3stalwarts (36 page)

“Like it?”

Lana nodded.

“Chloe. Bring that second glass.”

“Oh no, thanks, doctor.”

“Do you good.”

“I oughn’t to now. That’s what I came to see you about.” She looked at him frankly. “I’m pregnant, doctor, and I want to find out if after-after that time, I ought to be especially careful about anything.”

“Lord, no. You’re all right. If you want it.”

“Yes, I do.”

“That’s fine. I’m eternally glad, I tell you. I was sorry about you. It’s the best thing. It’s woman’s natural function, Mrs. Martin, and you’re a fine healthy girl. When do you expect it?”

Lana, remembering, colored slightly; but she smiled at the same time.

“Sometime after the first week in May.”

The doctor didn’t even swear. He just popped out his eyes and stared.

He looked so funny that Lana started laughing.

“I must be kind of a ghost.”

“Oh, no. No, indeed.” He cleared his throat. “It just happens another girl is expecting almost the identical time. She was in just before you and I’m beginning to wonder what’s been going on with my patients.” He glanced at her. “Will you be round this district, then?”

“Yes. Gil said we’d stay till the baby was born. He seems so pleased.” Her lips trembled. “Oh, doctor, I feel as if I’d just begun riving again.”

“Yes, yes.” Chloe knocking, he called her in. “Give that to Mrs. Martin. Drink it, girl. It’s a good thing to celebrate with. Here’s to Gilly or Magdelana second. Or both!” He laughed.

Lana laughed and drank with him.

“Afterwards, Gil talks about our moving back to Deerfield. He thinks we might get back in time to get our spring corn in. The Weavers will go with us.”

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. How’s your husband, by the way? Arm troubling him any?”

“Not a bit. He came down to meet Captain Demooth at the fort. We thought it might be about their taking Burgoyne, and I walked along hoping I’d see you here.”

“We ought to be having news.”

He showed her out and sat down again. A fine girl. He was feeling better. He was going to have a busy spring, though. Very busy. Well, he might as well get in to supper.

He went in and kissed his wife dutifully and Chloe served them. He was just starting on the rabbit stew when Demooth appeared.

“Doc,” he said. “Can you come down to Ellis’s at the falls? Right now. I said I’d drive you down.”

“What’s the matter, Mark?”

“There’s been trouble in Jerseyfield. You know that man George Mount who wouldn’t move down when St. Leger was at Oriskany?”

Petry nodded and stuffed his mouth full.

“Well, I saw him in Ellis’s a few days ago. He’d brought his wife down to buy some things at Paris’s. They were gone from home a week, and they’d left the two boys there with his nigger. Well, he went back. He found his place burned and the two lads scalped. One of them was still alive and he brought him out with the nigger. They hadn’t touched the nigger. The boy’s only seven and they say he can’t live, but Mount wondered whether you’d come down.”

The doctor dropped a morsel of rabbit.

He stared like a fish.

Then he wiped his mouth, and spoke slowly, “It isn’t over, then.”

Demooth’s face was drawn and bitter.

“It was two Indians that used to stay with Mount. Caderoque and Hess. The nigger recognized them. There were some white men in the same party. They didn’t do any scalping. They only shot the first boy.”

“Did the nigger recognize any of them?”

“He recognized Suffrenes Casselman. And he said the head man was called Caldwell.”

5

JOHN WOLFF’S JOURNEY (1777)

John Wolff had been in Newgate Prison for over a year, but he wasn’t sure himself how long it was. He seemed to have lost the sense of time.

There were days when he couldn’t have said offhand whether it was to-day, or yesterday; they were days beyond track.

Sometimes he would catch himself saying the days of the week, “Mon-day, Tuesday, Wednesday …” Or the months of the year. There were many things he used to say. “Lucy Locket, lost her pocket …” Sometimes he would wake up some of the near-by prisoners and they would throw odd pieces of rock at his bed and yell. It was awful when the men yelled. It started the echoes whirling in the high air shaft, seventy feet high. It was fifty feet across at the bottom, they said, though you couldn’t find that out by pacing because the water lapped against the far side. But at the top the shaft was four feet across with an iron grating fixed into the stone; and what with the smoke from the charcoal braziers one could hardly tell where the sun was in the sky, except at noon. A little before and a little after summer solstice, you could see the sun itself upon the grating if you waded out into the water far enough. You could even imagine a faint warmth from it on your head. John Wolff had felt it, and the next man, walking out, felt it also, but he started a convulsion, and they had to haul him out of the water for fear he would drown.

