3stalwarts (41 page)

But Joe knew what was going on in their minds. He said seriously, “You ought to have been along with me, Adam. You’d have liked it. Gil, now, he’s a settled kind of man.” He drew his breath, slowly, and belched. “Along in those days, a white man was just about the finest thing that could happen to an Indian girl. It made her important in her town. When I first went out there, the Indians treated any white man like he was one of their sachems. Like a big bug, see, come visiting. They gave him a house in the town and then they sent in all the best-looking girls so he could take his pick and feel comfortable while he was staying. It was a good idea. Only it wasn’t so easy making your pick. Some of them girls was pretty nice.” He poured himself another drink and stirred the molasses in with his finger. “Some trappers got the idea of staying and then going off for a day and coming back and beginning over. There wasn’t any harm in that. It don’t matter what a girl did till she got married, see? But it didn’t happen that way to me. I got to the Chinisee Castle, the one they call Little Beard’s town now, and they sent in eighteen hand-picked ones. But right away I knew the one I wanted. I knew she’d suit me fine. I was young-and-coming, see, and I suited her too. Don’t laugh, you timber beast. It’s truth. She stood with the rest of them looking on the ground, the way they all done, but as soon as she made out all the rest was looking down,” she just took one look at me and it fixed me. Boy, she could throw her eyes at you!”

“I believe you,” Adam said.

“Go to hell. I reached out at her and I said, ‘You, you me fine!’ I hadn’t learned the language then. But she understood all right. The others went out, leaving just her. And as soon as they’d gone she just looked up at me, kind of scared and shy. I was pretty young, I guess, but it made me feel big.

“She didn’t come only to my shoulder and she had braids reaching down to the middle of her thighs. She wasn’t only medium dark, too, and she was pretty in her best clothes. She had on a kind of red overdress, what they call Ah-de-a-da-we-sa, and a blue skirt with beadwork on it. She was a great hand with beadwork. It was what made her come high in marriage. And her pant things was doeskin with more beading on the foot.”

“She come high?”

“I didn’t know how I could pay her Ma,” Joe said seriously. “I didn’t have only a bare stake. No beads for trading. I needed everything I had, see? The girl’s Ma was something big. One of the chiefs lines. They keep their family on the female side. The way the girls act up they’ve got to if they’re going to keep the children anywhere near straight… . But I’ve got away from me and the girl. Soon as we was alone she signed for me to set down by the fire and take off my shirt. She took a bone comb out of her belt and started combing my hair. She greased it and picked out the ticks and took pains where it was curled. She liked them curls. I had fine curly hair, you know.”

Even though Joe looked so serious, they had to laugh. They stared at the shiny expanses of bare scalp between the remnants of his past beauty. Joe rolled over and turned his back and lifted his shirt to let the heat strike against the rum in his belly.

“Lord,” he said over his shoulder. “When I went to bed with her it was pretty dark. But I didn’t have to see her to know she was good-looking. I told her in the morning I’d like to marry her.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t speak the language.”

Joe looked hurt. “You don’t have to when you’ve done that to a girl. I just said so, and she caught on all right. She colored some. Most Indians don’t show color, but that was one of the things about her. That and teaching her to kiss. The way she caught on. You can fool around with all the heifers between here and Albany if you want to, but you won’t know just what teaching a wild Indian to kiss is like. Well, she said she’d like to fine, so I said fine, and she said what did I have to buy her with? Well, I opened my pack, and she went through it like a dog after a rabbit. She shook her head. She made it plain there wasn’t anything good enough. I felt bad, and she looked sorry. Then she clapped her hands.”

“Yes,” said Adam, “she clapped her hands.”

“God damn you, Adam. She did.” Joe began to look embarrassed. “I’d been getting dressed and she come up to me and put her hands on my waist and made the motions I was to take my drawers off. I had red flannel drawers.”

The two young men guffawed.

“Honest to God,” said Joe. “I told the chief how I felt, and I got him to take them round to the old lady and she went near crazy over them. Later I heard she’d gone right in and tried them on. They was some tight, but they stretched enough. Though she had to rig a kind of tassel in front when she wore them in the turtle dance. She made a little bark box for them and hung them over her bed. They were still in good shape four years later when the old lady led the Okewa for Lou.”

