Woods Runner (10 page)

“Did he start the war?” It seemed a logical question; the war was so crazy. Maybe a crazy man started it.

“Probably not. It began on this side of the ocean in
Boston, not over there. People were sick of being treated like livestock.”

The dogs had been going ahead now and then to greet some people, their tails wagging, holding back with others, but now they dropped well back and Abner stopped the wagon. “British coming.” If he hadn’t seen the dogs, he would have known anyway; all the men who looked like patriot soldiers evaporated off the trail into the brush.

The soldiers came marching in a file. Not Hessians but regular British soldiers. There must have been two or three hundred of them, as near as Samuel could estimate, marching in loose route step, followed by supply wagons. They did nothing threatening, they didn’t stop at all, except to work around wagons that couldn’t get out of the way soon enough.

Abner watched them go by in silence, nodding at some of them, and when they were gone, he started up the mules. It was late in the day and he said, “Why don’t we stop for a good meal tonight?”

They had been eating corn and the venison, which was about gone. Samuel had been thinking he should take his rifle and head off into the woods for another deer tomorrow. “What do you mean?”

“I mean have somebody cook us a meal … say the people in that farm over there.” He pointed to a farm set well back off the road, with neat white fences and a white painted house. “Right there.”

Samuel and Annie said nothing. The house reminded Samuel of Annie’s home before the Hessians and he wondered if she felt the same.

As they had gotten closer to the city, there had been more and more cleared farms. Some were nice, even beautiful. Some had been attacked and burned—probably by the Hessians—but many had not. It made no sense, nor did it follow any logic—like so much of what had happened.

Abner pulled the wagon into the long drive and then the yard. There was a wooden watering trough by a hand pump and the mules went to it and started drinking. Abner, Samuel and Annie climbed down from the wagon.

“Let them drink,” Abner said. “Mules won’t blow themselves by overdrinking the way horses do.”

There was a barn—painted red, as Caleb’s had been. Samuel sneaked a look at Annie, but she seemed to take it in stride.

A man came from the barn. He was tall, thin, and had a tired felt hat, which he pushed to the back of his head. He started to say something but before he could get anything out, Abner held up his hand.

“Name’s Abner McDougal. Honor to the house and we come in peace. I have a fine surface-sharpening stone wheel and I repair and sharpen all tools, in the house and barn, all work for one good meal for me and the bairns.”

“Well …”

“Also buy and sell rags. Have some nice linen rags if the
lady of the house needs some soft garment material.” He spoke fast, never letting the man get a word in. “If you don’t need anything we’ve got, we’ll just thank you for the water for the mules and be on our way.”

The man removed his hat and rubbed his head. “Well, I’ve got some sickle bars that could use a honing and I ’spect Martha has some knives that need touching up.”

“No sooner said than done. Sam, why don’t you get that sharpening wheel down and we’ll get to edging things up.”

Samuel—who had never been called Sam in his life—went to the back of the wagon and peered into the mess. He hadn’t really looked at it before but now, as he pulled some things aside, he found a sharpening wheel, a wooden frame with a treadle and a small tin cup to drip water on the stone. When he pulled it out of the way, he found a wire-covered crate pushed under some things. It had some kind of birds in it and on closer examination he saw they were pigeons; live pigeons. How strange.

He hadn’t even known they were there. Why were they hidden? He took the wheel down and put it by the trough, filled the tin cup and hung it by the wire over the wheel so water would drip from a small hole in the can onto the stone. He made sure the treadle worked and the wheel spun.

The man came from the barn with three hand sickles that had the long curved blade used for harvesting wheat or other grains. Abner took one, stood by the wheel and
gestured to Samuel to start pumping with his leg to get the stone spinning. Abner held the first blade against the stone as it turned, making a scraping-hissing sound, and the steel edge ground down to razor sharpness.

Samuel was amazed at how easily the stone spun. This shouldn’t take too long. How peaceful it all seemed. He kept pumping until the sickle was done.

Then another, and Samuel switched pumping legs.

