3stalwarts Page 14

  “You ought to be ashamed,” she said, her strident voice filling the en-tire place. “Nobody’s asked you to do a thing, yourself. But Mrs. Martin’s bad sick and you’ll let Christian-hearted people help her, or you’ll get outside.” Mrs. Demooth made a frightened defense: “I’ll have to tell the captain.”

  “Go ahead. Just go ahead,” said Emma grimly. “And if he doesn’t put a strap to you the way he ought, I will. For my own sake, if not for yours, Mrs. Demooth.”

  But Lana was neither conscious of this bicker nor aware of the straggling arrival of the women and children of the settlement. Under the guidance of a few old men and younger boys, everyone clustered in the fort. The arrival of the Deerfield people brought the number to over fifty souls. They bestowed their bedding and their more easily fetched belongings where they could. The boys then scrambled onto the shed roof; the old men went to the blockhouse where Clem Copperaol with Grandfather Kast was watching from the spy loft, in which at last the alarm bell ceased its tolling.

  The Schuyler folk were not alarmed particularly. But they were eager to hear the story of the raid. It was the first occurrence of the kind in the western end of the Mohawk Valley, though in Schoharie there had been some trouble.

  The women crowded the entrance of the shed where Lana lay like a beast upon her bed of hay. Their thronging faces watched every move of Emma’s.

  “She going to lose it?” they wanted to know.

  They suggested remedies. One said, “You’d ought to lean a board against the wall and lay her with her head down on it.”

  It was, in Emma’s opinion, the first sensible idea.

  “Who said that?”

  “Me,” said an elderly, wrinkled woman. “I’ve see it work once when I lived in Rensselaer Manor. They did it to a nigger woman. But I don’t know will it work here.”

  “Well, find a board.”

  There wasn’t one to be found in the stockade. One of the boys volunteered to go out and look for one across the river at Kast’s, the nearest place. But it was then getting dark and his mother refused to let him go. So four women held Lana in her struggle.

  It was like a corner of hell. The darkness that the Betty lamps made yellow firefly glows in, the silhouetted figures of the women under the shed roof, the restless boys on the roofs, trying to see what was going on. The hushed female voices and the guttural tones of the old men in the blockhouse punctuated with silences each articulation of the sufferer.

  After the first half hour, Lana was only fitfully conscious of her own part in it. She knew that the bell had stopped, but her own pains had taken its place. At moments she was conscious of unfamiliar hands… .

  When she awoke in the black of the night, the stockade all dark but for one low mass of coals and the small flame of the lamp quivering in a draft of air, she found herself alone with Emma.

  The rawboned woman was sitting at her feet and staring into the dark.

  “What happened, Emma?”

  “Poor dearie.” Emma turned. “You feeling better now?”

  “Only sore. And kind of sick. What happened?”

  Emma’s eyes filled slowly with tears. The unaccustomed compassion in her face made it ugly.

  “Don’t you fret.” She smoothed the dark damp hair. “Poor pretty thing.”

  Lana lay still for hours it seemed. Finally thought and words coincided in her tired brain.

  “Did I lose it?”

  Emma nodded.

  The militia bivouacking at Demooth’s burnt house and barn slept on the ground like tired dogs. Only Gil and George Weaver, who had asked for the duty of keeping watch, were awake. Faint glows in the sky to west and north told them that all the places were destroyed.

  They sat together now, beyond the rim of firelight, not speaking. Demooth’s wheat had been fired and trampled. There was nothing left. They knew that nothing would be left of their own crops.

  Gil said, “What do you plan to do, George?”

  “I hain’t had time to think. We haven’t any money. You don’t get a chance to save money up here.”

  “I’d saved enough to buy some oxen with,” said Gil. “But it won’t last long, unless I can find work. Lana’s having a baby, too.”

  George nodded. “Work for money’s going to be hard to find.”

  Gil said, “A man could join the army, maybe.”

  “I’d thought of that. But now, I don’t know. If people all join the army, who’s going to look out for this country?”

