The Third Life Of Old Benny Reed

      "Get away!" shouts the old man huddled under a rock overhang on the western slope of Cave Mountain. "Let's go home," James quietly answers while stooping into the dark maw of Benjamin's secret cave.  "You all don't want what I have," Benjamin groans as a raven croaks from the steep hillside above them. "Alicy done broke out in chicken pox on the way to Little Rock," counters James reaching a hand down to his father. "We'll all have hallow's eve at home."      Thinking he was dying anyway, Benjamin Reed had waited for a chance to do so alone. A perfect opportunity arose when his catching of the pox coincided with a family trip for the first fall festival at the newly completed Arkansas State House. After the rest were gone, he'd climbed on his young pack horse with a blanket and a horn flask containing his insurance policy, the toxic heads and tails from a moonshine run.      Old Benny had found the small ca...

     "I just don't get it," begins a shaky James from his seat on a moss-covered boulder, the saffron-colored leaves of a cottonwood crinkling above his head in the fall breeze. "Why bust the pot when it's half full?" "Never...you...mind," coughs Benjamin levering the blade from a wide gash in the copper still and swinging again.  "Keeping the heads and draining the rest is no way to make money for old rope," the son continues, regaining composure after his father takes a second swing.  "Best...to stick...to one's knitting," Benny responds as he heeds his own advice and tears open the rest of the copper pot.     The old man had needed to keep some distance from his immovable son blocking the still. He knew that the itchy red spots emerging on his arms and under his beard were just the beginning. Smallpox could take down a previously unexposed settler family as easily as a Native American one.         Just before Benjamin thr...

       "Hold your horses," shouts James Reed in front of the still in the chill of a late October morning up in the back hollow.  "You...ain't...seen...the evil," his father coughs, his right hand smoothly lifting a hatchet even as his speech is interrupted by hacking.      Benjamin Reed had felt triply ill after his visit to the Cane Hill trading post. Some of the Cherokee risking their lives for a sip of whiskey had been sickening enough. It was made worse by the realization that back country distillers like himself had been preying on hopelessness. Then there was the cough that had now brought out sores in his mouth and throat.       Having lived his entire life on the remote frontiers of western Virginia and mountainous Kentucky, Benjamin hadn't been exposed to all of the European diseases that had rampaged through the eastern Native American communities. Being immune-naive to Orthopox and other viruses meant that the illn...

       "Woa Marty," Benjamin commands his favorite quarter horse with a little pull on the reins as they approach the spinning mill wheel of the Cane Hill trading post. "What in tarnation?" "Soldiers taking them dirty Indians to Oklahoma," a teenager calls up in the steady rain as he offers to hobble the sorrel gelding. "You'd be a might worse off herded five-hundred miles," Benny mumbles as he slips in the mud while swinging off the young horse named for President Martin Van Buren.  "Still sir," the boy calls back leading the skittish animal to a long hitching post beside a nibbled down canebrake on the high prairie of the Springfield plateau west of the Ozarks. "Cherokee don't belong out here."      That was precisely the problem for the eastern tribes being displaced west since the Indian Removal Act of 1830 - not belonging anywhere. Van Buren had been elected in 1836 and continued the removal policies of his Democr...

       "Damnedest thing up to Cave Mountain last night," proclaims a wrinkled man from a rocking chair on the front porch of an old cabin sinking into the hillside.  "You don't say," Benjamin prods as he gingerly slips back into a neighboring chair and passes the powder horn. "Plumb near tuckered out when I gets to the crag," Whitaker continues, uncorking the makeshift flask and taking a slug. "Looked down and seed a herd shuffling along the Military Road." "Whewee, ain't seen a line of buffalo in many a year," Benny marvels, pulling the strap back from the older man and tipping back his own shot.    Benjamin Reed had seen many changes in the four years he'd been in Arkansas. A rapid influx of settlers from the east along with their livestock and horses had driven the formerly vast bison herds farther west. Trading posts had sprouted along all the trails for the farming, hunting, and household needs of the newcomers. Longhor...

       " Morning rounds, Pop?" queries James Reed from the top of the stairs as his father shuffles for the door of their log house nestled into a cool hollow on the southern slope of the Boston Mountains.  "You know what they say about the early bird," Benjamin calls back in the orange glow from the hearth where he had just stoked the fire against the chill of an autumn morning. "You got that worm long ago," the son laughs as he tosses a walking stick to the old man.       The Reeds had settled onto an ideal eighty acres four years ago upon emerging from the Ozarks on the Old Southwest Trail. The lower acreage of short-grass prairie along a clear creek lined by cottonwoods would grow the corn they needed for animals and food, with a little left over for the family recipe. The sloped back forty were graced by an oak and hickory forest that would feed the fires for James's smithy and Benjamin's still.       The father was n...