3stalwarts (6 page)

It was like that, day after day. At sunset Lana stopped to hunt the cow and milk her. She had dropped off in her milk and only gave a quart at night.

Then Lana started their supper. She gathered a few green ears from the cornfield, stripped the kernels out, crushed them in a bowl, and cooked them in the milk. The milk tasted of cherry and wild onion. All the time, as she worked in the kitchen, she could hear the strokes of Gil’s axe.

He came in at dark all soaked with sweat and they went down to the creek together where a pool was, and stripped and washed side by side.

Each night, to Lana, that marked the beginning of life again. She felt tired afterwards, her back ached, but she was clean; and while she ate, the natural uses of her body gradually returned. And the sight of Gil naked, knee deep in the slow flow of the creek, was still the one exciting thing she had to see. Even when she looked up at the peacock’s feather in the dark, his lean white shape came between it and her eyes. One did not see the burned hands and face in the dark, only the whiteness.

They could begin to talk a little. They talked about a certain tree that had been hard in falling, or the way the mare was swelling in her neck from the flies. Gil would then go out with some of their precious salt in a cup and mix it with water and swab the mare’s shoulder, while Lana was clearing up. When he came in again, they would be wordless, and would wait only for a term of decency before going up to bed.

All day, her place to him might be taken by anything with hands and arms and the knowledge to cook. When they lay down together, she was Lana Martin, who had been Lana Borst, once, long ago.

When he came in from work on Tuesday evening, Gil took his rifle down from the pegs over the door.

“Where’s the sweet oil?” he said to Lana.

“Sweet oil? You’d better look on that shelf in the woodshed. Maybe I stuck it up there somewhere. It started to smell bad.”

Without a word he went out to the shed, where she could hear him stirring round with a heavy hand and muttering to himself. But he came back after a moment, carrying the earthenware saucer.

“It does smell kind of bad,” he said, and sat down near her, with the saucer on the hearth between his feet and a filthy bit of woolen rag in his hand. “George Weaver’s a particular man on muster. You wouldn’t think he was, to look at him. You wouldn’t think,” he went on, glancing at her slyly, “looking at him and me, that he was a sargint over me, would you?”

Lana refused to meet his eye. But she said, “I think George Weaver would make a better sergeant than you, Gil. You get up your mad too easy. The way you was getting ready to because I’d moved out your smelly old oil.”

“Mad! Listen, Lana, you just ought to hear him curse and swear on muster day.”

“He wouldn’t do that to me.”

“Who’s talking about you anyway?” He had run the scourer down the barrel with the rag wrapped round it, and now he was examining the result with the rag held close to his nose. There wasn’t any rust. He let the ramrod fall and patted her head.

“Don’t do that,” cried Lana, wriggling off from him. “You’ll have me smelling just like a gun.”

But he had taken to wiping the barrel. “I wouldn’t mind it if you did.”

“Gil!” she cried. “You wouldn’t talk that way to me before we married!”

“You wouldn’t have been dragging out my sweet oil on me, before we got married. Ain’t it a dandy rifle, though?” He held it in his hands. “I bought the barrel from Wolff. He ordered it from Albany.” He turned the gun over and looked at the scroll behind the trigger guard. “It was made in Peekskill. G. Merritt, Peekskill. Come and look at it, Lana.”

She felt suddenly jealous of the gun, which she had seen ever since she came to Deerfield, hanging in place over the cabin door. It had been just a thing till now; but when Gil put his hands on it, it seemed to have acquired the power of life. However, a queer little sense of wisdom compelled her to obey, and she looked down over his shoulder at the nicely etched name. She wondered if the man who put it there could have any idea that the barrel would come so far westward and have the power there to make a woman jealous.

But though she looked at the name, she would not praise it. “That’s nice wood,” she said, tapping the stock.

Gil blushed all over.

“I carved that out myself last winter. It’s a piece of black walnut Mark Demooth gave me. I spent pretty near every night all winter working on that stock.”

He put the gun back on its pegs, replaced the ramrod in the slot, and again looked round the cabin.

“Do you remember where I kept my hatchet?”

“What do you want with it?”

“I’ve got to have it tomorrow. You have to have an Indian axe or a bayonet.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well now, you listen to me, Mr. Martin. You just sit here till you’ve had your supper. After that I’ll hunt up everything you want.”

