3stalwarts (61 page)

It was just like the start for Fort Herkimer almost a year ago, except that this time they would go all the way in a cart. Thank God the wheat wasn’t yet quite ripe enough to burn!

They were two thirds of the way to the fort when Kast overtook them. Eldridge’s was warned. “They’ve only got powder for about twelve rounds,” he said. “Jake Small ain’t been able to get any anywhere.”

At Dayton the squad of regular soldiers with whom Van Schaick had garrisoned the fort assigned them to a space along the barrack wall and told them to keep out of the way. The night continued clear, warm, and uneventful, except for an outraged screech owl, and the myriad mosquitoes.

But late the next afternoon they were informed that reinforcements would be with them in twenty-four hours. The army had not yet left Otsego. About three hundred men were marching under Gansevoort.

Everyone breathed easier, except Van Sickler.

Towards sunset of the following day the drums were heard approaching, and within the hour the little army was encamped outside the fort. Gansevoort rode in with his pink Dutch face delighted at having made the swiftest march the valley had ever seen— two days from the foot of Otsego Lake to German Flats. He promised to wait until the Rangers came in, and in the meantime he arrested and court-martialed Van Sickler for desertion.

But Gansevoort was so pleased with himself that he let Van Sickler off with a fine of thirty-one dollars, and, since the man could not possibly pay it, announced that he would have to be on fatigue for the rest of the campaign.

Van Sickler himself was dubious about it all. At first he figured he had lost sixty-one dollars; but later he decided that he had got his barn roofed for a dollar, and that was a bargain.

As soon as the information was brought in that the Onondagas had passed to the south of Springfield, Gansevoort departed. His troops moved fast, their three light wagons keeping close up, their drums banging a quickstep.

The people watched them go and, long after they had disappeared, listened for the last faint mutter of the drums. That sound, hauntingly faint, was the last sound of war in the valley until the same detachment appeared, surprisingly, from the west in September.

In the meantime, it seemed as if the great army had disappeared from the face of the earth. They heard no news at all of it, but what it might be doing, whether it had met the army under John Butler,— Rangers, Greens, British, Tories, Senecas, and Mohawks,— whether it would reach Niagara, or even the Seneca towns, was the one thing men talked about in the settlement.

Gil thought little of it. During the last week in August Lana’s labor started, and they lived for three days with Dr. Petry in the house. Mrs. McKlennar, and Daisy, and Betsey Small, who had come down to help from Eldridge’s, were all worn-out and haggard.

To Gil it seemed as if the thing would never finish. Now and then, even in the wheatfield, he thought he heard her crying. Dr. Petry seemed helpless. He blamed it on the lack of food, on the drain that nursing the first baby had put on her. “Last winter took about everything out of her. And this is a big baby. I don’t see how she got to have such a big one.”

“Can’t you help her some way?” demanded Mrs. McKlennar.

“How can I help her? It’s part of a woman’s job— that’s all. We can’t do anything but wait.”

“But it’s unnatural!” Mrs. McKlennar’s voice grew harsh. “It’s terrible.”

Betsey Small remembered her own painful childbed, but that had been full of violence, and quickly over. Once when Petry was alone with her, he said, “Do you still want another one?” He tilted his head towards the room in which Lana lay.

Though Betsey’s eyes were shadowed, her mouth shaped itself impudently. “It’s part of a woman’s job— that’s all. I wonder whether a man or a woman said that first.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” he growled. “I hear tales about you and the fool Adam Helmer.”

“Well, you needn’t believe them! I’m fond of Jakey.” Her eyes brightened. “But I would like some more, if you want to know. Plenty of them. Poor Jake.” She turned her eyes away.

The doctor grunted.

“Will she die?” asked Betsey.

“I don’t think so. But you might.”

“Not with you looking after me, Bill.”

“Oh hell,” he said.

Mrs. McKlennar was beckoning him to the door.

The baby was born at noon on the fourth day, a huge and handsome boy. It looked so big to Gil that Lana’s body seemed to him completely caved in after the birth. She did not speak to him, but lay inert, eyes closed.

“She’s all right,” said Dr. Petry. “You needn’t whisper. She wouldn’t hear the trump right now. She won’t be good for much for quite a spell, though. No, don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything. I just sat here to earn some money.”

