Calico Bush

by Rachel Field

  “It’s a wonder to me, though,” said Ira, “why they wouldn’t go outside the islands, unless maybe they’re in some kind of trouble an’ need to put in along the way.”

  As it turned out this was exactly the case. Before night the ship was riding anchor in their channel, while the Sargents trooped down to the cove in an excited little group to meet the boatload of men who rowed in. She was a fine, three-masted vessel, with square-cut sails of new canvas, and her name in clear letters along the stern—Fortunate Star. But she had not lived up to her name, for already, less than two days out, one of her crew had fallen while climbing aloft to take in sail and suffered painful injury. So the men explained after they had beached their boat. They had come to fill their buckets with fresh water and to see if there was any able-bodied man ashore who would take their mate’s place on the voyage to Boston. They would anchor in the Channel that night and be off with the tide in the morning. Marguerite, standing with the children on the outskirts of the little group, saw Ira’s face light up in quick response and a look of relief pass between him and Joel and Dolly.

  “I’ll go with you gladly,” he told the men eagerly.

  “We’re carrying lumber to be delivered to His Majesty’s agents,” one of the others explained. “The vessel’s loaded with the finest pine masts for the Royal Navy.”

  “And they’ve need of ’em too,” put in another, “for fighting these pesky French and Indians.”

  Caleb might have taken this occasion to make one of his unpleasant remarks about Marguerite’s nationality had it not been that he was absorbed in other matters. Ever since Ira had volunteered to go he had been drawing nearer, his freckled face puckered with anxiety over the proposal he was about to make. At last he blurted it out.

  “What about takin’ me too?” he asked, his voice squeaky with hopefulness. “I can climb the riggin’ an’ box the compass an’—”

  Shouts of hearty laughter from the men cut him short, and Marguerite saw him grow scarlet to the roots of his red hair.

  “What do you say, boys?” one of the older men was asking the rest with an amused twinkle in his eye. “Reckon we could use a boy?”

  “You needn’t give me no wages,” Caleb urged them. “I’ll work my hands an’ feet off to go.”

  “You can come along back an’ talk to the master ’bout it,” they told him. “That is, if your folks’ll let you.”

  Joel hesitated at first, but Ira took Caleb’s side. He maintained there would be two of them to fetch back supplies from Boston. Besides, it was a chance for the boy to gain seafaring experience on a first-class vessel. Caleb listened to this discussion of his fate, shifting his weight from one bare foot to the other while he waited for the word to be given. Joel had counted on help from Ira and Caleb that spring, and now the possibility of losing them both at once presented grave difficulties. Of course, he vowed, Ira must go. It was too good a chance to get the much-needed ammunition and stores, but Caleb, if he remained, could be very helpful in plowing and sowing. On the other hand, such an opportunity might not come the boy’s way again.

  “Well, I won’t stand in your way,” his father told him at last. “Go, if you’re a mind to.”

  “I’m a goin’!” Caleb sang out eagerly when he and Ira returned from the vessel later. “The master says if I do my work well I’m to be paid in silver same’s the rest when the cargo’s unloaded.”

  His face was glowing, and he seemed to have grown inches taller as he stood before them with his announcement. Already it was as if he were removed from Marguerite and the round-eyed half-sisters and brother who would stay behind.

  “He’ll be grown up when he comes back,” she thought with a queer twinge of envy, “’most a man.”

  It was strange in the log house and clearing when Ira and Caleb had sailed away on the Fortunate Star. It seemed especially quiet and empty after all the bustle of their last preparations. Dolly and Marguerite had mended their few patched articles of clothing, and Caleb had amazed Marguerite by entrusting to her care his drying squirrel skins and the little vessel he had carved from wood that winter.

  “You watch out for ’em for me, Maggie,” he had said, “an’ I’ll fetch you a token from Boston.”

  They had been gone a week, and now it was Marguerite who went each morning to Ira’s post by the door to scratch another day lest they lose count. It pleased her to do this, to carry on Ira’s custom, so that he should find it all in good order when he returned.

