Drums Along the Mohawk (39 page)

He was like a man obsessed. He made no effort to be quiet, but picked up one of the hammers and started striking on the seams of his wrist bands. It was hard to get a good swing. His aim was clumsy from the cold and the hammer head kept rolling off the iron onto his arm. But the seam cracked finally and he pulled the iron loose. For a minute he stood looking at the rusty imprint on his wrist. Then he slowly flexed his arm and raised it over his head. He felt as if his fist could strike high heaven.

He broke the other fetter handily enough and began to work on the anklets. These were harder to break, for it was almost impossible to keep his leg on the anvil within striking distance of his arm and yet get a free swing with the hammer. Finally he thought of tipping the anvil over.

It took all his strength to do it, and the anvil teetered a long time before he could overbalance it. It fell with a terrific crash, but John Wolff did not seem to notice the noise until the screaming of the negro woman in the house broke in on his hearing. He lifted his chin and automatically started to join her—as if it were the singsong starting back in the cavern.

Then he remembered what he was doing and held his ankle against the anvil and swung the hammer with both hands. The seam smashed all to pieces. He broke the second at the first blow.

The negress was still shrieking over in the house, and John Wolff listened to her, cocking his head a little, while a queer look of cunning came into his eyes. The hand which held the hammer began to swing with little jerks. Suddenly he became aware of the motion of his hand and stopped it. He stood quite still with a growing excitement on his face and his breath coming and going sharply.

At his first step he nearly toppled over on his face. He recovered himself, went out through the door, and closed it behind him with great care. He stopped for a moment more, turning his head towards the house as if he tasted the fear in the black woman’s shrieks. The hand holding the hammer twitched again. He started for the house.

Habit forced his legs into the queer hobbling gait the shackles had trained them to; but the release from the weight deprived them of all sense of balance. He kept lurching forward; and on the second hop he measured his length in the mud of the yard. He scrambled up and forced himself to move more slowly until he had got onto the porch. He knocked on the door. At the first blow the woman stopped screaming.

He forced his hand to knock gently again: this started the woman off on her shrieks and he listened with his ear to the panel. When she stopped, the house was quiet as death, with only the sound of the rain dripping from the eaves.

The drip distracted him until he heard the woman moan inside the house, and then the sound of her feet sneaking towards the back.

It infuriated him. He raised the hammer with both hands and smashed it against the door. It was an eight-pound hammer and he broke in a panel in half a dozen blows. He became intoxicated
with the destruction he was making of the door and forgot all about the woman. He knocked in the panels one by one and hammered at the bar behind them until the bar fell away, brackets and all. Then he opened the door and walked into the warm lighted room.

A fire was burning on the hearth and a kettle was steaming. He had not seen a kettle with a spout for more than a year. The hammer dropped out of his hand, clanked on the hearthstones, but he let it lie.

He thought he was standing steady, but he was weaving on his feet. He had forgotten all about the woman; even when she stole down the stairs to see what had become of him he did not hear her. She stood there watching him with her round eyes rolling the whites in her black face and her lips hanging flabbily open.

She saw a man so thin he hardly seemed like a man at all, with a mess of light brown hair showing white streaks and hanging down on his shoulders, and a matted beard and a torn shirt, and rotten wet trousers and bare feet. The feet were bleeding. She saw the blood on the hearthstones. And then she saw the fetter scars on his ankles and wrists.

“Lan’ sakes,” she breathed. “You ain’ no booger, is you?”

His chin lifted, but his glazed eyes did not shift from the kettle.

“If I could have a cup of tea …” He sat down weakly.

The negress was a young wench. Her curiosity and sympathy were powerfully aroused. “You one of de prison people,” she announced. She nodded as he did not contradict her. “Soon as I lay my eyes on you, I say, ‘Leeza, dat am one of de prison people. He got put in jes’ like ol’ Massa. Dat’s what he did.’ ” She came forward. “Co’se you can have some tea. And I’ll jes’ bring along some eatables wid it.” She flurried about her job, chattering, “Dey takes away de hones’ people. Dey takes me away f’um ’em. Mistah Phelps he join de Committee of Safety and he get to be a powerful big man and he get me when dey lock up my ol’ fambly.
He’s gone to de Committee to-night. He used to go by hisse’f, but since he tuk to fallin’ off de horse, Missis she jest obliged to go wid um. Lot of de wimmen folks has to now. Dey have their party and de man they have theirs.”