  “I didn’t really believe it till now,” Gil said. “It don’t seem possible for a man to work as hard as I did, just for nothing.”

  There was nothing left west of Cosby’s Manor. Houses, barns, Reall’s mill, even, that had no stones, were burned. The militia, at Martin’s place, found Gil’s cow in the road, untouched, but dead. Somehow that raised their anger more than any other thing, even as they skinned a quarter and cut off steaks for their lunch.

  They did find Demooth’s oxen and one of Weaver’s yoke and drove them back on the slow march home. They ate at Wolff’s store.

  Of Mrs. Wolff there was no sign. The building, as well as Thompson’s house, was deserted. Footprints showed that Caldwell’s party had come so far. Whether the woman had gone off to Canada of her own free will, been taken, or been destroyed somewhere in the woods, they could not tell. There was no sense in following the trail with the start the destructives had had, and there was no telling what they might have done. The whole raid seemed such an ugly senseless thing to happen.

  For the first time they began to realize that there was no protection for them except in themselves. An unpredictable force had been born in the Mohawk Valley, with potential destructiveness as devastating as the old French rapes. It seemed a pitiful remonstrance when, in spite of Demooth’s wishes, Jeams MacNod led on the company to burn down Thompson’s and Wolff’s store.

  When Gil came back with the company that night to Little Stone Arabia Stockade, he found Lana speechless with pain and shame. She tried to meet his eyes, then burst out crying. Emma unexpectedly kissed him before going out of the shed.

  He sat down on the earth beside Lana’s bed and held her hand. He could not say, “Never mind.” He could not think of what Reall had said in breaking the news: “It’s too bad, Martin. But there’ll be plenty more.” He merely held her hand, because it was all he could think of to do.

  15. Winter

  The house Gilbert and Lana Martin had rented for the winter— it was no more than a shack, with one room, for all it had plank walls instead of logs, and a small, poorly drawing fireplace— stood opposite the old ford in German Flats, and close to the river bank. From it, the West Canada Creek could be seen across the river, coming straight out of the woods. The house had belonged to Mrs. Schuyler, Nancy’s mother, but now that one son was working for himself, that the daughter was in service to the Mark Demooths, and the other son working out, Nicholas Herkimer had good-naturedly offered his sister a room in his house below the high falls.

  It was Nancy, who had developed a great admiration for Lana since the day of the call with the captain’s letter, who suggested it. They had been able to rent the place for one dollar a month, and in October they had brought their effects from Little Stone Arabia Stockade and moved in.

  Lana had been cooped up there all winter. Every morning Gil went upriver to a farm, which Demooth had repossessed when the Herters went down to Schenectady, and worked with Clem Coppernol. He returned after dark, restless and irritable, for he felt that Captain Demooth had given him work out of charity. Even an old man like Coppernol could have handled the cattle and horses single-handed during the winter.

  Lana had tried to persuade Gil to take her back to her father’s place. There was plenty of room for them there, and plenty of work for him to do. Her family would have been glad to have them. It was better, as long as he felt the way he did, to depend on one’s family than on one’s neighbors.

  But he would not listen. Her mother, he said, h
ad been doubtful about his taking Lana westward. He would not go back now, within a year, to let them get an unjust satisfaction out of it. When Lana tried other persuasion, he talked so harshly that she dropped the matter for good.

  At first she had been afraid, living alone in the little house. Though they were within sight of Fort Herkimer, she felt more lonely than she had even in Deerfield. Nancy Schuyler came once a month, for her afternoon out had become a regular institution when the captain learned where she spent it, but the simple-minded girl, for all her natural cheerfulness, depressed Lana; and it was Nancy who first brought to Lana’s notice the disappearance of the peacock’s feather.

  “You hain’t hung up that feather of yourn anywhere,” she said on her first call. “I should think you would. It would make the place seem homey to you.”

  At the moment, Lana was pleased. She said, “I’ll get it out right away.” But it could not be found. She and Nancy turned over all the pitifully few belongings in vain.

