Sun Path

By Xlibris US

a story of family strife mixed with sexual incest combined with racial discrimination seems a flash of violence cascading off Americas multi-media of this century. But all the personal pain patterned from todays media blasts is told in the story of a young, half-Melungeon girl running from the horrors so original to humans even in the early year of 1809. This strong young teen is aided in her escape by a mixed-blood Osage youth also running from his past to his future. Fighting fear, exhaustion, starvation, and all the natural barriers of the Kentucky wilderness, the pair finds trails, crosses rising streams, and fights for their lives against nature and censure of man. As Charity Baxter flees from her origins she is followed by both the worst and best of her past. Holding only an ancient Port-a-gee knife given to her by her grandmother of the mountains and reunited with the one great blessing from her dead father, she and her companion now are pushed into a small community to be tested by the colorful, yet rowdy citizens of a small Mississippi River crossing. With the growing strength of self-reliance and the great gift from her grandmother and father, Charity finds both her will and her heart tested as she attempts the final, dramatic drive to cross into Missouri Territory and Americas new West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499063493

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Spawned by the devil’s nightmare now alive in sunlight …

Racing under a gray-green canopy of budding white oaks, the girl bent over the horse’s neck. Occasionally, she looked over her shoulder, as if being pursued by the dark dream demons of hell.

Speaking encouragingly, she leaned so close enough to the sorrel’s ears that her light hair blended with the flying flaxen mane of her galloping mount. Breaking from the timber, the pair burst into a meadow dotted with early yellow-centered daisies. The clear air exploded with thousands of yellow butterflies rising like candle flames around the fleeing pair. However, with the whirl of the butterflies came the shouts and the voices of pursuit.

She’s up ahead. Catch’er. Don’t care what you do to her, but don’t injure that horse!

As though the violent voice had somehow damaged both his body and spirit, the sorrel gelding broke his earth-covering stride. He staggered, his near hindquarter seemed to drag behind his flashing forestride. Struggling to continue the run, he now fought against his rider as she frantically attempted to bring him up with tightening reins.

Whoa! Easy, easy. Stop. Please stop, Sun, she begged.

Slipping from his back with tears streaming from her eyes, she ran her hand over the obviously misplaced stifle joint of his left hind leg. A low moan rose from her throat.

Oh no, Sun. We hurt you again. I’m sorry, so sorry.

As she caressed and crooned to her injured mount, a yell broke from the forest behind them.

There’s the little bitch! Get her. Get her now, and get me that horse.

Facing the four armed men bearing down on her, the girl paused to pass her hand for the last time over the arched neck of the gelding before she broke for the trees on the far side of the clearing, now churning with both butterflies and the yells of her pursuers. The injured horse tried to follow, limping painfully on the injured back leg until one of the men leaned from the saddle and grabbed his dangling reins.

Whoa, fella, Josh Baxter said as he slipped from his horse to inspect the horse’s stifle joint.

He turned to see his uncle pound up and mounted on a muscled bay mare whose sixteen-hand height matched her rider’s obvious bulk and girth. Jasper Baxter’s red face was fairly glowing with sweat and indignation.

Ruined! Ruined! he said as he saw the sad state of the sorrel gelding that was now standing quietly, with left hind leg cocked to relieve the pain and his elegant head hanging low.

The finest horse in middle Kentucky ruined by that wretched snip of a runaway Melungeon brat. I’ll have her tied to a jack fence and lashed till the blood drips off her flanks, he raved.

Now, Uncle Jasper, she’s Lucien’s girl. She’s your niece, not some runaway slave. She’s kin, said Josh, obviously disturbed by this diatribe.

That bitch is the daughter of the Melungeon slut that whelped her. Don’t matter to me who she is. Don’t matter to me who the sire was. I want to see her crippled or dead. This racehorse was my fortune, and now look at him—not worth the bullet to put him out of his misery.

No, the older man continued, I’ll have Ms. Mullins, and she’ll pay for her trashy mother and her own thieving ways. Come on, boys, he motioned to two other nephews. Let’s get her.

As an afterthought, he turned to Josh with a sneer.

Since you’re so gentle hearted, I’ll leave you here to dispose of this pitiful, ruined beast. Nope, he’s hardly worth the lead to put him down now, he growled as he led the way to the far side of the meadow on foot.

Josh looked at the lowered head of the injured horse and shook his own.

You were a beauty, he said, and so is my cousin. Doesn’t seem right to have to end all over a pulled stifle, but I guess you’ll never race again.

He went to his mount and removed the musket from the scabbard with his eyes still on the once-valued animal. Uncle Jasper always got what he wanted, but he couldn’t decide which was more horrible—killing a beautiful, courageous horse or running a poor, scared relation into the ground to gore and maim her.

