and swung it into the ground. At once it jarred on a root and he felt the sudden pain as the new skin on the palm of his hand split open and drained a dripping water. He caught his hand up and looked fearfully at it. The skin which had looked so dead and white had peeled off the wound and was pouring, not blood, but a clear liquor. The pain was so sharp that Johns head rang with it for long moments. Then he slowly bent, took the ax and the spade, tucked them under his arm, and brought them back to the house. He could not dig one-handed. His garden would have to wait.
Inside the house he took a strip of linen that had once been destined to be a white stock if he were invited to somewhere fine, and wound it around his hand, tying it tight to staunch the flow. It stung painfully as he wrapped it, and he felt the cloth stick into the wound.
The thing is, he said quietly to the empty room, is that I dont rightly know what to do for the best.
John thought he should wait till his shirt and breeches were dry and then walk, though it would be a long walk, to the Hobert plantation and see what Sarah Hobert could do for a grievous burn. She may have a salve, John said. And I could stay the night with them, and talk. And theyll have bread.
The high spirits of the morning were draining out of him. He felt his shirt, anxious now to leave. The shirt was dry and sweet-smelling but the breeches, made of thick homespun, were still wet. John was thinking of wearing them wet when a sudden pain gripped him deep in his belly.
It was the food, shoveled down into his shrunken stomach, too rich for a system which had been living at starvation level. Ah God! John exclaimed. The pang of it was like a sword thrust into his heart.
He doubled up and ran, bent double, for the door. He had scarcely cleared the house when he voided himself and felt his strength burst and then trickle from him. He clung to the doorframe with the pain of it and then felt his hands and even his fingertips grow weaker as the pain seized him in the belly and shook him, like a monsters jaws.
What a fool I am, what a fool he gasped between spasms. He thought he should have known that his body could not take the richness of such food after weeks of hunger. What a fool what a fool.
The attack subsided and John half-stumbled and half-crawled back indoors. The stink was very bad but he could not get down to the river again to wash. He wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down before his fire. He realized that he would not be well enough to walk to the Hoberts. He could not paddle his canoe one-handed. He could not dig his garden until his hand healed, and until this dreadful flux passed he would be fit for nothing. He would be hard-pressed to get down to the river and then he would be unable to walk up the hill again. He lay in the warmth of the fire, thanking God that he had thought to make it big this morning, and then closed his eyes. Every time the pain in his belly woke him with a spasm of hurt he turned his eye toward the door. If Suckahanna did not come again with food, with water, and with herbs to heal his burned hand, John thought he would probably die there, lying before a dying fire, bare-arsed, sick as a dog, and with one worthless and perhaps poisoned hand, and nothing fit to eat.
She did not come. When dusk fell John crawled to the door and pushed it shut, fearful of the night creatures. If the wolves came closer tonight it would be only the closed door that would keep them from him, and they could break that down with one spring. John himself did not have the strength to load his gun. He felt himself sweating into his cloak and then a wet sensation and a terrible stench which meant that he had emptied his bowels again. He could do nothing but lie in his own filth. Some time in the night he was sick on the floor, the vomit spreading in a pool around him, and then the smell of it made him sick again but he brought up only burning bile from his empty belly. He hauled himself up on one elbow and put more wood on the fire. Then he slept.