The Winter Somebody Fed My Children

What I Saw At The Creek In February

I need to tell this part in the order it happened and not in the order that makes me look better.

Before I ever followed those tracks, in the first week of February, I walked down the creek to cut cane for the fire because I had burned everything close in.

And I came up over the bank and Silas Doak was standing in the Delaware families’ winter cache with a brand in his hand.

They kept caches in that bottom, dug pits lined with bark, corn and dried squash and beans put down in the fall, the way everybody did who had any sense, and I had known those pits were there for two years the way you know where your neighbors keep things.

He had one of them open and he was burning it.

He saw me. He looked straight at me across maybe sixty feet of snow and cane, and he did not run and he did not say anything, and after a moment he went back to what he was doing.

Because there was nothing I could do. We both understood that at the same time. I was a widow with no standing, in debt to his brother, with three children in a cabin two miles up the same creek, and he was the captain’s brother, and he had just been told no by me in October and had heard about it.

I turned around and I walked home with no cane.

I did not tell anybody. Not that day, not that week, not for two months.

I have carried that for forty five years and I am not going to dress it up. I was frightened, and being frightened was reasonable, and it was still the wrong thing, and those are all three true at once and none of them cancels the others.