3stalwarts (16 page)

He had not, however, taken into account the childish streak in Christian Reall. The little man led the chase to the hut to get the first brand. His entry, with the flood of children after him, nearly submerged Lana, who was thrust against one wall and had to watch the spoliation of her fire with mingled amusement and annoyance. Every child wanted some fire.

But Reall, using his Bible voice, squelched them.

“No one sets to burning but me!” he roared. “You get yourselves some branches to beat with.”

He marshaled them along the first windrow.

“All right, Gil?” he shouted, but he did not look for Gil’s raised hand. He thrust the brand into the dried twigs and watched the first small flames take hold. They seized the points of the twigs, the curled leaves, making innumerable tiny contoured shapes, each in its own entity. The flames ran together. They grew and swelled and merged under the rush. The sputtering subsided in a long deep draught of sound, and the first big flame came up, like a pointed heart.

The children screeched at sight of it. Reall stood with the brand on his hip watching it. Then he sprang down the windrow, crablike, all head and arms, and set another section afire.

In half an hour the whole windrow was burning. The fire, making fast from the inside, filled the early autumn air with the voice of its increase.

Gil, on the creek bank, piling logs and drawing brush across them, felt the smoke in his lungs. White acrid clouds of it drew past him; ashes and swirling sparks, light with the instinct to leap up, came against his sweating skin. It seemed to him that he smelled the burning of the shadow of the forest, the fungus growths, the decay, the gloomy things. The yelling of the children and Reall was hardly to be heard above the noise of burning.

Punctually to their times, one yoke or other of the oxen would appear with a new log to place, coming through the smoke with heads kept low, Weaver or Coppernol walking beside them.

At first they had a word to say.

“She’s burning clean.”

“The logs are taking hold real active.”

“It’s going to make a pretty piece for wheat.”

“You’ve got deep soil here, Gil.”

The windrows now were all ablaze. The smoke appeared to run from the tops of them like lines of fleeing rats. Only when it had drawn over the creek, above Gil’s head, it lost its first mad impetus and rose on the gentle wind. When he turned, Gil could see it, a great cloud, filtering through the branches and slowly mounting the hillside. Its immensity filled his heart. He hardly heard Clem Coppernol, “I’ll have to drag to the next windrow, Martin. Fire’s getting too clost for the beasts.”

They were working fast now, the burning, the heat, the smoke, half smothering them all. Each log stirred up a cloud of ashes as it was dragged.

Lana appeared with a kettle of water. Drinking it, Gil seemed to feel the coolness flooding all his system, rising to the skin, as if after the fire the touch of water could make him new. He grinned when she stared with horror at his singed hair and crusted face. But he waved his arm for her to see the accomplishments of the fire.

They stood for a moment, looking together at the raging holocaust that once had been green trees.

“Oh, Gil!” she cried. “It’s beautiful!”

Her lips left a heart-shaped print of freshness on his cheek.

Whether they wanted to or not, they had to leave off at noon. The fire had mastered all the slash. The great logs were being eaten, and they discharged sounds like shots. All sat outdoors, watching what they had started. Grimy, singed, parched— food tasted like ashes in their mouths. It was Emma, shading her eyes, who said suddenly, “Who’s that?” They saw a shape at the far edge of the burning, running towards them through the smoke. Then one of the trees along the creek caught fire, mak-ing a torch that for the moment seemed to take all blue out of the sky and turn it black. The suction of the flame drew off the smoke, and all of them saw the Indian, stripped to the waist, trotting towards them with his old felt hat drawn low over his eyes.

Lana stood dully in the box of the cart, stowing away what things Gil and Blue Back handed up to her. There had been no time to pack properly. Their clothes, the two trunks, the chinaware, the axe and gun and knives and scythe and hoes, the churn, all these things were jumbled up like Lana’s thoughts.

One moment they had all been sitting there before the door, watching the emergence to reality of their plans; the next the old greasy Indian had arrived. Ten minutes after not a soul was on the place but themselves. George Weaver bad said, “We’ve got no time to lose. Blue Back says an hour, maybe they’ll come quicker.”

“Where’ll we go?” asked Reall.

