3stalwarts (66 page)

“Have you got any food?” he asked. “I’m hungry. Young John here’s just about played out.”

“I’ll cook up some wheat right away. There’s no flour.”

In one corner of the fort was an old burned-out stump, an Indian mill, they called it, in which they crushed their wheat grains to a kind of rough meal. Lana threw some of this in water and borrowed a pinch of salt.

While she was tending it, Gil brought John Weaver in with him and sat down in the shed.

“Are we going home with you?” Lana asked with a nod towards the children.

“Yes. It’s over, I guess. Sir John has headed north.”

“Sir John? North?”

“I forgot you wouldn’t know,” he muttered. “Sir John brought five hundred men across the Sacandaga flows. He’s struck the valley by Johnstown. They say he’s burned down every house in Caughnawaga. He’s killed fifty or sixty people. Old Fonda that used to be his neighbor, eighty years old, scalped on his front door. They crucified a man at Tribes hill, they say. There was three hundred Indians. Everything burnt. They say a hundred or more men went off with Sir John. They took their families with them. And the families of Tories that got left behind four years ago.” His voice became uncertain. “Bellinger got orders to muster us in case they came this way. But yesterday afternoon we heard they’d headed north. The soldiers hadn’t even started after him from Schenectady when the express left there. They’d been called back there until they knew that town and Albany was safe. We were just coming home when we got the word that there was burning up at Moyer’s. We started out after them. …”

“Don’t talk,” said Lana. “Stop. Eat something. It’s all ready.”

Outside the upright sticks at their backs a woman cried, “Tom! Tom! You come back here! You mind your Ma.”

A surly voice answered back, “We was just playing Indian, Ma. We was trying to scalp him.”

In the sunlit field two little boys with wooden knives were squatting be-side the dead Indian.

No man, all summer long, had gone to his field alone. The haying had been done by armed parties, of thirty or more, sent out from the forts. The people in Fort Herkimer attended to the south side of the river, those in Dayton to the north. At the end of July twenty men were sent to help out with the Eldridge haying. The hay was all stored in small stacks within sight of the stockades, but out of shooting range, so that they could offer no cover to the enemy. At the same time, they could be watched and sallies made to protect them against any small force.

The destructives had hung in the woods through June and July. The scouts sent out left and entered the forts under cover of darkness. In July a mob of sixty Indians almost surprised three hay wagons, chasing them right under the Dayton stockade.

Lana had heard the warning gun go off on the southeast rampart of the fort and gathered her children and run them through the gate. She did not know whether Gil was on that particular hay party, but she was not allowed on the rifle platform to see. She had to remain under it, out of the way, with the other women, listening— first to the shooting out across the valley; then to the rumble of the wheels and the squeaks of the racks as the heavy loads swayed in and out of ruts at their mad gallop. Then the thudding of the horses’ hoofs and the racket of harness; the screech of the gates swinging open; the yelling of the Indians close behind; and at last the thunder of the wagons rolling into the parade. As the gates screeched shut again a volley from the rifle platforms seemed to split the fort apart, and four swivels went off with sullen booms, and the yelling outside stopped.

Holding the two children to her, she crowded out with the other women, to see the men sliding down off the loads and running to join the sortie forming at the gate. She saw Gil looking over his shoulder at the line of women’s faces. His eyes met hers. He did not raise his hand or smile, no more than she. In the next moment he had passed with the others through the opening gates to drive the Indians away from the cabins and haystacks outside the wall.

That was the nearest any party of savages came to the forts that summer. Most of the time they lay in the woods, trying to pick up berrying parties, and burning all the new outlying cabins one by one. The valley now was as desolate as it had been after Brant’s raid. Most of the remaining cattle had been killed and eaten by the destructives. The scouts reported that the pigs, left to run loose in the woods, were getting to be as cute as the deer.

Though the women still cooked in the cabins, most families slept inside the forts; for, towards the end of July, Brant had appeared below Stanwix with eight hundred Indians. They had actually seen his army from Fort Herkimer, crossing the valley to the south. He made no demonstration against the forts, however. Instead, two weeks later he turned up at Canajoharie at the site of his old place, and desolated six miles of the Mohawk. Men, women, and children were killed and taken prisoner, one hundred houses were burned, mills and churches. Wagons were destroyed, ploughs and harrows broken. They said that opposite Frey’s you could see human bodies in the water.

