Drums Along the Mohawk

by Walter D. Edmonds

  Mrs. McKlennar looked at Lana.

  “Do I seem like somebody who’s going crazy?”

  “No,” said Lana smilingly.

  “I am, though. Raving crazy. He’s making me.” She smiled in turn and went on, “Why don’t you take the children out? It would do all three of you good.”

  “Won’t you come with us?”

  “No, I’d like to just lie here and rest. You stay out till the cow comes in for milking. There’s no cooking to do with those four pans of beans all baked.”

  Lana saw that she wanted to be alone, so she put Gilly’s deerskin jacket on him, which made him think he looked like his father, and wrapped a blanket round the baby. The baby had thriven for all the moving they had done that summer. He lay like a great fat lump on her arms, as much as she could carry. He hadn’t been christened till the spring when, one day, Domine Rozencrantz had come by McKlennar’s; and they had named him Joseph Phillip, with Joe Boleo for a sponsor. Young Gilbert, however, had never seemed to make such flesh, and Lana thought it was due to a combination of the hard winter after Brant’s raid and her own milk’s giving out when he was still so young. The last was due no doubt to the prompt occupancy of herself by Joey; and at the time it had seemed to her a strange and unjust manifestation of Providence that she should lose her milk. But now that Gilly was becoming so hardy she found it easier to accept the ways of God.

  For Gilly was a tough little nugget, active as a young squirrel, and for all that he was only two and a half he was able to walk for quite a little way. And he seemed to take great satisfaction in going into the woods, which, of course, meant the sumacs behind the barn.

  Lana took the two children a little way up the slope, perhaps a hundred yards, to an open patch she had found one day, where the earth was smooth enough for the baby to tumble about unwatched. The patch was on the brow of the upland, and, there being no trees round about, the sumac leaves, all gold with bloody crimson tips, and the dark red tassels, seemed to touch the blue of the windy heavens overhead.

  The earth was fairly dry, even after the night’s rain. The sweep of the wind hushed everything. Sitting there, Lana found herself growing drowsy, and after a while she glanced round to make sure that the children were close by and then stretched out upon her back. The house was so near that she could hear any sound that might rise from below, and yet, for all that could be seen of it, it might be under the moon.

  Lana wondered briefly whether Mrs. McKlennar were having a decent rest. Then her eyelids slowly closed. The voice of the booming wind lulled her. Her face was almost girlish as she lay there, the pink whipped up in her cheeks by the wind, and her hair pulled forward under her cheek so that her mouth seemed in a nest.

  A few minutes later, Gilly lifted his sharp little face. He acted as if he had heard a sound—a hail from the Kingsroad, perhaps. His mother had stirred in her sleep and the little boy walked up to her and stared down gravely. He glanced at his brother, but his brother wasn’t much good at covering the ground, so Gilly, after another moment, walked unsteadily down the slope and into the forest of sumacs.…

  The hail he had heard had been young Fesser Cox riding his first dispatch from Fort Dayton. Colonel Klock had sent up word from Schenectady that Sir John Johnson had struck the Schoharie Valley with fifteen hundred men. The seventeenth he had laid waste eight miles of the Schoharie. On the eighteenth he had entered the Mohawk and turned west, burning both sides of the river. All people were warned to enter the forts. The militia at Stone Arabia were to stand before the ravaging army. General Robert Van Rensselaer was bringing the Albany militia up the valley to take him in the rear.

  Bellinger sent orders to the detail at McKlennar’s. It was at once to proceed to Ellis’s Mills at the falls and reënforce the garrison there. Fifty militia were about to march from Dayton and Herkimer to back up Colonel Brown at Stone Arabia or join Colonel Klock. A detail would be sent out in an hour to pick up the women at McKlennar’s and carry them to Eldridge’s, where the men would amplify the garrison of the blockhouse.

  Gustin Schimmel did not like it. But he believed in orders. He woke Mrs. McKlennar out of a sound nap and explained that the second detail was on the way and that they would be taken to Eldridge. He himself hated to leave Mrs. McKlennar like that, but it would not be for long. He would prefer to wait until the others arrived or take them himself to Eldridge’s, but there it was, plain orders.

