Drums Along the Mohawk (15 page)

John Wolff went slowly down a slimy iron ladder, which had been grouted into the stone. It was hard work; the irons were heavy to handle, and the chains clashed on the rungs. The air grew damper and cooler. He began to shiver. His eyes were lustreless when he reached the bottom at last. A bearded man in the remains of a cravat and broadcloth clothes took him by the hand.

“You’ll get used to the cold,” he said. “It never gets colder, even in winter. It just stays about the same temperature as that.”

He pointed at the water. Now John Wolff saw that it was like an underground pond at one end of which he stood. Directly overhead, the walls rose into obscurity. “It’s seventy feet to open air,” said one of the men. “They’ve iron bars over it.” John Wolff lowered his eyes to the water again. It filled two passages of the mine; and all around, the trickle and drip of water sounded unceasingly from every wall.

“You can’t get out,” the man explained. It was obvious.

Mr. DeLancey asked through chattering teeth, “What are those for?” He pointed to three braziers.

“Charcoal. We burn them or we suffocate. If we make trouble they threaten us by keeping back the charcoal. It’s all very simple.” He smiled. “I’ve been here over a year now. I got taken by the Committee. I come from Virginia. My name’s Francis Henry.”

There were thirty men or more, lying on the sand. They didn’t get up. They didn’t speak. They lay there like half-dead beasts.

Mr. Henry said, “It’s the custom for new arrivals to attend to the braziers. You can settle it between yourselves.”

John Wolff spoke for the first time that day.

“I’ll look after them. I want to get warm.”

Mr. Henry showed him the charcoal box.

“Don’t fall asleep,” he said. He pointed to the dark water. “We’ve a rule. Anybody who goes to sleep tending fire gets thrown in there. It takes you a week to dry out.”

“I won’t,” said Wolff. Then he looked up. “Mister, do they let you write letters?”

“It’s against the rules. But one of the guards can be bought. It costs a pound.”

John Wolff sat down. He watched Mr. Henry return to his dirty blanket. Then he watched the braziers, and the smoke from them curling up to the ceiling. It went straight up, but when it
reached the ceiling, seventy feet above, it started slowly seeping back down the walls and slowly licked away into the shafts of the mine. It seemed to be floating on the water like canoes.

One pound. He wondered whether Ally had gone back to Cosby’s Manor yet. He wondered if she would be as scary by herself as she was when he was round to be complained at.

About a week later, Lana was alone in the cabin. Gil was working out time against the fall logging and burning he expected to do, when he would want George Weaver and Christian Reall and Clem Coppernol for two or three days. He was paying off Captain Demooth in grass from the swale. The trees were mostly girdled, and already had dried out on the lower branches, the leaves turning brown, with only tufts of green at the tops. From the window Lana could see in a vague way how the new land would lie, straight to the west of the cabin.

She felt listless and dull-headed. There was no doubt in her mind now that there was a baby on the way, and though she could have wished that there might have been a year or so without one, Gil was pleased. A man could clear his land well enough, but when he began to work crops he needed help; and there was only one way to get help in the back country, and that was to lay up children against the time. She wondered whether he would be displeased if the child were a girl. Girls weren’t much use around a farm. But the main thing for a successful wife was to prove herself fertile. The sex of her offspring was generally ascribed either to an
act of God or to the male parent, according to the reaction of the man himself. She thought, in any case, she wouldn’t have to be afraid of Gil.

He had recently bought a fleece from Kast, in Schuyler, and he had told her that in his absence she had better not try to keep on with piling brush. It would be better if she stayed indoors and carded and cleaned the fleece. She forced herself to the task, now, for she had been putting it off all day, on the pretext that the cabin needed a doing over. She had cleaned and sanded the floor and swept out the loft. All the pans had been taken down to the brook, where it was cool, for scouring. But there was no other thing to do after that and she had finally forced herself to come back to the hot kitchen.

The wool had a greasy smell; it put oil on her fingers; it was matted and torn from grazing on the edge of the woods; and the leg fleece had clay dried hard as shot that must be carefully removed. It was too precious to waste a hair of it.

