The Founder's Compact: A North Haven Story

Abigail Russet was not supposed to be awake when the lanterns crossed the field.

The fire had burned down to coals, and the cold in the loft woke her. She climbed down in her stocking feet for a drink from the water pail and broke the film of ice on the dipper with her thumb. She was turning back to the ladder when light moved across the east window.

She went to the glass and rubbed a clear spot in the frost with the side of her fist. It was past midnight. A full moon hung low over the harbor, casting its light across the frozen lake.

Four lanterns moved in a line from the Tyndale fence toward the shore. The men carrying them pulled the hand sledge Obadiah Tyndale had built for hauling ice blocks and cordwood, with oak runners shod in strap iron and a rope drawbar so two men could pull it at once.

She knew her father by his walk. Isaac Russet had dragged his left foot since he fell from the barn roof in October, and his lantern dipped each time that foot came down. The man in front of him stood a head taller than the rest. He held his lantern out at arm's length, the way he always did, and his white beard showed against his dark coat. That was Cornelius Boderich. She guessed the other two by their size. Obadiah Tyndale was broad through the shoulders, and Josiah Bardo was thin and walked with his head down.

What are the three of them doing out with Pa at this time of the morning?

Something long lay on the sledge under a canvas tarp. Rope held it down in three places.

Abby was fourteen in the winter of 1869 and tall for her age, with her grandmother's gray eyes and her father's red-brown hair in one braid down the middle of her back. She lifted her mother's gray shawl from its peg, shrugged into her coat, and pulled on her brother Wesley's boots. At the door she eased the latch up with her thumb so it wouldn't click.

When she opened the door, the cold stung her face like a hundred needles. She kept low and followed the rail fence her father had split the first summer they were on the island, and laid zigzag from the house to the cedars. Snow had drifted along the bottom rails up to her knees.

At the end of the fence the cedars grew thick along the bank down to the water's edge. The snow under them was shallow and didn't squeak when she walked on it. When she reached the last tree, the men had stopped on the harbor ice about forty yards out.

Obadiah swung an axe. The sound of each stroke hitting the ice echoed across the quiet of the snow-covered field. The men took turns, all but Josiah. He held his lantern up for the others and kept his right hand inside his coat.

When they finished chopping through the ice, they cut the ropes securing the covered load on the sledge. Her father and Obadiah lifted the long thing and slid it toward the water. It stuck at the edge, and Cornelius set his boot against it and pushed. The canvas caught on the ice and pulled back, and Abby saw a hand, with a gold ring on the smallest finger. Then it went under.

She put her mitten over her mouth. She had seen that ring every night for a month.

Cornelius took off his hat, and his voice carried in the stillness.

"We four stand together on this. If anyone asks, he set out on foot for the mainland Tuesday at first light. No man breaks it or tells his wife."

"Agreed," Obadiah said.

Josiah said it next. Her father said it last, so low she almost missed it. They kicked broken ice over the hole and walked back toward their farms.

Abby waited until her toes were numb inside the big boots. Then she walked out on the ice. Beside the hole, pressed into the snow where the sledge had stood, was something small and round. It was a brass pocket compass with a hinged lid, and someone had scratched the letters H.Q. into the lid.

She snatched up the compass and ran home with it clenched tight in her fist. Her father's boots stood by the stove, wet to the ankle. Without a sound, she removed the boots and hung her mother’s gray shawl back on the peg. Then she climbed to the loft and burrowed under the quilts. She shook for a long time, and not from the cold. She was still awake when the rooster crowed.

Horace Quill had come on the last schooner in November to survey the four claims for the Land Office in Traverse City. He boarded with the Tyndales while he was there. One night over pie he told her father, with a smile, that the Russet south line ran two chains into the Tyndale field. All through that supper he turned the gold ring on his smallest finger around and around with his thumb, and Abby watched it because she didn't want to look at his face. He was an unpleasant man with a stubble beard, and he always wore the same brown wool suit, with a watch chain dangling from his vest pocket.

At breakfast, her mother set a plate of fried mush in front of her. Wesley kicked her under the table and grinned, and she didn't kick him back.

"Sarah Tyndale came by yesterday," Mercy Russet said. "Mr. Quill left Tuesday morning. He said he was going to walk the ice to the mainland."

"That's eleven miles," Abby said. "The ice isn't good past the point. Pa said so last week."

"He's a grown man."

Her mother turned back to the stove, a strip of flannel tied around her left wrist. Her father ate without looking up. When he was done, he rose and went out to the barn without a word.

