Arundel (27 page)

J
OSEPH
W
ARREN
, President, P. T.

I left them reading and went into the kitchen, where I took my musket from the wall and sat down to clean it. My mother came in and looked at me; then went to her spinning wheel and fell to spinning. The whir and click of the wheel got into my head, in some unaccountable way, so that I could never go on a march after that, or move toward an enemy, without a whirring and clicking starting in my brain and keeping time to my movements.

Malary came in snuffling, so that my mother began to sing to drown her out; and at this I went into the gathering-room to have quiet. I found none; for James Dunn was sitting at his counting desk in the corner, a bland and kindly smile on his face, as though he had done some noble work of charity, which he had not. Before him stood Phoebe, her back as straight and flat as a board.

“Jethro Fish is going,” she told him. “He went home to get his musket and leave word at Lord’s and Towne’s and Cluff’s and Merrill’s. When he comes back I’m going to run him down to Newburyport.”

James Dunn sat silent, as benevolent as a minister who has saved a soul from hell fire.

“Why don’t you say something?” Phoebe wanted to know; but James Dunn just sat there looking indulgent; and since both of them ignored me, I went at my musket again.

“Can you shoot a musket?” she asked James.

After some deliberation he nodded gravely and said he could.

“You’re a Son of Liberty,” she shot at him, clutching his counting desk. “You’re one of the ones that wanted a war, and now you’ve got it! You’ve got to go! That’s what you joined the Sons of Liberty for! You promised to go, just by joining!”

James Dunn seemed to turn this over in his mind like a bass goggling its eyes and rolling a minnow in its mouth.

“He can go down with me,” I said.

Phoebe whirled. I thought she was going to wrench the musket out of my hands and clout me with it. “What are you talking about? You can’t go! You promised to wait! You told Arnold you’d wait till you heard from him! He may need you!” She raised her fists and shook them. “Lord! Men are terrible!”

“I know that, Phoebe, but I thought I’d find him quicker in Cambridge. I wouldn’t feel good staying around here with others going.”

“Oh, so you wouldn’t feel good!” she jeered, but with no sting in the jeer. “It’ll be good practice for you! There’s going to be plenty of times you won’t feel good before you chase the English army out of New England!”

James Dunn leaned forward with the look of a judge about to render a decision affecting the welfare of nations. “I could go if you married me, I guess.”

Phoebe hesitated. I thought she had an air of listening; but whatever she listened for, she failed to hear it. “All right!” she snapped finally. “I’ll marry you right now, and run you and Jethro down to Newburyport together. Go get the minister!” She stamped into the kitchen and banged the door behind her, making as much noise as though she were twice as big as Cap Huff, instead of little enough to walk under my arm, sea boots and all.

So Phoebe was married; nor had she ever exasperated me more than when she stood up to James Dunn in our gathering-room, like a swaggering little kingbird standing up to a big wall-eyed owl, answering “I do” impatiently, and saying to James Dunn, immediately it was over, “Hurry up with your pack; the tide’s running out!”

If I had married a slip of a thing like that, and she had bespoken me so, I would have shaken her until her teeth cracked. I think my feelings must have shown in my face; for she kept turning to look at me; and when she flung into the kitchen to gather up her belongings for the journey, she thrust out her tongue at me, as provoking as ever, more fitted to be a cabin boy than a wife—especially the wife of James Dunn.

Jethro Fish came back with his brother Ivory and four of his friends, all laden with packs and muskets and powder horns, and all hullooing and pushing and tripping each other, uncontrolled and prankish, as if off to a curlew hunt instead of a war.

I set them out to the sloop in the skiff; and they kept on with their whooping and skylarking, cuffing each other and jigging to keep warm in the brisk east wind, with James Dunn standing, noble-looking and faintly amused, among them, a major general in appearance. I envied them and thought ill of my promise to Arnold, who might be dead for all I knew, and said privily I would wait a day or two; then go myself.

Among them was one Asa Hutchins, a wild and lazy Son of Liberty, who sometimes condescended to go a-fishing when he could get no more credit from tavern keepers. While I leaned on my oars, watching them, Asa shouted: “Better get married, Steven, so there’ll be somebody to send you down to Cambridge too!”

Phoebe came scrambling aft and twitched him around to face her. She said something I couldn’t hear; then doubled her fist and drove it so hard into his stomach that he folded up like a flail and sat himself over the side of the sloop with a prodigious splash.

I salvaged him and threw him on the deck.

“I want no time wasted,” I said, shaking my finger at Phoebe, “in rowdiness and fighting! If you can’t keep this sloop peaceable I’ll sail her myself and leave you on shore in a skirt, where you belong! See you have her back here to-morrow for another load. There’ll be a kit and caboodle of our people waiting to set out.”

Phoebe turned indifferently in the middle of my words and busied herself with the raising of the anchor. When the sloop was under way, she looked at me from under the jib and said, in a mincing tone, “Was there anything else?”

