The Land(123)

I conceded to that with a nod, looked down at my tools, then back at him. “What I need now is cash money, Mister Sawyer, and I figure these tools can bring me some. I’ve come to you because I thought you’d appreciate their worth.”

“So what if I need for you to make me some furniture?”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t do it. I just don’t have the time. That’s why I asked you to get yourself another furniture maker.”

Luke Sawyer sighed. “All right, all right. I ain’t liking this, not one bit, but I’ll buy your tools. You just think over what I said. If you decide to come back and work with me, the door’s open.”

I thanked him for that.

“Now I suppose we gonna hafta haggle price.”

“Just give me your best offer,” I said.

Luke Sawyer studied me over the spectacles, and without even looking at the tools, he made his offer. There was no haggling. I knew he was giving me more than the tools were worth.

I worked seven days each week. I chopped the trees and I tended cotton. I worked with fever and I worked with pain. I worked as I had with Mitchell before Caroline came on the forty. I pushed myself until I could push myself no further. Everything in me needed to keep my promise to Mitchell and to myself. I needed to secure this acreage so that I could buy J. T. Hollenbeck’s land, and I needed to have a place for Caroline and her baby. Once that was done, then I figured I could take the time to rest. It wasn’t until I woke one morning with a fever burning so high, I almost passed out, and had the dysentery and legs so weak, I had trouble standing, that I recognized the Lord had put a halt to my working.

“Maybe ya listen t’ me now!” Caroline fussed as she tended me. “Told you long time ago, Paul-Edward Logan, t’ stop all this hard workin’ like ya do!”

“But, I’ve got to—”

“Ain’t gotta do nothin’ but rest like I tell ya to. I’m in charge now.”

“But the trees—”

“They get cut, don’t ya worry,” she said as she hovered over me with a cool cloth. “I see t’ that. Don’t be forgettin’ this here’s my land too.”

Well, Caroline did see to it. I stayed on my cot for almost a week with my weakened body, and from the dawn on until late nightfall, I heard chopping outside the shed. When I finally was able to get up, Caroline warned me, “You bein’ bedridden, it’s the Lord’s way of lettin’ you know you ain’t in this by yo’self, Paul-Edward Logan. He got His hand in it too, and He tellin’ ya t’ slow down. Y’all’ll get it done, but in His time, not yours.”

I smiled at her. “But I’m sure He expects me to do my part.”

“Just don’t you die on me,” she ordered. “I can’t hardly carry on for both you and Mitchell.”

Once I was back on the slopes, I learned from Tom Bee that it was not only he, Horace, and Nathan who’d been cutting the trees, but Caroline too. I began to worry even more about her and the baby. Even once I had my full strength back, Caroline continued the work she’d begun when she’d first come on the forty. She plowed, she planted, she weeded, and she burned the brush—that in addition to all the daily house chores she did. All she gave up at my insistence was chopping the trees.

As the days and weeks since Mitchell’s death had passed one into another, more and more I had begun to look forward to the evenings after the brush was burned, for there were many nights when Caroline and I sat at the outdoor fire and talked late hours into the night. Sometimes Tom Bee was with us and sometimes Horace Avery on the nights they stayed over, but mostly it was just Caroline and me, and I liked things that way. Nathan would always sit with us as long as he could, but then sleep would drift over him and he would lie down, curled on the ground near the fire, and we didn’t disturb him to go off to the shed until we too rose to go to our sleep. I’m not sure what Caroline’s thinking was on not sending Nathan off, but it was a comfort to me knowing Nathan was right there in our presence, and maybe the same was true of Caroline.

More and more I thought on my promise to Mitchell, that part of my promise to marry Caroline. I hadn’t broached the subject with Caroline again since the day after my return from the ridge; still, I thought of it and no longer just because of Mitchell. Although from the beginning I had been attracted to Caroline, once Mitchell had spoken for her, I had let thoughts of her pass. I refused to dwell on her. I admit there were times I thought of Caroline, but I fought those thoughts and let them go. She had become my friend’s wife, and that’s how I had seen her. I had always expected to fall in love and find the right woman to work the land with me, and I knew I couldn’t do better for a wife than Caroline. But at first following Mitchell’s death, I didn’t feel anything except my own sorrow and rage, and I knew Caroline felt the same. I had asked her to marry out of obligation to Mitchell and she’d made it clear that Mitchell was not about to rule her from the grave. The passing months, though, had begun to heal our wounds, and I began to wonder if her feelings for me were growing beyond our friendship, as mine were for her.