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Overview
When thirteen-year-old Stephanie Venable moves with her family from North Carolina to a four-hundred-acre homestead in Kentucky, she knows they’re in for a great adventure. The family sells whatever belongings they can’t fit in their covered wagon, and begin the long journey west. But Stephanie has brought something special with her, an apple seed from their tree back home, just as her grandmother did when she moved from France to America.
In Kentucky, the Venables must fell trees, build a cabin, and prepare the land for crops. Being a pioneer is a lot of work, but it’s also very exciting: Stephanie and her family must grow, catch, or hunt everything they need to eat and survive. With the Revolutionary War also moving west, the family faces threats from British sympathizers and American rebels. Will freedom take root in America, like Stephanie’s young apple tree, or will the Venable family succumb to the hardships of frontier life?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504025171 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 163 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 10 - 14 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Tree of Freedom
By Rebecca Caudill
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1949 Rebecca CaudillAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2517-1
CHAPTER 1
One Solitary Thing
Stephanie Venable knew as soon as she opened her eyes, although she could make out nothing in the dark, that the long-awaited day had come. She was not sure if her pappy had called her name to wake her. "Steffy!" Jonathan Venable usually said when he called her early of a morning. "Time to send sleep a-packin'!" This April morning in the year 1780, however, Stephanie had heard nothing of the kind.
For a moment she lay in bed tracing the sounds she heard: the heavy whish–sh–sh–sh– of the wind, like the restless roar of the sea, in the North Carolina piny woods along the road; the long, deep breathing of her three-year-old sister Cassie lying asleep beside her; the creaking of the bed in the opposite corner of the room as her mammy sat on the edge of it to pull on her heavy woolen stockings; the stumbling of her pappy's bare feet across the dog trot to the other room of the log house where her three brothers slept.
Nothing about those noises, she told herself, to make a body break out with goose bumps. She heard them every morning when light began to work at the window-panes and the roosters in the sweet gum tree back of the house began to flap their wings and crow. Set to this mortal sweet hour, however, when never a bird twittered sleepily in the tree crowns, nor one trickle of light leavened the darkness of the room, they spelled out a message to make a body's brain go reeling in his head.
"Noel! Rob!" Stephanie heard her pappy calling.
Always it was ten-year-old Rob who answered first. Stephanie heard him answer then. He groaned like a person with a misery, trying to prize himself out of sleep.
"Rob, are you awake?"
"Um-hum."
"Noel?"
"Yes, Pappy. It's dark as pitch."
"We're settin' out for Kentucky this mornin'. Get up an' do the feedin'. Rob?"
Stephanie heard Rob's feet on the puncheon floor as the news brought him bounding out of bed. Noel took his time about getting up. Noel took his time about everything these days, it seemed to Stephanie, as if everything he did rubbed him against the grain.
"Mind you don't wake Willie jist yet," Jonathan warned in a half-whisper, as he started back across the dog trot. "Your mammy says let him nap a mite longer."
"Steffy!"
"Yes, Mammy."
"Jump up. We're goin' today."
Bertha Venable's voice was calm in the dark — calm and steady as day a-breaking.
"Steffy, time to send sleep a-packin'."
"Yes, Pappy."
Jonathan crossed the dark room toward the big fireplace in the end of the house. Stephanie heard him jabbing the poker among the gray ashes in search of live embers with which to kindle a fire.
She slid from under the patchwork quilt quietly so as not to awaken Cassie, slipped her butternut-yellow linsey dress over her head, and buttoned herself into it. The next minute, she seated herself on the hearth beside Jonathan, drew on her long stockings, and tied her moccasins about her ankles.
Jonathan was on his hands and knees, blowing on the embers on which he had laid pine splinters fat with pitch. A blaze leaped to life and threw gangling shadows across the floor of the room.
"I'll help you, Pappy," Stephanie announced, getting to her feet, and tossing her two buckeye-brown braids over her shoulders.
Jonathan glanced at her small, plain, pointed face, a softness in his eyes like thaw. Her eyes with the firelight on them put him in mind of the wild blue chicory that bloomed along the roadside in the fall. Of his five young uns, this was his favorite — this slim, nimble-fingered girl of thirteen who, he claimed, had every other young un in the Back Country skun a mile. Give Stephanie a job to do, he often said to Bertha, any kind of job, from grubbing sassafras sprouts out of the tobacco patch to minding a baby, and when she finished, she had fancy work to show for it.