From where she sat, Lana could look up from time to time at the peacock’s feather on the dresser. Sight of it made her think of home. By now they would be finishing the wheat harvest; her sisters would be binding sheaves, laughing with the reapers. With the team hitched to the crib wagon, her father would be driving down to them. Her mother, standing in the door, would shade her eyes against the sun and stare after him, westward over the field, westward; perhaps thinking of Lana, trying to see her.

During the past week she had had a feeling of her mother’s solicitude, when she herself sat down alone with her thoughts, when she took to dreaming with the peacock’s feather.

She resolutely set to work. It made her feel better when she got down to it and could see the time of spinning coming nearer. Spinning was the next best thing to music: the vibration of the wheel entered your body; its humming got into the heart; the
thread mounted on the spindle, like dreams come true when you were a girl, or hope fulfilled when you got older, or like the memory of life itself. When a woman spun, she had her destiny in her own hands to make. A man had no place in spinning.

Lately she had noticed a queer thing in herself—that though her mind might wander, and her body lose awareness, senses like sleeping dogs awoke and walked. It was so now. She had heard nothing. Her hands were occupied with the comb and wool. She was not thinking any more of her girlhood home or her home with Gil. If she had been thinking at all, it had been of herself as a being past herself, growing without her own volition, like a lone plant in the woods.

Yet long before she heard a thing, before her mind wakened her senses to the approach of anyone, she knew that some person was coming near the cabin. When she finally did react, it was to start up in a cold sweat with the greasy fleece clutched in both hands like an apron over her knees.

She faced the door, slender and dark, her eyes clouded like damp glass, completely defenseless.

The person stopped before her in the door, hesitantly, awkwardly, half frightened.

“It’s me,” she was saying. “It’s just me. Nancy. I’ve got a letter for you, Mrs. Marting.”

“A letter?” Lana said mechanically.

Nancy looked into her face and swallowed noisily.

“Yes, Mrs. Marting, from Mr. Demooth. Capting, I mean.” She thrust a folded piece of paper out at arm’s length. “I don’t aim to stay. I’ll just give it and get along.”

Lana came to herself.

“Oh, no, Nancy.” The girl’s foolish face and wide blue eyes looked pitifully afraid of her. “Come in, Nancy.”

“Oh no, Mrs. Marting. I couldn’t set in with you. Missis is always after me, reminding me I’m just a hired help. I’ve got no place inside your house. I know it. Only sometimes I forget it.”

“Of course you have. I’m glad to have company. Come in.”

Nancy put a tentative foot across the threshold. It was shod in an old blue cloth shoe of Mrs. Demooth’s, too small, and slit to let the toes out. As she took the letter, Lana felt like weeping, to think how nearly she had deprived the girl of a great excitement.

Nancy was got up with care. In spite of the heat, she was wearing a blue camlet cloak over her dress, which was a calico, also obviously handed down. She had a string of beads round her neck, of blue and red glass, and a red ribbon in her yellow hair. The hair, too, had been brushed with thought and elaborately braided round her head.

Now she came in and sat down on a stool, denying herself the backed chair. Her china-blue eyes made one rapid revolution of the room.

“My,” she said, with an unconscious imitation of Mrs. Demooth’s inflection, “you have a nice place, Mrs. Marting.”

“Do you like it, Nancy? I’m glad.”

“You haven’t any picters. But that feather’s prettier than a picter, I believe.”

“I’m fond of it.”

“We hain’t got feathers in the big house.”

Lana read the letter.

Lana’s eyes filled with tears.

“What is it, Mrs. Marting?”

“I think Captain Demooth must be a very good man, Nancy.”

“Yes, he’s a nice man. Sometimes Missis is hard on me. But she says I’m stupid and I guess I am. I think Mr. Demooth likes me. He said so once. He said, ‘Nancy, you’re a pretty girl.’ Then he got on his horse and went to town.”

Lana, surprised, looked at Nancy.

“Why, you are,” she said.

It was quite true. When any rational emotion showed behind the doll-like eyes, Nancy was pretty. She was a large girl, with strong square shoulders. Under the dress her breasts showed firm and high. She was long-legged and she moved with an unconscious sleepy grace when she was walking. She reminded Lana somehow of a well-bred filly, in her body, now that she tried to see her with a man’s eyes.

