Father unto Many Sons

  FATHER UNTO MANY SONS

  FATHER UNTO MANY SONS

  ROD MILLER

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  Copyright © 2018 by Rod Miller

  All scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the King James Bible.

  Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Miller, Rod, 1952-author.

  Title: Father unto many sons / Rod Miller.

  Description: First edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018004734 (print) | LCCN 2018009807 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432843748 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432843731 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432843441 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-4374-8

  Classification: LCC PS3613.I55264 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.I55264 F38 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004734

  First Edition. First Printing: August 2018

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-4374-8

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  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 22 21 20 19 18

  In memory of Joseph Smith, Jr.

  who told a story much the same

  in a very different way

  ’Tis a happy thing to be the father unto many sons.

  —William Shakespeare

  PROLOGUE

  Blood and vomit mingled in a puddle between Abel Pate’s spattered boots. Head bowed, elbows on knees, he slumped on the edge of the board sidewalk, heaved, and added to the vile stew soaking slowly into the dust. Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped without splash into the viscous mess. Again and again he heaved until only bile, then nothing but stringy spittle, dribbled from his lips and chin.

  Abel’s breathing slowed and the spasms stopped. He sat upright and stared without understanding at the knife in his hand, smeared with the blood of his uncle. Turning aside, he wiped the flats of the blade across the dead man’s shirt and let it rest on the stain. The body sprawled on the walkway next to him, head dangling over the edge, the deep slit across the throat leering at the boy like a wide scarlet smile.

  Using the bandana he had knotted around his neck, Abel mopped his face and pondered his next move. The town was dark and quiet. Abel guessed it would be three or four hours yet until dawn. He picked up Uncle Ben’s hat and brushed the dust off it and knew then what he had to do.

  He slid his uncle’s heavy knife into the shaft of his boot. He worked one arm out of the long linen duster, rolled the body over, pulled the other sleeve loose and tossed the duster aside. Sweat again moistened his brow as he hefted the lifeless feet and rolled the body off the wooden sidewalk that spanned a narrow gap between the stone block building that housed a bank and a wood-frame barber shop. He stepped down and sat on the street, braced his hands behind himself and with both feet pushed Uncle Ben’s remains under the walkway. Even for a boy grown to the size of a man, the dead weight made the job difficult. With the side of his boot, he scraped dirt and litter over the blood and vomit, turning it all to dark mud. Abel knew his work made no kind of concealment but figured it would buy him an hour or two come daylight and that would have to do.

  Dusting off his backside with both hands, he slid into Uncle Ben’s long coat. He lacked the dead man’s heft, but hoped it would not be obvious under the duster. Tugging the wide-brim hat low over his brow, he set off for his late uncle’s house, trusting the darkness and his feeble disguise to accomplish his mission.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Somewhere in Arkansas, circa 1840

  With a fistful of fabric in either hand, Sarah, wrist-deep in the murky creek, knuckled back and forth in an attempt to erase the stains from her only other dress.

  And to think I left a wardrobe of finery behind for this. I’m damned if I know why I let that man drag me out here. He has not one lick of sense.

  Twisting tight the bodice and watching water spill back to the creek, she tried to blow away a strand of hair troubling her eye, finally swiping at it with her hand and tucking it behind an ear. She unfurled the dress, eyed the stains staring back at her, and plunged it again into the stream, raw knuckles dunking and scrubbing with renewed violence. With all the splashing and thrashing she neither heard nor sensed his approach until covered by his shadow. The haste of her spin upset her balance and she tipped from her squat to a sit in the shallow verge of the creek, soaking her backside.

  “Damn you, Lee Pate!” Scrambling to her feet she shook a dripping finger within an inch of her husband’s nose while the freshly washed garment streamed water, tinging it with fresh mud where it brushed the ground. “You ought not steal up on a body like that. My heart is pounding like a smith’s hammer on an anvil. Like to scared me to death. Damn you!”

  “Now, Sarah—there’s no need for that. Coarse language does not become you.”

  The woman wiped another stray strand of hair from her face and gathered the wet dress to wring water from it, muttering something unheard as she twisted and turned the fabric. The man, thumbs in the armholes of his vest, stood tall and thin and watched.

  When wrung water diminished to droplets, she shook out the dress, winced at the still evident stains and whispered another obscenity. Eyebrows arched, the man rocked back on his heels and studied the woman.

  “It cannot be helped, Lee. I am at my wit’s end.” Once started, it was as if the bung had been pulled from a vinegar keg. “What am I doing, squatting at this damn stream scrubbing laundry like I was black? Without even a washtub or scrub board! Of course, with naught but two dresses and one threadbare shift it is not as if I require much in the way of conveniences like I had back in Shelby County. I am left to feed four hungry men out of two cast-iron kettles, a skillet and a coffeepot! Oh, the kitchen I left behind. . . . Shops at hand for food and fixin’s. Womenfolk to socialize with. Why in hell did we leave it, Lee? Why?”

