3stalwarts (14 page)

About a week later, Lana was alone in the cabin. Gil was working out time against the fall logging and burning he expected to do, when he would want George Weaver and Christian Reall and Clem Coppernol for two or three days. He was paying off Captain Demooth in grass from the swale. The trees were mostly girdled, and already had dried out on the lower branches, the leaves turning brown, with only tufts of green at the tops. From the window Lana could see in a vague way how the new land would lie, straight to the west of the cabin.

She felt listless and dull-headed. There was no doubt in her mind now that there was a baby on the way, and though she could have wished that there might have been a year or so without one, Gil was pleased. A man could clear his land well enough, but when he began to work crops he needed help; and there was only one way to get help in the back country, and that was to lay up children against the time. She wondered whether he would be displeased if the child were a girl. Girls weren’t much use around a farm. But the main thing for a successful wife was to prove herself fertile. The sex of her offspring was generally ascribed either to an act of God or to the male parent, according to the reaction of the man himself. She thought, in any case, she wouldn’t have to be afraid of Gil.

He had recently bought a fleece from Kast, in Schuyler, and he had told her that in his absence she had better not try to keep on with piling brush. It would be better if she stayed indoors and carded and cleaned the fleece. She forced herself to the task, now, for she had been putting it off all day, on the pretext that the cabin needed a doing over. She had cleaned and sanded the floor and swept out the loft. All the pans had been taken down to the brook, where it was cool, for scouring. But there was no other thing to do after that and she had finally forced herself to come back to the hot kitchen.

The wool had a greasy smell; it put oil on her fingers; it was matted and torn from grazing on the edge of the woods; and the leg fleece had clay dried hard as shot that must be carefully removed. It was too precious to waste a hair of it.

From where she sat, Lana could look up from time to time at the peacock’s feather on the dresser. Sight of it made her think of home. By now they would be finishing the wheat harvest; her sisters would be binding sheaves, laughing with the reapers. With the team hitched to the crib wagon, her father would be driving down to them. Her mother, standing in the door, would shade her eyes against the sun and stare after him, westward over the field, westward; perhaps thinking of Lana, trying to see her.

During the past week she had had a feeling of her mother’s solicitude, when she herself sat down alone with her thoughts, when she took to dreaming with the peacock’s feather.

She resolutely set to work. It made her feel better when she got down to it and could see the time of spinning coming nearer. Spinning was the next best thing to music: the vibration of the wheel entered your body; its humming got into the heart; the thread mounted on the spindle, like dreams come true when you were a girl, or hope fulfilled when you got older, or like the memory of life itself. When a woman spun, she had her destiny in her own hands to make. A man had no place in spinning.

Lately she had noticed a queer thing in herself— that though her mind might wander, and her body lose awareness, senses like sleeping dogs awoke and walked. It was so now. She had heard nothing. Her hands were occupied with the comb and wool. She was not thinking any more of her girlhood home or her home with Gil. If she had been thinking at all, it had been of herself as a being past herself, growing without her own volition, like a lone plant in the woods.

Yet long before she heard a thing, before her mind wakened her senses to the approach of anyone, she knew that some person was coming near the cabin. When she finally did react it was to start up in a cold sweat with the greasy fleece clutched in both hands like an apron over her knees.

She faced the door, slender and dark, her eyes clouded like damp glass, completely defenseless.

The person stopped before her in the door, hesitantly, awkwardly, half frightened.

“It’s me,” she was saying. “It’s just me. Nancy. I’ve got a letter for you, Mrs. Marting.”

“A letter?” Lana said mechanically.

Nancy looked into her face and swallowed noisily.

“Yes, Mrs. Marting, from Mr. Demooth. Capting, I mean.” She thrust a folded piece of paper out at arm’s length. “I don’t aim to stay. I’ll just give it and get along.”

Lana came to herself.

“Oh, no, Nancy.” The girl’s foolish face and wide blue eyes looked pitifully afraid of her. “Come in, Nancy.”

“Oh no, Mrs. Marting. I couldn’t set in with you. Missis is always after me, reminding me I’m just a hired help. I’ve got no place inside your house. I know it. Only sometimes I forget it.”

“Of course you have. I’m glad to have company. Come in.”

