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(They are) robust young Backwoodsmen of Character helthy, hardy young men, recommended.  — William Clark

1. Ma

 End of September, 1803 — Near Stuart’s Draft, Virginia

John Colter reined in his horse at the top of the lane leading down to the house and filled his lungs with the familiar scents of home. Ripening apples hung heavy on the trees in the little orchard, blocking his view of the house. Their perfume, mixed with the heavy pungency of the nearby privy and the mossy scent of the summer-sapped creek, drifted to him on the late-September breeze. Familiar smells that seemed sweeter to him now that he was on the verge of leaving them forever.

His hand moved automatically to the bulge in his saddlebag. His stake money, the result of ten years’ hard work out on his trap lines in western Kentucky Territory. The last two winters since his partner Zoob died had been the worst, but now it was time to find new partners and a new life. In two weeks he would leave for Louisville to join Scratch Wilkes’s outfit. That meant saying goodbye to Ma and Stuart’s Draft for good. He had just two weeks to find the right moment to break the news, a task he dreaded like a child facing a whipping.

Blaze’s nicker brought him out of his reverie. He patted her neck. “Yep. I see ‘em.”

He loosened the reins so she could feed on the fruit that had fallen from the apple trees. Apples were her favorite treat, one she had not tasted in months.

Looking about from his perch on Blaze’s back, it struck Colter that his mother was finally relaxing her frugal ways now that Pa was gone. Windfall apples littered the orchard. It was not like her to not gather them up for cider or apple butter the minute they fell. He made a mental note to get out here early tomorrow to clean things up, then wheeled Blaze down the lane.

Approaching the house, he took note of the minor repairs he needed to see to before he left. He was almost at the porch before he noticed how quiet the place was. Where were the chickens? And Daisy, Ma’s curious three-legged goat?

The door to the barn was shut so she was likely off visiting. Good. That gave him time to prepare for her reaction to his news.

He was about to step up to the porch when the barn door groaned open. Out came a man leading a horse. Enos Smoot, Farley Stuart’s overseer.

Smoot stopped short as if startled to see Colter, then came forward with his hand outstretched. “You just get home, John?”

Colter shook the man’s hand. “Just now.”

Smoot nodded. “Be around long?”

Colter ignored the question to ask his own. “You got business with Ma?”

There was an awkward pause before Smoot said, “You haven’t heard then.”

“Heard what?”

“Your ma died. Two weeks back.”

Colter flinched as if lashed by the words. “She what? How?”

“She took a fall in the spring house,” Smoot continued. “Must have hit her head. She drowned in the spring pool.”

Ma? Dead?

“I came by to see what repairs the place needs.” Smoot glanced toward the barn, then back at Colter. “Suppose it falls to me to tell you that this place belongs to Mr. Stuart now. Your ma sold it to him before she died, but we been holding off doing any work till you got home. We did take the animals over to the big house though. Slaves’re looking after them.”

Colter pivoted slowly toward the little house that had long been his home. His mind rebelled at accepting what his ears had heard. Ma? Dead? No, it could not be. Surely this was some cruel joke.

The leather of Smoot’s saddle complained as he climbed into it. “You got questions, best you go see Mr. Stuart.”

Colter tried to imagine the kitchen without Ma, bustling to fix him some food, chattering all the news she had saved up for his return. He could not conjure such a picture.

“Sorry I had to be the one to break the bad news, Colter,” Smoot said.

She can’t be dead. I never said goodbye to her.

“Well, I got to get on back,” said Smoot. “You need anything, you let us know. Hear?”

Colter was too numb to acknowledge Smoot’s departure. He sank down on the porch and put his head in his hands.

The little slave boy lay curled in the corner of the church sound asleep. Except for the child’s light breathing, the room was still as Josiah Hartley watched out the narrow window that looked onto the graveyard. Farley Stuart’s orders had been specific: The minute you see him, send Puddin back to let me know. Don’t fail me now.

Hartley was not about to fail Stuart. Not this close to fulfilling the vow he had made the day his boyhood had come to an abrupt end at the age of nine. He had been out hunting squirrels that afternoon and been unusually lucky. He had downed three and was carrying them back home when he stepped around the bushes at the edge of the clearing to a nightmare. Instead of the shanty cabin he had left, all that remained were blackened smoking ruins. He flung aside the squirrels and went looking for his family. What he found was five charred bodies: his parents and three sisters, all the blood kin he had in the world.

