Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  “Is your name Ezekiel Hook?” I asked, taking a tighter grip on his hunting shirt. He looked me in the eyes, with no change of expression, and shook his head. Before I could question further I heard a rasping shout of “Don’t you ever salute officers?” It was the high officer who shouted. He was red-faced and angry, and in him I recognized the person who had given us a dressing-down in Cambridge for the same fault.

  “Sir,” I said, saluting carefully, “I ask your pardon! I thought this man once did me a wrong.”

  The officer, mollified by my respect, laughed uproariously. “No, no, no! John Treeworgy wouldn’t do anyone a wrong. Always doing good, John is. Guide, sir. Knows the Kennebec like a book. Best guide I’ve got.”

  A messenger stood at attention before him. “Colonel Arnold’s compliments to Colonel Enos,” the messenger said, “and Colonel Arnold asks him to wait here with his division for the construction of twenty more bateaux.”

  I rejoined Phoebe, dissatisfied with Colonel Enos’s recommendation of John Treeworgy. John Treeworgy was too like Ezekiel Hook for my own peace of mind; and Colonel Enos looked as if he would believe anything, provided it was told to him loud enough and often enough.

  I could hear Cap’s bellowing voice bursting out of Smith’s Tavern; and while I wondered whether to interrupt him and carry him up with us there was a scuttling beside me, and Jacataqua pushed herself under my arm. Her dog, a smooth-haired black animal with yellow legs and pale masklike markings around his eyes, grinned up at me and flapped his tail against my knees, making me think back to Ranger with a pang of homesickness.

  “Here,” I said, “whatever became of Ezekiel Hook?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know him.”

  “A minister,” I reminded her, “who wanted all of you to be Christians.”

  The name meant nothing to her.

  “Do you know a man named John Treeworgy?” I persisted.

  “Yes,” she said, wrinkling her nose, as if at a bad odor. “An inspector for the Plymouth Company. He carried information about settlers and traders, so they often had trouble with the company. I haven’t seen him for three years.”

  Phoebe touched me on the elbow, nodding toward the tavern. In the door stood little Aaron Burr of New Jersey, as neat and well brushed as though fresh from his tailor. Yet he looked less pretty than I remembered him, for his shoulders were stooped forward and his eyes glittered unpleasantly. Being glad to see him, I saluted; but he paid no attention. I saw he was staring at Jacataqua.

  She smiled at him, swinging herself forward and backward at my waist, and said: “We can go now.”

  “I don’t relish your distribution of favors,” Burr said.

  Jacataqua stared at him slack-lipped.

  “Sir,” I said, “you may remember me.”

  “Why,” Burr said, “I may, but I probably shan’t, under the circumstances.”

  “Under what circumstances?” I asked. His look was too offensive for my fancy.

  “You know very well,” he said, stepping up to me like a bantam. “I find you too free with your hands.”

  “Well, now,” I said, “that’s too bad, because if you had your way, I’d have to remove myself forever from my blood sister.”

  “Your blood sister!”

  “Why, yes,” I said. “Since she was four years old.”

  His hard black eyes never left mine.

  “Well,” I said to Phoebe, casting a look at the brassy-blue sky, “it looks a little like rain, so we’ll start.” I patted Jacataqua on the shoulder and took Phoebe by the arm, saying to myself that this liver-colored young whippersnapper needed a ducking in the river, and that the only thing saving him was the trembling of Jacataqua’s lip.

  We started away, whereat Burr came running to me, contritely holding Jacataqua by the hand. “Sir,” he said, “I behaved badly; but dark eyes and cheeks like wine on amber can make the best of men, like the poorest of us, into boors. What can I do to redeem myself?”

  When I had pondered his words, I said: “You might tell me about Colonel Enos.”

  Burr shot me what I thought was a grateful glance. “Enos is another of those lousy Connecticut colonels—a lieutenant colonel. He may not think he’s God Almighty, but he considers himself a close relative.”

  “It seemed to me,” I said, “he has a passion for being saluted. If he doesn’t get over it, there might be trouble on the upper Kennebec. From what I’ve seen of our bateaux, they won’t stand much dropping on the rocks, not even to let Colonel Enos be saluted.”

