Drums Along the Mohawk (36 page)

Nancy did not move or speak.

On the twenty-first of August, militiamen began to appear at Fort Dayton. They came from as far east as Klock’s, and with the arrival of the first groups the men of German Flats started to turn out. By nightfall the count had reached three hundred, and Arnold called Willett and all local militia officers into his tent for a council of war.

“Gentlemen, we start to-morrow.”

His eyes swept over the circle of faces, and fastened on the hesitant ones. Peter Tygert murmured, “Give us another day and maybe we can get another hundred rifles out for you.”

“In another day,” said Arnold, “Colonel Gansevoort may have to cut his way out of Fort Stanwix. It’s my opinion we could be more useful there than here. You can fetch the other hundred along to-morrow.” His eyes protruded at them. “This country’s rotten with its hemstitch policies. It’s time somebody acted. I’m going to. How about those militia? Are they decently organized?”

Captain Demooth said quietly, “They’re pretty disorganized.
A lot of the officers got shot or captured. Most of these men were in the first two companies.”

Arnold nodded.

“Very well. I suggest that they be turned over to the surviving officers and made into an irregular brigade. Bring them along in the rear. They ought to shake down as we march. We march to-morrow after sunrise.”

It was a still morning, a little cooler than usual. The river lay like glass between the rifts, not stirring the reflection of a leaf.

At dawn, so still was the air that from Little Stone Arabia Fort to Eldridge Blockhouse people heard the muster rolling of the army drums. Gil Martin, reporting, was appointed temporary sergeant of those of the Schuyler company whom he could get together. Of twenty-five he found eleven. Reall was dead, Weaver wounded, Kast wounded; of the other eleven men one was known to be dead, two taken prisoner, three wounded, and the rest disappeared.

Survivors of other companies even more unfortunate, Joe Boleo and Adam Helmer among them, asked to be attached to Demooth’s company. They made a compact knot of men when Demooth himself rode up to count them. “Good work, Martin,” he said, and wheeled his horse to let General Arnold pass on the narrow road.

But the general reined his horse.

“Is this your company, Captain?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They aren’t all sound.”

“Sound enough, I think,” said Captain Demooth.

Arnold smiled suddenly.

“By God, then, let them come. Do they know the woods?
Good. I suggest they act as an advance guard.” He turned to Gil. “Keep a quarter mile ahead of us.”

The way he said it made Gil feel inordinately proud.

“Yes, sir.” Then he asked, “How far will this day’s march go, sir?”

“Just as far as we can get.” Arnold grinned again. “You do a thorough job of combing the woods and I reckon we’ll keep up.”

They took the road, with the rolling of the drums recommencing behind them. It prickled their scalps to hear the fifes break out.

The woods covered them with their green silence and they went swiftly westward. In Gil there was a lifting of the heart. He nodded when Helmer said, “This beats the militia. Being our own men and eating nobody’s dust.” As soon as they had passed Schuyler, Joe Boleo and Helmer took over the direction of the company, but Joe Boleo was tactful about it.

“You ain’t timber beasts like me and Helmer, Martin. The two of us can find out a whole lot more of what’s going on if we don’t have you to keep track of. The rest of you keep on the road and go a little slow. We’ll let you know fast enough if we find anything. Wait at the ford until we pick you up though.”

The two men broke away and trotted forward into the woods, one on each side of the road. Their moccasined feet made no sound. Gil and the others continued along the road.

They could still see traces of the first march towards Stanwix; deep ruts off the road where an ox cart had bogged down, a rotting blanket, a dropped bayonet. But already the growth of the woods was beginning its work of hiding them. The ferns had straightened round the edges and grass was growing through a hole in the blanket. A deer runway crossing the road had blotted out the wheel tracks.

Well before noon they passed Deerfield and turned toward
the river. There, where the oxen had balked, they sat down on the bank and ate.

They were still eating their food when Gil heard a hail from the woods across the river. Helmer appeared with his hand raised. A moment more and he had splashed over the ford. One look at his big handsome face told that he carried good news.