John Wolff shivered with the tea. It scalded him, but the taste was so penetrating that he could not stop drinking. Warmth flooded him. The negress stood beside him, offering a collop of cold pork and a slice of heavy bread. She watched him with a kind of pride.

“Whar you gwine?” she asked softly. “You cain’ stay here.”

“No,” said John Wolff. “No, I’m going to Canada.”

“You cain’ go dat way.” Her courage made her swell herself. “Here,” she said. “I’ll fix you fo’ de trip. I use’ to shave old Massa.”

John Wolff was content just to sit still. He let the black wench work on him. She shaved him with her master’s razor and she hacked his hair short. Then she went upstairs and rummaged an old pair of shoes, and a coat and a pair of trousers.

“Dey’re kind of monst’us-lookin’ on you,” she said, “but you got to cover up dem iron marks.”

Her face was proud over her handiwork. She was a clean-looking wench, quite young.

“Thanks,” said John Wolff. “Maybe I better be going.”

“You take me wid you?” she suggested, making eyes at him.

He said, “I’ve got to find Ally.”

“I he’p you.”

“No,” he said. “It’s too far. I’m going out to Niagara.”

He felt strength coming back to him. He hadn’t thought of going there, before. But it occurred to him now that he might be able to find someone who had heard of Ally at that place.

The negress sighed.

“I guess you wouldn’t take me along nohow. I guess I’ll have to stay here.”

She watched him sidelong.

“I’ll jes’ have to chase myself out into de rain,” she went on, as he made no sign of having heard her. “Less’n you bash me wid de hammer a couple of times.”

He shivered.

“No.”

“Den I got to say you bus’ in here and took dese things. Oh, Mr. Phelps, he’ll lay into me. But he ain’ so smart. Ain’ none of dese folks is so smart.”

John Wolff took his eyes from the hammer. He turned and went out into the rain. The negress called after him shrilly:—

“You take de lef’ branch, Massa. Dat bring you into Canaan bimeby.”

He went along without a word.

It was late in November. A light snow had begun early in the afternoon. It drifted down without noticeable wind. But a heavy gathering of clouds in the northwest promised a storm to come.

The walls of the fort looked brown and close to the earth. Even the stone mess house and its two flanking towers seemed to huddle between the parallel expanses of lake and sky. The river and the flat of the land were gray with cold. The smoke from the barracks and the officers’ mess rose thinly against the falling flakes and mingled with the smoke from the small Indian camp and the huts of trappers, traders, and independent rangers that made a struggling kind of village beyond the gate.

The people moving down desultorily to the shore seemed
pinched. They talked a little and they stared with a kind of deferred eagerness at the small sloop that was approaching the dock. The freeze was due on the lake any day; and the sloop was the last boat expected till next April.

In their scarlet coats a squad of soldiers from the fort marched down among the Indians and whites and took their station at the head of the makeshift dock, grounding their muskets and standing at a chilled attention. The dock could not bear the weight of many people. At the last boat’s arrival it had been swamped and the outer end broken off. But nobody was expecting much of this boat.…

John Wolff, staring from the foredeck, watched the low land creeping towards the boat. His eyes wandered slowly over the crowd. He had been six weeks reaching Niagara. He was gaunt and footsore. But his pallor was disappearing.

He had crossed the Hudson at the mouth of the Hoosic and made his way to Ballston village, and there, by chance, he had picked up two men named Kennedy and Miller who had come down from Saint John’s to visit their families. They had used their leaves to cross Champlain and tramp sixty miles of enemy country, and the day John Wolff arrived they were planning to return. They took him with them. At Saint John’s he learned that Major John Butler was in garrison at Niagara. There was talk that Butler was recruiting a regiment of his own. Nobody knew very much about it, but John Butler was a good man to serve under. If you liked frontier service.