  “He’ll get over it,” Burr said, “when he has something to occupy his mind; but he’ll never recover from remembering he was an officer of the King in the last war against the French, and in the expedition against Havana in 1762, when all the rest of us were infants, puling about the kitchen floor. He’s stuffed to the bursting point with military lore he learned from the British, most of it not worth learning; and his age makes him cautious. When Colonel Arnold says ‘Damn everything! Come ahead!’ Colonel Enos says “Wait! Let me think how we did it when I fought with the British!’ To the devil with him and his caution! I can’t see how caution will ever help us take Quebec!”

  We went upstream close together, Jacataqua paddling Burr in a light canoe, while her dog sat in the bow, thumping his tail modestly against the bottom; and Hobomok at the stern of ours. When we slipped past the long strings of bateaux, those that rowed them bawled pleasantries at us, asking us where the dance was to be, or begging to be invited to the christening, or urging us to stop so they might lass the bride. The whole river was a highway, bateaux moving up singly and in strings, and canoes bearing messengers and sightseers, with here and there a sloop or a schooner. On the shore detachments of soldiery threaded their way between the oaks and pines, with messengers or officers a-horseback weaving through them.

  From Burr I had information concerning the army—how it consisted of a few more than one thousand men, all accustomed to fighting Indians or handling bateaux and axes, and skilled in the use of rifle or musket. They were, he declared, the choicest of the troops besieging Boston, and officered by the best the army afforded; so their patriotism and determination made up for the smallness of their numbers.

  At this Phoebe thrust in her oar. “If they’re all so patriotic, what ailed those aboard the sloop Eagle in Newburyport, struggling to get ashore once they were aboard, and guards placed over them to keep them from running home?”

  Burr shook his pretty head. “A dozen of us racked our brains over that! They embarked gaily enough, and within two hours it was as though the devil bit them. One of Arnold’s guides was there—a sourfaced fellow with a name like a mouthful of porridge. He thought they might have become ill from the stink of bilge.”

  “It takes more than the smell of bilge to turn a New Englander’s stomach,” Phoebe said.

  “Was the guide’s name Treeworgy?” I asked.

  “That was it,” said Burr. “Treeworgy. A name that sounds as if its owner didn’t know how to spell it.”

  I thought so too, and said to myself Treeworgy would bear further inspection.

  When I asked Burr whether he included Colonel Enos among those who were patriotic and determined, he said he did, since Enos had fought the French, and gone with the British to Havana on that dreadfully mismanaged expedition, and so must be counted a brave and able man.

  But if, he said, there were shortcomings in him, they were made up by the excellences of Colonel Arnold and Lieutenant Colonel Greene, the former regarded by General Washington and General Schuyler as the foremost fighting officer in the army; one who would bring the highest military honors to our colonies.

  He spoke with admiration of Major Meigs and Major Bigelow, and of the captains, any one of whom, he said, was fit to be a general. I think, with a few exceptions, he was right; for many of them became generals.

  Over the rifle companies he waxed well nigh lyrical, saying they were the greatest soldiers ever seen: so far as he wa
s concerned, he would be willing to attack Quebec with no more than three companies of riflemen and their officers, and Colonel Arnold to lead them. I thought at the time he was speaking irrationally, since there are but seventy-five riflemen to a company, but I soon had occasion to change my mind. At an even later date, when we had picked Burgoyne’s army to pieces at Saratoga, I heard Burgoyne admit that Morgan’s regiment of riflemen was the finest in the world; so I would be the last to consider Burr’s judgment far off the mark.

  There were horses and oxen at the foot of the quick water below Fort Western, and the bateaux were going up on sleds over the spongy wood road; so Hobomok and I overturned the canoes on one of the bateaux and traveled up in state.

  The parade ground between the long wooden barracks and the river was already filled with tents and board huts, put up by the riflemen; and at one of the doors of the barracks stood Cap Huff, idly rummaging among his teeth with a splinter of wood, but scrutinizing the newcomers with prodigious attention. He darted past me and seized on a young Rhode Islander who was carrying a pair of dead chickens.

