Scar (12 page)

“Give this—to my wife—please—and—tell her—I loved her—to the end,” he says in short gasps. I run my eyes along the top of the ledge, searching for the doctor. He's nowhere in sight. I can't do this without him. The man coughs, long and wet.

“No, sir,” I say, as I gently squeeze his arm, refusing to take whatever trinket he's trying to give me, “you will have to love her longer, I'm afraid.” He laughs silently at the joke that I hadn't meant to make and it relieves us both.

The doctor calls from above, “Noah, grab him,” and he slides a large man down the pebbly edge of our ledge. The man is mostly unconscious and doesn't take notice of his precarious position. I catch him under his arms but can't hold him, and he hits the earth hard, crying out, “My leg, my God, my leg!” I open up his stocking and find such a mess that I stare at it, wondering what to do. The doctor interrupts my attempts to stop the leg from bleeding with another wounded man to catch off the ledge … and after that, another.

“Dr. Tusten,” I call, but he's gone again.

I'm beginning to wonder who's left fighting up there.
I rush back and forth between the men, feeling lost. The doctor finally slides down the ledge, and in one breath's time, has cared for most of the small wounds, and a few of the large ones. I thank the Lord. I could not have lasted one more moment without him. I duck back to work, wishing I had ten more hands to lend this doctor and these poor, hurt fellows.

Then I hear something, or rather … I don't hear something. I stop, trying to figure out what has changed, and in an instant, it hits me. The musket fire has slackened. I hear one pop. Two pops. But then nothing. Is it over? I turn to find the doctor. “Dr. Tusten!”

He's right behind me, his back to mine. “Keep working, Noah, I hear it,” he whispers.

“What does it mean?”

My answer drops down our ledge. It's Colonel Hathorn, white-faced and out of breath. He picks his way through the wounded, and I can see that he's trying not to look at them. Some of the men recognize him. One calls out his name, and another reaches for him, but he skirts around the man's hand in his hurry to get to the doctor.

“Benjamin, it's over, they've broken through up at the northeastern end of our line. We couldn't hold them.” His voice is low so as not to alarm our injured. “I don't know what happened to Lieutenant Colonel Wisner and his men. I haven't seen any of them since the first musket shot. We number only what you see here before you, and about twenty more men up atop the ledge.” He fixes his gaze on the doctor and leans in closer to him. “I have released the men.”

We've lost? I can't believe it. But I find that I don't care. No. I don't care. It's over. Oh, thanks be to God, it's over. We are released.

But the colonel's hard stare remains steady.

We can't be in danger any longer if we've lost? Surely they won't hurt the wounded? And then I realize that they can and they will. “But the Van Eck boys,” I mumble. No. This is not how it was supposed to be.

“Benjamin,” Colonial Hathorn whispers.

“Go,” says the doctor. “And take him with you.” He nods at me.

“I won't leave you.” I don't even look at Colonel Hathorn. “I won't.”

“Noah,” Dr. Tusten begins, but he's cut off by the colonel.

“Follow me if you want to live, Noah,” he says. Then he grabs the doctor's hand, shaking it … not letting it go. Perhaps he's never seen a hero before. I know what the doctor is doing right now is surely heroic. I only stay because I fear losing him. I've lost my father, and Josh. I can't lose him.

I feel the colonel look my way. I don't move. He turns to leave. The wounded men call out to him. It's a hideous sound … their begging. I weave in and out of them trying to give them words of comfort. But they will not be comforted any longer. They hear the howling of the enemy just as I do.

I watch Colonel Hathorn's back fade into the trees. But I know I can't follow him. And they're coming.

I don't look at Dr. Tusten, but keep moving from man to man, pretending to check dressings. But I see nothing. My
ears hear only the shrieking and my sight has shut down. The doctor yells at me but his words have no meaning. He yells again and I look at him as if through a fog. “Noah, climb that ledge and find my other knapsack. I need more dressings RIGHT NOW!” he roars.

I scramble up the slippery ledge after the sack.

