Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  So all the chairs in the gathering-room were occupied; and Malary and my mother and sisters ran here and there in the kitchen, preparing supper, and my oldest sister Hepsibah stood guard over the bean pots to make sure the pork was on the top for its final browning, which is one reason for the toothsomeness of the bean as cooked in our family. Coarse fare though beans may be, I would liefer have them as Malary cooked them, and Cynthia still cooks them, than all the ragouts and French flummeries you can show me.

  On each side of the fire, which was small because the night was mild, sat the two commissioners from Wells and the two commissioners from Arundel, Mary’s father being one of these, sipping often at their rum, and gravely dusting tobacco ash from buckskin shirts with hands that seemed to me to fumble somewhat.

  In the corner was my father in his barrel chair, saying little but missing nothing. The trestle table had been put together, and around it sat a goodly company, shouting and laughing and pounding on the board as always occurs when a gathering is dry and snug, and of its own choice awaiting the passage of evil weather.

  There was Lieutenant Wattleby, detailed with two militiamen to the garrison house for duty; Thomas Scammen, a master shipwright from across the river; Humphrey Bickford, whose knowledge of herbs and simples was such that all the townsfolk sought him for medical advice, there being no doctor at all in our poor neighborhood; Ezekiel Kezer, the Indian trader on his way from Falmouth to Boston to lay in supplies; and Ivory Fish, one of the militiamen assigned to the garrison with Lieutenant Wattleby.

  Among them was a man I had never before seen. He was younger than any in the room, and yet had a look of being older, as though weary of seeing many things, but amused by all of them, though faintly, because of his weariness. He was slender, with a pale, pleasing face and an odd manner of throwing back his head and staring with cold eyes at the person he addressed. Even Noah Gooch, who carried beer and spirits to the wayfarers, walked carefully around him, and neither stumbled against him nor spilled rum on him, which was a miracle if ever there was one. Noah was the clumsiest of men, and could manage to slop small beer on a customer, even if the two were alone in the room with a brig’s mainsail hung between them. Yet the stranger gave him no warnings or reprimands, but only looked at him with a frosty smile.

  It was not the stranger’s dress that made him conspicuous; for, like any trapper, he wore a buckskin shirt stained the warm yellow color of ferns when the life first goes out of them in the autumn, and a worn and wrinkled pair of buckskin breeches, and moccasins, and a light, tight-fitting summer cap made of brown rabbit skin. It was his speech and manner that set him apart from those about him. His speech lacked the flatness peculiar to our part of the colonies, and had a delicate swishing note to it, that called to mind a snake moving through dried grass. His manner had something I thought of then as high and biting, or disdainful. There was distinction in it; and all in all he was so different that those at the table must often be broadly staring at him. But when they met the iciness of his look they would turn their heads and cough, as if to say they had no interest in him.

  The noisiest person at the board was Cap Huff, whose name was thought to be a military title. This belief, indeed, he encouraged, never correcting those who miscalled him Captain. Yet he was not a captain, but only a hugesome, bawling, swaggering young man from Kittery, not skilled in anything except the singing of ribald songs and the coining of bawdy phrases with which to insult the Indians, for whom he had no liking whatever, and a gift of tale-telling that would keep a dozen men hanging on his words and slapping themselves with delight at his injudicious statements, in which, in spite of himself, as it were, there was often a little truth.

  To give him his due, he was not bad as a woodsman, being accurate with a musket; but he was given to walking carelessly into perilous straits without taking the trouble to reckon the possible cost. He trusted, it seemed to me, too much on his large, face-encompassing smile; and when this failed, he was quick to fall back on the use of his fists, at which he was proficient.

  For all that, I took frequent pleasure in the company of Cap Huff when fate threw us together in after years. I know he was not thought well of in Kittery or in Portsmouth, where he had early occupied quarters in the gaol; but I disagree with those who claimed he would steal anything not securely fastened to wall or floor. He earned his living by carrying goods and messages between Portsmouth and Falmouth and the intervening towns; and what is more, he carried them safely, always. I have heard it said he sometimes returned from journeys with more packages than his commissions entitled him to have; and I noticed his visits to a locality coincided with thefts of minor articles like a sucking pig, or a pair of pistols, and sometimes a keg of brandy. Yet never did he steal from me, except small things I could easily spare.