  “Got a place to sleep, Brother?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “We got two bunks in the barracks,” Cap said, “but we got to move up river right away. You’re hable to be here five or six days, Brother, and get rained on if you ain’t under cover.”

  The young Rhode Islander stared helplessly.

  “Get your friend,” Cap said, “and we’ll trade you our two bunks for your two chickens.”

  What Cap said about being rained on was true; but he was not one to give up a bed so lightly. I waited for him; and in the course of time he emerged from the barracks, carrying his pack and the two chickens, and accompanied by a shambling man with a melancholy face. This man he introduced as Lieutenant Church.

  “The lieutenant,” he said hoarsely, “is the best scout in the province of Maine.”

  The lieutenant looked mournfully at the chickens.

  “You better get on one of these scouting parties, Stevie,” Cap continued in his hoarse whisper, “or they’ll put you to dragging bateaux. Have you dragged one of ’em yet?”

  He assured me with a horrified face that the Kittery gaol would be easier to drag. “I had to move one of ’em to-day,” he said, caressing his broad expanse of back, “and it kind of took away my appetite.” I asked him how he had happened to relinquish his bunks in the barrack.

  “Oh,” he said, “they were full of bugs. The lieutenant discovered ’em.”

  The lieutenant poked mournfully at a chicken. “All right, Lieutenant,” Cap said. “All right, we’ll get right at it.”

  “How did you get up here so quick?” I called after him, as they moved away.

  “I found a horse down at the shipyard,” he explained, “so I rode it up to see if I could find out who it belonged to.”

  “Who did it belong to?”

  “Well,” he said, “I ain’t had time to ask.”

  We worked until dark, getting up supplies from the foot of the quick water. Later I sought out Captain Goodrich’s company, so to share their supper. They had drawn cornmeal and salt pork and peas, and Phoebe had done what she could with them, which was little enough, God knows.

  As we sat by our fires and ate our rations I heard amazing tales of what lay ahead. There was a mountain, one man said, alive with bed bugs, enormous and rapacious, more like the hard red crabs on our rocky coast. These insects had, for centuries, bred on its slopes; and when it was overpopulated great armies of them set out, shrinking in size from their exertions in swimming streams and climbing deadfalls, until they came to settlements where they could support themselves. Men who fell asleep near this mountain, the man said, were eaten to death. No animal or bird could five on it.

  Noah Cluff piped up to tell a tale he had heard about the Chaudière River, which we must descend. “Chaudière,” he said, was a French word meaning “boiler,” and the name was given to the river because along its course were holes down which the water was sucked, boiling and steaming, into the depths of the earth; and any canoe that approached too close to a hole was never seen again.

  Another said the army must march across a place called the Height of Land which had never been crossed but by ten men; and on it were bobcats the size of moose, and wolverines so fierce they would attack men for the pleasure of hearing their bones crack.

  At each of these tales I laughed, expecting the others to laugh with me, as they would have laughed if I had said a sea serpent came up the Arundel River every Sunday morning and devoured two fishermen and a dory. But the only one who laughed was Asa Hutchins, and he would laugh at anything, even the Bible. The rest of them grinned discomfortably, looking sideways at each other.

  “Well, for God’s sake!” I said. “Where’d you get these bogey tales!”

  Jethro Fish poked at the fire with his bayonet. He was crowded off the Eunice, he said, and came up from Newburyport in the Eagle. All those aboard her had heard the tales and many more, some worse, like the one about the meadows above the Chaudière growing on top of rotted leaves, so those who set foot on them would be swallowed up.

  “Why was it,” I asked Jethro, “that men aboard the Eagle tried to run away after they’d embarked contentedly enough?”

  Jethro said he wasn’t sure; but those who tried to go ashore were Connecticut troops, men from towns, who knew less about the forests than most. It may have been, he said, they were frightened.

  “Frightened by these tales?” I asked.

  At this a laugh went up, a laugh of derision for folk who would allow themselves to be frightened; but I remembered how the laughers’ eyes had rolled when the tales were told.

