Peter Loon

by Van Reid

  “Here you are still, then!” she pronounced. “I see you’re good for talk! Such a pack of fools and crows I never believed could account for an entire town! Old women would have done more in a day than you’ll accomplish between now and next year!” She was ordinary enough to look at, though her eyes were fine and expressive–a black-haired young woman, perhaps a little older than Peter, her cheek bearing the former touch of the measles or pox–but the anger that enlivened her eyes and tilted her dark brows raised her otherwise plain features to the striking. She did in fact carry inside of her a fire, that was the more attractive for being employed. She gripped a shawl about her, as if fearing one of the men there would touch her and pollute her with their indecision.

  “Elspeth!” said Mr. Pelligue. “This is no place for you, nor your place to criticize men who have come of their own to help us!”

  “Help you to the bottom of a crock, more like!” she insisted. One or two of the men looked ready to lay hold of her, and she raised a hand, saying, “See if you’re brave enough to take a swat or two, since you haven’t the pluck to get an innocent man from jail or stand for what’s your own! Why, I’d laugh if the sheriff came back and took every one of you!”

  Mr. Briner sat back in his chair and said, almost with a smile, “Perhaps you’d care to have us go down to Wiscasset without thought or plan and deliver us up so the sheriff won’t need to trouble himself.”

  Parson Leach said, “Well, Miss Gray, Mr. Cargin here suggests we march on Wiscasset, burn a portion of the town, and fire on anyone in our way.”

  “And what do you suggest, Mr. Leach?” she asked, levelling that lofty gaze upon the clergyman.

  “Outside, a little while ago,” said Parson Leach evenly, “they were singing that the revolution is unfinished, and there are those all through the nation who lend credence to the thought. Daniel Shay rose up with his New England Regulation and escaped hanging, but narrowly. There were Ely’s Rebels in Massachusetts and the Whiskey Rebels in Pennsylvania, but no revolt has lasted so long, nor drawn so little governmental attention as ours:”

  “The reason is clear enough,” said Mr. Kendall. “We’re a long way from Boston.”

  The parson answered, “The miles from here to Boston are in our favor, but our greatest power has been to avoid organizing an army, or justifying retribution by acts of willful murder and destruction. The courts and the sheriffs and the government know we are here, and they know–by our acts against the French and the British–how capable we are. The fear of our capacity keeps them at arm’s length, experience of it will bring them down upon us. A fox in the neighbor’s yard might seem too distant to trouble with, but not a wolf.”

  “And with that,” said Elspeth Gray, “you suggest we do nothing.”

  “Your father was arrested,” said the parson.

  “Yes, he was! And he never was with those who drove out John Trueman, though there’s a man or two in this room who knows more than I do! It wasn’t difficult raising a troop to set upon a lone man, but they’re thinking twice about coming out of the woods to save one of their own!”

  These words occasioned some general discomfort in the room, and more than one man began to agree with Mr. Pelligue that this was not a proper place for a young woman–or, at least, this young woman.

  Joshua Cargin was not one of them, however, and he made so bold as to promise Elspeth Gray her father’s rescue. Miss Gray, strangely enough, was not impressed by this assurance, and she looked the big fellow up and down as if she wondered there was enough of him to answer the task.

  Parson Leach had seen, on the table before Mr. Pelligue, a wide strip of birch bark marked with lines and figures; he turned this slightly to understand what this chart represented. “How many men are here?” he wondered. “All told, the Indians in the yard as well. A hundred? A hundred and fifty?”

  “I counted ninety-three men this afternoon,” said Mr. Kendall. “But more have arrived since, including yourselves.”

  “Do you think a hundred men are enough to quell an entire town?”

  “The word is abroad,” said Mr. Pelligue, almost regretfully. “More will come.”

  “I think we should wait to know how many more they’ll be,” said the parson. “Then, perhaps we can decide whether we have enough for a show of force, or no more than would warrant stealth instead of riot. You wouldn’t object to waiting for more fellows, would you, Miss Gray? Perhaps in numbers we’ll find the courage you suspect we lack.”

