The Wooden Deer

A story of war, hatred, race and courage. Not the simple story of Confederate and Union- instead a work of confused values, ambiguous relations, strength and loyalty amid the great blood letting.

MICHIGAN 1915

The footprints in the fresh snow followed the pine guarded creek. One set of tracks was large and the other was clearly much smaller. Here and there they paused along the edge of the burbling brook. Its banks were bordered by rocks and boulders that were covered in places with a thick coating of emerald green sphagnum moss that peeked from under the white blanket. Now and then the tracks stopped. The snow was much disturbed in these places and it was clear that the owner of the larger tracks had paused wherever there was a long stick shoved into the muddy stream bed.

“Reach into the basket Lovin boy and hand me thet little bottle thet says ‘Mink lure’ on it.”

The old man reached down into the water that rushed passed his toes and pulled on the trap chain. The frigid icy water stung even his callous covered chocolate brown hand. There was a small weight on the end of the chain and he could tell by the drag that there was a nice buck mink caught in the jaws of the blackened steel trap. The trap was a ‘New House’ number one and the mink had drowned after his foolish curiosity had gotten the best of him when he investigated a natural pocket in the tumbled boulders and rocks. The old man had placed a small twig with a dab of mink lure on it at the back of the fairey sized cave and the beautiful brown mink had stepped onto the pan of the trap, springing it and catching itself by the foot. The quick thinking mink had retreated from the crevice and dove into the stream to shake off his attacker. The old man had staked the trap out in the middle of three feet of tumbling water and it took only moments for the struggle to end as the furry brown mink, worth five dollars of Christmas money lost its fight and drowned, unable to make it back to the bank. The trap acting as an anchor dragged it to the bottom, to be plucked out the following morning by Lewis and his grandson Moss.

“Mink is soft and pretty on the outside Lovin, but it’s pure blood and murder on the inside. Some people like that to.”

Lewis put his greasy nut colored deerskin mitten back on and depressed the trap spring and took the stiff, saturated brown killer out of the trap. He placed it in the ash splint pack basket next to three dead muskrats and a long tailed weasel in its winter ermine coat.

“Granddad, Daddy says you helped fight the Goddamn Rebels. Were you a soldier?”

“Hush your mouth boy! I don’t ever wanna hear that blasphemous word comin outta your mouth again! I raised your daddy better than to use language like that around chillens.” Lewis paused and took a moment to slip his arms through the webbed canvas straps on the pack basket.

“I was a soldier once a long long time ago Lovin”. He paused for a moment as he thought how to explain to the boy. “No one’s damned unless God says their damned.” He looked down at

Lovin. “You understand me? I knew boys in that rebel army.”

“Daddy says that when you and great grandpa lived in Kentucky a Godda"a rebel soldier killed great grandpa and he shot you too. What’s it feel like to get shot granddad?”

The old man was silent and he stared into the trees ahead of them seeing something in the far distance that only he could see.

“Hurts like the devils pokin a hot iron into ya.” Lewis began to walk up the bank of the stream toward his next trap set. The boy followed carefully watching his grandfather.

He thought that the old man was the biggest and strongest man he had ever seen. His daddy was big, but not as big as his grandpa who even past his seventieth year was a powerful man. Anything granddad said was Gospel to the boy.

After a hundred yards or so Lewis stopped at a slow moving pool in the stream. Here the water was deeper and the ice edged out from the banks trying to cover the small hole in the middle that was no more than a yard wide. The ice was paper thin though and would support only the weight of a deer mouse or a chickadee. The spruces and birches gathered close to the stream arching overhead and with the dense blanket of snow from the night before made a roof that blocked out the slate gray sky. Everything was silent except for the few soft woolen noises that came from the boy and his grandfather as they pulled another muskrat dripping from the water and quietly went about making a new set on the birch pole baited with a piece of apple. The grandfather pushed the pole down into the stream bed and the trap was submerged again.

Now that the set was complete and his mitten back on Lewis looked down at the quiet respectful boy.

“Lovin what’s everyone call you? What name do you go by?”

“Moss granddad. You know that everyone calls me Moss.”

“Why do you suppose we all call you Moss when yer given name is Lewis like me?”

“I dunno.”

“Yer great grandpap’s name was Lewis to"Just like you an me.”

