Drums Along the Mohawk (55 page)

“John,” she said, “how much money have you got?”

She knew already, but he answered again, glad of something to say, that he had given the money to his mother.

She said, “With what Mr. Demooth has given me, I’ve got ten dollars, now.”

She had not told him before how much. Ten dollars. Ten dollars. He looked at her. The sum automatically reminded him how six months ago they had thought they could get married when they had that much saved up.

“What is it in?” John asked.

“Mr. Demooth always paid me in hard money. He said that was what he had made the offer in and he would stick to it.”

John said, “Then you’ve got—let’s see—you’ve got eighty dollars in American money.”

Suddenly they were awed by the miracles of Congressional finance. Just by the word of it, apparently, Congress had made them incredibly wealthy. Eighty dollars—why, some people who were respectable had lived and died with less than that. They started smiling at each other.

Seeing him so pleased, Mary relaxed, and immediately the shivers got the best of her, and because John was looking at her he noticed them at last.

“You’re cold.”

She only nodded.

“You ought to have told me.”

She kept her teeth clinched, but she pleaded to him with
her eyes. And he could not scold her. He knew how she looked forward to going out with him.

The wind had begun to blow also, and it seemed to him that he could see it cutting through her threadbare jacket and shawl. Her face was pinched now with cold, and her brown eyes very large. The freckles stood out startlingly on her face.

John was frightened. He cast a wild look around and spotted Mrs. McKlennar’s stone house.

“We can get warm in there,” he said. “Come on, Mary.”

He grabbed her arm and began lugging her towards the house.

It was midafternoon and they found only the women at home.

“For Lord’s sake!” said Mrs. McKlennar. “What have you two children been up to?”

“It’s my fault. I brought her walking. She got cold. I didn’t notice how cold it was. Do you think she’ll get sick?”

John was breathless and white. He couldn’t get his eyes off Mary, and now that the shakes had taken hold of her she could not have stopped them with the whole world looking on. They both started as Mrs. McKlennar cried, “Sick! Pshaw! I’ll give her some sack. Daisy! Fetch the sack. Now sit down by the fire. John hasn’t introduced you, but I know all about you, Mary Reall. John’s a good boy and his mother thinks you’re lucky, but you’re not half as lucky as he is. I can see that.” Mrs. McKlennar meant what she said. The girl was already cocking her chin, and Mrs. McKlennar liked any girl who could cock her chin. She gave her some sherry and had some herself and motioned the two young people to sit down on one settle.

She sat down opposite them.

“What on earth brought you two so far—just talking?”

To John, troubled as he was, Mrs. McKlennar’s long and horsy face, seen against the ears of corn, and the strings of dried apple
and squash, in her large and comfortable kitchen, wore a kind and powerful beneficence. His young mind had been troubled too long with his and Mary’s burdens. Before he remembered that Mrs. Martin and the negress were still in the room he had started to tell Mrs. McKlennar everything.

“You see,” he concluded, “now Pa’s gone, I’ve kind of got to look out for Ma. And she won’t let Mary in the house. It ain’t as if we hadn’t waited quite a while, and we aren’t so terrible young. And then I don’t know where Mary’s going to live. She can’t live alone.”

“Can’t she stay in Demooth’s cabin?”

John flushed.

“He said Clem Coppernol was going to stay there.”

“Then of course she can’t,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “Do you know what I’d do, John?”

She was sitting very straight on the settle and looking down her nose at the two of them. As John replied, “No, ma’am,” the end of her nose quivered visibly.

“I’d marry the girl before some man with more brains than yourself snatched her from under your nose.” Her deferred snort was quite deafening.

John’s eyes shone. Then they sobered again. He had thought of it so many times. “It ain’t possible, Mrs. McKlennar. It wouldn’t be right to Ma. Taking Mary into her house. And I can’t build us another now. I couldn’t keep the two in wood. Cobus ain’t much yet. Somebody’s got to look out for Ma.”

Mrs. McKlennar said, “No, I don’t think you ought to abandon your mother, and I’m not telling you to. Now listen, John Weaver. What house are you living in?”

“In the cabin at the end of the row near the fort,” he said wonderingly.

Mrs. McKlennar snorted once more. “You
are
a stupid boy, John—maybe you shouldn’t get married after all. Now I’ve got
to tell you all the things Mary could tell you but has been too sensible to tell you. What I meant was, who built the cabin?”