After the second burning of the Herter house, Captain Demooth had moved into Fort Dayton. John Weaver, however, was sent across the river to Herkimer. Since he had served with the Continentals under Sullivan, he was now classed as an experienced soldier and was appointed by Bellinger a sergeant of the garrison.

The promotion made Mary proud, and thankful, also, that his duties kept him entirely in the fort. They lived on the second story of the northwest blockhouse, sharing space with Sergeants Stale and Smith and their wives and Stale’s two children. They had no room for privacy between themselves, but they all felt that it was better, airier, and quieter than living in one of the sheds.

It had been dry and very hot. The green had been slow in returning to the mown hayfields. The river ran very shallow. But since August there had been few alarms.

On the north side of the river Mary and John could see through the loophole next their bunk the stone McKlennar house with its shuttered windows. The survival of that house, the last left standing but Shoemaker’s, was one of the mysteries they often talked about, together, for they liked to look at it and plan on having a house of their own some day resembling it.

The other women, hearing them, would sometimes smile, half bitterly, that people could still be so young. But Mary ignored them. She understood how these two women felt, having lost everything that belonged to them. She did not try to answer when Mrs. Smith told her to wait until she had had a child and seen it sicken from lack of food and die from cold. Mrs. Smith had taken her child to bed with her during the past winter, but it had caught a malignant quinsy of the throat. “Doc Petry couldn’t do nothing. He said it needed milk.” Her toneless voice went on: “My own milk gave out. I ain’t like some people. I got to have food myself to breast feed a child. I’m the hearty-eating kind of woman. I’ve got another in me now. What’s going to become of it?” She glanced at Mary’s figure. “You’re lucky. You ain’t never had one. You talk about stone houses. Well, all I want to think about is a log house of my own again, and dried punkin and corn ears and hams on the rafters. Just to set down and look at them and know they’re all mine.”

Mary knew how lucky she was without being told. She was growing up. She would be eighteen before long, and John told her that she was getting prettier every day. Her breasts were filling out, and she had more flesh on her shoulders, and her cheeks were rounder. Her legs were still the slim hard legs of a girl; but John liked them, even though he used to tease her about how long they were. “When the war’s over,” he said one day, “I’m going to buy you a print dress. I’m going to get it made. With a long skirt. Right to your toes. Your legs won’t show, and you’ll be beautiful.”

“I’ll powder my hair,” she said. “There’ll be flour then.”

Imagine it, flour enough to use it on your hair.

“I’ll ride you over on a pillion saddle. You’ll look like a lady, Mary. With your bonnet tied with bows.”

These thoughts seemed so possible and real when they looked at the McKlennar house. As if the house might be their own, waiting for them to ride across the river and enter it.

The time would surely come. She did not tell John how she hoped he would look in a new blue coat and snuff-colored pants and polished boots, perhaps, and certainly a cocked hat. She felt too shy; his talking about her like that always made her remember with humility the way he had first noticed her in this same fort, the way he had talked to her and they had got engaged to one another. She was a little skinny brat then, with one braid down her back and one plain petticoat to her name; and he had stood out before his mother for her, and kept on loving her, and finally they had got married. Now he was getting to be a great man. He had been noticed and had started upwards. She had no doubt that the war would be won with people such as John in power. They would make it a fine free country afterwards, and maybe it was not too much to think of owning a black house servant.

Down in the yard there would be a shout for the changing of the sentries and John would have to get up and pull his boots on and go down and stand his watch. The square black room would become blacker after his going down. Mary would huddle herself against the wall and listen to the sounds of changing watch: the sound of men clambering onto the rifle platforms; the thump of Smith’s or Stale’s feet on the blockhouse ladder; his boots dropped on the floor; his little grunt as he stooped to take his pants off; one of the women, whichever wife it was, murmuring querulously in the hot darkness as she made room on the straw bed. Mary would lie straight and narrow, trying to shut out the sounds from her ears. The gross-ness of these men compared to John was sickening to her.