He would never know who had set the fire or what became of the squirrels. Suddenly he was homeless, penniless and all alone in the world. Frightened and crying, he wandered the forest for hours until exhaustion forced him to stop. Then he burrowed into a pile of leaves like an animal seeking warmth. He lay on the ground aching with sorrow until the discomfort of his body overcame the pain of his loss. As he got to his feet, he made himself a promise: No matter what it took, he would win a home for himself. A place no one could ever take away from him.

He took off walking, following the sun’s course across the sky, and never looked back. Two weeks later, he stumbled onto a tent meeting. Never before had he seen such carryings-on. But it was the sight of hats being passed from hand to hand, brimming with contributions that captured and held his imagination. That night he plucked a leather-bound Bible from the hands of a snoring matron and helped himself to a horse from the picket line. Thus he began a career as a self-anointed man of the cloth.

Still, even though gifted with talents for oratory and manipulation, his life had not been an easy road. It had taken him twenty years to get to the Draft. Twenty years of scheming, of kow-towing to the right people, of wearing out his wits to bring him to this place, to this moment when the fulfillment of his dream was nearly in his grasp.

Just two more months. Sixty days, he told himself as he glanced around the little church. Daylight poured through the unrepaired chinks in the north wall. Streaks of sunlight fell across the rough plank benches and the hard-packed dirt floor. The only adorned wall had a simple cross nailed to it. An incongruously elegant lectern, a gift from Farley Stuart, rested a few paces from that cross. Stuart preferred to spend his money on things that stood out, whether or not they were necessary. To his mind, chinking and wood flooring were details for the rest of the congregation to see to.

The sound of an approaching horse checked Hartley’s thoughts. A rider drew up at the entrance to the adjoining cemetery. Hartley pressed against the rough wall to keep the newcomer from spotting him through the window.

The slump of the man’s shoulders attested to a deep weariness. He slid off his horse and stood for a moment facing the well-used saddle. When he turned, he moved woodenly.

Hartley held himself rigid. This could be the one he had been watching for, but he had to be sure before he made his move.

The horse was chestnut brown with a white star blaze between its eyes. It looked as weary as its rider. The man was a little less than six feet tall, in his late twenties, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine. His clothes were worn and trail-dirty. His legs had the outward bow of a man who spent long days in the saddle.

Pausing at the waist-high gate, the man made an attempt to brush some of the dirt off his clothes, then removed his hat and pushed straggling locks of light-brown hair out of his eyes before clapping the hat back into place.

Hartley sucked in a breath at the sight of the purplish mark spreading across the man’s left cheek and temple. Ellen Colter, the dead woman whose grave this man had come to visit, had described that mark as the shadow of an angel flying across the face of God while the more cynical Stuart claimed it looked like a crow circling a dead cow at high noon. To Hartley, it was his cue to move. This was the man he had been waiting for. “Puddin!”

The grave lay between Pa’s and the three other children Ma had borne and buried. Colter walked slowly to the foot of the bare earthen mound. The grass trampled by his mother’s mourners was just beginning to stand upright again. In two more weeks the little path around the grave would not be visible, and by next spring her burial mound would look like all the others, covered with gentians and spring lilies, as life — and death — marched on.

He drew out of his side pouch the wooden figure of a river otter poised to slide into a pool and placed it at the head of the grave. Ma had always treasured the carvings he made for her.

On the other side of Pa’s marker stood another smaller stone. It marked the grave of Colter’s boyhood friend and long-time trapping partner, Zoob, who had died in Colter’s arms two years ago. Zoob, Pa, and now Ma. Three graves for the three people he had loved most. Three ragged holes in his heart.

As he stood among the dead, the numbness that had settled over him when he heard the news about his mother began to harden into the reality of loss. Then a footfall alerted him that he was not alone.

He turned to see a man coming toward him from the church. The man had the gangly body of an adolescent boy who had grown too tall to catch up to himself. His black shovel hat and frock coat seemed at once too small and too large, emphasizing a left shoulder that was decidedly higher than the right and a distinctive lopsided gait.

“Sorry to disturb you, friend. I’m the new preacher hereabouts. Name’s Hartley. Josiah Hartley,” said the stranger whose long narrow face was clean-shaven except for a thin mustache above a mouthful of uneven yellow teeth.

Colter shook the hand the man offered but did not feel inclined to introduce himself or to talk at all.

“You must be Ellen’s son, John.” Hartley nodded toward the grave. “It must be quite a shock for you to come home to this.”

Colter offered no answer. He wanted to be left alone.

