3stalwarts (46 page)

For he and Mary had it all settled. They had realized last winter that John’s mother still didn’t want them to get married, and that she had asked Mary up just for John to see how little Mary knew. But Mary had been apt at picking things up, and Mrs. Weaver hadn’t liked that. She had stopped asking the girl in March.

George Weaver had taken it pretty much to heart. He had said to his son, “That’s how your Ma is. You’ve got to take her the way she is, John. I’ve done it, and she’s been an almighty good wife. She’s been a good mother, too. If times were different I could give you something to get married on. As it is, you’ll have to work for yourselves. When you get enough, you’ll have my agreement, and I’m not going to take your pay, as I might otherwise. You go ahead, and you work it out when you can, and you get married. Mary’s a fine girl, and your Ma’s just notional now. Once you’ve gone and done it, she’ll come round.”

It was the longest talk he had ever had with his father. He had gone down to see Mary about it the next week. That was the day when Mrs. Reall had announced that she was going to go back to Massachusetts with Corporal Rebus White. Mrs. Reall was taking her family, but Mary had refused to go. She was ashamed. She broke down with John and explained that Mrs. Reall would not marry Mr. White until the state had paid her widow’s claim. It was shameful.

Mary had stayed. She had, through March and April, eked out enough, by working for the garrisons, to feed herself. But it had seemed pretty desperate to them both. At first John could not get work. Then when the spring came there was plenty of work to do for widow women, but there was no cash money involved. There was almost no money left that people were willing to lay out in hired help.

But at the end of April they had had a great stroke of luck. Captain Demooth’s hired girl had run away and the captain had been willing to let Mary go there and try the job. And then Gilbert Martin had joined the Rangers, which took him away part of the time, and while he was gone he paid John half a shilling a day to look after the McKlennar place. They realized they were getting along. For a while they even talked of getting married right away, until it occurred to Mary that it might interfere with her job; so they decided to wait a few months longer and save maybe twelve or fifteen dollars.

John had wanted to join the Rangers, but they said he was too young. They did promise to enroll him in the militia, though, when the companies were reorganized. He told Mary about it.

His mother never spoke about Mary. Every time John returned to see his family, she cooked some dish she knew he would like, but she froze all over if he mentioned the girl. She seemed bitter and unhappy. And now John, thinking of what one day Mary would surely have to go through, never considered that his mother had been through the same process to bring him into the world.

All he thought of was Mary. Since she got her job, she had taken to winding her braids round her head. Her neck showed slim and pliant. There were moments when she greeted him with a dignity and fondness through which her slim ardency emerged as a thing so surprising that it took the breath of them both. It gave John a queer feeling that her visible maturing, instead of giving her defenses against himself, was putting her in his power. She was so anxious to improve herself, she was so conscious of the fact that she had come between him and his mother, that she wanted to do everything to please him.

Even John did not think she was pretty, except in the way any girl that wasn’t too fat was pretty. He didn’t know why it was he had fallen in love with her. She was long-legged and she had an abrupt way of moving; but every now and then, when she looked at him, she seemed struck in a mo-ment with grace.

He tried to figure it all out. She was never malicious, and she was al-ways honest; and yet she was shy. He realized vaguely that she was fine, but it was hard to understand that, with her parents and her upbringing. That was what he called her to himself. She was fine.

It was quite a beautiful discovery for a boy so young as John to have made.

He tried to imagine how it would be when they were married, what kind of room they would have, and what Mary would have on. He wondered whether he would be shaving by then. Mary had once said she hoped he would never let his beard grow. He thought of her lying slim and snug under the blankets, and himself shaving over the slop basin.

Young John shouldered his musket and marched back to the road with his little brown dog trotting before him like a fox. He wondered how long the dog had been with him; he had not noticed; he had not even noticed that he had strayed away from the road. With surprise he saw that it had become dark. A still, black night, in which sounds carried long distances. He could hear a whippoorwill in the cornfield as plain as though it were in the road beside him. The peepers down by the river began to whimper into their night singing. John shivered, and looked back up the slope towards the stone house.

