3stalwarts (3 page)

They lunched before they came to Schuyler, by a little stream in a patch of hemlocks, eating bread and cheese side by side on the carpet of short brown needles and tossing crumbs to the chipmunks. It was cool there, for the trees held the sunlight far above them. In front of them the mare drowsed in the shafts and the cow found a cud to chew.

Looking at the cart, Lana imagined placing her things in the cabin be-fore dark.

“Will we set the bed up downstairs,” she said, “or put it in the loft?” He looked at her. “I’ve heard Mother say that in the cabins when she first came to Klock’s they sometimes had the bed set up in the kitchen.”

If he was worrying about her, she would show him that she was prepared.

“You’re not scared coming west so far with me, like this?”

She shook her head.

“It’ll be different from living in a house.” He poked the needles with a stick. “It seemed so fine to me, because I built it, that I didn’t think it might look different to a girl who was raised in a big house like yours.”

He was trying to prepare her.

“Mother started the same way,” she said. “In a few years we’ll have all those things. But beginning this way, Gil, we’ll like them better when we get them.” She glanced sidewise. “I’ve always thought it would be nice living in a cabin. It’ll be handy to look after if it’s small.”

He said, “It ain’t much cleared.”

“We won’t have to buy much now,” she added. “Mother was awfully good to me.”

He touched her hand.

Quite unexpectedly they came out on Schuyler. The open land, well cleared and cultivated, with men mowing hay along the river, and broad-framed houses, was like a release after the woods. Lana knew, as she looked about her, that their place was only a few miles farther on. It would not seem so far out of the world, now that she had seen these healthy farms.

Some people came to the fences to watch them by. They greeted Gil by name and looked curiously towards Lana. They asked for news, and when Gil said he hadn’t heard any worth telling, they smiled and said, “You’ve brought along quite a piece of news of your own, though.”

They were half an hour traversing Schuyler. Then once more the woods closed in on the road and river, great elms, and willows and hemlock along the brooks. Now and then through swampy pieces the cart lurched and tottered over corduroy, and the mare had to set her feet carefully.

When they reached Cosby’s Manor, it seemed to Lana a queer lost place. There was a fine house by the river, and a store built of logs, and a tenant’s house. But all had a forgotten aspect.

A woman came to the door of the store, shading her eyes with her hand. She did not seem like a live and healthy person. She seemed like someone in a trance. And she did not call to them, but met Lana’s shy nod with a dull stare.

Gil came hurrying up beside the cart.

“Never mind her, Lana. She’s queer. They’re Johnson people here, and they haven’t got friends.”

“Who is she?”

“It’s Wolff’s wife. I get along with Wolff all right, but people here don’t speak to them much. I guess she gets lonely.”

He lifted his voice to call good-day to her.

“Hello,” she said, flatly, and turned as if to reenter the store.

“You all alone, Mrs. Wolff?” Gil asked.

“John’s round somewhere,” she replied over her shoulder. “You want him?”

“No. I only thought the place looked lonely.”

“Thompsons left last Thursday,” she said.

“Left?”

“Yeah. They went for Oswego. They say the Congress is going to fix the fort at Stanwix, and that means trouble. I wanted John to go, but he said he couldn’t afford to. You can’t leave if you ain’t got cash money to live on up there, he says.” She tilted her head to the northwest, stared at them, and then went into the store.

Gil and Lana looked after her. Then he turned to the house. “They’ve boarded the windows,” he said. That explained the blankness. “I guess they’ve taken their cattle, too.”

In spite of herself, Lana shivered.

“Do just she and Mr. Wolff live here?”

“I guess so. He’s got a daughter married to Dr. Petry. But Doc’s a Committee member, and I guess he don’t let her come up here any more.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” whispered Lana.

Gil glanced quickly at her.

“It don’t have to bother us,” he said. “We’re all the right party.”

Lana did not answer. They were in the woods again now, and the road had become both narrower and rougher. Their pace was reduced to a mere crawl under the hazy slanting bars of sunlight, yet for the first time every step the mare took seemed to Lana to be drawing her an irrecoverable distance from her home. She told herself, “But we’re going home.” But it didn’t mean the same thing any more.