Hartley continued to prattle. “She was a fine woman. Upright, kind, God-fearing.” He paused as if searching for words. “This isn’t the best time to bring this up, but my conscience will not allow me to stay silent. We had to bury your mother without her Bible because your uncle insisted on keeping it for you. He would not listen to reason even though that Bible was as much a part of her as the wedding band she is still wearing. She was never without it in life and it isn’t right for her to be without it in death. I hope you agree.”

He cast an appealing glance at Colter who scarcely noticed. Grief had ripped apart the thin skin of his earlier denial and the pain oozing from that wound made it hard for him to care about anything else.

Hartley nodded sympathetically. “I understand. This is all so much to take in at one time.” He laid a bony hand on Colter’s forearm. “We’ll talk again.”

Colter shrugged away the hand. He wanted no sympathy, no talk. He wanted to be alone. Hartley seemed to get the message and hurried back to the church.

Colter knelt wearily at the foot of his mother’s grave. He had spent weeks worrying about how she would take the news that he had decided to go west for good. Now his worries were over. She would never experience the pain of his leaving. She would never feel anything again. Ever.

The sun was past zenith when Colter finally left the cemetery. He knew he ought to go back to the farm, but he could not bring himself to face the empty house. Instead, he decided to go retrieve his mother’s Bible.

Lorenzo Colter’s house sat on top of a small hill with a patchwork of fields stretching between it and a spring-fed creek. A few years back his uncle had added a deep porch across the width of the house on the west. Hardly a day went by without Lorenzo and his wife Devonna watching the sun set from that porch.

As Colter rode up the sloping path to the house, his uncle walked out of the barn with a pitchfork slung over his shoulder. “Devonna. John’s back,” he called to his wife.

Lorenzo was of medium height and muscular. It took three grown men to knock him off a stance once he was set. For once he was without his favorite floppy-brimmed hat to cover up the widening streaks of gray in his dark brown hair. He took a long look at Colter. “You know then?”

Colter nodded and swung off Blaze’s back. Grabbing the horse’s reins, his uncle put a fatherly arm over his shoulders. “We didn’t know when you’d get here. Only thing to do was wait.”

Devonna came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron. A shaft of sunlight fell on the thick braid that encircled her head, highlighting the red in her blonde hair. She hurried forward to embrace Colter. “What an awful homecoming for you, Johnny.”

A little of Aunt Dev usually went a long way, but now he drew comfort from her arms. “Come on inside,” she said, leading the way into the large warm kitchen. She poured cups of chickory coffee for the two men, then went back to the dough she had been kneading when Colter showed up, leaving them to talk.

“Was me found Ellen,” Lorenzo said softly. “Either she tripped or she fainted. Found her face-down in that little pool in the spring house. Just that little bit of water’s all it took.”

Devonna cut in. “Go on, Lo. Tell him the rest.”

Lorenzo threw her a warning look. “Not now. He’s had enough of a shock.”

“No, Uncle. Now’s best. Might as well hear it all,” Colter said.

His uncle’s face and tone hardened. “It wasn’t even a week later that Farley Stuart showed up with a bill of sale for your land, Johnny. Signed by your ma and dated a week before she died.” He paused, his jaw working. “Now I don’t know where Stuart got that paper, but I know — and you do, too — that your ma would never sell that land to Farley Stuart. She hated him worse than your pa did.”

Aunt Dev chimed in. “If she needed to sell, she’d come to us first, but we never heard a word about it until Stuart showed up here pretending to be so concerned about you. Saying he wanted to do fair by you. Horse-feathers!”

Lorenzo waved for her to calm down before she worked herself into one of her spells. “And then there’s the money. Stuart said he paid her in gold. Two hundred dollars. But we’ve searched your place top to bottom and found nary a plugged nickle.”

“Stuart’s been after that piece of land for years,” Aunt Dev spat. “Now he has it, however he wangled it. And I do mean wangled. You mark my words.”

The unspoken accusation hung in the air of the kitchen, souring the aroma of the baking biscuits. His aunt had put into words the doubts that had been niggling at Colter since he first heard the news about his mother.

Lorenzo reached for the leather-bound volume on the shelf behind him and slid it across the table to Colter. “Here’s your ma’s Bible. That new preacher wanted to bury it with her, but I figured you’d want it. I had to make one hell of a stink about it, too. That man didn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Colter laid his hand on the cracked leather cover and harkened back to the many times he had seen his mother’s hand resting on it just so. Opening it, he leafed through it until he came to the middle section where his mother had kept family records. Stuck between the pages listing births and deaths was a loose leaf. His parents’ marriage contract.

