Calico Bush

by Rachel Field

  It was as she did so that she saw the thin column of smoke across the channel, a faint blue spiral rising from the woods behind the Sargent point. The early winter afternoon was slipping into night, but there was still light enough for her to be sure, and the sight filled her with dread. The remembrance of the cave was upon her. She felt sickened at the memory, and the smoke still rose in a warning thread over the tops of the pointed trees. Behind her in the kitchen the dull booming of their talk seemed as far removed from her as the sea breaking on the outer ledges. She knew she must summon words to tell them, and at the same time she knew she must take care; she recalled Joel’s warning the night she had shown him the lock of hair and the buckle—“There’s to be no talk of this, mind you.”

  Caleb passed her and she pulled at his hand.

  “Regardez-là,” she whispered. “I mean—look over there.”

  As he followed her pointing finger his blue eyes narrowed, and the jeering smile with which he always greeted any lapse into French died on his lips.

  “Injuns!” he said under his breath. “Must be.”

  He hurried over to his father, and after that there was a babble of voices out of which Marguerite made little but that the smoke across the water had laid a chill on everyone in the warm kitchen. They all agreed it could have but one meaning.

  “We’ve been free of Injuns too long,” Hannah Welles spoke up. “I thanked God every night for it. But now we’ll live in dread of our lives again.” Her face looked drawn and troubled.

  “It may be but a small party on their way north,” Stanley suggested hopefully.

  “Not likely,” said Seth, who had already got down his gun and powder horn from the chimney. “That’s a big fire to send up a smoke like that. Comes from the same place where there was trouble last spring after Flint went. I told you to leave that land alone, Sargent. They’ll drive you out sooner or later.”

  “Not me, they won’t.” Joel Sargent had already slung his musket over his shoulder.

  “Well, the house is standin’ yet,” Aunt Hepsa reminded them as she peered against the gathering twilight.

  “I’d be obliged if you’d keep Dolly an’ the young ones here tonight,” Marguerite heard Sargent say to her. “Ira an’ Caleb an’ I’ll go over now.”

  “Oh, no, Joel, don’t you go,” Dolly was begging. “There’s maybe a hundred of ’em, and what’ll you three be against that?”

  “But I can’t stay here an’ let ’em burn our house to the ground same’s they did before,” he told her. “After the work it was to raise it I aim to keep it if I can.”

  The men drew apart in a little group, hurriedly discussing the best means of defense. They all had their muskets in hand, and Ethan was filling his powder horn while they talked. Although they disapproved of Sargent’s settling where he had they were not neighbors to refuse help. So it was finally decided that Ethan and Timothy Welles should join the three in the defense of the log house.

  “That’ll leave Stanley an’ Nathan Welles to help me keep guard here,” Seth explained. “I doubt their places an’ the Morses’ are in danger. Chances are the Injuns will move north when they go, not east nor westward.”

  Patty and the twins and Kate Stanley were crying with fright in a little group about Marguerite’s skirts, and Jacob’s eyes filled with tears as he listened.

  “I’m afeard for Pumpkin, Maggie,” he whispered, pressing close to her. “I don’t want no Injun to get him.”

  “I guess he can run faster than they can.” Marguerite tried to reassure him, but her heart smote her remembering how the dog had begged to come.

  The women and children clustered round the door to see them go. Seth and the other men went with them down to the water to help push the boats off. Joel and Caleb and Ethan Jordan were already lost to sight behind the wooded patch between house and shore, and Timothy Welles and Ira were moving after them in the dwindling half-light when Marguerite saw Abby Welles break away from the little group.

  “Ira,” she heard her call in a voice so sharp with entreaty that it no longer seemed to belong to the quiet, soft-eyed girl in the blue linsey dress. “Ira, don’t you go over there. Don’t you do it.”

  “Why, Abby—” Marguerite heard him plainly though she could not see either of their faces. “I’ve got to go. You mustn’t take on so.”

  “But if—if anything happened to you…. If the Injuns—” Abby had reached his side, and Marguerite felt her own cheeks growing hot to see, even in the dimness, how he set down his musket to draw her close with his free arm. “Oh, please make one of the other men go in your place.”