Won’t leave you here in the meadow for buzzards to find right away, he spoke to the gelding as he gathered the reins to lead the limping animal to the western edge of the woods. It’s darker in the woods—easier to give up life where the sun’s not so bright and the flowers don’t grow.

In the northern edge of the woods, the girl huddled under the drooping cover of a hundred-year-old cedar frozen like a bobwhite quail waiting to be flushed by the hunter. She knew she should be running, running just as fast as her fourteen summer’s legs could carry her, but she remained looking at the spot that had swallowed up the last limping glimpse of the golden horse she knew as Sun of Shenandoah.

She waited … her heartbeat so loud it sounded like the staccato of gunshots, a horrific sound of death and darkness. She stared in total disbelief at a cottontail that had found shelter under the same deep green boughs. Surely, the rabbit should be running, racing away from the cannonade of her heart. However, the rabbit, like all hunted creatures, haunted by the sudden end of their existence remained frozen, ears cocked for the slightest discernible sound.

Off to her left, the girl could hear the distant thrashing of horses and the occasional oath as the posse of three searched the undergrowth. Just as the sound of the one life-ending shot could reach her ears and be registered by her frantic brain, the cottontail bolted—bolted from the western woods back across the clearing.

Sobbing, unable to control her guilt and sorrow, the girl doubled over.

The last. He’s last. Now I’m alone, she moaned.

Her horse was gone; her escape blocked by her uncle and his two toadie nephews, Jediah and Matthew, cousins of blood, but not of heart. Then again, she was the product of a long line of survivors, both Celtic on her father’s side and Melungeon on her mother’s. Yes, the abhorred and disdained Melungeon blood Uncle Jasper so hated—untraceable yet undaunted by the wildness of the New World was part of her heritage. Even Maw Maw, her maternal grandmother, had no idea where her people of the mountains came from. Some said they are descendants of the lost Roanoke Colony mixed with Indian blood, but Maw Maw had passed on to Charity, along with an ancient curved knife with a richly carved ivory blade, the tradition of being descendants of Portuguese sailors—Port-a-gee her Maw Maw said—sailors who were shipwrecked on the eastern shores of the Atlantic long before the Spanish, French, English, and Irish had claimed the land for their own.

Why these mountain people spoke English and worshipped the same Christ of the Catholics and Protestants of most of the New World remained a very complex problem. Maybe it was so. Maybe the blood for which her uncle had so much disdain was older than even her father’s line that Uncle Jasper traced back through three generations into the new land to an adventuresome Scot/Irish sailor that had sailed with British pirateers late in the 1600s. Maw Maw said the Melungeons had been in the mountains of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky long before other whites arrived with their horses, guns, and land-grabbing ways.

The Melungeons had lived at peace with the Native Americans, sometimes intermarrying, but more often living their simple life of nonviolence in compatibility with their nomadic, darker-skinned neighbors sharing the crops they raised with the passing tribes and gathering a harvest of friendship and acceptance.

Now that survivor’s blood spoke. Move away from the sounds of pursuit, quietly, silently move and move now. Pulling her faded blue calico skirt, Charity crept from the shelter of the drooping cedar, moving in the opposite direction taken by the bolting cottontail. She turned her head to catch the sound behind her in the underbrush and heard Matthew and Jediah, sons of the fourth Baxter brother, Herschel, call to each other through the dense foliage.

Do ya see her, Matt?

Nah, but there sure is plenty of deer sign. We oughta be hunting for venison stead of some silly girl cousin.

However, Charity did not hear the voice or tread of Uncle Jasper who must have tied his horse to work through the entrapping branches and briars of the undergrowth. This worried her. Jasper Baxter was a huge man for the time, standing almost six feet tall and weighing as much as a full-grown boar hog. His size, though, was deceptive. His hunting and tracking skills were well-known in Middle Kentucky. He rarely waited in ambush for deer or bear when he hunted but could track them silently to their sleeping ground and shoot them there. Where was Uncle Jasper?

Charity’s bare feet moved silently through the damp, rotting leaves of last year’s summer as she ducked under the limbs of hickory and sassafras, keeping her back to the sound of her cousins while listening intently for another in the overgrown woods. If it had been July, she might have been safe. The verdant vexations of midsummer might have allowed her simply to go to ground and hide, but the new leaves of early April left gaps in the foliage that might show a glimpse of blue, a flash of bare arm, or a blaze of light hair.

Matt’s and Jediah’s voices were fading, and Charity’s heart beat a little slower. However, she still moved cautiously for she never doubted that if caught, her uncle intended for her to die. Surely, he would kill her, not for the theft of a horse because everyone knew that Sun should have belonged to her. The offspring of her father’s valued thoroughbred racing mare, Blazer, and a Virginia stallion known for his endurance, Sun was the product of her father’s dream of a native Middle Kentucky horse that would make his name in breeding.