He took the page in his hands and thought about his parents. Together they had devoted their lives to their land; first, scraping together the money to buy it, then clearing it, then planting it. Pa was always happiest with dirt — his own dirt — on his hands. Ma was always happiest when Pa was happy.

He slid the yellowed parchment back into the Bible and closed it. “I got to go.”

“But you need to eat, Johnny,” Aunt Dev insisted.

“Where you goin’?” Uncle Lorenzo asked.

“Farley Stuart’s. He’s got somethin’ belongs to me,” Colter said, shoving out the door.

No one could accuse Farley Stuart of thinking small. “Enough” was not a word in his vocabulary. There was never enough for him, from the vast and growing acreage he controlled to the immense size of his fields; from the number of slaves he owned, to the dozens of outbuildings that seemed to spring out of the ground like weeds after a rain; from the elegant family cemetery with its many gaudy monuments, each competing for a viewer’s attention, to the three ponds, each the size of a small lake.

Perched beside one of these latter stood the ramshackle house where Farley Stuart had been born. Stuart liked to tout his humble beginnings, but he was obviously unwilling to waste any effort or money to maintain the visible symbol of that start. For now, Enos Smoot, the overseer, and his family lived in the house, but doubtless one day soon, the dwelling would disappear, plowed under, Stuart’s orders, to make way for a new field of sorghum. And soon as the first green shoots of that crop appeared, so too a new story would begin to circulate. A newly-created version of Stuart’s birth and rearing would overlay the old one in the constantly reinvented tale of Farley Dumont Stuart’s rise to the position of richest, most powerful man in this part of the Blue Ridge.

Colter slowed Blaze to a walk as they approached the two-story house. He had been inside, just inside the door once before, but he and everyone else in the Draft knew all about the ten rooms and their lavish furnishings, imported from Europe by Stuart’s late wife. She had been a fussy little bird of a woman with a high-pitched voice, darting eyes and twitching hands who insisted on the very best of everything up to and including her overly elaborate burial seven years back. The money Stuart had spent on her funeral would have kept the average family of eight for four years.

A moon-faced groom scurried out of the nearby barn to take charge of Blaze. Colter waved him off. What he had to do here would not take long. He tied the reins to the iron hitching ring at the left of the steps, slid his saddlebags over his shoulder, and strode to the front door.

Stuart’s daughter Fiona, instead of a slave, opened to his knock. Seeing Colter, she uttered a small cry and tried to slam the door. He proved quicker, wedging his boot into the opening.

Fiona had been a gaunt child who had lost all claim to beauty by the age of ten. Even her voice turned ugly. At fourteen when other girls were preparing for marriage, Fiona found religion. Over the years what had been an interest blossomed into a passion that bordered on obsession and caused her to act in odd ways.

“It’s me, Fiona. John Colter,” he said, gently but firmly pushing open the door and walking into the hallway.

With her eyes wide and bulging more than normal, Fiona raised a hand to her thin gray lips and shrank back against the opposite wall. Gray was Fiona’s color. She had worn nothing else for years, and now even her hair and skin had taken on the color though she was not yet twenty-five.

Realizing that she might not recognize him since he still wore the dirt from his long journey, Colter took off his hat. “There. Know me now?”

She made a tiny panicked sound and shrank back even further. “Devil’s spawn,” she rasped in the voice of an aged crone.

It was the same nonsense she had been spouting for the last few years whenever she saw him. Somewhere she got the notion that birthmarks were the sign of the Devil. Colter was in no mood for such shenanigans now, but he did have to see this strange creature’s father. “Is your pa here? I need to see him.”

Before Fiona could answer, Farley Stuart himself appeared behind her. “Season!” he shouted.

A harried black woman issued out of a room at the rear of the house and bustled forward to take charge of Fiona. While Stuart watched the nurse shepherd his distraught daughter away, Colter watched him.

Farley Stuart was a small man, not much larger than his dead wife, but the impression he made was not that of a small man. From the studied cut of his clothes to the smallish people with whom he surrounded himself to the undersized furnishings of his home, he had made an art out of creating the illusion that he was tall and rugged. He wore his prematurely-white hair swept back from his forehead to give himself height. A stylish goatee lengthened his face and lent it an air of practiced sophistication.

Once the door closed on the women, Stuart turned his attention to Colter, extending a hand. “Welcome back, John.”