“What’s your name, Nancy?”

“Schuyler. Nancy Schuyler.” A trained sort of pride entered her voice. “My mother was Elisabeth Herkimer. She’s sister of the colonel. I do hear he has a fine place. I been there once, only I don’t remember it very well, only the nice horses and the cherry trees. They was in bloom, not bearing. Do you like cherries, Mrs. Marting?”

“Yes, I do. Have you any brothers or sisters?”

“I’ve got two brothers, Mrs. Marting. Hon Yost. He gave me these beads. He won them off an Indian down at Canajoharie. Nicholas, he’s younger, and black-complected, not like me and Hon.”

“Do you have to work?”

“Pa’s dead. Ma put me out to work with Captain Demooth and the Missis for four years. She gets three pounds a year in English money for me. I was sixteen then. Unless I want to get married after I’m nineteen. I’ll be nineteen next month. Did you want to get married?”

“Yes,” said Lana, with a smile.

“I wonder what it’s like.”

“You’ve never wanted to?”

“I don’t know. Old Clem Coppernol, he’s always bothering me to come sleep in his cabin. It’s dirty there. I don’t think I’d want to. And Missis puts me in my room every night anyway and locks me up. I wouldn’t mind sleeping with Captain if he told me to. But that ain’t marrying, is it?”

“It isn’t quite the same,” said Lana, gravely.

“That’s what Hon Yost told me. He said, ‘you and me ain’t got much brains, Nancy, but we’ve got looks to beat all. You make a feller to marry you if he wants anything. Don’t you trust a feller,’ he says. I think Hon Yost has got some brains, don’t you, Mrs. Marting?”

Nancy leaned forward on her knees. Her back was straight. She had a kind of animal strength that was invigorating to see, in spite of her foolish eyes.

“You’ll stay and have some milk with me?” Lana suggested.

“Oh no, I couldn’t.”

“Yes, please.”

The girl beamed.

The milk tasted a little bitter from cherry browse. But it was cool from the spring. And Nancy chattered happily. Her brother
had gone off to Canada. He was making money in the army. She supposed she wouldn’t see him for a spell, but maybe he might come next year.

“How do you know?” asked Lana with a tightening of her breath.

“He sent word down to Nicholas. He sent word to me he’d try to fetch me an officer, too. I wouldn’t mind it if the army was to come down here, would you, Mrs. Marting?”

She finished her milk and rose.

“I’ll clean the things,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

“No, I’ll do them.”

“I wouldn’t feel easy, Mrs. Marting. Missis might scold about it. It’s nice you letting me set with you this way, but I’d feel better if I could.”

She looked so anxious, Lana let her wash the cups. Afterwards she repeated Lana’s message of thanks to the captain.

“He’ll like that. It’s real nice to say it so. I’ll tell him after supper when he comes to clean his rifle in the kitchen.”

She went away.

The old Indian, Blue Back, had crossed the Hazenclever hill and gone down the north slopes for the valley of the West Canada Creek. He had kept on the west shore northward towards the big falls, and there, on the edge of the chasm, in a small forest swale he had come on the bed of a deer. He moused around in the grass like an old hound dog until he
picked up the track, which he followed through all the deer’s morning manœuvres.

They led Blue Back to where the deer had watered, dunged, drunk, and browsed. A little later, a couple of miles to the northwest, they brought him to a pond in which the deer had pulled lilies. By then the Indian knew that he was dealing with a heavy buck. He didn’t want a big deer, now that he had come so far from home; he wouldn’t be able to carry the half of it back to Oriska. What he was supposed to be after was a nice young doe or a grown fawn. His young wife, Mary, recently baptized by Mr. Kirkland, had asked him to get her a nice doeskin for a kirtle she wished to make for herself.

But Blue Back couldn’t let the deer go. He wanted to see the horns. He was what Joe Boleo, the trapper, called meat hungry. Every autumn, when the nights grew frostier and the trees began to get a tinge of color on the ridges, Blue Back began to feel an urge to get hold of big meat. Big horns. Something big in the way of a deer, to start the hunting; something that, when you ate the meat of it, didn’t digest so easy as a fawn, but kept the belly tight for a long time.