  “Was there much of a stench to the Eagle,” I asked, “of bilge or fish?”

  “No,” Jethro said. “She was a lumber schooner.”

  I asked him if he had seen the guide Treeworgy, or spoken with him. He said he had not; nor did the name have a meaning for him. There was something about the business that stuck in my gizzard; but I spoke my mind concerning the wild romances they were telling.

  “Now,” I said, “the truth is this: in my younger days, as all of you from Arundel know, I traveled far up Dead River. There I met an Indian, Natanis, who had come up the Chaudière from the St. Lawrence and across the Height of Land. I saw none of these things, nor did Natanis either. Your tales are fables, such as knaves tell to children to frighten them when they come to dark places in the road. If I knew who started them, I’d take off his skin with a rope end, just as I’d lash a man who found joy in frightening children. Wipe them out of your mind, and see there’s no repeating of them! First thing you know, we’ll have all the Connecticutters and Rhode Islanders running away, and our Maine men joining them in a panic to the shame of our province.”

  A messenger rode into the gate of the stockade and kindled a tin lantern so he might see the dispatch he carried. He bawled it out:

  “All men to the carrying up of bateaux and stores at dawn; all captains to headquarters at Captain Howard’s house, one mile above the fort, at ten o’clock; all guides to headquarters at sun-up.”

  Knowing we had need of sleep, I went back to Hobomok, and found he had made beds for us out of spruce branches. I said to myself, as I pulled the blanket over my face, that now, indeed, we were committed to the enterprise, and there was nothing to stand in our way, so that I could think of Mary as much as I wished. Before I could start to think I found Hobomok shaking me, and heard the trumpeting of geese overhead, and saw it was dawn again.

  XVIII

  I HAVE heard times without number, from folk who had no part in our march to Quebec, of the banquet held at Fort Western while we lay there waiting to start, a banquet of roasted bears and pumpkin pies and watermelons and rum punch. These tales have always come to me in after years, when the wood of our bateaux was rotting in the crevices of the river walls. If there was a banquet I saw none of it, nor did those who went with me; yet when I say so, I am r
ebuked by those who tell the tale. They say I wish to rob our march of its romance; but there was no romance to it that I could see, not even to that early part of it: nothing but haste that blistered our hands and toil that blinded us with sweat.

  To this day I can hear the snarling bellow of Daniel Morgan driving us through the woods with our loads, and see him go charging up past us, dragging at a bogged wheel or heaving on a bateau, cursing the curses he learned as a teamster with Braddock’s army when it marched to its ruin on the Monongahela.

  I can see the ledge that blocked the road. Captain Dearborn, who has since become Secretary of War and a major general and an ambassador to some country in Europe, stood at the top of it, his shaggy black dog beside him, and at the bottom Captain Thayer, a most deceptive man, gentle and mild, yet an ex-officer of Rogers’ Rangers, deadliest of all bush fighters. As we came laden to the ledge Thayer would push at us and Dearborn would pull, and the shaggy black dog would prance and bark, and we would bounce up the ledge as if it were no more than the feather bolster that separates children from their parents when all of them sleep in one bed.

  Above all, I can hear Colonel Arnold shouting at us in a voice that was excitement itself, so that it put new iron into our sagging legs: “Get it up, boys! Up with it! No time to lose! If we lose a day we may lose everything! Get it up! Get it up!”

  Those that talk of banquets never dragged up more than two hundred bateaux and the supplies to fill them, and made their camp and cooked their meals, and shifted the bateaux to starting places and loaded them, and learned their stations.

  Yet I think I know how those reports of banquets had their start. Many of the officers were fed and lodged at Captain Howard’s house, which he had built after he had ceased to be the captain at Fort Western; and at the end of our day of carrying, just after Colonel Arnold had passed up through us on his way to headquarters, Captain Hanchet, a Connecticut officer with an under jaw that stuck far out beyond his upper, came inside the stockade and made a hullabaloo about pumpkin pies, looking among all of us, and even under the bunks in the barracks.