Remember the Morning (50 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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“The British—and a lot of Americans—are angry at the Iroquois—at all Indians. At least ten thousand people have died on the frontier in the last five years. This raid could change their minds about the Iroquois. It could win better treatment for your people after the war.”
“If you win.”
“We're going to win, Clara. The British have poured in men. They've got twenty-five thousand regulars in America now. They've pinned down a big chunk of the French army by fighting them in Europe. It's a worldwide war, Clara. They're fighting the French in India, in Africa, in the Caribbean—and winning most of the battles.”
Clara capitulated and allowed the warriors to go off with Malcolm. It would have been difficult for her to oppose them. She lacked the authority her mother and grandmother had wielded over the Bear Clan's sachems and war chiefs. They would have to be wooed patiently over many years before they granted her the power which she possessed in theory now.
That night, as the warriors feasted and danced and boasted of the scalps and booty they were going to collect, Clara remembered her mother's dream of her and Malcolm on the dwindling island above the great falls. Was this part of the current that was slowly destroying their fragile foothold? If this expedition ended in disaster, she would be blamed. She might become a pariah, driven out of the village, possibly killed. Grey Owl's followers had grown more numerous during their years as refugees. Red Hawk's mother was one of the leaders, constantly preaching hatred of all whites.
Clara could not explain any of this to Malcolm as he took her hand and led her into the woods. They were still lovers. She could not deny the desire she felt for him whenever they met.
“Does Catalyntie know?” Clara asked, as the familiar sweetness gathered in her flesh.
“I lie to her,” Malcolm said. “I tell her you won't let me touch you.”
“That's probably better than telling her the truth,” Clara said.
“I'll tell her someday—when the war ends and we say good-bye, once and for all.”
“No. I'll tell her. I'll take all the blame. I deserve all the blame.”
“I can't imagine life without you, Clara. Or without her and the boys—”
“If you're right about the war ending soon—”
The thought of an imminent farewell made their mutual coming sweeter, deeper, darker. Clara wept as he held her against him. She was as divided, as tormented by guilt as he was. “Let me go with you on this
raid,” she said. “I want to protect the women and children in the villages you're attacking.”
“I'll do my best to save them,” Malcolm said. “But it's become a very dirty war.”
In every imaginable way, history, personal and public, stained and disfigured their love. Why did it survive? For a moment Clara almost hated it—as if it were a grotesque abortion to which she had given birth. She could not deny its reality. But she could not see its purpose.
W
HEN CLARA AWOKE, MALCOLM AND THE warriors were gone. They hurried east down the lakes and rivers to Albany, where Malcolm found his two hundred volunteers waiting for him. Most of them had served as rangers in earlier campaigns. Almost all were Americans and they welcomed the Indians as valuable companions-in-arms. A month later they were on their way up the Lake of the Sacrament by night, hugging the shore to avoid the French warships that patrolled the center of this narrow 140-mile stretch of water.
At the head of the lake, they hauled their canoes into the woods and left two Indians to guard them and the extra parched corn and dried beef and bread that they would need on their return journey. Into Canada they slogged for two days. As they made camp for the second night, a commotion in the rear guard spread swiftly through the ranks.
The two Senecas they had left with the boats stumbled up to Malcolm, gasping for breath. They babbled dismaying news. A force of four hundred French troops had found the canoes and burned them. They were now on the trail of the invaders. Malcolm called a council of war with his chief officers, and the leader of the Senecas, Little Beaver. Some favored an immediate retreat, but Little Beaver supported Malcolm's argument that a forced march would put enough distance between them and their pursuers. On the way back they would take another route to the east of the lake.
For the next week, they marched all day and half the night, struggling through swamps that often soaked them to the waist in freezing water. There were no fires to dry their clothes. For beds they laced together spruce boughs in the branches of standing trees. Meals were cold nibblings
of dried beef, sausage, corn meal. Some men had eaten too much from their dwindling packs and for the last three days many were starving.
Finally, Malcolm saw grey swirls of smoke rising above the trees. He halted the column and with two of his officers crept forward to reconnoiter the village. It was huge—at least a thousand Indians were living there. As they watched, darkness fell and fires blazed. Soon a major feast was in progress, with dancing, singing, and the whirring of pebble-filled turtleshell rattles. Liquor was consumed in large quantities by the men, who whirled drunkenly around the fire until they collapsed and were dragged into one of the many bark cabins.
Malcolm waited until the last of the revelers reeled off to bed. He and his officers crept back to the men and ordered them to stack their packs and load their guns. Bayonets slid softly over the muzzles and locked with a murderous click. Tomahawks and knives were loosened. Malcolm gave a brief speech, in which he urged them to spare the women and children. He sensed no one paid much attention to him. Too many of these men had lost sisters, brothers, wives to raiding Indians. That was why they had volunteered for this dangerous job.
