Arundel (3 page)

When Captain Moses Butler’s company marched off to Boston, Sally Butler and her mother followed in a one-horse chaise; and before my father set foot on the ship that carried him to Louisbourg, he and my mother were betrothed.

On his return from that drunken and successful holiday they were married; and ten years later, in the garrison house between the golden sands and white breakers of the Arundel beaches and the swirling glass-clear waters of the mill creek, there dwelt, beside myself, my father and my mother, who was the sweetest woman and the kindest, bar one, that I have known, and my sister Hepsibah and my sister Jane and my brother Ivory and my youngest sister Cynthia and my seal Eunice and my dog Ranger, who was my first dog of that name but not the last, all of them half setting dog and half spaniel, entirely black save for a white waistcoat.

Those days were happy and far less luxurious than at present, what with the stagecoach that now speeds down to Boston from Portland in two days’ time, and the chinaware on our tables and our plastered walls. Yet I cannot truthfully say those times were better, though many think they were. The war is over, and the roads are easier to travel; our tools are better so that our crops are larger; and though the youths are said to be growing softer and looser from too much luxury and money, I know they will fight as bravely as ever we did, once the need of it arises; and I hope fewer of them will run away.

I

I
T WAS
on the 6th of September in 1759 that I reached my twelfth birthday. I think I would have remembered the day because of the new eel spear my father had made for me, and the hunting shirt of buckskin my mother had cleverly stitched, with fringes at shoulders and skirt, and decorations of porcupine quills, even if for nothing else. But memorable as those things were, there was something else to keep me from forgetting.

There was a ring around the sun, and it had been there all the day before, a ring like a watery, ghostly rainbow; and with us, except in dry spells, when all signs fail, such a ring is an unfailing sign of rain.

This presage I was not pleased to see; for always, after the first hard rain of September, the Abenakis across the creek packed up their wigwams and their summer’s picking of sweet grass, their dried fish and dried corn and newborn puppies, and traveled again to their winter hunting ground. This lies near Ossipee Mountain, and is a fresh-water country, abounding in beaver and otter and moose deer, but gloomy, to my way of thinking, empty of the shimmer and freshness of our blue ocean and long sands and salt marshes threaded by shining inlets.

Mindful of the sun’s ring, I had been going about my duties, bringing dry white sand from the beach to place on the floor of the gathering-room, and replenishing the water jugs from the well, and occasionally pausing to speak to my young seal, Eunice. I had taken her from the rocks in the spring when she was little more than a foot long, and she now considered herself one of the family, privileged to hunch and squatter along behind me, coughing and hawking and imploring me for fish, to Ranger’s disgust.

Knowing the time was short before the Abenakis departed for their winter grounds, I had it in mind to cross the creek after my chores were done and accompany young Mogg Chabonoke, the sachem’s son, on a hunt for male night herons so that we might bring home their slender white plumes, I to my mother, and Mogg to Fala Ramanascho, granddaughter of the chieftainess Ramanascho, who is reputed to have owned all the land hereabouts at one time.

Therefore I was not overjoyed to hear a fretful bellowing for the ferry from the far side of the creek; for no boy wishes his labors to be increased when there is play afoot. The man who shouted was a smallish man named Mallinson. He had appeared in our parts from God knows where and availed himself of a grant of land a short distance up the river, and had since been held in esteem by the townsfolk.

He was a man of serious visage, who spoke with a portentous frown, so that it seemed a tedious and important thing when he so much as passed the time of day or affirmed that it looked like rain. Yet when, with this ponderous look, he said the east wind was chilling him, the breeze, like as not, came from the west; for he was usually wrong. In truth, he had no wisdom at all, poor man; but since folk are given to judging the wisdom of any person by his demeanor while in utterance and not by the utterance itself, he was generally held as among the wisest.

