3stalwarts (67 page)

The leaves were turning and the nights growing colder. Though there had been no frost as yet in the valley, it had touched the hills, and the maples were already scarlet and crimson and flaming orange. The afternoons were hazy and full of silence and without wind.

The two children began to put on flesh, eating the new wheat in mushes and samp from the new corn. It was a quiet time. Though Daisy fell ill of a queer fever and was sent to Dr. Petry to be treated for several days, and Lana had to do all the work, she felt a sense of peace take root in her own being, and now and then she caught herself looking forward. It was something she had not done with happiness for several years.

Mrs. McKlennar spoke of it to her one day. “I can see you’re planning things. About you and Gil and the two boys, ain’t it?”

Lana nodded.

“There’s one thing I want you to know. You needn’t tell Gil now. But when I die I want you two to have this place.”

The widow’s face reminded Lana of that March morning when she and Gil had come to interview her, perhaps in the way Mrs. McKlennar drew her breath. There was a sharpness in her eye as if she dared Lana to answer her back.

“In some ways,” she continued, “I’ve been happier than I’ve been since my husband died. That’s because you two have been like children to me. I’ve appreciated it.”

Lana said softly, “It’s nothing to what you’ve been to us.”

“Nonsense. I’ve just told you. Let’s forget it.” Then she said sharply, “Maybe, though, you’ll want to go back to Deerfield if this mess ever gets done with.”

Lana shook her head. “I can’t tell. I don’t know what Gil thinks— he’s never spoken of it.”

“Well,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “it’s up to you. The place is yours to leave or take.”

As she went out of the kitchen Lana thought, as she had more than once of late, that Mrs. McKlennar seemed a little frail.

Gustin Schimmel was a little man who could only be described as burly. He walked as if he weighed two hundred pounds, with a hunch to his shoulders, and his solemn face belligerently outthrust. He was a very serious person and he took his duty at McKlennar’s very hard.

Two days ago a lone Tuscarora Indian had come in to report to Bellinger a huge army of men moving east of Unadilla. He was so emphatic about the numbers of this army, whose trail he had happened on, that Bellinger wanted a scout sent out. He had summoned Gil to join Helmer and Boleo, and had sent word to Gustin Schimmel that on no account was any man to leave McKlennar’s until specific orders were received or others arrived to relieve them. It put Gustin in a very serious position, for it was his first command.

He came into the kitchen that evening to assure himself that all the shutters were bolted and the back door barred. With the colder nights, the men were sleeping in the front rooms of the house and the women and children occupied the kitchen.

“I tended to them myself, Gustin,” said Mrs. McKlennar.

“Yes, ma’am. But I got to see myself. I’m responsible.”

His eyes did not allow him to see Lana hastily veiling herself in a blanket, or to observe the widow pushing the chamber pot hastily under the bed. He wondered how such embarrassments could conceivably be avoided.

Having finished his inspection, he addressed the floor.

“I hope you sleep good, ma’am.”

“Good night,” said Mrs. McKlennar without hope.

“Good night, ma’am.” He backed himself out, closing the door. “You ain’t to bolt this door,” he said from the other side.

“There isn’t any bolt,” said Mrs. McKlennar.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

They had a good night as he had wished them, except for one interrup-tion: the sound of a horse coming from the falls. The clear chop of his hoofs on the hard road past the farm— increase, diminishment, and silence. Before they went to sleep again, a light rain started to fall. In the men’s room the snoring continued on its heavy course; then they heard one man stirring in the hall and the half-stifled breathing of Gustin Schimmel deep in his perplexities beyond their door. He breathed there for some time be-fore he finally once more retired.

The morning showed them the last of the rain. A west wind had begun to blow, to clear after the rain, so powerful in its deep gusts that it was like moving silver on the hills.

The wind blew all day.

Gustin Schimmel stood on the porch from time to time, facing it. He wanted to know what that express had carried. He wished mightily that Gilbert Martin would return and relieve him of this new habit of thought he was acquiring. The unaccustomed involutions of his brain had affected his appetite. Laboriously that afternoon he wrote on the piece of paper on which he had decided to keep a journal of his command.

Thirsdey, Oct. 19. It raind some, it clerd this morning. Express went by last nit Today nothing remarkabel.

