Drums Along the Mohawk

by Walter D. Edmonds

  “Where is it, Gil?”

  “Casler’s. Fetch the children in here, Lana, and keep them on the floor, near the fireplace. They ain’t near us, yet. Joe’s outside, watching.”

  In the house the firing was the faintest tapping of the air. A woodpecker would have made more noise.

  Joe came in silent and quick.

  “There’s about twenty-five or six of them. Indians. Three whites.”

  “Aren’t you going to help the Caslers?”

  “There’s too many of them. It wouldn’t do any good my going to the fort, either. Put the fire out. Maybe they ain’t noticed our smoke. Maybe they’ll forget about this house. No, don’t use water. Get some manure out of the barn, and bury it. Don’t look like that, Lana. They aren’t any of them over here, I’m pretty sure. By the time I went to the fort for help, them destructives will have done all the killing possible down there. The thing we want is not to be noticed by them. I’m calculating they’ll hear the racket over to Eldridge’s. Mrs. McKlennar.”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  “Can you load guns?”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  “I know Lana can. You two will have to load. Ain’t I seen two pistols somewheres round here?”

  “My husband’s. I’ll fetch them. If they get close enough I can shoot them better than either of you. I used to practise.” Her face colored and her lips set.

  “I bet,” said Joe. “Gil! You cover that fire with the manure and then bank the edges with the ashes. That way you won’t get smoke. Pack it right down. How much water have we got in here?”

  “There’s the washtubs.”

  “By God, what luck! Having a raid on wash day!” He chuckled. “I’ll just take another look outside and see what’s doing and fetch in a couple pails of water to drink. I don’t think they’ll come over this way, but we’re pretty well fixed if they do.”

  He slipped out of the front door. Gil finished banking the fire. For a minute all the people in the room were quite still. In their silence, like a faint far patting of the air, another burst of shooting sounded. Lana’s face seemed to draw in on itself and her eyes grew dark and still. She sat down suddenly on the floor and caught the two children onto her lap and looked up at her husband. It came to Gil that it was all a dream, a nightmare, and pretty soon he would wake up and find the three years’ dreaming was only the space between cockcrow and milking. He went out on the porch to cover Joe’s return from the well.

  Joe was standing in the open, a bucket in each hand. He heard Gil come out and said, without turning his head, “Take in these buckets.” As Gil relieved him he picked up his rifle. But he kept watching all the time across the river. When Gil returned, Joe’s speech followed the crack of a rifle.

  “I know that feller. He shoots left-handed. The skinny one, see. He sticks his head out forward after he shoots and drops his left shoulder.”

  “Who is he, Joe?”

  “Suffrenes Casselman. I’ve heard him swear before he quit Fairfield that he’d get his uppings back out of German Flats.”

  It was no dream.

  The Fairfield Scotch had always bitterly resented the fact that the Palatines held all the rich river flat land.

  It was easy to follow all that was taking place across the river. There were at least two dozen Indians surrounding Casler’s, and though they kept under cover from the house some of them were in open view of anyone at McKlennar’s. They kept firing at the window. The paper panes were already torn away by bullets. But now and then from a chink in the logs a dull yellow-red stab pricked out and the valiant roar of Casler’s old musket sounded over the other guns. As soon as it had fired, the Indians crept up nearer to the house. They were quite close already. Their bodies left long winding uneven trenches in the wet snow.

  Under the firing the body of the little girl retained its motionless, crumpled posture.

  Suddenly a couple of Indians sprang up to the corner of the cabin with two bundles of dry brush and laid them against the logs. They leaped back at once, but one of them stumbled, and the roar of the old musket showed that Casler had managed to find one bull’s-eye. They saw the Indian behind the brush hopping around and around holding onto his arm. All the Indians yelled, and three of them rushed up to the brush, carrying lighted splinters. They ducked down immediately and ran back to the cover.

