The Winter Somebody Fed My Children
The Six Years
People want the meeting to be the end of it. It was not the end of anything. It was April and I still had a crop to get in with a seven year old and a five year old and no horse.
What the meeting bought me was strange and I did not expect any of it.
Susannah Prather started coming again. Not with an apology, which I was glad of, because I would not have known what to do with one. She came with a churn under her arm and said her arms were tired, and she sat in my kitchen for two hours, and after that she came most weeks for eleven years until she died.
Jonas Tatum ploughed my ground in May of 1812 and would not take anything for it, and then took a bushel for it in 1813 when I insisted, and we settled into that.
And perhaps six families on that creek never spoke to me properly again. Not ugly. Just done. I will go to my grave thinking well of Susannah Prather and still not knowing what I ever did to Mrs. Cole.
That is the true accounting. You do not get the settlement back. You get about a third of it, and you find out which third, and knowing is better than not knowing but it is not free.
The war came that summer. I am not going to write about the war because I did not see any of it, and I have read enough by men who did not see it either.
What I will say is that the families in the sycamore bottom had the worst of both sides of it, and that in the autumn of 1812 most of them went east to the country near Piqua where the government had said they would be safe, and the bottom was empty for nearly two years, and there was not a night I did not think about it.
Rachel sent word twice by a trader. Both times the word was the same three words, which were that they were living, and I have thought since that she knew exactly how much three words would be worth to me and chose them on purpose.
They came back in the spring of 1815. Esther was nine and had lost most of her letters, and we started over, and she had it all back by Christmas and more besides.
Those were good years and I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of the ending.
Two mornings a week for six years is a great many mornings. Esther learned to read in my kitchen with my daughter, on a bench Josiah made, out of a speller with the cover off. She learned her hand from mine, which is why her letters slant the way they do. She could do sums in her head faster than any of us by the time she was ten, and she used to do it out loud to torment Betsy, and Betsy would throw things at her.