Arundel (39 page)

I was called before him when the night was half done, and found Colonel Greene, Colonel Enos, Major Meigs, and Captain Morgan with him, all in blue uniforms save Morgan, who wore a hunting shirt and leggins and moccasins.

Colonel Arnold popped out his pale eyes at me. “Nason, you’ve been up Dead River. Give these gentlemen your opinion.”

He read Conkey’s report aloud.

“Do you think,” he asked, “that this report is correct or that our army would be in danger from either Indians or British troops?”

“Sir,” I said, “that report’s worthless! I think Conkey stopped far short of his goal, and filled his report with lies. The man who made it had to carry six gallons of rum to get even as far as he did.”

“So!” Colonel Arnold said, smiling blandly at the others. “I think it’s plain we’re safe in taking a shot at it.”

“Sir,” I added, “in regard to the Indian Natanis ”

“I know all about him!” Colonel Arnold said impatiently.

“Sir,” I said, “in that matter the report is also—”

Colonel Arnold’s face grew dark and lumpy. He slapped his desk with the flat of his hand, while Colonel Enos frowned portentously at me. “I ask for advice when I want it!” Arnold snapped.

I thanked my stars I had sent Natawammet to warn Natanis; and I resolved to keep my mouth shut about him in the future until such time as I might be forced to speak.

That night we were assigned; and of the assignments I noted only three: Cap Huff to Lieutenant Church’s scouting party that was to start as soon as possible after sun-up the next day; John Treeworgy to Lieutenant Colonel Enos; and Steven Nason to Colonel Arnold.

Cap was fat and moist and pleased when he set off in the bow of one of Church’s two canoes the next morning, secure in having escaped the danger of being burdened with a bateau, and red-faced from his recent glut of pumpkin pies. At the same time the party of Lieutenant Steele of the Pennsylvania riflemen set off in two more canoes to scout across the Height of Land and bring back the information that the wretched Conkey had failed to get. Of men who have lived up to their names, I think this same Steele accomplished it best; for if ever a man seemed made of metal that would never break, it was he. The world is full of statues to less deserving men than Archibald Steele; but they were fortunate and he was not; so he is statueless still.

When Steele was gone, we moved the bateaux of the first division to the starting place, halfway between Fort Western and Captain Howard’s. The three companies of riflemen formed the first division, and all of them agreed to go under the leadership of Morgan. Our New Englanders, badly disciplined and more independent than a hog on ice, looked askance at Morgan because he issued strict orders and enforced them with a heavy hand. Yet the riflemen, being disciplined, took pride in him, holding him in esteem and affection, and would have followed him through hell and high water, even while calling him opprobrious names: Old Yeller-belly and Dirty Dan and Gorgon Morgan and others too foul to set down. Indeed, they held Morgan in almost as high esteem as Arnold, who was considered by all the troops to be the bravest and ablest officer, not only of our little army, but of the entire continental forces.

Now that I look back on it, I doubt that our march could have been made under any leader but Arnold, excepting Washington himself, because of the fearful jealousies that would have arisen. Arnold was a dare-devil, violent and passionate when he had cause. So, too, was Morgan, though ruder and coarser than Arnold, who had the manners of a polished gentleman when he chose to use them.

Because of Colonel Greene’s high rank, Arnold placed him in command of the first division. At once Morgan raised an outcry that many of us heard because of his booming teamster’s voice. He would acknowledge, he said, the authority of no man except Arnold over his riflemen, nor would the riflemen accept it. Therefore he himself would command the riflemen or nobody would. I looked to hear an explosion from Colonel Arnold, but there was none. He soothed Morgan and he soothed Greene, saying Morgan had a genius for leading quick-moving troops in forests, and was more experienced at it than anyone. Since, he added simply, the object of the attack was to capture Quebec, and not to gain glory for any individual, he would yield to Morgan’s judgment and give Colonel Greene the command of the second division. Thereupon there was great good feeling, Arnold and Greene happy because they had been generous, and Morgan happy because his claims, which were justified, had been recognized.

On the last Monday in September in 1775, we watched Morgan’s tall Virginians launch their sixteen bateaux, laden with forty-five days’ provisions and their ammunition and axes. They traveled light to hew out a road across the Great Carrying Place for the rest of us.

Each bateau was poled by two men, while a relief of two men followed it along the shore. When the first bateau of the sixteen had shrunk to a black dot upstream, the sixteen bateaux of Smith’s Pennsylvania riflemen went in, riding high in the water, and set off after them; and behind them those of Hendricks’s Pennsylvania riflemen, all the bateaumen poling for dear life, and those who marched on shore shouting at them profanely not to let the lousy Virginians beat them, and be careful not to run on a rock, dearie.

Among those who shouted was the wife of Sergeant Grier, an estimable woman with an arm as big as my leg and a rump like a draught horse, and Mrs. Warner, a tall red-faced wench. As they struck out ahead of their husbands, Sergeant Grier slapped his wife affectionately on her broad seat with the butt of his rifle, so that she went howling into the woods.

In three minutes there was no sign of the more than two hundred men save the bateaux bobbing upstream, yawing in the swift water, and the faint shouts of those who had been swallowed up in the crimson foliage of the river side.

By noon of the next day the second division went up, Captain Thayer’s company and Captain Topham’s company and Captain Hubbard’s company, the bateaux streaming out into the river under the eye of Colonel Greene and Major Bigelow, and half the men marching along the shore, strung out and making no effort to march in ranks, as indeed they could not, since the trail was churned into muck by many feet and the rain of Sunday.

With this division went young Burr, his rank that of volunteer cadet officer. He came up behind me, dapper and smiling and hampered by no pack at all, and said, “Bring up a pumpkin pie when you come.”

