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By Root 1425 0

The bitch Tige and her eight pups started barking and it wasn’t even the second Tuesday of the month, and the Ingledews grabbed their rifles and went outside, and there, coming up the trail, was a caravan: a covered wagon in the vanguard, drawn by horses, not mules, followed by pedestrians serving as drovers for a menagerie that might have come from the Biblical Noah’s Ark: a pair, male and female, of each: two sheep, two goats, two beeves (one a bull!), two dogs, two pigs, two house cats—and the rooster with a harem of hens. A middle-aged woman was driving the wagon, and the Ingledews noticed that the others, fourteen in number, were all young people or children. There was no grown man.

“Howdy,” said the woman, halting her team. “‘Pears lak this here road don’t go no further.”

“Hit don’t, I reckon,” Jacob observed.

“Reckon we’uns’ll jist have to turn back a ways. Shore is purty country ’way back around up in here. You’uns the only folks hereabouts?”

“Fur as I know, seems lak,” Jacob confessed.

“I’m Lizzie Swain,” the woman said. “Come from Cullowhee, North Caroliner. This un here’s my leastun, Gilbert”—she indicated the small boy sitting beside her—“and thatun’s Esther. Yonder’un’s Frank, and Nettie standin beside him. Thatun’s Boyd. Next him is Elberta and Octavia. Whar’s Virgil? YOU, VIRGE! Come out so’s these fellers kin see ye. Thar he is! Thatun’s Virgil. Then over yonder is Leo, tendin the sheep. Next him is Zenobia. The one tendin the goats is Orville. Aurora is inside the wagon here, layin down with a stomachache. Thatun with the cow and topcow is Murray, he’s my eldest boy. And yonder’s my eldest gal, Sarah, she’s done past twenty. All of ya’ll kids say howdy to these here fellers.”

“HOWDY!” they all said at once, with friendly, enthusiastic smiles.

“Howdy do,” responded Jacob, and Noah didn’t respond at all. In their shyness before all of these females, it never occurred to them to introduce themselves.

“How fur back up the road does yore land go?” the woman asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” Jacob said. “I aint been very fur up thataways. I hear tell there’s a lot of folks up around yonder some’ers, but I aint seed ary one.”

“Wal, I reckon we’uns will jist git on back a ways,” Lizzie Swain declared, and began turning the team of horses around.

In his discomfiture, Jacob did not even think to offer the ritual invitation, “Stay more.” He just stood and watched the caravan return back up the trail. But they were scarcely out of sight when he began to hear the noise: thock, the unmistakable sound produced by an axe hitting a tree. It was followed rapidly by an identical sound, and then another, and then a succession of thucks made by a different axe, and then began a series of thacks, from yet another axe, followed by some thecks from yet a fourth axe, and finally the chorus was joined by a fifth axe that said thick, until the air was filled with a constant cannonade of thock thuck thack theck thick.

“Shitfire,” Noah remarked. “They must be choppin the woods all to hell.”

Jacob went to investigate and discovered that the family had elected to settle less than half a mile from his own place. Four of the older boys and Lizzie Swain were busy chopping at oak trees, the beginning of the structure that we shall examine in the following chapter. Jacob went up to Lizzie Swain and took the axe out of her hands.

When he did, she looked startled, and asked, “Air we too close on ye?” and the boys raised their axes to defend her, but Jacob simply took the axe and began swinging it at the tree that Lizzie Swain had been chopping. He set a pace for the other boys, but his tree was felled long before theirs were. “That’s right neighborly of ye,” Lizzie Swain said to him. He started in on another tree.

Mrs. Elizabeth Hansell Swain was a true courageous pioneer mother—the first white woman in Stay More. Her husband had died the year before back in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and she decided to bring her fourteen children west in order that, as she would later explain to Jacob, “they could grow up with the country.” All