  “Godsake, man!” cried the widow. “Get along.” (“And thank God it’s the last of you,” she thought, realizing that her cap was caught in the pins over one ear.)

  She had been having her first good nap in a long time, but when she awakened she realized suddenly how old she had become. She did not feel like getting up at all, and she thought she would stay where she was until Lana came in. Lana would be down in a moment and could help her with her things. It was hard to have to move again, when a woman began to feel old and tired. Hard to leave the house she had been happy in, so wildly happy sometimes.

  She thought of Barney. Barney in his dragoon coat. Barney coming home from the Masonic meeting where he and his friends had been pooling the scandal and news of the valley, Barney coming home slightly tipsy, though he might have ridden fifteen miles, and singing his favorite song—they said he sang it whenever the rum began to seep around a little in his enormous barrel. The words came back to Mrs. McKlennar with her memory of his flushed, handsome face.

  Oh, I love spice,

  I love things nice,

  And I love sugar-candy.

  I like my life

  With my dear wife,

  Unless the girls are handy.

  The rascal! He would tumble her hair all out of its cap, her red hair it was, and look as full of sin as the devil himself, and all the time he was as chaste and simple as the brooks he was forever fishing. She remembered the way they dined on warm summer evenings when Sir William once came, with his son,—plain John then,—or John Butler, or Varick, or one of the Schuylers. The gentlemen took off their boots and put their pumps on in her bedroom, and they ate on the porch, with the white table napkin and the candles slobbering with moths, and the hill, the valley, the stars in the sky and in the river, like the finest French paper in the world. The gentlemen seldom brought their ladies, and for that Sally was just as glad, for she had the gift of making men treat her as equals and could crack as hard a joke as anyone if occasion required, and she liked her half bottle of port in the old days, and, tsk, tsk, tsk—what a waggery of scandal that would have started if a woman had the telling of it back in Albany.… They had planted the orchard together and they had planted a flower garden, but somehow neither of them had had the patience for gardening, or felt the need of being fashionable. It was better to straddle the mare for a gallop to Klock’s than to fork the roots of a bleeding heart. It was a pity he should die so long before her, and yet she was glad, for she could not imagine what Barney would have done in these days. He never was much of a man to think things out, poor dear, with his handsome useless head—Lord knew how he could have managed to hold court as Justice of the Peace if the courtroom hadn’t been the pub; he could always give both sides a drink and tell them one of his stories if the judgment was beyond him, and then sell them a cock or a foal at the end of it. And come home at night and tell her about it with great rib-swelling roars that tossed her beside him in the bed like being in a storm at sea. And the nice way he liked things, and on the minute—the linen spotless, his shaving water with the crystal salt in it, and the small lace stitched to his good shirts before they were put back in the drawer. Once when she hadn’t done it and he had looked in the wrong drawer for a pocket handkerchief, she had really believed he would lift the skin of her back for a minute. But instead he had sat down and explained it to her, the way a grandfather would to his youngest daughter’s little daughter, great stupid hand that he was, good only for handling guns or cursing men into level files. Oh, Barney, Barney.…

  She was not conscious of the m
inutes passing, or of the time it was, for the whole house had bloomed before her tired eyes and become beautiful and sweet once more. She did not hear the men marching down to the road, and half an hour later she did not hear the detail going by—the detail that should have stopped and taken them. She did not think of Lana, nor why the girl was not yet back with her two children, though it was getting shadowy in the sky across the east window. She had just remembered something that she had not thought of for years, showing how familiarity and custom makes one forget.

