Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  “You men!” she said. “Don’t you ever shave unless you have to? Don’t you ever shave just to look nice?”

  “What would Mary say,” Jacataqua asked, nor did I fancy her impertinence in asking it, “if she saw you with a beard like that?”

  “How should I know?” I said, turning on my side preparatory to sleeping again.

  It seemed to me Phoebe’s voice was more cheerful when she went on babbling to Jacataqua in an undertone, a pleasant and soothing undertone. It may be her voice sounded cheerful by comparison with the subject of her chatter, for she spoke of how the men had split the ox-bones and eaten the marrow, and had even eaten the intestines; how many of them, overeating despite the warnings of the officers, had become ill, and how a few, overeating still more, had died.

  To this babbling I fell asleep. That night we were allowed to have bread soaked in soup, and milk to drink, and more chicken, and the half of a partridge apiece.

  While Phoebe stitched away at her gray blanket-stuff, we lay and yawned and wondered about Quebec, and whether we should take it, speaking as though it lay a matter of six or eight miles distant, so that we could trot over to it on the first clear night. When we learned from Natanis that we must still march seventy miles down the caldron of the Chaudière before we could come to the St. Lawrence, we listened helplessly to the whooping and squalling of the braves who were arriving in twos and threes from up river. Seventy miles! We slept immediately and soundly, despite the hideous outcry.

  There was a bright light when we woke, reflected into the wigwam from snow that had fallen in the night, and in the brightest of it sat Natanis, gazing into his hand mirror and making himself beautiful with paint: vermilion, yellow, black, and white.

  “Two of your friends have come,” he said.

  “Not Hook!”

  “No,” Natanis said, running a line of white down the center of his nose, “older friends: Eneas and Sabatis.”

  “I thought we’d never see them again. What messages did they bring back for Arnold?”

  “That’s a queer business,” Natanis said, coloring his mouth and chin vermilion. “They say they were captured when they entered Quebec, and Arnold’s letters taken from them.”

  “Then it’s known we’re coming!”

  “That’s not the main thing,” Natanis said. “The main thing is that our people have always come and gone in Quebec as they pleased. Our help is too valuable to be thrown away by seizing us and searching us, and so angering us. There are a thousand ways our people can enter and leave Quebec unnoticed, provided they wish to do so. Therefore I doubt Eneas and Sabatis were captured.”

  I pondered while I honed my razor. If they hadn’t been captured, they had freely given the letters to some man of importance. If we were friendly with them and didn’t arouse their suspicions, and heaped favors on them, we might come to learn something of those with whom they had trafficked in Quebec. We might catch Hook, somehow, through them! To catch Hook, I would have gone without food for another week.

  Thus minded of food, I ate half a loaf of bread sopped in broth, and longed for the day when my stomach would let me start the day properly with a cut from a fat cow and half a pie, preferably pumpkin.

  Natanis had gone to work filling in the upper sections of his face with yellow, a task requiring dexterity because yellow paint soaks into black hair if allowed to come in contact with it. “There’s another thing,” he said, in the far-away tones of one absorbed in delicate manual labor. “Arnold shouldn’t show anger toward them. If he accuses them of doing what we think they’ve done, they may fly into a rage and leave us when we most need their help.”

  “He knows that,” I said, preparing to scrape off my beard. “He’s a wise man.”

  “He’s a bold man, given to speaking his mind. He was not wise enough to know we weren’t spies.”

  “He can’t be blamed for that! He was scurvily treated by those he considered friends. It’s natural for him to be suspicious. What could he do but suspect us of being spies if he was told we were spies?”

  Natanis shrugged his shoulders and painted a black tortoise in the middle of his forehead. His face was so covered that there was no way of telling what his expression might be beneath the paint. “None the less, he must be told to show no anger; for it’s my plan to know more about the persons who called me spy.”

  “It’s my plan to find Hook,” I said.

  “Then warn him,” he said. “Let him know Eneas and Sabatis are our brothers.” He made a snoot at me, a horrible snoot, so that I nicked my ear with the razor. Natanis was pleased: his painting had been successful.

