wonder why your Pa came to this lonely place with his bride? There’s a story
told in the lowland towns.”
“There was trouble when he married Ma. Her family objected to him.”
“Objected is a mild word. They objected so much they hired a man to kill him
when his brothers-in-law decided against trying it. Your Pa killed the man and
then lit out for the hills so he would not have to kill her brothers and have
their blood between them.
“Or so the story is told. Yet there is a whisper of something else, of something
beyond pride of family. There is a tale that they hated your father for a reason
before he even met your mother.”
We Sacketts had come early to the mountains. Welsh folk we were, Welsh and
Irish, and my family had come to America one hundred and fifty years before the
Colonies fought for their independence. A relative of mine had been killed in
the fierce fighting in North Carolina in the revolt that failed.
We settled on the frontier, as it then was, along the flanks of the Blue Ridge
and Smoky mountains, and there we made ourselves part of the rocky hills and the
forests. Pa was the first of our family to run off to the lowlands and return
with a bride.
The Kurbishaws made much of themselves and cut a wide swath among the lowland
folk, looking down their long noses at us who lived in the hills. We Sacketts
set store by kinfolk, but we never held up our family with pride. A mill grinds
no corn with water that is past. Come trouble, we Sacketts stand shoulder to
shoulder as long as need be, but we made no talk of ancestors, nor how high they
stood in the community.
Yet it was no wonder that Pa took the eye of the lowland girls, for he was a
fine, upstanding man with a colorful way about him, and he cut quite a dash in
the lowland towns.
He rode a fine black gelding, his pockets filled with gold washed from a creek
the Cherokees showed him, and he dressed with an elegance and a taste for fine
tailoring. There was gold from another source too, and as a child I saw those
hoarded coins a time or two.
My father showed me one of them and I loved the dull reflection of the nighttime
firelight upon it. “There is more where that came from, laddie, more indeed. One
day we shall gather it, you and I.”
“Let it lie,” Ma said. “The earth is a fit place for it.”
Such times Pa would flash her that bright, quick smile of his and show her that
hard light in his black eyes. “I might have told them where it was, had they
acted differently about us,” he would say; “but if they have it now it shall
cost them blood.”
How long since I had thought of that story? How long since I had even seen that
gold until Pa brought it out to turn over to Caffrey for my education and keep?
Her brothers had planned for Ma to marry wealth and power, and when she ran off
with Pa they were furious, and challenged him. He refused them, and as he
refused them he held two finely wrought pistols in his hands.
“You do not wish to fight me,” he said, and tossed a bottle into the air. With
one pistol he smashed the bottle, and with the second he hit a falling fragment.
It was after that they hired a man to kill him.
Pa and Ma would have lived their lives among the lowland folk had the Kurbishaws
let them be, but they used their wealth and power to hound them out of Virginia
and the Carolinas, until finally they took refuge in the mountain cabin among
the peaks, which Pa built with his own hands.
The cabin was a fair, kind place among the rocks and trees, with a cold spring
at the back and a good fishing stream not a hundred yards off. And happily they
lived there until Ma died.
“If you stay here,” the Tinker went on, “they will kill you. You have but the
one barrel of your old rifle and they are three armed men, and skilled at
killing.”
“They are my uncles, after all.”
“They are your enemies, and you are not your father. These men are fighters, and
you are not.”
My head came up angrily, for he spoke against my pride. “I can fight!”
Impatience was in his voice and attitude when he answered. “You have fought
against boys or clumsy men. That is not fighting. Fighting is a skill to be
learned. I saw you whip the three Lindsay boys, but any man with skill could
have whipped you easily.”
“There were three of them.”
The Tinker knocked the ash from his pipe. “Lando, you are strong, one of the
strongest men I know, and surprising quick, but neither of these things makes
you a fighter. Fighting is a craft, and it must be learned and practiced. Until
you know how to fight with your head as well as with heart and muscle, you are
no fighting man.”
“And I suppose you know this craft?”
I spoke contemptuously, for the idea of the Tinker as a fighting man seemed to
me laughable. He was long and thin, with nothing much to him.
“I know a dozen kinds. How to fight with the fists, the open hand, and
Japanese—as well as Cornish-style wrestling. If we travel together, I will teach
you.”
Teach me? I bit my tongue on angry words, for my pride was sore hurt that he
took me so lightly. Had I not, when only a boy, whipped Duncan Caffrey, and him
two years older and twenty pounds heavier? And since then I’d whipped eight or
nine more, men and boys; and at Clinch’s Creek was I not cock of the walk? And
he spoke of teaching me!
Opening his pack, the Tinker brought out a packet of coffee, for he carried real
coffee and not the dried beans and chicory we mountain folk used. Without moving
from where he was, he reached out and brought together chips, bark, and bits of
twigs left from my wood-cutting and of them he made a fire.
He was a man who disliked the inside of places, craving the freeness of the open
air about him. Some said it was because he must have been locked up once upon a
time, but I paid no mind to gossip.
While he started the fire and put water on to boil, I went to a haunch of
venison hanging in the shed and cut a healthy bait of it into thick slices for
roasting at the fire. Then I returned to grind more meal. Such mills as mine
were scarce, and the corn I ground would be the last, for I planned to trade the
mill for whatever it would bring as I passed out of the country.
If it was true the Kurbishaws sought to kill me they could find me here, for
mountains are never so big that a man is not known. But the thought of leaving
this place brought a twinge of regret, for all the memories of Ma and Pa
concerned this place. Yonder was the first tree I’d climbed, and how high the
lowest branch had seemed then! And nearby was the spring from which I proudly
carried the first bucket of water I could hold clear off the ground.
No man cuts himself free of old ties without regret; even scenes of hardship and
sadness possess the warmth of familiarity, and within each of us there is a love
for the known. How many times at planting had my shovel turned this dark earth!
How many times had I leaned against that tree, or marveled at the cunning with
which Pa had fitted the logs of our house, or put all the cabinets together with
wooden pins!
The Tinker filled my plate and cup. “We shall talk of fighting another time.”
Suddenly my quieter mood was gone and irritation came flooding back. No man
wishes to be lightly taken, and I was young and strong, and filled with the
pride of victories won.
“Talk of it now,” I said belligerently, “and if you want to try me on, you’ve no
cause to wait.”
“You talk the fool!” he said impatiently. “I am your friend, and I doubt if you
have another. Wait, and when you have taken your whipping, come to me and I will
show you how it should be done.”
Putting down the coffee cup, I got to my feet. “Show me,” I said, “if you think
you can.”
With a pained expression on his lean, dark face he got slowly to his feet. “This
may save you a beating, or I’d have no part of it. So come at me if you will.”