3stalwarts (63 page)

Sitting on the settle, with her feet wrapped in an old blanket, Mrs. McKlennar held Gilly on her lap. Somebody had to hold Gilly to keep him from getting one of his jealous fits of screaming. He hated cow’s milk so, and, though he was only two years old, Mrs. McKlennar maintained that he had all the passions of a grown-up man.

The negress stumped from fire to table, preparing the adult food— the last of the hominy, part of a dark loaf, and some salt pork. Now and then, if she moved unexpectedly, she would give a kind of singsong moan that was an echo of her winter’s chilblains.

The sound of Gil stamping his feet in the shed was the signal for all of them to hurry. Lana looked down at her breast and saw the baby’s mouth languorous round the nipple and pushed it away.

“He’s had plenty,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “He’s greedy as all get out. He’d wear you to the bone if you let him.”

Gil watched from the doorway, his dark face sharp and quiet, while Lana took the baby away to its cradle. Gilly slid down from the widow’s lap and started crawling after his mother and had to be fetched back by Daisy, who dandled him and whispered “Honey boy” in his ear. Joe looked up sheephishly and said, “Evening, Gil. What’s the news?”

“I was talking to Casler.”

Briefly he told them about Casler’s tax papers. He turned to Mrs. McKlennar. “If they tax Casler that much they’ll try to get three hundred dollars for this place.”

Mrs. McKlennar let out a snort that sounded like old times.

“I wouldn’t pay it, Gil. I can’t, for one thing. And for another, I’ll be damned if I do.”

Joe let out a shrill “Hurraw!” causing the widow to look down her nose at him.

“What do you mean by that?”

Joe grinned like an old half -rabid wolf.

“I was thinking it would be fun to be around here if they tried to put you off this place.”

Mrs. McKlennar snorted again.

“I don’t know what I’d do if they did that. I’ve used up almost all the money Barney left to me. I used to think it was enough to put me in my coffin, till Congress started printing this new-fashioned currency.”

Joe said quickly, “I guess you won’t have to move.”

“I suppose they’d send soldiers. I couldn’t do anything if they did that.”

“That’s why I said it would be fun to be around. I was thinking of me and Adam. I guess it would be quite a lot of fun.”

“You’re a fool, Joe Boleo,” and her long face softened. “Just a gawk-ing lazy fool.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Joe grinned.

She hitched her shawl up on her shoulders and got up to move to the table. It was a little pathetic to see her walk, when one remembered her former vigor, but there was plenty of snap left in her eyes.

She sat down in front of her bowl of samp and bent her head. “For all we are about to receive, O Lord, make us thankful, in Christ’s name.” She giggled. “You know, Joe, I think it might be quite a party, you and Adam and a squad of Continentals.”

“Amen,” said Joe, who enjoyed the formalities. “It sure would.”

“I feel sorry for that poor man, though. He’s probably just miserable.”

Joe pulled his spoon out of his mouth.

“Casler always was an honest kind of a fool,” he observed. He dipped his spoon, heaped it, and blew on it daintily, while Gilly watched him with disturbed eyes.

In the course of the ensuing week, a man served Mrs. McKlennar with her tax assessment. The paper was a thoroughly impressive document. It listed one stone house; one log house, floored, in excellent repair; one springhouse; one log barn; three cows; two horses; forty acres tillable land, prime soil; sixty acres woodland; one stand of King’s spar spruce, twenty acres. Mrs. McKlennar read it in front of the man, whom she kept standing before her in a state of extreme embarrassment. “Melchior Foltz,” she said. “Have you really got the nerve to come down here and serve this paper on me? Asking me to pay you four hundred dollars tax?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Foltz said dubiously.

“Then,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “I think you are a bigger fool than Absalom’s ass. Tell me, where’s my barn? Where’s my log house in good re-pair? Eh?”

“That ain’t any business of mine,” mumbled Foltz. “I’m just hired to serve the papers. I ain’t collecting it now.”

“You better not,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “or you’ll get kicked where Absalom’s ass ought to have been.” A faint color touched her leathery cheek. She peered hard at Foltz and then, in the silence, snorted.

“Yes, ma’am. I guess I’d better leave now. I got to go to Eldridge’s.”

He was wiping his forehead as he came out.