  This bed she was now lying in so contentedly was the bed that she had been a bride in. (At the tavern in Albany. The best in the house, the landlord had taken his oath, and it was a decent-looking bed for a tavern, though no great piece of furniture in a private house. Just honest maple wood; but in the morning Barney had waked up and looked at her and sat up with the bedclothes over his knees,—and a cold draft pouring down inside her nightgown,—and he had sworn that he would never sleep in another bed unless he had to. He had rung the landlord up then and there. “Good morning,” said the landlord. “Your Honor had a good night?” Impertinent, sly-tongued devil: Sarah had sat up beside Barney and flushed furiously in his face; but she hadn’t made him change expression. Barney laughed, till he coughed, and swore. “I want to buy your bed, landlord. How much is your asking price?” The man was so confounded that he named three guineas. “I’ll give you four and not a penny less,” shouted Barney, “and bring me a bottle of the lobo pale for my breakfast. Oh, and I forgot, what will you have, Sarah, my dear?” She said she would have a glass of his bottle. “You will not. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a wife always cornering in on her husband’s drink. Two bottles, landlord, and in twenty-three minutes to the second. Get out and good morning.”)

  What a thing it was, this delicious revival in her mind of all those early days. Sleighing down the frozen river to the barracks by Hudson Village. Or driving out to the flats at sundown.… No, no, it was better to remember coming to this place and building the house together, and Barney being dumbfounded because a chimney could not be laid up in a day.…

  She did not hear the muffled tramp of the German Flats militia going along the Kingsroad—sixty frightened men with orders to proceed as far as the falls for the night and wait there with a scout out to the north in case Sir John’s Indian forces broke loose from his army.

  She was thinking of Indians though, and the way Barney would not let them in the house, because they smelled so beasty it spoiled his taste for claret for three days.… He could even taste it in the cottage cheese the evening one had slept beside the kitchen fire.…

  That reminded Mrs. McKlennar that the past was not hers to recapture. She realized that she was sleeping in the kitchen and that the house was bare of people and that she was alone, and it was dark.

  No, not alone. Somebody was walking in the next room. Somebody being very cautious. Somebody carrying a firebrand. Two people, she could tell it now, carrying torches. The pine smoke scent came in to her, aromatic, bitter, clearing her head. The light was coming down the hall. Suddenly it occurred to her that the detail Gustin Schimmel had apologized about had never turned up. These could not be they. The detail must long since have got to Eldridge’s. Sir John was in the valley.

  The door opened slowly and an Indian wobbled into the room. He was slightly tipsy, having just found and emptied a brandy flask, but not so tipsy as his companion. He held the torch over his head with one hand, and clutched a mass of clothing and blankets and a green glass bottle in the other, and the light flared down on his shaven head with its startled scalplock dangling a broken feather. His face was painted black with liverish yellow spots and a white stripe that went down his nose and over his mouth and chin, as though his face had been put together by an inexperienced cabinetmaker. He was very hot, and he smelled not only of himself, but of the bear grease all over him that had turned rancid in the heat and wet. And he stared at the old lady in her bed as if she were the great snake demon of Niagara Falls.

  “What do you mean by coming into my house?” demanded Mrs. McKlennar.

  She had sat up very straight in the bed with her wool jacket over her shoulders and her cap awry. Her long nose was sniffing. She was thinking of the cottage cheese. Barney.

  The Indian’s jaw dropped. He was not used to being talked at so. And though he did not understand English, his companion said he did.

  “Owigo,” he said softly. “Come quick.”

  Owigo was a squattish individual with white circles painted round his eyes. He hit the doorjamb with his shoulder and dropped both muskets and spun round till he was facing the bed.

  “Speak English,” grunted the first Indian.

  “Bellyache bad,” were the first words Owigo thought of, and he said them.

  “Something worse than that will happen to you, my lad,” Mrs. McKlennar said grimly. “You talk English. Well, what have you got to say for yourself? Coming into my house like this!”

  Owigo teetered into what he thought was dignified politeness.

  “How,” he said after a pause.

  “What are you doing in my house?” repeated Mrs. McKlennar, drawing herself a little more rigidly erect.

  Enlightenment traced a devious course through the Indian’s fuddled brain.

  “Ho. Set house on fire. Burn quick. All burning there.” He waved his hand, a wide gesture that embraced the universe.

  For a moment Mrs. McKlennar stared at the two. It was true. She could hear the fire now, she could see the faint light on the floor beyond the open door. These drunken, beastly, good-for-nothing, stinking fools! All the Irish in her blazed.

