Arundel (28 page)

I reached for her, but she squeaked and backed away. “Steven,” she said, retreating before me, “I either had to send a man or go myself.”

“Then why didn’t you send a man!” I bellowed, furious at her.

“He’ll be all right, Steven,” she protested. “You can see he goes where you go; and between us we’ll look after him!”

“Us! We!
We
look after him! There’s no reason why I should look after him, and I won’t do it! If it’s in your mind to go tagging after an army, making a nuisance and a spectacle of yourself, get it out of your head before I put you over my knee and drive it out of you with a butter paddle!”

With no further words she left me and went to gathering her human cargo from the dunes and the beach, where they were dozing in the sun and recovering from their military evolutions of the night before.

For the next two weeks there was constant traffic, from the eastward, of men bound for Cambridge, some going by land so they might have free rum and food along the road and kind looks or better from the girls; others hunting for schooners and sloops to speed them more quickly to Cambridge. There were some in ancient blue militia uniforms, and some in homespun, and many from the back settlements barefooted and unkempt, but all with muskets and blankets, and all panting for a shot at gilt buttons on a red coat.

The traffic dwindled when the news of fighting slackened. Toward the end of May we learned how Arnold, lacking men of his own, had gone with Ethan Allen to the taking of Ticonderoga; and then, having received a few Massachusetts troops, had gone and captured St. John’s alone. In June we had the news of Bunker Hill: how our men stood face to face with British regulars, which the British had said we were too cowardly to do, and twice drove them down the hill in disorder before our powder gave out, killing them in heaps and suffering some loss ourselves. Of those from Arundel, Israel Dorman was stuck with a bayonet where he sat down, and Nathaniel Davis was shot through a rib; while young Nathaniel, his son, having picked off eleven Britishers in the three charges, sent word home it was easier than killing squirrels, but more fun.

At this there was another outpouring, and our sleep of nights was again broken by whoops and occasional musket shots from those who pressed toward Cambridge; while I daily grew more fractious from puttering over the affairs of the inn when all the rest of the world went adventuring.

Mogg Chabonoke had come in from Ossipee Mountain, bringing me a leather hunting shirt from his wife, Fala Ramanascho, and had gone off with messages from me to Paul Higgins, the white man who had become the sachem of the Assagunticooks on the Androscoggin; also to Natanis in his camp on Dead River. To each of them I sent a gift of hand mirrors, scissors, awls, and needles, asking whether they were still my friends, and saying I needed their help against my enemies. Mogg returned with a belt from Paul Higgins and a message saying he would come with thirty warriors whenever the time was ripe. At Swan Island, Mogg said, he had found a town of Abenakis, Jacataqua being the sachem and Hobomok the
m’téoulin,
a powerful
m’téoulin
able to scream so that those who heard him could not move. But he had found the town at Norridgewock abandoned; and when he reached Dead River he could not find Natanis though his cabin had been occupied within the month, and there was dried venison hanging from the ridgepole. Therefore he left my message drawn on a piece of bark.

August found us fretful from heat and mosquitoes, and ill at ease because General Washington had come to Cambridge to command the troops. A scattering drift of men was wandering back from Cambridge, swearing it was better to desert than to be drilled and drilled through scorching days by a Virginia disciplinarian.

Sick of everything, I rolled a blanket, with hunting shirt, razor, and extra stockings in it, and thought to myself I would go off to Quebec without saying anything to anyone, though I caught Phoebe watching me and misdoubted I would be able to do it. While I pondered the matter a horseman in a blue coat and doeskin breeches came up off the beach with his horse in a lather of sweat and began to bawl for Steven Nason. I asked him what he wanted.

“I want beer!” he said. “Here’s an express from Colonel Arnold to Steven Nason.”

He went off bowlegged after his beer. I clawed at the message, which lies to-day in my green seaman’s chest.

