3stalwarts (69 page)

Mrs. McKlennar had lain down in the bed. Was she sick? Too sick to move? But she had followed the bed out there.

Suddenly her eyes were caught by the shape of a man, stooping down among the sumacs, well away to her right. She dropped inside the hide-hole. At the same moment Joey let out his first bawl. He had a voice like a calf when he was hungry. She fumbled frantically in the dark for his mouth and pressed her hand on it. She felt his instantaneous convulsion of protest, arms flying, legs kicking, as he tried to get his breath. Gilly started to whimper. “Hush,” she whispered. With her free hand she tore at her short gown, ripping it in two, baring her breasts. “Oh God. If my milk doesn’t come now!” She huddled Joey up to her and withdrew her hand and pressed his little face towards her. She felt him start to yell, then his surprised jaws clamped on her breast so hard she almost cried out. And then the reassuring pressure beginning.

Gilly was starting softly to cry now. Cold and hungry as he was the smell of milk was too much for him. He would not hush. She pulled him towards her too and let his face rest against the free breast and left it to him whether he would accept it. They had worked so hard to wean him. But when, fumblingly, he touched the breast, her heart welled over.

The man in the sumacs was Joe Boleo. He and Adam and Gil had returned from their scout reporting that an Oneida Indian had seen the army of hostiles strike the Schoharie. When they had reached Fort Dayton, Bellinger had ordered them to take a detachment of men with Mark Demooth to the south. An express had said that Van Rensselaer’s army was fighting Sir John above Klock’s, and that the Tories were breaking over the river. If possible Demooth was to capture Johnson or John Butler or some of the leaders.

Gil had asked at once for his family and Bellinger had explained what he had done. “You’ve got to go, you three. You’re the only scouts to find them after dark in those hills. I can’t spare one of you.” He looked gaunt and haggard and determined. “Your women are all right,” he said.

Gil hurried off to report himself to Demooth. Joe Boleo, however, didn’t give a damn for Bellinger or General Washington himself, if it had come to that, or army discipline or cause or justice. He remembered that he had a godson in McKlennar’s and he was going to make damn sure he was all right. If he felt like it afterwards, he could circle and still catch up with Demooth.

He reached McKlennar’s in time to see the roof fall in and the widow lying on her bed. The old woodsman took one look, then bolted down to her. He was sure he had heard stray shots at Eldridge’s. More of the destructives were on the way; running the woods like driven wolves, they would snap at anything that crossed their path.

He snatched up the bedclothes and pulled Mrs. McKlennar to her feet. He didn’t ask her why she had not used his hide-hole. He ran her up the slope and shoved her in. As he did so he felt the presence of terror in the pit and called, “Lana, is that you in there?” Then he added, “It’s Joe.”

“Yes.” He could hardly hear the word through her release of breath.

“Here’s Mrs. McKlennar. You keep quiet and you’ll be all right. I ain’t coming in. But I’ll stay close.”

He was right about more Indians. Three of them came to the burning house and started nosing round. They picked up footprints at the edge of the sumacs and began to work up the slope. The women heard their footfalls gradually approaching the hide-hole. Then they stopped. Suddenly a man whooped, a terrible ear-piercing sound. Then he was still, waiting for the frightened stir that should point out his victim.

There was a clean, sharp crack. The two others yelled, and at the same time the women heard Joe Boleo shout. The sumacs crashed overhead with the sounds of pursuit and flight, and in only a minute the wind again was audible.

Mrs. McKlennar leaned against Lana and wept.

The clear October dawn woke them— unbelievable as it seemed to wake, to have fallen asleep at all. The babies began to cry.

“It’s all right,” Joe’s voice reassured them from above. When Lana looked out she found him on the fallen tree, cleaning his long rifle. His hatchet and knife were polished at his side. “Three of them,” he nodded at her. He helped haul out the babies. “I did a perty on the one that yelled. Twenty rod, right through the head. He’s down there.”

Lana would not look, but Mrs. McKlennar stared curiously at the dead painted body. “Jurry,” she said suddenly. “Jurry McLonis!”

“Deader’n fish,” nodded Joe. “Come on. I’ll lead you back to the fort.” He picked up the baby. “I’ll lug Joey,” he said.

The threads of news were slowly gathered during the day. The Tory army had disappeared to the west. But they had burned the whole of Schoharie and both sides of the Mohawk from Canajoharie and Caughnawaga to the fording place above Klock’s. They had not been caught as they might have been. They had killed forty men at Stone Arabia who had tried to stop their march; and the Indians and destructives as usual had dropped away from the main army in their uncontrollable desire to hurry.

