Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation (20 page)

“Jonathan?” she whispered.

“He—he—”

“Tell me!”

Kennen nodded, unable to speak.

Her children were sobbing, clinging to her skirts. A great weight for her to bear—too great a weight. She had to rest, lie down, ease herself. Perrin dead, Jonathan dead; what was left now?

She had to feed her children. Death comes, life passes, yet children have to be fed. The other women, too: hardly anyone wept, but there were faces of stone while they fed their children. And when Cullen sobbed, Mercy cried:

“I'll have none of that! You mind your food!”

A cloud of dark smoke over the face of the sun. Hannah Stevens took her children for a while. Mercy went to the gate, stared out at the wilderness. Tears were beyond her, and she stood there dry-eyed.

Then her mind was made up. She saw only one thing: the quiet countryside of Connecticut, where there was peace. She walked back through the fort, through hundreds of women who were stricken with death, through a terrible, subdued hum of sorrow. She came to Hannah Stevens and said:

“I'm leaving Forty Fort tonight.”

“Mercy—you're mad.”

“I'm sane enough. There's nothing left for me here now. I only want peace.”

“But not tonight.”

“Tomorrow it will be too late. I feel that.”

They left Forty Fort that same night, under the cover of a dark, starless sky. A dozen women had decided to accompany Mercy. Together with their children, with Lem Seely, the one old man the fort could spare them, they made a party of thirty-odd souls. They stood a little while in the gateway of the fort. Some of the women who were left wept quietly; some said a few words of encouragement.

Then Forty Fort was behind them, and they were picking their way through the dark forest toward Wilkes-Barre and the river. Eastward, across two hundred miles of wilderness, lay their homes in Connecticut.

Mercy walked with the man, with Lem Seely, who was past sixty and who chattered endlessly. She heard little that he said; she was conscious of two things: that her face was turned eastward, and that Perrin had gone out of her life. Perrin was dead, and Perrin's dreams were dead. The wild had defeated them. Now there was only a desire for peace, for the cessation of fear. Within her she could sense the movements of her unborn child; she carried Billy in her arms, where he slept blissfully.

That was her life, only that, only her children; and the only purpose of her life now was to gain peace for them. Once life had been different for her, and even now, as she stumbled through the forest in the dark, there was a picture of that.

There was a picture of a tall, blue-eyed, light-haired girl who walked at the side of Perrin Ross into a new land. There was a picture of Perrin felling logs to make their house. There was a picture of that house, rising out of the strength of Perrin's arms. Now, all that was done. She was on the way back.

They walked for hours through the night. They crossed the river above Wilkes-Barre. Mercy felt the water swirling about her thighs as she waded through, her child in her arms. Twice more she made the passage, taking a child each time. Old Lem carried the rest.

They went on then. Some of the children wept from sheer weariness. Sometimes they fell over roots in the dark. They had to be careful. There were Indians near by.

At last they could go no farther. They had reached Solomon's Gap, and beneath them stretched the dreadful wilderness of the Pocono swamps. They dropped on the ground, and many of them slept where they lay. But some of the women could not sleep, only look into the dark and wonder.

Mercy was one of these. She stood for a while beside old Lem.

Lem said, “It'll be hard, but not so hard that we won't get through.”

“Hard for the children,” Mercy said.

They went on. Seemingly endless were the Pocono swamps, black mud and a roof of trees to hide the sun. Black mud sucked at their feet each time they took a step. The sun shone no more. A child died; they buried it in the mud and there was no stone to mark its grave. Mercy thanked God that it was not hers—craved forgiveness for her selfishness. A fear of the mud: where could they sleep and where could they rest? What little food they had brought with them was used up. Sometimes old Lem shot a squirrel, once a chuck. They became lean specters of women and children. Now, when old Lem tried to laugh, nobody laughed with him.

They went on and on. Mercy's flesh dropped away. She was no longer strong and round and lovely; her face had become lean and haggard. Her body cried out for food: there were two to feed; and her children looked at her with hungry, sunken eyes. She would say to them, “Only a little farther—only a bit more.” Words that her own face belied.

They were lost. Old Lem admitted it with tears in his eyes. Some of the women wept, but Mercy said nothing. Her tired, thin face was obsessed by an idea—peace for her children, only that.

For her children: Perrin would understand; Perrin would know that they must live, that a woman alone cannot face the wild.

Then, ten days after they had entered the morass, they came out of it, came into a land of rolling green hills, of scattered farms.

Four years had passed. Thirteen scattered colonies at war with Great Britain were now a nation at peace. The massacre and horror at Wyoming were already a memory.

But for Mercy Ross, the memory was more than a memory, and Perrin and Jonathan and the lush green valley of the Wyoming pervaded her dreams. She had come back to Connecticut and her child had been born: a man-child, as they said, and she called it Perrin.

Her maiden aunt, Celia, said: “I'd 'a' known no good would come of that scamp.”

But she saw Mercy's face, and she said no more. A girl had gone away and a woman had come back.

Her beauty returned, her calm, splendid beauty that marked her face with her name; but the lines of sorrow and longing were never erased from her face.

