3stalwarts (18 page)

“You’d better eat,” he said.

“I don’t want anything.”

“Doc said you ought to eat.” He glanced down at her. Her face was pale and thin, it seemed to have lengthened, and there were unnatural shadows under her eyes. She still looked young; but she looked as if she had been hurt. “You know why,” he said, roughly.

“I know,” she said. “But I don’t dare.”

“You ought to.”

“Who wants a baby now? Living like this. We haven’t any chance of getting started again this year. If ever.”

“We’ll get back in the spring, maybe. That’s why I want to stay up here.”

“Go back there? To Deerfield?”

“Where did you think I meant?”

“It’s so far away, Gil.”

“It’s no further than it used to be.”

She did not answer. She did not even look at him. She heard him finish his supper and drop the spoon back in the bowl. He got up and walked across the cabin, got his rifle down.

“What you want with that?”

He said, “Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll go up in the woods and see if there’s any deer come down.”

He cleaned the rifle in silence.

She said, “Isn’t the snow too deep?”

“Adam Helmer’s lent me a pair of snowshoes. Maybe he’ll come with me.”

Adam Helmer was a new friend of Gil’s. He was a young man, very tall and heavy, almost a giant. He had blond hair and a thin blond beard, and strangely bright gray eyes. Women admired him, for his strength and his good looks. But he had never married. If he married, he often said, he would have to go to work. As it was, any girl was glad to give him supper. Lana had not been glad. She felt that he was taking Gil away the only days that he might have stayed at home.

Helmer shot a thin doe that Sunday, but Gil missed three. They split the deer and parted in the village below Fort Dayton. When he noticed the light burning in Dr. Petry’s office store, instead of heading for the house across the river, Gil went to see him. He found the doctor alone.

“Well,” said Dr. Petry, raising his heavy brows, “what do you want?”

Gil handed him a steak he had cut off.

“Here’s some deer meat, Doc. I guess you don’t remember me. My name’s Martin. My wife was taken sick in Little Stone Arabia last September. You came up to see her.”

“Yes, I remember her, and you too. It’s too bad she had a miscarriage. She’s a fine girl. But you paid me for that visit.”

“Yes.”

“How is she now?”

“That’s what I want to ask you about. She don’t seem healthy. She don’t eat hardly anything. She just moons around the house all day.”

“She ought to be getting over it by now. Maybe I ought to see her again. Fetch her up.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. She’s afraid of you, anyway. She’s afraid of everything.” Gil blushed suddenly and looked at a bottle on the wall marked Sal. Ammon. Like a girl’s name.

“What’s the trouble, Martin?”

“She’s scared to death of having another baby, Doc. She’s so scared of me, I just have to leave her alone. I don’t know what to do.”

The doctor grunted and looked at him.

“Do you think I ought, Doc? It gets hard on me. But I can’t stand to see her scared.”

“Women get notions,” observed Dr. Petry. “But she seemed like a sensible girl to me.”

“Why, she always used to be. She’s a damn good wife. She was.”

“Was she scared about the first?”

“Hell, no, Doc. That’s what beats me so. She was about all a man could expect to handle. She made jokes about it. Not but what she’s modest. She’s a decent girl.”

“Yes, I understand that.”

“But sometimes I wonder, Doc, if she wouldn’t be better off if I treated her different.”

Dr. Petry drew a long breath and let it out again. He remembered Mar-tin’s wife— a pretty girl, he had thought then, sensible, and full of feeling. He didn’t know the first damn thing about this young man’s problem. No man could. Take Jacob Small’s wife. Since she had successfully had a baby she was crazy for another, though he had warned her and Small that it was just about likely to kill her. And this Mrs. Martin, who was equipped to have a dozen or fourteen and had probably started out with every intention of having them, was scared to death.

He wondered if the girls of his mother’s and grandmother’s times had been so unpredictable. But he couldn’t tell. He had trained for an army surgeon, and then he had come over to this country. He had located here in German Flats fourteen years ago, and he had delivered probably a hundred women, or women a hundred times, and yet when this young man asked him a perfectly simple question, he couldn’t possibly answer him.

He would like to help him, too. Help them both. Dr. Petry, having married no beauty himself, felt a cranky tenderness for all pretty young women; but he was going to have to admit to Martin that he didn’t know the answer, any answer.