  “Time is a difficult coin to come by in the backcountry, Mr. Leach,” said the young woman, “and a day’s labor lost might decide who won’t last the winter. My brothers are young and my sister is ailing, and what my mother and I accomplish may not answer for the entire house. But I suppose there is nothing for women to do but wait when the men find there’s rum and ale still to be had.”

  “We thank you for your forbearance,” said the parson. “I will be satisfied to wait as well, then, and suggest no great plans be made till we know we have the men to perform it. I, in the meantime, must find a place to put my head.”

  “Grandmother will ask after you,” said Elspeth Gray, “and you can’t be staying in this mess. Come back with me and we’ll feed you, unless you want to dance around the fire. The bed will be a rick of hay, but it will be peaceful.”

  “Peter, here, is with me.”

  The young woman inspected the well-dressed young man, and said, “He is welcome, too.”

  Peter was amazed by the invitation, coming as it did on the tail end of a harangue, but the parson took it in stride. “I will come, then,” said the clergyman, “and take some abuse from your grandmother.” He rose from the table and Mr. Pelligue thanked him for his sentiments. Parson Leach tapped at the map on the piece of birch bark, and said, “There is no door at this end of the jail, by the way.”

  19

  Concerning Matters with Elspeth Gray and Gray Farm

  PETER LOON HAD LISTENED ATTENTIVELY TO THE TALK AND ARGUment in the kitchen of the Star and Sturgeon, but he hadn’t had time to consider what it all meant. Manasseh Cutts followed Parson Leach, Elspeth Gray, and Peter into the tavern room where several heads came up and Crispin Moss greeted them cheerily from a nearby table. More than the gentlemanly appearance of the parson and Peter, the presence of a young woman drew its own particular attention from some, but Elspeth kept herself wrapped in her shawl, as in armor, and her head up in that same commanding posture. Peter noticed that she was considering him with particular interest, and without thinking he lifted his hand to the scar on his forehead.

  “Did Mr. Barrow ride off to Wiscasset, then?” asked Parson Leach of Mr. Moss, with more irony perhaps than was evident to the big woodsman.

  “He couldn’t find any men, but one, who was sober enough to sit a horse,” said Crispin Moss.

  “A shame,” said the parson, and Peter thought he might be half in earnest. “He might have saved us a deal of trouble.”

  “Barrow?” said Miss Gray. “You wouldn’t send that man after my father, would you?”

  “No, I don’t suppose I would.”

  Peter considered the opinions advanced in the kitchen and the men (and woman) who had offered them. Mr. Pelligue seemed a steady fellow in search of a commander, while Mr. Kendall and Mr. Brine seemed contrary sides of a coin–of the same weight, but opposing views. Joshua Cargin was a gun waiting to go off, but Miss Gray, who seemed to be looking for just such a man, had been unimpressed by him. Nathan Barrow was himself off somewhere, having his visions or exhorting men to wild behavior. Mr. Cutts and Mr. Moss were of less opinion, it seemed, though more ready than some to act, Peter thought, if called upon.

  “We’re going to the Gray farm, north of town,” said Parson Leach to the woodsmen. “Perhaps I can cull some sense from all the nonsense. The ladies Gray may have more intuition than these gentlemen possess in their present state.” He indicated those who were flopped about the perimeters of the tavern room; their numbers had grown in th
e short while that Peter and the parson had been in the kitchen. Noise continued to jar the night, however, and through the tiny-paned windows at the front of the tavern, the light of the bonfire wavered. “Anyone can tell you where the Grays live, if something happens that I should know about.”

  Manasseh Cutts and Crispin Moss accepted these subtle orders placidly. “We’re glad you’ve come,” said the older woodsman.

  Parson Leach did not look so sure himself. He followed Elspeth Gray into the tavern yard and he and Peter went to the stable to retrieve Mars and Beam. “Did you walk in?” asked the parson of the young woman.

  “Yes, I did,” she answered, “and it is a good thing, as my temper had time to cool.”

  “Very right, of course,” said Parson Leach, and he gave Peter an odd expression when Elspeth turned away.