“What’s that, Joe?”

“It’s the woman’s all-night Dead Song.”

“Your girl died?”

“Yes,” said Joe. He blew smoke against the logs and watched the flame snatch it up the chimney. “After we got married, I and Lou went up the Chinisee. I built us a hunting cabin up there. It was good beaver country and a wonderful range for fisher. And she was a first-rate woman for a man. Knew how to take care of me. She was the only woman I ever had around that didn’t get on a man’s nerves. When I felt like laughing, she was ready to bust with it herself. Never saw anybody so always happy. She wouldn’t call me Joe. Just Boleo, only she couldn’t ever say the B. She called it Do-le-o.” Joe’s face was deeply concentrated. “And when the trap lines weren’t bearing so good, she didn’t make a lot of talk— what a white woman would call distracting you. She minded her business. I knew she was around, that’s all. She was good to have around. And she never got lonesome. Seemed as if I was good enough for her. Of course we’d go down to the Castle every once or twice a year. I had to trade my fur pack, see? … It was a good life. And healthy. The way she kept me healthy. Used to make me hemlock tea to keep my skin open. Her cooking was Indian cooking, but she learned a few things, to please me. I told you she learned kissing. But is was a funny thing, she never got to be like a white woman. She was always shy about the way she acted with me. She wouldn’t wash with me in the crick. Sometimes it got me mad. I never saw her naked in plain light. A bear kilt her while she was berrying.” Joe drank and drew a breath. “The queer thing was we never had no children.”

“What’s queer about that?” Gil asked.

“Why, those girls could have children easy as letting go a crock of lard. John O’Beal now. He come out there and traded; he bought my furs. He married a girl too, and had a mess of children. One of them’s got to be a chief. His name’s Cornplanter.”

“You said John O’Beal?” Adam asked.

“Sure, he was quite a lad, too. But he soured on it. He came back here and lives down the valley somewhere.”

“Near Fort Plain?” suggested Adam.

“Sure, that’s the man. I ain’t seen him in some time.”

Joe Boleo lay full length on his back, draining his glass.

Gil asked, “What did you say her name was, Joe?”

“Well, her Indian name was Gahano. Means something like Hanging Flower. But I told you I called her Lou. You ought to have been out there in those days, Adam. You’d have got along good. But now they ain’t so friendly about white men. You can marry all right. But they don’t trot the girls out for you any more. I quit myself when Lou died… .

“But that was the way for a trapper to live. All you had to do was run your lines, and you had a nice cabin to come back to, and your dinner cooked, and a woman to mend your clothes. You just lay around, and got up warm in the morning. It didn’t cost you a cent.” He looked at them again. “Most trappers came home in summer. They cleared out with the furs and spent their money, and the woman took care of herself while they was gone. Some kept two families going. But those buffaloes never spent the summer the way I did. We’d take trips, her and me, and lay around fishing. We’d go off where there wasn’t anybody, not even the tracks of anybody but ourselves, for three months. We’d build a summer shanty and she’d plant corn. Yes, sir. You’d just lay around listening to a big fish jump and wondering if it was worth the bother putting the worm in the water. Lou worked all the time we was on our vacation, readying hides and putting up quitcheraw against the winter. I whittled her a little press for making the cakes in, which tickled her a lot. And then she’d go berrying to make pemmican. That was when the bear got at her. An old she-one with a couple of cubs. I spent a while tracking them and I killed the lot—” Joe paused and spat. “But, hell,” he went on, “that’s not what I set out to tell you. Indians ain’t no good. This country would be a whole lot better off without any Indians. We’d be better off right now, I tell you. And I wouldn’t be setting here listening to that drip off the roof.”

Adam Helmer stirred himself. Adam had been wishing he had been born in a good time of civilization so he could have gone out to the Indian country. His full lips were compressed and wet just thinking of it. A little lithe hard girl like Joe’s Lou, right now, would suit him fine. “Drip?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Joe with scorn. “Drip. The thaw’s commencing.”

Gil got to his feet. He went to the door of the cabin, opened it, and stood there, leaning out.

The wind had turned to the south. He felt it damp against his face; he could feel it even with the outrush of overheated air from the kitchen.