“I did,” said John.

“Item one. You did. How much money of your father’s has your mother got? How much of yours?”

“She’s got five dollars of Pa’s and seven dollars I earned.”

“Item two, you are mostly supporting her and your brother. Item three, how much money has Mary got saved?”

“Ten dollars,” Mary said softly, but with pride. She couldn’t help it. Her voice made Mrs. McKlennar swing her eye round, and a sly little smile pulled the corner of her mouth.

“Then,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “marry the girl, take her to the cabin, and tell your mother that you’ve brought your wife home to your own house, and that Mary has said that she will be very glad and proud to have your mother stay with her.” Mrs. McKlennar’s grin had infinite relish. “She hasn’t another place to live in so she’ll have to put up.”

“We haven’t much corn. Pa was trying to get his money back in wheat. We haven’t much to live on.”

Mrs. McKlennar tossed her head.

“Mary’s money will take care of her as well when she’s married as when she’s single, and she won’t eat more. To look at her I’d say she’d gladly go without food every other day for the sake of being married to you. Shame on you, John Weaver. You’re trying to be too respectable. Respectability never made a saint. Saints most always start their careers with some good honest sinning. If you’re going to starve, you might as well all starve together. And that reminds me. There’s no stores where I can buy Mary a wedding present. So you’ll have to use your ingenuity to find yourself something. I shall give you a pound, Mary.”

John and Mary both stared at her. Then John looked at Mary and flushed painfully. But she did not flush at all. She merely looked at him. The voice of Mrs. McKlennar went on almost
like the voice of a higher power. Lana had told her the whole story; and long ago the widow had thought something ought to be done about it.

“John,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “I’ll tell you something you don’t probably know. Reverend Sam Kirkland’s over in Fort Herkimer, and he sent word by an Indian he’d be down this afternoon to spend the night here. He always stops on his way out from the Oneida towns each fall. He won’t mind marrying you without banns when I tell him about you. Now—would you like to wait and get it over with here and now? You, John Weaver, would you?”

John glanced at Mary. He looked positively shamefaced. Then he faced Mrs. McKlennar again and gulped.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“And you, Mary, would you?”

“Yes,” said Mary. Her voice was very low, but very steady.

“Oh, Lord,” thought Mrs. McKlennar. “See what I’ve done now! They’re nothing but children. The girl’s just a child.” But Lana was smiling at her, and black fat Daisy was muttering, “ ’Clare to gracious, ain’ dey sweet?”; and she went on thinking, “God, what nasty sentimental things women are, and God knows why either. Likely as not he’ll beat her or something, and she’ll be miserable with her mother-in-law, and the two of them will hate me all their lives.” But suddenly she began chuckling, and when they all looked at her, she said, “Anyway, Mary’s lost her chill.”

Now that it was done, it seemed hardly possible. It had taken so short a time. First Reverend Mr. Kirkland had come, and both John and Mary had been impressed with his kindness, and a little awed to think that he was the man who had kept the Oneidas on the American side of the war. He was a tall lean man, dressed
like any other man, except for his black hat. He had straight thin features and a gentle mouth, and his eyes seemed completely detached from all the world. But the solemn, nasal tones of his voice as he repeated the service yet rang in Mary’s ears.

She felt humble and uplifted together. It was odd, too, walking home, though the daylight had waned, that she did not feel cold. She took John’s arm just as they reached the outskirts of the settlement. The feeble lights of tallow dips coming through the paper windowpanes of the cabins were like solemn light brown eyes. Her thin hands were strong on his arm, helping him to walk to the cabin where they would now live together with his mother.

“John,” she said. “Are you unhappy?”

He said, “No.” But she knew that he was worried.

“I’ll always be anything you want me to be, John. I’ll always love you, no matter what.”

He squeezed her hand against his side without speaking. But he looked into her face as they went under the first window and saw it brave, and patient, and adoring, and so young that he felt frightened to think that she was now his own.

Frightened, and excited, and glad that they would not have to sit through supper. Mrs. McKlennar had given them a supper before leaving. It was a marvelous meal—the bone end of the last ham, some heated chocolate in china cups, a pone with jelly, and apple sauce. It now occurred to him that he and Mary would have to find themselves a place to sleep together. He would take Cobus’s bed for themselves, as it was in the corner—though farthest from the fire, it would be more private. They had nothing but two deerskins to make curtains of—he hoped it would not turn so cold these would be needed for bed covers. He felt himself prickling all over; and then with a rush of elated confidence he knew that Mary had felt his elation, and that suddenly she had lost all her courage, and was afraid of him. When he opened
the door, the light shone softly on her face, her eyes on his, and the color rushing into her cheeks.