  I could not in all conscientiousness hold him up before my grandsons as a model of the manly virtues, especially in the matter of bath-taking, at which he was more lax than most of our townsfolk, some of whom boasted there were parts of their bodies that water had never touched; yet I can freely say that although Cap Huff had something of a smell, I would liefer fight beside him than beside many a man who bathes as much as twice a week and would not steal even a kiss from a willing maid.

  Cap Huff knew little and cared less about the origin of his parents; but in 1725 the people of this neighborhood helped to relieve the survivors of that gallant fray known as Lovewell’s Fight; and I know from my father that when the colonists returned from that long hard journey they brought with them, out of the Indian country, Cap’s father and mother and two children, one being named Much Experience and the other Little To Depend Upon. The family was deposited in Kittery, where they subsisted on clams and fish entirely; and shortly thereafter this son being born, he was named Saved From Captivity and called Cap for convenience. His taking advantage to be called Captain I have ever regarded as a harmless whim, and have humored him in it, especially when among strangers.

  I had brought into the gathering-room an armful of logs from the tall pile beside the kitchen door; and Cap, perspiring gently and nursing a pewter measure of rum so that it looked fragile between his great brown hands, was telling of his adventures on his most recent trip.

  I slowly stacked the wood beside the fire so that I might listen to Cap’s discourse; for I have always taken pleasure in it, even though accused of having low tastes for so doing because of the vast deal of meaningless profanity with which his tales are interlarded. He used it, obviously, as others use punctuation.

  He spoke of an Indian neighbor of ours to the southward, a harmless Abenaki named Ockawando. Cap declared Ockawando was ill-begotten and verminiferous, and an eater of bugs to boot, though in all my goings and comings among the Abenakis I never saw one of them eat an insect of any sort.

  Cap, it appeared, had observed a bear cub engaged in reaching meditatively for honey in the crotch of an elm tree. The elm tree was close to Ockawando’s wigwam—so close, Cap swore, that Providence must have had a hand in it. Not being one to disregard a hint from above, he said, he had hunted out Ockawando and offered him four shillings, hard money, if he would climb the tree and capture the bear. Inflamed by the generosity of this offer, Cap said, the bug-eating Ockawando had readily agreed.

  They had gone to the tree, which Ockawando had ascended. When he laid hold of the bear’s tail the bear not only objected, but the bees failed to distinguish between the bear and Ockawando, and the two fell to the ground with a hideous outcry.

  When Ockawando again laid hold of the bear’s tail, eager for his four shillings, the bear clawed at him protestingly. Thus Ockawando was obliged to retain his hold of the tail and still remain out of reach of the claws, which is easier to say than to do.

  “There he was,” Cap said, “going round and round and round, and shouting to me to help him let go of the bear!”

  “Did you help him?” asked Lieutenant Wattleby.

  “Not me!” Cap said contentedly. “I come away and l
eft him there, going round and round and round.”

  “Did you pay him the four shillings?” my father asked.

  “Now Steven!” said Cap with an injured air, “how could I when there wasn’t any way of telling whether he was going to catch the bear or the bear catch him?”

  In an undertone he added, as though to himself, “I hope it was him as got caught, the dirty bug-eater! He is a bug-eater. I’ve seen him eat snails, and snails is bugs!”

  Heartened by the guffaws that followed, Cap absent-mindedly helped himself to the stranger’s flask, cupping his thumb and forefinger around the top of his pewter measure so that a full half inch was added to its height, and pouring until the liquor overran his hand.

  The stranger looked at him coolly. “I wonder if it was not a gentleman named Ananias who first told that tale? Will you do me the honor to accept a drink?”

