Drums Along the Mohawk (20 page)

He watched her struggle with the meat. He thought she was going to be sick. But she wasn’t. She got through it somehow. But when she looked up at him, as a dog might for a kind word of praise, he saw that she understood what was in him. Her face turned deathly white and her eyes showed fear as tangible as tears. She never said a word.

They didn’t speak to each other the next morning. They went several weeks without any words but absolutely necessary ones. Gil kept trying to tell himself that he was doing better than having to do with Demooth’s hired girl, but when he looked at Lana he had to check himself from fleeing the house. She was completely compliant now. Yet her compliance had the fearful quality of a misused dog’s.

On Christmas Day he broke down. He had brought her, from the store, a piece of ribbon, which he could not well afford, and as he watched her mechanically putting it in her hair, with mechanical gestures of pleasure, like a travesty in female flesh and blood, he cried out, “For God’s sake throw it away.”

Her hands stopped at her hair, and for a long while she stared
at him. Then when he sprang up to get out of the house, she stepped before the door.

“Gil.”

Her face was so white that he was afraid of her. Then his hand raised and clenched. And suddenly he broke down.

“It was all wrong, Lana. I was all wrong.”

After his words the silence between them in the shack was as complete as the silence of winter beyond the door. He could hear his own heart beating, and then, with amazement, he heard her breathing.

“Maybe it wasn’t,” she said.

“You’re like a dead person.” He felt the words rush from his heart. “As if I’d killed you.”

“I don’t know, Gil.” Her face for all its pallor became thoughtful. It hadn’t the quick responsiveness any more. Looking at it, he felt that that had gone forever. “It wasn’t you altogether, Gil. It was me, too.”

While they stood there, they heard the bell of the old church, which had been taken out of the belfry to make room for the alarm gun and hung over the barrack door, send its slow notes over the snow.

Gil saw the pathetic question in her eyes.

“Let’s,” he said.

They went to church across the snow. They had no joy in the service or in the Reverend Mr. Rozencrantz’s ponderable sermon on God’s nearness in the wilderness or his prayer for the continued fruitfulness of God’s earth. The water in the flat pans between the pews, placed there to draw the frost from the stone walls, the white icy light that filtered through the panes, the slow measured encroachment of the damp chill air to their very bones, were all beyond their senses. They sat side by side, untouching, yet close.

To the west of Deerfield, where the Mohawk River made the great bend from north to east, the wooden ramparts of Fort Stanwix, striped with new palisades to patch the old, rose on their embankment above the swampy, snow-filled clearing. Beyond the cleared land the woods looked contracted in the frosty air. Sentries on the walks looked out at them through clouds of their own breathing, lethargically, for there was nothing, as there had been nothing since November, for them to see. Not even the river, which ran under ice; no movement about the two small deserted farms lying under the protection of the fort. Nothing at all but the snowshoe tracks of the five Oneida Indians who that morning had approached the glacis from the west and been admitted through the sally port.

Now they were in the commandant’s quarters, a low frame building, of the shape of a cattle shed, set against the north wall. The smoke from the end chimney rose in a blue, thin, transparent tape against the gray sky.

The commandant’s office was also the officers’ messroom, walled with hand-hewn boards, furnished with tables of milled plank, and heavy chairs, the product of the garrison. There was not one in which a man could be comfortable. At the end of the big table, Colonel Elmore, of the New York line, sat in his shirt sleeves, his back to the roaring fire, with his coat hung over his chair. Down the table before him four of the Indians huddled in their blankets, sweating, putting their odor in the room, staring with eyes that missed nothing while they seemed to be unseeing. The fifth Indian stood at the end of the table opposite the commandant.

This Indian was an old man, but his bearing was like a young brave’s. His thin, tan, hawk-featured face was turned steadily toward Colonel Elmore. He spoke in a slow deep voice that rose and fell rhythmically, while one of the officers of the garrison, at another table, scratched down his own translation with a squeaky goose quill.

“We are sent here by the Oneidas in conjunction with the Onondagas. They arrived at our village yesterday. They gave us the melancholy news that the grand council fire at Onondaga has been extinguished.…” His voice was raised for a moment. “However, we are determined to use our feeble endeavors to support peace through the confederate nations. But let this be kept in mind, that the council fire is extinguished.
Brother, attend:
It is of importance to our well-being that this be immediately told to General Schuyler. In order to effect this, we deposit this belt with Tekeyanedonhotte, Colonel Elmore, commander at Fort Stanwix, who is sent here by General Schuyler to transact all matters relative to peace. We therefore request him to forward this intelligence in the first place to General Herkimer.… 
Brother, attend:
let the belt be forwarded to General Schuyler, that he may know that our council fire is extinguished, and can no longer burn.…”

Joe Boleo, the news runner, was a thin man whose joints seemed always on the point of coming loose. He used snowshoes of the Algonquin shape, with spurs at the back, that left prints in the snow like the hind finger of a heron’s foot. He went out from the fort while the Indians were still working their jaws on the salt pork Colonel Elmore had served them. He did not take the road along the south bank. He followed the river, where the snow was packed hard on the ice by the wind.

At noon the old Indian, Blue Back, sticking his nose outside the door of his bark shanty at the mouth of the Oriskany, saw the runner and looked long at the bent lank figure, shuffling past beneath the big coonskin cap, at a steady four miles an hour.