The light through the leaves softened, became more golden. Off on a hill to the right a cock grouse began drumming, starting with slow beats, and gradually gathering pace.

A great mess of flies collected round the mare’s head, like sparks in the sunlight, deer flies, and horseflies an inch long, that drew blood when they bit. The mare kept shaking herself. She stopped to bite at them, and kicked and snorted, and then went on with a sullen resignation. Lana could have cried. She looked back at Gil and saw that he was switching the cow with a branch of maple; and the cow had moved up close behind the wagon.

“Are they always like this, Gil?” Lana asked.

“There’s always flies in the real woods,” he said shortly. “It must be going to rain, though, the way they take hold.”

He had a lump on his forehead, with a red trickle issuing from it. She said, “They never are so thick at home.”

“You’ll have to get used to it then. Here, take this and slap them off her.”

He gave her the branch and stopped to cut himself another. Lana kept switching the mare, and after a moment she was glad of the occupation. There had been no driving for her to do for some time, for the mare had to have her head in getting over the rough spots. Lana became so absorbed in batting off the flies that she did not notice the small side road turning off to the left, or the clearing through a narrow fringe of trees. It was only when Gil said, in a pleasanter voice, “That was Demooth’s place,” that she realized she had missed something.

“Where?”

“We’ve passed it. But Weaver’s is just ahead.”

She raised her eyes to see the leaves thinning at last. The sun was just ahead, nearing the horizon, and putting fiery edges on some overtaking slate-gray clouds.

While she watched, the clouds overlapped the sun, and at the same mo-ment a fresh east wind struck the road, dispersing the flies, and they emerged into the clearing with the rain.

Lana saw Weaver’s, dimly, through the slanting spear-like fall of rain. A square cabin, with a small wing added on, in which the logs were un-weathered, a roof of bark, and a chimney sending up smoke. It stood in the midst of the clearing, surrounded on three sides by Indian corn through which the stumps, blackened by their burning, still showed. In front of the house, like a showpiece, was a three-acre patch of wheat in well-worked ground. A track ran through it toward a low log barn, and just in front of the cabin door two hollyhock plants, one red, one yellow, stood together with a small border of pinks.

Nowhere was there any sign of people. But on the edge of the woods a new road ran off, making a Y, which Gil told her led to Reall’s on the creek.

“We’re straight ahead,” he said.

The Kingsroad burrowed into the woods again, but they ended shortly, and Lana looked out over a long swamp of alder. Half a mile to the left lay the river, sluggish and dark. Beyond, behind a fringe of old willow trees, the ground rose again. Suddenly the road turned left down to the alders, going straight through to the ford.

The mare stopped there, and Gil came alongside with the cow. His face was streaming wet, but he smiled at her.

“Well,” he said, “we’re here at last.”

“Where?” asked Lana, dully.

“Home.”

He looked at her.

“Giddap,” he said roughly to the mare.

She turned off the road onto a winding pair of wheel tracks. Then Lana saw.

A small new cabin standing on the higher ground. Beyond, a muddy brook flowed widely through some scattered alders. On the far side the land widened out in swamp grass for perhaps two acres. She saw, almost without seeing these things.

Her heart was in her throat. “You mustn’t cry,” she said to herself, over and over, “you mustn’t start crying.”

It seemed to her so utterly forlorn. Behind the cabin were the marks of Gil’s first struggle with the land: the stumps, half burnt, surrounded by corn of all heights, the most uneven patch she ever saw. All round the cabin the earth was bared to the rain and fast turning into mud. Beyond was a low shed to shelter the horse and cow.

Then Gil cried out, “Look, there’s smoke!”

She saw it feebly beginning to rise from the chimney. Somehow it made the rain seem drearier than ever. She wanted to say, “Oh, let’s go home.” But then, in a saving moment, she took hold of herself. For better or worse she had married him, she was out of reach of home; it would have to be her business to change the looks of the place.

They came up to the door, the cart creaking in the rain. The door opened. A rawboned gray-haired woman, in a faded, dirty calico dress that had been blue once upon a time, was holding a basket with two pinks in it. She looked completely taken aback.