The windows of the bedroom were lighted. Against the curtains he saw the silhouettes of the doctor, bent over like a grubbing bear, and the dragoon-like figure of the widow.

“God,” thought John. “It’s happening now.”

The sweat came pouring out of him. Then there was one uncontrollable welling of sound that he would never have taken for Mrs. Martin’s voice. The doctor ducked down. Mrs. McKlennar bent forward. They were like people smitten out of the power of life.

And then the doctor straightened up, and John suddenly relaxed weakly against the fence. He had forgotten all about destructives, Indians, war, Mary, his mother, himself. It was over. But John stayed still and struggled with himself, to make himself go up, to find out what had happened.

Then the little brown dog started growling.

“Shut your mouth,” said John savagely. He aimed a cuff at the beast, but the dog eluded him and spun off down the road barking high and shrill. Then John heard a man running towards him.

“Hello, hello. That you, John?”

“Is it Mr. Martin?”

“Yes. I saw Dr. Petry coming up when I was on the hill. What’s happened?”

John said with a strangely controlled voice: —

“The baby’s just got born.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I was just going up to see,” said John, “when I heard you coming.”

They turned towards the house. They saw the door open and a path of light shoot towards them down the slope. Mrs. McKlennar was standing there with a bundle.

“John! John Weaver!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s all right. I thought you’d like to know.”

John’s throat filled.

“Yes, ma’am. Here’s Mr. Martin. He just got back.”

He felt Gil take hold of his arm. They ran that way, full tilt up to the porch. Mrs. McKlennar stood waiting for them, grinning wide, but with tears sliding bumpily down beside her nose. She was snorting and sniffing like a dog with a breathful of smoke.

Gil shoved right past her and went into the room; and John couldn’t help peering through behind him. Dr. Petry was in the act of covering up Mrs. Martin. But the thing that surprised John was that Mrs. Martin had her eyes open. She gave Gil a small smile.

The doctor grunted.

“Everything went off first rate, young man.”

There it was. There in Mrs. McKlennar’s arms. She pulled back the wrapping and showed John the red small face with its intimations of humanity quite plainly to be seen already.

John breathed hard.

“It’s a perfectly beautiful boy,” said Mrs. McKlennar.

Whatever she might be doing, Mrs. McKlennar beamed like the rising sun. She would not hear of Lana’s working more than to wash the baby and change its diaper cloths. One day when Lana was bathing herself and the baby started to yell, Lana asked Mrs. McKlennar whether she would change the cloths for her. Mrs. McKlennar did. “Nasty, nasty,” she said. “He’s just like a man already, the way he don’t care how he musses.” That afternoon, when John showed up to say good-bye, she gave him the brightest shilling she had in the house. “Don’t you put it away,” she said to him. “You go down to Petry’s and buy your girl a hair ribbon with it.” John was amazed. He looked at the shilling in his soiled palm and he looked at Mrs. McKlennar. Her horselike face was still beaming because she had been asked to change the baby’s dirty cloths.

John went down to the hay piece to see Mr. Martin. He had already been paid; he had nearly three dollars in his pocket, but he thought he ought to say good-bye again. And he hated to leave the farm. Somehow it had become associated in his mind with the life he and Mary were going to start as soon as they were able. He had lately imagined themselves in such a place.

Gil was mowing some of the corners along the bottom land and he rested his scythe on the point of the snathe when he saw John coming and began to whet the blade. The stone against the steel gave ringing notes in the still heat.

“Well, John. You’re going?”

“Yes, Mr. Martin.”

“I hate to let you go.”

“I kind of hate to go myself, Mr. Martin.”

“I’d keep you here if I could afford to. The hay’s standing heavy and I’m going to have a lot of work with it, now my wife can’t help on the cart.”

They accepted this gravely. But Gil was obviously proud and pleased that he was going to have to do extra work.

“Yes, sir,” said John.

“You’ve got another job, John?”

“I promised Mr. Leppard I’d make a trip over to Andrustown with him and help him get in some of his hay.”

Gil was thoughtful. “I hope it’s all right.”

“They only figure on staying a couple of nights. There’s been no news in, has there?”

“Not that I know of,” said Gil. “But it’s pretty far off.”