Lewis pointed his thick mittened hand across the stream.

“You see that boulder boy. That boulder has been sittin there for a thousand years- no two thousand years. That boulder was there when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, when Herrod ruled the Jews and Caesar ruled Rome. That boulder is a hundred times stronger than you an me and its patient. You see how the moss grows on top. That’s cause its patient. Like yer great granddaddy. That’s how come they called him Moss. He was the strongest most patient good man I ever new.”

Lewis turned into the woods and began striding through the powdery knee deep snow.

“Lets’ go check that fox set at the top a the ridge.”

Lovin or Moss as others called him followed in his grandfather’s white wake, the snow nearly hip deep on his eight year old frame yielded easily and his wool pants and tall gum soled leather boots kept out the cold.

The old man talked clearly, but quietly without looking back, a tall ancient beech wood walking staff in one hand and a small octagon barreled .22 caliber rifle in his other.

“Your great granddad was born free Lovin as was his daddy before him. Our people been free for over a hundred years. Civil war though was fought so all colored folks could be free just like us. Slave folks called it the “Jubilee”. I got my chance to help fight to preserve the Union and free the slaves in sixty four when I was twenty one years old. My best friend fought in Duncan’s Kentucky Battalion and then in the 4th Virginia regiment"he was one of those ‘GD’ rebels. Joby was my best friend Lovin and he never come home.

KENTUCKY

The boys raced barefoot across the field being careful not to step on any of the young tobacco plants. Joby new that if his father ever found his footprints near a damaged plant his ear would get twisted painfully as he was dragged, his toes barely touching the ground into the drying barn. His daddy would angrily show him the empty hogsheads waiting to be filled with tobacco leaves tightly bound and packed after harvest and weeks of drying. The slender poles stood waiting for the large leaves that would dangle from them as they dried and the airy barn reeked of sweet acrid long leaf tobacco.

The last time he had gotten in trouble, his father had laid a hickory withe across his bare buttocks. The withe was left over from repairing one of the hogsheads and it was stiff and the lashes had left thick welts. Daddy never said anything once he had caught the boy or his older brother Sam. Eaton Ambrose Webb was a man of few words and those most often were sharp and cold. He was without humor or warmth.

“Pull yer trousers up boy.” He had tossed the withe aside and stood looking down on the nine year old. His blue eyes were cold in his whiskery face and his wide footed stance was menacing.

“Eggs are food. If I catch you throwin an egg again I’ll give ya twenty lashes instead of ten.” He turned and left the barn. There was little passion in his punishments; it was the same as when he lashed a mule that refused to complete a furrow.

Joby rarely cried in front of his father anymore. The whippins were not common because Joby had quickly learned how to avoid them. The incident with the egg was rare and he had not been paying attention as he lobbed the brown egg over the stanchion at Sam. His father had walked into the barn to pick up a wrench he had forgotten and had caught him red handed. Eaton allowed the boys to play when their chores were done, but he was a harsh master.

Joby remembered long ago when his daddy had smiled and let him ride on his shoulders and chased both he and his older brothers around the farm yard when he came in from the fields for noon supper. His mother had stood in the doorway in her brown checkered dress with a white cotton apron and laughed as the four of them fell in a heap with Eaton at the bottom. To the boy that all seemed ages and ages ago. His oldest brother Dick and his two baby sisters along with their mother Lavinia had died in a Cholera epidemic nearly six years ago. Eaton was crushed and his deep anguish combined with fatigue and fear had driven all of the warmth from him. He was now a cold, taciturn man incapable of showing love to his remaining children. Somewhere deep in his soul he feared that if he loved Sam and Joby they would be taken from him. His heart broke for the ones he had lost and Joby’s brown hair, deep eyes and forgiving face reminded him of his beloved Lavinia. He was mad at her for leaving him and when he had stopped crying at night and silently raging at the lord he grew despondent and forgot to feed the boys or milk the cows for days. Sam had cooked and done what chores his little eight year old hands would allow. The cows eventually had to be shot with the double barrel when their udders had hardened and their painful lowing reached Eaton’s ears.

When he realized what had happened while he wept, he slowly began to boot strap himself up the same way his daddy or granddaddy would have in the early days of Kentucky, but the life was gone out of him. That spark that illumines the immortal soul and kindles our hearts fire was as dead as Judas ghost.