  “Soon it will be the first of May,” she told the children. “In Le Harve and all over France there will be dancing and merrymaking.”

  “What for will there be such doin’s?” the twins questioned her as she sat with them on the doorstep.

  “In honor of the spring,” she explained, “and in England also, I have heard.”

  “Yes,” Dolly joined in with unexpected volubility from indoors. “Many’s the time I’ve heard my folks tell of it. They were out o’ Somerset where there was a Maypole an’ dancin’ an’ a Jack o’ the Green every year.”

  “We had Maypoles too,” Marguerite went on in eager reminiscence. “Oncle Pierre would play, and I have myself danced with the others and helped to braid the colored ribbons.”

  The children could not hear enough of this. They pressed Marguerite and their mother for more details, hanging on their every word.

  “Couldn’t we have one here?” Becky asked. “There’s that pole out on the point, and Maggie would show us how to dance round it.”

  But such an idea was not encouraged. “Mercy, whoever heard o’ such a thing?” Dolly exclaimed. “Haven’t we got plenty to do plantin’ an’ findin’ enough food to fill our stomachs every day without you must raise a Maypole too?”

  “Besides,” added Marguerite, “there must be bright streamers to weave about it, and we have none.”

  “Maybe Aunt Hepsa would give us some,” urged Susan. “She’s got lots o’ colored cloth in her weavin’ shed.”

  “You’d best not let your father hear such talk,” warned their mother. “It’s time you were all helpin’ him, not gabbin’ away on the doorstep.”

  Even Marguerite and the children had been pressed into the work of planting. The plowing was only half-done when Ira had left, so Joel must continue this heavy work and the stump-pulling alone. Sometimes the twins were set to work with a homemade wooden rake and hoe, getting out stones, sticks, and snags of root from the earth. These tools were clumsy and too large for the children’s hands, so Marguerite often helped when she was not following Joel along the furrows he turned with such pains. They had a little corn left for seeding, and Seth had given them some barley and a few potatoes to be cut and planted. Joel showed the girl how to drop the corn and seeds in carefully, counting each one as if it were a nugget of gold. Up and down she went at his bidding, her bare feet treading the damp, chill soil. There was to be another planting when the Fortunate Star brought Ira and Caleb and the new supplies, but meantime they must raise an early crop if all the mouths were to be fed before cold set in. Sometimes at the end of these days the girl ached from head to foot with all the tramping and bending. She was slight and wiry, but this was work for a man or a half-grown boy.

  Still it was beautiful out there in the strong spring sunshine. Marguerite marveled at the swiftness with which the seasons changed in this northerly place. At home in France spring had come after a more leisurely fashion, but here, almost overnight it seemed, the earth turned from bleakness to vehement green. One day patches of snow and brown earth, and the next wild flowers under foot, and bushes of blossoming shadblow white in the woods. Already there were little new leaves on the appletree grafts and bayberry filling the air with spiciness from its fresh and springing green. Soon, Marguerite knew, there would be blue flags in the swampy land and then daisies to remind her of her true name.

  “Everything makes haste in this place,” she told herself as she went about her work. “I do believe that even the birds sing more and the fl
owers put on brighter colors because the season is so brief.”

  Whether this was true or not, Joel meant that it should be so on his part. Dolly rebuked him sometimes for working so hard and late. She could not get him to leave his patch of cleared land while there was so much as a ray of light to see by. He plowed and dug and chopped with a kind of fierce tirelessness. It was as if he had ceased to feel anything but the need to pour all his strength into the task before him. A curious light was in his eyes, which had sunk more deeply into their hollows after the hardships of the winter months. His back stayed stooped when he returned to the log house at night as if he had forgotten how to straighten it. Sometimes Marguerite heard Dolly remonstrating with him, begging him to pause a moment for rest or to take the snack of food she carried out to him.

  “You can’t go on this way, Joe,” she would say. “No man can do the work o’ three without killin’ himself.”

  But he would only shake his head grimly as he stood gulping the food and water she brought, his knotty brown hands so numb with gripping ax and crowbar that he could scarcely bend them to take what she held out.