Lucien Baxter had not lived to see this dream to fruition. Helping Jasper clear the land for a new-ground corn, he had been killed when a fifty-foot red oak Jasper was chopping fell the wrong way, crushing her father beneath its weight. No one had witnessed the accident except Jasper Baxter, and it was only in the last few months that Charity had begun to wonder if he had called to her father a warning as the tree began first to vibrate, then topple toward him, or was the forest as silent that day as it was this spring day as Charity slipped between trees.

It was also just in the last few months that Uncle Jasper began to pay attention to his niece who had become his ward upon her father’s death in the forest and her mother’s death back in the mountains. This was attention that was both disturbing and frightening to a young girl whose mother had died of the coughing disease soon after her father’s death when she herself was nine.

Come sit on my lap, Uncle Jasper would say when no one else was in the parlor late in the evening. Yer uncle just wants a minute of your time, young lady.

Sitting on his lap was not a terrible thing to Charity at first, but as time passed, she noticed how he liked to move his hands over her arms and legs, always moving closer and closer to her body. His breath would be coming faster, and as always, when Uncle Jasper became upset or excited, she would hear his teeth begin to grind. The first time this behavior disturbed Charity, she had simply jumped down saying, Oh, I think I hear Aunt Melissa calling.

Aunt Melissa was no aunt, but the aging black slave that did for Mr. Baxter and his household. Big, dark, and unsmiling, Aunt Melissa was the only person that Uncle Jasper seemed, if not to fear, at least to respect. He well should. She prepared every bite of food he ate and crept silently through his house as he napped after dinner. Somehow Charity knew he would not like Aunt Melissa or anyone else to hear his quick breaths and hear his teeth grind as he held his ward and niece on his lap.

However, when Aunt Melissa did not appear on that occasion, Uncle Jasper had given Charity a straight look that said, I’m on to you, girl. After that, he held her so tightly that Charity merely had to sit, trying not to pay attention to his harsh breathing or his red face above her.

This had been bad enough, but this spring, as the days lengthened and the first tree frogs began their spring song, Uncle Jasper had taken to slipping into her room as she slept. After the first time she had awakened to find his hulking form above her bed, she had slept little and often woke with a start at the sound of footsteps in the night dark house.

A week ago, she had awakened in the midst of a moonless night to the sound of deep breathing above her bed. Sitting up in alarm, she felt a heavy hand on her shoulder.

Be quiet. It’s just your Uncle Jasper, he whispered. I just wanted to see if you were sleeping. He did not turn to go. Instead, he sat on the side of her bed and began to run his hand over her arms first and then down her body.

The loss of her mother at an early age put Charity at a disadvantage. No mature woman had ever explained the ways of men and women to her. Her only knowledge came from observations on the farm, but even if this was the way humans began such things, something innately told her this was wrong. It was her body, and he was her uncle.

Even now, as her young breasts had begun to appear, they had been often painful and sometimes itchy, so she wanted to rub them against a tree. Then again, she knew that girls changed to women in certain ways. Luckily, Aunt Melissa had known when she had her first monthly bleeding and taught her to sew rags to keep that surprising new revelation from showing openly.

Hold still, the voice was raspier now, and she began to hear the grinding of clenched teeth.

Please, no, she begged as she tried to scoot back across the bed from him.

A strong hand went over her mouth, and another pulled at the simple cotton nightshirt she wore. Charity panicked and began to twist and claw like a wildcat caught in the jaws of a steel trap, then a stunning blow to her head left her senseless and confused. When the roaring in her head subsided and her eyes began to focus once more, she heard footsteps at the door and saw the flicker light of a candle.

Is something wrong? I thought I heard someone cry out, said the deep, resonant voice of Aunt Melissa.

Get that light out of my eyes, woman, snarled Uncle Jasper. I was checking on the girl too. She must have cried out from a bad dream. You go back to your bed in the kitchen. However, Aunt Melissa advanced on Uncle Jasper, her eyes never leaving the white man’s face.

Yes, bad dreams. There are many things in this life that can bring on bad dreams. She stood motionless, holding Uncle Jasper locked with her steady gaze. Then abruptly and silently, she turned and was gone. Uncle Jasper sighed.

Don’t you ever say nothing about tonight, you hear? he growled. If’n you so much as whisper to one other mortal, I’ll see you buried by your pa. Then he was gone.

Charity never doubted that he had meant every word of his threat. In the days to come, he always seemed to be watching her. If she spent too long helping Aunt Melissa in the kitchen or in the garden hoeing lettuce and onions or planting sweet corn, he appeared—never too close, just where he could catch her eyes with his flat gray stare.

He avoided Aunt Melissa as much as possible. Something in the way she looked at him seemed to make him uneasy. He began to take meals away from home, first at a neighbor’s and then at the tavern in Columbia. However, when he was home that flat stare seemed to light on neither dog, horse, nor any other human except Charity.

