The Old Maris eyes flashed with pleasure, and he clapped Mr. Epps on the back. “You know, Mister Epps, I love it when one of these racist Yankees hoists himself like that!” he exclaimed, and laughed.
“Yassuhr,” Mr. Epps quietly answered, and we drove the horses back to camp.
Shortly after dawn the next day, we departed Westport for North Elba. The sky, I remember, was cloudless and bright blue — one of those cool, dry northcountry mornings that let you see sharply all the way to the far horizon. Our teamster, Mr. Epps, sat up on the box with Mary, who was feeling poorly. Little Sarah, who was four that spring, settled herself happily between her mother and Mr. Epps. The rest of us walked, with Father and me out at the front of the team, while a short ways behind the wagon, Ruth walked hand-in-hand with seven-year-old Annie, and the boys Watson, Salmon, and Oliver herded the sheep, cattle, and swine along at the rear. The horses, to my surprise, seemed untroubled by the loaded wagon, and they responded quickly and smoothly to Mr. Epps’s commands. Of course, we were still on a relatively flat, dry road and would be for half the day, at least until we got to Elizabethtown, where the steep ascent supposedly began.
Father wanted us to leave Westport with dignity and evident seriousness of purpose — so as not to comfort any of the locals who might think us foolish or pitiable, he explained. Consequently, we moved briskly, heads held high and eyes squarely on the road before us, and kept the separate parts of our caravan distinct from one another, as if we were a military parade passing in review. We wore jackets and waistcoats and hats, as usual, and the little girls and Ruth and Mary wore mob hats and shawls over their shoulders, and their dark outer skirts were appropriately long. Farmers leaned on their hoes, and women and children came to their kitchen doors, to watch us as we passed out of the town and headed northwest towards the first gentle hills of the interior.
A few miles beyond the settlement, we came to a tilted, unpainted shanty that served as a tollbooth and signaled the start of the new Northwest Road to Elizabethtown, more cart track than road. A bar blocked our way. The Northwest Road had been cut through the forest by a private company that had purchased the narrow band of land on which it ran, so as to profit from the traffic. Evidently, Father had not anticipated this, for when he had made his only previous journey to North Elba last fall, he’d come in from the lake at Port Kent by a somewhat more northerly route — through Ausable Forks and Wilmington Notch — with no toll road.
An old, grizzled fellow in floppy trousers and patchwork shirt emerged from the shanty, hobbling on a badly constructed crutch — a veteran, to judge from his U.S. Army braces. He scrutinized our wagon and animals for a few seconds, spat a brown stream of tobacco juice, and said to Father, “Cost you forty cents for the wagon and team. Cost you seventy cents for them there cows. The sheeps and pigs can pass free.”
Father drew himself up and said, “My friend, I have no money. We’re not hauling freight to sell at a profit. We’re a poor family on our way to settle a piece of land in North Elba.”
“Don’t matter to me where you’re headed, mister. Or why. I charges by the axle and the hoof. Far’s I can see, you got two axles and at least nine sets of hoofs. I’m ignoring them sheeps and the pigs. You want to use this road, it’s going to cost you one dollar and ten cents, total.”
“I’ll have to pay you on my return^’ Father said. “Can’t do that.”
“And if I refuse to pay you now?”
This puzzled the old fellow. He gnashed his wad of tobacco and spat again. “Say what?”
Father turned to me. “Remove the bar, Owen.”
I walked over to the barked pole, which was laid into a pair of notched posts, lifted one end, and swung it away, clearing the road. The toll-taker, with Father blocking his approach to the bar, stared in disbelief. Immediately, Mr. Epps chucked to the horses and drove the wagon through, with Ruth and Annie following somberly behind, and then came the cattle, driven by Watson and Salmon, and the sheep, driven by Oliver and the pair of dogs. Oliver wore a mischievous grin on his freckled face and waved at the toll-taker as he passed by.
Father said to the old man, “I apologize for my son’s rudeness. He’s nine years old and should know better. And I give you my word, friend, on my next return to Westport, I’ll pay the toll.” Then he and I replaced the bar and hurried to catch up to the others.
As Father strode past Oliver, he reached out and with the back of his hand struck the boy a hard blow across his unsuspecting smile. “Never mock a man for doing his duty!” he said, and without breaking his stride moved rapidly alongside me to our former position at the front.
After a few moments, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that Oliver’s face was bright red from the blow. He had turned his head to the side in an attempt to hide his tears, while the other boys stared straight on down the road, politely averting their gaze.
Back in Springfield, Father and I had fitted out the box of our wagon with a white canvas canopy stretched over a bent willow frame, for the purpose of protecting the contents and shielding Mary and Ruth and the smaller children when it rained. Also, we intended the wagon to provide a little privacy and serve as sleeping quarters for the females. Until Westport, this had worked out fine, but now, with so many supplies added to our household goods and tools, passengers were obliged to stay out on the open seat at the front with the driver, for there was no room for anyone to sit or lie down under the canopy.
We had brought all of Father’s surveying tools with us, and his old tanning knives, spuds, and chisels, a small bark mill and various other implements and basins retained from his tanning years, for, during his previous journey to the Adirondacks, the Old Man had observed plenty of hickory trees, both shagbarks and butternut, and he planned to set up a small tannery in North Elba and perhaps teach the trade to some of the Negro settlers. We had also packed into the wagon our broadaxes, hatchets, adzes, hammers, wedges, and froes — tools that we would need for clearing the overgrown land that Mr. Smith had deeded to Father. We carried a pair of grass scythes, a bull rake, hay forks, and reaping forks; we had a small hornhead anvil, various types of nails, jack hooks, and a fine oak tumbril sledge that Father himself had built one winter years ago back in Pennsylvania; we had braces and augers and a good pit saw, a bucksaw, and a half-dozen chisels and planes: we carried all the tools, or most of them anyway, that the Old Man, in spite of bankruptcy and lawsuits, had accumulated and held on to in his various homesteading ventures and numerous business operations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massachusetts.
We also carried our mattresses, bedding, and clothing, and the furniture that Father and Mary had brought out from the house in Ohio to Springfield the year before — a pair of small chests, Father’s writing table, Great-Grandfather Brown’s mantel clock, Mary’s spinning wheel, and Ruth’s loom; and all the cooking implements and pots, the bowls, plates, mugs, and tableware; and, of course, Father’s big chest of books, which had traveled everywhere with us, from Ohio to Pennsylvania, back to Ohio and on to Springfield, and now to North Elba. To these things, in Westport, we had added kegs of salt, flour, dried beef, corn, crackers, seed, and feed for the animals, buckets for collecting and boiling down maple sap, a washtub, extra harness, and a plow.
As a result of the great weight of these goods, the wagon creaked and groaned on its axles. The spring mud had gone out early that year, fortunately, and the big, iron-sheathed wheels ground down the stone and gravel of the track, as the team of Morgans drew it slowly from the broad, greening valley of Lake Champlain to the upland, leafless forests and the freshly plowed fields and gardens of Elizabethtown.