  “I’ve got to raise a good crop,” he would answer, pushing the damp hair off his forehead. “Everything depends on that an’ clearin’ more land.”

  “I guess things can’t never again be so bad as this year,” she tried to encourage him. “Don’t see how they could be if the Injuns just hold off.”

  Instinctively Dolly lowered her voice as she spoke. They all did now if they used the name. There had been quiet for so many months, but it was after just such a spell of peace that an attack might follow without so much as a sign of warning. Marguerite knew this, and that the dread of a raid was on them each night as they lay down to sleep. There had been less chance of it during the months of ice and cold, but with river and wood ways open, all the old fears were renewed. Besides, as she well remembered, on that first meeting Seth Jordan had spoken of spring as a bad time. That was when they had come before and burned down Flint’s house. What would they say, she wondered, if they could know of her strange meeting with an Indian on Christmas Eve?

  She often went out in the skiff with the children to catch fresh fish. There were plenty near shore in the channel waters, and even Patty and Jacob were now skillful at baiting their hooks and bringing up cod and haddock. They caught flounder, too, and silvery pollock, and by using a net and stick of Caleb’s inventing they could often pull up lobsters and crabs. At low tide they often went to the little inlet on the other side of their eastern point, where they could dig clams for Dolly to cook into chowder or bake in seaweed to be eaten out of their shells.

  “That’s how the Injun’s do it,” Susan remarked the first time they tried this method. “Aunt Hepsa, she says there’s old heaps over on Sunday Island where they used to come.”

  “Well, just so long’s they keep away from here, I don’t care how or where they eat their clams,” said her mother from the fire.

  The fresh food gave them all better appetites, as did the work in the sea air. By early May the children all began to look sturdier again and to have their old color and freckles. Dolly got out all her pieces and began contriving how to make them larger dresses and how to lengthen Marguerite’s old holland. But turn and twist as best she could, there was no making extra yards to keep pace with their growing bodies.

  “I declare if you young ones keep on this way,” she sighed one night, “I’ll be put to making one decent dress, an’ the rest of you can stay indoors whilst one’s wearin’ it.”

  But before that happened, there were new cares to fill her mind, for Joel stumbled on a rooty snag just as he sprang away from a tree he was felling. Thrown to his knees, he was not able to clear the trunk as it crashed down, pinning him fast by one leg. He was not within hailing distance of the house, and so it was only Pumpkin’s barking that brought the others to him. At first the children paid no heed to the dog’s leaps and whimperings, but finally his tugs at Dolly’s apron and his short starts towards the woods made them suspicious. They found Joel unconscious, and it was only by their combined tuggings that they were able to free his leg from the fallen tree.

  Dolly and Marguerite scarcely spoke while they worked. They made no replies to the children’s frightened questions, and it was only when they heard him begin to groan that they dared pause to wipe his face of its sweat and dirt. He was a heavy man for all his gauntness, and it seemed to the girl that they would never get him back to the house though it was hardly a quarter of a mile distant. They had to crawl along, Marguerite supporting his injured leg and moving backwards, while Dolly grasped him firmly under the armpits and guided them over the rough places.

  The children she sent on to make the bed ready and set the kettle to heat. It was almost dark when they got him under the covers. Marguerite volunteered to row over and fetch Hepsa Jordan at once, but Dolly would not hear of it at such an hour and with no man to help her. So between them they did what they could to ease Joel of his pain. He was conscious now, for the moving had roused him with every jolt. They bathed a great bruise on one side of his head under his lank, matted hair, and washed away the blood and dirt from his leg. It was badly crushed and evidently broken in more than one spot for already the bone rose in several ugly lumps.

  “If we don’t get that in splints tonight those bones’ll likely come through the flesh,” said Dolly, practical even in her despair. “You go fetch me two flat pieces o’ wood, Maggie, as smooth an’ thin as you can find, while I lay this witchhazel water on.”