Then the detail that had gone to Eldridge reported that Jacob Small had been caught by the first appearance of the Indians before Fesser Cox had given the alarm. He had gone out to gather apples. He had always liked apples and there was a tree a few rods from the blockhouse, behind some woods, whose apples he particularly fancied. He had been shot and scalped and left where he was in the branches. They found an apple in his hand, with one bite out of it.

Towards dark, Adam and Gil returned with two thirds of their force. They had been surprised. Demooth and eight men had been captured by Johnson’s Greens and Butler’s Rangers.

As darkness came that night, the still-booming great west wind brought clouds and the first early fall of snow.

9

WEST CANADA CREEK (1781)

The rain as it started on the fifth of May looked like an ordinary spring shower, clouding over a little after noon, and the first cold drops slanting out of the northwest. The river was already high between Dayton and Herkimer. In the falling rain it flowed with a smooth force, which covered the fording place without a riffle.

Lana and Mrs. McKlennar kept the fire going and listened to the steady patter on the bark sheaths of the roof. It was damp in the small cabin that Gil, with Joe and Adam to help him, had laid up after the McKlennar house had burned, though it stood on the high ground north of the fort. Mary Weaver said that her place, which was the next below Petry’s store, had a stream running through one corner. Cobus had been trying unsuccessfully to dam it out with clay all afternoon.

After Mary left them, Mrs. McKlennar turned on the negress, who as usual hugged the hearth.

“Can’t you stop that chattering?”

“Fo’ God I can’t, Mis’. Hit’s de way dey is, dat’s all.”

Daisy felt the damp since her fever of last fall. She claimed she felt it on all the bones in her “skelington.” “If you could des’ leave me have a little drap of rum, Mis’.”

“Rum!” snorted the widow. “If I had it I’d drink it myself. Even Dr. Petry hasn’t any.”

Lana began to prepare supper. They had a small cut of deer meat and a little milk for the children; there was no flour in the place.

Her face had a new quality of transparentness. She was very thin; even her hips that had grown so heavy a year ago were now fined down like a young girl’s. She was dressed, as were Mrs. McKlennar and the negress, in a strange collection of odds and ends; her petticoats, raveled out almost to her knees, seemed ready to fall apart with the rottenness of age. She wore clumsy homemade moccasins on her feet and a deerskin jacket poorly tanned over a shrunken woolen shirt of Gil’s.

As she set the iron kettle on the logs to boil, she tried not to think of her family; but for months her mind had been conjecturing about their fate. Expresses coming up the valley in November had said that Fox’s Mills was one of the settlements entirely wiped out by Sir John’s Tory army. Most of the people were believed to have been killed. But there was no way in which Lana, in German Flats, could find out. All that she had been able to discover was that her second sister had been married the year before to a man from Johnstown. Her informant could not say who the man was; it was something he had heard in Klock’s. Lana thought that her sister would now be twenty years old. Lana herself was twenty-three; but she felt that she must look much older than that.

Her thoughts went round and round, making no connected sense. When she heard Gil’s footsteps hastily squelching through the mud outside, she had to force her face into a smile. She wanted to smile; the instinct lifted her out of the day’s listlessness whenever she heard him coming home. But to make her lips respond was an effort of translation which she was always conscious of.

As the door opened to let him in, she turned her head and saw the rain sheeting down in the dusk beyond him, and Joe Boleo standing at his side, dripping in damp deerskins.

“I brought home Joe to see his godson,” Gil cried.

“I’m glad,” said Lana. The children were always glad when Joe or Adam came to visit. She thought, “I’ll have plenty. I’m not hungry myself.”

“Come in and sit close,” Mrs. McKlennar said. “You poor boys certainly look wet.”

“It’s quinsy weather all right,” said Joe, grinning at them all and hanging his rifle, muzzle down, on a peg through the trigger guard. The two boys came up to him.

“Did you bring us anything, Uncle Joe?” they asked.

“I got a piece of soft pine in my pocket,” he said. “What’U I make you?”

They disputed for a moment between a buck. deer and a tomahawk. But the vote finally settled on the buck. A buck with twelve points, Gilly specified. Joe looked a little blank. He could whittle pretty well, but a buck deer was a large order for a man with a hunting knife. Then a thought crossed his mind and made him smile, and he set to work manfully on the rear quarters.