  “You may take my horse, if you like,” Peter said quietly to the young woman.

  “I will ride with you,” she said, and she indicated with a wave of the hand that he should mount before her; then she reached up and let him pull her behind him. Beam fidgeted for a moment, then relaxed beneath the extra weight. Peter did not relax very much himself, particularly when Miss Gray locked her arms about his middle and for the sake of a secure seat pressed herself against him. He thought that for a plain farm girl she smelled very interesting–that is of more than cows and dust–and whenever she spoke on the ride to her family’s farm he could feel her voice resonate against his shoulder.

  It occurred to Peter after they had ridden a mile or so that she reminded him of Emily Clayden, if Emily Clayden had been older and made a little bitter with life. It was Miss Gray’s directness that both daunted and intrigued him, and if she did not otherwise look like Emily, her eyes were similar to those of the young Newcastle girl–pale blue, direct, and comely.

  They rode two or three miles along a path that was marked only by the passage of other horses and rows of stumps. The moon was riding high by now, and Peter fell to wondering about Peter Klaggerfell and his dog Pownal, and had they finished their meal and pressed on toward New Milford beneath this very moon? The trail rose and fell among alternate acres of forest, cleared land, and fallen trees. Quartz veins in granite hillsides glowed, and somewhere in the blue shadows of a pine wood a wild creature coughed. The Gray farm was first sighted from one of these rocky knolls, and it was a pretty enough situation as seen in the halflight, tucked against the opposing hill by the narrow reaches of the Sheepscott River.

  Miss Gray dropped down from Beam’s back without warning and strode the rest of the way, keeping a brisk pace down the slope. She led them through a gate, then showed them the easiest place to ford the stream. Lantern light fell across the yard when the door to the cabin opened. A woman’s silhouette appeared there.

  “El?” came a voice akin to, but older than Miss Gray’s. “That you? You didn’t bring your father, did you.” This last was couched in assertion rather than query. “Who is that, then?” she asked, hearing, perhaps, rather than seeing the horses and the extra bodies.

  “It’s Mr. Leach, Ma, and a friend.”

  “Mother Gray,” called Elspeth’s mother into the cabin. “Zachariah is here to argue with you.”

  “God bless the sinner!” Peter heard coming from within.

  Two or three other, smaller forms filled the doorway behind the mother, and Mrs. Gray–that is Mrs. Gray the younger–shooed her children aside so that, once Mars and Beam were tethered, the parson and Peter could follow Elspeth in.

  “We killed a pig about a week ago, so there’s something on the table,” promised the mother. She turned her back on the guests as she went to the hearth, barely showing interest in who the parson’s friend might be.

  The cabin was not as old, nor as large, as the one Peter had been raised in. The barn behind the cabin was large, however, and evidenced the labor of the surrounding community. It hovered darkly over the cabin as Peter stepped inside the Gray home. An ancient woman sat by the hearth, toothless and sightless, by Peter’s guess, but indicating great curiosity by the posture of her head, which was craned up, as if she were considering the weather.

  “Go out and take those horses to the barn,” said the mother to a small boy, who immediately jumped to the task. “And give them hay and water!” she shouted after him. She looked at Peter, glancing from his clothes to the scar on his head, before turning back inside.

  “Zachariah, you awful heathen!” declared the elderly woman when they entered the cabin. “Have you come finally to confess all your devil-notions?”

  “I come to offer you truth and beauty, Mrs. Gray,” said the parson happily. “I’ve come to court you, as always.”

  The woman made a noise to indicate her disgust. “You think just because these eyes can’t read, you’ll overwhelm me with your high talk. But Elspeth here can read, and she tends me my Bible every day. Elspeth? You’re there, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Gran.”

  “Tell him you can read as ever as your old Gran could.”

  “He knows that Gran.”

  “He might forget. Don’t let him get ahead of you, that’s all. He talks high, but ‘devil, get thee behind!’ ”

  Peter was sure that he had entered a perpetual state of astonishment, and that this treatment of Parson Leach was just one in a series of ongoing surprises. The parson however seemed unaffected, and spent this harangue in inspecting the pot that steamed by the hearth.