Legs a little tired.

And another. He switched legs again.

Legs a little
more
tired.

Then three axes, two picks, a tomahawk, a set of rail-splitting wedges—six of them—four slaughtering and sticking knives, and four butcher knives that Martha, a short, thin woman who was all smiles, brought from the house. Then an ice chisel, two serrated hay knives, two planking adzes, one shingle froe, and, at last, an old cavalry saber that the farmer—named Micah—used for chopping corn.

Samuel staggered over to the trough to wash. Abner put his whole head underwater and then shook like a dog. He pulled his hair back and combed his beard down and Samuel saw Micah smile at him. He saw something else there, a look of what? Recognition? As if they already knew each other?

The meal was good, very good, though not up to what they had eaten at Caleb’s. Venison stew, piles of new potatoes, fresh bread with new butter, apple pie made with
maple sugar, and fresh buttermilk cool from the spring-house on the side of the barn, in quantities to fill even Samuel. He was shy about asking for seconds, but Martha kept piling it on and he ate it gratefully. Sit-down meals were always rare in his life, even before the war—he winced at that thought,
before the war;
there didn’t seem to be such a thing anymore—what with his living in the woods on the hunt most of the time. But being a guest was almost unheard of and he wasn’t sure how to act.

He needn’t have worried. As with Caleb and Ma, Micah and Martha made eating enjoyable, not something to fret over. When they were done with seconds, and thirds on the pie—even Annie ate like a wolf—they went out to sit on the porch while Micah and Abner lit up clay pipes with coals from the fireplace.

“Food gets better every time I stop here,” Abner said, ending the mystery. “I didn’t think it was possible.”

“She can cook.” Micah nodded, smiling. “In fact, there ain’t much she
can’t
do.”

Annie and Samuel sat on the edge of the porch. The dogs were in the dirt in front of them. Annie was about to doze off but Samuel wanted to listen, so he sat drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick, the dogs watching with a kind of casual interest as the stick moved around.

“Know anything about the happenings in New York?” Abner asked. “How it went?”

Micah shook his head. “Not much. The English took it and a bunch of prisoners. They’ve moved in, the English.
Took over houses for their own—they ain’t making a lot of friends. Course that doesn’t seem to bother them much, not making friends, the way they brought those damn Hessians into it. Hiring mad dogs.”

“The passes I brought you working out?”

“So far. I’m more worried about scavengers hitting us. The wild ones would kill you for a turnip. But we’re still here, ain’t we?”

“Good. I’ve got some more birds to leave. You still have that hutch in back of the barn?”

“Yes.”

“Same as before. Send one if anything big comes along. I’ll send one this evening. We saw a large detachment heading up the road today—maybe two hundred. They ought to know about it back in Philadelphia.”

“If the hawks don’t get him. I don’t know how any of them get past the hawks.”

“Well, there’s always that. Always some risk. But it’s better than nothing.”

The pigeons are for carrying messages, Samuel thought. He glanced at Abner out of the corner of his eye—there was so much more to him than he’d thought at first.

The men sat smoking in silence for a moment; then Abner said: “You said they took some prisoners. Sam’s parents weren’t military but they took them prisoners anyway.”

“They’re doing that.” Micah nodded. “No sense to it.
Just see a man working in a field and take him prisoner. Stupid. Like they think the crops are going to plant themselves.”

“You know where they’re keeping the prisoners?”

“Not certain. There are warehouses and an old sugar mill—you remember that three-story thing they built to mill sugar?”

Abner nodded. “Along the waterfront.”

“Yes. I think they might use that, along with the warehouses. There are thousands of prisoners. I don’t know how they’ll feed them, plus I s’pose plenty of them were wounded. It can’t be good for them.”

“Well,” Abner said, knocking his pipe out on the side of the porch. This, Samuel saw, made the dogs stand up and get ready. He was amazed by them. They saw everything. “We’ll see what we can see,” Abner said. It was starting to get dark. “You mind if we sleep here tonight? We’ll be out of here early.”