The boys watched out for each other and while they respected their father they avoided him as much as possible, running away over the fields when their work was done. Eaton knew they feared him and he hated himself for doing that to them, but he could not find a way to say he was sorry- for he no longer was and so he was silent. The boys now were a chore that kept him from death. If he could die and be with Lavinia then perhaps all would be right again, but not until then and the boys were a coarse tether to a life he no longer wished to live. When they reached manhood perhaps he could put down his burden of living and rest.

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Lewis ‘Moss’ Lyman was born in 1812 just two years and some months after his daddy the first ‘Moss’ had purchased his own freedom from his master in Troy, New York. His daddy had moved to Kentucky thinking that heading west toward the newly opened lands along the Mississippi would hold great promise for a newcomer. He carried no more than a belt knife, an axe and a small canvass pack with a shirt, socks and a wooden plate and a tin cup. Looped across his chest and over his shoulder was a coarse wool blanket and tucked into his waist band was a soft leather poke jingling with dollars he had carefully saved over 40 years spent as a slave. His manumission papers he wore around his neck safely packed in a waterproof leather wallet. He got no further than Richmond and he grew tired of walking, eating wild leeks, frogs and beech nuts. He stood atop a low hill and leaning on a fresh cut staff and he decided that after coming through the rugged mountains of Kentucky that he liked the level countryside that lay before him the best of all he had surveyed in his journey. As he caught his breath he pondered that perhaps he should buy a few acres hereabouts.

No one had wanted to sell land to a ’Nigra’ and so he had to pay twice the going price for the fifteen pretty wooded acres along the creek, but he soon had cleared the trees off of two acres and had a place to pasture a cow and an ox that he had bought cheaply at auction just before they could be sold for rendering down. The failing spavined cow yielded a little milk and the ox held up long enough to help pull twenty stumps from Moss’s dooryard before it fell to its knees, lowed mournfully and never rose again. The tough beef from the ancient ox saw him through the first winter and in the spring he planted a vegetable garden in the dooryard of his little cabin. Moss Lyman hired himself out to work for others clearing stumps and building fences in order to have a little cash money on hand to buy the few things he couldn’t make.

In New York Moss the older had been owned by and trained as a fiddle maker and he was a master at building violins and violas, but there was little call for violas in Richmond, Kentucky in those early years and more especially there was no use for them in the countryside outside of town. He did make a dandy fiddle now and then and his reputation as a first rate fiddler spread throughout the district and soon he was hired for a Spanish dollar here and there to play at wedding feasts or on special occasions and by the end of his second year in Kentucky he had glass windows in his little cabin and two healthy cows were pastured amid the slowly rotting stumps.

In the earliest days of 1812 he met Persimonny Cash a slave girl who worked for the Albert Claxton family in Richmond, Kentucky. Moss courted Persimonny vigorously and after a few months passage of time he offered to purchase her off of Mr. Claxton. Claxton was no one’s fool and could see that Moss was in love with his cook and so he doubled his money on Persimonny and fondly wished the couple the very best and gave the bride four yards of gingham and a laying hen as a wedding present. To buy Persimonny, Moss had had to part with every penny he had saved over two years and had borrowed the rest from Mr. Hawkins a trapper who had returned from the west rich on beaver peltry. Claxton missed the delicious meals that Persimonny cooked, but he bought three more scrawny Africans smuggled into Charleston from the Gulf of Guinea for the money Moss had paid. For the past four years slavers had had to sneak into creeks and rivers along the southern seaboard to unload their stunned, brown cargo. After ample food and some education the three had yielded a good return and had learned quickly how to plant and harvest tobacco.

Hawkins, the trapper made over fifty percent interest on the money he lent to Moss and held the deed to Moss’s farm as collateral for ten years and he often entertained friends to the strains of Moss’s fiddle playing a highland lament or a rollicking reel. The wide, highly polished and waxed butternut floorboards of his stylishly colonnaded home reflected the whirling and stamping of the country dancers.

