Arundel (7 page)

In return I could give them next to nothing: a pinch of salt or sugar; a bead; a piece of calico; a little powder and ball; yet they would have been my friends if I could have given them nothing at all, and I was loath to see them go.

Mallinson came pompously to the bank, followed by Mary, and stared at me out of eyes like those of a dead shark, but redder, and suspended in pouches of flesh that seemed to hang from the ends of his eyebrows.

“Don’t rock the boat, little boy,” he said, with his weighty frown. “What I ate last night sits discomfortably within me.” Lowering himself stiffly into the bow, he clambered around me where I stood holding to the bank with the oar.

If he had not been Mary’s father I might have been tempted to jab him with the butt of the oar for calling me a little boy, or for blaming the effects of his rum-guzzling on my mother’s cooking; but I lost my spite at him when Mary jumped into the skiff and as she slipped past me, pressed my arm.

So powerfully did she affect me that I felt no pain when Mallinson observed that we would probably have more bad weather, and that because of the departure of the Abenakis from the creek we would have no further troubles with Indians until spring. The poor man should have known that the east wind was passing around to the south, which means fair weather always, and that with the departure of the friendly Abenakis there would be more opportunity for the hostile Indians from St. Francis and the French settlements to fall upon us without warning.

Yet I gave no thought to these matters, what with staring at Mary and waiting for her to lift her eyes, which she did from time to time. Once, indeed, when her father was peering over his shoulder at the Abenaki camp, she wrinkled her nose at me so pleasantly that my strength failed and my oar turned sidewise in the water, so I was near to pitching in the river.

It was well I stared at Mary while I could; for no sooner had the skiff touched the shore than Mallinson clambered out without a word of thanks, took Mary by the hand, and hurried her up the bank and into the narrow path that led through the high pines. Twice she looked back and smiled: then the brush hid her. Never, I thought, had the pines seemed so tall and dark; never before had our garrison house and its stockade looked so cold and cheerless against the broad expanse of sea.

Long I stood staring after her, while those two backward looks of hers warmed me with the sweetness of them, yet stung me with longing. Then slowly I turned; and Ranger barked for me on the far bank.

But I sat in the skiff with my head down.

Mary was gone.

That day was unlike any other I had known. My friends turned stupid and unreal in my eyes. Ivory Fish, on guard at the gate, seemed a grinning lout; and the talk of Lieutenant Wattleby, whom I had respected as a brave soldier, appeared senseless. Even my mother I deemed slow-witted because she smiled blithely and took no notice of my leaden heart, that was gradually ceasing of its own weight to beat.

As for my father, going about his business in the smithy, it seemed to me he was a sort of dull monster, the very sight of which hurt me so I was breathless.

I did, it is true, contrive to make my way weakly to the house with the sand buckets; but when I saw Malary place on the kitchen table a platter of hash, brown on top and moist in the center, and a plate of corn bread flanked by jugs of maple syrup, I knew that life was over for me. There had been few things to stir me as deeply as hash, followed by syrup on corn bread; and yet, of a sudden, these foods seemed coarse and repulsive: I could not touch them.

That day was long. At mid-afternoon the sun came out and the wind blew fresh from the southward. I was working listlessly in the cornfield, turning back the husks from the ears and braiding them together so they might be hung from the ceiling of the kitchen to dry, when young Mogg Chabonoke ran out of the woods and down the path on the opposite side of the creek. He stood on the bank, whistling shrilly through his fingers.

I ran to launch the skiff and sculled over to him. He jumped in, looking at me curiously, and said, “My father sends to your father, Steven.” He showed me a strip of birch bark with Abenaki writing on it—though I have heard many wise men say the Indians have no written language, even after I have told of receiving hundreds of written messages from them.

As soon as we landed, he ran straight for the smithy, and I followed when I had made the skiff fast. My father came out of the door, taking off his leather apron as he came; for whenever an Indian runs as young Mogg was running it is a sign that everyone had best prepare to do the same.

He took the birch bark from young Mogg and studied it. Then he looked up and said: “Stevie, Indians killed Mallinson and scalped him after he left here this morning. There was another man with them—a white man. They took Mary and started north.”

He turned to Mogg. “Tell, son of my dear friend.”

I went and sat down against the smithy and heard young Mogg’s voice hazily through a fog, just as I heard the beat of surf on the beach.

There were eight, he said, and a white man had joined them with half-dried mud on his clothes. They had lain all night under the ledge of rocks to the west of the high point on the path.

“Waiting for someone,” my father said, “or they’d have been off at daybreak.”

I was thinking back at Mary: of the pressure of her shoulder against mine; of the faint freckles across the top of her cheeks; of the way she held my face between her hands and kissed me; of the firelight behind her bright hair when the stranger had looked at her with glowing eyes. The fog lifted in my head, and I interrupted Mogg. “Waiting for the stranger Cap threw in the mud!”

My father frowned. “It was last night he was thrown in the mud. There was no need to wait this morning.”

“He made them wait. For Mary. He wanted Mary.”

My father looked at me abstractedly. Then he nodded and walked toward the house.

I got up heavily and followed.

My father went into the kitchen, where my mother was knitting a long woolen stocking. She looked up as he entered, and, seeing his face, would have risen; but my father pressed her back in her chair.

“Mallinson was killed and scalped this morning, Sally, and them that did it took Mary away to the north.”

My mother drew me to her. “Oh, I feared some evil would come of throwing that man in the mud!” she cried.

My father reached up over the fireplace and took down his long-barreled musket and the wampum belt of the Norridgewock Indians that hung from its lock. My mother pressed me closer. “You think you must go, Steven?”