“That woman just about had me worried,” he confessed to Gil. “I ain’t doing this because I want to. I get off some of my taxes for doing it.”

“Oh, you do?”

“Well, I got to do something, ain’t I?”

“There’s one thing you better hadn’t. That’s come around here again. If Adam Helmer was here, he’d probably take a branch of thorn apple at you.”

“I don’t want no trouble with Adam Helmer. I ain’t collecting the bachelor tax.”

“Is there a tax on orphans and lost pigs?” inquired Joe Boleo.

Foltz took a look at Joe and started down the yard to his horse. The two men watched him ride slowly down to the Kingsroad. They went into the house.

“You know what I bet they’re doing,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “I bet they got hold of the old King’s tax list.” She threw the paper into the fire.

“For God’s sake!” said Joe, sincerely.

Casler came over the river one morning and heard that Mrs. McKlennar had thrown her tax paper into the fire. It heartened him a little; but then he shook his head. “She’s gentry,” he said. “She knows how to hire law.” Gil couldn’t think of any way of reassuring him. He tried to talk to him about sugaring. But Casler was not interested beyond admitting that the sap was on the rise and that he planned to sugar next week.

“You’d better sugar over in our bush,” said Gil.

“It’s too far,” said Casler.

He went away a little before noon. He walked like a defeated and embittered man.

That afternoon the weather turned warm and clear. The snow seemed to be falling in on itself. The boles of the river willows stood out thick and dark against it, and their upper twigs gleamed in the sun like brassy spears. The warmth and the sunlight and the lack of wind made Joe so lazy that he refused to try to get a trout through the ice.

Instead, he was plaiting cords of elm bark with which Gil patched the mare’s harness. Behind them the house sounded as drowsy as they themselves felt. One of the babies was making a whining to itself, and Lana and Daisy were washing.

“Right now,” Joe remarked, passing over a completed cord of bark, “I bet that Adam he’s just laying on his back in Betsey Small’s kitchen doing nothing at all. That’s a shot, Gil!”

Gil looked up.

“Did you make out where?”

“I wasn’t paying attention.”

Neither of them moved. “I think it was across the river,” said Joe. He carefully laid down the elm bark; Gil held the harness on his knees. The valley was hushed; the ice on the river beyond the willows looked sodden and rotten, near to breaking. The only thing they saw was the smoke on the hillside beyond Fort Herkimer, where a party, with most of the garrison to guard them, were sugaring.

Slowly their eyes came down the valley and turned eastward. Nothing there to see but the roof of Casler’s new cabin. The walls of the building were mostly hidden by a grove of trees and a growth of brush; but one corner of it showed up in the sunlight. A path went round that corner through the snow to the well.

Now, along that path, they saw someone moving. It was Casler’s oldest girl. They could tell who she was because of her two tow-colored braids. She was carrying a bucket, and she was running. She was floundering slightly in the soft snow, and she was not looking back, and the bucket kept slopping little glittering waves of water. Something in the child’s attitude brought the two men to their feet. As they rose, they heard, very faintly, almost like a whisper, somebody shouting.

The little girl suddenly turned her head, dropped the bucket, and tucked up her elbows. Her legs looked thin and long under her short petticoat and the two braids lifted behind her back. At the instant of her leap, another shot cracked with complete finality.

The child’s body fell away from it, struck the corner of the cabin, bounced, and dropped in a huddle against the snowbank. For an instant it lay there; then slowly rolled over on its back and slid down into the path.

Powder smoke puffed out all through the bushes, rose, and merged into a thin level line, and a volley of reports succeeded it. Then, distantly, men yelled.

“Indians,” said Joe. “Get inside. Close the shutters, Gil, and get the guns down. I’ll stay here and see how many there are.”

In the kitchen, the washing had stopped and the women rested over the tub, black arms and white, their faces turned together. The baby had stopped whining. Mrs. McKlennar rose from the settle, and, as Gil went to the blinds, reached down the guns.

“Where is it, Gil?”

“Casler’s. Fetch the children in here, Lana, and keep them on the floor, near the fireplace. They ain’t near us, yet. Joe’s outside, watching.”

In the house the firing was the faintest tapping of the air. A woodpecker would have made more noise.

Joe came in silent and quick.

“There’s about twenty-five or six of them. Indians. Three whites.”