He turned to the room, “Hello, Ma.”

Emma Weaver said, “We saved you some supper.”

“I’ve had it,” said John. He closed the door behind him and swallowed hard.

“Ma, I’ve brought Mary home.”

Emma turned her head. Her homely face, grown more gaunt, became animate. Anger, doubt, conviction, and fear passed over it.

“John,” she said softly, “you mean?”

John managed to nod.

“Mary’s staying. We got married this afternoon. Reverend Kirkland married us at Mrs. McKlennar’s.”

Cobus, who was whittling an ash stick for snowshoes, became all eyes. He turned from Mary to stare apprehensively at his mother. Emma said, “Do you want me and your brother to move out?”

“No, Ma. You know that we wouldn’t want that.”

Emma said, “I heard Captain Demooth would not take Mary to Schenectady. I didn’t know you’d do this.” All at once tears, big helpless ones, poured out of her eyes, and trickled unevenly down her lined face.

Mary’s breath caught.

“Don’t, Mrs. Weaver. Please don’t cry. I want to help you, John and me both do. And we can, please, if you’ll let us.”

She had stepped forward and bent slightly down towards Emma. Now, to her astonishment, and to the two boys’, Mrs. Weaver lifted her wet face.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “You don’t know how tired I have got since George got took.” The sobs rose in her breast. She hid her face, and, as Mary touched her, leaned against the girl’s knees. John thought that he was going to cry himself. He had never
seen his mother licked before; she seemed physically beaten, as if he himself had laid a stick across her shoulders.

They got her to bed on the floor before the fire, where she lay sobbing quietly. John ordered Cobus to bed and then he and Mary moved the chest as he had planned and hung the deerskin up. They blew the tallow dip out and crept under the blankets, dressed as they were, for warmth. They could see the soft glow of the firelight pulsing over the bark on the log walls. The fire burned without sound.

Over in the other corner, in John’s old bed, fat Cobus lay like a hare, unmoving, holding breath, soundless, and all ears. Emma’s sobbing continued softly. The deerskin, not completely cured, had a faint tangy rankness that seemed to grow as the fire sank to coals.…

In one of the cellar cells, in the very wall of the old fortress at Chamblée, George Weaver was wondering whether German Flats had managed to get through the summer and autumn without suffering the raid everyone had been afraid was coming. He did not know. There were nine other men distributed around the walls of the small cell. They had no window to see each other by. Their faces must be remembered from the brief flashes that the jailer’s torch made when he came to bring them their food. Since they had entered the cell they had not been allowed out of their irons; and their irons were fastened to heavy rings in the stone walls.

It had taken George two months to get there. First three weeks of following his Indian captor through the wilderness to a Seneca town, where they had made him run the gantlet. It was his plodding patient strength that had brought him through that, though George would have said it was the fact that they could not beat him off his feet. His captor had become a celebrity on the strength of George’s performance and told George in
broken English that he had never seen a man take so slow a pace and survive.

George had stayed two weeks in the Indian town before being led on to Niagara, where he was traded for the customary eight dollars to a beefy British major. They had kept him at the fort for eight days before shipping him with some other prisoners on a small sloop to Montreal. All the prisoners hoped they would be kept in Montreal, and most of them were. But George, with two other men who had been captured near Cobleskill, was shipped on to Chamblée.

When he saw the immense square walls of the old fortress, he had thought that it would be a hard place to get out of; but he had had no idea that men treated prisoners the way he was treated. A man could stand up, and he could sit down, and he could lie down if he got in a particular position parallel to the wall. That was bad, but worse was the fact that since the ten men had entered the cell they had not been allowed loose for even long enough to clean the filth out. The place had an unbelievable stench. Some of the men had periods of raving, and others never said anything. George was managing to get used to the stench. It was becoming part of him, like an integral function of his own skin. The only thing that bothered him was his belief that the man in the corner behind the door had been dead for four days. He had not touched food for that period nor said anything nor rattled his chains, and the jailer’s light never reached into that corner, except to touch the unused food, which was left lying there. There was quite a heap of it now on the board the man used to use as a plate. But no one else could reach it.