"What happened to your wrist?" Abby said.

"I burned it on the kettle. Take the crock back to Sarah Tyndale. She's been asking for it."

The Tyndale farm sat a quarter mile east on the wagon tracks that ran the length of the island. She walked it with the crock in her arms and kept her eyes off the harbor ice.

Jonah Tyndale was splitting kindling in the yard. He was sixteen, with big hands and a neck that had grown faster than the rest of him.

"Ma's lying down," he said. "Pa burned the mattress out of the spare room this morning. He said it had lice."

Abby set the crock on the chopping block. "Did Mr. Quill take all his things?"

Jonah glanced back at the house, and then led her into the barn. He climbed the ladder to the loft above the stalls, where the Tyndales stored their winter hay, and came down holding a book bound in black oilcloth.

"I took it off his table a week ago," he said. "I can't make out his hand. Now he's gone, and Pa's burning things and carrying his bag off to the woods. If Pa finds this on me, he'll know I was in Quill’s room." He held it out. "You read better than anybody. You tell me what's in it."

After pages of survey figures came a letter, crossed out and copied over twice.

To Mr. R. Latham, Bay Timber Company, Saginaw.

The four claimants on the island have not completed their filings. Russet and Tyndale lack final affidavits. Bardo's entry was never recorded. Boderich holds the landing by purchase, but his deed is defective. On my return, I will enter Sections 12 through 15 in the Company's name. The families can be removed in spring. I will expect the sum we discussed.

Below it were four lines.

O.T. will not sign. J.B. will not sign. I.R. will not sign. M.R. to be persuaded.

Abby read it twice. M.R. meant her mother.

"What does it say?" Jonah said.

"He was going to steal our land, all four farms and the landing." She closed the book. "Did you hear anything Monday night?"

"Pa told him to get out of the house. Tuesday he was gone, but his valise was still in his room."

She buttoned the ledger inside her coat. She didn't tell Jonah about the ice. At home she hid it under her mattress in the loft before her mother could ask what took her so long.

After dinner, she was sitting on the back step shelling dried beans into a pan when Josiah Bardo pulled his sledge up to the Russet barn to borrow a maul. His right hand was wrapped in a rag.

She heard him tell her father, "Cut it on the bucksaw, bled like a stuck pig."

Her father went into the barn for the maul. Josiah stood in the yard and waited. He was a narrow man with a long jaw and a beard cut close, and his eyes were pale blue. He didn't smile or nod. He kept looking at her, and Abby kept her eyes on the beans until her father came back and Josiah drove away.

When he was gone, she went to the barn. Her father's workbench stood against the north wall with the anvil beside it. The floor there was dirt, and someone had spread clean sand over it in a patch about the size of a bed. Her father kept that corner swept. He had never spread sand there before.

Kneeling, she pushed the sand aside with her fingers. The dirt underneath was dark and hard. A flake came up under her fingernail, and it was brown. Close to the foot of the anvil, she found a gray horn button with four holes.

Abby knew that button. Her mother's everyday dress was gray wool with six horn buttons down the front, and Abby had helped her set every one. She put the button in her pocket. She put the sand back as close to the way she found it as she could.

The next morning, after chores, she went back down to the harbor. The hole had frozen over. Only a rough white patch in the gray ice showed where it had been.

She took out the compass and opened it. The needle swung and settled.

"That's not yours."

She didn't hear his approach, and his voice startled her so badly she almost dropped the compass. Josiah Bardo walked out from the cedars and stopped an arm's length away. He held out his left hand. "Give it here."

She gave it to him. He shut the lid and put it in his coat pocket.

"You were at the trees Tuesday night," he said. "I saw your mother's gray shawl."

Abby's mouth went dry.

"Listen to me. Don't tell anyone what you saw, not the Tyndale boy and not the preacher when he comes over in the spring. If the county sheriff hears one word of this, four men hang in Cheboygan, and the farms go to a timber company in Saginaw. Your mother and brother end up on the poor farm. And if you're lucky, you'll scrub floors in some rich man's kitchen until you're old." He waited. "Do you understand me?"

"I understand."

Then he walked back to the cedars with his right hand still inside his coat.

Abby stood on the ice until her legs stopped shaking. Then she went home and around to the cellar door. Her mother was in the root cellar sorting potatoes. The cellar was cool and smelled of earth and apples. Mercy Russet was a small woman with her brown hair pinned up tight in a bun.

Abby took the button from her pocket and held it out.