  While I studied my hunting shirt, not knowing where first to thrust my needle, Phoebe came to the door with a bundle. Such was her elegance that I clean forgot I had on no shirt, until she said that she’d mend it, unless I was planning to boil it and eat it. With that Natanis said he had a new shirt for me, and he fished it out from the rear of the wigwam, a stout one of buckskin, without fringes or ornaments.

  Phoebe wore a gray blanket coat, belted around her middle with a red worsted sash, and long gray breeches stuck into the top of moccasins. Her string of cat’s eyes dangled at her throat. Cap sat up and rubbed his eyes at sight of her, swearing that if she had a queue down to her waist and a pipe in her mouth, and stunk of garlic enough to crack the wigwam apart, no one would be able to tell her from a Frenchy.

  She gave me her bundle: blanket breeches and worsted stockings for Cap and myself. Cap declared he was disappointed at being given breeches, since he had planned to get the loan of a pair from the young Frenchman who had charged us so handsomely for provisions. In fact, he said, he had planned to borrow those the young man had on, if he could catch him in a dark, quiet place.

  While Phoebe cut my hair we warned Cap to keep his hands off all Frenchmen, since they were our friends and we would often stand in need of their help.

  “Stevie,” Cap said, “you always gravel me in an argument, but these Frenchies aren’t real Frenchies: they only think they are. You never saw a real Frenchy with a queue like these Frenchies. These Frenchies are more like folks from China that have tails on their heads a rod long.”

  “Well, what of it? They’re our friends, tails or no tails, so let ’em alone.”

  Cap whined that he merely wanted one of the tails to take home with him: that I whistled a different tune when it came to my own pet Frenchy, Guerlac; that these Frenchies were robbers, anyway, charging double what they should for the necessities of life. Weary of his clack, I pushed Phoebe out, scrambled into my new breeches and shirt, and fled the place, reminding him that when it came to robbing, our own honest citizens on the Kennebec had been quick to sell us sour beef at four hundred per cent profit. He managed to have the last word, bawling after me that people ought to expect that when they come to Maine, whereas it should be different elsewhere.

  There was a fleet of twenty canoes on the river bank, brought there by forty braves, all decked out in wampum necklets and armlets, and silver wrist guards. They had fur robes, and their heads were shaved.

  All of them were painted, even Paul Higgins, so there was no way of telling one from the other. Natanis said this was why Indians paint when preparing for war: so that if one of them comes close and strikes a foe, the stricken man cannot tell his assailant from any other painted Indian, and so may later be unable to take his vengeance. This may be true; but if you ask me, I think they paint their faces because they like to do it. They spend hours daubing themselves, and fly into terrible rages if their hands slip and spoil the symmetry of their designs.

  Natanis, while I knew him, wore paint on his face this once, and never again; yet he enjoyed painting himself on this occasion as much as a woman enjoys putting on half a dozen petticoats and a dress that sticks out behind her big enough to make a hiding place for a pair of owls. I think they are two customs of a piece. Many Indians I know are as handsome men as you could find in a month of Sundays, whereas when they paint themse
lves they look like something you dream about when overly free with pie and hot buttered rum. In the same way there are women as straight and sweetly rounded as can be; though when hung with silken saddle bags and wire lobster pots underneath, they might as well have spavins and broken hocks for all anyone knows.

  Hobomok greeted me at the canoes, and Natawammet, and the braves who had been with us among the swamps of Finger Lake; also Paul Higgins, whose face was yellow with a jagged black line across his forehead like the tops of pine trees against the sky.

  “We left a camp full of men at the head of the Chaudière,” Paul said. “Food was scarce, so we stole a horse from the French and sent it back to them. What do you think? Is it all right to steal a horse?”

  “Probably they’d have given it, if you’d asked,” I told him.

  “Not the French,” Paul said. “You don’t know ’em!” I thought that if I didn’t keep Paul and Cap Huff apart there might not be a French queue left on the Chaudière by the time we reached Quebec.

