Drums Along the Mohawk (25 page)

“Where’s Bellinger’s regiment?” asked Gil.

“Beyond Doc’s house,” replied a delighted farmer from Snydersbush. “Cox had to haul his tail down that time.” He grinned. “He used to hunt around and raise hell with young Johnson, and now he thinks he’s drawn title to being a gentleman.”

But Gil noticed what the Snyders man had not, that several
of the other officers were looking after Cox with sympathetic eyes. Like him they rode good horses, with English-made saddles and polished riding boots. In their company, Herkimer’s faded outfit, horse and coat, looked like a shabby imitation. No doubt they thought him one.

George Weaver greeted him. “You’re only just in time, Gil. How’s Lana? We ain’t seen her in a month, now.”

“She’s fine,” said Gil. “How’s Emma?”

“Just the same. She’s been considering going down to visit Lana to get a quilting pattern off her. She said she might go down while I was away.”

“That’s fine,” said Gil.

Finding the company mustered took him back more clearly than ever to the time before his house was burnt. Reall, with his gun clean for once, was there; and Jeams MacNod, looking a little pallid at the thought of war; and Clem Coppernol.

Gil said, “I thought you were over sixty.”

The white-haired Dutchman said, “Too old? By Jesus a Dutch man ain’t ever too old to take a pot at the British.”

Weaver said, “We’re to camp along the road to-night, right here. We’ve got to wait for Fisscher’s Mohawk company, and Campbell’s Minutemen.”

“I thought they’d have to stay, with Brant around there.”

“Brant’s cut back west again,” said Weaver. “He’s at Stanwix now.”

A man gaped. He said, “That Indian can move through the woods faster than you get the news of him.”

“He’d better look out where he shows his head,” said Reall in a boisterous voice, raising his gun and aiming at a cabbage in the doctor’s garden.

George Weaver smacked the barrel down, roaring:—

“Do you want to kill somebody?”

That evening it looked as if the drought might break. Slate-colored clouds with traveling veils of white lifted their heads over the southern hills. There was a distant rumble of thunder, but no rain came. Fires broke out beside the ox carts. Eatables were unloaded. Pork and bacon frying made an odor through the village. Men sat together, grumbling because they had been kept out of decent beds—men like Fred Kast who couldn’t see the sense of walking east seven miles one day to walk back seven miles the next, merely for the sake of sleeping in a blanket on the ground.

“I ain’t complaining of your company,” he explained. “It’s just the idea.”

“You ought to have brought your bed along,” a man said.

“Yes, with Katy in it,” said Christian Reall.

Kast laughed.

“I thought of that, and then I thought I couldn’t find no room in it, with all you ground pigs trying too.”

George Weaver looked down the slope of ground to the river, where Peter Tygert’s house was. Herkimer was staying there. Few noticed the late arrival of the Mohawk regiment until they saw Colonel Frederick Fisscher, dapper and dandy for all his gray hair, go cantering down to Tygert’s.

“Well, they got here,” Weaver said. “I’m going to bed.”

He rolled over in his blanket. Reall said, “You’d better pull your feet out of the road, though.”

Demooth came round at breakfast time, wearing the homespun coat he used around the farm. The men were pleased to see him.
They had got sick of the handsomely outfitted officers of the other regiments. It made them feel too much like the plain bush Germans the others claimed they were.

“All present?” he said to Weaver.

“Yes. There’s nobody missing.”

“That’s fine.” His dark face, lean, alert, quick-eyed, looked them over.

“Boys,” he said, “Herkimer was going to put us in front. But the way feeling is, he had to let Cox go up ahead. Bellinger’s regiment and Klock’s are going to be the main guard. Fisscher’s so tired he’ll just naturally have to come behind. You can fall in when you hear them cheering Herkimer off from the fort. When he goes by, you just drop in behind him. I’ve got to send Cox off now, but I’ll join you up the road.”

“Yes, Captain,” said George.

They both grinned.

It took them all one day to get to Staring’s Brook. Ten miles. The companies straggled along the road, taking it easy in the heat. Up ahead, Cox lead the Canajoharie men, festering all the time in his wounded vanity. Then, after a long gap, came Herkimer, musing on the old white horse who picked his footing with such caution. With Herkimer rode half a dozen officers, Colonels Fisscher, Veeder, Klock, and Campbell, and Paymaster Isaac Paris, talking volubly on how a campaign of this sort should be conducted, making a bright patch of blue coats, like out-of-season gentians in the woods; and then the German Flats regiment and the Palatine, perhaps five hundred men. Then another gap, and the long line of ox carts jolting on the road, making their painful crawl, beasts and drivers choking in their own dust, stung by horse and deer flies. And after another gap, the Mohawk regiment, taking its ease along the way.

The total force of the army was eight hundred men. The number weighed heavily on Herkimer’s mind that morning. He knew that St. Leger had four hundred regulars, that he had six hundred Tories, men just as good or better than his own straggling militia, and in addition almost a thousand Indians.

At Fort Stanwix, Gansevoort had seven hundred men under arms, but Gansevoort couldn’t be expected to send them all out. His duty was to hold the fort. But if it were put up to him in time, he might be willing to spare a couple of hundred of them for a diversion.

The advance guard crossed Staring’s Brook early in the afternoon. It took three hours for the train of carts and wagons and the rear guard to arrive. The army pitched camp wherever they could find room along the road, a scattering, unorganized mess of men, nearly two miles long. The fires were like glowworms in the big timber—the men lying beside them, talking softly, hugging close to get in the smoke, cursing the flies, and wondering how things were going at home.

In the morning camp was broken at ten and the troops set out at a good pace. A little before noon, Gil and Weaver, marching side by side along the road, came out in Deerfield, on their own land.

It was incredible how quickly the land had become overgrown, as if the mere fact that men had moved away had emboldened the weeds. The burnt acres on Gil’s place already had a scrub of blueberries, and tall clumps of fireweed were flourishing among the charred stumps where corn by now should be beginning to tassel out. The houses were no more. Only the black lines of dead coals marked the squared outlines where the walls had stood.

“It don’t do any good to look at it, Gil.”

Weaver turned his face towards the alder bottom, through which, deep-rutted by the army carts that had passed that way last fall, the road headed straight to the river.

In the ford, a mile away, Cox’s regiment was stirring up the mud.

“Thank God the water’s low,” said Captain Demooth. “All these wagons going through at once are going to cut the bottom out of the river.”

The passage of two hundred men had softened the bottom. By the time Klock’s and Bellinger’s regiments had waded over, the mud was getting pulpy.

Klock and Bellinger halted their companies on the bank and ordered them to stack arms and take their pants off. But with the way the mosquitoes were taking hold, the men preferred wet leggings and shoes to bites, and raucously refused.

They had to wait an hour before the horns of the first yoke of oxen appeared at the bend of the Kingsroad. The animals came on, snuffing the corduroy and planting each hoof as if they wished the things to grow there. When they reached the riverbank, they came down willingly enough, then stopped and drank.

The teamster swung his bull whip on them, but they refused to stir. Behind the tailboard yoke after yoke was halted, until the train filled all the alder swamp, a dozing mass of beasts, with switching tails. Other teamsters came forward and applied their lashes to the first yoke. The cracking of the whips banged like musketry. There was no room to bring another yoke around the first cart. The whole army was held up by a pair of lousy steers.

Even Colonel Fisscher had time to overtake them. He came storming and swearing along the edge of the road on his bay horse and stared and said loud enough for all the men to hear, “You’d think they were a couple of brigadier generals to look at them.”

The men looked up. This militia business, with its high-toned colonels all over the lot, was new to them. They couldn’t think what to say. But Bellinger had also heard him. He jumped off his horse and waded into the ford.

“Just what did you say, Fisscher?”

“I said they were like brigadiers, the way they take their time.”

“Perhaps they wanted to see whether you’d catch up,” said Bellinger.

The Palatine and German Flats outfits guffawed. But the teamster, who was embittered by the whole concern, turned the situation off. “It’s got me beat,” he said, helplessly. “The buggers don’t even want to move their bowels.”

Fisscher splashed his horse through the water to find Colonel Cox.

“Can’t you do anything?” Bellinger asked the teamster.

“I’ve licked them. I’ve twisted their tails. I bit the off one by the ear. It’s got me beat.”

Old Coppernol crossed the ford. He said, “I’ve cut me an ox gad. If you bush twerps will make two lines and look like fences, these critters might mind a sensible man.”