“It’s quite a rain,” said the widow. “Where’ve you been, Joe?”

“I was over the river to Herkimer seeing Adam.”

“We haven’t seen Adam much, lately.”

“No; he’s sitting on Betsey Small’s tail, just about. She won’t have him less’n he marries her, and seeing she’s the first woman ever stood him off it seems like he just can’t stand to come away from her.”

“I thought Adam had another girl,” said Lana.

“Polly Bowers? Sure, but now she’s having a baby, Adam ain’t interested in her.”

“Sinner,” exclaimed Mrs. McKlennar, but she did not say it with the proper moral indignation at all. She was too fond of the hulking, handsome, yellow-haired brute.

“Has anyone talked to the girl?”

“Oh, I did, some. I kind of got the idea she was willing to peddle it out to any father, though she had the belief it was one of them Continentals was in garrison here last year for a spell.”

“Well, my land,” cried Mrs. McKlennar, “doesn’t she know?”

“She said she hoped it was the corporal,” Joe replied; “but she’s trying to lay it onto Adam and I guess that’s why he’s hanging on after the Small woman. You know how it is with a man like Adam when he finds a woman has acted inconsiderate like that.”

“Uncle Joe,” cried Gilly, “it ain’t got no head on it yet.”

“I know. I’m coming to it when I get to it,” said Joe. “Even the Lord had to begin somewhere on a buck. I just ain’t so quick. This here’s quite a rain. Last Wednesday I was up to Stanwix and the water was getting up close to the sally port. Yes, ma’am, I figure it’s going to rain real hard. How long? Three or four days. It’ll be a flood.”

“How can you tell?”

“Wind’s passing through the north. You can hear it on the north side of the roof now.”

His Adam’s apple bobbled a little as he lifted his lean face.

“When the wind passes through the north to southeast you get a real storm.”

“Ain’t it de troof,” Daisy said dismally.

Lana lifted the steaming kettle from the fire and the rich soup smell was a momentary beneficence in the cabin. They hitched up to the plank that served for a table, Joe last.

“There’s your buck,” he said to Gilly.

“That ain’t a buck,” cried the boy.

“Yes it is. It’s a good twelve-pointer.”

“It ain’t. It ain’t got no horns at all, Uncle Joe.”

Gilly’s underlip began to twitch.

” Tis so a buck,” said Joe Boleo. “Ain’t you got any sense? Who ever seen a buck with horns this time of year?”

Gilly set the crudely carved animal in front of his plate. He still sniffled to himself, thinking it looked almightily like a sheep; but he ate his soup down. And pretty soon he piped up, “It is a buck, Uncle Joe. I can see now.”

Joe looked embarrassed. But Lana smiled and caught Mrs. McKlennar’s eye. The two women had small helpings; now they watched the men eat. Four men, Lana thought, sentimentally. Four boys, thought Mrs. McKlennar.

The spatter against the north side of the house swelled to a driving gust, reducing everyone to silence. Then it stopped abruptly, and for an instant everyone listened to the eaves drip outside. But in a moment the wind be-gan again, stronger and steadier, and the rain seemed to come all the way across the valley and strike the cabin like the flat of an enormous hand against the south and east.

“She’s beginning now,” said Joe. “This valley’s going to be a wet place tomorrow, when the river gets hold of it.”

Listening to the fall of rain all night, like a voice in the dark that would not hush, Gil wondered whether there would be any seed left in the riverside meadows, supposing the river got as high as Joe thought it would. His ears stretched for a sound of the river; but there was no sound beyond the rain.

Lana, with that strange awareness of things beyond her senses that sometimes came to her, thought of all the places down the valley, tracing the brown swelling course of the river, and thinking how desolate Fox’s Mills must look, with its close-gathered houses, now burned. It would be hard on older people like her parents to camp out this way. As hard as it was on Mrs. McKlennar.

Sarah McKlennar managed to keep up her spirits during the day. She was the kind of woman that always reacted well to an audience, and instinctively played her part. But when night came and the babies dropped off and the light faded down on the hearth, she began to think of her house. She hadn’t many years left to live, she knew, so it did not matter to her as it did to Lana and Gil, who should have inherited the house along with the place. And it didn’t even matter to them as much as it did to the house itself. She imagined it now, the scorched stone walls, blackened and split, under the cold rain, streaking the soot marks— no matter if it was rebuilt the house would always wear scars.