When I asked for Jacataqua, he winked mysteriously, saying she would be along shortly. So she was, as soon as the tumult had died away, paddling bow while one of her Swan Island braves knelt in the stern, her yellow-faced dog leaning against the small of her back, yawning as though he took no interest in the prospect.

Knowing Phoebe would be off on the morrow, I traveled to the Fort to see her that night. She was cutting James Dunn’s hair, while he brooded philanthropically on a log, as though he had founded a college but couldn’t decide who should be president. Phoebe gave him a few extra snips around the ears, then handed him the scissors, patting him on the shoulder as one pats a child. “Take these to Jethro, James, while Mother talks to Stevie.”

“For God’s sake,” I said, when he padded away, “go back to Arundel and take him with you. You’re like two children, not knowing what lies ahead.”

She shook her head. “Yesterday I thought I might. There were some men deserted from Enos’s companies, and no effort made to pursue them, so I thought I might take James away with me.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She twirled her string of cat’s eyes. “When I told him about it, he looked at me so I felt worse than a coward. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘Somebody might think I was afeared.’ He told me he was having a good time: the best he ever had.”

She swung her cat’s eyes thoughtfully. “He never had a good time, Stevie. He was always put upon; always pecked at; always browbeat when there was any browbeating afoot, more than anybody else; always laughed at in the shipyard and the tavern. Now he isn’t pecked at any more than anyone else; never will be again, he says, because he can always do what they tell him. Nothing to do, he says, but carry a pack and a musket and go where you’re told. He can do that as well as anyone, he says.”

“Isn’t he afeared?”

“He says not. He says there’s nothing to be afeared of if you don’t think ahead: just do what you’re told.”

There was something in that, I decided. I knew that in
my
own case I sweated and groaned in my blanket when I thought, as I often did, that I might be kept from finding Mary by these endless days of delays, or by falling over a rock and breaking a leg.

“Why did you marry him, Phoebe?” I asked. It was a question that often came into my mind.

She held up one of her cat’s eyes and squinted at the fire through it. “I’ll tell you some day. I’ll tell you after you’ve found Mary.”

“I hope to God it’ll be soon then,” I said. Phoebe continued to gaze at the fire through her cat’s eye, turning it from side to side, as though to catch the glow in it.

“So,” I said at length, “there’s been desertions among Enos’s men?”

She nodded. “They say there’s a thousand Iroquois ambushed on the Chaudière, waiting for us.”

“They say! They say!” I shouted. “It’s a lousy lie! How would the Iroquois get down through Schuyler’s army, and who’d feed ’em? Why is it that none of the other divisions gets these stories, only Enos’s?”

I got up in a rage, a vague idea in my mind, and started off to put it to use.

“Well,” Phoebe said, “good-bye in case we get separated.”

I went back and took her by the shoulders. I had seen a deal of her in the past four years, and she seemed like a young brother, a little. “We’ll see each other often. Don’t go falling into logans, and keep your feet out from between rocks.” I looked around to see if anyone was listening. “If anything goes wrong after you reach the Height of Land, you can always find friends of mine in the woods. Understand? Red friends.”

She stared up at me with a sort of trusting look in her eyes. I stooped and kissed her. Her lips were cold.

“In the spring,” I said, “well have our brig.”

She nodded.

“Good-bye, Phoebe.” She didn’t answer; so I went away to look for Treeworgy.

I found him sitting by a fire, gray-faced and sour-mouthed, as if he had been eating half-ripe chokecherries. If he was not Ezekiel Hook, he was the spit of him, except for being heavier and grayer. There were a few musketmen at the fire with him, all somber and cheerless. I dropped my hand on his shoulder, saying, “Hook!”

He turned and looked up at me, then grinned sourly. “Not me,” he said, seeming to take no offense.

“What’s all this I hear about desertions?”

Treeworgy humped his shoulders. “There’s a few went home. One or two, mebbe. Homesick, likely. Got to thinking, the way boys will, they wouldn’t see their mothers or their gals for months or years, mebbe; mebbe ever.”

One or two of the musketmen moved uncomfortably, staring into the fire.

“There’s something queer going on in this division,” I said. “There’s more damned lies afloat in it than Beelzebub himself could think up in a million years of hell.”

Treeworgy nodded. “I heard ’em. Them about the British mining the banks of the St. Lawrence, so’s to blow us all up, and Million Rattlesnake Mountain, where the rattlesnakes strike first and rattle afterward, and Boiling Water Bog, that you fall into and cook if you try to cross.”

“My God, Treeworgy!” I shouted, “haven’t you got more sense than to repeat these things? They’re damned filthy lies, fit to scare the gizzard out of folks that don’t know Dead River’s as pretty a river as there is.”

“That’s what I tell ’em,” Treeworgy agreed. “When they come to me and ask if Dead River got its name from the thousands that died on it I tell ’em it ain’t so. The same with all of the stories. I don’t believe any of ’em.”

“You don’t
believe
’em,” I said, breaking into a flux of profanity and eyeing him while I cursed. “You know there isn’t a word of truth in ’em!”

“Well, now, I guess that’s right,” said Treeworgy, mild as a phoebe bird’s song on a hot day, and seeming to pay no attention to my swearing.

“You
know
it’s right! If I can get my fingers on the misbegotten spawn of hell that started ’em, I’ll tear his lying windpipe out of his throat.” With that, having in mind how Ezekiel Hook had shrunk before what he had been pleased to call my father’s blasphemy, I blasphemed against the teller of these tales with such violence that I was shamed by my own play-acting. Yet the gray sourness of Treeworgy’s face altered not a whit, so I was forced to believe he told the truth when he said he wasn’t Hook.