  His answer was too low for Marguerite to catch, but for a moment she saw them cling together before he moved after Timothy into the wood path. There was a queer silence when Abby rejoined the women, and Marguerite thought she heard her crying as she went past.

  “So that’s the way the wind blows, is it?” she heard Hannah Welles saying to her daughter from the doorstep.

  “Leave her be, Hannah,” Hepsa Jordan put in. “A girl don’t know her own heart till she’s had a smell o’ danger.”

  “She shouldn’t have took Ethan’s teacups,” the other reminded her.

  “Maybe not,” observed Hepsa, “but I tell you love’s got nothin’ to do with chinaware, if my own flesh an’ blood did fetch ’em back to her.”

  But there was no more talk of love that night under the Jordan roof. Darkness was on them even before the three men and young Andrew Stanley came up from the shore. They kept watch by turns at the two seaward-facing windows, straining their eyes against the darkness for any sudden flare. That was to be the signal in case of need, for to fire a musket would be foolhardy and a waste of precious gunpowder as well.

  “They’ll keep to the house till morning,” Seth said. “I told ’em not to risk unbankin’ the fires. Those Injuns have got noses a mile long.”

  “Queer we don’t hear that dog o’ theirs bark,” remarked Aunt Hepsa. “Some nights when it’s still like this I can hear him real plain across the channel, an’ he’d likely make a rumpus when they landed.”

  Jacob and Patty began to cry again at this, and though Marguerite did her best to comfort them, she also felt grave misgivings. She would have preferred to stay in the kitchen with the men and older women, but the children must be kept from under foot and she climbed with them into the loft where Ethan and Seth usually slept. It was shadowy up there, but snug under the low rafters. Aunt Hepsa had given them some old quilts to spread on the floor since the two beds would not hold them all. The twins and Kate Stanley whispered together for a long time, but at last their breathing grew quiet and they slept. William Stanley and Jacob were also asleep in the other bed, and Patty, curled up in a quilt beside her on the floor, had finally stopped her low whimpering.

  But Marguerite could not do likewise. Every nerve in her body was alert, taut as the strings on Seth Jordan’s fiddle. She tried to close her eyes, but that was no use. She must open them again to see the chinks of light coming between knotholes and cracks in the floorboards. Her ears, too, were strained to hear any words of the low-voiced talk going on in the room below. Once she heard Debby give a low wail and Aunt Hepsa go into the pantry to fetch her a drink of milk. Sometimes the muskets thumped on wooden boards as the men changed places at the windows. Sometimes she heard another log being thrown on the fire and a quick sizzling as the flames caught at the bark. Once she recognized Abby Welles’ voice in the talk below, and she wondered what she had said and what she must be feeling. She found herself thinking of Ira and the red ear of corn, though that seemed to have happened years ago, as if it were part of Le Havre or the days before they left Marblehead. Of course, she told herself, it couldn’t really mean all that they had said. Abby must have loved Ira before she, Marguerite, had slipped it into his hand, yet it had all turned out so queerly, just like a book or an old ballad. Maybe there would be a song about it sometime, even as there was about the Calico Bush; and people would sing it
long after they were all dead and gone. But romances and ballads were apt to be sad at the end. It mustn’t be like that for Ira and Abby Welles. Le Bon Dieu must have it explained to Him how important it was that the Indians should stay away from their house. It meant so much to them all as well as to Ira and Abby. Surely if He knew about those logs and how hard it had been to cut and drag and set them in place, He would not be so cruel as to let harm come to them. She began to pray desperately there in the darkness, a queer mixture of Latin and French and such English as she could muster.

  “O, Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Regina Coelorum,” she prayed, “let not the savages do us harm! Bon Dieu et les Saints en gloire, send them away from these parts before there is bloodshed, je Te prie. Spare all our lives, and the house too, please. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina. O, Lord, make haste to help me!”

  Over and over she repeated it, counting it on her fingers as she had her old rosary prayers. Ten times, twenty times, thirty times, forty times, and then fifty. Soon it would reach a hundred and that could not fail to help.