  Her lips parted to a stream of invective that might have silenced even Barney. It certainly silenced the Indians. They were appalled. They recognized virtuous outrage when they saw it, and they did not know what to do.

  “Burning my own house with me in it!” cried Mrs. McKlennar. “You ought to be whipped. If my husband were here he’d have the hides off your backs clean down to your heels.”

  “Yes, yes,” apologized Owigo anxiously. “You get out quick, you catch on fire.”

  It was true enough. The very door smelled hot. Already little fingers of flame pointed round the edge and were withdrawn.

  But Mrs. McKlennar would not move.

  “I’ll not,” she said. “I’m not a well woman. I can’t sleep outdoors on a cold night like this.”

  The slowly seeping intelligence in Owigo’s eyes was transmuted into words. He explained to his puzzled companion what the white lady had said. The companion looked worried. He replied in Seneca.

  “Friend Sonojowauga say,” explained Owigo, “you get’m out quick. Burn bad. Burn very bad.”

  Mrs. McKlennar said then, “If I’m to get out of this house, you’ll have to move my bed out for me.” She tapped the bed and pointed to the door. Sonojowauga understood the gesture while Owigo was still trying to get the sentence translated in his mind.

  He grunted. Then Owigo said, “Yes. Fetch it out. Sure, fine.”

  “Don’t look at me while I get up,” said Mrs. McKlennar, mastering a slight shiver. She rose and donned a coat.

  “Now,” she said severely, “you hurry up.”

  Willingly they caught up the bed and ran it to the door.

  “On its side,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “like this. And don’t scratch it, you careless lazy beast.”

  “Make quick,” panted Owigo.

  They blundered through the door and set the bed up in the yard beside the barn, and hurried back for the bedclothes; by then the kitchen was ablaze. Mrs. McKlennar shrieked at them.

  “Don’t touch my sheets with your filthy hands; I’ll carry them myself.”

  They escorted her, nonetheless, and watched her with mystified faces while she made the bed. Then she got into it.

  “Go away, now,” she said. “And don’t ever come near me again.”

  Owigo smiled ingratiatingly. “Burn fine.”

  �
�Get away,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “Quick. I don’t like you two. You are very bad.”

  Owigo looked dismayed. He had done everything. His face was sorrowful. Seeing his friend so, Sonojowauga made his face look sorrowful too.

  “We go,” said Owigo. They gathered up their muskets and trooped off into the woods, one behind the other, feeling very bad, and still a little drunk.

  Mrs. McKlennar looked after them, then she returned her gaze to the house, and watched it burn. The red light covered her in the maple bed, showing her long face very quiet. Her eyelids blinked against the light as she sat there, backed against the pillows, and after a few minutes, slow, heavy, silent tears began to drop over her lined cheeks. She lay down in the bed, with her back to the house, but she could not keep the light away. She did not then think of Lana. Her heart was breaking with the destruction of her house. For three years it had escaped the destructives. Now at last two drunken Indians had set it off.

  An hour after she had lain down, Lana had wakened, and after a single glance around her had sprung up in terror. The baby lay sound asleep, but Gilly was gone. She called, but as she started down through the sumacs she had a view across the valley.

  In the late afternoon sunlight, for one instant, between two groves of trees, she saw a party of men, proceeding at a trot that was unmistakable. Indians were in the valley.

  She stopped with Gilly’s name frozen on her lips, overwhelmed with the bitter knowledge of her own criminal foolishness. It was well that she did. Following the fences along the Kingsroad she saw two Indians, painted on chest and face, one red, one black, and Lana realized that they could not have missed the house. They were turning up to it. Utterly helpless, she watched them pad softly onto the porch and nose their way inside like two inquisitive dogs. It was too late to see what had happened in the house. No shooting had greeted the Indians. The six men must have gone.

  Not only must they have deserted her for some incredible reason; they must have taken Mrs. McKlennar with them. There was just one thing Lana could think of to do. To hide the baby first in Joe Boleo’s hide-hole, then to search out Gilly without calling.