“Why would I mind? There’s new hay in the loft, makes a good bed, long as you don’t smoke.”

And with the mules unharnessed, fed hay and put out in a pen for the night, Abner took time to put two pigeons in the hutch in back of the barn. He wrote something on a tiny piece of thin paper, tied it to a third pigeon’s leg and let him go. He and Samuel and Annie watched the bird fly away to the south.

“He’ll roost somewhere tonight if he doesn’t get there before dark. It’s probably only forty miles in a straight
flight, an hour the way they move, so he should make it. Imagine, moving through the air at forty miles an hour. Just imagine.”

Later, lying on the new hay with the clover smell thick around him, Samuel could hear Annie breathing regularly in sleep. He teetered on the edge of it, but before it came he said to Abner, who was lying just above him on the stacked hay bales: “You and Micah aren’t what you seem to be, are you?”

“We are,” Abner chuckled, “exactly what we seem to be—and maybe just a little bit more.”

T
here was a long, shallow hill as they came into what Samuel would have called a city, and Abner stopped the mules at the top of it, still half a mile out, and studied it.

Samuel had never even imagined such a place. Houses and other buildings everywhere, built on the land next to the open water. And that water was another thing he’d never seen. “Is that it?” he asked. “That water—is that part of the ocean?”

“That’s the Hudson River,” Abner sighed. As they’d moved from settlement to settlement, each one bigger than the last, Samuel and Annie had been asking, “Is this New York?”

“And that’s not New York, either,” Abner said. “Not yet. We’re in New Jersey. Look there, across the river, through the fog—that’s New York. We’ll leave the wagon
here and the mules and get a boat across. I know somebody who might help us.”

Down below, on mudflats that led out to the river, Samuel saw dozens of boats pulled up to the shoreline, some large, some small, and men waiting to row them across the river. Now and then through the mist, he could make out what seemed to be a large city.

Large? Huge.

“Wait here,” Abner said. “I’m going to go look for a friend.”

Between the wagon and the river were many buildings, some with fenced-in pens full of oxen and horses and mules.

Abner came back. “Very well.” With him was a man who looked a lot like him: gray hair everywhere, tobacco spit down his chin, old clothes. “Matthew here is going to take us across and bring us back. We have had enterprise with each other before and he understands the nature of our business. I told him we hope it won’t take long and that we prefer coming back in the dark, if possible, and fast. We’ll leave the wagon and mules and dogs with his boys on this side. They’ll keep them ready for us. Samuel, you may take your knife, but leave your rifle here. There are soldiers everywhere and a rifle will draw attention. Annie, you wait here with the wagon.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“He is all I’ve got.”

“And he will be back. If this works right there will be
two more people coming back with us, and the boat is not that big. We might need the room….”

She looked at Samuel. “You come back.”

“I will.”

“I’m telling you, you better or else.”

Samuel could see that she was crying and he found himself choking up but hid it. “Don’t worry.” He put his hand on her shoulder.

The truth was he had no idea … about anything. They didn’t even know for certain if his parents were over there. He looked across the river. It was late afternoon and the sun was burning the fog off. The city was huge, with buildings standing three and four stories high, and houses spread out in a grid.

How could they hope to find anybody in all those buildings? Looking at the city, imagining how many people must be there, made the rest of the trip seem almost easy. The woods, the forest, was nothing compared to this.

“Away,” Matthew croaked. “We must go. Darkness comes fast on the river and we must be across when there is still light for to see. Follow.”

Abner moved with him toward the boats and after a moment’s hesitation Samuel followed. There were about a hundred boats pulled up along the mud bank in a long line, tied to brush or small trees, and most of them looked to be on their last legs. Water-soaked, unpainted clunkers, covered with mud and filth that came down the river. Samuel was surprised—considering that Matthew looked
even rougher than Abner—to find that he brought them to a beautifully maintained, painted double-ended boat about twenty feet long. There was a small cabin in the center and a short mast up over the cabin.