3stalwarts (42 page)

“The destructives have been in Fairfield. Indians and Tories. The whites was all the Fairfield people who went off before last August. Suffrenes Casselman, and Countryman, and the Empies. They killed little John Ma-bee and they took everybody else prisoner but Polly. She got away from the Indians. But she seen the rest. They’ve burnt every house and barn in the town. There ain’t a thing left.”

George Helmer was an earnest young man, and he was scared.

Captain Small said, “Did anybody see which way they went?”

“They went out on the Jerseyfield road,” said George. “Cobus Mabee had it all planned to move down to his uncle’s place in Indian Castle. He’s moved his wife and the baby down and he was going back to get Polly and John and the cow. He stopped for dinner in Snyder’s. When he got up to Fairfield the houses was still burning. Hadn’t nobody known a thing about it, anywheres else.” He caught his breath sharply and looked over at the shanty. “Do you plan to stay here, Jake?”

Jacob Small said, “Yes. Ain’t no sense in moving till Joe or Adam comes in. Don’t you go acting scared, George. We got to make sugar. We got to make enough for next winter, same as we’ll have to do our planting.”

“My God, Jake!” The young man’s face was pale. “How can a man go out and plough and plant with them in the woods?”

“I don’t know,” Small replied. “But either you got to die hungry or you got to raise food.”

George said unsteadily, “That’s right.” But his eyes kept rolling towards the woods. It was he who spied Joe and Adam coming in abreast. Joe was wringing wet with sweat and snow. He came over to Gil and Small and rested the rifle butt on the toe of one of his snowshoes.

“Where’s George been to?” he asked, and pointed to the horse lather on the inside of George’s pant legs.

They told him.

“That’s good,” said Joe.

“Good?” cried George Helmer.

“That’s what I said. If they hadn’t gone there, they’d’ve come right down here. They had an open camp six miles back. I guess they wanted to make sure of Fairfield before they hit so near a fort.” His eyes were owlish. “There was about twenty of them, nine Indians. They struck out some time yesterday for the northeast.”

The five men stood together a moment.

Joe asked, “How much more boiling have you got to do?”

“We could finish in a couple of hours.”

“I guess you might as well finish,” said Joe.

“You don’t think they’ll come back?”

Joe pursed his thin lips.

“Not that particular bunch, maybe. Maybe nobody right off, either. I’ve took quite a circle and there weren’t no signs. This time of year, jays holler easy.”

Nancy was inside the house when the news of Fairfield was brought to the captain by a soldier from the fort. She had just finished clearing up after dinner, and in the silence she heard the captain go out into the warm sunshine and she heard every word the man told him. When the captain came in she saw that he was worried. He looked almost frightened to her.

“Where are you going?” he asked sharply.

“I’m going to give this to the pigs, sir.”

She held a plate of food scraps, and she stared at him with wondering blue eyes.

“Pretty good food for pigs,” he said irritably, but Nancy forgave him that. With the doctor, the captain had stood up for her against Mrs. Demooth. She couldn’t have borne it otherwise. All day long Mrs. Demooth was after her with stinging, small remarks. Mostly low, unladylike things about her shape, how big her belly was, and how bastard children always showed more— things Nancy would never, have believed Mrs. Demooth capable of saying.

“Men are fools,” Mrs. Demooth said. “If I had my way you’d be turned out. Girls like you ought to be whipped before the town. But your own mother wouldn’t have you round— I don’t blame her— and the men say you couldn’t starve. Men all take a sneaking pleasure in it. They always do if the girl’s young. Get out of here. Get out of my room, anyway, if you won’t get out of my house.”

Nancy knew she was big, but it had seemed natural at first. The soldier had been a big man, and she was a big girl, and sometimes she thought the child would be big even if he was lawful. But as time went on and the captain seemed to notice her more, the sight seemed to make him irritable with her, and she began to think that what Missis said must be true.

Hon Yost laughed about it. Hon Yost would pat her belly as if he were patting the child itself.

“I’ll bet it’s going to be a dinger of a boy. Just like you and me, Nancy. But we get fun out of life.”

