The Winter Somebody Fed My Children

The Winter

It came every week. Not on a schedule I could catch. Sometimes Monday, sometimes Thursday, never twice in the same place.

Venison four times. A turkey twice. Parched corn in bark, which is a thing I had never seen done, folded and tied with bark string so tight the snow did not get in. Once, in January, a bladder of bear grease, which I would have traded a horse for if I had still had a horse, because we were burning the last of the tallow and I had been putting the children to bed at four in the afternoon for the dark.

And every three or four days, before light, somebody broke the ice on my spring.

I never once heard it. I am not a heavy sleeper and I have never been, and I lay awake listening for it more nights than I slept, and whoever it was came and went across frozen ground within forty feet of my bed and I never heard a step.

I made myself sick over it. That is the honest part of this that does not make me look well.

I decided it was Susannah Prather, who had lost a husband herself in 1808 and knew. I watched her hands at meeting for two weeks to see if they were a woman’s hands that had been dressing deer, and I could not tell, and I did not ask her, because if it was her and she wanted it secret then asking would end it.

Then I decided it was Captain Doak.

I have to put that down because it is true. For most of January I believed it was Captain Doak, doing it quietly so that when spring came he could say he had kept me alive and I could not say otherwise. I lay in the dark and worked out what I would owe him and what I would say and whether I could bring myself to say no a second time with the children fatter than they had been in October.

I ate a man’s charity all winter in my head and hated him for it, and he had not given me so much as a handful of meal.

In February I did what I should have done in December. I went out before light and waited in the brush at the edge of the clearing with Josiah’s coat over me and his rifle, which I could load and could not shoot worth anything.

I waited four mornings. Nothing came.

On the fifth morning I could not feel my feet and I went in at first light and there was a turkey hanging in the hickory, and my tracks in the snow going out to the brush pile were crossed by another set of tracks going to the tree, and they were smaller than mine.

A woman’s tracks, or a boy’s.

And they came up out of the sycamore bottom along the creek, from the south, from the direction there was nothing in but water and cane and, two miles down, the Delaware families.