Arundel (37 page)

“Yes, she is, is she!” said Phoebe, dropping her lower lip vacantly in a manner she doubtless felt to be an imitation of me, “and a strange thing, if you ask me, that one who goes around miawling she’s your sister, and hanging to your waist like a sick ninny, should have said nothing to you about it!”

“What do you mean?”

“Sister, indeed! What I mean is clear enough! It wouldn’t be so pleasant for you, would it, if a woman from your home followed this army and saw you at your innocent play with a brown hussy calling herself your sister? Sister! Pah!”

“Phoebe,” I said, “there’s no sense in what you say. She was a little girl, playing with her doll, when I was hurt going after Mary Mallinson. How could she be anything but what I tell you, Phoebe? There’s no room in my mind for anyone but Mary!”

Phoebe shouldered her pack with a sniff. “Then you don’t fear what I’ll see, and don’t mind my being with the army?”

“I do
not!
It would make no difference to me if you marched three feet from me all the journey!”

“Then we’ll say no more about it,” she said. “If you’re going up to Fort Western by canoe I’ll go with you.”

She was bound to have the last word, I saw, and nothing was gained by arguing with her, any more than with any other woman; so we set off for the tavern together.

Already order was appearing. The bateaux, drawn to the edge of the river, had been filled with packs and supplies. Strings of them were being launched and detachments of men rowing them upstream. The water was dotted with loaded bateaux, all moving toward Fort Western; and detachment after detachment was setting off afoot along the rutted wood road leading north from Agry’s Point.

On a knoll at the lower end of the shipyard, surrounded by captains and lieutenants, stood a high officer of the expedition supervising the formation of three companies of musketmen. What caught my eye was the face of a man standing a little behind him—a long, sour face of a flat gray color, as though modeled in the clay from one of our Maine coves. It called to my mind the inside of the council house at Swan Island and the cold spring day when my father, dripping wet, dragged himself for the last time up the stairs of our inn at Arundel. I leaped away from Phoebe, raced around the group of officers, and took the gray-faced man by the front of his buckskin hunting shirt. What was in my mind I’m not quite sure; but I know I had often thought, in the half-dreams that lie between sleeping and waking, that I would like to take this man in my hands and pull him slowly to pieces in revenge for what he had done to my father.

“Is your name Ezekiel Hook?” I asked, taking a tighter grip on his hunting shirt. He looked me in the eyes, with no change of expression, and shook his head. Before I could question further I heard a rasping shout of “Don’t you ever salute officers?” It was the high officer who shouted. He was red-faced and angry, and in him I recognized the person who had given us a dressing-down in Cambridge for the same fault.

“Sir,” I said, saluting carefully, “I ask your pardon! I thought this man once did me a wrong.”

The officer, mollified by my respect, laughed uproariously. “No, no, no! John Treeworgy wouldn’t do anyone a wrong. Always doing good, John is. Guide, sir. Knows the Kennebec like a book. Best guide I’ve got.”

A messenger stood at attention before him. “Colonel Arnold’s compliments to Colonel Enos,” the messenger said, “and Colonel Arnold asks him to wait here with his division for the construction of twenty more bateaux.”

I rejoined Phoebe, dissatisfied with Colonel Enos’s recommendation of John Treeworgy. John Treeworgy was too like Ezekiel Hook for my own peace of mind; and Colonel Enos looked as if he would believe anything, provided it was told to him loud enough and often enough.

I could hear Cap’s bellowing voice bursting out of Smith’s Tavern; and while I wondered whether to interrupt him and carry him up with us there was a scuttling beside me, and Jacataqua pushed herself under my arm. Her dog, a smooth-haired black animal with yellow legs and pale masklike markings around his eyes, grinned up at me and flapped his tail against my knees, making me think back to Ranger with a pang of homesickness.

“Here,” I said, “whatever became of Ezekiel Hook?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know him.”

“A minister,” I reminded her, “who wanted all of you to be Christians.”

The name meant nothing to her.

“Do you know a man named John Treeworgy?” I persisted.

“Yes,” she said, wrinkling her nose, as if at a bad odor. “An inspector for the Plymouth Company. He carried information about settlers and traders, so they often had trouble with the company. I haven’t seen him for three years.”

Phoebe touched me on the elbow, nodding toward the tavern. In the door stood little Aaron Burr of New Jersey, as neat and well brushed as though fresh from his tailor. Yet he looked less pretty than I remembered him, for his shoulders were stooped forward and his eyes glittered unpleasantly. Being glad to see him, I saluted; but he paid no attention. I saw he was staring at Jacataqua.

She smiled at him, swinging herself forward and backward at my waist, and said: “We can go now.”

“I don’t relish your distribution of favors,” Burr said.

Jacataqua stared at him slack-lipped.

“Sir,” I said, “you may remember me.”

“Why,” Burr said, “I may, but I probably shan’t, under the circumstances.”

“Under what circumstances?” I asked. His look was too offensive for my fancy.

“You know very well,” he said, stepping up to me like a bantam. “I find you too free with your hands.”

“Well, now,” I said, “that’s too bad, because if you had your way, I’d have to remove myself forever from my blood sister.”

“Your blood sister!”