Watching the doctor’s red, heavy, Bavarian face, Gil began to feel frightened.

“Doc,” he said, “you don’t think there’s anything gone wrong with her? Inside, I mean.”

The doctor exploded with a solid German curse.

“No, I don’t. She just had the devil shaken out of her at a bad time. Three weeks later, maybe, and she’d have been all right. That girl’s able to have all the brats you can get. Baskets of them. Oh, I know she’s small; but not when you look at her with my eye, boy.”

Gil felt weak.

“Her mother said that to me. She said all Borst women had babies easy. But I got wondering. And now …”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “and now …” His eyes swelled as he looked over at Gil. “I don’t know. Do you see? I don’t know.”

Gil nodded. “I guess it’s hard to tell.”

“You feel as if I’d let you fall down,” growled the doctor. “But I can’t help that. I can set bones. I can sew up cuts. I can deliver a baby.” Suddenly he fell back on religion. “But God’s supposed to look out for the soul. You can’t expect me to know everything.”

“I shouldn’t have asked. Only I didn’t want to make a mistake.”

The doctor got up with him and shook hands.

“You’re a good man, Martin. But there’s some things we have to trust to luck about. Or God. Or whatever. I guess this is just one. I wish to God I could answer you. I can’t. I’m tired. You better go have a drink and get to supper.”

Gil picked the half of the doe up off the floor and started out.

“But listen,” the doctor said after him. “It’s awful easy to get impatient. See? You’ve been patient. It won’t hurt waiting a while.”

Gil went down to the river and crossed on the ice. He wanted to leave a cut of the meat at Demooth’s. When he got to the house, there was nobody home but Nancy. She told him, smiling, that Captain and Missis had gone down to Herkimer’s place and were spending the night. Coppernol was out. She held the door open for him to enter, the candlelight making ripples on her yellow hair when she moved her head.

“You better set down and get warm,” she said, taking the cut from him. “I’ll put this away, Mr. Marting, and fetch you some cordial. Captain would want for you to have it.”

The kitchen was warm. There was a deep fire on the hearth. Gil couldn’t resist the cheerful heat, the wide comfort that the slate-gray walls enclosed. He was tired from the long cold hunt, and the heat seemed to go all through him. He sat drowsily, waiting Nancy’s return, listening to her footsteps in the storage pantry and then in a back room. She took quite a while. When she came in she carried a glass for him. As he took it, he saw that she had put a red ribbon round her head.

The ribbon made him look at her.

“Sit down here with me, where it’s warm,” he said.

She giggled a little and sat down on the settle between him and the fire.

“You’re real pretty, Nance,” he said.

She flushed up to her ears and turned her slow blue eyes on him.

“Oh, Mr. Marling!”

He sat quite still, watching her struggle in her mind for something to say. The stupidity on her face made no impression on her prettiness. He kept thinking of Lana’s listless paleness, and comparing it to Nancy’s full smooth pink skin. She seemed so incredibly warm and bursting with health.

“Here,” he said, extending the glass. “You’ve got to have your share.”

“Oh, Mr. Marting, Missis said I wasn’t ever to drink, with my head.”

“Nonsense. It ain’t going to hurt you. I don’t get much fun any more.”

“Mrs. Marting’s so poorly,” she said.

“Yes. It’s not her fault. Go on.” His voice hardened.

She sipped from the glass, her eyes wide on his. She choked a little, laughed, and had another sip.

He watched her face. The liquor fixed her flush. But her eyes became almost animated. She sat up for a moment, with a queer animal expectancy. Her voice sounded quite bright. “Oh, Mr. Marting!”

Gil threw his arm round her waist and pulled her to him. He felt her waist swell under his hand. While he kissed her the sheer force in her seemed to lift him. Then she let herself sag into his arm and lie like a dead weight, her head thrown back on his shoulder, the full round of her throat bare to the light, and one hand ineffectually pulling at the laces between her breasts. But her quiescence let her hand slip down again to her side. Her mouth slowly relaxed, the lips shakily finding their normal shape. Almost the only sign of life in her was the formation of sweat beads on her forehead and her upper lip.