  Gil turned his eyes towards Eldridge Blockhouse. It seemed incredible to him that no one had yet heard the firing. Joe said, “The air’s drawing straight from the south.” When Gil looked back to the cabin, the brush was smoking. A small flame ran up several twigs, zigzag, and leaped out into the air. Then all the brush caught and blazed. It was like a picture of fire. The Indians whooped again; their shrill voices, that seemed hardly human to a white man’s ear, were like birds’ voices.

  “The cabin’s caught. I didn’t think it would be so dry.” Joe was leaning on his rifle, resting his chin on his left wrist. “I wonder will they stick it out. Or make a break for it.”

  The rising force of the fire tossed large loose flames up against the eaves, and suddenly they laid hold of the bark roof. The sheaths curled up, revealing the rafter poles, and the fire swept up to the rooftree and strained into space. The encircling group of Indians drew in on the cabin.

  At the same instant the dull thud of the swivel in Eldridge Blockhouse struck the valley, and a heavy somnambulant cloud of black smoke hung in the window of the spy loft. A moment later the thud was repeated from Herkimer Fort; and then, almost at once, but louder, from one of the three-pounders on Fort Dayton.

  The Indians in view of the two men at McKlennar’s wheeled to stare towards the forts. Then they lifted their muskets and yelled.

  “Herkimer can’t send any men till the sugaring party gets back,” said Joe. “If they send any out from Dayton, they’ll come down this side.”

  Gil found himself shaking. He remembered how he had felt watching the Indians chase the three women at Andrustown, but this time his conviction of horror could not escape fulfillment.

  The end happened abruptly. For some moments there had been no shooting from the house. Now, suddenly, he and Joe saw Casler jumping out round the corner of the house. He had his musket held in front of him and he fired as soon as he stopped. It was impossible to tell whether he had hit anyone. Things happened too fast. As soon as he had fired he ran straight at the concealed Indians, who knelt with leveled guns. They let him get just to the bushes before shooting him. Immediately they swarmed all over him. It was impossible to see him under the pile of Indians. Then the Indians drew apart and one of them gave a loud yell and raised his hand.

  At the same time, in the snowy field behind the trees, Mrs. Casler appeared, running clumsily with the baby in her arms, while her younger daughter clung to the back of her petticoat. About a hundred yards behind the child five or six Indians, dark lean shapes, ran easily in the path beaten down by the woman and the child. They overtook them without haste. The first one caught the little girl by the back of the neck and raised his hatchet. The woman kept running. The Indian who was now leading leaped clear of the snow and landed hard on her back. They went down together almost buried by the snow. The Indian was like a dog worrying a sheep. He rose up on all fours and got to his feet and held up his hand. The sunlight caught his hand, reflecting on the inside of the scalp. The woman’s long hair surrounded his arm.

  In the sunset the militia marched down both sides of the river. The Dayton men stopped at the McKlennar house, but Joe and Gil had already crossed to join those from Herkimer.

  They had seen the destructives band beyond the house and take a straight path to the hills, striking for Springfield. Joe led forty men on their beaten trail, but there was no chance of catching them with the half hour’s start they had. The Indians could outrun militia any day.

  Gil stayed long enough to help gather the bodies. They buried them near the house, where the earth was thawed—Mrs. Casler and the two little girls and Casler, all scalped, all with th
e same lost faces that scalped people had. Only the baby had not been scalped; he had no hair at all.

  2

  Deodesote

  Like all the other Seneca towns east of the Genesee River, Deodesote had been razed by the American army in September of the preceding year. Only one house remained, and that because it was not near the town, but down the Hemlock Lake Outlet, at the northwest corner of the wide-water pond. The pond was all shored with high hemlock timber hiding Gahota’s cabin, which was on the low ridge. Behind the cabin, where the evergreens gave way to leaf trees, the small field that his wife worked was open to the sun, a hidden place, warm and well-drained.

  The squaw had finished planting the corn. The hills stood in rows of patted mounds. She gathered up her basket and her wooden hoe and stared happily at the work she had done. Her own field: her own corn would soon pierce the brown earth; her own squash and pumpkin vines invade the soil between, lacing the whole together; her own beans climb the growing cornstalks. Beans, corn, and squash—the three sisters, Gahota called them.