  Down in the cove Marguerite remembered to have seen pieces of wood worn smooth and thin from sea and sun. She sped over the path and stones and from one driftwood pile to another, seeking the finest of these. At last she had two of a proper size and smoothness and back she hurried to help Dolly bind them on over the wrappings of wet linen. Dolly had sacrificed one of her treasured dowry sheets for this, there being nothing left to use since Debby’s burns. Joel was talking now, a faint, feverish jargon that caused the children to peer at him with more than their usual awe.

  “He’s out o’ his head with the pain,” said Dolly as they lashed the homemade splints tight with leather thongs. “There, Joe, don’t take on so,” she added, taking his hand between hers, “we won’t touch it no more.”

  Marguerite left them together while she went to prepare the supper. The children must eat, and there was herb tea to be brewed from a dried bunch Aunt Hepsa had given them. Perhaps, she thought, this would ease him enough to make him sleep.

  Ever since Debby’s accident there had been an agreement that a white sheet hung out from the old pole on the point would be a sign to the Jordans on Sunday Island that help was needed. Already it was too dark for this, and next morning when Marguerite woke she saw with dismay that fog had come in from open sea blotting out even the nearer ledges. Sunday Island might have been a hundred miles distant with this chill gray wall between them.

  “If only Caleb were here,” she thought as she rose to peer out at the damp and dripping trees beyond the window panes; “or that I had learned to use the compass!”

  It was not enough that she could pull the oars sturdily. She and Dolly both knew the dangers of setting out in a fog with only one’s feelings for guide. People could row in circles for hours on end; and worse than that, they might head straight for open sea and come to grief on dangerous reefs.

  “There’s nothin’ for it but to tend him the best way we can till it clears,” Dolly Sargent told her. “He’s ’most crazy with the pain, but we’ve got to keep that splint on firm if the bone’s to knit.”

  Marguerite could hear Joel groaning and moving restlessly on the bed in the next room while she made the children’s breakfast and tried to keep them from being too noisy. When she carried a bowl of hasty pudding in to him it seemed unbelievable to see him lying there so weak and feverish, laid low as completely as one of the great spruces his ax had so often felled. His eyes were bright in their dark sockets, his lips parch
ed, and he called for water continually.

  “What’s the day?” he asked her querulously as she was slipping away from his bedside.

  “It is the ninth of May,” she told him. “I have but just been out to scratch another mark on the post.”

  “The ninth o’ May,” he murmured faintly; “so late, and so much still to be done. Here I lie, an’ Ira an’ Caleb can’t be back for a fortnight at best.”

  He turned his face away with another low groan, and Marguerite, being unable to think of any remark to give him comfort, went back to the fire and the children. She had her hands full between them and the fire and cooking, for Dolly must stay by Joel’s bed to keep him quiet and put fresh compresses of witchhazel water on the swellings around the splints. Marguerite and the children fetched wood and water and fished or dug clams at low tide by turns. Never had a day seemed so long, or a fog so heavy and determined.

  “Ain’t it goin’ to clear, Maggie?” Jacob asked a dozen times before it turned dark.

  “It can’t till this east wind shifts,” Susan would answer. “You’d ought to know that by this time.”

  “The gulls know it,” Marguerite pointed out. “See how they sit facing the east so that their feathers shall not be blown the wrong way. It was even so in Le Havre along the quay when the fog was in. But,” she found herself giving a discouraged sigh, “I do not think there were ever such fogs as these.”

  In spite of all that Dolly could do, Joel Sargent’s fever increased as the day wore on. Toward evening he began to wander in his mind and to talk in half-delirious fragments that were frightening to hear. Sometimes he shouted orders to Ira and Caleb about the chopping and plowing, and sometimes he started up in bed, reaching for his musket and insisting that he heard Indians about. Pumpkin lay by the bedroom door, his head raised in a plaintive, puzzled way, uttering low whimperings when the sick man grew especially excited.

  “He knows Pa’s hurt bad,” Jacob pointed out. “If he could swim as far as he can run I guess he’d go after Aunt Hepsa.”