“Why, yes,” I said. “Since she was four years old.”

His hard black eyes never left mine.

“Well,” I said to Phoebe, casting a look at the brassy-blue sky, “it looks a little like rain, so we’ll start.” I patted Jacataqua on the shoulder and took Phoebe by the arm, saying to myself that this liver-colored young whippersnapper needed a ducking in the river, and that the only thing saving him was the trembling of Jacataqua’s lip.

We started away, whereat Burr came running to me, contritely holding Jacataqua by the hand. “Sir,” he said, “I behaved badly; but dark eyes and cheeks like wine on amber can make the best of men, like the poorest of us, into boors. What can I do to redeem myself?”

When I had pondered his words, I said: “You might tell me about Colonel Enos.”

Burr shot me what I thought was a grateful glance. “Enos is another of those lousy Connecticut colonels—a lieutenant colonel. He may not think he’s God Almighty, but he considers himself a close relative.”

“It seemed to me,” I said, “he has a passion for being saluted. If he doesn’t get over it, there might be trouble on the upper Kennebec. From what I’ve seen of our bateaux, they won’t stand much dropping on the rocks, not even to let Colonel Enos be saluted.”

“He’ll get over it,” Burr said, “when he has something to occupy his mind; but he’ll never recover from remembering he was an officer of the King in the last war against the French, and in the expedition against Havana in 1762, when all the rest of us were infants, puling about the kitchen floor. He’s stuffed to the bursting point with military lore he learned from the British, most of it not worth learning; and his age makes him cautious. When Colonel Arnold says ‘Damn everything! Come ahead!’ Colonel Enos says “Wait! Let me think how we did it when I fought with the British!’ To the devil with him and his caution! I can’t see how caution will ever help us take Quebec!”

We went upstream close together, Jacataqua paddling Burr in a light canoe, while her dog sat in the bow, thumping his tail modestly against the bottom; and Hobomok at the stern of ours. When we slipped past the long strings of bateaux, those that rowed them bawled pleasantries at us, asking us where the dance was to be, or begging to be invited to the christening, or urging us to stop so they might lass the bride. The whole river was a highway, bateaux moving up singly and in strings, and canoes bearing messengers and sightseers, with here and there a sloop or a schooner. On the shore detachments of soldiery threaded their way between the oaks and pines, with messengers or officers a-horseback weaving through them.

From Burr I had information concerning the army—how it consisted of a few more than one thousand men, all accustomed to fighting Indians or handling bateaux and axes, and skilled in the use of rifle or musket. They were, he declared, the choicest of the troops besieging Boston, and officered by the best the army afforded; so their patriotism and determination made up for the smallness of their numbers.

At this Phoebe thrust in her oar. “If they’re all so patriotic, what ailed those aboard the sloop
Eagle
in Newburyport, struggling to get ashore once they were aboard, and guards placed over them to keep them from running home?”

Burr shook his pretty head. “A dozen of us racked our brains over that! They embarked gaily enough, and within two hours it was as though the devil bit them. One of Arnold’s guides was there—a sourfaced fellow with a name like a mouthful of porridge. He thought they might have become ill from the stink of bilge.”

“It takes more than the smell of bilge to turn a New Englander’s stomach,” Phoebe said.

“Was the guide’s name Treeworgy?” I asked.

“That was it,” said Burr. “Treeworgy. A name that sounds as if its owner didn’t know how to spell it.”

I thought so too, and said to myself Treeworgy would bear further inspection.

When I asked Burr whether he included Colonel Enos among those who were patriotic and determined, he said he did, since Enos had fought the French, and gone with the British to Havana on that dreadfully mismanaged expedition, and so must be counted a brave and able man.

But if, he said, there were shortcomings in him, they were made up by the excellences of Colonel Arnold and Lieutenant Colonel Greene, the former regarded by General Washington and General Schuyler as the foremost fighting officer in the army; one who would bring the highest military honors to our colonies.

He spoke with admiration of Major Meigs and Major Bigelow, and of the captains, any one of whom, he said, was fit to be a general. I think, with a few exceptions, he was right; for many of them became generals.

Over the rifle companies he waxed well nigh lyrical, saying they were the greatest soldiers ever seen: so far as he was concerned, he would be willing to attack Quebec with no more than three companies of riflemen and their officers, and Colonel Arnold to lead them. I thought at the time he was speaking irrationally, since there are but seventy-five riflemen to a company, but I soon had occasion to change my mind. At an even later date, when we had picked Burgoyne’s army to pieces at Saratoga, I heard Burgoyne admit that Morgan’s regiment of riflemen was the finest in the world; so I would be the last to consider Burr’s judgment far off the mark.

There were horses and oxen at the foot of the quick water below Fort Western, and the bateaux were going up on sleds over the spongy wood road; so Hobomok and I overturned the canoes on one of the bateaux and traveled up in state.

The parade ground between the long wooden barracks and the river was already filled with tents and board huts, put up by the riflemen; and at one of the doors of the barracks stood Cap Huff, idly rummaging among his teeth with a splinter of wood, but scrutinizing the newcomers with prodigious attention. He darted past me and seized on a young Rhode Islander who was carrying a pair of dead chickens.