She knew he was afraid she would talk. Then again, what would she say, and to whom would she say it? She had no words for what had happened in the darkened bedroom. Had he harmed her? Could she be with child by her own uncle?

Charity had no exact idea of what it took to make a baby, but he had pulled at her clothes and touched her in places that she felt were hers alone. At best, she knew it felt bad—wrong—something done in the dark—because it could not stand the light of day. Was it his fault, or had she unknowingly done something that made him act that way?

She mulled all this over as she went about her tasks. She wanted to find a way to tell him that she would gladly promise never to mention that night or the other nights on his lap to a living soul, if he would just promise that they would never happen again, but he gave her no chance to talk, just stared—a promise more real than all the screamed threats of a multitude.

Somehow she sensed that he would do anyway to prevent her speaking of, and having such behavior being known about him. Therefore, it must be a wrong in him. Uncle Jasper could abide no wrongs. He was the head elder of the strict Presbyterian Church and hosted its bi-monthly meetings in his own home. Now he was intent on running for the state legislature. He spent time away from the farm and fields, traveling around the countryside to political meetings, country fairs, and horse races and shaking hands and talking in his deep, sonorous voice about issues that touched the pioneer and farming settlement now growing in Middle Kentucky.

In meetings, he condemned the no-goods that drank too much home brew and failed to provide for their families. He detested high-spirited manners and loose ways and lectured long and hard about young girls that crimped their hair with hot irons and wore smocks too loose at the neck and short in the skirt. Women came in for a large measure of his censure—women who smoked a pipe, women who didn’t stand behind their man’s chair to serve him at a meal, women who spoke up in meeting when they should have remained silent and listened to the word of God revealed through men. Women—women in general with their provocative bodies and frivolous laughter—seemed to make him incensed.

Maybe this was the reason Jasper Baxter had never married. No woman could meet his standards. Surely, if had a wife, Charity would have someone to turn to now. . . someone she could have told the truth of what happened when the sun went down and the sky grew dark over Jasper Baxter’s farm, as it had last night.

Aunt Melissa had saved her once. Charity could not tell if the slave believed Uncle Jasper’s story of a bad dream or not. Even if she did not, she was powerless to protect anyone. She had not been able to protect her own sons, three of them, when Uncle Jasper decided he needed cash more than extra mouths to feed.

Charity remembered the youngest of Aunt Melissa’s babies well. He was called Scooter because he never learned to crawl but scooted around the kitchen floor by sitting upright and bouncing on his plump, round buttocks. When Scooter finally learned to walk, he followed Charity around the house and yard as she fed the poultry and weeded the garden.

He often tried to help by pulling weeds from the vegetable patch, but as often, he pulled up a sprouting corn or a melon plant from Mr. Baxter’s prize patch. Finally, Charity had set him on a quilt rag with a pine cone and left him to sing in his high, pure tone senseless, rhythmless songs of childhood.

It was early fall when the trader had come through. By now, Scooter was walking around the house and talking as he named each dog, chair, and person. The trader was selling combs, ribbons, and geegaws and filling orders for clients across the state in need of horses, hides, or slaves. Uncle Jasper had traded for a bright red ribbon for Charity’s blonde hair and a length of blue calico for Aunt Melissa a dress. Charity had immediately played the starch out of the ribbon, tying and retying the red length with pleasure until she noticed the trader lift Scooter onto the back of his ratty wagon.

Yep, Mrs. Jackson over in Harrodsburg will be pleased with this here, nigra. She’s been yearning for a young’n to learn to do for her around the house, he said.

No! You can’t take Scooter, Charity had shouted. He belongs to Aunt Melissa.

The trader had laughed and spat a wad of Kentucky Wonder tobaccer at Charity’s bare toes.

Nigras don’t belong to their mammys, no more than foals belong to the mare, he laughed as he climbed on the seat of the rickety wagon. Charity ran to Uncle Jasper.

Stop him! He can’t take Scooter.

Shut up, girl, and get in the house, Uncle Jasper growled as he gave a rough shove toward the door.

Standing under the lintel, Charity had snuffled and watched Uncle Jasper and Aunt Melissa’s backs as they looked after the departing wagon. Aunt Melissa did not sob or raise her hand in farewell to the last of her children, but as she turned back to the house, she threw the blue calico into the dirt at Uncle Jasper’s feet.

Charity had run to the woods behind the garden and sobbed until she was exhausted. She crumpled the red ribbon, dug a hole, and buried it in the soft loam. The rejected calico became the hated dress she was wearing now—a reminder of possessions. A small black boy or even a white man’s niece did not own even themselves as Uncle Jasper had proved to Charity just last night.

CHAPTER 2

Charity had been achingly tired with