3stalwarts (28 page)

“There’s been a fight. They’ve stood the British off. I don’t see why we should move yet. Magdelana, get some sleep. You look a sight. I’m going to wash and eat and lie down myself. Daisy can milk this morning.”

Lana was upstairs in her house. She had prayed for Gil. It seemed futile to pray, now that the battle was over, but it was the only thing she could think of to do.

She was still on her knees, her elbows deep in the bedtick, her head in her hands, when Mrs. McKlennar shouted from the yard.

“Magdelana, Magdelana! Here he is!”

For one breath Lana was like ice. Then she got on her feet and went down. She went out into the yard, where, in the hot sunlight, she saw him kneeling at the horse trough, drinking, while Mrs. McKlennar stood at his side and splashed cold water on his head with her hand.

All Lana could think of was how dirty he looked. His face was dirty, almost black with grime; his hair was matted with sweat and hemlock needles. His shirt was torn and his trousers looked as if he had been lost in a briar patch.

He raised his face at her across the trough, and she thought he looked indescribably old. Then, as if he had seen enough of her, he put his lips to the cold surface of the water and drank.

Mrs. McKlennar nodded.

“Come here, he’s had plenty. We must get him to bed.”

Lana went to his other side. His shirt sleeve had been torn off and there was a dirty rag round the upper part of his arm. The rag was stiff with a brown clot.

“Gil,” she said softly.

But Mrs. McKlennar was abrupt.

“Up, lad!”

He got up. The two women bolstered him on either side as he made slowly for the farmhouse.

“We’ll get him some brandy,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “It’ll put him to sleep like a poleaxe, the way he is. We can look after him when he’s sleeping.”

“Don’t you think we ought to fetch the doctor?”

“Doctor?” Mrs. McKlennar stared. “Anything that old fool Petry can do, I can do. And this arm is nothing. He walked home, didn’t he? All he needs is a little sleep.”

“Yes,” said Gil, unsteadily. “I’m tired.”

He had gone to sleep, as Mrs. McKlennar had foretold, within ten minutes of swallowing the brandy. Mrs. McKlennar had taken charge in a way that allowed Lana no protest. As soon as Gil’s eyes had closed, she started cutting free the bandage with her sewing scissors. She held the dirty rag by the tips of the scissors and took hearty sniffs of it. “It isn’t mortified,” she said. “But anyway we’ll swab it out.” She dipped the chewed birch twig that was her toothbrush in the brandy and swabbed it through the bullet furrow. To Lana it looked like a brutal operation. “Nonsense,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “So long as he don’t feel it we might as well be thorough.”

“He might wake up.”

“Don’t be a fool. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen him drunk be-fore. But he couldn’t be any drunker if he was lying in a ditch.”

She bandaged the arm deftly.

“Now,” she announced, “I’ll help you bathe him. You get his clothes off while I fetch some warm water.”

While she was gone, Lana worked quickly. Gil lay like a log. She found that he would not wake no matter how she shoved and heaved, and for some reason she was glad to have him stripped and a blanket over him by the time Mrs. McKlennar returned with towels and a pail.

“Pull back the blanket,” ordered the widow.

“Thanks,” said Lana. “I can do the rest myself.”

Suddenly Mrs. McKlennar laughed.

“Don’t you think I ever saw a naked man, Magdelana? And I old enough to be his mother, or his grandmother, too. Heaven help me! Oh, come on!”

Her decisive hand laid hold of the blanket and peeled it back, and she looked down on Gil’s straight brown body with frank curiosity. Then she raised her eyes to Lana’s.

“Don’t look so shamefaced, girl. He’s nothing to be ashamed of. Why, damn it, you ought to feel proud!”

But Lana could not feel that way. It seemed unrighteous for her and the widow woman to be working over Gil like that. But she said nothing, only dried the parts of him that Mrs. McKlennar had done washing.

The widow, to do her justice, wasted no time.

“There,” she said. “He ought to have one blanket. He’s tired. But no more, or he’ll wake up with a head like a punkin.”

She picked up the pail and the soiled towels and said, “I’m going now.”