Hon Yost had had a wonderful time the first half of the winter. He had never done less work in his life. For a long time everybody seemed glad to talk to Hon. Men slapped him on the back wherever he went and stood him drinks. He had been a regular public hero and generally drunk. But he was a harmless drunkard and came home every night to the barn, where he shared the stall with Mr. Demooth’s horse. Nancy took him out what scraps of food she could steal. That was the plate’s destination now.

But lately nobody paid much attention to Hon. At first he had been unhappy about it; disbelievingly, he would stick his face into Shoemaker’s tavern, or the place across the river, and say hello. Once he even started the story of how he licked Sillinger with his wonderful account of Arnold’s army. He got to where he said to the Indians, “Can you count the leaves on the trees?” Meaning, of course, that Arnold’s army was as big as creation. But they kicked him out of the tap. He hardly ever got a drink. He once thought that if he enrolled in the militia he would get popular again, and saw Captain Demooth about it. But the militia were disorganized. Captain Demooth said Colonel Bellinger was trying to have new companies organized. New officers were needed. Over half the old ones had been killed.

Captain Demooth was sorry. He said that he appreciated Hon’s patriotic sense and that as soon as the new organization was complete he would be proud to have Hon on his own company’s roster.

At first Nancy was happy about it. While Hon had been a public figure she hardly ever saw him, but now that nobody else would talk to him, he hung around the Herter place. He seemed to like to talk to her. He was pleased when she asked shy questions about McLonis. McLonis was quite a man. The Butlers thought high of McLonis. Some people thought it likely McLonis would get to be a commissioned officer some day.

“Yes, Hon. But what is he like?” asked Nancy.

Hon poked her.

“Gee, you ought to know!” He burst out laughing, flinging himself back in the straw so that his long hair gathered chaff. Hon had a nice voice, for all he was dim-witted like herself. She loved to hear him laugh, and she smiled a little herself. Sitting in the cool light of the barn window that day, Nancy looked like a goddess of fecundity. With her yellow hair down her back and the lids of her eyes full and her lips half parted in the remnant of the smile, she might have been the original mother. Hon always made her feel that her accident was a distinction.

But now that he was on the subject of McLonis he liked showing his familiarity.

“Jurry,” he said, “he’s a fine, ruthless man. That’s quite a word. I heard Major Butler call him that. I was right close to Major. It was the night we camped at the Royal Blockhouse coming down here.”

“Do you think we’ll ever see him?”

“I will,” said Hon.

“But I’ve got to see him, you know.”

“Well, maybe you will.”

“Do you think he’d like me now?”

“Say,” said Hon. “If you ever got to Niagara you’d be just about the queen of the company there, Nance.”

“What do you mean?” She was breathless.

“Why, there’s not a white woman there looks half of you.”

“Oh. Then he might marry me out there.”

Hon suddenly was silent.

“Mightn’t he, Hon?”

“Well,” Hon shook his head wisely. “If he gets to be an officer, maybe he wouldn’t.”

“But you said he would.”

“That’s when he was a corporal.”

“Yes, but I’m me, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” said Hon. Hon did have a few ideas. He had seen enough to know that an ambitious man would not marry a girl like his sister. The trouble with Nancy was that she had been happened on by an ambitious man. He liked Jurry and he wanted to keep friends with him. And it didn’t seem important.

“But I’ve got to get married,” Nancy said urgently. “Mrs. Demooth says I am the living sin.”

“Old Clem said he’d marry you.”

Nancy shuddered. “I couldn’t marry Clem. He always smells so sour every morning.”

“Listen, Nancy. I used to say for you to marry. But now I don’t know. Out there at Niagara lots of the women ain’t married. They’re nice women too. Some of them in the officer barracks. Maybe you could get in the officer barracks.”

“Couldn’t you take me out there, Hon?” she pleaded.

Again he slapped her belly.

“With a load like that, Nance?”

“I can walk all right.”

“If you had it on your back, maybe.” Hon laughed at his own joke. But Nancy looked as if she were going to cry.

“Sometimes I get scared you’ll leave me here.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“I get so scared, Hon. She keeps talking at me some days. She says it makes girls awful sick. She says sometimes, they die— bad girls do. It ain’t like having honest children.”

For the moment Hon was troubled. He was fond of Nance, in a way. After a minute or two he said, “I don’t believe you’ll die.”