The militia reaped the wheat systematically along the valley from west to east and the McKlennar fields were, consequently, the last to be visited. As the farm was so far from Fort Dayton, both Bellinger and Demooth agreed with Gil that it would be simpler to move down ten or fifteen men to the house and let them camp there while the grain was harvested. But Mrs. McKlennar would not hear of a herd of men let loose in her home un-less she went along.

“It’s my house,” she said, looking the colonel in the eye.

Bellinger sighed.

“Besides,” pursued the widow, “with a couple of women looking after their food they’ll do the work a whole lot quicker.”

Lana was delighted that they were allowed to go. It seemed quite safe with all those men close by. The last scout had reported the Indians moving west towards Tioga. The frequency and magnitude of the earlier raids led people to suppose that nothing much more could be expected to happen that fall.

As the first wagon turned off the road and drew up to the porch, the mystery of the immunity of Mrs. McKlennar’s house was explained. Just above the front steps a horse’s skull lay on the porch floor.

The men noticed it at once, and one asked suspiciously, “How’d that get there?”

“I put it there myself,” said Mrs. McKlennar proudly.

“It’s a Tory sign,” the man said.

“Of course it is; that’s why I put it there.”

“It’s a Tory sign,” he repeated, eyeing her.

“Where’d you get that skull?” another asked her.

Mrs. McKlennar snorted.

“It’s the skull of my own mare. I found it this spring when I was strawberrying. She was killed two years ago.”

The fact that the skull could be identified seemed to make them feel better about it. One man laughed; it was a joke on the destructives; and they all began to lug in their bedding and spread it on the porch.

But when Mrs. McKlennar went into the house she found that someone had been making free with it. Men apparently had cooked at the fireplace, for the hearthstones were greasy. They found a bit of bloody bandage on the floor. Some of the destructives must have used the place, keeping it securely shuttered and lighting a fire with no fear of detection. Mrs. McKlennar grinned wryly. “I guess I didn’t have my whole joke to myself, Lana, and I’ll bet these men have left their bugs in here.” The women opened all the windows to let in the sun and clear away the mustiness, and then, while Lana mopped the floor, Mrs. McKlennar attacked the sooty cobwebs.

She was in a fine temper by the time they had the kitchen habitable. “I’ll not leave this house alone again,” she said. “I’d rather lose my scalp than go through this again.”

Gil had brought wood and Daisy was cooking before her fireplace once more, muttering to herself, as she had to clean one pot after another, “Dear, dear, dear, dear,” with a clucking noise like an offended hen. But she had the men’s food ready by sundown and they came up from the wheatfield to eat it on the porch, where they sat admiring the swathe they had cut through the grain and eyeing the full moon that rose through a shelf of mist upon the hills by Little Falls.

They spent a week at bringing the wheat up to the barn, and the second week they started threshing. Some of the men had returned to their cabins, a new lot succeeding them, and as fast as the grain was threshed it was barreled and carted to Fort Dayton.

The women worked longer hours than the men. The cooking and washing were far more than Daisy, the negress, could handle alone, and before the wheat had been threshed Gil began pulling ears from the corn and expected Lana to help him. Mrs. McKlennar therefore had to assist the negress.

But they all enjoyed it, even the cow, which had been led down from the fort when it was decided to thresh at the farm. The feeling that they were in a house, that they had a place to themselves, made up for all their labor.

Gil decided to talk to Bellinger about their staying. His first argument was that if the destructives had actually been using the house for a hideout, it was better either to burn it to the ground or else to have a guard upon it. His second argument had more effect. The McKlennar wheatfields were among the best in the valley. It would be of advantage to the whole community if Gil were allowed to plough them in the fall. He thought if he could have six men on hand continually that he could safely keep on at the house. In case of any large raid, naturally, the family would withdraw again to one of the forts. If Bellinger realized that Gil’s principal idea was to keep his fields in order, it only agreed with his own passionate conviction that the one hope for the settlers was to hold their land and feed themselves. He agreed. And though the tiny garrison changed personnel every day or so, there were always six men working with Gil at the ploughing or helping Lana to gather the apples which were just beginning to fall.