He growled, and wearily mounted his old horse, and rode away.

“Bill’s aging lately,” Mrs. McKlennar said.

Betsey Small was dandling the child and calling it her lusty man.

“I’m just as glad Adam’s not around,” thought Mrs. McKlennar, watching her.

Throughout the summer and fall their feeling of security was strengthened. After each scout Joe and Adam reported the same emptiness of the woods. Maybe a lone Indian: if they followed his tracks up, they found he was an Oneida or Tuscarora going fishing. Or sometimes they saw the tracks of several Indians; but these parties always included squaws. They weren’t war parties. They were Indians looking for the blueberries. “They say it’s going to be a hard winter. They’re doing a lot of berrying.”

It got so that the two men hated to go out. Especially Joe; for Adam generally dropped off a scout and came back to spend a while with Betsey Small, and, when he got sick of getting nothing from that red-haired woman, to make a night excursion somewhere with Polly Bowers. But with the latter he went out just enough to keep his own inside track with her. Betsey Small had infatuated him. It got so that he would pick her a bunch of flowers, maybe, besides bringing her in a good fish or two, or some venison, or a couple of prime partridge. Once he asked her whether she would think any more of him if he brought her a couple of scalps.

“Senecas?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Senecas, or a couple of them Tories. If you ever want anybody’s scalp, you let me know.”

She smiled, veiling her eyes and looking insolent and badgering, studying all his magnificent body as he sprawled on the bench with his back against the table and his chest bare to the fire.

“You like me an awful lot, don’t you, Adam?”

He tossed his yellow hair back and grinned.

“Don’t you ever get tired waiting around here?”

He kept on grinning.

“If it wasn’t for Jake, I’d have had you a long while ago. But I like Jake.”

He looked puzzled, as she repeated, “Yes, if it wasn’t for Jake.”

Jake Small came in. He was getting bald and looked fatter.

“Hello, Adam,” he said. “You back for a while?”

“Yes, I’m back. I just stopped by on my way home. How are you, Jake?”

“Fine, boy, fine.”

He reached for an apple off the shelf.

“Have one, Adam?”

“No, thanks,” said Adam.

“Well, I will,” Jake said, biting into it. “I’ve always had the awfulest hankering for apples, Adam.”

He put his arm round Betsey when she came up to kiss him. It was the damnedest thing Adam ever had to look at— the happy way she looked when she kissed him back. He got himself lazily onto his feet and picked up his rifle and went out of the house.

Though Lana was getting about again, she had not much strength. She worked because there was a great deal to be done. Gil was threshing in between days of picking the ripened corn, and he needed help in sifting the chaff. He wanted to get his oats all threshed and safely stored before the fall was over. The steady thump of the flail on the barn boards was like the drumming of a partridge, hour after hour.

The air was cold and very clear, as if frost were in the offing. Lana sniffed it in the yard and looked up the valley. The sky to the west had a greenish glassy tinge. One could almost think that the sky was reflecting the shine from the river. The tips of balsams seemed more sharply pointed, needlelike, and made of iron. The low sun looked like a thin coin. In its light, Lana seemed pale and full of stillness; her black hair was heavy and without lustre. As she stood beside the shed door, the evening found in her the same hushed intentness it found in the darkening woods. Only the front of her short gown moved with her light breathing, showing her full and heavy breasts.

Joe Boleo, stepping quietly in the shed for an extra log of wood, watched her for a moment. He thought she had not heard him, any more than she seemed to have heard the thudding of Gil’s flail. But she said suddenly, “Joe, what’s that bird?”

“Which bird?”

“There on the bottom branch of the maple. I never saw one like it.”

She seemed to have a sixth sense for spotting anything alive. The bird had neither moved nor made a sound.

He said, “That’s a Canada Jack. It’s early to see one of them— and so close to a house, too. Most generally it means a hard winter.”

They both stayed still, and the bird on its limb was still, staring back at them. Then the calf bawled flatly in the barn, and they heard the blatant answer of the cow homing through the woods.

In the kitchen, Daisy rattled her pans.