  She awoke to sunlight slanting through a small window shaped like an eyebrow under the eaves. So it was morning again. She had fallen asleep in the midst of her prayers, and the children still slept in heaps about her under Aunt Hepsa’s quilts. She could hear the fire snapping below and someone stepping about the kitchen. Softly she slid out of the quilt folds so as not to rouse the children, and down the steep, ladder-like stairs. Aunt Hepsa was moving about the kitchen, and Abby Welles stood at the table setting out dishes. She gave Marguerite a rather wan smile, and her eyes looked as if she had not slept all through the night. There were no signs of the men and their muskets. Aunt Hepsa explained in a whisper that they had already eaten and were setting out for the point. The log house was still standing, Marguerite could see that in the early morning light. Their eyes met in relief over this.

  “Let ’em sleep a spell longer,” the old woman whispered, nodding in the direction of the bedroom. “They didn’t have a wink till the sun came up, and heaven only knows what kind of a day we may be in for.”

  But it turned out not so disastrous as they had feared. The party returning to the house the night before had been unmolested. The chief loss, it developed, was old Brindle and her calf. They had been taken from the shed along with a bag of meal. Evidently Pumpkin had defended the place to the best of his powers. There were paw marks in the soft earth thereabouts, and, alas, traces of blood farther up the trail. Judging by the smell of the smoke in the woods there had been roast meat—little chance that they would ever see the poor animals again. What troubled them all now was fear of another sally from the woods.

  “They’ll be just fit for a fight with all that fresh meat inside ’em,” Seth said. “You’d best leave the women an’ young ones on the Island a spell.”

  But Joel Sargent was against this. He sensed his neighbors’ disapproval, and he was not one to ask favors. They did not say so much to his face, but he guessed what they were thinking and that they blamed him bitterly behind his back.

  “We’ll make out,” he told them the next noon when they had all landed on the point, even Marguerite and the younger children in the last boatload from Sunday Island. “The baby’s old enough to live without cow’s milk, an’ between us Ira an’ me can hold off quite a pack of Injuns.”

  “If we hear firing we’ll come straight across to you,” Seth promised.

  “Looks like a storm anyhow,” Timothy Welles added, squinting off to the Mount Desert hills, which barely showed in a grayish blur, “an’ that means they’d keep under cover till it’s past.”

  “It’s my opinion this wasn’t any regular band of the Tarratines,” Nathan Welles added. “More likely some three or four on their way north, run out o’ food an’ helped themselves to yours.”

  “All the same,” put in Dolly Sargent, “we’ll keep well indoors till the danger’s over. Better lose the cows ’n any of our scalps.”

  Timothy Welles was right about the storm. Clouds were piling up to the east and north, and the sea was growing rough. No time to waste in talk if the men were to get home before it set in. So off they went in different directions, their boats dwindling to specks on the heaving slategray water.

  “I declare I can’t bring myself to watch ’em out of sight,” said Dolly, turning into the house. “Who knows what may happen afore they come again?”

  By late afternoon the storm had settled into a steady northeast blow with rain driving furiously against the log house, pouring in miniature cascades off the roof. They had closed the outer wooden shutters against it, so what light there was came from the fire. In spite of four great logs and the handfuls of cones they added from time to time, it burned badly. Rain pelted down the chimney, sending smoke into the room and making fitful splutterings.

  “Smoke’s in my eyes,” complained Patty, rubbing them with her fists till they were red. “It smarts!”

  “Yours ain’t the only ones that do,” Caleb told her crossly. “I can’t hardly see to whittle this spoon I’m makin’, they keep waterin’ so.”

  “It is well the good Sisters taught me to knit without looking at my needles,” Marguerite told the children, her fingers busy with the wool, “for I should certainly drop many stitches because of these tears.”

  “You’re lucky if you don’t shed no worse ones,” came from Dolly as she rocked Debby in the old cradle.