To Steven Nason in Arundel [it read]

D
EAR
S
IR
:

As I make no doubt of your being hearty in the cause of liberty and your country, and mindful of certain messages that I left with you at an earlier period, I should take it as a particular favor if you would come down at once to Cambridge. I shall be at the hdqtrs. of Gen. Washington, and shall hope to learn of your arrival there no later than three o’clock to-morrow afternoon. Pray hurry on as fast as possible, and under no circumstances hazard any opinions concerning your movements or concerning the object of this message to any except your own family. I am, dear Sir, your friend and humble serv’t,

B. A
RNOLD
.

“Mary!” I said, and went to get my musket.

XIII

P
HOEBE
put me into Newburyport that night, pestering me all the way to take her to Cambridge, so she might see James Dunn.

“This is beyond me,” I said. “First you dawdled for years, threatening to marry him but not doing it. Then you up and married him and sent him off in a half-hour’s time, all brisk and businesslike. Now you want to tag along to see him when you have this sloop here to tend. You’d be a horrible nuisance to me and everyone else. You said once that men were terrible; and I say to you now that women are worse, for they change their minds every two minutes, and still they’re bound to have their own way in spite of hell and high water!”

“Then you won’t take me?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say. If you can’t understand my thoughts after the way I’ve spoken, I’ll unship the tiller and pound them into your head.”

When the sloop nosed into Tracy’s wharf at Newburyport I wasted no time in farewells, knowing she’d pester me. As I went up the wharf she called: “I’ll wait here until I have word from you.”

I turned and ordered her back to Arundel, while she played with her string of cat’s eyes and stared abstractedly at the peak of the mainsail. When I started onward, she let me reach the end of the wharf; then again said: “I’ll wait here until I have word from you!” I’d have spoken my mind freely, but when I turned to do it she was vanishing into the cabin. I said to myself she could lie there, for all of me, until the
Eunice
had barnacles on her bottom as thick as the mud on Ranger’s belly in the spring.

All Newburyport was astir: candles in the windows; carts rumbling through the streets loaded with provisions for the army; up and down the walks a passing of people, many of them hallooing to me when they saw my musket, wishing me good luck.

By Davenport’s Inn a man came out of a side street, carrying three muskets. He drank from a flask, and stood watching me as I swung toward the turnpike. Then he hailed me, calling me Brother and asking whether I was bound for Cambridge. He joined me, and between us we emptied the flask. Soon, he said, we must beg a ride in a provision wagon or a rum cart, so he could be relieved of the weight of his three muskets.

He had a hare lip, poor fellow, and was hard to understand; for when he wished to say “Brother” he actually said “Mruther.” I gave him a lift with one of his muskets, a cheap thing, expressing surprise that he should travel so heavily armed, whereupon he said: “Mruther, ain’t you min oun oo Amridge yet?”

I said I had not yet been to Cambridge; so he explained there was a shortage of muskets in the army, some of the farmers having arrived armed with rusty swords, bayonets on rake handles, and muskets that had needed cleaning and repairing since the days of the Plymouth Colony. Muskets brought such prices in Cambridge that he had come home and bought two for twenty-two shillings, lawful money. These, he said proudly, he would sell for fifty or sixty shillings apiece, lawful money.

While I was turning this over in my mind a cart came clopping up behind us. I surmise the driver, a villainous-looking man with matted hair and a drooping mustache, would never have stopped for us if we had carried fewer weapons. He looked even less amiable when my companion, after climbing into the cart and poking into the hay, uncovered four kegs. They held rum, the driver said; and he gave us a drink of it. It tasted something like rum, and was made, my companion said, from a little rum and a lot of water, to which had been added burnt sugar, tobacco, and certain chemicals to make it more powerful, so that those who drank much of it awoke on the following morning feeling as though the sweepings of a barber shop had been burnt in their mouths.

He downed a pint of it and then said gloomily he didn’t know what the world was coming to: that soon nobody at all would be honest.