Nancy put a tentative foot across the threshold. It was shod in an old blue cloth shoe of Mrs. Demooth’s, too small, and slit to let the toes out. As she took the letter, Lana felt like weeping, to think how nearly she had deprived the girl of a great excitement.

Nancy was got up with care. In spite of the heat, she was wearing a blue camlet cloak over her dress, which was a calico, also obviously handed down. She had a string of beads round her neck, of blue and red glass, and a red ribbon in her yellow hair. The hair, too, had been brushed with thought and elaborately braided round her head.

Now she came in and sat down on a stool, denying herself the backed chair. Her china-blue eyes made one rapid revolution of the room.

“My,” she said, with an unconscious imitation of Mrs. Demooth’s in-flection, “you have a nice place, Mrs. Marting.”

“Do you like it, Nancy? I’m glad.”

“You haven’t any picters, But that feather’s prettier than a picter, I believe.”

“I’m fond of it.”

“We hain’t got feathers in the big house.”

Lana read the letter.

Dear Mrs. Martin,

I am writing you this to let you know that John Wolff has been sent to Simsbury Gaol instead of shot. I know you will be glad to hear that, as I am. He will be out of harm’s way there and we need have nothing on our consciences. But I wish we all could feel as impartially on both sides as you do.

Respectfully,

Mark Demooth

P.S. I understand that Mrs. Wolff has returned to her house at Cosby’s. If so, she must be there alone. I shall try and drop in and see her.

Lana’s eyes filled with tears.

“What is it, Mrs. Marting?”

“I think Captain Demooth must be a very good man, Nancy.”

“Yes, he’s a nice man. Sometimes Missis is hard on me. But she says I’m stupid and I guess I am. I think Mr. Demooth likes me. He said so once. He said, ‘Nancy, you’re a pretty girl.’ Then he got on his horse and went to town.”

Lana, surprised, looked at Nancy.

“Why, you are,” she said.

It was quite true. When any rational emotion showed behind the doll-like eyes, Nancy was pretty. She was a large girl, with strong square shoulders. Under the dress her breasts showed firm and high. She was long-legged and she moved with an unconscious sleepy grace when she was walking. She reminded Lana somehow of a well-bred filly, in her body, now that she tried to see her with a man’s eyes.

“What’s your name, Nancy?”

“Schuyler. Nancy Schuyler.” A trained sort of pride entered her voice. “My mother was Elisabeth Herkimer. She’s sister of the colonel. I do hear he has a fine place. I been there once, only I don’t remember it very well, only the nice horses and the cherry trees. They was in bloom, not bearing. Do you like cherries, Mrs. Marting?”

“Yes, I do. Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“I’ve got two brothers, Mrs. Marting. Hon Yost. He gave me these beads. He won them off an Indian down at Canajoharie. Nicholas, he’s younger, and black-complected, not like me and Hon.”

“Do you have to work?”

“Pa’s dead. Ma put me out to work with Captain Demooth and the Missis for four years. She gets three pounds a year in English money for me. I was sixteen then. Unless I want to get married after I’m nineteen. I’ll be nineteen next month. Did you want to get married?”

“Yes,” said Lana, with a smile.

“I wonder what it’s like.”

“You’ve never wanted to?”

“I don’t know. Old Clem Coppernol, he’s always bothering me to come sleep in his cabin. It’s dirty there. I don’t think I’d want to. And Missis puts me in my room every night anyway and locks me up. I wouldn’t mind sleeping with Captain if he told me to. But that ain’t marrying, is it?”

“It isn’t quite the same,” said Lana, gravely.

“That’s what Hon Yost told me. He said you and me ain’t got much brains, Nancy, but we’ve got looks to beat all. You make a feller to marry you if he wants anything. Don’t you trust a feller, he says. I think Hon Yost has got some brains, don’t you, Mrs. Marting?”

Nancy leaned forward on her knees. Her back was straight. She had a kind of animal strength that was invigorating to see, in spite of her foolish eyes.

“You’ll stay and have some milk with me?” Lana suggested.

“Oh no, I couldn’t.”

“Yes, please.”

The girl beamed.