People laughed. But Demooth called to Bellinger, “Clem knows oxen. Let him try.”

Clem said, “You see, these animals have got intelligence. They wasn’t born for Baptists and they have to be convinced. Besides, they’re kind of bored with all the colonels around.”

“Meaning me?”

Clem looked at Bellinger.

“Hell, no. You ain’t even a brigadier’s nephew. You only married his niece.”

In the laughter, Bellinger said good-humoredly, “All right, Clem. Try a hand.”

The men waded into the ford and formed two lines, like
fences for a lane, but Clem Coppernol acted as if he didn’t see them. He talked to the oxen, patted them behind their horns, and then he walked the length of the ford and back, between the lines of men. He said to the oxen, “If an old man like me can do it, you two God A’mightys ought to.”

Then he pricked the off ox with the stick and said, “Hup.”

The oxen, miraculously, blew their breaths out, lowered their heads, and lifted their knobbed knees. The cart creaked, sank into the mud, but did not stop. The beasts had got to work again.

Clem bawled, “The others will come now, but don’t let one get stuck. If it starts to stop, lay hold of the spokes and pull like God A’mighty.”

To the admiring teamster he said tolerantly, “You can fetch my muskit for me. Somebody’s got to show these twerps the way.”

He went ahead as unconcernedly as the slow brown beasts, talking to them happily, as if for the first time since the muster he had found something he could do.

That night the head of the straggling column got as far as the Oriskany Creek. Colonel Cox picked his camp site on the eastern bank, opposite the little hamlet of Oneida huts. But the huts were empty, and Joe Boleo explained that the Oneidas had cleared out the same day the British Indians left Oswego.

Along the road the rest of the army bivouacked as they had the night before, wherever there was room. It was nearly dark when Demooth’s company were finally fed and ready to lie down in their smudges. But as they sat on the ground, quietly in the dark, with the firelight streaking the boles of the trees, and a white mist creeping towards them from the river flats, a man floundered down the line, calling over and over, “Captain Mark Demooth. Captain Mark Demooth.”

“This way,” Demooth answered for himself. “What is it?”

“Herkimer wants to see you in his tent.”

“Who are you?”

“Adam Helmer. Do you know where Joe Boleo is?”

“Right here,” said Joe. “Has Herkimer got any likker on him?”

Herkimer’s tent was pitched in a natural clearing a little behind the Canajoharie militia. His old white horse, ghostly and gray in the mist, was grazing stodgily beside it. They could hear the steady crunching of his teeth, and the small tearing sound of the parting roots. There was no sentry. Nobody hailed them. Even the horse didn’t trouble to prick his ears.

Joe pulled the flap open and asked, “What’s bothering you, Honnikol?”

“Come in, Joe.”

Seated on his blanket, the little German was thoughtfully smoking his pipe. “Sit down,” he said when they had entered. “Spencer’s bringing Skenandoa.”

The low tent was rank with the tobacco, but none of them noticed that. Even Joe Boleo, when he saw the general’s troubled face, forgot the liquor question.

“Those bug-tits been dripping again?” he asked.

“If you mean Cox and Fisscher and Paris,” the general said quietly. “Yah.” He pushed the tobacco down in the pipe bowl with a calloused thumb. “It ain’t them bothers me.”

But they could tell by his voice that the officers were getting under his skin.

“It ain’t them,” he said. “Spencer says Skenandoa thinks that Butler has moved out of camp and that he’s waiting for us.” He cocked his head towards the west and for a minute all four men were so still that the flowing of Oriskany Creek on its rift in the mist was audible in the tent. And queer mingling sounds come with it: the clink of a halter link on a tied horse; the raised voice of a distant man; the hooting of a small owl back in the hemlocks; the grumble of a frog by the waterside.

“Spencer’s bringing Skenandoa.” Herkimer stopped again. “That must be them outside.”

The two Indians had come quietly. Turning, the four white men saw Spencer’s blacksmith hand pull back the flap. Then the old chief of the Oneidas stepped in. He bent his head with dignity. He was wrapped around in his blanket, and he scarcely seemed to crease it as he squatted down in the door, so that they saw his dark-skinned wrinkled face, and the red head covering against the fire on the ground.

Spencer said above him, “Skenandoa’s young men have come back.”