3stalwarts (27 page)

It seemed a long way to the ravine where the battle had started. It seemed a long time, longer than they could remember, since they had seen it last. It was sunset by the time they reached Oriskany Creek.

From there men were sent ahead to order boats rowed up the Mohawk, to meet the wounded at the ford. The whole army lay down when they reached the ford. They lay in the darkness, along the edge of the sluggish river, until the boats came up. They were apathetic.

Only when the boats arrived did they get onto their feet and help put the wounded men in. Several of them afterwards remembered Herkimer’s face in the light of the fire. He had stopped smoking, though the pipe was still fast in his teeth. He wasn’t saying anything. He sat still, holding onto his knee.

At the time they had just stood around watching him being loaded aboard the boat and laid out in the bottom. Then they had been told to march through the ford, and along the road. They went wearily, too exhausted to talk, even to think. And tired as they were, they were forced to do the same march they had taken three days to make on the way up.

They did not look at the terrified white faces of the people when they came to the settlement. They were too exhausted to see. The word had already gone down the river. People were expecting the appearance of the enemy.

It was a calamity. The army had looked so big going west that nobody had thought they would not get through to the fort. Now they were back; they looked licked, and they acted licked, and they had not even met the regulars. It was pointless to think that the enemy had left the scene of battle before they had.

An officer, some said afterwards that it was Major Clyde, yelled from the foot of the fort stockade that they were dismissed. They were to go home and try to rest while they could. They should expect another summons very soon.

But the men did not stop to listen to him. Ever since they had come out of the woods at Schuyler they had been dropping from the ranks. The instinct to get home was irresistible. They weren’t an army any more, and they knew it better than anyone could have told them.

4

STANWIX (1777)

Mrs. McKlennar simply would not hear of removing to a fort. “What’s the use of women being left behind in a war, if they can’t stay home and do the man’s work?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Captain Jacob Small, who had been placed in command of Eldridge Blockhouse, shifted his feet on the kitchen floor, turned his hat over twice in his hands, and looked anxiously towards the fireplace. “It’s orders, though. ‘Where women and children shall be gathered together,’ it says. And me and other men over sixty and under sixteen is to collect with them and protect them.”

“Pshaw, Captain Small, don’t you think I can look after myself?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Captain Small was uneasy. “But them’s the orders. You’re rightly in my district. But if you don’t want to come to Eldridge, you can go over the river to Herkimer, I guess. Only we’ve been keeping the corner space in the shed for you.”

“Shed!” snorted Mrs. McKlennar. “Do I look like the kind of woman at my time of life who’d go live in a shed? Herded up like a freshened heifer. With everybody else, eh?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Captain Jacob looked appalled. “I mean, no, ma’am.”

“Well, look at me, damn it, man. Can’t I take care of myself?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Captain Small raised his eyes and turned them abruptly away again towards the fireplace.

“If you want to spit,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “for God’s sake, spit, and get it over with.” There was an almost piercing look about her long nose as he availed himself of the ashes. “I suppose it’s nice of you to come down here to make a damn-fool woman see some sense. The trouble is my idea of sense just doesn’t coincide with yours.”

The captain said, “Well, I only tried to be neighborly. But if you change your mind we’ll have the corner space ready for you. Phil Helmer has got his cows in it now, but we’ll move them right out any time.”

“Thank you, captain.”

Captain Small hawked a little, as he reached the door. He looked over his spit at Fort Herkimer beyond the river.

“See there,” he said significantly. “Ma’am, there’s some women coming to the fort now.”

A line of teetering carts, overloaded with goods and women and children, dragged across the flats from the southern hills.

Mrs. McKlennar blew out her breath.

“I’ve been seeing them for two days. I’m sick of the sight. Scared as rabbits.”

Mrs. McKlennar watched him trudge away down the road. Then she stamped over the porch and down the steps and went towards the barn. “Indians!” she said to herself.

She saw Lana coming down from the springhouse with a crock of butter in her arms. “How much did it make?” called Mrs. McKlennar.