  “What have you done for my son, Zachariah?” asked the old woman, and the use of the parson’s christian name seemed at odds with her previous abuse.

  Parson Leach answered her with all the ease in the world. “I may have dissuaded some gentlemen from getting him killed in an attempt to break the jail.”

  “Gentlemen, I’m sure!” she said. “That’s something, anyway. And who is this high-handed fellow?” she asked, considering Peter sightlessly.

  “This is my friend, Peter Loon,” said the parson, “and you’re not to convert him.”

  “So the devil says!”

  The younger Mrs. Gray turned from the plank table where she had been laying out bowls and said crossly, “What is it to be, then?”

  “Perhaps you should tell me,” said the parson. “I only know that he was taken to Wiscasset, but neither how or why. Where we’ve been, discussion has shed more heat than light.”

  Peter was standing by the door, feeling as out of place as he had in the Clayden’s kitchen; he did, in fact, feel so very out of place, partly because of having been in the Clayden’s kitchen. He looked down at his clothes then–the fine attire of the younger Captain Clayden–and met the curious stares of two small children, a boy and a girl, who stood on either side of him. Their faces were glum and dirty. The little boy showed the same marks of disease that speckled Elspeth’s cheek. Peter was reminded of his little brother Amos and he smiled at the boy.

  “I told Sam to go with them, when they drove John Trueman out,” the mother was saying bitterly, “and maybe he’ll wish he had, when all is said and done, as he’d have reason to be where he is now. I told him to garb up and take his gun, if he had to, but he’d have none of it.”

  “Been talking to you!” said the ancient Mrs. Gray to the parson. “I told him he lacked sand and he preached moderation to his own mother!”

  The parson seemed unaware of, or at least unconcerned with, the triangle he occupied–the grandmother at the hearth, the mother at the table, and the daughter–her arms crossed and her face grim–by the curtain that hid the single bedroom. A voice came from behind the curtain, and Peter remembered that Elspeth had spoken of a sister who was ill.

  “He is a temperate fellow, is Sam Gray,” said Parson Leach, as if he were praising a congregant after church.

  “Moderate never does, I say,” pronounced the elderly woman.

  “Perhaps one of you good women should have taken up a gun and gone yourselves.”

  “Don’t think I wouldn’t have,” said Elspeth’s mother, and her manner l
eft no room for wry response. “The men assemble for their drunken meetings, and ramble off on their hunts when things are hard, and when things are harder still, they get it into their heads there’s treasure in the woods and half lose a harvest digging up rocks and bones.”

  “There is treasure in the woods,” said the older Mrs. Gray, almost to herself, as she rocked by the fire.

  “I have no more than the house to talk with,” continued her daughter-in-law, “and rarely see another like myself from month to month. And when there’s sickness or we come up half starved to the end of winter, it’s me that bears the hardness of it. It’s woman knows the first injustice.”

  “Yes,” said Parson Leach. “I know it’s true. Adam took the rule and Eve took the curse for breaking it. Woman knows the first injustice, but it’s the children know the worst.”

  “That’s blasphemous talk!” said the elderly woman, delighted. “There is treasure in the woods,” she repeated. “Edward Bailey saw it in the pit he dug, but his son sneezed and it whisked away. That was fifteen years agone.”

  “You speak of drunkenness,” said the parson to the younger Mrs. Gray, “but I was always of the opinion that Sam was as temperate toward drink as he was toward the use of violence.”

  Mrs. Gray recommenced her business at the table.

  “And I remember–three years ago, wasn’t it?–” he continued, “when half the settlement was up on the Dresden line, digging for treasure, and Sam was clearing the acres across the river.”

  There was nothing replied to this.

  “I expect,” he added, as if only by the way, “that Sam was sharpening an axe or getting some sleep while the White Indians were out putting sticks to John Trueman.”

  “Perhaps he should have been gone with them, instead of hovering about here!” said the wife with audible vehemence. She was weeping suddenly and she went to the pot over the fire and stirred it as if it had made her angry. The entire business seemed contradictory to Peter.