The milk tasted a little bitter from cherry browse. But it was cool from the spring. And Nancy chattered happily. Her brother had gone off to Canada. He was making money in the army. She supposed she wouldn’t see him for a spell, but maybe he might come next year.

“How do you know?” asked Lana with a tightening of her breath.

“He sent word down to Nicholas. He sent word to me he’d try to fetch me an officer, too. I wouldn’t mind it if the army was to come down here, would you, Mrs. Marting?”

She finished her milk and rose.

“I’ll clean the things,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

“No, I’ll do them.”

“I wouldn’t feel easy, Mrs. Marting. Missis might scold about it. It’s nice you letting me set with you this way, but I’d feel better if I could.”

She looked so anxious, Lana let her wash the cups. Afterwards she repeated Lana’s message of thanks to the captain.

“He’ll like that. It’s real nice to say it so. I’ll tell him after supper when he comes to clean his rifle in the kitchen.” She went away.

The old Indian, Blue Back, had crossed the Hazenclever hill and gone down the north slopes for the valley of the West Canada Creek. He had kept on the west shore northward towards the big falls, and there, on the edge of the chasm, in a small forest swale he had come on the bed of a deer. He moused around in the grass like an old hound dog until he picked up the track, which he followed through all the deer’s morning manoeuvres.

They led Blue Back to where the deer had watered, dunged, drunk, and browsed. A little later, a couple of miles to the northwest, they brought him to a pond in which the deer had pulled lilies. By then the Indian knew that he was dealing with a heavy buck. He didn’t want a big deer, now that he had come so far from home; he wouldn’t be able to carry the half of it back to Oriska. What he was supposed to be after was a nice young doe or a grown fawn. His young wife, Mary, recently baptized by Mr. Kirkland, had asked him to get her a nice doeskin for a kirtle she wished to make for herself.

But Blue Back couldn’t let the deer go. He wanted to see the horns. He was what Joe Boleo, the trapper, called meat hungry. Every autumn, when the nights grew frostier and the trees began to get a tinge of color on the ridges, Blue Back began to feel an urge to get hold of big meat. Big horns. Something big in the way of a deer, to start the hunting; something that, when you ate the meat of it, didn’t digest so easy as a fawn, but kept the belly tight for a long time.

Last night, sitting in the door of his hut at Oriska, and hearing the creek flowing towards the Mohawk River with a misty sound in the dark, it had come into his mind that he ought to take a hunt north just to keep track of things the way he had promised Captain Demooth. When his wife said she wanted a doeskin, he said all right, he would get one. But he knew he wasn’t going to look for does.

He had started in the hour before dawn, fording the Mohawk and going down towards the Martin clearing. He thought of stopping in on the Martins, but he wanted to get well north early. In the swale he roused out the foolish brown mare and watched her kick her heels through the mist and thought it was a pity, the way she was getting fat, that she belonged to his friend Martin. Otherwise he could slip over any time with a bow and arrow and do some neat night work on her. Horse meat was good meat, and very handy.

But Martin was his good friend, and the squaw was getting pleasanter. He let the horse go. It was well past noon when he came to the big buck’s bed.

With the patience and phlegm of a shadow he trailed the buck through the afternoon until he found that the animal was circling. Then he left the tracks and struck out across country for where the deer had bedded the night before. He trotted steadily, his kilt of deerskin flapping up and down on his knees, the fingers of his leggings jumping and shaking. The sweat came out on his hunting shirt, staining it where the grease would let it through. Sweat made a dark ring round the band of the disreputable felt hat. As he went, he gnawed at a small loaf of pressed dried meat and blueberries, got himself a mouthful, sucked till the juices enlivened the meat, and chewed it. It was all the food he had with him; but he was not troubled by that. It was good to get hungry before you killed a big deer. You wanted to bring it home when you were on the point of famishment. Then you would throw it down in the house and lie down on your bed, and watch your young wife cut it up and put it in the kettle. Now and then you would tell her to hurry. It was pleasant to see her hurried and anxious, to smell the steam from the cook kettle, and to lie with your hands on your belly.

The air had a bluish thickness of smoke. It lay all along the horizon. That smoke was another sign of the autumn. It enlarged the trees and made the land look flat when you came out of the woods. You saw a deer on a day like this and it was a deer worth seeing.