  HIs mouth and jaw worked but formed no words.

  “Don’t bother—I’ll tell you why. All on account of some highfalutin notions about the state of mankind! Damn craziness, that’s what it is. That’s the why of it!”

  He cleared his throat. “A man has to follow his conscience, Sarah, or he ain’t no kind of man. Now, I know I ain’t got the kind of pedigree you prefer, but I’ve got my principles.”

  “Principles! No, Lee, principles is not what you have got. What you have got is a head as hard as a hickory stump! It is not a principled man who stands in the town square of Memphis and warns his neighbors they are doomed to hell. To tell them flat out their city will fall down around their ears on account of their so-called sin
of holding slaves!”

  “But I know it to be true. It is not given for one man to own another.”

  “Your own family has done so for a hundred years! More!”

  Lee cleared his throat. “An accident of time and place. Nothing more. And it needn’t be a barrier to a man’s learning better. Besides, I have never held a slave.”

  “No. But your brother Ben does.”

  “That’s nothing to do with me—nor is anything Ben does. I hardly consider the man family anymore.”

  “And he, no doubt, returns the favor. But you will not find his wife washing what is left of her wardrobe in a no-name creek in the middle of nowhere!”

  He reached a hand to place on her shoulder but she cast it aside, stuffed the wet, wadded dress into his chest, lifted her skirts and left for camp.

  Lee watched her walk away, stared at the wet garment in his hand, then followed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Spoons scraped enamel plates, raising a ruckus that would betray the camp’s presence to any traveler within a mile. Lee Pate set the pattern, face tipped over the plate balanced on his knees, spooning up the thin stew—or thick soup—as fast as his hard-working jaw allowed. Along the length of a log next to the stump on which he sat, his sons, Richard, Melvin, and Abel, followed suit.

  Sarah looked on and shook her head in disgust as she gathered her apron and wiped her hands. She pulled a speckled plate from the jumble in the box and spooned up a helping of the meal, such as it was, for herself. A few stringy pieces of snared rabbit meat shared the watery puddle with the mushy roots and slimy greens of plants plucked from the woods surrounding the clearing that had been their home these past twoand-a-half months—give or take, lacking a calendar to mark the passage of days with any precision. Muttering under her breath, she took her accustomed seat on the stump. She spooned up her food without appetite, wondering how her man and their boys—grown men themselves, for the most part—could attack the tasteless mess with such gusto.

  Not even salt for seasoning. Such herbs as I can gather a damn poor substitute. Spuds sprouted and rotten. Carrots long since eaten. Onions no more. Like as not we will be stricken with scurvy. If we don’t starve first. Nothing that passes for bread, even—hasn’t been for weeks.

  “Lee!”

  All four men snapped to attention.

  Lee swallowed. Said, “Sarah?”

  “How is your supper?”

  The man poked at some unidentifiable fragment of food on his plate, spooned it up, chewed it carefully. “It fills the hole, Sarah.”

  “Not much!” said Melvin from his seat down the log.

  “Now, boy—”

  “But it don’t, Pa. There ain’t never enough of it to fill me up. Been so long since I felt full I can’t remember if I was born first or hungry first.”

  “Melvin, show your Ma some respect.”

  “I told you—asked you—not to call me that. ‘Mel’—that’s what I go by now. And my bein’ hungry ain’t got nothin’ to do with Ma. It’s you.”

  “He’s right, you know.” That, from Richard, firstborn son, seated next to his father. “We eat it, ’cause it’s all there is. That don’t mean we like it. It ain’t like it’s food fit for a hungry man.”

  “Oh, Richard,” Lee said, shaking his head.

  “Lee!”

  Sarah’s sharp word this time resulted in three of the four faces looking her way. Abel’s remained hidden behind his plate.

  “The boys are right. I know it. And you know it, too, if only you would admit it to yourself.”

  “Why, Sarah, it’s not that bad.” He leaned forward to look down the log. “Abel, what do you think?”

  The youngest of the brood, Abel was just sixteen years old but had already outgrown Richard, who had eight years on him, as well as Melvin, six years his senior. He pulled his plate away from his face, licked so clean it could pass for unused. He looked at his father and smiled. “I like it fine, Ma.”

  “Aw, hell, Abel—you’d eat a snake and like it,” Richard said.

  Melvin laughed. “He’d eat a damn bush if he thought there was a snake hidin’ in it!”

  Abel’s brothers laughed, slapping knees and each other on the back.

  “Settle down, boys,” Lee said. “And watch your language. We ought to be grateful to your Ma for feeding us as well as she does, and be thankful for every bite that finds its way to our mouths.”

  “It ain’t like we ain’t thankful, Pa,” Richard said. “It’s just that there ain’t never enough of it.”