“We’ll head for Schuyler and the Little Stone Arabia Stockade. Clem, you’d better hit right off for Demooth’s.”

The sour old Dutchman shook his head.

“Nein” he said. “I will not leave mine oxen.”

“Turn them into the woods,” said Weaver. “We’ll find them when we come back with the militia.”

“I will take them with me,” said Clem. “They are good beasts. I have a place to hide them there.”

“Then get going now, you fool. Blue Back said the Senecas told him they’d be left to themselves. There ain’t no Indians worse than Senecas. I went with Johnson against Fort William Henry. I know. But, my Jesus, then they was on our side.”

As Coppernol set off, Weaver turned to his fourteen-year-old son. “John, you run to Captain Demooth’s. Tell him what we’ve heard. Remember, eight whites and six Indians. Blue Back says they’re Senecas, and they’re painted.”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Run like God Almighty, John.”

“Can I leave my shoes off? I can’t run in them so good.”

“Yes, Cobus will fetch them home. Now git.”

Cobus took the shoes from John. He asked, “Can I take mine off too, Pa?”

“Stop asking questions,” bellowed Weaver, but Emma Weaver nodded at the little boy. “Reall, you’d better light out right away. Don’t try to bring anything heavy. You’ll have a little time to hide stuff in the woods. But not over twenty minutes. Meet us at my place, but we won’t wait for you.”

“We’ll be along.”

Reall was amazingly unperturbed. He gathered his children as a man might herd his calves, started them off up the path, cut himself a stick, and flogged on the laggers.

Weaver turned to Gil and Lana.

“You got the longest way to travel. You’d better get to work.”

Gil was already striding off to catch the brown mare. His face was set. Lana said, “Do you think they’ll do harm?”

“God knows,” said Weaver, catching Cobus by the hand. “We just don’t dast to chance it. They want Demooth.”

“Poor dearie,” said Emma, glancing back at the burning. That day she had been reminded of her own bare start.

“Emma!” shouted George from down the track.

Lana realized that she was alone with the greasy old Indian. He was still puffing a little, but his brown eyes looked at her kindly. “You pack your load,” he suggested. “I’ll help.”

Lana felt dizzy. She hardly knew where to begin. The smell of the Indian, when he followed her inside, suffocated thought, but now it roused no animosity. He looked at her a moment, pushed his hat back on his head, and picked up her spinning wheel.

“You go up, get blankets,” he suggested.

Lana went.

Gil came with the mare. They piled what had already been gathered into the cart. Then he and Blue Back brought the bed downstairs and took it bodily out into the woods above the spring. After they set it down among the hemlock thicket, they came back for the dresser. To Lana they seemed to act like the confused half-drunken figures one meets in dreams.

Gil shook Blue Back’s hand.

“Thanks.” His voice was tight and dry. “You’re a good friend, Blue Back.”

The Indian nodded.

“Oh sure,” he said. “Fine friends.”

“Maybe we’ll be seeing you again.”

“Oh sure. But you go way now. Men come pretty fast soon.”

“Did you know any of them?”

“One man with a whistle was named Caldwell.”

“Caldwell!”

He struck the mare. Lana caught herself against the lurch of the cart. They both looked backward as they rolled down the track. They saw the slash still sending clouds of smoke against the hill; but the flames were lower. On the other side of the cabin the corn stirred its leaves in the slight breeze. The Indian had vanished and the place already looked forlorn.

Gil said roughly, “Don’t look at it, Lana.”

Obediently she turned her face away. But her eyes filled with slow tears. She had hated the cabin at first. She still hated it on certain days. And yet to leave it was like leaving a part of herself, and a part of Gil.

Through the window glass, Blue Back watched them go. They were fine friends. It was too bad.

When they had turned the corner into the Kingsroad, he stopped looking through the glass and carefully began to take it out of the frame. He had always wanted a glass window. He did not have much time to waste; he had a feeling that the man Caldwell wouldn’t be a friendly person to anybody when he found the settlers gone. He took the glass under one arm, and laid hold of his musket with his free hand. He trotted out past the burning and slid down the creek bank. He waded in the creek until he came to the river. There he stood in deeper water, with his eyes just over the level of the bank. He waited perhaps fifteen minutes before he saw the hooped headdress of the Seneca rise over the grass on the far edge of the swale.