“By damn it,” he said to his wife. “Joe Boleo’s in a hurry.”

“Why don’t you holler for him to come in?” she said, gathering spit to work into the doeskin.

“It’s too cold to holler,” Blue Back said, shutting the door. “Besides, he always knows if there’s any rum.”

“We haven’t got any,” she said.

Blue Back sat down and put his hand on his stomach.

“No,” he admitted, “but when I smelled Joe Boleo I’d want some myself.”

He lay back on the bed and looked from the peacock’s feather over his head to his young wife. She was growing a belly. The sight of it filled Blue Back with conflicting emotions. It was gratifying at his age to be able to show the tribe a legitimate offspring; but at his age, too, it was going to be hard work hunting for three people.

Joe Boleo had seen the group of Indian shanties and his squirrel-like, round, small black eyes had noticed the closing chink in Blue Back’s door.

“God damn,” he thought, “that old timber beast has got some likker and he’s afraid I might turn round and visit with it.”

He glanced up two hours later to see what was left of Martin’s cabin at Deerfield. A corner of the log wall, charred away in sloping angles, thrust broken black teeth through the snow. The sight meant nothing to Joe. If anything it made him feel pleased to think that the settlers for a few years would be held back from the trapping country.

Joe Boleo hadn’t many convictions in life, beyond the fact that he was the best shot in the Mohawk Valley; that women couldn’t get along without him—not in their right minds, they couldn’t; and that if rum wasn’t a very good substitute for whiskey, whiskey was a first-rate substitute for rum. He was also annoyed at the British efforts for regulating the Indian trade and price of peltry. If it hadn’t been for that he might as well have tailed along to Canada with the Johnsons. But if you couldn’t cheat an Indian, who in the name of God could you cheat in this Godforsaken country?

Men were coming in from barns and cattle sheds when he passed Schuyler Settlement, and the setting sun drew Joe’s shadow long before him on the crust. It put a spark of red on the lip of the alarm bell in Little Stone Arabia Stockade. The farmers were hurrying so that the milk would not freeze in the pails. Farming, Joe considered, was a hell of a life. You milked and milked at a cow for half a year, and just about as soon as you got her dry, the animal would get herself a fresh supply. But when he saw the warm vapor left in the evening air by the closing doors, it seemed to him there were advantages. A farmer in winter could sit at home and order his womenfolks around, while a scout might have to be running thirty miles to tell General Herkimer that a fire in an Indian lodge had gone out.

Joe wondered whether that had been an accident, or whether the old women watching it had gone to sleep, or whether the God-damn thing had been put out a-purpose. The Indians said the fire had been lit in the early life of mankind, and the Iroquois had kept it alive ever since. Even when they moved they had carried it around with them in a stone pot.

An hour after black dark he slogged his way up to Fort Dayton, handed in the news, and asked for a sleigh to take him down to the falls. The commandant got him the sleigh and a driver and packed him off with a pan of rum in his inside and called in the members of the Committee, Demooth, and Petry, and Peter Tygert, and gave them the news in front of the fire in his own quarters.

Their faces animated, even at the bad news, for having a new thing to talk about. The commandant said, “I’m from Massachusetts, but maybe I’m wooden-headed. What difference does it make?”

Demooth answered him soberly.

“It means that the Six Nations can’t act together any more without the fire to confer around. That means that the Senecas and the Mohawks and the Cayugas and anyone else are free agents. While the fire was lit, no single tribe could go to war unless the other five were in agreement.”

Herkimer, who had been appointed Brigadier General of the Tryon County militia in September, wrote a letter in his crabbed English to Schuyler and then had Eisenlord the clerk translate it and transcribe it while he and Joe Boleo did a little sober drinking.

Herkimer wanted Joe’s opinions.

The scout, sprawling at the table in the white-paneled room whose windows looked out on the river and towards the falls, rinsed the liquor slowly round what teeth he still had claim to.

“If you want to know what I think,” he said, “it just ain’t safe hanging onto Stanwix. The wall’s rotten. They’ve spiked in
enough pickets to keep the others from falling down. If a man’s got a cold he dassn’t do sentry work there, for fear he’ll sneeze and level the whole shebang. Poor old Dayton done a lot of complaining, but that ain’t never stopped a leaky roof so far’s I know.”

Herkimer said he hadn’t seen the fort.

“You needn’t,” said Joe. “Because I’m telling you about it. It would take a regiment four months to fix that place. And it don’t do nobody any good way up there. It might have been a pertection for John Roof while he was living there, but he’s come down here to your farm, since Deerfield got burnt. If the British was to come that way they could march right round with their pants off.”

Herkimer said, “Maybe they won’t think of that. Not if they send an army officer. An army officer has got to keep his line of communications open.”

“My God!” exclaimed Joe. “What’s that?”

“Well, he don’t want anybody cutting in on his back trail.”

Joe scratched his head.

“Oh, you mean he wants to know which way he’s going when he has to run home. I thought it was a bowel complaint. But you could cut off his communications if you had a decent garrison at Dayton and Herkimer. They’re a whole lot better forts, and they’re handy for us to get to if we have to help them out. Take Stanwix, now: it’s way the hell off from nobody’s business. It stands to reason that it ain’t sense making two armies in a war walk a long ways just to kill each other. Somebody ought to have some comfort.”