The high spirits of the morning were draining out of him. He felt his shirt, anxious now to leave. The shirt was dry and sweet-smelling but the breeches, made of thick homespun, were still wet. John was thinking of wearing them wet when a sudden pain gripped him deep in his belly.
It was the food, shoveled down into his shrunken stomach, too rich for a system which had been living at starvation level. “Ah God!” John exclaimed. The pang of it was like a sword thrust into his heart.
He doubled up and ran, bent double, for the door. He had scarcely cleared the house when he voided himself and felt his strength burst and then trickle from him. He clung to the doorframe with the pain of it and then felt his hands and even his fingertips grow weaker as the pain seized him in the belly and shook him, like a monster’s jaws.
“What a fool I am, what a fool…” he gasped between spasms. He thought he should have known that his body could not take the richness of such food after weeks of hunger. “What a fool… what a fool.”
The attack subsided and John half-stumbled and half-crawled back indoors. The stink was very bad but he could not get down to the river again to wash. He wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down before his fire. He realized that he would not be well enough to walk to the Hoberts”. He could not paddle his canoe one-handed. He could not dig his garden until his hand healed, and until this dreadful flux passed he would be fit for nothing. He would be hard-pressed to get down to the river and then he would be unable to walk up the hill again. He lay in the warmth of the fire, thanking God that he had thought to make it big this morning, and then closed his eyes. Every time the pain in his belly woke him with a spasm of hurt he turned his eye toward the door. If Suckahanna did not come again with food, with water, and with herbs to heal his burned hand, John thought he would probably die there, lying before a dying fire, bare-arsed, sick as a dog, and with one worthless and perhaps poisoned hand, and nothing fit to eat.
She did not come. When dusk fell John crawled to the door and pushed it shut, fearful of the night creatures. If the wolves came closer tonight it would be only the closed door that would keep them from him, and they could break that down with one spring. John himself did not have the strength to load his gun. He felt himself sweating into his cloak and then a wet sensation and a terrible stench which meant that he had emptied his bowels again. He could do nothing but lie in his own filth. Some time in the night he was sick on the floor, the vomit spreading in a pool around him, and then the smell of it made him sick again but he brought up only burning bile from his empty belly. He hauled himself up on one elbow and put more wood on the fire. Then he slept.
He woke in the morning, aching all over and shivering as if he had an ague. His hand was throbbing and the fingers were turning black. The house stank like a kennel and his cloak was stuck to his back by a dried pelt of excrement. He crawled to the door and opened it, kicking the cloak off his back as he went. His skin was raw and sore and his sight kept coming and going, the open door a wavering oblong of gold and green light.
There was a black earthenware pot of clean water on the doorstep, and another pot beside it of warm corn porridge. John heard his sore throat give a little sob of gratitude. He drew the pot of water toward him and sipped it cautiously. His stomach rumbled but the dreadful spasms of pain had passed. He pulled himself ’round to sit on the doorstep and lifted the pot of porridge to his lips. It was not porridge as he made it, in his dirty scorched cooking pot. It was light, faintly scented with herbs, as yellow as blancmange, flavored with something like saffron. John took a cautious sip and, despite a growl of hunger from his belly, made himself wait, sip water, pause. Then he took another.
Cautiously, eating so slowly that his breakfast took most of the morning, John ate the porridge from the pot and drank most of the water. An hour later, he found he could stand without fainting. Warily, he pulled himself up the doorframe and bundled his stinking cloak out of the house. A row of cleared and dug earth extended along the front of the house, from the point where John had thrown one blow of the pickax to where it ended, neatly squared, before the door. John looked at it and then rubbed his eyes as if it were a dream, a dream from fever and from his sickness.
No. It was real. She had come in the night and cleared a row of earth for him to plant his seeds. She had come and seen his sickness and realized that he had eaten too fast and put himself at the very door of death through his own greed and stupidity, and she had left him, not a little feast, but a thin meal of gruel and water, so that he would get well again. She was keeping him as if he were a child, choosing his food for him, doing his work for him. John felt ready to weep for gratitude that she was prepared to give him food, fetch his water, do his work. But he knew also a sharp, contrasting discomfort that she should see him so unmanned, that she had seen he could do nothing in this new land, not even survive.
“Suckahanna?” he whispered.
Still there was no reply, just the calling of birds, and the quacking of ducks in the river.
John gathered his foul cloak and hobbled down to the river to soak it in his washing place, and lowered himself into the cold water to try to get clean. Again he labored up the slight slope to his house, lugging the wet cloth, his feet tender on the stones of his field. His hand was sore, his head thudding, his stomach quiveringly tender. “I cannot survive here,” John said as he reached his door after a long, arduous struggle up the little hill. “I must find a way to get downriver to Bertram, I will die here.”
He wondered for a moment if he should wait for her, if he were to lie before the fire whether she might come and live with him, as they had planned. But he was warned by the cautious way she had approached him. He could not count on her to rescue him. He must help himself. “I shall go downriver to Bertram,” he said. “If she wants to come to me she will know how to find me there.”
His breeches and his shirt at least were clean and dry. It took him a long time to pull them on. His boots went on with a struggle which left him panting for breath, and he bent over to ease the swimming of his head. He did not take his gun for he could not load it nor keep the fuse lit in the canoe. There was nothing else that he could carry. This new country which he had been certain would make him rich had made him poorer than a pauper. All he could carry were the clothes that he stood up in, all he could manage to do was to stagger like a drunkard down the hill to where the canoe was pulled up, out of reach of the tide.
He thought for a little while that he would never get it down the small beach and into the deep water. He pushed for a while and it moved no more than an inch. Then he had to rest, and then he had to push again. It was a process that took most of his strength and courage. When the canoe finally rocked in the water he could hardly find the energy to climb in. He thought that his weight had grounded it, but when he took the paddle in his one good hand he managed to lift the weight a little and the canoe slid into the middle of the river into the deeper water.
The tide was on the ebb and the current of the river was flowing seaward. The canoe picked up speed. John tried to use the paddle to steer it closer to the bank but with one hand he could not control it. He thrust the paddle into the water and the canoe spun around it; in a second he would be swamped and the canoe would sink. He made one desperate shove, pointed it downriver, and then clung to the side as it bucked and weaved in the fast current, shaking as it tumbled in the white water. John looked at the bank which seemed to be tearing past him. Nothing seemed familiar though he and Bertram had watched carefully, pointing out landmarks, so that he would be able to make this journey, so Bertram would know when he was nearing John’s headright. He thought he recognized a tall single pine with its roots extending deep into the water, and he dug the paddle in again, trying to turn the canoe toward the shore. The current snatched the paddle, John lunged to grab it back, and then the paddle was flicked like kindling from his hand and the canoe was turning and turning in the dizzying flood and John could neither steer it nor control it, nor do anything but duck down on the wet floor of the canoe and give himself up for lost.