Arundel (68 page)

I shook my head, strangled by his nearness.

“Why wasn’t we told about it, Steven?” he demanded. “Steven, that’s a great drink! They got brandy in those cellars forty years old! Fifty, some of ’em! I want to tell you, Steven: you take a gallon of that Normandy cider and add a pint of old brandy to it, and you got a drink to put hair on a pumpkin!” He shook his head, as if recalling something that gave him pain. “Listen, Steven: I can talk French!” He rolled his eyes at the ceiling, put his head on one side, and ejaculated in a high, monotonous voice:
“On Normandee noo boovong doo see-druh.”

“What did you mean,” I asked, when I had pushed him away from me, “by saying you didn’t understand how all that stuff could have come out of one house? All what stuff?”

Cap passed his hand reflectively over his moist red forehead. “Didn’t I tell you about the picture? The picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry?”

I shook my head.

“Didn’t I tell you about getting the cariole? Didn’t I ask you whether you had any use for a fur coat or some silver knives and forks and spoons?”

“Nothing at all: you asked me nothing at all. We’ve just come here.”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “I believe you’re speaking the truth, since I ain’t seen you for two days or five or something. Steven, I’ve got the most beautiful picture: Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry.”

“I could use knives and forks and spoons,” I said. “Leastways, my mother could. And what was that about a fur coat?”

“Let me tell you about this picture,” Cap insisted.

“What kind of fur was the coat? Was it a man’s or a woman’s?”

“I dunno,” Cap said. “I can’t hardly tell the difference between ’em. I think it was sable, though I disremember.”

“Well,” I said, “I want that coat.”

“I got to tell you about this picture. This is the most beautiful picture in the world. Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry. It’s engraved. You can see ships on the river and people walking on shore, all as lifelike as if they was alive. I’d ruther have it than any picture I ever see! There’s another one there, an oil painting, twice as big, of cows in a field; but I’d a thousand times ruther have my Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry. You can see a cow any time, and there ain’t anyone don’t know what a cow looks like; but it ain’t everyone that can get to Philadelphia, and looking at my picture is just like going there—better, too, in lots of ways. It don’t take up near as much room as Philadelphia itself would.”

He put his arm around me. My head throbbed from the fumes of his brandy-and-garlic breath. “Stevie, there ain’t a man alive powerful enough to get that picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry away from me.”

I got him silenced and pushed into a chair after a time. It was a quiet gathering at first, in spite of Cap’s noisiness and his eagerness to have my opinion of Normandy cider strengthened with brandy. When all of us, even the brown-faced boy with the pipe, had sampled it a few times I saw that Natanis, who had been brought up in the Frencli-Abenaki town of St. Francis, could speak this whiny French tongue with ease, and that Jacataqua could make herself understood by the two brown-faced girls. After Cap had borrowed the stubby pipe from the little boy and sucked at it and then pretended to strangle, falling to the floor with a crash that shook the house and writhing there in seeming agony, there was more freedom among us.

The two brown-faced girls, Lizette and Zhulie, prepared the dinner for the next day, which they said they always did on the night before. Lizette climbed a ladder into the attic to cut a piece from the meat hanging there, and Zhulie climbed down a ladder into the cellar to get vegetables. When Cap tried to climb the ladder after Lizette, a rung broke so that he pitched down and wedged his beefy body into the hole. It seemed as though we might be obliged to cut the ladder from him, what with the bland, helpless way in which he lay where he was, refusing to move.

Nothing would do but I must master the song he had been singing; so we kept at it and kept at it, learning the verses from Lizette and Zhulie, who sat in our laps to teach us the better.

In the quiet of later days the verses would come back to me, a scrap here and a scrap there. They were about love and wine. Judging from the French songs we heard at the Taverne de Menut in St. Roque’s outside of Palace Gate before we were through with Quebec, all French songs deal with these matters, nor do I know any better things for them to deal with.

My eye was taken by the dinner that Lizette and Zhulie prepared as well as they could for keeping out of the way of Cap, who would lean all over them whenever he moved, unless they dodged him, which it seemed to me they made no pointed effort to do.

They took a piece of meat not as big as my fist, and put it in a kettle with a tight lid. With it they put a part of a cabbage and some garlic and a few potatoes and three or four turnips cut into pieces, after which they filled the kettle with water and set it on the stove. On the following day, at noon, they took it off and ate what was in it. They had put in, it seemed to me, less than enough to feed one man; but what they took out was a fine, meaty stew for six or seven persons. Meanwhile it had kept heat in the kitchen, which is a good thing in winter, since the kitchen is the place where the family sleeps, and guests as well, and any living thing that happens along.

Our host, Pierre Lemoine, said little; but what he said was to the point. When we spoke of the English, with Natanis interpreting between us, he used a word that Natanis did not know. He made an effort to get at the proper meaning of this word, but could not. He said it was not only a bad word, but a worse word than any of the bad ones he had heard used by Frenchmen.

What we did to the British, Lemoine said, he didn’t care, provided we left no dead bodies in front of his farm during the day, to cause talk among the neighbors.

