Free Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt Page B

proud about keepin’ yore books, Shad.”
    “Well, read all you can. And newspapers, Jeth—study them. I know they’re a little difficult, but you’re a bright boy; you can get something out of them. The accounts you read in newspapers today will fill the pages of history by the time you’re a man.”
     
    When the supper dishes were out of the way, Shadrach took the guitar down from the wall, and as Jethro sang the folk songs that his mother had brought with her from the hills of Kentucky, Shadrach worked out accompaniments for them on the strings. It was something they had often done together, and Jethro loved it.
    “ ‘Seven stars are in the sky,’ ” he sang softly, and Shadrach nodded, pleased with the choice. It was a song without a definite beginning or end, full of distortions acquired as it passed by word of mouth from generation to generation; but it had a pleasing melody which wailed over some secret that lay under the unintelligible patter of words.
    Seven stars are in the sky,
Six and six go equal,
Five’s the rambeau in his boat,
Four score’s an acre;
Three is a driver,
Two shall be the Lily o’ the Day,
Dressed in scarl’t and green-o,
The one, the one, that’s left alone
It no more shall be alone— 1
    It stopped, but did not end. Shadrach sang the last lines over again as if searching for a completion.
    “Those words must have had a meaning to someone at some time or other,” he mused.
    “Ma says that old people in Kaintuck thought it was witch-talk to the Devil, talk they didn’t want Christians to understand.” Jethro shifted a little uneasily. “I doubt if there’s anything to it, though,” he added, conscious of the look of skepticism on Shadrach’s face.
    “Anyway, the witch theory was always a convenient one for something they didn’t understand, wasn’t it?”
    “You don’t believe in witches at all, do you, Shad?”
    “No. Not at all.”
    “And yet you’ve told me that we ain’t got a right to say fer sure that a thing is true or not true ’less we kin prove we’re right.”
    Shadrach struck a few chords on the guitar and seemed to study their harmony closely before he replied.
    “You’re right, Jeth. I can’t offer positive proof that there are no witches. And my anger is not with people who believe that witches actually lived back in the mountains where your mother was a girl. They have a right to their belief—as I have to mine. But I’m scornful of people who are so sure of something they can’t prove that they’ll torture or kill anyone who is accused, the ones who would have been in a hurry to cry ‘Witch’ to an odd old woman if they heard that she’d been humming ‘Seven Stars’ on the day their best cow died.”
    Jethro nodded and sat quietly staring into the fire for a long time, listening to the music of the strings until his eyes grew heavy and his shoulders began to droop. Then Shadrach turned the covers of the bed back and smiled as he watched his guest burrow under the quilts and curl up into a small, relaxed spiral in one corner. ,
    “I’m going to keep the fire going for a while, Jeth, and do a little writing. Sleep well.” He stood for a minute looking down at Jethro and then went to sit at the table beside the fire, busying himself with pen and paper.
    Jethro lay awake for a few minutes; snatches of conversation, flashes of things remembered from the day, raced through his mind. There was a war somewhere outside, and it was bitter cold; there was a sad-eyed President, and one should always call him Mr. Lincoln; there was Jenny, who was not too young to be in love, and Tom somewhere with Grant’s army, and Bill standing in a straight, gray line that stretched across the country until it was broken at Donelson. Donelson was a square on Shad’s map, and there was a long, wavy line that stood for a river. And boys had thrown away their coats and blankets before they reached Donelson; but now the fort was taken, and supplies for