She lived with her aunt and mother. They said she should forget. The West was wilderness, no fit place for womankind. Her silence might have been agreement. She had peace at last, the peace she wanted so desperately for her children's sake. She never spoke of what had been at Wyoming, and the children forgot very quickly. Even Perrin, they forgot.

A man came back from the war. Like most of the men who had fought through the war, he wanted peace and rest—and the love of a woman. He needed them desperately, and in the quiet of the Connecticut countryside he found the first two.

When he saw Mercy Ross, he considered that he had found the third.

His name was Samuel Allen; he was tall and strong, a man who knew what he wanted and would have it, a man almost like Perrin. Yet he was not Perrin.

Somehow, Mercy had never thought that there could be another man after Perrin. When Perrin died, some of the world had died—a world he made for her. But Sam Allen wanted her; after the hell of war, her beauty was peace and refuge for him.

He told her that; he also told her that what he wanted, he got.

Vaguely, Mercy feared him. That was after she had learned to care for him—love him, she thought sometimes. It took many months. He was a solid, undemanding type—the type she could lean on. He would come over in the evening, sit on her porch and smoke his pipe. He would smell of fresh-turned dirt, of growing things on a farm, the smell she always associated with Perrin. He asked little and he gave a great deal.

The children took to him easily—so easily that it frightened Mercy. That and his restlessness; his restlessness was not the uneasy, nervous kind: it was a fire burning within him, and she would see it sometimes when he turned his face westward toward the setting sun.

She told him the story of the Wyoming, of Forty Fort and the flight through the wilderness. It was the first time she had spoken of it to anyone. He listened in silence; even after she had finished, he kept his silence a long time. Finally, he asked: “This Wyoming country—it seems a fair, fruitful land.”

“Perrin said, the land of Canaan,” she told him.

“I would like to set my eyes upon it,” he said thoughtfully. And then he said: “A man would want a woman—a strong, proud woman.”

After that, Mercy feared him.

Yet when a day passed and he didn't come, she felt strangely alone, troubled. And when he came again, she would welcome him with her calm open smile.

She was afraid. Peace for the children, for herself. Wasn't that all that she desired? Wasn't that why she had suffered? She hardly knew now. When he stared westward, the way Perrin had stared, as though the world lay to the west—

He asked her to marry him.

Mercy said slowly, “I would be no wife for a strong man. There's fear in me, dreadful fear.”

“Of that?” he demanded, pointing westward.

She nodded.

“There's no fear with a man like me,” he said, almost harshly. “A woman's not made to live alone.” Then he rose and walked quickly away.

Mercy was thinking,
Alone
—
always alone
. She shivered, put her face in her hands. The children would grow, forget, have their own lives; but what would there be for her?

He came again the following night, sat down on the porch, packed his pipe and lit it.

He sat there for a while, smoking. It was good for Mercy to have him there, a strong man to lean on. A man like him—always.

“I made up my mind,” he said finally. “I'm going West. I'll not root in a stubble when there's broad lands to be taken.”

She stared at him, not speaking.

“I'm going to the Wyoming Valley. It's a fair, beautiful land, and I'll take some of it.”

Still she did not speak. He was going. As Perrin had gone, so was he going. He would go out of her life and there would be no other. Slowly she rose and walked toward him; and even as she walked, it came back to her—the Forty Fort, the wilderness. She stood before him, and he said softly:

“I'll have no woman who fears to go where her man leads.”

“I'll go,” Mercy said.

“Without fear?”

“Without fear.”

She knew it then, and long ago Perrin had been right in choosing her destiny. There would be no peace and no rest; but there would be dreams to be realized.

Then Sam Allen took her in his arms, and then she was happy—for the first time since Perrin had dashed up to the house, so many years ago.

When they came down from Solomon's Gap, crossed the river, and went north through the valley to where her home had been, the children were already pointing out things that they remembered. They remembered; they were laughing: it brought a thrill of gladness to Mercy's heart.

And when they came to the burned ruins of the house, Sam Allen stood next to her, silent, and Mercy wept. The tears came easily now. They were facing westward, and the sun was setting; and the children had paused to watch the setting sun.

10

The Bookman

 

THE BOOKMAN

W
E WERE
very poor, but we were never so poor as the soldiers. Before the war, it had been different, but as the war went on, we got poorer and poorer, yet we were never so poor as the soldiers.

I think it was in the fall of seventeen eighty that the soldiers were all encamped down in the valley beyond our house. It was just at the beginning of the winter, and the day they came, a film of snow covered the whole valley down to the river, which you could see from our house. Our house stood on a hill, commanding the valley and the river and the plain beyond it. Mother always watched the valley. She said that when father came back, we should see him riding up the valley all the way from the river. Father was with the Third Continentals, a captain. But this was before he was killed.

The soldiers came marching down the river-side, along the dirt road, and they turned up the valley, where they prepared to encamp. They were part of the New Jersey line, all of them very tired-looking men, and very thin. We ran down to meet them, and they all waved to us. I was ashamed of myself, I was so fat and healthy.