The ‘New Madrid Shaking’ shortly after the couple began courting that year upset Persimonny’s dishes in Mr. Claxton’s kitchen and cracked the spring house door in its frame and set the geese and chickens to honking and flapping in the yard, but no great harm was done. Later Moss and Persimonny heard of mountains that had disappeared and how the mighty Mississippi even changed its course and made what is called the Kentucky bend. Some in the neighborhood had seen their ponds drain and several homes nearby had burned when chimneys toppled and banked fires were upset. Many thought the Lord had ordered a reckoning. To be sure taverns did less business and churches did more for several months after the shaking. Kentuckians though never had much trouble reconciling good spirits and righteous living. God in his Heaven created fast horses and smooth corn liquor for the enjoyment of Kentuckians. He created church as a place where they could give thanks for those blessings. Moss found that some of the chinking from his cabin had fallen out and one of his new windows had broken.

Late in 1812 Persimonny gave birth to the first of her four children, only two of whom survived to see childhood. The second of her brood died of a lung ailment at three weeks and the third was still born. Persimonny’s white neighbor ladies fared no better with their birthing and they brought soup and wild flowers whenever the brown woman took to her childbed or buried one of her babies. Lewis Lyman was the first of his family on either side to be born into freedom since 1728. It was not long before everyone called the little boy ‘Moss’ because he bore such a striking resemblance to his sire.

Two tiny headstones now sprouted like baby teeth in the backyard of the small white washed, clapboard house with its four rooms and a shake roof. The original cabin now served as a barn for the cows and ox. Posies grew around the stones and Persimonny let the sheep crop down the grass to keep it neat and tidy, but the stones she had fenced off with a neat stick fence so that the sheep would not devour the blooms. The wool from the grazing ewes and lordly ram she wove on her loom which sat in a room it shared silently with a spinning wheel, a wool winder and bags of oily fleece. Lewis and his little sister Ruth slept in the smallest room on the second floor near the warm chimney in the winter and in the sultry heat of the summer they often slept on the porch or if it was raining they would throw down a straw tick in the kitchen and sleep on the cool hearthstones. The other room on the main floor was a small bedroom off of the keeping room for Moss and Persimonny.

While Moss built fiddles and played music for others, Persimonny tended a growing flock whose woolen gifts she sold in the neighborhood at rifle frolics, horse races and market days. Ruth, as she grew, learned to wash and card the wool and to spin it into threads for the hungry loom.

When young Lewis wasn’t tending the flock or sweeping the shavings from his father’s tiny fiddle shop in the barn, split wood and planted tobacco and corn. By ten he could plow a straighter furrow than many a grown man and already his size fooled many into thinking him older than he was. The shelled corn they took to the local mill for grinding into that staple of Southern cookery-- cornmeal. The tobacco was sold for cash money to buy needful things except of course for a few pounds that Moss kept for his own enjoyment.

In the evenings daddy would rosin up and play a lively tune and little Ruth would dance barefoot around her father while Lewis and mama clapped and stamped. In all during those early years of the century the Lyman’s were a happy family and they raised happy children who were deeply respectful of all people and most especially of the Lord God Above.

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Life passed well for Lewis “Moss” the younger in the decade of the twenties. Moss the elder had raised strong righteous children. In 1836 “Younger” courted and married a chattel girl like his father before him. The very same year, volunteers like John Gatson and John Benjamin Kellogg II from Kentucky, members of the Gonzales Ranging Company, died alongside the Honorable David Crockett at the Alamo mission in San Antonio de Bexar, Republic of Texas. Young Moss heard the news of the heroic defense of those pitiful adobe walls and of how the bodies of Texas patriots were tossed about on the bayonets of Santa Anna’s victorious peons.

The unwed daughters of freedmen were a rare bird in those days and they often flew north or were snatched up quickly by the few freedmen in the county. Father stood at his cluttered work bench covered with tiger maple shavings and tools. A Jacob’s ladder shone down through the dirty glass window, the only source of illumination in the shop. Young Moss reached under the bench with his switch grass broom to clear out the shavings which were good for starting or rekindling a morning fire.

“Son, there’s lots a fine girls around and you’ve saved yer money careful like I told ya. So it’s time ya started lookin’ for a woman. I’m a young man no more and soon I’m gonna give up the farm and stick ta fiddlin.” He paused to run his hand over the smooth shape of the fiddle back he was building, feeling its gently curving arch for imperfection. “Don’t be lookin’ at some o’ those saucy wenches in town that give you pie and the Lord knows what else.”