Her mother set down the potato and undid the top of her dress. The fourth button from the collar was gone, and a loose thread hung where it had been.

"Where did you find it?"

"Under the sand by the anvil."

Her mother sat down on an upturned bucket and didn't speak right away. A floorboard creaked overhead, and they both looked up. Abby waited.

"Your father went to Josiah's Tuesday morning to help with a sick cow," her mother said at last. "He took Wesley. I was alone. Mr. Quill came in the barn while I was milking. He said he could fix the claim or give the land to men in Saginaw, and it was up to me which. He said your father had already refused, and now it was my turn." She untied the flannel on her wrist. The skin was purple in the shape of fingers. "He grabbed me, and when I pulled away, he tore the button off. He shoved me back against the bench. The ice spud was leaning there. I don't remember picking it up."

"Did he fall?"

"He hit his head on the anvil going down. He didn't get up." Her mother retied the flannel. It took her two tries. "I sat in the straw until your father came home."

"Why not tell the sheriff what he did?"

"The sheriff in Cheboygan drinks with the timber men, and nobody saw it but me. If Horace Quill walked off on the ice, nobody comes asking until spring, and by then the claims are filed right. If he died in our barn, we lose the farm, and I go to prison, maybe the gallows."

Abby thought about Quill at the supper table, turning his ring. She wasn't sorry he was under the ice, and that scared her.

"I have his book," she said. "It's under my mattress."

Her father was at the kitchen table mending harness when they came in with it. Isaac Russet was a quiet man with a weathered face and big scarred hands. Her mother set the ledger in front of him and told him what Abby knew. When she finished, he put down the awl.

"Josiah talked to you on the ice," he said.

Abby told him about the sheriff and the poor farm and the rich man's kitchen. Her father's jaw moved, but he let her finish.

"He shouldn't have frightened you," he said. "He's scared. So am I." He turned the ledger over in his hands. "Nobody set out to do murder, Abby. Your mother defended herself. What we did after, we did to keep this family on this land. If you want to go to the Reverend in spring and tell him, I won't stop you. I'll tell him myself it was my doing and nobody else's."

She looked at her mother. Mercy Russet stood by the stove with her arms folded and her wrist wrapped in flannel. She didn't say a word.

"My lips are sealed," Abby said.

Her father let out a breath. He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. Then he opened the stove door and fed the ledger into the fire a few pages at a time.

Cornelius Boderich came to the Russet farm three days before Christmas. He sat in the kitchen in his buffalo coat, with frost in his beard and his hat on his knee. Abby sat by the window with her mending and listened.

"Josiah told me about the girl," Cornelius said. "Come March, the four of us take the first boat to Traverse City. We file the affidavits and pay what's owed. I'll cover Josiah's share, since his entry was never recorded. If a man from the Land Office asks after Quill, we tell him Quill set out on the ice."

"Abby wondered about Josiah's hand," her father said.

"He cut it on his bucksaw Monday, as he told you. He kept it in his coat so he wouldn't bleed on the snow."

"And after March?" her father said.

"After that we look after each other. The four of us decide who settles here, and we handle island trouble ourselves." Cornelius looked at Abby. "We'll need somebody with a fair hand to keep the minutes. My eyes are going."

"She'll do it," her father said.

Cornelius took a ledger from inside his coat and set it on the table. It was new, with a black oilcloth cover, the same kind Quill had carried. Abby wrote what he told her: the date, December 22, 1869, the names of the four men, and that they had met to discuss their claims. He didn't tell her to write anything about Horace Quill.

Some nights she heard the ice groan out toward the point and thought about what was under it. Her mother's wrist healed, and she sewed the horn button back on her gray dress.

On the ninth of April the first boat came in to the landing. A clerk from the Land Office stepped off with a leather case under his arm and asked Cornelius whether anyone had seen Horace Quill. Cornelius told him Quill had set out across the ice in December, meaning to reach the mainland. The clerk wrote it down and left on the same boat that afternoon.

A week later the four men took that boat to Traverse City. When they came home, her father found her at the landing and nodded once, and she knew the claims were filed. The patents came the next winter, four of them, each with a red seal.

She kept the minutes of the four families for eleven years. None of the entries mentioned Horace Quill. On the last evening of April, after the ice was gone out of the harbor, Abby walked down to the cedars alone. She stood at the last tree, where she had stood that night in December. The water was dark green and calm. Out past the point, a loon called, and another answered it. She thought about the gold ring down there in the cold.