“About three pounds,” Lana replied. She looked cool and pink, but her eyes seemed to darken. “Was that Captain Small, Mrs. McKlennar?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Did he have any news?”

“He was down to try to persuade us to move into his blockhouse. He’s got a stall ready for us. There’s some cows in it now, but he was cordial enough to suggest he would prefer us.”

Lana smiled slightly. She was getting used to the widow’s way of talking.

Mrs. McKlennar said, “And then he pointed out some women going in to Fort Herkimer. And he said a lot more about the way Indians handled women.” She paused and looked keenly at Lana. “What do you think about it, Magdelana? Getting scared?”

Lana said, “No,” quietly. She wasn’t looking at Mrs. McKlennar; with the crock still hugged up in her arms, she was staring westward. “Gil expected I’d stay here, unless we got news things had gone wrong out west. When he comes back, he’ll probably expect to find me here.”

“Good for you,” said Mrs. McKlennar. She tramped away to the barn to curry the horses. It was a job she fancied just then. She didn’t have the faintest idea of what might happen, but in any case she had no intention of living like a pig in a sty and having all the farm women constantly peering at her to see what kind of underclothes she wore… .

On her way from the stone house to her own kitchen, Lana heard the widow hissing like a whole stableful of grooms. She stopped again in the doorway to look out over the valley.

Two days— and they had had no news. The valley was still and hot; the earth was dry; the river, shallow and slow. Whenever she looked across it, Lana had a feeling of the hills drawing together. She felt the presence of the woods behind her back, as if, on the north bluff, the wilderness crept close and watched her movements through the day with an invisible intelligence.

At the departure of Gil, life as it was known on the farm seemed to have departed too. The three women, in spite of Mrs. McKlennar’s noisiness, were imprisoned in a green silence. There was nothing to hear but the crows at evening, or the sounds of their own voices. There were not even any wagons on the Kingsroad, now. No boats on the river. It was as if the valley held its breath; as if the going of the militia drained it of all the things that made for life. One stopped one’s talk suddenly for no reason except an unexpected instinct to listen. Listen for what? Lana did not know. But her breast ached.

A thought lived in her with the beating of her heart. He would surely die.

Sometimes it occurred to her that since last fall both of them had been dead. Even in the little Schuyler hut she had had that feeling, though they had felt crowded there, so near that they withdrew from each other, as though to avoid physical encounter. Later, in the early summer, life had seemed easier. Work had been good for Gil. He was the kind of man who needed to be tired. But on Lana’s part, living had been merely a slow regulation of the breath. What they did, what they said, had lost all personal significance.

Then had come the first muster and Gil’s departure for the Unadilla. And then he had come home, and her first quickening had come and gone like a moth’s temptation. She was healthier. But she had not been able to regain her vanished impulse towards happiness.

Gil seemed unaware, detached, and baffled. Often Lana had heard women say of other women that they “got along” with their husbands. She wondered whether that was how she was living with Gil. She submitted to him as she had submitted to the fact of the destruction of their farm, wordlessly, blindly. Blindly until she had seen him making the turn in the road to Fort Dayton, with the erratic flamadiddles of the Palatine drums passing after him. When it was too late she had had the choking thought that he would surely die.

As she looked westward she could see the Schuyler house. The little shack stood by the river, shuttered and forlorn; but it seemed to her that she was again lying on the narrow bunk bed, exhausted, still, cold, pressed down entirely by the bleak terror and her sense of outrage. She struggled against the memory. Her mind worked vaguely with the words with which she must try to tell him they were not themselves then. That she had got past that time. That it was neither his fault nor hers, but that they both had been forced by something which was neither of their making nor of their understanding. Her effort to find words and reasons was pathetically in-adequate. She wrenched herself away from the sight, turning into her own kitchen, with an awareness that when two people acted so against each other it was beyond the power of their minds ever to retract the moment.

It was Mrs. McKlennar who first heard Gil coming home. The night be-fore, she and Daisy and Lana had been roused by the noise of Fisscher’s fleeing rabble. She had come down to the farmhouse and knocked on the door.