“Joe’s got a squad of Gansevoort’s men up the road. They say Sillinger’s pulled foot.”

“Pulled foot?”

“Yes, pulled foot. Bag and baggage. The Indians lit out yesterday. The whole mess of them, and Sillinger pulling his foot with the rest. They’ve left everything they’ve got behind.” He burst out laughing.

The other men suddenly joined in.

“By Jesus!” A British brigadier galloping hell for leather down the Indian track towards Oneida. They could see it themselves. Bed, tent, writing desk, and chest of liquor, cooking pots and silver forks, sword, spurs, epaulets, and oaths. They saw the whole shebang. “Pulled foot.” It was a joke.

They fell silent after a few minutes and started looking at each other.

“Where’d you find them?” Gil asked.

“About where Honnikol camped, at the crick.”

“What are they doing there?”

“Eating,” said Adam. “Eating their lunch. When Joe walked in on them they asked him to set down and eat.”

Inexplicably they all burst out laughing again.

The rest of the march went swiftly. As soon as Arnold was notified he let his baggage and artillery come on at their own pace and pushed ahead with the troops alone. The army crossed
the Mohawk early the next morning. Two hours later they had reached and forded Oriskany Creek.

Gil and his small company marched at the head of the column. As they went on they began to recognize the lay of the land and their talking gradually stopped.

It was Joe Boleo who first began sniffing. He stopped his shambling stride and lifted his face, and the others crowded up behind them.

“What’s the matter, Joe?” Gil asked.

“Smell for yourself, lad.”

He started forward again. The road was familiar now, running in the gloom of hemlocks above the river bottom. And as they proceeded they began to pick up more strongly the odor of decay that the woodsman had spotted long before.

It became an overpowering stench. It rose up in their faces, like a wall, through which they felt they could hardly pass. They found themselves suddenly on the edge of the ravine, staring down at the causeway. They all stopped again. Then Helmer said, “God! Come on,” and they went down the incline and out along the corduroy.

Some of the men looked curiously right and left, but Gil, after one glance, kept his eyes to the track. And even then more than once he had to step carefully round the disintegration of the dead.

They lay, not as they had fallen, but as the foxes and wolves and Indian dogs had left them. The grass or ferns were trodden down around each body, impartially, horse or man, Indian or white; and the half-opened skeletons were like white roots of a miasmal wilderness.

Along the rising bank the corpses thinned out, the air seemed to lighten, and the men could hear each other breathing. Then on the plateau the frequency of dead was resumed, always thicker till they reached the edge of the gulch of the farther side;
and here they lay so close together that the preying animals had not disturbed them all—postured as they had fallen, in the attitudes of fighting, or grasping the earth with swollen hands.

As they saw the end of the battleground ahead, the little knot of living men began to quicken pace. They were running when they finally rose on the far side of the gulch.

Presently, while they waited, they heard the sounds of the marching army far behind across the blanketing silence of those bodies. The tramp of feet coming down on the corduroy, the rattle of harness, and the jolt and clatter of the munition carts. There was a momentary disorder and halt, and Joe Boleo’s sardonic voice inquired at large, “I wonder what Mr. Benedict Arnold makes of that?”

It was the first word any one of them had spoken. They looked in each other’s faces, seeing them sallow and wet.

But then the first bluecoats were visible along the road. They came in two columns, their white breeches and the white facings on the buttoned-back skirts of their coats swinging steadily, as their solid boots trod heavily on the rough ground. They were marching at attention, eyes to the front, muskets at right shoulder. Above the heads of the first company, the shoulders and flushed face of Benedict Arnold rose to the extended branches of the trees, and his lips moved as if he talked to himself. His eyes looked blazing mad. Demooth’s company of militia turned, all twenty-five as one, and took up the march again towards the fort.

At three o’clock the advance companies came out on the vlaie land at the great bend of the Mohawk. Half a mile ahead, the
walls of the fort stood square and brown above the grass, surrounding the low roofs of its four buildings. The sun, westering, picked out the sticks of the stockade along the south wall facing the army and shadowed the sally port.