  Ira paid little heed to them. He seemed busy with his own thoughts, which Marguerite guessed had much to do with Abby Welles and all that had taken place at the cornshelling. Joel sat moodily hollowing part of a spruce trunk to make a water barrel. He looked tired from anxiety and lack of sleep. He had grown a rough, grayish brown beard that summer, which made him look years older, so Marguerite thought, than when they had all set off from Marblehead.

  “We’ve got but four o’ the sixteen hens we fetched with us,” he was saying to his wife. “Three we lost to other wild birds, an’ the Injuns must have helped themselves to the rest. It’s a wonder these escaped.”

  “There’ll be precious few eggs this winter,” she sighed, “an’ what with Brindle an’ the calf gone I don’t see how we’re to make out.”

  “You’ll never starve so near the sea,” he reminded her. “It’s never so bad but what we can get fish an’ birds.”

  They talked but little as they ate supper round the fire. The cornmeal pudding was scorched, but Dolly gave them each a dipping from the molasses piggin.

  “While it lasts,” she had said, “we may as well take what comfort we can get.”

  Her gloom and Joel’s anxiety seemed to settle on the room like a heavy film. Marguerite felt suddenly old and tired, as far removed from the girl who had danced to Seth Jordan’s fiddle as if that had been fifty years ago and not the day before. A score of taunting remarks that Caleb had made to her of late came back to prick painfully at her mind. “You—why, you’re next thing to an Injun,” he had flung at her again and again. “You’re French!” She sighed and tried to put the memory from her by forcing her fingers faster at the knitting.

  And then, out of the noise of the storm, there came another sound outside the door—a faint scratching, and then the thud of something flung against the logs. They all started up, listening.

  “Something is trying to get in!” cried Marguerite.

  “That’s right,” came from Ira. “It’s at the other side now.”

  “Pumpkin!” Jacob sprang up from the floor where he had been lying half-asleep, “Pumpkin’s come back!”

  “Can’t be—he’d bark,” said Caleb.

  They all followed Ira to the door while he unbolted it a crack and peered out, taking care to keep one hand on his musket.

  “Watch out!” Dolly told them sharply. “You keep away from that door.”

  But there was no need of her warning, for suddenly a yellow head was poked through the narrow opening, and a thin and dripping Pumpkin wriggled in between’s Ira’s legs.

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p; “Pumpkin! I knew ’twas Pumpkin!” cried Jacob, flinging his arms about the dog’s wet fur.

  “Pauvre chien! Pauvre chien!” Marguerite was on her knees beside him.

  He had started towards them bravely enough with tail waving, but he fell exhausted at Marguerite’s feet, the ribs showing sharply under his water-soaked coat. In an instant she had taken his head into her lap, and her hands were busied with the matted fur.

  “Quick,” she told the children, “get me water and—and a knife. No,” as Jacob cried out at this,” “no, I shall not harm him, but he is hurt. See what they have done to him!”

  No wonder he had not been able to bark. His jaws were tightly bound together with stout leather thongs. His muzzle showed raw and bloody where he had tried to paw them loose. Besides this an ugly open gash showed in his side, and the fur about his neck was half rubbed away as if from trying to slip a noose.

  “Poor old fellow,” said Ira. “He looks as if they’d ’most done for him.”

  The children stood about crying, and Marguerite felt tears in her own already smarting eyes.

  “Look,” Jacob cried between sobs. “He’s waggin’ of his tail—he’s tryin’ to.”

  “Well, he’s got home anyhow,” Caleb was saying with unusual show of feeling. “There, now I’ve got those leather bands off’n him, he can drink.”

  But the dog’s tongue was too swollen with thirst for him to move it. Marguerite dipped water in her hands and let it trickle down his throat, and he rolled his eyes up to her gratefully.

  Dolly seemed almost as much moved by Pumpkin’s return as the children. She brought out some of the salve Aunt Hepsa had given them for Jacob’s cut and a few hoarded scraps of cloth to bind up his wounds.

  “Wisht I had some milk to give him,” Becky said.

  “He needs more’n milk,” Ira answered, returning from the cupboard with the metal flask he always wore slung over one shoulder when he went on hunting expeditions. He poured a little from this down the dog’s throat, and it seemed to revive him somewhat.