  The trackless forests had ended at Sartigan; and the river ran between level fields, snow-covered and sprinkled with whitewashed farmhouses. Here we saw the first of many chapels, surmounted by the papist cross. These farms and chapels surprised me, since I had thought that Canada, being papist, was a heathen and barbarous country. Yet I found it neater than our own province of Maine, and the houses snugger and better than most of those in Arundel.

  We went rapidly down the six miles of quick water that lay between Sartigan and Arnold’s headquarters, and put in at a point where there were two whitewashed farmhouses with barns and sheds.

  A number of men emerged from one of the farmhouses as we came up to it, among them Lieutenant Church and Lieutenant Steele and Captain Ogden, all of whom eyed me coldly. Lieutenant Church, staring at his moccasins with his usual gloom, asked abruptly, “Where’s Cap Huff?” This was the only greeting I had from any of them.

  “We picked him up,” I said. “He was lost. We took care of him. He’ll be down to-morrow.”

  Church nodded and scanned the sky, as though looking for more snow. “I cal’late!” he said. Like so many of our Maine people, he didn’t explain what he calculated. I interpreted it to mean that there had been no serious doubts in his mind concerning either of us at any time.

  Arnold’s room was sizeable, and heated with an iron stove, so that I felt my first real warmth in a month. It sent such a wave of weakness through me that I had to hold to the wall.

  Arnold was talking with his commissary when we filed in, and though I thought he might, like the rest of us, be worn and weary from the march, his face was as florid, his shoulders as broad, his hair as crinkly and jetty black as ever, albeit his hair curled a little about his ears and neck, and his uniform was stained and wrinkled from soakings.

  He dropped his head to stare at me from rounded, light-colored eyes. I went to his table of loose plank and placed a piece of bark on it. On it I’d written: “Wait before rebuking Eneas and Sabatis.” He looked at it sourly, his face dark and bulbous. Then he went to the Indians, shaking hands with each one. Finally he shook hands with me.

  “What are you doing with these—these gentlemen?” he asked.

  “Sir,” I said, “my friend Natanis asked me to interpret.”

  Arnold nodded. “Which one is Natanis?”

  Natanis stepped forward, as straight as the mast of a sloop, and I wished his face could have been free of its mask of yellow and vermilion, to let the colonel see the wisdom and kindliness in it.

  They eyed each other, the rest of the Abenakis standing silent behind us. “Truly,” Natanis said, “I am your friend.”

  Arnold smiled when I interpreted. As I have said before, there was something so reckless and straightforward about his smile that the person on whom it was turned would follow him, with little persuasion, wherever he led.

  “Why,” he said, “I’ve been sadly misinformed. I’m his friend as well, and the friend of all these brave men.”

  “That is good,” said Natanis. “There are matters we must discuss with the white chief; matters that must remain between him and us, and discussed alone.” He glanced at the commissary, an officer from Matthew Smith’s riflemen, and a hater of Indians, as could be told when he glowered, from time to time, at the men behind me.

  The commissary went out, red as an August sunset, and hotter, unless I greatly mistook, and I knew we must keep an eye on him to make sure we got something besides briskets and rump when beef was butchered.

  Paul Higgins spoke first, gloomy and grand with his black lightning-streak across his bright yellow face; for it had been agreed that he, being sachem of the Assagunticooks, should speak for all.

  “Brother,” Paul said, dropping his bearskin on the floor and sitting on it, so that Colonel Arnold might sit as well, “you are on your way to fight for the country in which you live. This you are proud to do. We, too, would be proud to do this, for it is as much our country as yours. But when we went to see the great chief in Cambridge, offering to fight behind him, he thanked us and let us come away. He had no need of our help.”

  He waited a moment, and I wondered whether Arnold would have any answer for this. I could think of none he could make. Nor could he, it seemed; for he only popped out his eyes like grape-shot, and said nothing.

  “Brother,” Paul continued, “there’s no need for a great oration. We are not talkers. We prefer to help a little and to fight a little when opportunities come. Thus we will tell the white chief certain things that have happened, so he may know he has been helped, in spite of what was said to us in Cambridge.

