The widow's war Read Online Free PDF Page A

store.
    The minute she stepped outside Lyddie was choked by the smell from the try pots. She had once welcomed the foul odor as a sign of unexpected bounty, but not now; by the time she reached Sears’s store she felt as ill as Mehitable. She selected her tea and took it to Caleb Sears to mark it off the account. When she saw him write it in the ledger under Edward Berry she corrected him.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “It goes to Mr. Clarke, now?”
    “Yes, to Mr. Clarke.”
    It was a little thing, but it unsettled her, and when she left the store she turned wrong, moving a dozen rods past the Clarke house before it struck her. Did she think she was going back to her old house, then, one last look before Smalley took possession?
    And why not?
    Lyddie kept going, turning left at the landing road, leaving off the muddy ruts for the sandy track and the general for the familiar. Here the shadblow cracked by the wind, there the old wall, next Edward’s fence, and there, or was it? Yes, the chimney and roof and there the barn; from the distance she could even see the horse tied in front and think it was Edward’s chestnut darkened with sweat from a lengthy ride, and the sound of an ax ringing out in the woodlot could well have been made by Edward as he set up next winter’s wood to season over summer.
    Lyddie shook herself to earth. The horse was a bay, not a damp chestnut, and no doubt Smalley’s. But if the horse was so easily explained, the sound of the ax wasn’t. She moved around the far side of the house until she had a clear view of the woodlot. The pitch pines, used for a quick start or a bright light, had lost their north side to the wind, and gave the lot an appearance of tilting away from the sea; theoaks, used for steadier, slower heat, were more evenly grown, but in disparate heights: those that had recently shot up from the old stumps and those that had been growing at least a decade and a half and were again ready for cutting.
    The Indian stood in front of one of the adolescent oaks. Lyddie watched him swing the ax up and bring it down in one long, smooth motion, gouging a thick yellow chip out of the trunk, the slap of ax almost but not quite drowning out whatever it was that Nathan was shouting at him. Lyddie caught the words devil and trespass and constable, but none of them disturbed the Indian’s stroke, and at length Smalley turned away and strode toward the barn so that Nathan was forced to turn and trot after him, still shouting.
    “Hold! Smalley! You’re not put off by such a trifle, are you? I’ll have it sorted by morning. He likes to make trouble; you know that as well as anyone.”
    Smalley stopped by his horse. “He says he’s got deed to the wood.”
    “And so have I got deed to it. And we’ll soon see whose deed holds up.”
    “You’ll have it in writing?”
    “I bloody well will,” Nathan said. “ In blood, if I have to.” He thrust a hand at Smalley, who shook it, but Lyddie noticed Smalley’s upper body leaned away, like the pines, as if he would commit no more than he had to.

     

    Eben Freeman arrived again, not long after supper. He had barely shaken off his hat and coat and greeted Mehitable and Lyddie when Nathan Clarke appeared and swept him into the study, barking over his shoulder at the nearest pair of hands, which happened to be Bethiah’s, for cakes and cider.
    The men were not long out of sight when Nathan Clarke’s first outburst traveled through the door, left open by Bethiah.
    “Thieving, bloody cannibal!”
    Eben Freeman responded in normal tones, but used to the courtroom, his voice carried to the keeping room with little trouble. “There was no thieving,” he said. “Sachemas, Cowett’s great-grandfather, made a gift of the piece to Edward Berry’s great-grandfather.”
    “There you have it, then! He gave it. And once the will’s proved, it’s mine.”
    “Yes, he gave it, but he kept for himself and his heirs the right to cut wood for fence or