But when the men started yelling and got the echoes going, it used to make John Wolff feel sick. The voices would start picking each other up, catching and passing each other, and coming up and down, until the echoes managed to acquire individual personality of their own, having echoes of their own, and the echoes had echoes, and it went on and on, a bedlam that wouldn’t die even when the trapdoor opened above the iron ladder and the guard looked down and yelled back furiously. Then the men would work on the echoes and a queer singsong rise and fall would be worked out that, even after everyone was tired, kept the echoes working endlessly.

It was like the eternal drip of water magnified. The drip of water had the same effect, when everyone was silent. At first you would notice it on the wall right beside you. Drip, and a pause; drip, and a pause. Gradually this soft impingement of a single drop would lead you to listen for drops farther away, and soon your ears would become attuned to drops much farther off. Then you would begin to be aware of the graduation of loudness that distance made, and all at once the drop you had first noticed would have the regular clang of a ringing bell. You couldn’t then put it back into its proper equivalent in the sound of sense.

Sometimes a man would get up from his wet straw and work at the bare rock for hours to change the direction of an individual drip, so that its sound would be altered and thus restored to a sane proportion.

But one night when the men were making their singsong, it happened that the guard was drunk. Maybe the guard went a little crazy himself. Anyway, he opened the trap and fired his musket. They could all see him, fifty feet above their heads in the lighted square of the trap, his furious red face, and the musket pointing down like the finger of wrathful ret-ribution. The bullet striking made no sound through the yelling voices and they yelled twice as loud. Even John Wolff yelled that night. And the guard lost his head entirely. He fired again and again, and finally a ball ricocheted and killed one of the prisoners. He was the man who had come in with John Wolff, the man who had beaten a soldier for molesting his wife.

But they did not notice he had died till it was time for them to go up the next day.

They had to haul him up with a rope and carry him to the smithy so that his irons could be taken off. Then he had been buried, and the commandant, Captain Viets, in a fury, had had half a dozen men flogged, choosing the ones the outraged guard who had committed the murder pointed out, and one man, who owed the guard three shillings, was hung by his heels for an hour and a half. Nobody had had any food for two days, but the guard did well instead, for it was necessary for the prison to consume its full ration of beef if the commandant were to receive his regular allowance.

It was odd, after that, to think of the dead man. He was buried in the prison yard. And yet he was sixty feet above any of his fellow prisoners. He was decomposing somewhere underground, but they were still more underground than he. Waiting for him to come down, one man said: “to come down in drops of water.” He embarked on an intricate calculation of how long it would take the first drop to come down to their level. John Wolff started watching the drops on the stone beside his bed.

Now and then long firey discussions would start up over the progress of the British army. They all knew one was on the way. But the guard would give them no news. The guard struck a man if he asked. They gathered from that that the army was making progress. But one night the commandant himself opened the trap and they saw his bare legs squatting under his nightshirt as he yelled down, Did they want to hear about General Burgoyne? They let the drops answer. But Captain Viets wasn’t to be stopped. “He’s surrendered his entire army. Seven thousand men,” he bawled. “And the Hessians have been licked at Bennington, Vermont, and Sillinger has been driven off from Fort Stanwix by Benedict Arnold. How do you like that? Hey?”

Purely from habit they started their singsong and he had to slam the door shut. They kept the singsong up all night. They knew now that all hope of their being rescued from the caverns must be deferred. In fact it was a question now if they ever would get out. People didn’t even know where they were, a lot of them. They didn’t really know themselves. They were conscious only of the vast formation of rock that was above them. Black tons of it, they thought. A person wouldn’t think of looking for a man so deep down in the rock.

For a week afterwards they beguiled themselves by saying what they thought of General Burgoyne. They imagined General Burgoyne if he were put down among them. They wondered if he would be. But people like General Burgoyne, who made war and brought Indians and wore epaulets and carried his private whiskey with him, weren’t ever put in places like this. Only a person who preached in the pulpit for the King, or who said he was a Loyalist, or who owed a new Yankee judge some money, or who hit a soldier who was raping his wife— only that man was an atrocious villain.