"Get your piggin, then, an' do the milkin', while Rob an' Noel feed," Jonathan told her. "I'll be gettin' things together in one place while your mammy cooks a bite of breakfast. Reckon you won't need much fire this mornin', Berthy," he added. "After breakfast, hit can die for good."
Stephanie slipped out of the door into the cool morning. The air was scented with Bertha's early-blooming lilacs, and from Bertha's apple tree came a whiff of perfume sweet with springtime memories of the log house and the clean-swept doorway, the piny woods and the fields of broad-leaved tobacco the Venables were about to leave forever. In the dog trot she stood a moment, the cool, misty April darkness all about her, breathing in the heavy perfume. Then, firmly she felt for the piggin turned upside down on a bench in the dog trot, and started toward the stable.
"When're we leavin', Pappy?" she asked, as Jonathan joined her. Rob, followed by Noel, stumbled after them. "Sun up?"
They were halfway to the stable before Jonathan answered her. Though he walked along the well-worn path directly behind her, he was away off yonder in his mind, she knew, thinking about Kentucky, maybe, maybe stewing about Noel. All winter Jonathan had stewed about Noel. Stephanie wondered why he couldn't see things as Noel saw them. They were as plain to her as the star over the stable.
"Mebbe," said Jonathan, absent-mindedly. "Mebbe not. Jist depends."
For the next half hour the dark stable was a hive of busyness. Milking with both hands, Stephanie see-sawed long darts of milk against the bottom of the piggin and poured foam into a little trough for Willie's kitten that purred about her ankles. Jonathan brought nubbins for the cow, threw down fodder from the loft for the horse and hackled his tangled mane. Noel carried corn to the four pigs stretched full length in their wallow back of the crib, while Rob herded the three Venable sheep into the stable and fed them.
Daylight was seeping in from the east as the four of them, their stable chores finished, hurried toward the house to their breakfast of side meat fried in the skillet over live coals, and hoecake, cold milk and butter, and sweet wild honey from a honey gum tree. Breakfast on this morning, however, was to the Venable young uns a bother that had to be got out of the way before they could set out down the road for Kentucky.
"Ever' swaller of meat you don't eat'll raise up its head to ha'nt you, if ever your vittles give out," warned Jonathan. "Hit's been many a man stumbled into Harrod's Fort with ever' rib he owned a-stickin' out to be counted. An' sometimes," he added, "he didn't come from as fur a piece as Caroliny, either."
"That's fair warnin', young uns," added Bertha. "Can't anybody go far on an empty stomach."
The Venable young uns lent dull ears to such warnings, however. They weren't hungry, they said. Vittles stuck in their craws.
"Jist wrop ever'thing up, Berthy, an' bring hit along — meat, hoecake, an' all," said Jonathan. Begging young uns to do what they had no mind to do threw him into a fidget. "We won't be half a mile down the road 'fore they'll all be snivelin' for a snack. Noel," he added, "you round up the critters — the cow an' the sheep an' the pigs. Rob, you bring the horse so's we can load the creels on him. Berthy, I don't favor tryin' to take them chickens less'n you're dead sot on givin' some Kentucky fox three square meals, but you run an' catch two hens an' a rooster, Steffy, you an' Willie, an' tie their legs good an' tight till we're ready to load 'em. Stir yourselves, now. Ain't no time to waste."
"Mammy, can I take my kitten?" asked Willie.
"Naw. No kittens," said Jonathan.
"Can I take my butterflies?" asked Rob.
"Naw. No butterflies," said Jonathan. He kicked the front log and sent a bright shower of sparks up the wide chimney. "Your butterfly-catchin' days are over, Rob," he said, looking down into the boy's brown eyes which smarted from the sting. Then he spat in the fire as if he'd been chewing something bitter he was glad to get out of his system. "Yours an' your Uncle Lucien's," he said.