However, he found the axe for himself. Then he greased his boots; and after supper, all there was for Lana to do was to get down his hunting shirt.

“It’s filthy dirty,” she said.

“That don’t matter. So long as your gun’s clean and you’ve got your four flints and your pound of powder, nobody cares.”

“I care. As long as you’ve got to go, you’ll go looking decent. What would they say about me if they saw you had the same shirt on and it hadn’t been washed since last muster?”

She held it up under her nose, as he had held up the scourer under his, and made a face at him. Then she stuffed it into the iron kettle and put some more sticks on the fire and set about boiling the shirt. It came out finally, looking rather pale.

It was made of heavy linen, dyed butternut brown, with long fringes or thrums round the shoulders and down the sleeves. Ironing it out was a hard job. By the time she had finished, Lana was flushed and heated and the whole cabin smelled steamily of soft soap.

She felt out of sorts until her eye fell on Gil laboriously turning up the brim of his hat, by tacking the edge to the crown in three places.

“What you doing?” she demanded.

“Well,” he said, “you’re fixing the rest of me so fine I thought I’d ought to make my hat look smart.”

“You ought to have a cockade on it then, Gil.”

“That would look fine. But aren’t you tired?”

“No, I’ll make you a cockade. What do you want?”

“Something red,” he said. “Red’s the color of our party. George Herkimer’s company’s got a solid red flag. It’s handsome.”

Lana went upstairs to her trunk with a candle and found a piece of French red calimanco. They sat quite peacefully together while she gathered pleats in it and sewed it on. The light of the candle flashed on her white teeth biting the thread.

“Put it on,” she ordered.

He sheepishly did so.

She thought he looked even handsomer the next morning, starting off down the track. She had promised to visit with Mrs. Weaver as soon as she had got the dishes cleared, but halfway down the clearing he wheeled to remind her of it.

“I will,” she called.

He waved his hand and went off with long strides. She leaned against the door. The early morning sun was just beginning to reach down under the level of the treetops, making islands of light in the clearing, and showing the glitter of the night’s dew. Gil’s feet had left a dark track through it.

“But I’ll bet he won’t think about me once all day,” she thought.

He had reached the Kingsroad by now. Christian Reall was waiting for him there on the edge of the underbrush. They saluted each other stiff as two dogs meeting at the corner of the fence. Then they moved off side by side into the woods.

On muster day, Christian Reall was a different man from the meaching Bible reader his wife professed to admire. Gil had never been able to understand why in his family he should pretend to such devoutness if he wished to be such a rip hell once he got loose from them. His very walk was different. He cocked on his toes at each step, instead of flat-footedly shuffling the dust, and as soon as they were safely in the woods he clapped Gil on the shoulder and told him he looked like a God-damned gentleman.

“You don’t look so bad yourself,” Gil said good-humoredly.

Walking with a swing of his outthrust elbows, Reall preened himself like a jay bird.

“Not too bad,” he admitted, “but by Jesus it takes more than clothes to get the girls to look at you. You got to have something. Like a gentleman. Not just lace around your neck or a handkerchief to blow your nose in. You know.”

“I can’t say I do.”

“Well, you could. You’ve got it. Look at the girl you got to marry you! Lana’s prettier than the nigh side of a peach. But that ain’t what I mean. Who actually wants to marry? Gentry do and gentry don’t, but they al-ways have a trot with the girls notwithstanding.” He shouldered his rust-pitted Spanish musket and jerked his flopping hat brim over his eyes. “The stories I used to hear when I was down in Caughnawaga was a caution. The way the young gentry went around the country. Just like a bunch of stallions. Why, a girl of fourteen couldn’t hardly dast get up a sweat without fearing one of those gentry would be tagging on her heels like a breed bull. Young Sir John, and they say young Walter Butler. And Claus and Guy Johnson. And young Cosby. The whole lot. They rutted the year round. Mostly they hung around the Indian camps or went up into the Sacandaga bush clearings.”

“I’ve heard some of those stories,” Gil said. “But I don’t believe the half of them.”

