Arundel (4 page)

Suddenly she sprang from me and laughed and said, “Why don’t you kiss me better, Steven?”

Whereat I, foolishly, in simple earnest, said to her: “Where did you learn so much about kissing?”

She leaped up and stamped her foot, crying, “I hate you! You’re a baby!” She fled across the dunes and toward the stockade, and I after her. It was time, for the wind had turned into the east and the prophecy of the sun’s ring was borne out by the spitting rain drops that were falling in the gathering dusk.

Nor would she speak to me as we ran, so that I was well aware what a clown I was, and could only lead her to the small hole under the rear of the stockade, which, since I had cut it for my own and Ranger’s benefit, it was my duty to close each night with a little gate of logs.

She fell to her knees and crept through, still saying nothing; but when I crawled after her, and my head and shoulders were through the hole, so that I could not move, she was waiting for me, still on her knees. As I looked at her she took my face between her hands and kissed me again and said, “Are you going to marry me?”

“Yes,” I panted, and I meant it. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

She kissed me quickly again: kissed me yet once more. Then she scrambled to her feet and ran into the kitchen.

I think I meant it as I had never meant anything in my life.

II

T
HE
gathering-room was full of clamor and bustle; for travelers who might otherwise have continued their journeys had taken warning from the east wind and made themselves snug indoors for the night.

In this they were wise; for the paths through the woods, though proudly called roads, were little better than successions of bog holes, uncomfortable to travel on horseback, with the horse perpetually slipping into the muck up to his withers, and a matter for powerful cursing when the rider pitched from his horse, as he often must.

The country was sparsely settled; and the settlers, lured to the wilderness by false statements on the part of land speculators in Boston, were in large part poor, ignorant, and embittered folk, living in dark and cheerless cabins; so that a traveler who sought hospitality among them might suffer from gloom for a day and from a quinsy for a week, and be robbed in the bargain.

We were still at war with the French and Indians; and some few of our people, weary of their monotonous life and hopeful of booty, had gone away with Lord Jeffrey Amherst to attack Quebec from one direction while young James Wolfe attacked it from the other. So the French were striking where they could; and dark and rainy nights provided excellent opportunities for the French-inspired red men from the north to reach out silently from the underbrush and seize a likely colonist who could be hurried captive to Canada and put to work for the further glory of the King of France.

Often had my father warned me not to go alone on the roads on a dark or rainy night, unless I went with friendly Indians. He himself wouldn’t do so except for the best of reasons; for being a blacksmith and a gunsmith, and as strong as he was wise, he was desired by the Northern Indians, who were eager to take him, since they would be well rewarded by their French masters for providing them with such a workman, as well as for depriving the colonies of his services.

So all the chairs in the gathering-room were occupied; and Malary and my mother and sisters ran here and there in the kitchen, preparing supper, and my oldest sister Hepsibah stood guard over the bean pots to make sure the pork was on the top for its final browning, which is one reason for the toothsomeness of the bean as cooked in our family. Coarse fare though beans may be, I would liefer have them as Malary cooked them, and Cynthia still cooks them, than all the ragouts and French flummeries you can show me.

On each side of the fire, which was small because the night was mild, sat the two commissioners from Wells and the two commissioners from Arundel, Mary’s father being one of these, sipping often at their rum, and gravely dusting tobacco ash from buckskin shirts with hands that seemed to me to fumble somewhat.

In the corner was my father in his barrel chair, saying little but missing nothing. The trestle table had been put together, and around it sat a goodly company, shouting and laughing and pounding on the board as always occurs when a gathering is dry and snug, and of its own choice awaiting the passage of evil weather.

There was Lieutenant Wattleby, detailed with two militiamen to the garrison house for duty; Thomas Scammen, a master shipwright from across the river; Humphrey Bickford, whose knowledge of herbs and simples was such that all the townsfolk sought him for medical advice, there being no doctor at all in our poor neighborhood; Ezekiel Kezer, the Indian trader on his way from Falmouth to Boston to lay in supplies; and Ivory Fish, one of the militiamen assigned to the garrison with Lieutenant Wattleby.

Among them was a man I had never before seen. He was younger than any in the room, and yet had a look of being older, as though weary of seeing many things, but amused by all of them, though faintly, because of his weariness. He was slender, with a pale, pleasing face and an odd manner of throwing back his head and staring with cold eyes at the person he addressed. Even Noah Gooch, who carried beer and spirits to the wayfarers, walked carefully around him, and neither stumbled against him nor spilled rum on him, which was a miracle if ever there was one. Noah was the clumsiest of men, and could manage to slop small beer on a customer, even if the two were alone in the room with a brig’s mainsail hung between them. Yet the stranger gave him no warnings or reprimands, but only looked at him with a frosty smile.

It was not the stranger’s dress that made him conspicuous; for, like any trapper, he wore a buckskin shirt stained the warm yellow color of ferns when the life first goes out of them in the autumn, and a worn and wrinkled pair of buckskin breeches, and moccasins, and a light, tight-fitting summer cap made of brown rabbit skin. It was his speech and manner that set him apart from those about him. His speech lacked the flatness peculiar to our part of the colonies, and had a delicate swishing note to it, that called to mind a snake moving through dried grass. His manner had something I thought of then as high and biting, or disdainful. There was distinction in it; and all in all he was so different that those at the table must often be broadly staring at him. But when they met the iciness of his look they would turn their heads and cough, as if to say they had no interest in him.