  Cap hurriedly filled his mouth with liquor, and holding it so, without swallowing, he once more poured a generous cupful from the ironically proffered flask. When he swallowed he looked up appreciatively, exclaiming: “Brandy! Hot stuff!”

  “Hot?” the stranger asked incredulously, feeling of the flask and placing it well beyond Cap’s reach.

  “Hot stuff,” Cap repeated, staring at the stranger with knitted brows.

  He cleared his throat, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, threw back his head and bellowed:

  “Ain’t you heard that?” Cap persisted. “That’s what they’re going to give ’em at Quebec. Ain’t you heard the song they’re singing?”

  “No,” the stranger said, “I haven’t heard it One who buys lumber in Falmouth hears few war songs.”

  “That’s strange you ain’t! Everybody ’twixt here and Boston knows it. Quebec’s about the only place where they ain’t heard it.”

  At this my father moved out from his comer and tapped Cap on the shoulder. “Cap, this here’s our country, and we got to live in it. Ockawando’s all right. He’s square with us and we’re square with him. If you go shoving your big fat face into his affairs he’s liable to come over here and scare the gizzard out of these women. You know what Indians are.”

  “Gosh Almighty, yes!” Cap cried. “They do anything; they’re dirty bug-eating—”

  “They ain’t as dirty as you are,” my father interrupted calmly. “Ockawando takes a sweat bath twice a week for the rheumatiz, and I bet you ain’t had any kind of bath since Pharaoh’s army took one in the Red Sea.”

  “Hell, Steven, I never got wet there,” Cap protested. “Anyways, you needn’t be afeared I’ll hurt your damned Indians; but if they ain’t what I say, I’m a Frenchman!”

  “To the pure all things are pure,” the stranger murmured enigmatically.

  Cap looked at him again. It seemed to me the two men were erecting a screen of cold air around themselves: a chilling, burdensome screen that made their movements slow and unpleasant to watch.

  “If you’re in lumber,” Cap said, “we might sing ’em that song about Benning Wentworth they’re singing up in Portsmouth.”

  “We might,” the stranger said graciously, “but I don’t sing.”

  “You don’t say! Well, mebbe you could put me right on how much Benning paid the surveyor gineral to get out of his job, so’s he could grab it himself and get the money. You’re in lumber and you ought to know.”

  “Indeed,” the stranger said, and the dry, swishing note in his voice sounded more than ever like a snake in dead leaves, “some say one thing and some say another.”

  Cap smiled into his empty cup and flapped his huge paw at Noah Gooch, whereat Noah came stumbling up with the rum jug, carefully avoided the stranger, and lurched against Cap’s shoulder, pouring until the rum overran Cap’s thumb and forefinger, whose width had again been added to the cup’s height.

  “What’s the song, Cap?” asked Humphrey Bickford. “Lieutenant Wattleby’s got a tenor.”

  “Hot stuff,” said Cap, “and if he don’t use it right, you can all hit him with a rum jug.” He shot a glance at the stranger’s cold smile and then went on: “What you think of a man that’ll be governor of a province and then turn around and buy the surveyor gineral’s job? Pays two hundred pound, that job does; and there’s so much money in it, waiting to stick to a man’s fingers, that Benning, the old rat, paid him two thousand pound to get out!”

  Kezer clicked his tongue admiringly against the roof of his mouth. “Better’n trading,” he opined.

  “Trading!” Cap Huff exclaimed. “It’s better’n smuggling or privateering! Less trouble and more money!” He tilted back in his chair, grinned widely and sang the song, which I remember well, for he was given to singing it in after years, when things were going a little wrong with us:

  He sang a dozen more stanzas, enjoying himself the more, the louder and longer he sang; and as he sang his companions banged on the table with fists and pewter measures, so the song was a stirring one, albeit I was uncomfortable at hearing such ribald things about the governor of New Hampshire, who must, I thought, since he was rich and powerful, be also good.

  “It’s harmonious,” said Lieutenant Wattleby, when the pleased shouts had subsided, “but if you go on singing it, Cap, they’ll be citing you for slander.”