“Thank you, Mrs. McKlennar.”

The widow snorted.

“Thanks, my foot. You’re just wondering when the old fool’s ever going to take herself off.” She stamped deliberately down the stairs.

Gil slept all the through the day. He was still asleep when the sun set. But as darkness came he had a spell of restlessness. In the first dusk, while Lana was getting a bite of supper, she heard him muttering overhead, and stole swiftly up to him. He was saying over and over, “I won’t run. Oh, God, I won’t run.” She put her hand on his forehead and he flung round in the bed and shouted, “For God’s sake, kill the next one.” She shuddered. His face had not changed, but his voice frightened her.

His forehead was slightly feverish, and she went down again to get cool water, with which she bathed his head until his muttering stopped. Then she fetched the Betty lamp, lit it, and sat down where she could watch him on the bed.

Now that he was quiet again, the look of age went gradually out of his face. He had turned on his side with the complete rest of a boy.

As the night crept over the valley, she heard the widow finish milking and turn the cattle into the yard. A little later the light in the window of the stone house went out. There was no further sound except the last sleepy clucks of the hens settling on their roosts. All the farm was dark but for the light in their own room. It brought her a queer feeling of the world withdrawing, leaving them together, just they two. And as she watched his face, hour after hour, she lost all track of time.

A breath of air stirred in the room, flickering the lamp. Looking up from her hands, Lana saw Gil’s eyes upon her.

She got up from her chair and went to the bed.

His eyes followed her. His hands lay on the blanket in front of him.

“It seems a long time, Lana.”

“It does to me, too.”

“You didn’t see me.”

“I didn’t see you wake up.”

“I was watching you. You made me think about the way you were when you were burning flax. In Fox’s Mills. Do you remember? On the side of the hill?”

Her voice had a small catch. “I was thinking of it too.”

“Were you?”

Suddenly she put out her hand to touch his. At the touch he turned his hand over and grasped her wrist.

“Have you been sitting up with me?”

“Yes.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what time it is.”

He did not comment. But he began increasing his pressure on her wrist. It frightened her, and she had to force herself to look at his face. She made herself relax until his grip was so strong that her fingers spread apart and stiffened.

He let go.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“It didn’t hurt.”

“It must have.”

“A little,” she admitted.

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you want to do it again?” she asked suddenly.

“Do you want me to?”

“I don’t know.”

She felt that a spell had come upon her. Whether it was the darkness or his hand upon her wrist, or both, the fatigue of her long watch was transmuted. She was no longer afraid of him, and yet she was afraid. In that moment when he had taken hold of her wrist his dark eyes had lost un-certainty.

“Sit down.”

His hand guided her so that she sat beside him. She could feel herself trembling; but if he felt it, he did not mention it.

“What are you looking at?”

“There’s a light,” she said. “Up beyond the fort, on the hill to the west.”

A pale tongue of flame was lifting from the hilltop. He hoisted himself, without letting go her wrist, and looked at it. While he watched, it mounted rapidly, and sank again.

“That’s Indian fire.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know. It makes you realize we’ve got no way of telling if the fort surrenders. They might come down any day.”

“Yes.”

“Are you afraid?”

The fire dropped, before she could answer. In a moment it was gone. They were just they two again, in the low-eeilinged room, with the wide bed and its swelling feather mattress.

“Tired?”

“I was.”

He was watching the small oval of her face, with its dark hair. As she spoke her lids closed and the curves of her lips softened and filled. She sat beside him as if entranced.

She could not stir for the swelling blood; she felt it in her helpless quiet through all her body, breasts, thighs, and arms. Suddenly he let go her wrist, and she raised both hands to her temples, pushing the hair back. She turned her face to him.

He saw that she was tremulous, half shrinking.

“Lana.”

“Yes, Gil.”

“When I was up there, I kept thinking about you.”

“Did you?”

“About what it would be like coming home.”

The pause drew out. Her heart started beating.

He said quietly, “Are you coming?”

“If you want.”

“Yes.”