He stared down at her a moment and saw the mouth form itself for words. Oh, Mr. Marting! He knew she would say it. And it made him feel sick. He shoved her back into her corner of the settle and got up.

The night was piercing cold, the air clear as ice, the wind like the edge of a knife. Gil, with the deer on his back and his rifle freezing to the palm of his mitten, walked home along the snowy road.

Across the river, the lights of the old Palatine settlement were contracted to points. The fort was a dark square on the snow-buried knoll. Along the road small houses and barns stood like little empty boxes. Further down the valley the earthworks and the low palisade atop them of Fort Herkimer, with the two blockhouses and the old stone church raising their roofs among the stars, were hushed in dormance by the frosty night. The only sound was the steady rapid squeak of his snowshoes.

Gil did not even hear them. He did not see the valley. He walked in a blind rage, Nancy, Lana, himself, and human decency like fumes in his tired brain. He hardly saw the Schuyler shack and the single pitiful light its window made against the river ice.

Lana was waiting with his supper when he flung open the door.

“Here,” he said, “Adam shot a doe. Let’s throw the mush out and fry a steak.”

He sat unmoving on the stool, staring at her slow and listless obedience before the hearth, smelling his own sweat rising through the steam of his clothes, feeling contempt for the tiny room with its leaky walls, rage against himself and her and Petry. Petry didn’t really know; he had said as much.

As Lana put the steak on the table, he caught hold of her wrist.

“Sit down and eat some.”

“I don’t want it, Gil.”

“Sit down and eat some, I said.”

She said, “I’ve had my supper.”

“I said sit down and eat some.”

She sat down.

“Get a plate. You can’t eat off the table.”

She got a plate, mutely accepted the helping, sat staring at it.

“I can’t, Gil.” Her eyes filled with tears. He watched them come out be-side her nose and follow down her cheeks with ugly slowness.

“You’re going to, though. And you’re going to quit this business of treating me like this. You’re going to start tonight, see?”

He watched her struggle with the meat. He thought she was going to be sick. But she wasn’t. She got through it somehow. But when she looked up at him, as a dog might for a kind word of praise, he saw that she understood what was in him. Her face turned deathly white and her eyes showed fear as tangible as tears. She never said a word.

They didn’t speak to each other next morning. They went several weeks without any words but absolutely necessary ones. Gil kept trying to tell himself that he was doing better than having to do with Demooth’s hired girl, but when he looked at Lana he had to check himself from fleeing the house. She was completely compliant now. Yet her compliance had the fearful quality of a misused dog’s.

On Christmas Day he broke down. He had brought her, from the store, a piece of ribbon, which he could not well afford, and as he watched her mechanically putting it in her hair, with mechanical gestures of pleasure, like a travesty in female flesh and blood, he cried out, “For God’s sake throw it away.”

Her hands stopped at her hair, and for a long while she stared at him. Then when he sprang up to get out of the house, she stepped before the door.

“Gil.”

Her face was so white that he was afraid of her. Then his hand raised and clenched. And suddenly he broke down.

“It was all wrong, Lana. I was all wrong.”

After his words the silence between them in the shack was as complete as the silence of winter beyond the door. He could hear his own heart beating, and then, with amazement, he heard her breathing.

“Maybe it wasn’t,” she said.

“You’re like a dead person.” He felt the words rush from his heart. “As if I’d killed you.”

“I don’t know, Gil.” Her face for all its pallor became thoughtful. It hadn’t the quick responsiveness any more. Looking at it, he felt that that had gone forever. “It wasn’t you altogether, Gil. It was me, too.”

While they stood there, they heard the bell of the old church, which had been taken out of the belfry to make room for the alarm gun and hung over the barrack door, send its slow notes over the snow.

Gil saw the pathetic question in her eyes.

“Let’s,” he said.

They went to church across the snow. They had no joy in the service or in the Reverend Mr. Rozencrantz’s ponderable sermon on God’s nearness in the wilderness or his prayer for the continued fruitfulness of God’s earth. The water in the flat pans between the pews, placed there to draw the frost from the stone walls, the white icy light that filtered through the panes, the slow measured encroachment of the damp chill air to their very bones, were all beyond their senses. They sat side by side, untouching, yet close.