“I guess we’ll be all right.”

“Joe Boleo’s down towards Edmeston, right now. Who’s going?”

John said, “Mr. Leppard said him and both the Bells, and Hawyer and Staring, and then young Bell’s wife and Mrs. Hawyer and Mrs. Staring. They’re coming to rake and to cook for us.”

“They oughtn’t to take the women.”

“I guess it’ll be all right,” John said again.

“Well, good luck, John.”

John raised his hand. “You’ve treated me real well,” he said. “When I come back I’ll come around here. Maybe I can give you a couple of days if I haven’t got other work.”

Leaning on his scythe, Gil watched the lad go. John was a good worker and it would have been fine to keep him round the farm. If it hadn’t been for having to pay Dr. Petry’s fee, Gil would have hired John out of his own pocket, just for the sake of the place. Another hoeing wouldn’t hurt the corn, with all the wet there had been; there would be a big hay crop; and the wheat looked absolutely clean. It looked pretty close to a record harvest all along the line.

But Gil couldn’t lay half a dozen sweeps of hay without having to look up towards the house. And then he would naturally swing his eyes across the valley, taking in the sky line from Eldridge Blockhouse to Fort Dayton. Then he would look back to the house again.

The house was always the same. He could see Mrs. McKlennar and Daisy doing their jobs, and nowadays he could see Lana doing fine work on the verandah— Mrs. McKlennar wouldn’t hear of their moving back into the farmhouse, any more than she would consider moving down to one of the forts herself. “What’s the sense of your staying in that hot cabin?” she would demand. “You ought to keep the baby cool nights like these.” And she was right about the forts, too. They were overcrowded. Since the word had come, at the end of last week, of Butler’s attack on Wyoming, the people in Schuyler had moved down. Little Stone Arabia Stockade could not contain all of the local families. Now, with the people from up the Creek Valley and from south, by Andrustown, the forts were jammed. “Me live in a fort!” Mrs. McKlennar’s voice was raucous. “Have you smelled them? Have you seen the flies? I’d rather be scalped!” But the people wouldn’t live outside— even some people with near-by houses came into the fort at night, since they had heard of Wyoming. There had been Wyoming Tories in Butler’s brigade. They had been the ones who had searched out fugitives. They hadn’t hurt the women and children to speak of; they had just driven them into a swamp without food, to make their own way to safety as well as they were able. There weren’t any berries ripe at that season for them to live on; many of those who were lost starved to death. Of those who managed to reach the settlement of Wilkes-Barre, more than half were naked and so stung with flies and infected with ague that it wasn’t expected they would survive. Blue Back, who had got the story from his Tuscarora friend in Unadilla, said the swamp was named by the Indians “The Shades of Death.” It didn’t seem possible that civilized man could allow such things even in war.

A dog was barking over the river to the eastward. Gil’s scythe stopped. Now all he could hear was the high screech of the locusts in the woods and he cursed them silently because they obliterated any distant sound. Looking over the river, he saw that men at work in their fields had also stopped. A few were moving slowly to the places where they had left their rifles. The whole valley seemed to have become still. It had happened that way again and again, all the men Gil could see, stopping, and looking in the same direction. He glanced back at the house. That was all right. Up there the baby was squalling about something or other and they had not even noticed.

Then the dog’s barking picked up and made a fluent ascent of the hillside woods and everybody knew that he must be running a rabbit; yip-yapping for hell and gone as if the one object of creation were a rabbit and a dog to chase him. Mechanically Gil’s scythe sheared again through the standing stems of grass.

Up at the house, Lana opened her dress for the baby’s second feeding of the day. She had never felt so much contentment since her first wedded days. In her heart she felt that it was even better than that time. She no longer worried about herself and Gil. The baby was a tangible expression of their success together in the world, while at the same time he was a defense against the world and Gil. She took no thought for the future, except vaguely, thinking of the boy as a man; she was too full of love and the sense of her own easement in feeding her son to feel beyond the moment. It made her proud to know that she could feed him; small as she was, she had a splendid flow of milk; and he was a big demanding child, moreover, who had weighed ten pounds on the doctor’s estimate, a child many a larger woman would have envied having.