In a column of twos, they advanced on the village through a thick chilling mist. At a half hour before dawn, Malcolm raised his hand and roared: “Now!”
Into the village they charged, the rangers howling as wildly as the Senecas. Most of the French Indians were still on their pallets when doors crashed open and bayonets pinned them to the earth or the butt end of a musket smashed their skulls. Those who stumbled into the street were shot or bayoneted before they could find a weapon. In the semidarkness, little discrimination was made between women and men.
Many ran for the nearby St. Francis River. Malcolm had detailed forty men to cut off this line of retreat. Muskets roared from the shore and bodies toppled into the dark water. Those who tried to launch canoes were easy targets. Soon dozens of corpses were drifting downstream.
In the village, one of Malcolm's men shouted: “Look at the scalps!” On poles in the center of the street were literally hundreds of scalps, many of them with long soft strands of hair—obviously from women. This sight redoubled the rangers' blood lust. For a while, they showed mercy to no one. Malcolm tried to control them but he soon abandoned his efforts as hopeless. “It's our turn!” one man screamed as he hacked the corpses of a woman and her child.
A few St. Francis Indians found guns and fired back from doorways or windows. Torches flung on their roofs soon turned their cabins into funeral pyres. They could be heard inside, quavering death chants. Others ran out, aflame from head to foot, to be bayoneted or tomahawked. Only as the carnage subsided did the Senecas prevail on the rangers to spare
about twenty women and children, whom they herded around the scalping poles. They intended to take them back to their village to replace their recent losses.
Cowering in one hut the Senecas found a Jesuit missionary. They dragged him out and the rangers decided he would be given a trial. In twenty seconds the priest was found guilty of 302 murders—the number of scalps one enterprising ranger had counted on the poles. The murderous man of God was dragged to the nearest tree and hanged.
One of the Senecas emerged from the Jesuit's hut with a silver statue of the Blessed Virgin. “Is this worth money, Standing Bear?” he asked Malcolm.
“If it's real silver, yes,” Malcolm said. “Put it in your pack.”
In three huts they found baskets of corn. Malcolm ordered everyone to load his pack with as much of the precious stuff as could be crammed into it. This would have to sustain them on the long march home. By 9:00 A.M. they had begun their trek south along the shore of the St. Francis River. The region was a wilderness, badly mapped. On their heels came enraged French and Indian pursuers. The rear guard fought a number of bloody skirmishes in which a dozen men died.
In a week, they had eaten most of their corn and were still far from safety. By now it was mid-October and the Canadian winter was coming on. Game fled before their numbers. Malcolm decided they should split into small parties, hoping it would enable them to find food. The Senecas decided to travel west above the head of the Lake of the Sacrament as the most direct route home.
It proved to be a trail of tears. They were attacked a dozen times by the French or enemy Indians, losing men each time. They stumbled into Shining Creek, half-starved skeletons. Only five of the captured children survived the journey. The village was filled with wails of mourning and songs for the dead. Hardly a family had not lost a son or nephew. The surviving warriors had nothing to show for their travails but the silver statue of the Virgin Mary.
When Clara saw that serene face, she felt doom gather around her. The Virgin had not forgotten the blasphemy she had committed after Caesar's death. She had returned to remind her of the lost sweetness of her celestial voice. Clara took the statue into the longhouse of the Bear Clan and put it in a dim corner. That night, while everyone slept, she knelt before it and begged the Virgin to forgive her, to guide her once more. There was no answer.
At British headquarters in Albany, Malcolm was being feted as a hero. His exploit was extolled in every newspaper in America. General Amherst praised him and his men in his orders of the day and in an official dispatch to London. All but forty of the rangers had survived the return trip.
They were soon involved in a much larger celebration. Down the lakes came a messenger to report that General James Wolfe had captured Quebec. He had paid for the triumph with his life—but it meant the war was over. It was only a matter of time before the scattered demoralized French capitulated. A hundred cannon roared a victory salute and everyone from General Amherst to the lowliest private got gloriously drunk. No one drank more joyously than Malcolm—his brother Jamey had survived the battle with only a minor wound.
At the victory banquet at Amherst's headquarters, Malcolm found the conversation disturbing. After the toasts to Wolfe and other heroes, including a nice compliment to “our American brothers-in-arms” from the general, the aides and colonels began discussing how much money the war had cost—and how they could economize to pay off the staggering debt the British government had run up.
“The first thing we should do is get a grip on the money we spend on these bloody Indians,” one aide declared.
