He smiled. “You would.”
I waved a hand at his case. “Do you always travel with your fiddle?”
“If I want to protect it from several grubby, sticky hands intent on ruining it, I do.” He pulled gloves of York tan from his coat pocket and, with his odd elegance, slipped them on. Then he brushed the tiniest speck of flint off his coat sleeve. “Marian can’t seem to keep the buggers in check and, more often than not, accuses me of too poorly understanding and appreciating the inquisitive minds of youth. Inquisitive!” He gave a disdainful sniff. “Obnoxious, more like it.” He tapped the case. “It’s safer with me. Two things matter in my life: my music and my sweetheart.”
“Marian?”
“Ha. That’s a good one. No.” His arm went up and hugged his horse’s neck. “This creature. Sweetheart.”
Gid and I nodded. What was there to say? The man loved his horse.
“Now. What did you mean by ‘eventually’?”
My brother frowned. “Eventually?”
“Yes. You said you were traveling to Gaines eventually.”
“Oh. Well, we will, but first we need to head to the Holland Land Company in Batavia to make the purchase and deposit.”
“Which article did you choose?”
“I didn’t. The Welds brothers recommended the two hundred acres west of them.”
Phineas blew a silent whistle and wagged his head.
“What?” Gid demanded.
“Not a smart idea, purchasing a lot, sight unseen.”
My brother folded his arms. “I can trust my friends’ recommendation.”
“Because they’re clearly bright, those boys.”
Gid bristled, but I couldn’t help it: I burst out laughing.
Again, that elegant shrug. “Well, the lot might suit you as well as any other. I’m on the other side of the Welds boys, and in truth, the entire territory is a vicious trial. Nothing but wooded swampland.”
Gid and I stared.
“All of it?” I asked, vividly recalling the description of snake dens Robert Welds had read to us from one of Mrs. Linton’s letters.
“Inevitable, really. Lowlying land under an endless canopy of trees stays moist. You’ll see for yourself.” He sighed. “I’ll escort you to Batavia.” He shot a glare at the tavern. “I have to explain why I don’t have the money to make my loan payment and might as well do it now than later.”
“Aren’t you worried about leaving Marian and the children unattended?” I asked.
He snorted. “She’s more capable than I am of defending the family. You should have seen what she did to the bear that tried to attack our cow.”
“Shot it?”
He released the tether from the post. “Axed it.”
“Heavens.” That was impressive. “But won’t she fret if you don’t return right away?”
He fitted his boot into a stirrup and gracefully mounted Sweetheart, giving her a moment to prance under his weight, then rewarding her with a rub. “She’ll be glad I’m not underfoot, ‘sawing up a racket on the fiddle,’ as she says. That woman has zero appreciation for fine music.” He sniffed again. “Truthfully, this will be a pleasant vacation for me—a chance to get away from her tart tongue and that pack of dirty ankle-biters.”
These unromantic disclosures left me nonplussed. Perhaps he and Marian had married prematurely, without sufficiently considering their differences before plunging into a lifelong union. I’d never met a man so obviously disenchanted with his mate and offspring.
Gid, however, seemed more focused on the agreeable news that we’d secured a guide for the remainder of our journey, and he and Phineas spent a moment discussing directions and probable difficulties, given the mucky conditions. Finally Gid said, “We appreciate your escort.” He tapped a stump with his boot. “But after we take care of our business with the land company, I’d like to make one additional stop in a place called Barre.”
“That won’t be difficult. It’s not far from Batavia. Friends settled there?”
My brother nodded, his quick peek in my direction sheepish.
I grinned. Gid wasn’t wasting any time in resuming his courtship.
*
Before leaving the tavern yard, we turned the sleigh back into a wagon and then followed the river for three days until we came to a section shallow enough to cross. During this time, our guide sparkled with humor, even when he complained about farm life, the iniquities of the three children “infesting” his cabin home—and his wife.
I felt sorry for the poor woman and probably too blatantly wore my sympathy because Phineas said, “Don’t be taking her side, Freddy. She’s terrible. The temper in that woman! Most don’t even guess it. Why, if I ate a cherry tartlet every time I heard someone gush, ‘Oh, Marian, what a lovely girl,’ I’d be a fat fiddler, let me tell you. She fools them all because she hides the meanness so well. Make the mistake of irritating her once in a while, and she’ll let it go for weeks, whole months, with hardly a scowl, but what she’s really doing is saving the anger, storing it up like an army hoarding weapons and ammunition. Then, one day, I’ll say the littlest thing, like ‘Golly, Marian, that gingham getup could stand to meet a hot iron,’ and boom! She’ll blast me so hard, it’s like there’s a cannon hiding in that wrinkled skirt. Ah, well, it’s my lot in life to suffer so, I expect.”
I was skeptical. Seemed like the person suffering the most was Marian.
After a couple days of this, Phineas took a break from bemoaning family life in order to enthusiastically recount stories of raging torrents, drowning cattle, and pioneers floundering in deep waters and sinking to their deaths.
The conditions inspired the shift in his morbid wit. The melting snow had dangerously swelled the river, and I could easily imagine never making it to the other side. I was constantly clasping the lucky spile in my pocket as we followed along the river’s rushing length.
We traveled as much as we could during the frigid hours before and after nighttime, when the ground was stiff with cold, permitting us to rumble over the pitching lanes without sinking into the mud. I got a good amount of exercise popping in and out of the wagon to drag aside broken tree limbs and hack at the dead remnants of trail-webbing vines. So many encroaching branches: It was as if the forest wanted to reclaim itself and swallow the paltry path humans had carved out of its wildness.
I’d never seen such a forest, with its ancient trees, enormous and innumerable. It teemed with animals awakened by the milder conditions. When I needed to venture from our riverside sojourn into the woods for privacy’s sake, I stayed as close as possible to the dense edge, certain that trespassing even a foot too far would make me one more intrusion the vegetation would engulf, perhaps holding me in its gnarled clutches to await a wolf’s or panther’s or bear’s dinnertime.
Eventually, I couldn’t avoid the fearsome interior, for our journey veered straight into the woods. This, however, only happened after we executed a different terrifying feat: the fording of the river.
With the wagon cracks caulked and the oxen hitched by rope to our horseman guide, we dared the river at its shallowest point, which still seemed dangerously deep. It was a strangely silent crossing. Anxiety had stolen our voices. The entire way, the poor animals’ alarmed eyes bulged above the surface of the water. Fancy, with a frantic whimper, scrambled almost to my shoulders.
The great benefit of the crossing (besides, obviously, survival and being able to continue on our journey) was that I achieved the first thorough soaking I’d had in weeks. I wasn’t precisely clean, but I no longer reeked. Phineas, of course, stayed miraculously dapper and mostly dry. Afterward, he merely stretched out a long leg and exclaimed, “The Genesee works better than champagne for boot shining.”