he turned to the door she resumed her seat, balanced her great Bible on her own knees and continued reading, her lips moving silently. As Speed stepped into the chilly April evening he formed a memory of her which he held from that time forward. It was of a slight and sharp-featured woman reading under the soft yellow glow of an oil lamp about a man bringing heaven to earth. Speed had no intention of being a preacher, but there was something in his aunt’s manner that suggested a higher calling for him, something he could not articulate, but nonetheless a compelling prospect. It crossed his mind that as he opened his Bible in the ensuing years he might think of the promise she held out for him.
Speed’s ambitions were to be a farmer as his father had been before him. But the Missouri part was right. Everybody was going to Missouri now. People said it was God’s country where the land was rich and free for the taking. When his mother hinted they might join the exodus from these hills to the far land, Speed could dream of little else. Missouri was a golden land where he could farm for his mother, free of all that bound them down in Kentucky. He didn’t quite see how a bear could eat with his cows, but he accepted the notion that the land of Missouri could be God’s holy mountain where all God’s creatures lived in peace.
On the way back to the cabin, Speed passed by his father’s tombstone in the graveyard of the Christian Church of Whitley Courthouse as he had all of the years of his boyhood. Speed had a vision of his father as a man without a face but with a voice who would someday come up behind him, put a hand on his shoulder and say, “Son, you did real good.” Speed’s mother never talked about his father. On the few occasions when she let the topic come up she would quickly dissolve into tears. One day when Speed was washing Aunt Ruth’s slates after school he complained to her about his mother’s closemouthed ways. The old lady looked at him with resignation in her steel gray eyes. “Your ma and my brother had something special, and Joycie’s never really adjusted. I think that’s what gives her that moody and restless way sometimes.” Speed was taken aback by his aunt’s frankness, but recognized his mother in what she was saying. Aunt Ruth took a deep breath and said, “Your pa never wanted to go off to the Creek wars back in 1812, and he didn’t have to. Governor Blount of Tennessee called for two armies, one in the East under a fellow named Cocke, and one in the West under Andrew Jackson. That’s the same fellow as is President now. But volunteering seemed like what men was doing, so he did it too.
“Well, he never liked the war once he got caught up in it. He said it was really a fight between two groups of Indians; it was none of the white man’s business. And then it turned out what Jackson really wanted was Indian land so he could shove all the Indians out of Georgia and Alabama. Your pa said what came out of war was never what they promised when you went in. And then he wasn’t quite right when he came back from that war. He couldn’t sleep, drank a lot, flew off the handle easy, and not two years after you was born he drowned in a ditch.” The old lady stood from her chair to look away from the boy. “Oh, he thought baby Speed was the sun, the moon, and the stars. I always wished he coulda seen taking care of himself woulda let him take care of you. Oh coulda, woulda, shoulda. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Tell you one thing though, that’s how you got your funny name. He liked two of the men he served under, a Captain Speed and a Captain Smith, so that’s how come you isn’t plain John Wilson, you is John Speed Smith Wilson.”
Speed’s reflections on his father’s legacy—a strange name, nineteen acres of bottom land, and a restless mother—ended when he threw open the cabin door to see his mother Joycie preparing their meager belongings for the upcoming journey. The single-room log cabin that Speed shared with his mother didn’t have furniture that would load into a wagon. The posts for the two beds were sunk into the dirt floor so that the beds probably would not have held together if they were uprooted. There were the pots and pans and the crockery and the mismatched collection of forks and spoons, of course, and they were in bundles mostly, although Joycie had a sturdy wooden box for her Sunday clothes and a goodbye quilt the ladies had stitched for her. Speed took the Bible from under his shirt and placed it in the folds of the quilt where it would be safe.
Speed was up several times that night, and even went out in the yard thinking it was morning when the rooster over at the McCurdy place crowed not long after midnight. He missed his dog, Buster, who should be coming from the cow shed, his tail wagging his whole hind end, but Buster had not returned from the woods one day last month and his mother had said he probably found someplace better. Speed didn’t question her, but the McCurdy boy teased him, saying Buster might have fallen in a well, been bit by a snake, or got the worst of a bear or a mountain lion.
It was cold, but in the dark of the moon the sky was resplendent. He sat on a bench outside their front door and imagined he could float up in the stars of the Milky Way. After the tail of the Big Dipper had dropped noticeably toward the ridge in the east and he was cold through and through, he gave a long sigh, wondered if the stars would be this good in Missouri, and crawled back into his bed carefully so that the frame would not creak and wake his mother. As he tried to get back to sleep he thought again about the move. They didn’t have any family in western Missouri. When people asked his mother about it, Joycie said, “I’d just like a new start for Speed.” This comment puzzled Speed. When people asked Joycie about friends and relations in Missouri, she said she didn’t have any but there was that preacher, the Rev. Hebert Spencer, in a town called Liberty in Clay County. It was near Kansas Town and the Platte Purchase, and he had said to the congregation the last day he preached in Whitley Courthouse that his door was open any time any of them wanted to come. But that didn’t feel quite right to Speed either. Was the preacher’s general invitation really enough for a woman to take her son and go all the way to Missouri?
There was one thing, a person actually, that Speed would be glad to leave behind, that snake-in-the-grass Buford Crawford. Why did his mother let Crawford visit so often? His ma made Speed go to Sunday evening worship by himself one night in January, and when he came back early, there was Mr. Crawford sitting by the fire. He was polite and all, but Speed knew he had a wife, a prissy lady named Annabelle Crawford who was always buying hats and things in Fergusson’s store when Speed went in for penny candy. How come she didn’t come along with Buford Crawford? After dark on a Sunday night was a strange time to be making social calls. Later, when he asked his mother, she said, “Well, Mr. Crawford’s buying our house, land, and livestock, so he had to come by and discuss the details.” Speed accepted the explanation when his mother said it, but after the McCurdy boy elbowed him in the ribs at Aunt Ruth’s school and said, “Guess your ma’s not too lonely lately, Speed,” he blushed in shame and started having daydreams about how he would humiliate Buford Crawford in front of the whole town. No, he considered as he drifted back to sleep, at least in Missouri they would be far from Buford Crawford.
When Speed heard the McCurdie’s cock crow again, he swung his feet to the floor for the third time that night. He looked over at his mother and saw that she was awake, staring at the rafters with a vacant look he had seen more often lately. When she didn’t object, he determined that he could get started. As he pulled his pants on he noticed that the right leg was ripped most of the way up to the knee. It was a small matter. His mom could darn it up. There would be lots of time on the flatboat for something like that. He pictured himself lying on the deck floating down a peaceful river with trees reflected in the water, his leg stretched out while his mother darned his pant leg. Even without a tear, his pants were well above his ankles, but that wasn’t unusual for youth on the Kentucky-Tennessee border.
Outside he saw by the position of the Big Dipper that there was another hour before the sky would lighten over the ridge that ran northeast. When he opened the door to the warm shed, Bullnose the ox gave a gentle grunt in greeting, perhaps sensing that this morning was special. Speed’s hand found the hay fork where he had left it the night before, and he felt for the last of the fodder from the shed floor. Today would be his last day with Bullnose, but he could feel the excitement of the journey extinguishing his regret at parting from the familiar bovine. His mother had sold Bullnose and the wagon to Buford Crawford, who had a buyer up in Corbin, Kentucky. She had got $9.50