  “I packed it,” Lana said. “I remember taking it off the dresser when I went to get the white china pot.”

  “You must have put it somewheres. Or maybe Mr. Marting did.”

  That night she asked Gil, but he swore he had not seen it. “You ought know where it is, Lana. You did the packing.”

  She left the subject, listlessly, continuing the preparation of his supper. It was nothing but stewed corn mush. They put water on it, having no milk except when Nancy kept a little out of the Demooths’ supply and sent it down with Gil, and salt was so dear that they used it only once a week. She put his bowl before him and stayed crouched down on the hearth herself.

  “You’d better eat,” he said.

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “Doc said you ought to eat.” He glanced down at her. Her face was pale and thin, it seemed to have lengthened, and there were unnatural shadows under her eyes. She still looked young; but she looked as if she had been hurt. “You know why,” he said, roughly.

  “I know,” she said. “But I don’t dare.”

  “You ought to.”

  “Who wants a baby now? Living like this. We haven’t any chance of getting started again this year. If ever.”

  “We’ll get back in the spring, maybe. That’s why I want to stay up here.”

  “Go back there? To Deerfield?”

  “Where did you think I meant?”

  “It’s so far away, Gil.”

  “It’s no further than it used to be.”

  She did not answer. She did not even look at him. She heard him finish his supper and drop the spoon back in the bowl. He got up and walked across the cabin, got his rifle down.

  “What you want with that?”

  He said, “Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll go up in the woods and see if there’s any deer come down.”

  He cleaned the rifle in silence.

  She said, “Isn’t the snow too deep?”

  “Adam Helmer’s lent me a pair of snowshoes. Maybe he’ll come with me.”

  Adam Helmer was a new friend of Gil’s. He was a young man, very tall and heavy, almost a giant. He had blond hair and a thin blond beard, and strangely bright gray eyes. Women admired him, for his strength and his good looks. But he had never married. If he married, he often said, he would have to go to work. As it was, any girl was glad to give him supper. Lana had not been glad. She felt that he was taking Gil away the only days that he might have stayed at home.

  Helmer shot a thin doe that Sunday, but Gil missed three. They split the deer and parted in the village below Fort Dayton. When he noticed the light burning in Dr. Petry’s office store, instead of heading for the house across the river, Gil went to see him. He found the doctor alone.

  “Well,” said Dr. Petry, raising his heavy brows, “what do you want?”

  Gil handed him a steak he had cut off.

  “Here’s some deer meat, Doc. I guess you don’t remember me. My name’s Martin. My wife was taken sick in Little Stone Arabia last September. You came up to see her.”

  “Yes, I remember her, and you too. It’s too bad she had a miscarriage. She’s a fine girl. But you paid me for that visit.”

  “Yes.”

  “How is she now?”

  “That’s what I want to ask you about. She don’t seem healthy. She don’t eat hardly anything. She just moons around the house all day.”

  “She ought to be getting over it by now. Maybe I ought to see her again. Fetch her up.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. She’s afraid of you, anyway. She’s afraid of everything.” Gil blushed suddenly and looked at a bottle on the wall marked Sal. Ammon. Like a girl’s name.

  “What’s the trouble, Martin?”

  “She’s scared to death of having another baby, Doc. She’s so scared of me, I just have to leave her alone. I don’t know what to do.”

  The doctor grunted and looked at him.

  “Do you think I ought, Doc? It gets hard on me. But I can’t stand to see her scared.”

  “Women get notions,” observed Dr. Petry. “But she seemed like a sensible girl to me.”

  “Why, she always used to be. She’s a damn good wife. She was.”

  “Was she scared about the first?”

  “Hell, no, Doc. That’s what beats me so. She was about all a man could expect to handle. She made jokes about it. Not but what she’s modest. She’s a decent girl.”

  “Yes, I understand that.”

  “But sometimes I wonder, Doc, if she wouldn’t be better off if I treated her different.”