I was in no good humor when I rowed ashore to humdrum tasks while the others pranced off to Boston on a holiday. In a cabin near us lived Joseph Denico, a poor worthless Frenchman who had been sent out of Acadia many years before with all the other Acadians; and with him lived his sons, John and Joseph, both clever at hunting, traveling frequently into the Indian country. I bargained with John to set off for Ossipee Mountain and bring Mogg Chabonoke to me on urgent business; and with Joseph to carry a copy of Warren’s handbill to Turbat’s Creek and Cape Porpus, telling the townsfolk on the way that those desiring to travel to Cambridge to join the army might go as far as Newburyport without charge on our sloop.

All through that night our townsmen straggled into the inn, laden with muskets and packs, most of them happy and many of them boisterous, since it became at once the fashion at all inns and ordinaries not only to give double drams to those who were going for soldiers, but even, in some taverns, to refuse pay from such persons when they felt the need of rum.

They sat in our gathering-room until dawn and long after, pounding on the tables with rum mugs and singing such songs as “Lilli-bullero” and “Benning Wentworth” and “Hot Stuff’ and “Yankee Doodle,” all out of key, many fancying their voices were tenor when they were not; while some who considered themselves poetizers insisted on writing new verses for the songs, all of them horrid.

Shortly after dawn other stragglers appeared and some military genius conceived the idea of greeting each one by marching him to the beach and having him yell curses at King George, who was supposed to be listening and seeking protection beneath the royal bedstead across the water. I think we marched back and forth to the oceanside twenty times betwixt dawn and sun-up; and I know we laughed immoderately at the profanities addressed to the fat King of England. Whether his ears burned I do not know; but if all of us could have blown our breaths on him at close range that night, he must have died the death.

I had forgot how our little town had grown until I saw the numbers who poured out like hornets, to help hold the English in Boston-three Wildes, one a ship captain, and the Hutchins twins; Cleaves, the blacksmith’s son; Jesse Dorman and his brother, and the two sons of the Murphy who was an ensign at Louisbourg; my cousins Joshua and Edward Nason from the Saco Road, and Carr whose brother was a sailor and went later on the
Chesapeake;
Miles from Turbat’s Creek, and the Abbott who had come recently from Scarborough, and the unmarried Adams, and the son of Deshon who came from France as a linguist; Nathaniel Davis and his son Nathaniel, the latter being only thirteen years old, but as good a marksman as any of us, as the English discovered when he lay behind the rail fence on Bunker Hill in six weeks’ time. Also James Burnham who had twelve children, and Noah Cluff and poor Nathaniel Lord; an Emmons, a Tarbox, two Townes, a Lewis, two Dearings, a Perkins, a Burbank, an Averill, and some others that have gone from me. These were only the ones who went at once. Many more went later, volunteering or being drafted, or being hired by those who from necessity or timidity wished to avoid the draft.

Phoebe returned with news for me. Arnold, she learned, had gone to Cambridge with his New Haven company immediately on hearing of the battle at Concord, and had proposed to the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety an expedition to capture the English forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. To this the committee agreed, and made him a colonel. In Newburyport she spoke with an officer, newly sent from Cambridge to urge all sloops and schooners to scour the New England coast for volunteers; and he, she said, told her Arnold had just now departed on the mission.

“You’ll be mighty big,” said Phoebe, putting her hands on her hips and staring up at me as though in admiration, which I knew she did not feel; “grand and important, being the adviser of a colonel.”

“Do you suppose a man like that,” I asked her, “would remember what he said to a country innkeeper long ago? I’m a fool to stay here when I ought to be in Cambridge, carrying a musket against the English!”

“You’d be a fool to be in Cambridge,” she said. “They’d put you to peeling potatoes, since you know how to manage an inn; or set you to making the colonel’s bed or washing his shirt. Stay here where you were told to stay, so when you go to war you can fight, and not be nursemaid for a horse! If Arnold forgets you, which he won’t, I’ll go to him and snap my fingers under his nose and ask him why he hasn’t put you to leading men through the forest toward—” She stopped and clapped her fist against my breast, bringing my mind back from Mary, toward whom it had instantly flown when Phoebe spoke of going through the forests.

“What if he sends for you? What can you tell him about the Indians, or about other things he ought to know? If he’s gone to Ticonderoga he’ll need news of every road to Canada!”

“It seems to me,” I said, “that a hussy who thinks on some matters as you think might have thought more carefully before marrying James Dunn.”

“Will you answer me!” she cried, stamping her hulking sea boot within an inch of my foot.

“I’ve sent for Mogg Chabonoke to carry messages to Natanis and Paul Higgins. And will you answer me?”

She played with her string of cat’s eyes, and shot a jeering glance at me. “He’s a handsome, good man. With a little learning he’d be equal to any Boston statesman.”

“Bah!” I said.

“And unless I’ve misheard the words you yourself have spoken, his brain is no worse than those of many British generals sent here in past years: General Abercrombie and General Braddock in particular.”

This being the truth, I was unable to make a quick reply, whereupon she added: “And you’ve told me that always, when such a general was sent over, a woman contrived it.”

“What are you getting at?” I asked, feeling it was time either to shake her or slap her.

She placed one hand coquettishly on her brass-studded belt and daintily drooped the other at arm’s length before her; then stepped affectedly in front of me with a simper that aped a modish lady. “What has been done before can be done again. I’ll make him a general and have him sent to conquer Spain.”