Robert Foster Nicolls emphatically agreed with him. “We've poured ten thousand pounds a year into presents for those Iroquois for the better part of a century,” he said. “What did we get for it in this war? The scalping knife and the torch. From now on, it should be cash on the barrelhead for anything they get from us.”
“After the Indians, we've got to get these bloody Americans up to the line,” rumbled a colonel. “Do you realize how few taxes the bastards pay?”
Malcolm ignored the last remark but he protested vehemently against the proposal to cut off presents to the Iroquois. Presents were needed more than ever now, because the Six Nations were their best spokesmen with the western and Canadian Indians. William Johnson, speaking as Indian superintendent, wholeheartedly agreed with Malcolm. They tried to explain to these foreigners (what the British really were) that Indians did not see presents as bribes, but as proof of a continuing friendship. An abrupt end of presents would be seen as an insult—a virtual declaration of war.
Robert Foster Nicolls, playing the American expert, disagreed. He said it was time to teach the savages how civilization worked. “I don't use that last word lightly,” Robert sneered. “The lazy bastards should learn to do something besides hunt and screw.”
Malcolm and William Johnson angrily refuted this slander. They described the harsh life of the warriors who spent winters in the woods trapping beaver, muskrat, and other animals. The Seneca and the rest of the Iroquois had almost hunted them to extinction in their own lands, which made it more and more difficult for them to earn money.
General Amherst listened to the argument without committing himself. Malcolm hoped that with Johnson's backing, he had scotched a very bad idea.
A month later, the snow lay deep on the ground as Malcolm slogged into Clara's village on snowshoes. Ice floes drifted on the lake, driven by a freezing wind from the north. On two packhorses were bushels of corn and barrels of salt meat. The calls of children and warriors drew Clara to the door of the longhouse. There was no smile of greeting on her face.
“Do you think you're welcome here because you bring gifts?” she said. “Do you think these can replace the lives of twenty-five warriors?”
Malcolm was stunned by the Senecas' losses. “I begged them to follow me down the east bank of the lake to Albany,” he said. “But they were too eager to get home.”
“Everyone here says you abandoned them. You gave them no food. You kept it for your white men.”
“That's a lie,” Malcolm said. “None of us had any food.”
Grey Owl's people had been busy refashioning the story of the raid into a parable of white treachery. As the horses were unloaded, Clara told him she had lost all semblance of authority as the matron of the Bear Clan. “You can't stay here, even for a night,” she said. “I can't protect you.”
“I'm a warrior of the Seneca nation. I can protect myself,” Malcolm growled.
Out of the longhouse of the Wolf Clan hurtled Red Hawk's mother. Her husband, Little Beaver, had been killed on the way home from the raid. “Look at him,” she screamed. “This is the Evil Brother in the flesh. Look at the man who betrayed the Senecas to starvation and death.”
In the doorway of the Wolf Clan longhouse stood Grey Owl, his tattered prophet's blanket around his shoulders, a sneer on his lips. “Here is the messenger of death, returned to seek more souls,” he said. “Does anyone doubt that the Manitou speaks through me, now?”
“The Evil Brother has possessed your soul, Grey Owl,” Malcolm said. “Ever since you proved yourself a coward in your combat with me, and preferred surrender and flight to honorable death.”
“I am no longer a warrior,” Grey Owl said. “I cannot make you die for those words. But I have followers who are eager to undertake the task.”
“I welcome the attempt,” Malcolm said. “I have no doubt I'll prove them as cowardly as you.”
In the Bear Clan longhouse, a frantic Clara dragged Malcolm to the dim rear of the building and pointed to the silver statue of the Blessed Virgin. It gleamed like a small ghost on the shelf in the corner. “You brought her back to me. All she does is reproach me for what I've become—what I've let us both become.”
“I don't understand.”
“I love you too much. I can't stop you even though I see you leading my people to destruction.”
“I'm trying to save them—”
“You can't. You're white. You don't understand them—or me. Go now, before Grey Owl sends to the next village where he has a hundred warriors ready to kill you. He can't find a murderer here. Our warriors still adore you. But all the women have turned against you. They'll tie you to the stake and torture you for days. They'll force me to watch!”
“I'll go if you come with me,” Malcolm said.
“I've told you. I can't go back.”
“Neither can I—until I know you're safe.”
Malcolm went into the woods and with his usual uncanny combination of luck and marksmanship killed a huge buck with a single shot. He carried the carcass back to the village and proclaimed a great feast to celebrate the English victory over the French. The warriors were astonished and delighted by the news. He told them that he would do everything in his power to make sure their contribution to the victory was remembered by their father, King George.

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