Johann raised his hand. The soldier looked at him. “Captain, sir, if there’s an attack, it takes many hours to get to Broad Bay from Fort St. Georges. Will soldiers be stationed here?” The fort was less than a dozen miles away by foot, but the woods were so thick that most travelled by boat, a route that led around two peninsulas and through several islands.
“I’ve nine soldiers to protect this entire section of the coast.” When his statement was translated, a murmur passed through the crowd. “I’ve been told that no more soldiers will be available. So, no, there will be no soldiers at Broad Bay. You, like other settlements in this colony, will have to defend yourselves.”
A man asked in German whether there was reason to expect more attacks at Broad Bay. After Nungesser translated the question, the captain said, “We have to be vigilant along this entire frontier. The French have inflamed the Indians, and they have armed them. Many Indians don’t want to see settlements like Broad Bay succeed. They want to have the forest take over your homes, to push us back across the ocean and return to the days when only they lived here, when they hunted and fished without white men. But we’ll not leave. So the war will not end soon.”
“What about the French ships?” a man asked in English. Johann recognized the voice of Robert McDonnell. “They can attack our trade up and down the coast. How can we feed ourselves if we can’t trade?”
“The Royal Navy is patrolling these waters, but it’s a very large area. We’re recommending that merchant vessels arm themselves.” He spoke firmly and swept his eyes over the settlers, using the pauses for translation to emphasize his points.
“This is King George’s land, which he has seen fit to share with you. He will do his best to protect you. But it is a wild land, filled with wild things, which you knew when you chose to come here. If you wish to hold the land, you must fight for it. I have counseled with Mr. Leichter on the best way for you to do that, which he will discuss with you.”
“Say, Captain,” McDonnell called out, a smile playing on his lips. “By the by, this war of ours. How’s King George doing? Is he winning?”
The captain straightened, his face unmoving. He put his hat on, spun on his heel, and walked back into the compound.
Leichter, in German, asked the settlers to come closer. The men stepped forward while women and children hung back. He presented the plan quickly. Broad Bay must change how it lives. If the settlers stayed on their farmsteads, the Indians would pick off more of them. They must build four defensive stockades, spread through the settlement, and take up residence inside them. General Waldo’s compound would be one stockade. Each stockade must be large enough for sixteen families. Captain Shaw and Leichter had identified good locations for the other three stockades, locations on high ground or in the center of open clearings, giving them good sight lines against attacks. One stockade would command the river and the settlement’s water supply. As he described the locations, some of the settlers nodded. Leichter stopped and asked for questions.
“How thick must the walls be for these stockades?”
“A single log’s width is fine,” Leichter said, “enough to stop a musket ball. The Penobscots don’t have cannons, and we can’t build anything that would withstand the guns from a French ship. But each stockade will need a high observation deck, so we’ll always have someone on lookout.”
“Who owns the land for these locations?”
“General Waldo owns this site and the one next to the sawmill. He will donate those to the settlement until this crisis is over. The other two are on allocated lands, so we’ll ask the owners to donate the lands for a limited time. We may be able to have the settlement pay some form of rental.”
“How will we live? How will we farm if we’re huddled into stockades?”
“We can leave the stockade under armed escort. So that means that you men will have to form a guard. We need volunteers for that. The guards will take different farmers to their lands on different days, on a rotating basis.”
“We’ll never have enough time to do all that needs to be done!” came a voice. A second said, “This isn’t practical. We’ll be prisoners. We can’t live like that.”
Leichter fixed his eye on the second speaker, a tall, broad-shouldered man. “Perhaps you should ask Fritz Bauer whether he would be willing to live like that.” He took a breath. “It is your choice. I cannot force you. You can choose to change nothing about the way you live and wait for the Indians to come. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Or you can follow this plan. It’s the best we have. We live in a time of war.” When he stopped, the settlers talked to each other in low voices. Leichter waited for them.
Johann spoke. “I don’t like this plan, Herr Leichter, but I think it’s the best we can do. And it’s only temporary. The war can’t last forever.”
“Must we decide tonight?” came the question.
Johann turned to the voice. “What will be different tomorrow?”
After a silence, Leichter clapped his hands. “All right, then. I will take names tonight of those who volunteer for the guard. All men must help with building the stockades. We’ll form regular work crews.”
As the settlers began to disperse, Johann turned to Christiane. “I must do this,” he said.
She nodded and held an arm out for Hanna. The little girl resisted, burrowing her head into her father’s shoulder.
“I’ll be at the boat in a few minutes, sweetheart,” he said to her.
The volunteers gathered before Leichter. He said he needed twenty-four men, but there were only nineteen. “Others will join,” Robert McDonnell said from the second row.
Leichter leaned toward McDonnell. “You, you and Bennett, how will you understand the Germans?”
McDonnell shrugged. “How much German do we need to know when we’re under attack?”
Karl Heilman, Johann’s neighbor, asked if Leichter would be the captain of the guard.
“No,” the agent said. “I won’t be here all of the time, and the captain must be. You should choose your captain. Someone whose word you’ll follow without questioning.”
McDonnell pointed at Johann. “The sergeant major,” he said. “Agreed?”
The others nodded. McDonnell said to Leichter, “I didn’t need to know German for that.”
The men were eager to get their families back to their cabins, so Johann spoke quickly. He set up an informal system for the guards to carry messages from one to another, at least until the stockades were built. Leichter took the volunteers’ names, then copied the list for Johann. “Will McDonnell be a problem for you?” he asked.
Johann shook his head. “No, he knows more German than he lets on. In fact, I’m inclined to make him my lieutenant.”
“Is that wise? Will he follow orders? He made no friend in Captain Shaw.”
“Captain Shaw and his nine soldiers won’t save us. Robert might.”
CHAPTER THREE
†
Christiane loathed this fourth winter in Broad Bay. Johann, like most of their neighbors, lost himself in the drive to put the settlement on a war footing. Lumber had to be cut and hauled for stockades. Stakes had to be driven, living quarters built, and farms converted to provide the greatest amount of food with the least amount of tending.
Johann helped with everything, especially building the living quarters. His woodworking skills still lagged behind McDonnell’s, but he had learned much. Using thick timbers and narrower planks from McDonnell’s mill, he had built their home at Mayflower Hof with mortise and tenon joints, a tongue-and-groove construction that eliminated nails or pegs. Each of Johann’s joints was tighter and firmer than the one he made before. He had the patience for the work. He meant to do it well.
Using his careful joints, he had doubled the length of the cabin’s walls beyond what was usual in Broad Bay. He cut windows in two walls, covering them with thick boards on grooved tracks that slid open and closed. To heat such a large space, he installed fireplaces at both ends, with clever piping
that drew the smoke from the cabin but screened out all but the most furious wind gusts. As Johann had hoped, other settlers admired his work, then hired him to improve their cabins. He had begun on floor planking for Mayflower Hof when Fritz disappeared, which changed everything.
Johann’s focus now was the guard. He set a rotating schedule so two guard members, loaded muskets in hand, walked the length of the settlement twice each day. They were to watch for signs of Indian activity, though such signs could be hard to detect. The guards encouraged settlers to be vigilant and asked about suspicious sights or sounds. A single gunshot, Johann decided, would be the alarm. When someone complained that there would be false alarms if someone fired a gun by accident or shot at game, Johann was unmoved. Better too many alarms than too few.
By mid-July, settlers began moving into the stockade converted from General Waldo’s compound, which was named for the Prince of Wales. To set an example, and because Mayflower Hof was so exposed, the five Overstreets were among the first to take up residence. They crammed into a single room a fraction the size of their new cabin, with none of its clever adaptations. As more settlers piled in, Christiane’s unhappiness grew. By winter—another freezing, wind-whipped season—they were enduring the misery they had known on Mary Anne: confined for months, rebreathing other people’s air, eating only salt fish, knowing only shreds of privacy.
They shared common walls, which meant they shared personal habits and noxious smells, bugs and mice, loud arguments and soft endearments. When they stepped outside their room, they entered spaces occupied by fifteen other families. No disease could be avoided. Whenever Christiane managed to impose cleanliness and order on a corner of their world, in came filthy feet, bone-biting cold, or the whimpering of an ailing child. She feared for Walther and Hanna and Richard, fears that made her short-tempered, like her neighbors.
For two half-days each week, each family could return to its farm in the company of two guards. The visits were too brief to maintain the cabins and fields, or to stop the forest from reclaiming land that had been so difficult to clear. Johann and Christiane worked on the Bauer farm too. Ursula came with them, but listlessness often overtook her, deadening her eyes and slowing her mind. Christiane tried to be patient with her friend, who had lost so much, but could not always contain her frazzled annoyance. At night, Christiane prayed for a larger heart, a spirit that would love and nurse Ursula and her girls through this terrible time.
In mid-November, in the dark hours before another frosty dawn, the earth shook with a low growl, as though it would crack open. Women in the Prince of Wales stockade rolled from their beds to their knees, praying aloud. Children cried and hugged each other. Men scrambled into the courtyard, looking anxiously to the heavens, then at the earth, then at the heavens again. The earth stilled after ten seconds or so, but the shaking had seemed endless. Near the end of that churning, a log fell from the observation platform with a crash, knocking the front gate askew.
As the women and children ventured out uncertainly, they asked if this was the wrath of God upon their land? Or some massive weapon of the French? Attendance jumped at Nungesser’s prayer meetings. It was months before they learned that the earthquake had struck all of New England.
In the bleak winter days after Christmas, the compound simmered in surly watchfulness. Christiane asked Johann one morning how long the war would last. It had already been almost two years. How long could nations fight? Johann drew his lips tight. He didn’t know, he said, but the last war between Britain and France took eight years. Walther will be half a man by then, Christiane said in a rising voice, and will have known only this as his home. Johann had no answer.
Later that morning, Frau Reuter, the one with the thieving husband, set Christiane off. That shrewd woman had quieted Johann’s suspicions by praising him and by the energy she brought to her work. Johann had a fondness, Christiane knew, for the strivers of the world, the ones who took on hard jobs and laid on the elbow grease. Frau Reuter seemed to be one of those, but Christiane knew what that cow really was underneath her false smiles: a close, grasping woman who manipulated people to her own ends.
