The Land(84)

“He’s my horse.”

“Yours?” questioned Filmore Granger. I’d seen that look before. “Who’d you get him from?”

“Mister Luke Sawyer. He owns a mercantile up in Vicksburg.” I told him that truth and no more.

“He know you got him?” asked the boy.

I stared coldly at him. “He knows,” I said.

Filmore Granger nodded. “Then get on him and let’s go.” Filmore Granger then mounted the mare and started off. The boy quickly mounted his bay and did the same. I followed them.

For nearly an hour we traveled over a rutted road, which finally meandered off into a trail in the middle of the forest. Filmore Granger halted his horse and got down. “This way,” he commanded, and started down a footpath too narrow for the horses. I dismounted and once again followed him and his son. The trail led to a small glade near a creek, where the Grangers stopped. “This here’s the center of this section,” Filmore Granger said. “You want, a house could go right up there on that slope, and then you’d have your water just a few feet away.”

I looked around. It was a land dense with trees and brush, dark, with little light shining through. There was no magic here.

“Now, a good part of this land would have to be cleared to get yourself a crop. My family’s owned this land the last sixty-odd years, and far’s I know, none of these timbers have been cut. It’d be a lot of hard work, and I’d be expecting no less than seven hundred trees a month until it’s cleared. You got somebody to help you?”

“Well, I’ve never been afraid of hard work,” I said truthfully. “As for help, I’ve got somebody in mind.” I was figuring that Mitchell and I together could turn this place into something. Later on, after we’d cleared the place and put in a few years of crops, we could sell it and buy something better.

“What about oxen?” Filmore Granger said. “You’d have to supply your own. You got that kind of money?”

“I was figuring on mules.”

“Oxen are better for logging.”

I knew he was right. But when Filmore Granger said this to me, I had already thought about what animal I would use to help in the logging. I had done enough logging to know that oxen were sturdier and that their short legs were less likely to break than the legs of a mule. They had an even temperament, unlike some mules who could be as stubborn as any man, and they had the strength to pull logs through mud and rain. Still, I figured a mule could hold its own on this kind of land. I didn’t figure the soil to become too sodden, not by the moisture I saw now at the end of what had been a rainy few weeks, and it looked to me a mule could manage logs across it. Besides that, I was thinking about after the logging was over. A mule could travel as fast as a decent horse, so therefore was good for riding. Mules could pull a plow and they could pull a stump; oxen could as well, but most farmers preferred mules over oxen, so I figured to buy four mules, then sell three of them without much trouble when the logging was over. That was my thinking. I just hoped I wouldn’t regret it.

I met Filmore Granger’s eyes. “I can manage with the mules,” I answered quietly, without addressing his question about my money.

Filmore Granger pursed his lips, eyeing me again, and after a moment went on.

“Now, you say you’re interested in thirty or forty acres. Well, it would have to be forty. But you’ll have to chop all the trees that are at least sixteen inches in diameter at the smaller end, that’s sixteen or more straight across the tree. The lumber company won’t take any trees less than that. The rest you leave in the ground.”

I nodded my understanding as my eyes took in the forest of virgin longleaf pines and white oaks. While Filmore Granger talked, I was figuring how many acres Mitchell and I could clear in a year.

“You clear all the trees I want,” Filmore Granger went on, “all forty acres become yours. You don’t, you forfeit the whole forty. Now, all the timber you cut is mine. I expect that timber to be stripped of branches and stacked here along by this creek.”

“Who’d take it out of here?” I asked.

“I’ll take care of that. I’ll bring up a crew of rafters each month and run the logs down creek. You just chop the trees and get them to that bank yonder.”

“What about crops?”

“I’m not interested in your crops, just these trees. Whatever else is in the ground is yours. Once the land is yours, you can clear all the rest of the trees, for all I care. You do after a few years, give them a chance to grow, then you’ll have yourself some good cash money.”