The noisiest person at the board was Cap Huff, whose name was thought to be a military title. This belief, indeed, he encouraged, never correcting those who miscalled him Captain. Yet he was not a captain, but only a hugesome, bawling, swaggering young man from Kittery, not skilled in anything except the singing of ribald songs and the coining of bawdy phrases with which to insult the Indians, for whom he had no liking whatever, and a gift of tale-telling that would keep a dozen men hanging on his words and slapping themselves with delight at his injudicious statements, in which, in spite of himself, as it were, there was often a little truth.

To give him his due, he was not bad as a woodsman, being accurate with a musket; but he was given to walking carelessly into perilous straits without taking the trouble to reckon the possible cost. He trusted, it seemed to me, too much on his large, face-encompassing smile; and when this failed, he was quick to fall back on the use of his fists, at which he was proficient.

For all that, I took frequent pleasure in the company of Cap Huff when fate threw us together in after years. I know he was not thought well of in Kittery or in Portsmouth, where he had early occupied quarters in the gaol; but I disagree with those who claimed he would steal anything not securely fastened to wall or floor. He earned his living by carrying goods and messages between Portsmouth and Falmouth and the intervening towns; and what is more, he carried them safely, always. I have heard it said he sometimes returned from journeys with more packages than his commissions entitled him to have; and I noticed his visits to a locality coincided with thefts of minor articles like a sucking pig, or a pair of pistols, and sometimes a keg of brandy. Yet never did he steal from me, except small things I could easily spare.

I could not in all conscientiousness hold him up before my grandsons as a model of the manly virtues, especially in the matter of bath-taking, at which he was more lax than most of our townsfolk, some of whom boasted there were parts of their bodies that water had never touched; yet I can freely say that although Cap Huff had something of a smell, I would liefer fight beside him than beside many a man who bathes as much as twice a week and would not steal even a kiss from a willing maid.

Cap Huff knew little and cared less about the origin of his parents; but in 1725 the people of this neighborhood helped to relieve the survivors of that gallant fray known as Lovewell’s Fight; and I know from my father that when the colonists returned from that long hard journey they brought with them, out of the Indian country, Cap’s father and mother and two children, one being named Much Experience and the other Little To Depend Upon. The family was deposited in Kittery, where they subsisted on clams and fish entirely; and shortly thereafter this son being born, he was named Saved From Captivity and called Cap for convenience. His taking advantage to be called Captain I have ever regarded as a harmless whim, and have humored him in it, especially when among strangers.

I had brought into the gathering-room an armful of logs from the tall pile beside the kitchen door; and Cap, perspiring gently and nursing a pewter measure of rum so that it looked fragile between his great brown hands, was telling of his adventures on his most recent trip.

I slowly stacked the wood beside the fire so that I might listen to Cap’s discourse; for I have always taken pleasure in it, even though accused of having low tastes for so doing because of the vast deal of meaningless profanity with which his tales are interlarded. He used it, obviously, as others use punctuation.

He spoke of an Indian neighbor of ours to the southward, a harmless Abenaki named Ockawando. Cap declared Ockawando was ill-begotten and verminiferous, and an eater of bugs to boot, though in all my goings and comings among the Abenakis I never saw one of them eat an insect of any sort.

Cap, it appeared, had observed a bear cub engaged in reaching meditatively for honey in the crotch of an elm tree. The elm tree was close to Ockawando’s wigwam—so close, Cap swore, that Providence must have had a hand in it. Not being one to disregard a hint from above, he said, he had hunted out Ockawando and offered him four shillings, hard money, if he would climb the tree and capture the bear. Inflamed by the generosity of this offer, Cap said, the bug-eating Ockawando had readily agreed.

They had gone to the tree, which Ockawando had ascended. When he laid hold of the bear’s tail the bear not only objected, but the bees failed to distinguish between the bear and Ockawando, and the two fell to the ground with a hideous outcry.

When Ockawando again laid hold of the bear’s tail, eager for his four shillings, the bear clawed at him protestingly. Thus Ockawando was obliged to retain his hold of the tail and still remain out of reach of the claws, which is easier to say than to do.

“There he was,” Cap said, “going round and round and round, and shouting to me to help him let go of the bear!”

“Did you help him?” asked Lieutenant Wattleby.

“Not me!” Cap said contentedly. “I come away and left him there, going round and round and round.”

“Did you pay him the four shillings?” my father asked.

“Now Steven!” said Cap with an injured air, “how
could
I when there wasn’t any way of telling whether he was going to catch the bear or the bear catch him?”

In an undertone he added, as though to himself, “I hope it was him as got caught, the dirty bug-eater! He
is
a bug-eater. I’ve seen him eat snails, and snails is bugs!”

Heartened by the guffaws that followed, Cap absent-mindedly helped himself to the stranger’s flask, cupping his thumb and forefinger around the top of his pewter measure so that a full half inch was added to its height, and pouring until the liquor overran his hand.

The stranger looked at him coolly. “I wonder if it was not a gentleman named Ananias who first told that tale? Will you do me the honor to accept a drink?”

Cap hurriedly filled his mouth with liquor, and holding it so, without swallowing, he once more poured a generous cupful from the ironically proffered flask. When he swallowed he looked up appreciatively, exclaiming: “Brandy! Hot stuff!”

“Hot?” the stranger asked incredulously, feeling of the flask and placing it well beyond Cap’s reach.

“Hot stuff,” Cap repeated, staring at the stranger with knitted brows.

He cleared his throat, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, threw back his head and bellowed: