3stalwarts

by Unknown

  “Senecas?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Senecas, or a couple of them Tories. If you ever want anybody’s scalp, you let me know.”

  She smiled, veiling her eyes and looking insolent and badgering, studying all his magnificent body as he sprawled on the bench with his back against the table and his chest bare to the fire.

  “You like me an awful lot, don’t you, Adam?”

  He tossed his yellow hair back and grinned.

  “Don’t you ever get tired waiting around here?”

  He kept on grinning.

  “If it wasn’t for Jake, I’d have had you a long while ago. But I like Jake.”

  He looked puzzled, as she repeated, “Yes, if it wasn’t for Jake.”

  Jake Small came in. He was getting bald and looked fatter.

  “Hello, Adam,” he said. “You back for a while?”

  “Yes, I’m back. I just stopped by on my way home. How are you, Jake?”

  “Fine, boy, fine.”

  He reached for an apple off the shelf.

  “Have one, Adam?”

  “No, thanks,” said Adam.

  “Well, I will,” Jake said, biting into it. “I’ve always had the awfulest hankering for apples, Adam.”

  He put his arm round Betsey when she came up to kiss him. It was the damnedest thing Adam ever had to look at— the happy way she looked when she kissed him back. He got himself lazily onto his feet and picked up his rifle and went out of the house.

  Though Lana was getting about again, she had not much strength. She worked because there was a great deal to be done. Gil was threshing in between days of picking the ripened corn, and he needed help in sifting the chaff. He wanted to get his oats all threshed and safely stored before the fall was over. The steady thump of the flail on the barn boards was like the drumming of a partridge, hour after hour.

  The air was cold and very clear, as if frost were in the offing. Lana sniffed it in the yard and looked up the valley. The sky to the west had a greenish glassy tinge. One could almost think that the sky was reflecting the shine from the river. The tips of balsams seemed more sharply pointed, needlelike, and made of iron. The low sun looked like a thin coin. In its light, Lana seemed pale and full of stillness; her black hair was heavy and without lustre. As she stood beside the shed door, the evening found in her the same hushed intentness it found in the darkening woods. Only the front of her short gown moved with her light breathing, showing her full and heavy breasts.

  Joe Boleo, stepping quietly in the shed for an extra log of wood, watched her for a moment. He thought she had not heard him, any more than she seemed to have heard the thudding of Gil’s flail. But she said suddenly, “Joe, what’s that bird?”

  “Which bird?”

  “There on the bottom branch of the maple. I never saw one like it.”

  She seemed to have a sixth sense for spotting anything alive. The bird had neither moved nor made a sound.

  He said, “That’s a Canada Jack. It’s early to see one of them— and so close to a house, too. Most generally it means a hard winter.”

  They both stayed still, and the bird on its limb was still, staring back at them. Then the calf bawled flatly in the barn, and they heard the blatant answer of the cow homing through the woods.

  In the kitchen, Daisy rattled her pans.

  At sunset the two companies of soldiers swung down the road from Fort Stanwix. They were lean and tired. Their ragged uniforms gave them at first sight a kind of ghostliness. Their long strides brought them swiftly and with an odd effect of silence, for half of them wore moccasins, to replace the shoes they had used up. And the drums of the two drummers were head-less.

  John Weaver returned with them. He did not look at all like the boy who had started out. He was like a stranger to Mary. She felt even younger than on her bridal night; and when they went to bed in the Herter house, she was shy and half frightened. He seemed so much stronger— even in his happiness with her she was aware that he had been with men and become a man. Though she had never thought of him otherwise, she knew that the John she had married was a boy; and proud as she was of him, now, his touch conveyed to her a strange sense of warning that she would never be as close to him again in all their lives.

  Gansevoort had given him his discharge, and paid him in a wheat warrant, so that he felt quite comfortable about feeding his mother and Cobus during the winter. For themselves, he and Mary would stay on with Demooth.

  He was glad to get home. The next morning, when the conch horns sent their dim invading wail over the valley, they lay under the blankets close together and heard the cannon fired from the fort as a salute to the departing soldiers. The rising sun, entering the low window, touched the shoulders of his campaign coat, stained, frayed, and faded… .

  “John, was it awful out there?”

  “It was the finest farming country I ever saw. But we got so we were sick of it. Every time we saw a cornfield we were “sick. They made us cut it down— all of it. We cut down the apple trees. They had peaches, even. We cut them down. We did at first; but there was so many we just girdled the last orchards. We burned every house. Some of them had nice houses, framed ones, with glass windows. Nicer than this house, Mary.”

  “It must have been hard work.”

  “I don’t know how much we burned. Captain Bleecker figured it out that the army had destroyed one hundred and sixty thousand bushel of corn. The Indians all went west to Niagara.”

  “Was there any battles?”

  “Only one. It was short. There was five thousand of us and only fifteen hundred of them, more than half Indians. Afterwards they cornered a scouting party. Twenty men. They caught two of them and burned them in Little Beard’s town. Chinisee Castle.”

  He stopped suddenly.

  “Poor John,” she whispered.

  “It was mostly just walking,” he said. “Walking every day and sometimes at night. Or burning. Or cutting corn with your bayonet. We got short of food and had to eat our horses. We wished we hadn’t burned everything, coming home.”

  “The Indians will never come again,” she said.

  “No. They’ve gone to Niagara. I don’t know.”

  “Were the burned men anyone we knew?”

  “No, a Lieutenant Boyd. And a sergeant. His name was Parker. I didn’t know either of them. I don’t want to talk about them. I been dreaming of the way they looked. It makes me afraid sometimes. I don’t want to go to war again, Mary.”

  She tried to hush him.

  “You won’t need to.”

  “I never was scared of the Indians before. But they did things to those men.”

  “Don’t talk.” She lifted up her lips. But he didn’t kiss her. He lay close beside her, with his face hidden in the hollow of her shoulder. He didn’t

  Gil and Joe Boleo and Adam made a trip up to Fort Dayton to talk to Rimer Van Sickler. The squat, overmuscled Dutchman sat in his cabin among his fourteen children, with his second wife cooking him an apple pie. Her thin face, prematurely aged from bearing children and too much heavy work, was exalted with the social eminence her returned hero had brought the family. Why, only yesterday, Colonel Bellinger and Captain Demooth had spent the whole afternoon listening to her Rimer tell about his western expedition. Here in her own cabin. She had had to send the children over to Mrs. Wormwood’s out of politeness, seeing they were gentry, but she herself had stayed. And now here was Mr. Martin and Joe Boleo and that worthless Helmer, who had thought he was a hero himself when he out-ran the Indians.

  Rimer yelled a “Come in” to the men. He was obviously tickled to have them come to see him. Timber beasts.

  “Get out some rum for my vriendts,” he yelled. “You voman: Py Godt, I think I haf to put my belt across you und learn you again who is boss, hey!” He turned to the three. “I had to do it pefore, I can do it again, ja!” He had her almost in tears. The light went out of her face as in obedience she fetched the jug and set it down before him.

&nb
sp; He was sitting in front of the fire on a deerskin, whittling calluses on the balls of his feet. “Efry time I cut a piece off I say to mineself, ‘Rimer, you old timber beast, dot is free miles from Kandesago to Kanandaque.’ “

  Joe said dryly, “I always figured that fifteen miles, myself.”

  “Ach, fa. You peen out dere. I haf forget it. You’re right, Joe. But, py Godt, dot big hunk over there, dot is twenty-seven und a half we marched Candaya to Appletown. In te afternoon. Py Godt! Efry shtep I feel dot punion grow, like a horn. Dot vas de day mine boots broke through, too.”

  “Did you kill many Indians, Pa?”

  “Don’t talk. No, de Indians vas alvays de trees behind, or de hill behind, or de shwamp across. Only once we haf a battle, dunder, shmoke de cannons, und de Indians run right off. Old Pa Rimer couldn’t run so fast as Indians.

  They had to listen to the full details of the campaign as witnessed, memorized, and amplified by the aggrandized imagination of Van Sickler; but finally he came to Boyd’s capture, telling how the army found the ambush and marched the next day to the Genesee, forded it, and entered the great town.

  How, in the open space before the council house they saw the two stakes. Even Van Sickler forgot himself as he described it. Those Senecas, what they could think of! The two corpses half consumed from the waist down before the fires burned out, eviscerated; the nails removed from the toes and fingers, the fingers disjointed or cut off at various lengths. “Ve found two thumbs, so ve knew de nails vas pulled. Dere vas clam shells dey had cut de fingers off mit.” The eyes had been pushed out and the nostrils slit, the cheeks pierced, the lips skinned off, the tongues pulled out, and all over the chest slabs of hide removed.

  The children listened with popping eyes and a dull apathetic horror came over the woman’s face as she stared at her husband, though whether at the torture or at the man, describing each detail with bestial accuracy, she hardly knew herself. “Dey cut de heads off. But de last thing vas de heart.” His small eyes glittered as he told it. “Cut out between de ribs, und stuck de mouth into. Only dere vasn’t any lips, joost de teeth. J a! It vas a sunny day.”

  The winter came early, and it turned piercing cold. By the first of October the hills were white in the north, and the leaves fell with the snow. The snow never went down. By November, before the blizzard, it was more than a foot deep on the ground. But after the sixth day of the snowstorm it was four feet deep. It mounted up against the sides of house and cabin and barn until the paths to the door were like inclined chutes, holes in the earth. No one had ever felt such cold or known such snow.

  Few people went visiting. Lana, who had thought of trying to see her parents during the slack season in December, gave up the notion. Provisions coming up to Stanwix took two days even on the river ice. More than once horses broke down and froze where they had fallen.

  At McKlennar’s, Gil was thankful that he had stacked his hay beside the barn. He could never have found it in the woods, once the big snow came.

  All day he and Lana and Mrs. McKlennar and the babies hugged the fireside. The negress suffered a strange change in her complexion. It was as if her skin had turned gray with dark brown blotches underneath. She could hardly walk for her chilblains. Joe Boleo never left the place. The idea of raiding parties coming in that cold was simply preposterous. But he took great satisfaction in his idleness. “I can’t get them Senecas out of my mind,” he said. “They ain’t got any food. I bet they’re dying every which way.” It was a comforting thought to them all.

  The only thing that troubled him was having to help Gil get wood. They cut great logs and skidded them in the front door and set the butt ends in the fire. Every hour or so they would pry the log forward into the coals. They kept it going all night, taking turns at watching.

  Even so it was so cold in the kitchen that Lana’s fingers were too numb to spin, except occasionally when the sun shone at noon. They became silent for long periods. And Mrs. McKlennar seemed to age during the winter, and sat more and more, close to the fire. Finally she succumbed to Lana’s suggestion of having her bed moved into the kitchen.

  Only Adam went about at all, visiting occasionally at Eldridge’s or pay-ing a dutiful visit to Dayton. The cold did not affect him as it did the others. He did all the hunting alone. But hunting was poor, and the deer, when he got one, were terribly thin. The meat was tasteless as old leather.

  The wind seemed never to stop blowing. It had a high note on the crust. At night, when it came from the north, they could hear the howling and threshing of the pines on the high ridges half a mile away. But on the few quiet nights, the cracking of frosted trees in the icy darkness was worse to listen to.

  In the barn Gil had built a kind of wall around the cow and heifer and mare, banking it every day with the manure that was dropped overnight, but that was always frozen. The three animals kept close together. Their coats were shaggy as sheep’s wool. To milk the cow was an ordeal; his bare hands received no warmth from the teats; and the milk froze before he could get it to the house.

  But the knowledge of their security was one comforting thing; and when the weather finally broke towards the end of February, they waited uneasily for a week, hoping for more snow. It came at last, heavy, without wind, a deep, protecting blanket between them and Niagara.