Most of them thought John Wolff was going crazy. He was not aware of it himself. Only he liked to repeat things he knew. And he also dictated to himself letters to his wife every week, though he hadn’t money to smuggle them out if he had been able to write them. He would ask her to write what she was doing and then he would say what had happened in the prison. The letters sounded pretty much alike even to himself. He got tired of them. The day after the captain delivered the news of Burgoyne’s surrender, he wrote Ally about it; but then he could think of nothing to add. The Mr. Henry who had first welcomed him to the caverns asked what the trouble was. “I’m writing my wife, Alice,” explained John Wolff, “but I can’t think of anything new to tell her.”

“Have you described this lovely home of ours?” said Mr. Henry.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Why don’t you? Take a look around and see what there is to see.”

Several men laughed, but John Wolff did not mind. It was an idea. He began looking round and made up his letter, about the air shaft and the beds and the queer beach of sand and the water. “The water is queer,” he said, “the water keeps dropping down off the walls all the while and the water don’t never get higher nor lower.” He realized that he was saying something nobody had noticed.

Suddenly John Wolff came out of his daze and he had a long fit of the shakes. But they were not the damp shakes that everybody had. He was shaking with excitement. He went and looked at the water.

He said, “Has anybody ever tried to wade out there?”

“It’s too deep,” one of the men said.

“Has anybody tried to swim?” asked John Wolff.

A roar of laughter went up. One of the men reached out and rattled the chains connecting his ankle and wrist fetters. “Try and swim with forty pounds,” he suggested. John Wolff stood in their midst looking at their faces, gaunt and filthy with rock dust and charcoal smoke and unwashed beards. It came to him that he must look like that himself. His hand went to his beard. He had never had a beard before. He had always shaved.

Then his eyes grew cunning. He felt them growing so and closed the lids lest the other men should see it, and he went and lay down. They were still making jokes about him when the guard opened the door and shouted at them to “Heave up!” for their exercise.

From his bed, John Wolff watched them clambering toilsomely up the ladder, their chains clashing against the iron rungs, as they fought upward with one hand and carried the night buckets with the other. The smoke from the braziers drew into the guardroom and the guard stepped away from the door. John Wolff lay there till they had all gone up.

“Hey, you!” the guard yelled. “What’s your name, Wolff!”

John Wolff didn’t answer.

“Come up.”

John Wolff remembered all the filth he had ever heard and sent it up to the guard. The guard laughed. “All right,” he said. “Stay down. Stay down for a week.” Wolff was a harmless man, not worth coming down for and lugging up and flogging. He slammed the trap shut.

John Wolff got up. He clanked slowly down to the beach, looking at the water. Then he started rummaging in the straw beds. Some of the prisoners had bought pieces of plank from the guard, to put under the straw. He hadn’t any himself because they cost a shilling a foot. Moving with the slow, half-hopping motion the irons forced him to use, he took down planks and put them in the water. They floated soggily. He got more. He laid them on top of each other, side by side. Then he waded out and straddled them and tentatively pulled up his feet. The planks sank under him and he rummaged for more. He finally had enough to float him and he tied them together with strips torn from his blanket.

He straddled the raft and pushed it out with his feet. He paddled with his hands. The weight of the irons made his hands splash no matter how careful he was. But he had only a little way to go to get out of the brazier lights.

John Wolff had thought a long time about which shaft to choose. But as he could not make up his mind he chose the farthest. When he entered it, the noise of his splashing diminished. The light behind him was cir-cumscribed by the low ceiling of the shaft and the flat level of the water. Looking back, it seemed to him that he had come a great distance. He could not see far ahead, because the shaft made a turn. He paddled slowly round that, and then in the darkness that instantly became complete he felt the front of his raft strike the rock. The blow was very slight, but it almost knocked him forward off balance. He barely saved himself by lifting his hands and bracing himself against the rock wall. He realized that the drift was filled to the ceiling, and that there was no way out. He felt all round the water level to make sure and then tried to turn his raft.