The Winter Somebody Fed My Children

The Tree By The Door

The first of it was a quarter of venison in the crotch of the hickory by my door, and I have never in my life been so afraid of a piece of meat.

It was the ninth of December, 1811. I know the date because I had been marking days on the door frame with a nail since my husband died, the way you count out something you are afraid you will lose track of. Josiah had been in the ground since the eighth of April. I had three children under the age of eight, a cabin with one whole wall of green timber that whistled when the wind came out of the northwest, and in the loft I had perhaps two weeks of corn if I was careful and none of us grew.

I went out that morning to break ice on the water bucket and there it was, hanging in the fork of the tree, wrapped in the hide, clean and quartered and hung out of the reach of dogs.

I stood in the cold in my husband’s coat and I looked at that meat and I cried, and I want to say plainly that I was not crying out of gratitude. I was crying because I was terrified.

You have to understand what it meant. If a man in that settlement had left it, he had left it in secret, and a thing done for a widow in secret is a thing with a price coming. I had already been told what the price was. I had already said no to it once, in my own doorway, in October, with my hand on the latch.

I took the meat in. Of course I took the meat in. Betsy was seven and had stopped asking for things, which is a worse sign in a child than crying, and Levi was five and had started sleeping in the day.

We ate that night for the first time in nine days without me counting out what was left afterward.

And the next Monday there was parched corn in a folded bark packet, set up under the eave where the snow would not reach it.

And the Monday after that, there was more.