“I got to do it. I know the Indians and they know me. I can talk their lingo. You know there isn’t much danger for me, Sally; but if these other folk tried it their scalps would be dripping by nightfall. Somebody’s got to let ’em know that we go out after murderers.”

“Ma,” I said, “I got to go too.”

My mother laughed and touched her upper lip with the tip of her tongue, as though she heard something absurd.

“Well, I
got
to,” I said. “I
got
to help hunt for Mary.”

My mother glanced at my father as if to see what he thought of my craziness, and for the first time discovered that he was regarding me seriously. Her look grew frightened, and she shook my shoulder. “What makes you say such a thing, Stevie?”

“Because I
got
to, Ma. I promised her I’d marry her when we’re growed up. I
got
to. I’ll die if I don’t, Ma!”

My father nodded. “It’ll do him no hurt and he’ll come to no more harm than I will myself.”

“He’s too young, Steven.”

“No,” my father said, “he’s able to handle himself in the woods. He’s as big as I, and he knows the Indian signs and the lingo and the tricks of the weather. He needs experience, Sally. When he’s got it he’ll be better able to look after you and the girls.”

“Then if you must take Stevie take others too. Take Lieutenant Wattleby and Ivory Fish to guard against an ambush.”

“No,” said my father again. “Wattleby and Fish are on duty. For that matter, we can do better alone. More than the two of us would go blundering through the woods, and we’d lose time. Stevie and I can go where others can’t. With my belt, we’ll be welcome in the Norridgewock towns. The main thing’s to overtake ’em.”

He raised and lowered the hammer of his musket. It clicked sharply in the still kitchen. “When we find ’em, we can send back for help, if need be.”

Sighing, my mother got up and kissed him. “I’ll have Ivory Fish’s brother to work around the place, and Ivory can help when he isn’t on duty. But see you hurry back to make the house snug for the winter.”

She bustled about for salt and extra flints and fresh woolen stockings and the tight-knitted woolen shirts my father wore under his buckskin in the woods, even in warm September weather, and for other small oddments we were like to need on our travels.

I ran to unwrap the oily rag from my light musket. My father made a package of needles and metal beads and brass rings as gifts for his Indian friends, filled our patch boxes and our shot pouches, and encircled our belongings neatly in the brown blankets we carried on our backs.

The sun was still bright and warm when we set off for the creek, accompanied by my mother and my sisters and Ivory Fish and Lieutenant Wattleby and Malary; yet it seemed to me, such was my impatience to be off, that we had wasted hours of valuable time.

I fretted while my father reminded my mother of things to be done in his absence, such as banking brush around the bottom of the house to keep out the shrewd winds of autumn; and I thought ill of him because he cast about in his mind to make sure he had forgotten nothing.

I endured my mother’s kisses with ill grace, my thoughts being with those who were hurrying Mary from me. It was not until Ivory Fish had set us across, and the pines loomed black before us, that I looked back with a pang of regret at the small group waving to us from the other shore, brilliant in the golden afternoon sun against the green of the meadow and the cornfields: fat Lieutenant Wattleby with his blue militia coat unbuttoned; black Malary with a red cloth about her head; my mother all in gray, a white kerchief at her throat and her hand pressed against her lips; Hepsibah and Jane and Cynthia in their brown homespun clinging to her skirts; and Ranger, with his white shirt front, sitting apart, his muzzle in the air, howling dolefully at being left behind.

The thought came to me that never before had I been separated from my mother and my sisters. It is likely something showed in my face, for my father dropped his hand on my shoulder and pressed me onward. “One thing at a time, Stevie. What we do, we do for them. The sooner we do it, the sooner we’ll come back.”

Both of us turned and waved once more, then moved on into the pines to seek for Mary.

IV

F
ROM
our creek the path wound crookedly along the high land until it reached the narrow ferrying place where now stands the bridge that is ever tumbling into the water on spring tides. Midway between the creek and the bridge lived Hiram Marvin, recently returned from the massacre at Fort William Henry with an arrow through his shoulder and a tomahawk gash in the muscles of his back, such was the deviltry of the Northern Indians.

He was a good man, my father said, but petulant with his wife and six daughters because of the inflammation that afflicted his wounds whenever the weather changed and obliged him to seek relief in rum to which had been added an infusion of tobacco to let him know, as he said, that he had been drinking something.

Marvin’s house was a small one of two rooms, a pistol shot from Mitchell’s garrison house, which stood nearest in the direction of the ferry; and some of the garrison folk were sitting along the front of Marvin’s house in the warmth of the westering sun, along with Marvin and his youngest daughter Phoebe and Mogg Chabonoke the sachem, and young Mogg, who had waded the creek ahead of us and gone to tell his father we were coming.

It was Phoebe who had seen Mallinson drawn into the grass by the roadside, where he had been killed by a knife thrust and his scalp taken. She had likewise seen a white man in mud-stained garments run after Mary, stop her mouth with his hand, and carry her back into the brush. I sickened at her tale and at her eagerness to tell it.

I had long misliked the girl Phoebe, who was noisy and previous, dark and thin and so quick in her jumping about that one never knew where she was. Within the year she had been milking her father’s cow in the field when she saw an Indian lurking behind near-by bushes, preparing, no doubt, to steal the milk, of which all Indians are enamored. Flying into a passion because the Indian watched her, she dashed at him and banged him so outlandishly with the milk pail that he went away in a panic, leaving a fine French blanket behind him. This she made into a winter dress, which she wore with an air of knowing that all who saw her were speaking of her exploit, which indeed they were far too often for her vanity; for her vanity was unbearable.