She was called to the house by the tinkle of the captain’s bell, to Hon’s immense relief. She was the devil to reason with. He took himself away from the barn before she could return.

Nancy had thought of late that Hon was getting restless. As the snow softened towards the end of March, and mists rose in the valley, he had been acting more and more uneasy. He kept making excursions into the woods. At last he spent a night away. Nance was terrified. But he had come back the evening after; he was in the barn at supper time when she carried out his plate of left-overs. He was sitting on some straw he had raked out of the mare’s stall, whetting his hunting knife on his boot sole. She thought he looked excited.

“I found tracks where a party had been across West Canada Crick,” he said. “Three or four days ago.”

“A party?”

“About twenty. I guess they was some of ours.”

“Ours, Hon?”

He was impatient with her. “Sure. What do you think? From Niagara, maybe?”

“Oh, Hon! You don’t want to go with them?”

Immediately he was sly.

“How could I go with them? They’re way the hell off by now. I wish I knew where they went to, though.”

In her relief she wanted to please him, and she repeated everything the soldier had told Demooth. But as soon as she was’ done, she saw that she must have been dim-witted. Hon didn’t say anything at all. He reared up like a dog and looked through the open door towards the woods.

“Please don’t go, Hon. Not till I’m through.”

When he didn’t answer, she sneaked back to the house. She thought if Hon went she would surely die.

He was gone in the morning. Clem told her. Clem was feeling pretty grand; he had thought for some months that things were bound to come his way. With that damn fool out of reach, maybe he could work on Nancy.

The way she drooped in the soft morning sunlight, there in front of him at the barn door, he felt lustful. He didn’t want to be a lustful man, particularly, but he thought what a damn fool he had been to be drunk that night when Hon was captured. Any sober man could have horned in on the game.

“Don’t cry, Nance. You’ve always got me to look out for you.”

She just looked wilted.

“Do you know he’s gone, Clem?”

“Yes, he told me to tell you good-bye.” Seeing her frantic glance at the woods, he laughed. “He didn’t go north. He went by Unadilla. He’ll need to get food in the Indian villages. Him and Indians get on good. He’ll be all right.”

“That’s why he didn’t ask me for any.” Nancy gave a small miserable nod.

Clem said harshly, “You needn’t figure on catching up with him. He’ll be going like a wild hog. You couldn’t ever keep up with him, girl.”

“Why?” she said like a child.

“He don’t want anybody catching up with him.” Clem thought it might be just as well to give her a little plain sense. “Hon may be a half-wit, but he knows what’ll happen to him if they catch him another time.”

6. Mrs. Demooth

Only a little over a week later a second attack was made on Snydersbush. Word came to German Flats on the fifth of April. This time the information was complete. The enemy were over fifty strong, half white, half Indian. They had left the stockade alone. The people inside the stockade possessed a swivel they had let loose when the enemy first appeared in the road. The roar of it had kept them from the fort. They sashayed up the road instead.

They took Garter at his mill and burned the mill in plain sight of the fort. At Windecker’s they cut off a threshing party, four men and two boys, and took them prisoner. They sent Indian scouts ahead to pick up the four settlers on the edge of the town and took them all: Cypher, Helmer, Uher, and Attle. They moved with great swiftness and discipline. They burned the farms, houses, barns, barracks, even Attle’s brand-new backhouse. They killed all the horses and cows in their way. They headed for Salisbury; and swept that settlement at dusk. There they captured only three men, for the other inhabitants had moved into the Mohawk Valley down around Klock’s and Fox’s Mills and hadn’t yet returned. But the destructives razed the town. Then they headed out along the old Jerseyfield road, northwest, past Mount’s, the scene of their first irruption.

The leader of the party had attracted a good deal of attention in Snydersbush because of his uniform. It was a strange one; nobody had seen anything like it. A green coat, it was said, and deerskin breeches, and a black leather hat like a skullcap with a brass badge on the front of it. He roused a great deal of morbid speculation. Some of the old settlers said it reminded them of the uniform worn by the French commander, Beletre, back in ‘58. It was over a month before a report from James Dean, outside Niagara, informed them of Butler’s Rangers. With his usual precision in detail he included a description of the new uniform.