At sunset the two companies of soldiers swung down the road from Fort Stanwix. They were lean and tired. Their ragged uniforms gave them at first sight a kind of ghostliness. Their long strides brought them swiftly and with an odd effect of silence, for half of them wore moccasins, to replace the shoes they had used up. And the drums of the two drummers were head-less.

John Weaver returned with them. He did not look at all like the boy who had started out. He was like a stranger to Mary. She felt even younger than on her bridal night; and when they went to bed in the Herter house, she was shy and half frightened. He seemed so much stronger— even in his happiness with her she was aware that he had been with men and become a man. Though she had never thought of him otherwise, she knew that the John she had married was a boy; and proud as she was of him, now, his touch conveyed to her a strange sense of warning that she would never be as close to him again in all their lives.

Gansevoort had given him his discharge, and paid him in a wheat warrant, so that he felt quite comfortable about feeding his mother and Cobus during the winter. For themselves, he and Mary would stay on with Demooth.

He was glad to get home. The next morning, when the conch horns sent their dim invading wail over the valley, they lay under the blankets close together and heard the cannon fired from the fort as a salute to the departing soldiers. The rising sun, entering the low window, touched the shoulders of his campaign coat, stained, frayed, and faded… .

“John, was it awful out there?”

“It was the finest farming country I ever saw. But we got so we were sick of it. Every time we saw a cornfield we were “sick. They made us cut it down— all of it. We cut down the apple trees. They had peaches, even. We cut them down. We did at first; but there was so many we just girdled the last orchards. We burned every house. Some of them had nice houses, framed ones, with glass windows. Nicer than this house, Mary.”

“It must have been hard work.”

“I don’t know how much we burned. Captain Bleecker figured it out that the army had destroyed one hundred and sixty thousand bushel of corn. The Indians all went west to Niagara.”

“Was there any battles?”

“Only one. It was short. There was five thousand of us and only fifteen hundred of them, more than half Indians. Afterwards they cornered a scouting party. Twenty men. They caught two of them and burned them in Little Beard’s town. Chinisee Castle.”

He stopped suddenly.

“Poor John,” she whispered.

“It was mostly just walking,” he said. “Walking every day and sometimes at night. Or burning. Or cutting corn with your bayonet. We got short of food and had to eat our horses. We wished we hadn’t burned everything, coming home.”

“The Indians will never come again,” she said.

“No. They’ve gone to Niagara. I don’t know.”

“Were the burned men anyone we knew?”

“No, a Lieutenant Boyd. And a sergeant. His name was Parker. I didn’t know either of them. I don’t want to talk about them. I been dreaming of the way they looked. It makes me afraid sometimes. I don’t want to go to war again, Mary.”

She tried to hush him.

“You won’t need to.”

“I never was scared of the Indians before. But they did things to those men.”

“Don’t talk.” She lifted up her lips. But he didn’t kiss her. He lay close beside her, with his face hidden in the hollow of her shoulder. He didn’t

Gil and Joe Boleo and Adam made a trip up to Fort Dayton to talk to Rimer Van Sickler. The squat, overmuscled Dutchman sat in his cabin among his fourteen children, with his second wife cooking him an apple pie. Her thin face, prematurely aged from bearing children and too much heavy work, was exalted with the social eminence her returned hero had brought the family. Why, only yesterday, Colonel Bellinger and Captain Demooth had spent the whole afternoon listening to her Rimer tell about his western expedition. Here in her own cabin. She had had to send the children over to Mrs. Wormwood’s out of politeness, seeing they were gentry, but she herself had stayed. And now here was Mr. Martin and Joe Boleo and that worthless Helmer, who had thought he was a hero himself when he out-ran the Indians.

Rimer yelled a “Come in” to the men. He was obviously tickled to have them come to see him. Timber beasts.

“Get out some rum for my vriendts,” he yelled. “You voman: Py Godt, I think I haf to put my belt across you und learn you again who is boss, hey!” He turned to the three. “I had to do it pefore, I can do it again, ja!” He had her almost in tears. The light went out of her face as in obedience she fetched the jug and set it down before him.

He was sitting in front of the fire on a deerskin, whittling calluses on the balls of his feet. “Efry time I cut a piece off I say to mineself, ‘Rimer, you old timber beast, dot is free miles from Kandesago to Kanandaque.’ “