“You don’t? You’re a fool then. Everybody knows Sir John had Clare Putnam living in sin in the Fort with him when he got married to Miss Watts. Even Sir William Johnson kind of dabbled in such things. He didn’t marry the Weisenberg woman till she was ready to die. He bought her for his bed the way a man would buy new sheeting. Then he had two Indians. One afore Brant’s sister. And God knows how many he happened against. All you’ve got to do is look at all the Jacksons there was in the Lower Castle. It was a joke he had. He let all the papooses born in the house get called Johnson. All outside he called Jackson. Otherwise, he said he’d be feeding half the Mohawk nation. By God, he ought to know, too.”

“Well, he was a great man,” said Gil. “I’ll bet if he was alive he wouldn’t have run off to Canada.”

“Well, maybe he was. But he surely could rip hell around.”

“It’s just the fashion with gentry.”

“Fashion, that’s the word I tried to remember.” Christian Reall licked his lips. “Wish to God I had some of it myself.”

Gil laughed out loud.

They passed Cosby’s Manor about when Wolff and his wife must have been having breakfast in the store, for smoke was still trailing out of the chimney. There was no sign of the storekeeper or the woman, but a couple of Indians, like two sleepy cats, sat in the woodshed in a patch of sunlight.

“What’s them?” whispered Reall.

“I don’t know,” Gil answered. “I never seen them.”

“They’ve shaved fresh, look at their heads.”

“Yes.”

“Do you expect they’re painted?”

“I don’t know. Not on their faces anyways.”

Gil took a good look at them. They didn’t seem as stocky as the Mohawks he had seen. But they weren’t Oneidas. They were too dark, he was sure, to belong to either tribe. They were thin, almost starved-looking. As they sat under their blankets, they made him think of snakes.

“Morning,” he said to them, walking by.

They said good-morning with their mouths. But their heads did not move. Nothing about them moved but their brown eyes, which were small and bright and followed the two militiamen slowly across the front of the woodshed.

A moment later, in the woods once more, Reall said, with a quick backward glance, “Who do you think they was, Gil?”

“I don’t know. I think they might be Cayugas. Or more likely Senecas. But I don’t know.”

Reall drew a shuddering deep breath.

“My God,” he said, “the way they stared at me. I’ve heard the Senecas and the Erie tribes eat human meat.”

Reall quickened his pace. “We ought to tell Demooth right off there’s a couple of Senecas at Wolff’s. God knows what they’re up to. They must be from Niagara. Niagara’s where John Butler is. Oh, my Jesus, Gil. Maybe he’s down here too. Wolff’s looked shut up pretty tight.”

“It always does,” said Gil. “That don’t mean anything.”

“Wolff’s always been a King’s man. Always said so.” He looked round again. “We ought to tell them the first thing.” He had that fixed in his mind.

The men of Demooth’s company of the fourth regiment of Tryon County militia were gathered along the barnside fence in Kast’s field, opposite the ford. There were twenty-five of them. They had the half-uneasy look of men who have been caught loafing on the job. When one happened to laugh, two or three would join him explosively. Then they would spit and look away from each other and eye George Weaver, who was standing a little down the fence.

He said, “Captain hain’t here to-day. I ain’t got a watch. Anybody know what time it is?”

“It ain’t time yet.”

“Must be past ten,” said Weaver. “I’m to fine anybody’s late.”

“There comes Martin and Reall now. There ain’t anybody else missing except them that have a lawful excuse.”

At that moment Kast came out of his house in a brown coat. “It’s two minutes to ten,” he said. “By the clock.”

Somebody laughed.

“Time’s always by that clock of his, when Kast’s around.”

Martin and Reall walked up.

Reall cried out immediately, “George.”

“Yes,” said Weaver.

“There’s a couple of Seneca Indians up to Wolff’s. They’re shaved. Reckon they’re going to paint. Maybe Butler or somebody’s hanging around there.”

“How do you know they’re Senecas?” Weaver asked sourly. He didn’t want anything to interfere with the muster. With Captain Demooth away, the whole responsibility devolved on him.

“Ain’t I telling you, George?”

Just then, tardily, Kast’s clock wound itself up and struck seven. The notes came feebly metallic to the waiting men.

“That’s ten,” cried Kast. “She hurt her inwards somehow coming up here, and the bell’s never caught up to the time since.”