  Dr. Petry drew a long breath and let it out again. He remembered Mar-tin’s wife— a pretty girl, he had thought then, sensible, and full of feeling. He didn’t know the first damn thing about this young man’s problem. No man could. Take Jacob Small’s wife. Since she had successfully had a baby she was crazy for another, though he had warned her and Small that it was just about likely to kill her. And this Mrs. Martin, who was equipped to have a dozen or fourteen and had probably started out with every intention of having them, was scared to death.

  He wondered if the girls of his mother’s and grandmother’s times had been so unpredictable. But he couldn’t tell. He had trained for an army surgeon, and then he had come over to this country. He had located here in German Flats fourteen years ago, and he had delivered probably a hundred women, or women a hundred times, and yet when this young man asked him a perfectly simple question, he couldn’t possibly answer him.

  He would like to help him, too. Help them both. Dr. Petry, having married no beauty himself, felt a cranky tenderness for all pretty young women; but he was going to have to admit to Martin that he didn’t know the answer, any answer.

  Watching the doctor’s red, heavy, Bavarian face, Gil began to feel frightened.

  “Doc,” he said, “you don’t think there’s anything gone wrong with her? Inside, I mean.”

  The doctor exploded with a solid German curse.

  “No, I don’t. She just had the devil shaken out of her at a bad time. Three weeks later, maybe, and she’d have been all right. That girl’s able to have all the brats you can get. Baskets of them. Oh, I know she’s small; but not when you look at her with my eye, boy.”

  Gil felt weak.

  “Her mother said that to me. She said all Borst women had babies easy. But I got wondering. And now …”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, “and now …” His eyes swelled as he looked over at Gil. “I don’t know. Do you see? I don’t know.”

  Gil nodded. “I guess it’s hard to tell.”

  “You feel as if I’d let you fall down,” growled the doctor. “But I can’t help that. I can set bones. I can sew up cuts. I can deliver a baby.” Suddenly he fell back on religion. “But God’s supposed to look out for the soul. You can’t expect me to know everything.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked. Only I didn’t want to make a mistake.”

  The doctor got up with him and shook hands.

  “You’re a good man, Martin. But t
here’s some things we have to trust to luck about. Or God. Or whatever. I guess this is just one. I wish to God I could answer you. I can’t. I’m tired. You better go have a drink and get to supper.”

  Gil picked the half of the doe up off the floor and started out.

  “But listen,” the doctor said after him. “It’s awful easy to get impatient. See? You’ve been patient. It won’t hurt waiting a while.”

  Gil went down to the river and crossed on the ice. He wanted to leave a cut of the meat at Demooth’s. When he got to the house, there was nobody home but Nancy. She told him, smiling, that Captain and Missis had gone down to Herkimer’s place and were spending the night. Coppernol was out. She held the door open for him to enter, the candlelight making ripples on her yellow hair when she moved her head.

  “You better set down and get warm,” she said, taking the cut from him. “I’ll put this away, Mr. Marting, and fetch you some cordial. Captain would want for you to have it.”

  The kitchen was warm. There was a deep fire on the hearth. Gil couldn’t resist the cheerful heat, the wide comfort that the slate-gray walls enclosed. He was tired from the long cold hunt, and the heat seemed to go all through him. He sat drowsily, waiting Nancy’s return, listening to her footsteps in the storage pantry and then in a back room. She took quite a while. When she came in she carried a glass for him. As he took it, he saw that she had put a red ribbon round her head.

  The ribbon made him look at her.

  “Sit down here with me, where it’s warm,” he said.

  She giggled a little and sat down on the settle between him and the fire.

  “You’re real pretty, Nance,” he said.

  She flushed up to her ears and turned her slow blue eyes on him.

  “Oh, Mr. Marling!”

  He sat quite still, watching her struggle in her mind for something to say. The stupidity on her face made no impression on her prettiness. He kept thinking of Lana’s listless paleness, and comparing it to Nancy’s full smooth pink skin. She seemed so incredibly warm and bursting with health.