“Daddy, Mama was a town girl and she gave you pie, can I go tend my tobacco sir?”

“This isn’t something to take lightly boy. I’ll be glad to help you make arrangements if you want. White folks can be touchy bout this and slaves ain’t much better. You know a freedman walks a narrow rail boy.”

Moss the elder had given his son a half acre on which to raise his own tobacco to sell. This along with the money he made from a few furs he trapped each fall and winter and helping out his daddy’s white neighbors at planting and harvesting time gave him a fat poke. When he hired out, the lad worked right alongside bought and sold slaves and kept his mouth shut tight and worked twice as hard. Many said they had never seen a Negro so well mannered nor bound for success as a farmer and perhaps even as an overseer.

It was this money, which Moss “The Younger” had saved for nearly fifteen years, that would give him enough to think of buying himself a wife. The money he had squirreled away though would not be nearly enough, as the price of slaves had shot up when the supply from Africa had been strangled by the British naval blockade earlier in the century. Mr. Hawkins who had loaned his daddy the money to buy his mother was now a fat and well respected planter who wore long white mutton chops and a correspondingly fat gold watch in his bulging blue waist coat. Hawkins had continued to speculate in furs, but had grown even richer raising hemp, tobacco and mules. Ponderous oxen were slowly going out of style as the roads improved and stumps and forests disappeared from mid Kentucky. Squire Hawkins as he was now known owned no less than thirty two slaves. Four of these folks worked in his home cooking, cleaning house and minding his children and then his grandchildren. Fifteen worked in his barns and fields and farm shops. The remainder were elderly or children who could work no more than a few hours at a time and barely counted in the telling.

The “Younger” had already approached Squire Hawkins with a proposal to borrow the balance. With that promise from the old squire he had gone with his hat in hand to see a neighbor he sometimes hired out to who owned a comely fine girl.

Thomas “Fretful” Perkins was a thrifty farmer who worked fifty acres of cleared land near the steep banks of the Kentucky River. During the past fall “Younger” had met Coffee while working in the fields. The nut brown girl with the sparking eyes had caught his attention early the very first day though he remained quiet lest he be fired and maybe even whipped for spreading insurrection. All of the field gang knew that he was a hired freedman and the girls quickly learned that he was a bachelor. They each vied for his attention knowing that the great silent young man offered a chance to be free. The weeks had worn on and Younger had slowly and very carefully communicated his interest and desire to Coffee with a smile here and a “good mornin” there. Coffee had ignored him for the first day but she smiled back demurely on the second. “Younger” had learned the silent tongue of slaves from his mother. It was this secret language of gestures and subtle vocals that allowed slaves to communicate under the gaze of a watchful overseer.

Perkins had agreed upon a price with “Younger”-- and it was dear.

“Prime handsome young wenches are not to be given away cheaply young Moss. I like you and your daddy boy and I have a dandy coat made from some o that fine butternut wool yer mama wove, but I warn ya you’ll have to take Coffee miles away from here. I don’t want her seein or talkin with my other people. Its cause I like you Moss that I’m sellin her at all ya understand, but only on terms that you agree to move at least ten miles away. I’ll go along with ye buyin her if ye still want her. I expect she’ll make ye a fine wife. Last time I checked she was virgin too. Tuther part o the bargain is that you by yerself come back next year and work my fields. I’ll pay ya the same wage, but I’m gonna need all the help I can get to put in ten more acres. If you’ve a mind to- I’ll put you in charge of the clearing gang and ye can stow yer traps in the barn and sleep in the loft. Have we gotta deal?”

“Yes suh we got us a deal. If it suits I can work fuh ya fuh four weeks an still git my own backy in Mister Perkins.”

“Younger” knew that when doing business with a white man it was best to sound and act like a chattel and not some 'uppity' freedman. In his dealings with other colored folks he spoke an accent that was more cultured than many of the farmers of Scotch and German families who had come over the mountains from Pennsylvania and Virginia. “Younger” could speak as nearly pure an English as Dr. Walker who strode the Cumberland Gap in the early days before Boone. The narrow rail was a frightening perch sometimes.