“Why, Gil,” she said. “You surely did surprise me. I was figuring to get the place ready for you. I’d only lit the fire and was going to set these pinks out by the door.”

Gil held out his hands to help Lana down.

“You go inside,” he said. “I’ll unload. This is Mrs. Weaver, Lana.”

The woman opened her arms and clasped Lana, without letting go the pinks.

“My God,” she said. “I’m surely glad to see you. I’ve heard enough about you, Lord He knows it. But you’re even prettier than Gil let on!”

2

DEERFIELD (1776)

A small haystack stood beside the shed. That was one of the great advantages of the Martins’ place-the fact that part of it was already open land and covered with swamp grass. Most people, opening new land, had to let their cattle browse for what they could find in winter, having barely enough corn leaves to subsist their horses on. “We could keep two teams on the natural grass in that old beaver fly,” Gil said more than once, “if we could afford to buy that many horses.” They had harvested the hay together, Gil mowing and Lana raking, and both pitching it onto the cart through a week of dry breezy weather. Her father had taught her a little about thatching and she had put in two days’ work on the stack. Though it looked to her a bungling kind of job compared to the work her father did, Gil swore that there was no better-looking stack between Schenectady and the Indian country.

But everything she did seemed to please him. The way she had fixed the cabin over, arranged their scanty furniture to make the place look, he said, as if they’d lived in it for years. The way she sanded the floor every morning; and the little cotton curtains she made for the two windows, stringing them on cord. It had been exciting, after that first gloomy day of their arrival, to unpack the two trunks and the boxes from the cart. Gil had had no idea of all the things in them. “You brought a complete outfit,” he said. She felt a little shy, replying, “I told Mother there wasn’t any sense in me bringing a lot of clothes, and such things. I told her I’d rather have the money spent in house things.”

The cabin lost its dreariness when they had the dresser set up against the wall beside the fireplace, with its dishes laid out on the shelves. It was one her father had made of pine in his young married days, with scalloped mouldings, but it had been put by upstairs years before when he brought home the maple cupboard he bought in Caughnawaga. It had seemed like an old and clumsy piece. When Lana asked for it, her mother had been glad to let it go. But now, in its new place, the dresser looked impressively handsome. It gave Lana a comforting feeling to see it there, and to think that her father and mother must have admired it together in their first house.

On its shelves she placed her brown earthenware plates, the baking dish, and the six glasses from Albany. On the top shelf out of harm’s way she put the Bible and the white china teapot that had been her Grandmother Lana’s, and the peacock’s feather that her mother had given her out of the cluster of six, so that she should have a reminder of home always in sight. War on sea or land could not affect its fantastical colors.

When Mrs. Weaver saw it first, she held up both her hands and marveled stridently.

“It’s like the feather off an angel’s wing. You say it come from an actual bird?”

“Oh, yes,” said Lana.

“What might such a bird be called?”

“A peacock, Mrs. Weaver.”

“Think of that!” exclaimed Mrs. Weaver. “I wonder what he looks like.”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Would they be wing feathers, do you suppose?”

“My mother had an uncle who went to sea,” said Lana modestly. “He said it was off the peacock’s tail. Mother inherited them. She has five at home.”

“You certainly know a lot,” Mrs. Weaver said admiringly.

Mrs. Weaver made Lana feel very proud. She examined all the other fixings of the cabin with a new respect; she went upstairs into the loft and sat upon the bed, bouncing a little.

“That’s a dandy bed,” she said.

“Mother made it for me. It’s all genuine white goose.”

“God! Imagine! I ain’t seen a genuine white goose since I come up here. Your Ma must have been a knowing person, Mrs. Martin.”

She tried the spinning wheel, saying it ran nice but felt a little light for a woman like herself. “I’ll bet, though, that a dancey body like yourself would get a first-rate tone out of it.”

But what inevitably attracted her was the peacock’s feather. She stopped again before it, holding her hands before her petticoat, tight down against her legs. Her curving nose looked rigid with the wonder of it. Her kindly mouth was hushed. Her gray eyes shone. Beside her Lana looked small and young and frail.