  Though it came in time to save them, it did not come in time to save the Oneida Indians. On the last day of February, the entire fighting strength of the Onondaga nation, with a few white men and a party of Cayugas and Senecas, fell upon Oneida Castle. In German Flats they never learned the rights of it; all they knew was that a mass of half-frozen Indians-men, women, and children,— and a few starved dogs, appeared at Fort Day-ton and asked for food and shelter. They crowded the fort for two days, making dangerous inroads on the supplies, before Bellinger was able to get them started for Schenectady. The town had been utterly destroyed, but the raiders, they said, had gone back to Canada.

  When Adam went down to see them, he found old Blue Back, his fat cheeks mottled with the cold, squatting in his blankets and watching his wife make a sort of hot mash of whole oats. The two larger children huddled against him, and the baby on the squaw’s back was wrinkled like a nut, with two enormous eyes. The old Indian accepted tobacco wordlessly.

  “They’ll take care of you all in Schenectady,” Adam said in an attempt to cheer him up.

  “Sure. Fine.” But the old man obviously did not think so. He smoked, looking past Adam along the soiled snow of the parade. “You watch’m woods close,” he said. “They come some more. They mad.”

  “I wish you was going to be around, Blue Back. It’d be handy having you scouting with us.”

  “Maybe.” He went on puffing. Then he said, “You going back to Mar-tin?”

  “Yes.”

  Blue Back reached a dirty hand inside his shirt, and felt of something.

  “You fetch’m this. No luck,” he was going to say; but as he touched the peacock’s feather it occurred to him that in a white man’s town it might be lucky after all.

  His eyes grew blank. He shook his head.

  “You watch’m woods,” he muttered dully.

  Adam told Bellinger what Blue Back had said that afternoon, and Bellinger wrote letters to the Governor, and to General Clinton, and to Schuyler. Three weeks passed before he got a reply. All three sounded upset and indignant. The army last fall had been organized to wipe out the In-dian towns. It had done so. The Indians were bound to be crippled for years to come. The menace had been removed at a vast expense; no other single campaign of the war could compare to it in cost. Over a million of dollars had been expended, purely for the benefit of the frontier. There was some mention of common gratitude. And let him be reminded that such continual fears and apprehensions and baseless alarms would have deleterious effects upon the inhabitants. It was felt in Albany that the time had come for the frontier settlements to stand on their own defense.

  In German Flats, the settlers began to look for sp
ring.

  McKLENNAR’S (1780)

  1. Jacob Caster’s Tax Problem

  Gil was getting some hay into the barn. There wasn’t much left. He had been feeding the three animals one good forkful between them. They showed it. The mare was gaunt, and, as Joe said, the hip bones of the cow and heifer stood out sharp enough to hang the milk pails on them.

  He heard a man’s boots squash through the wet snow in the yard, and then the door opened to let Casler come in. “You in there, Martin?”

  “Yes. I’m just feeding the stock. Walk in.”

  Casler closed the door behind him and walked up to Gil. The light in the barn was a dim, dusty twilight gray, in which the animals looked even more meagre than they were.

  “How are you all?” asked Gil.

  “We’re in pretty good health. How’re you, Martin?”

  “All right.” Gil leaned on his fork and looked at his neighbor. Casler was a good neighbor to have, even though Gil did not see a great deal of him. He was a thin, earnest-looking man, with a slow way of speech, and a hard worker. He had rebuilt on the site of his old house across the river —a tiny cabin, in which he had wintered his wife, his two young daughters, and his three-year-old son.

  “It’s getting bad footing,” he remarked, picking up a straw to chew. “It looks to me as if the snow was going pretty quick now.”

  “I’ve been thinking so myself.”

  They considered that fact in silence for a few minutes, before Casler asked, “You folks going back to the fort soon?”

  “I hadn’t planned. Mrs. McKlennar is against it till we have to.”

  Casler nodded slowly.

  “She’s a stout-hearted woman, ain’t she?”

  “Yes. I hate to move her, too. She’s been poorly, off and on.”

  “Yes. I hate to move, myself. I was figuring on getting pretty near all my ground working again this season. Now I don’t know.”

  Gil had the feeling that Casler had only got round to part of what was in his mind.