Free The Purchase by Linda Spalding Page B

between them. The wagon began to move and the old man called out, “I hear tell Mister Shoffert’s land is going up for sale.”
    Daniel showed no interest. The Shoffert land abutted his own near the boundary he shared with Jester Fox. Driving away, he took another look at the old man’s trees. Most of them had beenstripped to the bone by the width of a fist. “Look, boys,” he said to his sons, pointing at the girding, “and see that this man is growing his food without clearing so much as a garden plot. Now I ask, what nourishment can he expect?”

A piglet is a shivering, rooting, ornery thing and heartbreaking to its beholder. When four of them were carried down to Simus in the timber lot, his face broke into the first smile Mary had seen there. She had spent the afternoon telling him a story. “There was a father who loved his two children,” she had begun it, “although both of them were boys.” With that, she had wanted Simus to laugh because sons are a bother and brothers are worse. Then she remembered his brother lost to the Tennessee slave trader and felt sorry and said that the father in the story loved his sons and gave both of them coins and one of them was very good but the other ran away and spent every cent.
    “Jes like Onesimus in de Bible run. And Mister Aeneus for his place.”
    I shall be a schoolteacher, Mary thought, because she was proud of her pupil’s quick response. She was glad to have an effect on him, to brighten his view of the world. It was surely compassion, what she was showing, and she was enjoying every bit of it. I will go back to Pennsylvania as soon as I can, where people appreciate an education, she said to herself while Simus sat with his injured leg propped up on a log, his face full of concentration. He was whittling a knot of oak that kept his hands occupied. Inside an hour, he had made the knot into a head with a fine-featured face. He had carved onto the headcurls that moved with the grain of the wood, and when Mary stopped her story to admire it, he said, “It be yourn if yun sew it a body, Miss Mary.”
    Mary did not like dolls. She, who had a new baby brother and toddling sister, thought dolls were lifeless things. Who would dress up a piece of wood when there was a real baby crying to be carried and a little sister in the hammock waiting to be pushed? “This girl is of the oak race,” she said. “Carve her out some hands and feet so she can feel and walk.”
    Simus rubbed the nose and eyes and chin of the doll’s head with his thumb. “Oak race,” he repeated, and he learned about the father’s love for his two sons although one of them was prodigal and wondered about his lost brother. Then the four piglets arrived, carried down by Daniel and Isaac and Benjamin, and the smile unfolded itself. It was easy enough to build an enclosure for little pigs, Simus said, for they had only a few inches of legs to climb up and out with. What worried him was fortification against bears and wolves and snakes. He decided to keep the pigs with him at night. “For ta grow fatn make us fat too.”
    In this fashion, spring began to announce itself. Geese and ducks returned from farther south, filling the sky with noise. Robins pecked at the ground, bushes and trees dressed themselves in bright colours, wild flowers sprang out of the fields, and the smell of the land was inviting. The sparrows, as Mary had predicted, built little nests and laid pretty eggs, though the robin eggs were best. Ruth gathered dandelion greens. Jemima carried the oak doll around by hanging on to a leg. Joseph began to crawl more evenly on the warming ground, and Daniel bought, with his two remaining warrants, a hundred and seven acres of Michael Shoffert’s rolling land. “Most of it I will sell,” he told the family. “Jester Fox will be keen, as the Shoffert land surrounds him on two sides.”
    “And another side is us,” Ruth said with some satisfaction.
    “With Frederick Jones on the