Twice he had acted as one of a commission of three men to represent the residents of Arundel; and on each occasion he had talked mighty wordily concerning Arundel’s needs. The first time he got for Arundel an increase in taxes, and the second time a demand to provide more men for the militia. When the townsfolk referred to these matters, they spoke only of the fervor of his oratory, whereas my father dwelt more upon its unfavorable effect. All in all, I took no pleasure in Mallinson’s hoarse and lengthy calls to be ferried across. Yet, since he wished to come to our inn, I could not in duty continue to affect an utter deafness; so I pushed the light skiff into the creek and sculled across, with Eunice playfully diving under and over the oar and making me wish to crack her on the head with it, which I never could do because of her agility in the water.

With Mallinson was his daughter Mary, a shy child with yellow hair bound around her head in braids, as the Indian women bind their own tresses when moving through the forest. After the manner of children little acquainted, she and I had nothing to say to each other, nor was there reason why we should: a few times only had I seen her, and then we had but eyed each other from a distance. Mallinson, however, bespoke me with condescension, observing weightily that we should now have fine September weather, which I knew we would not because of the ring around the sun.

Mary folded her hands in her lap and crossed her sunburned legs beneath her dress of faded blue calico and gazed sidewise from under lowered lids at Eunice, who swam and blew noisily alongside the skiff and stared with round-eyed curiosity at the two strangers, as is the custom of seals; for they will follow travelers for miles along the beach, peering out of the surf at their every movement.

When I had beached the skiff in the wiry grass that grew on the top of the creek bank, and dragged it beyond the reach of the tide, Mallinson stumped off toward the inn, between the corn patches we have always planted on its landward side. Mary, after making as though to follow him, turned back to watch Eunice who, with an apprehensive look in her large brown eyes, was dragging herself onto the bank with difficulty, because of her fatness.

At this her father called back to her that she could play a little while with me if we would be careful not to fall in the river and drown. I was well able, even at that age, to swim to the mile rock and back. Therefore I declared to myself that Mallinson was wrong in this, as in all things. Mary could not play with me because I would not be there to play with, but would be off for something more manly.

But Mary slipped down in the cool grass at the edge of the creek and said in a thoughtful tone, as if to herself, and yet freely allowed, “He will be drunk again to-night.” Eunice, as though comprehending, which she could not, of course, flopped herself up on the bank and over to Mary and looked at her sadly out of round brown eyes that seemed brimming with tears. It appeared almost that some communion were established between the gentle animal and the bright-haired child. I thought I saw a tear steal down Mary’s cheek, whereat I was filled with revulsion, and determined to flee me instanter from two such sentimental females.

Before I could turn, Mary looked hard into my eyes. She smiled, and her eyes seemed to cling to mine, so that I couldn’t, to save my life, have looked away. I knew only that her eyes were blue, that her smile caused a roaring in my ears, and that simultaneously there was befalling within the middle of my chest a flopping, such as that which comes from Eunice’s tail when in a spasm of fright she hurls herself from a rock into the water.

I stood like a frozen lummox, unable to tear my eyes from her. Eunice rolled over on her side and held up her flipper for Mary to scratch under it, which Mary comprehended and did; and at that, when I had stolen a glance at the inn and at the Indian camp, and had seen no one was watching us, I decided that if young Mogg Chabonoke hunted for herons’ plumes that afternoon he would hunt alone.

It was a pity, Mary said, that one as big and clumsy as I should keep captive a poor seal, instead of freeing her to rejoin her friends and kin. At this I told her how I had once taken Eunice to the long ledge to the southwestward, where the seals lie on sunny days to heat their fat sides, and how, on that occasion, she had followed me home again: how I had then taken her four miles to sea and pushed her overboard; then quickly and painfully rowed ashore to find her caracoling on the beach, squawking and bristling out her whiskers and getting under foot at every step.

When Mary held out her hand to be helped to her feet, her wrist and arm were smoother and softer than anything I had ever felt. Because, possibly, of long sitting, she wavered and stumbled against me. Then she looked at me hard and straight, as if she sought something, and smiled again, and again my middle chest was full of Eunice-like floppings.