He stared awhile at the paper. For the seventeenth he had inscribed in his burly hand, “Warm to-day noboddy on the road. Skvash py for super.” Squash pie as an entry disturbed him somewhat, for it did not seem very military. He had put it down to fill out the line, since he could think of nothing else. Ultimately he decided to let it stand, folded the paper, and breathed in the widow’s direction.

“If you’ll excuse me, ma’am,” he apologized, “I think I’ll just go down to the road and see if I can see anybody.”

Mrs. McKlennar fixed him with a marble eye.

“I shall miss you, Gustin Schimmel.”

“I could send in one of the boys to keep you company,” said Gustin.

“No, thanks, since you can’t stay with us, I think we’d rather be alone.”

“That’s what I thought, ma’am. I want to see if I can find out about that express.”

Mrs. McKlennar looked at Lana.

“Do I seem like somebody who’s going crazy?”

“No,” said Lana smilingly.

“I am, though. Raving crazy. He’s making me.” She smiled in turn and went on, “Why don’t you take the children out? It would do all three of you good.”

“Won’t you come with us?”

“No, I’d like to just lie here and rest. You stay out till the cow comes in for milking. There’s no cooking to do with those four pans of beans all baked.”

Lana saw that she wanted to be alone, so she put Gilly’s deerskin jacket on him, which made him think he looked like his father, and wrapped a blanket round the baby. The baby had thriven for all the moving they had done that summer. He lay like a great fat lump on her arms, as much as she could carry. He hadn’t been christened till the spring when, one day, Domine Rozencrantz had come by McKlennar’s; and they had named him Joseph Phillip, with Joe Boleo for a sponsor. Young Gilbert, however, had never seemed to make such flesh, and Lana thought it was due to a combination of the hard winter after Brant’s raid and her own milk’s giving out when he was still so young. The last was due no doubt to the prompt occupancy of herself by Joey; and at the time it had seemed to her a strange and unjust manifestation of Providence that she should lose her milk. But now that Gilly was becoming so hardy she found it easier to ac-cept the ways of God.

For Gilly was a tough little nugget, active as a young squirrel, and for all that he was only two and a half he was able to walk for quite a little way. And he seemed to take great satisfaction in going into the woods, which, of course, meant the sumacs behind the barn.

Lana took the two children a little way up the slope, perhaps a hundred yards, to an open patch she had found one day, where the earth was smooth enough for the baby to tumble about unwatched. The patch was on the brow of the upland, and, there being no trees round about, the sumac leaves, all gold with bloody crimson tips, and the dark red tassels, seemed to touch the blue of the windy heavens overhead.

The earth was fairly dry, even after the night’s rain. The sweep of the wind hushed everything. Sitting there, Lana found herself growing drowsy, and after a while she glanced round to make sure that the children were close by and then stretched out upon her back. The house was so near that she could hear any sound that might rise from below, and yet, for all that could be seen of it, it might be under the moon.

Lana wondered briefly whether Mrs. McKlennar were having a decent rest. Then her eyelids slowly closed. The voice of the booming wind lulled her. Her face was almost girlish as she lay there, the pink whipped up in her cheeks by the wind, and her hair pulled forward under her cheek so that her mouth seemed in a nest.

A few minutes later, Gilly lifted his sharp little face. He acted as if he had heard a sound— a hail from the Kingsroad, perhaps. His mother had stirred in her sleep and the little boy walked up to her and stared down gravely. He glanced at his brother, but his brother wasn’t much good at covering the ground, so Gilly, after another moment, walked unsteadily down the slope and into the forest of sumacs… .

The hail he had heard had been young Fesser Cox riding his first dispatch from Fort Dayton. Colonel Klock had sent up word from Schenectady that Sir John Johnson had struck the Schoharie Valley with fifteen hundred men. The seventeenth he had laid waste eight miles of the Schoharie. On the eighteenth he had entered the Mohawk and turned west, burning both sides of the river. All people were warned to enter the forts. The militia at Stone Arabia were to stand before the ravaging army. General Robert Van Rensselaer was bringing the Albany militia up the valley to take him in the rear.