Lana went down the stairs in her nightdress to open it. Mrs. McKlennar was standing in the moonlight, her hair stringily fringing the edge of her white cap.

“Did you hear them, Magdelana?”

“Yes.”

“Something’s gone wrong with them,” said the widow. “I’m going down to the road and see if I can find out how bad it is. Give me something dark to throw over this and go up and make sure Daisy don’t scuttle off somewhere.”

“I’d like to go with you,” said Lana.

“Well, you can’t. No telling who they are. They sound almighty like licked militia to me. But if there’s anybody chasing them, a pretty girl has got no business hanging around in a nightgown.”

Lana fetched her shawl.

“Will you be all right?”

Mrs. McKlennar grunted.

“Don’t be silly!”

But as she went down to the road, Mrs. McKlennar almost wished she didn’t feel so safe. She remembered how Barney once said to her, “Now don’t you go traipsing round the militia camp at night. You can’t tell about militia. And, begod, in the dark you’ve got a figger would make a lion out of a rabbit.”

But that was long ago, when he liked her in a green silk nightgown, to go with her red hair. Now her body had taken after her face, with angles and joints, and no waist that Barney used to try to enclose in his two big hands. All that was left of those days was the fact that the militia were an unpredictable force.

She stood by the rail fence until she saw a man drop beside the road to take off his shoes, and she moved over behind him and prodded him with her forefinger.

He jumped and yelled and swung his gun round.

“I’m only a woman,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “and I’m too old to bite.”

“Oh, my Jesus,” he said. “I thought the Indians were still after us.”

“What happened?”

He cast a look down the road after his comrades, a dark disorderly shadow hurrying on the white dust.

“God! I got to get going.”

“Is the army licked?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. We was in back and then they started shooting out of the woods. You couldn’t see. Fisscher came back and yelled the army was licked. That’s all I know. We ain’t seen anybody since. Only we heard them yelling after us in the woods. And I seen some. All painted. To look like devils.”

He was already down the road. Edging off from her, breaking into a weary shuffling run.

Mrs. McKlennar sniffed and turned back towards the house. There was no use waiting for more, the way those men had gone.

She walked into the kitchen, getting an “Oh, my Gawd, Mis’,” from Daisy, shut the door and dropped the bar.

“We’d better stay here tonight. You too, Magdelana. And I think we’d better not light a candle.” She made her way through the moonlight from the window to the settle and sat down. “Stop your jibbering, you black baboon.” When she had sat down she repeated what the militiaman had said.

“Fisscher’s run away. And I guess they’ve surrounded the rest of the army. John Butler always was a clever devil.”

Lana’s voice surprised herself. She said quite calmly, “They’ll be killed.”

“Some of them. Magdelana dear, that’s the business of war.”

“Gil will be killed,” Lana said.

Mrs. McKlennar pulled her shawl tighter.

“Go ahead and think so if it does you any good. I used to be just a baby myself when Barney was away. But there’s no sense in it.” She straightened herself with a slight shake. “I think we’d just better sit quiet here until morning. Then we’ll see what’s actually happened. I’ll even move to a fort if necessary. Hush your noise, Daisy.”

“I was only saying de Praise-God-from-whom.”

The widow would not even let them light a fire until she had come back from the road. She went down, dressed, soon after sunrise, and held up a horseman with her brandy flask. He turned out to be a dispatch rider from Fort Dayton, starting down to General Schuyler’s camp somewhere below Fort Edward. But you couldn’t expect a soldier to disoblige a lady with a flask.

“No, ma’am, we don’t know what’s happened to the army. We’ve just got word they had an action up the river. They’ve sent for boats to fetch down Herkimer. He’s bad hurt. But they say the British left the field.”

“God bless you,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “Take the flask with you.”

The rider accepted it, touched his hat with it, and spurred his horse. Mrs. McKlennar watched him go with a small swelling of her heart. A nice-looking lad, a poor soldier— God knew what would happen to this country if a regular army ever came against them. She was humming a dim alto to something or other as she came back to the stone house.