  Though the time of terror and famine had gone by, no other Indians had returned to Deodesote. Gahota said they would not return. The heavy passage of the army had rolled them irretrievably into the west. But Gahota and Nancy, and the baby, Jerry Log-in-the-Water, and the baby to be born, could all live where they were.

  Nancy straightened her back proudly: Gahota would hunt them meat and fish them fish; but it was she who would earn them their indispensable provender of grain. The field was a large one and well hoed. Gahota had grunted and stopped to look at it when he passed it yesterday, and Nancy had been able to tell from his brown lined face that he was satisfied with her.

  Her back had rounded slightly, and there was a pad of fleshy muscle across her shoulders. In her doeskin clothes she looked larger than she used to. But her face was as pink and white, her eyes as blue, and her yellow hair fell in two thick braids to the joints of her hips. She left her field like a goddess of earth, placidly secure in her awareness of fruition.

  When she reached the cabin, Gahota was sitting beside the door coiling his fish line, with four trout on a pile of ferns before him.

  “What big ones!” Nancy said.

  Gahota grunted. She passed into the cabin. It had no chimney, only the circular fireplace of stones on the earth floor, and the small opening in the roof above it. All the ceiling was blackened, shiny, and offering a faint bitter smell of soot. In the corner, where she and Gahota slept, the baby was poking his fingers through the eyeholes of the bearskin, laughing the while with long, soft, rich gurgles. He shouted when he saw his mother, rose up on his unsteady legs, and followed his stomach towards her.

  She took him by the hand to lead him out and, gathering up the four trout, went down to the lake to clean them for dinner. Gahota found himself a sunny spot against a tree bole and stretched out.

  Squatting at the water’s edge, Nancy opened the fish with deft slices of her knife, while her son, imitating her, sat suddenly in the shallow water. The splash and the chill made him raise furious wails to the four winds; but Nancy laughed, and let him yell.

  A hail across the lake caused her to lift her eyes. She saw at first only the surrounding hemlock trees, with their breathless reflections an inverted forest, and the clear sheet where the Onehda entered the wide water in the south. Beside this stream early azaleas coming into bloom gave a first hint of their clear pink, so ineffably soft that even the untouched crystal of the lake had failed to capture it.

  Waist-deep in the azaleas, some men were standing.

  “Gahota. Come.” Nancy’s voice was quiet, untroubled.

  She heard her husband’s feet pad down behind her. He stood over her, his shadow falling across her bent back, shading his eyes.

  “Nundawaono,” he said. He lifted his arm and called.

  “Who is that?”

  “Gahota. You come.”

  The men disappeared back into the woods. Nancy finished cleaning the four trout and followed Gahota back to the cabin, the baby tumbling along behind like a hungry puppy.

  “Nine come,” Gahota said to her. He got his pipe and tobacco and sat down at the threshold, leaving her to gather wood and start the pot cooking. Luckily there were three rabbits and the quarter of the fawn.

  Outside the door she heard the men arrive and squat and talk in the Indian language. But they did not say much for a while, and what they did say failed to interest her.

  When she had finished the stew she carried the pot outdoors and set it down before the men. There were nine of them, as Gahota had said, six Senecas, three white men. One of the white men wore a brown coat and battered pants. He had a lean jutting throat from which his small head pointed like a turkey cock’s. Nancy hardly noticed him. She glanced at the other two.

  One of them wore Indian clothes. His face was painted with remnants of vermilion and black, and his hair had been awkwardly stained. As she looked at him, he lifted his eyes from the steaming pot, and stared.

  “Nancy!”

  It was Hon.

  Nancy could not speak for several moments. Neither she nor Hon could find words. But the struck silence of their attitudes made the others look at them. Gahota grunted impatiently. A woman’s place was not here. Obediently Nancy turned to go.

  “It’s my sister, Nancy,” Hon said. “Don’t you remember me telling you about her?”

  “Her, who?” The third man licked his fingers.

  “The girl you had at Shoemaker’s.”

  “By God.” Jurry McLonis looked up. “I never noticed her.”