Bellinger sent orders to the detail at McKlennar’s. It was at once to proceed to Ellis’s Mills at the falls and reenforce the garrison there. Fifty militia were about to march from Dayton and Herkimer to back up Colonel Brown at Stone Arabia or join Colonel Klock. A detail would be sent out in an hour to pick up the women at McKlennar’s and carry them to Eldridge’s, where the men would amplify the garrison of the blockhouse.

Gustin Schimmel did not like it. But he believed in orders. He woke Mrs. McKlennar out of a sound nap and explained that the second detail was on the way and that they would be taken to Eldridge. He himself hated to leave Mrs. McKlennar like that, but it would not be for long. He would prefer to wait until the others arrived or take them himself to Eldridge’s, but there it was, plain orders.

“Godsake, man!” cried the widow. “Get along.” (“And thank God it’s the last of you,” she thought, realizing that her cap was caught in the pins over one ear.)

She had been having her first good nap in a long time, but when she awakened she realized suddenly how old she had become. She did not feel like getting up at all, and she thought she would stay where she was until Lana came in. Lana would be down in a moment and could help her with her things. It was hard to have to move again, when a woman began to feel old and tired. Hard to leave the house she had been happy in, so wildly happy sometimes.

She thought of Barney. Barney in his dragoon coat. Barney coming home from the Masonic meeting where he and his friends had been pooling the scandal and news of the valley, Barney coming home slightly tipsy, though he might have ridden fifteen miles, and singing his favorite song— they said he sang it whenever the rum began to seep around a little in his enormous barrel. The words came back to Mrs. McKlennar with her mem-ory of his flushed, handsome face.

Oh, I love spice, I love things nice, And I love sugar-candy. I like my life With my dear wife, Unless the girls are handy.

The rascal! He would tumble her hair all out of its cap, her red hair it was, and look as full of sin as the devil himself, and all the time he was as chaste and simple as the brooks he was forever fishing. She remembered the way they dined on warm summer evenings when Sir William once came, with his son,— plain John then,— or John Butler, or Varick, or one of the Schuylers. The gentlemen took off their boots and put their pumps on in her bedroom, and they ate on the porch, with the white table napkin and the candles slobbering with moths, and the hill, the valley, the stars in the sky and in the river, like the finest French paper in the world. The gentlemen seldom brought their ladies, and for that Sally was just as glad, for she had the gift of making men treat her as equals and could crack as hard a joke as anyone if occasion required, and she liked her half bottle of port in the old days, and, tsk, tsk, tsk— what a waggery of scandal that would have started if a woman had the telling of it back in Albany… . They had planted the orchard together and they had planted a flower garden, but somehow neither of them had had the patience for gardening, or felt the need of being fashionable. It was better to straddle the mare for a gallop to Klock’s than to fork the roots of a bleeding heart. It was a pity he should die so long before her, and yet she was glad, for she could not imagine what Barney would have done in these days. He never was much of a man to think things out, poor dear, with his handsome useless head —Lord knew how he could have managed to hold court as Justice of the Peace if the courtroom hadn’t been the pub; he could always give both sides a drink and tell them one of his stories if the judgment was beyond him, and then sell them a cock or a foal at the end of it. And come home at night and tell her about it with great rib-swelling roars that tossed her beside him in the bed like being in a storm at sea. And the nice way he liked things, and on the minute— the linen spotless, his shaving water with the crystal salt in it, and the small lace stitched to his good shirts before they were put back in the drawer. Once when she hadn’t done it and he had looked in the wrong drawer for a pocket handkerchief, she had really believed he would lift the skin of her back for a minute. But instead he had sat down and explained it to her, the way a grandfather would to his youngest daughter’s little daughter, great stupid hand that he was, good only for handling guns or cursing men into level files. Oh, Barney, Barney… .

She was not conscious of the minutes passing, or of the time it was, for the whole house had bloomed before her tired eyes and become beautiful and sweet once more. She did not hear the men marching down to the road, and half an hour later she did not hear the detail going by— the detail that should have stopped and taken them. She did not think of Lana, nor why the girl was not yet back with her two children, though it was getting shadowy in the sky across the east window. She had just remembered something that she had not thought of for years, showing how familiarity and custom makes one forget.