Richard was nursing as Christiane tried to knit with unfeeling fingers. Poor little Hanna was curled against her, her thumb in her mouth, her breath crackling with thick phlegm, her skin waxy. The girl had been feverish, off and on, for at least two weeks. Christiane had been up with her several nights, wiping her brow, humming, praying.
The slap she heard was loud. It could have been anyone. But Christiane knew the cry that came next, the hiccupping and snorting that only Walther produced.
She flew into the compound, carrying both little ones. That cow was bending over Walther, her cheeks red, shouting at him, her finger an inch from his startled face.
“What’s this!” Christiane called, trying to keep the blanket around Richard. She almost lost her balance on the courtyard’s packed snow.
Walther turned wide eyes on his mother, but Christiane went for the woman. “What are you doing?”
Frau Reuter brandished a pewter spoon with a hand. “Your boy had this spoon of ours, one of our set that came from my mother, that she got on her wedding day. Why, he’s nothing but a thief, and we can’t have thieves here in Broad Bay. I won’t live with thieves.”
Stepping between Walther and that cow, Christiane felt the anger rise. “Well,” she said, “then you should move out from your entire family, which is nothing but a den of thieves, filthy stinking ones at that.” Other children and women, transfixed, gathered round.
The Reuter woman put fists on her hips and leaned back. “Ah, so this is what I hear from the wife of the great sergeant major, the man who stands by while his neighbor is snatched by savages. Maybe he was just hoping to get some time with his neighbor’s pretty wife, eh? You’re all such good friends! While you hold the baby, of course, there’s nothing I can do about your vile accusations.”
Having noticed Ursula nearby, Christiane handed Richard over and set Hanna on her feet. “I accuse you. You and your kind are the thieves,” she shouted.
The other woman glared at Christiane. She spat. “You peasants are beneath me. I don’t truck with such scum.”
“Yes?” Christiane screamed. She flung herself, tearing off the woman’s bonnet and reaching for her face. Her fingers became entangled in Frau Reuter’s hair so she couldn’t pull back for a slap or punch, so she pushed and pushed the heavier woman, driving her back into the onlookers, finally tipping her over. Frau Reuter fell heavily. Christiane jumped on top. Her arms were free. She pummeled the woman, shrieking and crying, rage pouring out while the woman shielded herself with her forearms. Shouts came from around the compound, piping children’s voices at the far edge of frenzy. Christiane ignored them all.
Strong hands gripped Christiane’s shoulders and pulled her up. When she struggled, the hands lifted her off her feet, denying her purchase for a solid blow. Her bellows and shrieks continued as Frau Reuter scrambled to her feet. The other woman came after her now, but the strong hands spun Christiane around. Frau Reuter bounced off Robert McDonnell and slipped to her knees.
“Now, now,” his deep voice said, flat and calm. “Are you done?” Christiane’s feet reached the snowy ground. His hands still held her shoulders. Her anger drained, replaced with shame. She covered her eyes and started to shiver with the cold, her naked hands aching. Walther grabbed her leg and began crying. She felt Ursula’s arm around her.
McDonnell looked down at Frau Reuter. “She’s done. How about you?” The woman struggled to her feet and turned away.
“Listen, folks,” he said to the others, some stunned, some smirking. “I know most of you can’t understand the king’s English, and I don’t know what the hell this was about. But we’ve got plenty of Indians and Frenchmen to fight without going after each other. Everyone go on about your business.”
Back in their room, Christiane sank onto a bench. She pulled Walther into her arms until he finished his wailing. He h
ad been playing with the spoon, he said, just playing with it. He didn’t mean to take it. She hugged him. When he grew quiet, she spoke. He shouldn’t just borrow something like that, she said. He must ask the owner. He always must ask. He nodded. “Will you punish me now?” he asked.
She shook her head. “You’re a small boy,” she said. “You must learn this. But if it happens again, then you’ll be punished.” She patted his leg. “Now, get wood for the fire.”
With Walther’s help, she rebuilt their fire, then took Walther back into her lap. Together they stared into the flames. Ursula came to the door, a fussy Richard in her arms and other children trailing behind. “He wants his mother,” Ursula said. Christiane waved them in.
Later in the day, watching the children run in the snow of the courtyard, Ursula and Christiane had a moment together. “Nothing she said is true,” Ursula said. “About Johann, I mean.”
“She’s a wicked woman. Johann thought so from the start, back on the ship. But I must make peace with her. We could be in this cursed place for years. With her.” They squeezed each other’s mittened hand. “But not today.”
“No,” Ursula agreed. “Not today.”
Christiane still had to face Johann. He returned late, like always, from working on the Governor Shirley stockade, the last one to be built. She didn’t know what to expect from him. He was careful of his position in the settlement, worried to set a proper example.
When he arrived, he knelt to rinse his hands and face with water from melted snow. She handed him a cloth. In a small voice, she said, “I have something to tell you.”
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