Fretful Perkins smiled and stuck out his hand and shook with “Younger” as though they had consummated a deal for a cellar hole to be dug or an ox to be shod. “Younger” was happy and inside of a week had taken possession of his new wife and with the bill of sale and her papers in his pocket rode home to his parents. Coffee sat next to him, her hands in her lap and all her earthly goods tied up in a little yellow nankeen handkerchief. This was as free as she would ever be until the day came when Moss the Younger could afford to file a manumission with the county. Until then she was the rightful property bought by young Lewis Lyman of Thomas Perkins in Madison County. Coffee though felt light, but was fearful of moving so far from everything she knew. At sixteen she had never known anything but the Perkins farm. Her mama had raised her and her 'daddy' had owned her, but hardly ever spoke to her except to beckon her to his bedroom.

Fretful’s wife had died young and childless years before when a sweetgum tree had fallen through the roof of the sprawling cabin during a rare cyclone and crushed her in her bed and so on occasion he consoled himself with his slave women. He did not know that Coffee was his daughter and had never entertained the possibility. The girl did not know it, but her mother had found a way to broadly hint to Fretful about Coffee’s parentage. Perkins appalled at his own near miss with the oldest sin had been only to glad to have “Younger” purchase his daughter. With the pretty object of his past desire removed he could once again attend the white board church with his head held high.

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The Reverend Mr. Janewell in a beaver high-hat and gray tailcoat attended by his primly bonneted, hatchet faced wife, joined together Coffee and Moss the “Younger” as man and wife under the watchful eyes of a loving God and before those assembled in late summer of the year 1836. It had been a quiet wedding held under a spreading sourwood tree near the creek. A handful of Daddy’s white neighbors smiled and clapped when the young couple was introduced as the Lyman’s.

“Younger” had carefully followed the order of ‘Fretful’ Perkins and had moved away from his daddy, Ruth and mama, taking Coffee to live in a little white board house with six fair acres near Pinch Creek in Green County. Moss the elder aged and sick with ague gave up the ghost in 1841 and so “Younger” became known to all and sundry as just ‘Moss’.

Moss had grown to be a large and powerful man of intelligence but in spite of his brute strength and hard work his few acres didn’t yield enough for him to prosper. Far from home his neighbors didn’t care for him the way his daddy’s had and he found it impossible to borrow ready cash or to buy more land. Still he and coffee could grow a couple of acres of corn and a tobacco patch with the rest in pasturage for the mule and cow. An apple tree surrounded by a fence grew in the middle of the pasture. Each spring the white blossoms fell like snow.

Moss let out his time and labored for others who had no slaves and who needed extra help at harvest and planting times or he cut wood and built fences as his father had. After Persimmony died in 1842 he sold his daddy’s farm to Squire Hawkins’s harelip boy and took his daddy’s fiddle, walking staff and mama’s big loom back with him to Pinch Creek. Ruth his sister had married a freedman in Richmond and had born three of her own children already. Coffee lost her first three babies in a row, but the fourth cub took and grew in her belly and in early 1843 Lewis ‘Moss’ Lyman was born. Coffee and Moss tried again and yet again to add to their little family, but it was plain for any and all to see that she was as barren as the plains before Sinai.

Little Lewis grew well despite his father’s poverty. Laughter and joy was a regular part of his life. Daddy would caper and play ‘Ole Zip Coon’ and other rollicking songs on granddads fiddle in the evenings as was the custom when he had been a boy. Life had a pattern like the patch work quilt on Lewis’s little maple bed.

The 1840’s saw many a blue clad Kentucky boy killed on the battlefields of Old Mexico. Their Springfield flintlock barrels were hot to the touch and their bayonets dripped with Mexican blood. When the smoke had drifted off and the cannons were silent once more, Santa Anna’s army was whipped and our good land was increased and its inhabitants both swarthy and white were free from the despot’s heel and the wicked deeds at the Alamo Mission were revenged.

Lewis was too little to understand or remember the war, but his daddy paid keen attention and he and Coffee often spoke in the evening of moving toward the setting sun. Restless Southerners however flooded into Texas now and brought their slaves with them. As Lewis grew his father surrendered his own dream of owning a big farm where a freedman sweated to till the soil, but rested in the shade of his own orchard.

Author's Note

Apparently pagination doesn't translate well. Excuse spacing. First draft excuse minor punctuation errors.