She got up slowly from the bed. Her fingers had a feeling of fullness as she took the laces of her short gown. She met his eyes and flushed painfully, and slowly. It was no use to think that he was her husband. He was a strange person who had acquired a right; and she felt completely without power or desire to thwart him. But her instinct made her turn from him towards the far corner of the room.

She did not recognize his voice.

“Don’t go away.”

She hesitated.

“Turn around.”

Again she obeyed. Then her hands went to her hair.

“No,” he said. He was smiling now. His eyes were deliberate. “Leave it for last,” he said.

She felt the last drop of strength going out of her. It almost made her cry out as she surrendered. She pulled away the laces of the short gown, put it back over her shoulders, and let it drop from her bare arms.

The lamp put a soft shine on her skin as she bent her neck and undid her petticoat. It fell round her ankles. For an instant she stood so, half bent, in its encircling rough folds. Then she stepped from it, timidly, and for a brief moment encountered his eyes, her hands raised tentatively to undo her hair. She had no will of her own under his deliberate and amorous dominance; and she seemed held for an eternity in her submissive pose.

His nod released her. Her fingers flew to the pins, loosening them and letting her hair fall of its own weight down her back. Her breath came out of her breast with a shudder, and the pins dropped from her hair with a little sprinkle of sound on the broad planks. She stood quite still with her hands hanging limply at her sides, the palms turned childishly forward.

For a moment more Gil watched her. Then he smiled slowly, stretched out his hand, and pressed it down over the small flame of the Betty lamp.

The same evening, across the river in Fort Herkimer, Emma Weaver sat on the hearth considering all the things on her mind. What chiefly troubled her was the effect this garrison life was having on her oldest son. John had turned fifteen during the winter and grown fast. Already he was almost as tall as his mother, and since he had been issued an old French musket and appointed to regular sentry go, he considered himself a man.

It wasn’t that he was undutiful to her; but she could tell that in the last few days he no longer acknowledged her authority in his personal affairs. She had only to look up from her shed against the stockade wall and see him passing, lanky and rawboned, with stiff strides back and forth upon the walk, to know that John had passed beyond her reach. And when he came in from his duty and sat down to supper she saw the impatience in his face to be through with the meal and get off to the blockhouse on the east, where the squad of soldiers bunked and where he could listen to what he now considered man’s talk. The rough laughter, in the evenings, would pass heavily across the enclosure.

Emma didn’t mind man’s talk. Men together were entitled to their own ways of fun; but John was too young yet. Careless ideas took hold too hard. And with the way the place was crowded, so that there was no privacy, she was afraid that John would get entangled with some girl she herself could not like. There were plenty of them, and there were plenty of times when she had seen John, with the exhibitionism of the first impulse of manhood, stretching himself out in the sun before the blockhouse. He would take off his shirt, like the other men, baring his skinny torso, and drawing deep arching breaths with his chest, while he pretended to doze.

So far, she thought, he had not made a shine at any particular girl. It was just the idea of manhood getting at him now. But there were one or two girls her maternal eye had noticed watching John. Young Mary Reall for one, the Realls’ oldest. She had no special urge against the girl, except that the Realls were idle, shiftless, loose-thoughted people, and if John were to marry early he ought to marry a girl with a settled way of seeing things. She wished George would come back so she could put the matter in his hands. George was sure to stamp on any nonsense. For all his easy-going temper, George had an instinct for righteousness that would put a curb on the boy, as it had curbed her own quick temper in their first married days.

The Realls, two partitions down, all reveled in the life. There was no steady work to do. They had no cattle to look after. Mrs. Reall eased about all day, letting the brats run wild. Peebles, the baby, had been weaned, and scurried like a puppy all over the parade ground on his hands and knees. In the evening he had to be hunted up and brought to bed, but Mary had taken on that duty. Mary was doing all their cooking, and it was also Mary who swept out their eight-foot square of space when she could borrow a broom, shook up the hemlock bedding, and saw that one of the boys carried their night’s pail of slops to the dumping ground outside the stockade. It was a comfort to have a child at last grow up, and Mrs. Reall let herself luxuriate. She had another baby on the way and it did her good to be idle.