When I told this to Cap, to soften his hard feelings against the French, he nodded his head complacently, as if he had invented the French people. “That’s right!” he said. “These frog-eaters ain’t got no use at
all
for the British. I dunno how they’d be to fight, but they’re powerful haters! They hate the English something
terrible!
They ain’t bad people, either, once you get used to the awful stinks around their houses—garlic and manure and their pipes.”

“Look here,” I said, “I want to be sure to get that fur coat.”

We finished our cider and brandy; and Cap, taking a lantern, led me through an adjoining grove of trees to one of the summer residences overlooking the St. Lawrence. It was a neat affair, a wooden house with gables; but the inside of it seemed to have been struck by a hurricane, everything overset and twisted out of place.

Cap apologized for its appearance. “I was in kind of a hurry, and I guess I wasn’t standing up too well. Seems to me I never saw a house with so many things to fall over. I moved out a lot of stuff and packed it in the cariole.”

“Whose cariole?”

“Well, that old Lemoine, he told me himself I drove up to his house in it, so I guess it must be mine.”

He got the fur coat from a compartment beneath the stairs. It was, as he had said, a sable coat; one that would keep Phoebe as warm as though she nestled in a feather bed.

He showed me the cellar under the kitchen, and bragged of it as though he had not only built it but filled it. The bottles were all in racks, each bottle in a hole by itself, and I had a powerful desire to taste the different liquors, some of which I had never heard tell of.

Cap brought me a bottle with Beaune le Grève, 1761, printed on its label. He thought it must have been this, he said, on top of some brandy, that had rendered him unconscious for three days, while still leaving him able to walk about as though in full possession of his faculties. Knowing a half-bottle could do us no harm, we knocked off the neck and sampled it. I found it so pleasing that I took away four bottles, though warned by Cap that brandy was more helpful in this bitter weather, and safer.

We went back to Pierre Lemoine’s farm, with the Great Dipper turning slowly above us and the tremendous cold flames of the Northern Lights marching across the sky. Lizette and Zhulie came out and helped us into the warm kitchen, where we sang “Vive la Canadienne” until long after the hour when honest people should be asleep.

XXX

I
THOUGHT
, when I looked at the weather-beaten farmhouses of Pointe-aux-Trembles, clustered drearily around a papist chapel on the desolate bank of the broad, ice-flecked St. Lawrence, that there would be no man of our little army, ever, who would speak good of the place, or hear its name without bursting into heartfelt curses. The snow was deep, and scarce a day passed without a fresh blanket of it being laid upon us; and full five hundred of our men had no rag to their backs save the tattered remnants of the garments in which they had marched out from Cambridge in the hot September sun.

Yet, miserable as they were, they had food to put in their bellies; and they lived in the warm, snug farmhouses of the long-queued French, neater and snugger than most of those on the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania and Maine. Somehow, despite the scurviness of their appearance, they were followed about by the children and seldom spurned by the farmers’ sprightly daughters. So in spite of eating themselves into stupors and heating themselves to the boiling point over pot-bellied kitchen stoves, and then going out into three feet of snow with their threadbare coverings, and suffering from coughs and quinsies and God knows what all, they contrived to endure their misery.

In after years I heard these very folk speak of Pointe-aux-Trembles with a wagging of their heads and a smacking of their lips, as though they had found it a place of heavenly pleasure; yet I remember how full of rancor they were at the time. Thus I have learned to disbelieve the tales men tell me of the delights of their younger days.

I had thought to avoid trouble by persuading Cap Huff to give his mysterious horse and cariole to Pierre Lemoine; but Cap wouldn’t hear to it.

“Steven,” he said, “you ain’t got the trading instinct! That horse and cariole was a gift right out of heaven; and we got to cart away a lot of stuff with us. We got to have that cariole.”

“But you can’t keep it! They’ll take it away from you—a colonel or somebody.”

“Not from me, they won’t,” Cap said. “Not while I got my health and my trading instinct.”

We had some trouble with the packing of the cariole, because of the vast store of goods Cap had unearthed during his three days of unconsciousness. Bottles of brandy and Beaune and Spanish wine had to be protected between feather beds. On top of the beds we placed cushions, counterpanes, blankets, and other odds and ends, including a few garments for Phoebe, several dozen handsome case-knives and forks, and a set of dessert knives, which I knew would be gladly received by my mother if it should be my good fortune to return to Arundel. In among these things, where we could find room, we stowed firkins of butter and lard. On top of everything we balanced ourselves, Cap carrying the rolled-up picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry, he having made as much to-do over removing it from its frame as though it had been his major general’s commission from Congress, engraved on gold.

There were some of Morgan’s riflemen on guard at the edge of the town when we drove up to Pointe-aux-Trembles; and their faces steamed with excitement when they saw our cariole.

“Jeeminy!” said one of them, “where you been to get feather beds!”

He was huddled into himself with the cold. I remembered I hoped to go with these men in case there was fighting at Quebec, because they were wild enough to fight their way out of any difficulty.

“Where we’ve been,” I told him, “there’s enough truck to make you rich for the rest of the winter. You ought to be there instead of here.”

The rifleman looked at me for a minute, then bawled down the road to another rifleman: “Hey, Buck! Tell Old Dan to come out here, ’n’ hurry!”