3stalwarts (17 page)

At Demooth’s they found John waiting for them, a small white-faced figure under the trees. He said that the captain had taken Mrs. Demooth in the light wagon and driven straight off for Schuyler to gather the militia.

Clem Coppernol had hidden the oxen in the woods, and he and Nancy were now somewhere ahead with the odd horse.

The mare was laboring when Gil swung her into Cosby’s Manor. Reall’s ancient stallion was going weak in the knees. Lana struggled in the respite to regain her senses. She felt half dead, and after the first blessed relief she felt more pain in standing still than in the fury of travel on the jolting road.

Gil handed her the lines. “I’ve got to tell Mrs. Wolff, if she’s here.”

He jumped off and ran onto the porch of the store. The building looked as deserted as Thompson’s house; but when he knocked, Mrs. Wolff opened the door.

“What do you want?”

Her white face stared at him as if he were someone she had never seen. He said, “We’ve had warning of a party of British and Indians up above our place. Lana and I can give you room in our cart.”

“Thanks.”

“You’ll have to hurry, though. They can’t be far back.”

She still stared at him.

“I’d rather trust to Indians than you people,” she said.

The Weavers came into the clearing and drove up beside the Martins’ cart.

“You’d better come with us,” George said.

“I’ll stay here.” She raised her voice. “I told John I’d stay here and wait for him. I don’t want help from you. You put him there. You tried to get him killed, George Weaver.” She gave a little unnatural laugh. “I’ve been praying lately, Weaver. And I guess the Lord, He’s heard me.”

They all followed her look to the westward. When they saw the fresh smoke, they knew it wasn’t from the Martin place. More likely Weaver’s.

George Weaver turned back to his wagon, walking heavily. “Get back into the wagon,” he roared to John. His boot just missed the terrified boy. He hauled himself up after and said to Emma, “Start the horse. If she wants to be fried by Indians, let her. I won’t feel sorry.”

The three wagons were halfway to Schuyler when they heard the bell begin to ring. It was a small sound at first, hardly to be heard over the crash of wheels and rattle of harness. But when one of the Reall children called attention to it they all heard the sound quite plainly, even Lana.

As they proceeded she felt the slow harsh clamor growing in her. It beat with the hammering of her heart; now with the dinning of this bell through all her being, it seemed to her that she would never clear herself of the sound.

She hardly heard Gil shouting at her. He had to yell into her ear to make her hear, and she had to fight herself upward into consciousness, like a drowning person.

“What’s the matter with you?”

She wrenched the words free: “I can’t stand it any more.”

“You’ve got to.”

He grabbed her as she started to slide away; and all the rest of the way he had to hold her on the seat.

The three horses were all played out when they broke out of the woods at Schuyler and found the level road at last. Now the bell was clear in the open air.

They saw the sky, the fields, the fences, houses that looked secure. The cattle that had gathered in the pastures to listen to the bell turned curious uneasy eyes to their passage. Women hovered in their doorways, staring across the river to the fort. Beyond the ford was Demooth’s light wagon, towards which men were running.

As he saw the scene, the power to think returned to Gil. He let the brown mare splash through the river and drew her up beside Demooth’s wagon. The captain had already got down and was examining his rifle.

He said, “All here?”

“All but Nancy and Coppernol.”

“They’ve gone into the fort. You’d better leave your own things there. We’re going right back now.”

Emma Weaver said, “You go along, Gil. I’ll look after Lana.”

The stockade made an irregular square, the twelve-foot posts following the level of the ground around a well. In the width of the valley it seemed a puny resource against the chances of Providence. Even the blockhouse, projecting its second story five feet higher than the palisade, made but a tiny show against the autumn sky.

Inside, the place seemed smaller yet. Along the four sides of the stockade, low sheds, whose roofs served for rifle platforms, crowded the enclosure, and the slope of the roofs brought the eaves so low to earth that Lana had to stoop as Mrs. Weaver helped her in.

You would have thought that Emma Weaver had lived there all her life. She showed neither dismay nor impatience. She made the two boys bring her blankets for Lana’s bed, and then sent them out to find fresh hay to make a pallet. As Nancy appeared, she ordered her to get her water and build a fire against any need. When Mrs. Demooth demanded Nancy’s services, Emma strode out and confronted her.

“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.

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, had 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.