I broke into his meditations on the growth of dishonesty by asking a question that had been preying on me: how, in short, it had been possible for him to leave the army in order to go home. This, he said, was simple: you told your captain you had to go home to tend to your haying, though you might have to promise to harvest the captain’s hay as well. When I asked him whether or not his crop had been good he said, “Hell, Mruther, I ain’t
ut
no hay: I’m a whew maker!”

“A what maker?”

“A
whew
maker!” he replied impatiently. “Whew! Whew! What you wear on your feet!”

At Ipswich we left the clean, fresh smell of the salt marshes and struck the broad fields and rich farms of Wenham, the odor of new-mown hay lying heavy and sweet under the maples and elms. We dozed through the long hills of Danvers and awoke at Salem to a great hurly-burly, for though dawn was not far off, the provision sloops and schooners were unloading, privateers were stocking up, and brigs that had stolen in from the Sugar Islands were discharging cargoes. Here my hare-lipped friend proposed we buy two gallons of rum and make it into five gallons with water and
molasses
and a substance he would buy at an apothecary’s: then sell it in Cambridge at a round profit.

Having no time for such diversions, I left him and went into a tavern, the Anchor and Can, to have a slab of bacon with eggs. There my attention was caught by a small, graceful young gentleman in a tight uniform. It was not his being somewhat in liquor that took my eye, nor the way in which he tongue-lashed the landlord with such an amiable smile that his words sounded like compliments. I think he was the prettiest man I had ever seen, his ears small as a girl’s, and his mouth large with smooth red lips. He looked a little like a wellshaped woman in his close-fitting doeskin breeches and blue broadcloth coat. The chief thing that drew me to him was his declaration, made in elegant language to the innkeeper, that if the chickens were not packed in five minutes he would go elsewhere, since he wished to be in Cambridge by breakfast time. At this I asked him politely to advise me how I could most speedily arrive in Cambridge.

“With pleasure!” he replied quickly and happily, being, as I have said, somewhat in liquor. “By running!”

“That would be bad training for the future,” I said.

The young man nodded. “True, but you Massachusetts men should be trained for all emergencies.”

“Sir, I’m from Maine, not Massachusetts.”

The young man struck an attitude. “Incredible! Don’t tell me you’re not a colonel—not a Massachusetts colonel!”

I had no idea what he was getting at; but liking his looks and knowing I was at liberty to show Arnold’s letter so long as I kept silent concerning the reasons behind it, I fished it from my pocket. The young man accepted it, declaring, even while he opened it: “I’ve met hundreds of Massachusetts men, and they’re all colonels. The blow of meeting, in the very heart of Massachusetts, a man who’s neither a colonel nor a Massachuser is like to unnerve me.”

He glanced through my note. “Oh, ho!” he cried. “To Mr. Steven Nason from a colonel, but not a Massachuser colonel! Oh, ho! Oh, ho! And secrecy in the air! Ah, hah! Well, sir, I’ll get you up to Cambridge behind the cleverest black gelding that ever outran a Massachuser colonel, and my name’s Burr, from New Jersey. We’ll have a drink on it, a drink of Spanish wine that doesn’t lie in your stomach for days, like this damned New England rum, a drink for ditch-diggers and pirates.”

“Captain Burr,” I said, “I think you’ve never drunk your rum buttered.”

“Not captain! Plain Aaron Burr of Princeton in New Jersey, sir. Since I’ve seen these Massachuser colonels strutting and blowing about, and giving all the rest of us to understand that God made Massachusetts first, working hard at the task, and then tossed off the rest of the world as a sort of adjunct to Massachusetts, sir, I don’t want to be any sort of officer unless I can be greater than a colonel. What’s more, sir, I know as much about buttered rum as the next man, and I say the drinking of rum, whether hot, cold, buttered, or unbuttered, is no better than swallowing a mouthful of powdered flints. To hell with rum and to hell with colonels, sir.”