“You’re right, Joe,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s the thaw beginning. Sugaring ought to start early this year.”

“Shut that door!” yelled Joe. “Do you want to freeze us?”

Towards the end of the month, when the sugaring was in full progress and the smoke from the sugar bushes made pale blue wavering ribbons against the hillsides, a horseman left the Snydersbush stockade and rode full gallop the eight miles south to the falls, turned west along the Kingsroad, and flogged his way through the slushy ruts as fast as his blowing horse could lay foot to the ground.

The spattery thudding of his hoofs was audible in Mrs. McKlennar’s sugar bush, high though it was above the road. They were boiling for the fourth day and some of the Eldridge people, the Smalls and the Caslers and the Helmers,— Adam’s cousins, Phil, his wife Catherine, and son George,— were attending. The women were knitting by the fire, minding the kettle. Adam, on his own initiative, was bringing the wood for the fire and hanging round the women as much as possible. He was wearing a new hunting shirt, colored after the pattern Morgan’s Riflemen were supposed to wear. It was of heavy white linen with long green thumbs along the sleeves, the double capes, and the bottom hem. He looked inordinately handsome in it; his yellow hair was carefully combed, and he had shaved.

Gil and Captain Jacob Small and George Helmer were hauling in the sap on hand sledges from the trees where the boys gathered it from the small pails. It was a sunny, windless day, warm enough to make sitting in the open pleasant. The steady drip in the pails was like the ticking of a clock, as if the trees together combined to mark the passage of the time. The distance one could hear a drop fall in a bucket was surprising; it was audible even above the women’s voices.

Of all the men, only Captain Small, and Adam and Joe Boleo, had brought their guns. Adam and Small had left theirs in the little bark shanty before the kettle. But Joe was prowling the woods. They did not know that he was making a cast three or four miles to the north and west. They would have laughed if they had known. The snow still lay more than five feet deep in the woods. Even with snowshoes it made heavy going.

When they heard the horseman coming up the road, Gil and Captain Small left their sledges and walked to the edge of the bluff. From there they could look down on him. The horse was floundering, but the man’s arm rose and fell with pitiless fatigue. Jacob Small took one look.

“That’s Cobus Mabee. He looks scared.” He took his hat off and rubbed his grizzled head and stared incredulously at Gil.

Adam, seeing them move to the edge of the bush, left the women and joined them.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Small said, “Cobus Mabee just went up to Dayton.”

Adam laughed.

“Maybe he’s after Doc.”

“He didn’t look to me like that. Did he to you, Gil?”

“He was spoiling his horse,” said Gil.

Adam’s face sobered.

“That’s serious.”

They looked at each other.

“Do you think we ought to move down out of the woods?”

Adam said, “No. Joe’s back there in the woods.”

Small said, “One of us ought to find out what’s happened. Gil, there’s George Helmer on the edge. You send him down and let him ride your mare up. No sense scaring the womenfolks. It’s the first party of the year.”

Adam went back to the shanty. He got his gun. “I’m going to see if I can get a partridge,” he explained. “You ladies have got wood enough?”

“Oh yes, Adam.” They smiled at him. They went on with their talk. All except Lana. Suddenly Gil found her staring at him. He forced himself to smile. But she wasn’t deceived. And he shook his head and put his finger to his lips.

His heart was like something shrunk inside himself as he watched her face. He thought, “What’s it going to do to her?” Her face went deathly white. Then suddenly her chin went up and she said something in a quick high voice to Mrs. Small that made the latter laugh and pat her red hair. Mrs. McKlennar nodded, looked at Gil and smiled. Mrs. McKlennar had the instinct for such things. He guessed that she had caught on even before Lana.

He made himself go back to his sledge and haul “it to the kettle. Nobody had missed George Helmer. The sugaring continued. But he and Captain Small managed to bring the children to trees closer to the fire without any-one’s noticing, and themselves kept a watch on the woods. They would hear Adam shoot if anything went wrong, and he would hear Joe. Now the drip of the sap seemed startlingly loud.

Two hours passed before George Helmer returned. He came quietly without fuss, and without fuss Small and Gil joined him at his trees. He told them at once.