Stephanie, watching Rob, saw a lonesome look settle on his face. She didn't see why he couldn't take his butterflies. Great Uncle Lucien de Monchard had taught him where to look for them on nettles and milkweeds, on huckleberry bushes and wild clover, on willow trees and pawpaw trees, and on the grayish, strong-scented stalk of the everlasting which Uncle Lucien called immortelle. Rob had twenty butterflies now, all different, and one great moth. The silken lined slabs of bark to which they were pinned with sharp thorns of the honey locust tree stood on a shelf over Rob's side of the bed, and color from their brittle, outstretched wings — sulphurous yellow and dark ginger and smoldering purple, the red of ripe persimmons and the sultry red of a burning sun — drenched the corner of the dimly lit room.
"Jonathan," said Bertha quietly, "ever' young un can take one thing that's his'n. Looks like as many tobacco plants as you've set out, you'd know a transplanted thing grows best if a little dirt's left cuddled up to the roots."
"Well, mebbe," agreed Jonathan, grudgingly. "But hit'll have to be sech a little mite of a thing, a body'll might' nigh have to have a spyglass to see hit. No kittens. An' no butterflies."
"But somethin'," repeated Bertha. "One solitary thing."
"Don't you mind too much about the butterflies," Stephanie said to Rob outside the door. "I 'spect there are hundreds more butterflies in Kentucky than here in North Caroliny."
"But Uncle Lucien won't be there to help me find 'em," Rob said. "And mount 'em."
"You don't need Uncle Lucien to help you," Stephanie told him. "He showed you how once. You can do it by yourself now."
"I could do it better with Uncle Lucien," said Rob.
"I know," said Stephanie. "But a body mustn't waste time frettin' over what he can't have. Some time or other, a body has to learn he can stand up to his own lick log on his own feet, and now's your time to learn it. You'd better skedaddle for the horse before Pappy sets in hollerin' for you."
The sky was a wash of pale gray light when finally two creels, crammed with trammels and pothooks, wool cards and flax hackles, griddles and spiders and skillets, sheep shears, plow irons, hoes and log chains, all of them cushioned with old blankets, were laid across the horse's back. Jonathan stood in the doorway, surveying the cabin for any small object they ought not to leave behind.
"Young uns," said Bertha, "run fetch whatever 'tis you're takin' for yourselves. We'll be leavin' in a minute."
Quicker than a body could reel off
"Wire brier, limberlock, Three geese in a flock,"
Cassie darted to the chimney corner and came back hugging a wooden doll that Noel had made for her of a stick of ash. A sharp little nose and eyes and a mouth he had carved, and little bitty ears that were the spit and image of a human being's ears. In place of feet, however, he had whittled the stick broad and flat and smooth at the bottom so that Bertha, by turning the dress of red linsey back over the doll's head, could mash potatoes with it.
"This family could do with a little horse sense," Jonathan declared, when he saw that Bertha favored taking the doll. "Why saddle us with a lot of wood when that's what the whole endurin' wilderness is made out of?"
At that, Cassie let out crying and clutched the doll tightly in her arms.
"You carry it and you can take it, Cassie," soothed Bertha.
Willie, seeing Cassie's easy victory, grew bold. "Mammy," he begged, "couldn't I take my kitten? I'd carry it."
"Naw. No kittens," declared Jonathan. "I told you so once."
"You can get another pet in Kentucky, Willie," soothed Bertha. "A coon, maybe. Coons make likely pets."
"I know what I'm takin'," said Willie, darting up the ladder to the loft. In a minute he came down the ladder backwards, carrying in his hand a ball-shaped puzzle Uncle Lucien had carved of the gall of a scrub pine tree. Many a winter evening Noel and Stephanie, sprawled on the floor, had worked by firelight, taking the puzzle apart and putting it together again. Separated into twelve oddly shaped little pieces, it seemed a thing a body couldn't possibly get into a ball again, not if he worked at it till Christmas. Then, all of a sudden, one little bitty piece would slip into another. Then another piece would settle into its place, and another, and, finally, there would be the ball, no bigger than a body's thumb.
"Stuff it in your shirt, Willie," said Bertha, before Jonathan could say, "Naw. No puzzles. Nothin' at all made by your Uncle Lucien."
"Rob, what are you takin'?" asked Bertha.
"I reckon I'll just find me somethin' when we settle down in the wilderness, Mammy," said Rob, glancing at Stephanie.
"Steffy?"