The dark, painted face was still as an image. It made no move at all. From the look of it, the man behind it might be using his nose, the way a good dog would.

Then the Indian raised his hand. Another appeared by his shoulder, so like him that together they lost all human aspect. They were like two foxes you might see together, two weasels, two cats.

“Cats!” thought Blue Back, with contempt. The Indians began to move through the swale, but unless you had seen them first you would not have known they were there. Blue Back followed their progress anxiously. He hoped they would not strike the creek bank where he had come down.

But they missed the place. They lay against the bank for half a minute looking at the cabin. Then they rose up. One waved. A whistle blew on the far side of the burning and the rest of the party came bursting through the smoke. They thronged together at the door, they rushed inside, they poured out again and stood in a group before the door.

Suddenly the six Indians slid away and began working over the ground like foxes hunting mice. They went to the edge of the burning, returned, went up the path towards Reall’s, reappeared in the edge of the woods, and knelt at the wagon track.

A little apart from the rest the man Caldwell watched them. Now they ran up to report to him. Even at that distance Blue Back saw his face flush up; and unluckily for her, at that moment Martin’s cow came out of the underbrush and looked at all the visitors. One of the Indians pointed at her, and Caldwell nodded.

It was over in an instant. The cow raised her tail, but before she could whirl out of reach, the Indian had leaped beside her and drawn his knife across her throat. Plunging away down the track after the cart, she seemed to go blind, suddenly, crashing head on into a tree. As she bounced off, she bellowed once so that the whole hill made an echo. Then, until she fell, she stood in silence, head out, pouring blood.

In the meantime one of the white men had seized a stick from the burning brush. He ran into the cabin with it, and laughed as he came out at Caldwell’s whistle.

All the men ran straight down the wagon track for the Kingsroad. Blue Back straightened himself as the last man turned the corner. At the first puff of smoke in the doorway of the cabin, his hand went under his deerskin kilt and emerged holding the peacock’s feather. He put it through two holes of his hat, so that the eye end dangled in front of his face as he walked, where he could see it all the time. Blue Back had coveted that feather ever since he had first laid eyes on it. But it was too bad about the cow. He had thought to come back and use that cow himself, if Gil Martin left it behind. To go back for it now, though, would be unwise.

Besides, he had to retrieve the hind half of the deer from the top of the Hazenclever hill. His wife would be annoyed with him for shooting a buck, but he would pacify her with the feather.

Gil lashed the brown mare with the reins and Lana had to hold on hard. The wheels bucketed, the box creaked and strained and banged, and the jumbled load in it clattered deafeningly.

“You didn’t do much of a job packing,” he said savagely.

Lana did not answer. The jolting made her sick; each bounce was like a fist delivered in her back, her abdomen. She remembered something about not riding in a cart when you were pregnant; she wouldn’t have thought it would have made a difference so early. For her body was like a dead weight on the seat. She had to fight herself to keep from being sick, to keep from crying, to keep from falling off. It was a pain to get a breath.

Gil took one look at her and lashed the mare again. He hadn’t yet begun to feel. But he drove in a blind resentment against fate.

The road reechoed to the noise of flight. At Weaver’s the cart picked up Reall’s wagon. Reall was driving a superannuated black and weedy stallion. He had bought it for next to nothing with the idea of getting rich on stud fees; but nobody had seemed to fancy that particular horse as sire of a colt. He looked like a doubtful proposition anyway.

Mrs. Reall sat on the seat beside him with an anxious face. She felt obliged to carry the baby, but neither did she dare to trust her new possession to the children’s care. So she had wedged the baby into Thompson’s chamber pot and thus held both together.

The children perched in the body of the wagon wherever they could find room, and stared behind them, hoping to see Indians. They shouted shrilly as the brown mare galloped past.

The Weavers came last. Both George and Emma looked grim. He waved once to Gil; then he handed the reins to Emma and climbed back into the cart and took his rifle from Cobus. He shook the priming out, refreshed the pan, and leaned himself against the rack. It was a comforting feeling, to know he was watching the rear.