Colter had never liked the man, and that feeling had deepened in the preceding moments. He pointedly ignored the offered hand. “I come to see the bill of sale for our land.”

Stuart nodded cooperatively. “That’s understandable. This way please.” He led Colter into his office. From the size of the windows to the expensive leather-bound books on the shelves to the scaled-down chairs, everything helped to make Stuart look more substantial.

Stuart took a seat behind the mahogany desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl and motioned for Colter to sit as well. But Colter chose to remain standing. He took the document Stuart retrieved from the desk drawer and read it slowly, deliberately. He did not want to miss anything on the page.

The transaction was all there as his uncle had described it. The date, two weeks back. The sale price of two hundred dollars. And at the bottom, Ma’s signature: Eleanor Susan Marie Shields Colter. The same signature that had stared up at him from the bottom of the marriage contract he had found in her Bible. There was no possibility of mistaking the writing. The three “l”‘s all leaned left, opposite to the right-hand slant of the other letters. He gave the page back to Stuart.

“I realize what a shock this must be for you, John,” Stuart said. “Of course you’ll need time to go through the house and sort out what you want to keep.”

Colter drew a lumpy sack out of his saddlebag and slapped it down on the desk. “Here’s your money. I’m buyin’ that there paper back.”

Stuart placed the folded parchment into the drawer. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

Colter tossed a second bag atop the first, the sum total of his stake. “Four hundred then. Twice what you paid. Now give ‘er here and we’ll call it even.”

Some of Stuart’s vaunted composure slipped. He slammed the drawer shut. “That land belongs to me now, John. It is not for sale, at any price. In fact, it is my daughter’s dowry.”

The idea that anyone would be willing to marry Fiona even with all Stuart’s money as incentive was beyond comprehension. “Who’s she marryin’?“

“Perhaps you met the new preacher, Josiah Hartley. He and Fiona are to be married on November 15. I’m giving them the grandest wedding this region has ever seen. It’s not every day a daughter of mine gets married.”

Stuart rested his elbows on the carved arms of his chair and steepled his fingers. “A month ought to give you enough time to sort through what’s left in the house and barn. I would give you longer, but there is a lot to be done to the place before Fiona can live there.”

Before Colter could argue, Stuart pushed back his chair and stood up. “So you see, John. The matter’s settled. Elijah, see Mr. Colter out.”

Colter stared at the man for a long moment before picking up his money bags from the desk and following the hulking slave from the house.

It was full dark by the time Colter reached the farm that Farley Stuart now owned. With his feelings swinging between sadness and anger, he unsaddled Blaze, put her into a stall in the barn and fed her, all by rote. Then, taking his saddlebags and Ma’s Bible, he walked up to the house and stepped onto the porch for the first time in nearly a year.

He stood there for a time taking in the unnatural quiet surrounding him. Ma had loved animals of all kinds. For as long as he could remember she had kept ducks and geese and chickens, pigs and goats. Their sounds had defined home for him as much as the people who lived there. Now only his own breathing challenged the silence.

The door’s leather hinges creaked under his pull, a sound made louder and more penetrating by the stillness. He stepped into the kitchen to the smell of neglect overlaid with the powerful odor of rotting apples.

He located the lantern that hung on a nail inside the door, then dropped his saddlebags and the Bible on the table in order to light the wick. In the flaring flame the room appeared as his mother had left it. She must have been interrupted while peeling apples for one of her delicious pies. A bowl of rotting fruit, a pile of desiccated peels and her favorite knife rested on the floor next to her rocking chair. Behind the chair stood her butter churn, washed and ready to receive a fresh batch of milk. Milk that would never come.

Her spinning wheel had been pushed up against the opposite wall. Ma had loved to spin. She always sang when she did so, the haunting songs of her Scottish homeland whose words Colter did not need to know to understand. Songs she would sing no more. Death had silenced the whispery soprano that had given life to those mysterious melodies, the body that had given life to him.

A surge of sadness clumped in his throat. For comfort he picked up her Bible and brushed its leather cover with his fingertips in the same way Ma had always touched it every morning and every evening after she finished reading in it. That preacher Hartley was right. The Bible had been part of Ma in life and now it belonged with her in death. Tomorrow he would see to that.

He did not notice the fading lantern light until it guttered and died, leaving him in the dark in that now-lifeless room. He knew where the kerosene was. He could refill it. Then again, why bother? All the light did was bring up more memories of things he regretted never fully appreciating before.

He took the Bible and walked through the darkness to the barn. He could not stay in the house. Not tonight. Perhaps not ever again.

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