Once up on top, I search the forest floor but don't see it. The pines block out the sunlight so well that there's not much small growth on the forest floor, and I should easily have found the sack if it were nearby. But my eyes are useless, and my head swivels round and round on my shoulders, making me dizzy. I wander farther from the ledge. The sun is setting and I blink again and again, staring out into the darkening woods.

Then I see it! Ten paces ahead. I stumble forward, and as I bend to pick it up, I'm knocked over by something catching me in the side, throwing me to the ground. I lie facedown in the dirt, stunned, not understanding what just happened—until I feel the burning.

The shouts of the wounded compel me to leave the ground and head back to the ledge. I have the sack. I must return to the doctor. My side burns, and I have trouble standing straight … I half crawl toward the ledge.

Just as I near the spot where I climbed up, I see them come out from the trees in the opposite direction. I can't see my men below, but I can hear them shouting for mercy. Their cries fill me with courage and I leap up, ignoring the pain of the musket ball.

But Dr. Tusten is waiting. He's standing with his back to the Indians coming for him. He's scanning the top of the ledge. He's watching for me. His eyes find mine and before the first Indian can get to him, he gives me one last order: “Run!”

I watch him go down. They scalp him alive, although I hear no sound come from him. And then I follow his order and run like hell.

       
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

     
KEEP YOUR PROMISE

       
FRIDAY, JULY 23, 1779

The sky is getting light. It's morning … finally. I try to lift my arms and shake him, but I only manage to push on his side. “Scar,” I whisper. He doesn't answer. He's hard to the touch. “Scar.”

I stare past the trees into the quiet morning light. He's left me. As my father did, and Josh, and the doctor. They are all gone. I am alone.

But not for long.

They arrive in silence, filling our small clearing. Staring, they surround us. I see them struggle to understand the scene before them, the two of us, side by side on our backs, bleeding into the hemlock needles. I see them recognize Scar …

“His name.” The words sting my dry throat.

One of them steps toward us. He has wide eyes and a large forehead. His scalp lock is long, hanging well past his shoulders. He moves closer. Just like me, he is shiny with sweat and covered in musket powder. I know he's not coming to kill me—his face doesn't have that look on it, that horrible look I remember on the faces of Brant's men as
they approached the wounded under the ledge. What then? Scar … he's coming for Scar.

“HIS NAME?” I shout, the strength of my own voice surprising me. And then I grab Scar, burying my face in the worn frock—and I wait for the Indian to rip him from me.

“Ronhnhí:io,” a soft voice says. It is not a question or a command.

I look up. A tall Indian in deerskin leggings and a green military tunic emerges from the trees. A silver-mounted cutlass hangs at his side. It is him. Joseph Brant.

“His name. It is Ronhnhí:io.” I watch him look down at Scar. “It means, ‘he who has a good spirit.'”

The sweaty Indian retreats and I loosen my painful hold. He who has a good spirit. Yes. That is it. My head sinks back to the earth, and for the first time, I notice the cool morning air on my cheeks.

I want them to leave us now. I want them all to go. But they don't. They hang back. A few sit. One bows his head in prayer. I can hear his voice but can't make out what he's saying. It's like they've forgotten about us. Why do they stay? What are they waiting for?

An emptiness spreads through me … I realize what they're waiting for. I know. I'm not going home.

I look around at the men, searching for a way to be wrong. But I can't make out any of their faces, except one. Joseph Brant. When I catch Brant's eye, he's not uncomfortable with it and keeps my gaze. He moves closer, kneeling at my side.
His moccasins, those white beads, the red tassels … the same ones I saw from under the laurel branches three days ago.

My eyes are too heavy and I let them close.

… Water. I need to get to the river. He's standing in the middle of the wheat field
.

“Scar!” I shout. “Are you thirsty?” He doesn't answer. Instead he waves to me, just as the bearded heads of grain wave to the clouds gliding across the high summer sky. “Wait!” But he's already turning—already racing away through the straw-colored wheat
.

I jerk awake. And I know that I'm alone under the frock before I even open my eyes. My friend is gone.