“Aren’t you going to help the Caslers?”

“There’s too many of them. It wouldn’t do any good my going to the fort, either. Put the fire out. Maybe they ain’t noticed our smoke. Maybe they’ll forget about this house. No, don’t use water. Get some manure out of the barn, and bury it. Don’t look like that, Lana. They aren’t any of them over here, I’m pretty sure. By the time I went to the fort for help, them destructives will have done all the killing possible down there. The thing we want is not to be noticed by them. I’m calculating they’ll hear the racket over to Eldridge’s. Mrs. McKlennar?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Can you load guns?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“I know Lana can. You two will have to load. Ain’t I seen two pistols somewheres round here?”

“My husband’s. I’ll fetch them. If they get close enough I can shoot them better than either of you. I used to practise.” Her face colored and her lips set.

“I bet,” said Joe. “Gil! You cover that fire with the manure and then bank the edges with the ashes. That way you won’t get smoke. Pack it right down. How much water have we got in here?”

“There’s the washtubs.”

“By God, what luck! Having a raid on wash day!” He chuckled. “I’ll just take another look outside and see what’s doing and fetch in a couple pails of water to drink. I don’t think they’ll come over this way, but we’re pretty well fixed if they do.”

He slipped out of the front door. Gil finished banking the fire. For a minute all the people in the room were quite still. In their silence, like a faint far patting of the air, another burst of shooting sounded. Lana’s face seemed to draw in on itself and her eyes grew dark and still. She sat down suddenly on the floor and caught the two children onto her lap and looked up at her husband. It came to Gil that it was all a dream, a nightmare, and pretty soon he would wake up and find the three years’ dreaming was only the space between cockcrow and milking. He went out on the porch to cover Joe’s return from the well.

Joe was standing in the open, a bucket in each hand. He heard Gil come out and said, without turning his head, “Take in these buckets.” As Gil relieved him he picked up his rifle. But he kept watching all the time across the river. When Gil returned, Joe’s speech followed the crack of a rifle.

“I know that feller. He shoots left-handed. The skinny one, see. He sticks his head out forward after he shoots and drops his left shoulder.”

“Who is he, Joe?”

“Suffrenes Casselman. I’ve heard him swear before he quit Fairfield that he’d get his uppings back out of German Flats.”

It was no dream.

The Fairfield Scotch had always bitterly resented the fact that the Palatines held all the rich river flat land.

It was easy to follow all that was taking place across the river. There were at least two dozen Indians surrounding Casler’s, and though they kept under cover from the house some of them were in open view of anyone at McKlennar’s. They kept firing at the window. The paper panes were already torn away by bullets. But now and then from a chink in the logs a dull yellow-red stab pricked out and the valiant roar of Caster’s old musket sounded over the other guns. As soon as it had fired, the Indians crept up nearer to the house. They were quite close already. Their bodies left long winding uneven trenches in the wet snow.

Under the firing the body of the little girl retained its motionless, crumpled posture.

Suddenly a couple of Indians sprang up to the corner of the cabin with two bundles of dry brush and laid them against the logs. They leaped back at once, but one of them stumbled, and the roar of the old musket showed that Casler had managed to find one bull’s-eye. They saw the Indian be-hind the brush hopping around and around holding onto his arm. All the Indians yelled, and three of them rushed up to the brush, carrying lighted splinters. They ducked down immediately and ran back to the cover.

Gil turned his eyes towards Eldridge Blockhouse. It seemed incredible to him that no one had yet heard the firing. Joe said, “The air’s drawing straight from the south.” When Gil looked back to the cabin, the brush was smoking. A small flame ran up several twigs, zigzag, and leaped out into the air. Then all the brush caught and blazed. It was like a picture of fire. The Indians whooped again; their shrill voices, that seemed hardly human to a white man’s ear, were like birds’ voices.

“The cabin’s caught. I didn’t think it would be so dry.” Joe was leaning on his rifle, resting his chin on his left wrist. “I wonder will they stick it out. Or make a break for it.”

The rising force of the fire tossed large loose flames up against the eaves, and suddenly they laid hold of the bark roof. The sheaths curled up, revealing the rafter poles, and the fire swept up to the rooftree and strained into space. The encircling group of Indians drew in on the cabin.