Stephanie hesitated. All through the winter she had had her heart set on an old French looking glass that had come to the New World with the de Monchards, and had been handed down from Grandmammy Linney to Bertha, to be given to Stephanie some day when she should have a cabin of her own. It was an oblong object, a foot wide, framed with walnut carved all around with fragile curlicues, and topped with a golden bouquet in a vase of gold. To leave it behind wrought an emptiness the like of which the loss of Rob's butterflies was as nothing. Every which way a body might turn in the Kentucky wilderness, he was apt to see mottled gauzy wings — yellow and black, pale spring-green and ginger — fanning the air, but let a body look till blindness overtook him, and he'd never find Grandmammy's French looking glass.
"If you're a-thinkin' of that lookin' glass, Steffy," said Jonathan, reading her thoughts, "naw. Scotch that notion right away. Nobody packs a lookin' glass across the mountains."
Stephanie swallowed hard. No, she knew nobody in his right mind packed a fancy French looking glass across the mountains. It couldn't be eaten and it couldn't be worn. It couldn't mold a bullet, chop down a tree, nor fend off an Indian.
Worst of all, in Jonathan's sight, the looking glass had de Monchard connections. Poor Jonathan! The de Monchards, according to him, had heaped a sight of disgrace on him one way or another. They were always sitting and thinking, he complained. Or fiddling. Or piddling. Or reading out of a book. Or brewing notions as acrid as black cohosh tea. And how they could fritter away time! To think of a grown man whittling for hours on the gall of a scrub pine, or traipsing after butterflies the way Uncle Lucien had, when the piny woods were full of deer and the Waxhaw was overflowing with speckled trout. The de Monchards were plumb beyond a man's understanding, Jonathan said.
It seemed queer to Stephanie that her pappy had married Marguerite de Monchard Linney's daughter, Bertha, and that in spite of himself he was as no account without her as a powder horn without powder. He himself said so when he was feeling good.
"Sam Coldiron's a-comin' over in his oxcart purty soon to pick up the things we can't take," announced Jonathan. "I've already settled with him on that lookin' glass. He's paid me a Spanish milled dollar for hit. One Spanish milled dollar in Kentucky's wuth a wagon load of that Continental stuff they're coinin' comin' an' goin' at Philadelphy."
Stephanie glanced at the looking glass, for a moment her shoulders wilted like a tobacco plant wanting rain.
"I'll have to think a minute what I'm takin', Mammy," she said.
"Noel," Bertha asked, "what are you takin'?"
"Nothing'," Noel answered, a sullen, hurt look in his lean, freckled face, a smoldering fire in his eyes that were as gray as steel, and as hard to bore through. "Nothin' 'cept some notions in my head," he said. "And," he added, looking straight at Jonathan, "my dulcimore on my back."
"Noel!" Jonathan stormed, as red as a red bird with rage. "That dulcimore's a-stayin' on this here side of the mountains."
"Why?" asked Noel, never taking his eyes off his pappy.
"Why? 'Cause you'd sure be a purty sight a-showin' up at Harrod's Fort with that plague-take-hit thing!" sputtered Jonathan. "An' besides," he added, "your rifle's load enough. What do you think your back's made out of? Iron?"
"It's his back, ain't it, Jonathan?" put in Bertha.
"Can't the boy never grow up, Berthy?" hollered Jonathan like a clap of thunder, as he turned on his wife. "You jist humor him in his Tidewater notions. Noel," he turned back to the boy, "we ain't movin' a step from this place till you say good-by to that dulcimore. An' all the foolish notions you brung from your Uncle Lucien's along with hit."
"If Noel promises not to play the dulcimore in your hearin', Jonathan," Bertha said, her voice cooling as a wind blowing off the sea, "and promises not to pluck a solitary string, let him have it. 'Twon't hurt him any. An' a little music won't hurt Kentucky, either."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tree of Freedom by Rebecca Caudill. Copyright © 1949 Rebecca Caudill. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1. One Solitary Thing,2. Journey's End,
3. Black Kentucky Land,
4. Deed to the Land,
5. Lonesome Tilly,
6. Visitors,
7. Bad News from the Back Country,
8. Report from Charleston,
9. Express to Governor Jefferson,
10. A Soldier for Colonel Clark,
11. Waiting,
12. "Indians!",
13. Chinking Talk,
14. Frohawk Again,
15. Neighbors,
16. Home Is the Soldier,
About the Author,