Brant makes me drink. I want to refuse, but I'm too thirsty. He places my head back onto the ground and waits. Scar died with me by his side and now I will die with this man by mine. But the thought doesn't comfort me, and with him sitting so close, so quiet, I lose my courage to die silently, as I know I should. “I lost … we lost.” I'm embarrassed at my stammering, but the expression on the Mohawk leader's face doesn't change.

He looks up, as if through a hole in the cloudy morning sky. He's silent, staring through that hole. And then he looks back down at me and smiles a weary smile, drained of happiness. “Boy, I fight a battle every day of my life that I know I will lose.”

“Is it worth this?”

At first his face slackens. But then a hardness takes over
his features. “It's not that the fight is worth your life, it's that your life is worthless if you do not fight.”

I see in an instant the fight Brant speaks of, and its hopelessness. Not the war between the British and the Colonies, but the fight for his own freedom and the freedom of those who have followed him into the clearing this morning to find Scar and take him home.

Freedom.

Wasn't that the same thing I was fighting for?

My mother's face and Mary's tinkling laughter float over me, and then Dr. Tusten's kind voice: “You are what happens next, Noah” … so tired … and then her … shaking my hand, telling me that two days make her wiser.

Eliza.

The thought of never seeing her again shreds my heart like a battlefield of musket balls. The sadness is suffocating, and I'm afraid … so afraid.

“Wheat,” I tell him, but I can't make out his face anymore. “I promised.”

He bends close to my ear. I feel his warm, comforting breath on my forehead—or is it my father's breath? “Go keep your promise, boy.”

And I slip away under my father's old blue hunting frock.

     
E
PILOGUE

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in July, Joseph Brant, under British orders, descended on the settlement of Minisink (the present-day city of Port Jervis and the town of Deerpark, New York) with twenty-seven Tories and sixty Iroquois, where they plundered, burned, and killed.

Loaded down with stolen supplies and livestock, Brant took off north as fast as possible, taking the path along the Delaware River.

Word of the destruction spread and the militia responded. By noon the following day, Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Tusten and Colonel John Hathorn, with 120 men gathered from New York and New Jersey, marched upriver in pursuit of the Mohawk leader.

Early the next morning, under the charge of Colonel Hathorn, the militia prepared to attack. But before the men were in place, a musket shot rang out. Captain Tyler had gone ahead to scout the exact whereabouts of Brant and his troops. Some say, upon discovering them, he accidentally discharged his musket. Others say he unwisely shot at one of
Brant's men crossing the river. Tyler was killed on the spot, his reason for the shot forever buried in history.

With the element of surprise lost, the battle began …

The militia quickly divided into three divisions: Tusten on the right, Hathorn in the center, and Lieutenant Colonel Wisner on the left. Joseph Brant was a quarter-mile downriver when Tyler's musket fired. He immediately gathered half his men and started up the hill from the river. This maneuver brought Brant around behind both Hathorn and Tusten, completely splitting off Wisner's division. Wisner's men, accounting for at least a third of the militia, ran off, never to be heard from again, thus leaving Tusten and Hathorn behind to face Brant's experienced war party with only eighty men.

When Brant's party began firing on the rear of the militia, with the division he left at the river firing on its front, another large group of the militia broke and fled. Hathorn and Tusten were now left with approximately forty men hard pressed on three sides.

The battle wore on for hours, but the militiamen were eventually overpowered. Although casualty reports are not clear, it is thought that forty-seven militiamen and eight of Brant's men were lost that day. Brant carried away his fallen from the field, as was the Mohawk custom. No one was left alive to bury the bodies of the militiamen.

The dead would have to be patient. It would be over forty long years before anyone would come for them. The dangers of the war and the wild place in which they died kept their whereabouts hidden. It was not until 1822 that a scouting
party finally found the scene of the battle. The bones of the men were collected and encased in two walnut coffins. And on July 22, forty-three years to the day they fought and died, all were buried in a mass grave in Goshen, New York.