But above this shadow, on the main or northeast flagstaff, the new flag hung in its bright colors. Even at that distance the men were able to make out the red and white stripes and the blue field. The air was too still to move it.

Men were moving across the fields outside the gate; a wagon was crawling towards the sally port from some abandoned tents on the high ground to the north; nowhere was there any sign of war.

The gathering resonance of the deep army drums reached onward past Gil’s moving head. He saw a man spring up on the sentry walk and the men in the field scramble to their feet. The wagon halted momentarily. The horses turned their heads. The banging of the drums grew stronger, putting a lift in the tramping feet. The sun over the fort glanced in two sparks from the shoulders of an officer. Man after man appeared behind the points of the stockade. They seemed to stand in a frozen silence. Then, suddenly, hats were scaled in the air. Four cannon on the southeast station let loose orange bursts of flame and the entire side of the fort was engulfed in a black cloud of smoke. The thudding roars beat down the sound of drums; but they swelled again triumphantly. At a signal, the fifers licked their fifes and filled their cheeks. The shrill notes leaped upward, piercing the valley.

As he walked, Gil watched the black smoke from the cannon rising over the stockade until it obscured even the flagstaff. Then it began to drift gradually towards the north. When it had vanished he saw the flag as it had been, limp against the flagpole. But now it brought him a strange sensation that it was his and that it hung in victory and peace.

The mid-October sun was already low over the southwest hills as Dr. Petry rode his old gray horse homeward past Herkimer Church. The fort looked almost deserted. Only George Weaver’s family and the Realls were living in it now, besides the small remaining garrison; and George Weaver no longer needed his services. He was just as glad, for Emma Weaver had become so concerned about her son John and one of the Reall girls that she was unpleasant company. The jealousy of an ambitious mother: Emma, for all her homely face, had strong passions for all her menfolks. And then, he was tired.

He was so tired that if it hadn’t been for Bell’s abominable hen squawking in the sack behind the cantle, Dr. Petry would have been dozing in comfort.

He had long ago caught the trick of sleeping in the saddle. The old gray horse had a steadfast sort of ambling gait; his back was flat and broad enough to lay a table on, and he knew every road, bridge, ford, and footpath in the western half of Tryon County. People said that he knew every patient as well, and what was wrong with him, and what the prescription ought to be.

Now the doctor took off his hat and banged it behind him against the sack, causing an unexpected fluttering commotion. The silence was grateful and complete. He put his hat back on his head, tilting it well forward, and closed his eyes under the brim. Well, when he got home, he’d take his boots off and sit down and have a drink before the fire. A fire would feel good.
The cold was getting more pronounced and he thought they were not far off from frost. He could feel admonitory twinges in his wounded foot. It was a good thing people were getting in the last of the corn. They had got it all in at Andrustown; they were going to have a bee there next week for the husking and had asked the doctor to spread the word of it.

“God damn that God-damn hen.” She was making a little moaning in her nose, or bill, or wherever it was. He hadn’t wanted her. He was sick of poultry round the house, but George Bell swore she was a layer, and an egg in his rum, now … Well, a man oughtn’t to complain. It was all Bell had to pay with. It was all the pay he had collected for his thirty-mile ride. He had started at four o’clock that morning, and here it was past five in the afternoon.

But a man ought not to complain. The crops were in and they were good this year. The price of wheat was soaring. Bill Petry ought to collect on a few back accounts this winter. It surely looked as if the war were over, now that St. Leger had skedaddled back to Canada, frightened off by the simple lies of Hon Yost Schuyler. Hon himself, the hero of the day, seemed to have returned to his American allegiance. Fort Stanwix was in first-rate order, with that unswerving, stolid Dutchman, Gansevoort, returned to the command. And best news of all, a battle had been fought with Burgoyne at a place called Freeman’s Farm, three weeks ago, and it had been a stand-off. But they said the American army had swelled to twenty thousand men (that ought to make an earful for the King of England) and Burgoyne couldn’t even run away. They had him, and they ought to lick him any day. There wasn’t any question that Great Britain would have to give in and recognize American Independence.…