  Gahota was watching them with small inexpressive eyes. Nancy had just passed into the shadowed interior of the cabin, but there she turned and her white skin and blonde braids made a ghost of her, as if glimpsed in a twilight.

  McLonis rose.

  “It’s true,” he said. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Set down, you fool,” growled the third white man. “Can’t you see the Indian’s took her for a squaw?”

  “That ain’t right, Casselman,” exclaimed McLonis. “It’s bad business—Indians taking white women. Butler’s afraid of it at Niagara.”

  “Butler!” Suffrenes Casselman’s lean face became contemptuous. “Who talks about Butler now? The Indians won’t go with him any more since Sullivan licked them. Johnson don’t have anything to do with him. Let the Indians alone. It’s hard enough to get them to go with us.”

  “Maybe,” said McLonis. “But this girl’s Hon’s sister.”

  “Yes,” said Hon. “She’s my sister—Nancy.”

  Casselman snarled at them both. “Sit down.” He leaned forward and said in a lower voice: “Listen, you dumbheads. These buggers we got with us ain’t feeling any too good about us. They didn’t get no loot out of that house we burned, and the four scalps wasn’t enough to go round. You’d better not give them the chance to get mad at us.”

  The ever-present mistrust of Indians that most of the Tories felt, the knowledge that their scalps, delivered at Niagara, would look the same and fetch as much as any rebel’s, made even McLonis pull in his horns. He sat down in his faded green Ranger coat and stared back at the Indians. Their host was still watching him. Now he said something in Seneca over his shoulder and Nancy obediently closed the door. McLonis dropped his eyes and resumed his eating. It was not that he cared where she was, or who she was: it was just that the sight of her, her handsome pink-cheeked face and yellow hair and vacuous blue eyes, had reminded him of that hour behind Shoemaker’s barn; and he had been away in the woods now for eight weeks.

  Suffrenes Casselman explained to their host that Hon was his squaw’s brother, and had not seen her for two years. The Indian nodded understandingly. Such encounters were surprising to a man; he looked more closely at Hon. He realized that Hon was like Nancy, slightly touched.

  “You see your sister,” he suggested. “Yes?”

  Hon nodded.

  McLonis whispered to him, “Fetch her out. I’ll drop bac
k in the woods. We can take her with us, whatever Casselman thinks. If he don’t like it he can go by himself.”

  Before Hon moved, McLonis rose and wandered off into the woods. He went with studied aimlessness and the Indians paid no attention to him. Some men always went into the woods after a hearty meal.

  McLonis found a fallen tree and sat down on the trunk. The more he thought about her, the more fun he thought it would be to take her to Niagara. A lieutenant up from the ranks had to content himself with Indian girls. If anything better than Nancy came his way he could always hand her over to the privates. There’d be plenty of men anxious for a girl, with her looks, whatever her brain was like. He thought that they could kill a few days on the march back to Niagara. There was no hurry. They had to collect ammunition and round up another gang since the one they had taken east in March had fallen apart. Suffrenes wanted fifty men. He meant to wipe out Eldridge’s and the other outlying small forts, and if one of the promised expeditions materialized, he would plan to join it. A little fun before a campaign like that would hurt no man.

  McLonis sat on the fallen tree and cleaned his nails and thought he would buy her a dollar’s worth of dress goods. It would seem like a fortune to her after a year in that cabin. He had smelled it through the open door. It had the Indian reek. But she looked clean and healthy. She had a kind of perfection, he remembered, a kind of ripe apple roundness to her. It made him realize how eternally tired he was, how lonesome he was, month after month in the woods, with the inevitable return to the barracks and the Indian town and the long uncompromising level of the lake with its level shores, with the everlasting dinning of the falls. Leg-weary and heart-weary.

  Hon’s arrival startled McLonis.

  “Where’s Nancy?” he asked.

  Hon scuffed the hemlock needles with a moccasined toe.

  “She’s talking to Gahota,” he said. He looked ashamed.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I told her you wanted her to come with us. I said you would take her back to Niagara.”