  “Brother, the Abenaki people are a proud people, unaccustomed to be scorned when they offer help. On returning from Cambridge we would have gone into the forests to hunt deer and beaver, wounded in our feelings. But your friend Steven came to us and made an oration, telling us we must go to the Height of Land to hunt, or else be liars when we said we wished to help our white brothers, regardless of money or glory.”

  My face was red when I interpreted this, and Arnold shot a sour look at me, saying, “Leave nothing out.”

  “Likewise, Brother,” Paul went on, “news was spread about that one of our brothers was a spy, our brother Natanis, whom we love dearly. Men were sent to kill him; but by good fortune he was warned by your friend Steven, and so escaped to be of service to us all.

  “That’s enough of that,” Paul said, drawing a roll of birch bark from his belt. “We came to the Height of Land to hunt, as we promised Steven. We found the hunting bad. Our brother Natanis drove two moose into the hands of the men who had been sent to kill him. Without those moose they’d have died.

  “Six of our braves”—he read the names from the bark roll—“were sent to Sartigan to say food must be brought up river against the coming of the white men. That’s why my brother found more food in Sartigan than had ever been seen there before. Then they made canoes, so there might be enough to carry the white men across the St. Lawrence. They made eighteen canoes, tightly sewn and pitched. These are hidden on the west bank below the falls at St. Francis on the Chaudière, where the smooth water begins.

  “Some of our men were used as messengers, Brother, between Sartigan and Megantic, and there were others at intervals from the meadow at Seven Mile Stream all the way around to the lake, all of our number being thus employed.” Here he read the names of the remainder of his men.

  “We did not know whether we could trust the men in your army, Brother. The life of our brother Natanis was being sought. We have heard there are some among your men who have murdered Indians without cause. Perhaps this is not true. We are glad if it is not; but we had heard enough so we did not wish to go openly to them and offer our help.

  “Nevertheless, Brother, there has been help given.” He consulted his bark roll again. “Our brother Natanis left a map of Dead River and the Chain of Ponds at his cabin, where soldiers found it. We built a house of bark on the shore of Lake Megantic, where it could be see
n by all who came down Seven Mile Stream. You camped in that house, Brother. A good bark canoe was placed where you could find it and travel in comfort with it. When you left that house we kept a fire before it each night, so that wanderers might reach it.

  “When there were men lost in the swamps your friend Steven and our brother Natanis built a fire for them in the snow and warmed them. When your guide, Hull, returned to lead the army around the swamp and to the shore of Megantic, he took them into the swamps. We followed and picked up those who fell out from exhaustion, warming and feeding them. When it was seen that many could not escape and would die in the swamps, our brother Natanis guided them to safety.

  “We took twenty-two men from the swamps, Brother, unconscious or so weak they couldn’t walk, and put them by fires on the trail. We took nine men from the Chaudière after the bateaux were wrecked; men who would have died if our braves had not saved them. We picked up and warmed thirty-seven men on the path down the Chaudière when they were exhausted and near death.

  “We stationed guards at the long portage around the Great Falls, and my brother was helped by them, as were many others who came after him. We provided canoes for the sick captain with the black beard. Two of our brothers paddled him from the Great Falls to Sartigan, fearing he might otherwise be wrecked and drowned.

  “There are other things: the carrying of provisions to the army and the stealing of food for men who must otherwise have gone without; but there is no need to go into them. It is probable my brother knows the English have destroyed all canoes and boats on this side of the St. Lawrence, so that his army cannot cross. But we have with us our own canoes in addition to the eighteen new canoes. If my brother thinks it would be a help to him, we will take all these canoes to the St. Lawrence and set the army across in them. Also, if my brother thinks it would be a help to him, we will fight with him to take Quebec from the English. Brother, I have finished.”

  Paul got up from his bearskin and moved back among his Abenakis. It seemed to me, as I watched Colonel Arnold staring down at his clasped hands and moving his thick, broad shoulders inside his wrinkled blue coat, that although Paul’s speech had made no pretense at eloquence, it was as eloquent as any speech could have been. Therefore I was glad when he, too, made no effort at fine speaking, but spoke simply and to the point.