We walked along the beach to the river, she and Eunice and Ranger and I. It was low water; and at the river’s edge the rocks stood high and dry. Seaweed fringes hid their bases, reminding us that it had been long since breakfast, and that food was to be had for the taking.

We groped beneath the weed curtains until the feel of a hard shell or the pang of a nipped finger apprised us of the presence of one of the small lobsters that lurk under the rocks, whereupon we dragged him forth, flapping his tail and clattering his claws.

Having taken six small ones, we went to the dunes, which are always to be found on the westward side of the mouth of any river, provided it runs into the ocean through a sandy beach. At the mouth of our river they rise up like small mountains, abrupt and close together, eight and nine and ten feet tall. Among them are valleys; and in the warm lap of one of these valleys we built a fire on flat stones.

We split each lobster lengthwise with my hunting knife; and when we had banished Eunice to the top of the mountain pass leading into the next valley and set Ranger to watch over her so she could not splatter us with sand, and when the fire had burned down, we put the lobster-halves on the embers and let them stay until the flesh was white, with a milky look.

We ate them with a feeling of coziness and domesticity, a feeling somehow heightened when we saved the last two for Eunice and Ranger, and Eunice, in descending from her mountain fastness to obtain her portion, slipped and rolled against the hot rocks, set up a horrible hoarse outcry, and flounced off across the dunes to cool herself in the river.

Now I cannot say how we came to speak of marriage. It may have been because Mary told how her mother had died of a cough, and how her father had obtained an Indian woman to cook and keep things tidy, and how she hated the Indian woman, so that she hoped soon to be married.

At any rate, she asked me when I would take a wife. After having been well at ease with her, I became voiceless. I could not even look at her, for the very knowing of how she looked at me; I stood swallowing, and for better ease coughed, scratched myself, and coughed again. Then, and I think it was hoarsely, I told her I did not know, but supposed I would wed at eighteen or thereabouts, as seemed to be the custom.

She asked me whether, in case I found a woman who pleased me, I would be married at fifteen; but what could I say save that I did not know? Thereupon she declared that the man of her choice must be tall and strong, and skilled in the ways of Indians, and without hair on his face and broad in the shoulders and slim below them: that she would have only two children, and travel to Portsmouth and Boston and wear pink brocade and fine lace: and if these things could be so she would marry at any age soever.

I remained silent, which is a fair thing to do under such or any circumstances, and was glad that since I knew so little what to reply to her I had told her so much about my wide knowledge of birds and beasts.

Shortly thereafter I became aware that Mary was kneeling beside me, looking into my face; and what she said took not long in the saying, but remained long in my memory.

“Oh, Steven,” she said, and an odor of sweet grass came from her, an odor I have always loved, and I discovered later that she braided wisps of sweet grass into her hair, “Oh, Steven, I want to kiss you.”

Now it may have been my age, or it may have been a heritage from my great-great-grandfather Richard, or it may have been ordinary stupidity; but whatever it was, it led me to say something I have remembered with little pride late at night when lying awake. God knows I wanted her to kiss me; and yet I had to say, probably somewhat dourly, though I am not certain on this point, “Nobody’s looking, and I don’t care.”

I closed my eyes, and felt her draw closer, felt her hands on my shoulders, and so waited for what might come; but naught came save a small voice saying, “Steven, open your eyes.”

I opened them and saw her blue eyes and the long brown lashes around them; her heavy braids of yellow hair; her soft skin with small faint freckles across the top of her cheeks; her red lips. There was a faint, sweet smile on those lips; and she said softly: “Steven, put your arms around me.”

So I put my arms around her. I remember now how little but how mightily pleasant she felt to me. She slipped her hands around my neck, and my eyes blurred as her face came close. I had kissed my sisters and my mother a few times; and once, in the woods, Fala Ramanascho had asked me to kiss her, and we had kissed each other; but none of them ever kissed me as Mary did.