  “Slander hell!” Cap said. “Let somebody try it if he wants his nose pushed around into his ear! There ain’t no law court powerful enough to stop me saying what I think!”

  Here my mother came in and ordered the men to the stockade, so that she might clean the room and place the supper. The stranger leaped to his feet and bowed politely, and all of us were offended and displeased, without knowing why. I think it was because he made us feel rough and uncouth. At all events, we had the desire to be even more uncouth and rough before him than we hitherto had been.

  The others followed him out; and Cap stumbled clumsily over his own feet and shrank sheepishly from my mother, so that she threatened him in fun with an iron spoon and restored him to composure again.

  The fire was made bright, the floor swept smooth and resanded; and Malary set on the table two pots of beans with a relish of chopped cucumbers steeped in brine and flavored with onions, and two haunches of venison, and brown bread hot from the oven, and butter fresh from the churn. Close beside the table, on wooden scissors, was a barrel of my mother’s small beer, though I know not why they call it small, for scarce a man can drink a gallon of it without a thickening in his speech.

  Also there were six mince pies laced with rum, and a bowl of creamy cheese made from sour milk. If I had been a rich man in those days I would have traveled far to enjoy such a meal as that; for good provender was hard to come by; and our inns were rightly called ordinaries, especially in the matter of their food, which was so coarse and grease-laden as to bring on heartburn or even apoplexy. Nor was the charge of one shilling that my father made for supper an unreasonable sum, considering that poor travelers were never pressed for payment, and that those who supped at the inn might buy an oval flask of rum for one shilling. Such a price was possible because my father’s shipmaster friends bought rum in the French Sugar Islands for two pounds a keg and smuggled it from their brigs at our back door.

  I do not know that Cap spoke ill of the stranger to the others during the time they spent in the stockade; but when they returned for their supper, it seemed to me, they stared at him even more furtively and suspiciously. It seemed to me, also, that his smile grew colder and colder, and yet that he took pleasure in saying things that befuddled or inflamed the wits. It gave me such a feeling as I have had at seeing a swordsman playing with a country bumpkin, threatening him with a cruel wound from the shimmering tongue of steel in his hand, and unconscious that the bumpkin, in rage or despair, might beat down his guard by main strength and hack him in pieces.

  Mallinson, far gone in liquor when supper was over, told my father with an air of drunken pride that he had signed an agreement with the commissioners from Wells establishing the boundary between Wells and Arundel at the A
rundel River, and that this question would no longer vex us. Upon that my father roared violently and brandished his fist under Mallinson’s nose. He must be a fool and worse, my father shouted; for by this agreement the town of Wells would be seven miles in length, and Arundel less than two.

  “Nay,” Mallinson said, “we’d been here so long we had no money to pay our reckoning! The Wells commissioners paid for us. What could we do but let ’em put the boundary where they pleased?”

  My father grew purple with rage. The others stared at Mallinson with dropped jaws for being such a drunken zany; all but the stranger, who smiled his hard, bright smile and said that since the people of Maine had been willing to fight a barbarous war over so small a thing as fish, he feared for their future if they must hereafter be confronted with such serious matters as this.

  The company forgot Mallinson. A muttering arose among them, an angry muttering, at the stranger’s words, even though they could not quite understand them.

  To me he had become hateful. He put me in mind of a hostile Indian, the way he lurked silent and motionless for a time; then shot a knife-tipped dart among us.

  “Well, now,” said my father, moving behind a chair, which he did when violence was brewing, “those here know little concerning wars over fish, and less concerning barbarities except those inflicted by Indians from the northern settlements.”

  “The dirtiest crew of bug-eaters outside o’ hell!” interposed Cap Huff, mopping his plate with a piece of bread.

  “Surely,” said the stranger, with an air of wide-eyed surprise, “surely you haven’t forgot the siege of Louisbourg, as well as the wars before it, came about over who should have the taking of fish on the Grand Banks.”