  “And what there is it ain’t all that good, truth be told,” Melvin said.

  “Back home in Tennessee we ate a lot better, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Now, boys—”

  “—Let it go, Lee. They’re right,” Sarah said. “It pains me no end to put this sorry excuse for food in front of you-all day after day. Thinking about all those hams and bacon sides left hanging in the smokehouse—them root crops buried in the cellar—fresh eggs every morning—hell, flour, sugar, salt. . . .” Sarah gathered the hem of her apron and wiped away a tear.

  Lee raised his cup as if offering a toast. “We’ve got fresh milk, leastways.”

  “For now. The cow’s drying up and I haven’t seen any gentleman cows hereabouts to get her with calf again.” Sarah wiped away another tear.

  Lee turned the mug in his hands, studying the bead of milk skating around the bottom. “I don’t feel good about it, myself,” he said. “But I was moved to be shut of that place. And when I get a sign I am not given to ignore it.”

  “You and your damn dreams,” Sarah said. “Even so, it don’t mean we had to leave like thieves in the night with nothing more than we could carry in one trip to the wagon.”

  Richard stood and dropped his plate and cup in the steaming kettle set beside the glowing remnants of the fire. “She’s right, Pa. I’m surprised you took the time to hitch the mules ’stead of making us boys pull the wagon. We left behind a damn good life in Shelby County, and for what? This?” he said as he spread his arms and turned a circle. “Here we sit in the middle of No-Damn-Where Arkansas, all on account of your stupid notions.”

  Melvin joined the tirade. “Yup,” he said, with a nod.

  Abel only looked on.

  “No need to worry,” Lee said. “It is about time we moved on, so we won’t be here much longer.” He shook out his cup and slid it, with his plate, into the dishwater, and then hitched his thumbs in the armholes of his vest. “But before we go, I’ve got a little errand for you boys.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Abel jerked upright. He rubbed his hip where the toe of his father’s boot had prodded him awake.

  “Wake up, boy. It’s near time you were on your way.”

  The boy’s hands scrubbed his sleep-smeared face. He stretched, shook out his boots in case any critters had taken up residence, and pulled them on. He rooted around in his blankets for his shirt and slipped it over his head.

  He looked around the clearing in the dim glow of the fire. Ma squatted over a kettle, fanning smoke with one hand and stirring the pot with the other. Rustling branches and leaves announced the arrival of his brothers, stumbling back into the clearing after tending to their morning toilet somewhere off in the trees.

  “Come and get it, such as it is,” Sarah said.

  Richard and Melvin hurried to fetch plates and spoons from the box that served as a cupboard, but waited for their father. Abel joined the back of the line.

  “Acorn mush,” Sarah said.

  “Again?”

  “Hush, Melvin,” Lee said. “It’s better than nothing.”

  “Not much. And don’t call me Melvin.”

  Sarah said, “It don’t matter how many times I leach the acorns, I can’t wash out all the bitterness. I’m awful sorry about that, boys.” She stared at her husband through squinted eyes as she plopped down a spoonful of the goop, nearly upsetting his plate in the process. “Sugar would help.” Plop. “So would mol
asses.” Plop. “ ’Course we don’t have a speck or lick of either.” Plop.

  “I’m sure it will be fine, Sarah.”

  Richard snorted. Melvin laughed.

  Dawn was breaking by the time the men finished their breakfast. Lee gathered his sons in a squatted circle to give them final instructions.

  “I still don’t see why a wore-out family Bible and an old book matters,” Melvin said.

  “Melvin—Mel—we’ve been over this before. The Pate family—your family—came generations ago from the north of England. That ‘wore-out family Bible’ as you call it contains our heritage. In it is recorded births and baptisms and marriages and deaths going back generations. You’re in there, and me, and those who came before. And those who will come after, if your brother Richard fulfills his obligation to the family when the Bible comes to him as my firstborn, as it has come down to me. Mayhap it doesn’t seem important to you now but someday it will. Or ought to.

  “As for the other book, it is the journal of Ezekiel Pate, my grandfather—your great-grandfather—the first Pate to leave the Old Country and come to America, long before anyone had any notion it would become these United States. And he brought with him that family Bible, by the by. His little daybook hasn’t the value of the Bible, but it is an important family treasure all the same.”

  Richard said, “So if them books was left to your safekeeping, how came Uncle Ben to have them?”

  Lee picked up a twig and scratched in the dirt for a moment. “When your Uncle Ben built that big house in the town he got himself an iron chest to protect his valuables. Convinced me them books would be safer there, as that lockbox was made of inch-thick cast iron. So I gave them to his safekeeping. Otherwise, they’d have come with us. But, like I said last night, I am given to believe it is time we moved on from this place, and I cannot leave without those books. What I want is for you boys to go back to Shelby County and fetch them.”