As the boat drew in, people began calling out to the sloop from the shore, and the deck hands yelled back. Nobody said anything in particular. There was nothing to say.

The boat warped alongside the dock and the business of unloading began at once without ceremony, for the master wanted to get back across the lake before the freeze.

He moved up beside John Wolff now, smoking his short pipe, the tail of his red knitted cap hanging down beside his cheek.

He said, “Here’s where you get off.” His voice was sarcastic in spite of his joke.

John Wolff said, “Maybe I can get to see Mr. Butler and he’ll lend me the money.”

The master spat over the side.

“I’ll collect it next spring. Ain’t no hurry.” He sucked his pipestem free and stared westward across the river. “That’s where you’ll live, I reckon.”

“Over there? I thought that was the fort.”

“ ’Tis. But that’s where they’re building the barracks. They ain’t got any nails. I just as soon not see Major Butler till I got some nails to bring him. Maybe I’ll have them next spring.”

John Wolff looked west. Well back from the river shore a low line of log buildings raised bark roofs against the sky. They looked even more bleak, even more huddled under the snow, than the fort.

“God,” said the master. “I don’t see how folks can stand to live here. They must be crazy. Ain’t more than eighty women in the whole place, barring the Indians. And what I’ve seen of most of them, they wouldn’t raise the hackles of a six weeks’ rabbit.” He looked companionably at John Wolff. “You said you’d lost your wife, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how it is,” nodded the master. “You lose them, or something.” He gestured with the pipe. “But out here you can’t even find them. I don’t see why you came out here.”

He cocked his head.

“By God,” he said, “hear the falls. When they sound that way I begin to expect ice. Well, you might as well get off. I ain’t spoiling my time here much longer.”

The dock was now loaded with boxes and barrels—shoes, flour, rum, powder kegs, pork, salt beef, blankets.

“I wish there was some nails, though,” said the master. He shook hands. “There’s a couple of the new rangers coming down. Maybe it’s Butler. Guess I’ll get below.”

Wolff saw three men in green coats coming down to the opposite shore. They got into a skiff and rowed over the river. In the stern sat a short gray-haired man with a red face and black eyes and a long Irish lip to his mouth.

“Grange!” he shouted. “Mr. Grange. Did you bring me any nails?”

“No, I didn’t.”

The master stuck his knitted cap out of the cabin.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t get them. That’s why!”

“Did you hand over my requisition?”

“Yes, I did!”

Major Butler’s face was black with suppressed rage.

“Didn’t they say anything?”

“They said nails was scarce.”

“That’s a lie.”

“I ain’t saying it ain’t, am I?”

“What did they say?”

“They said, ‘Jesus Christ, you’d think the old bastard was going to win the war with a kag of nails.’ ”

The major drew in his breath. Then he seemed to collapse back into himself and his eyes became helpless. But he started to grin.

“Why couldn’t you tell me that in the first place?”

The master grinned back.

“Well, I didn’t just want to crucify you, Major.” In his relief, he prodded John Wolff to the side. “Here’s a man wants to jine
on with you, Major. Come all the way from Simsbury Prison in Connecticut. I thought he might kind of take the place of a kag of nails. He’s kind of built like a nail, ain’t he?”

John Wolff flinched at the major’s direct stare. Then he drew in his breath and stared back.

Butler lowered his voice.

“What’s your name?”

“John Wolff.”

“Wolff? Wolff? I seem to remember the name.”

“I kept store at Cosby’s Manor.”

“Oh, I remember you now. You want to join Butler’s Rangers?” His voice had a kind of pride at the name. As if the organization were something tangible, like hand work.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’ve been in jail?”

“Yes, sir. I was arrested a year ago last August.”

“That’s a long time.” The red face quieted. “Get into the boat, man, and come back with us. This is Sergeant McLonis. He came from your part of the valley. You may know him?”

John Wolff shook hands with the young man as he got into the boat. He felt shy. He thought he might feel better when he had a good warm uniform coat like McLonis’s. He studied the uniform. Green coat, with crossed buff breast straps. The lining of the coat was scarlet. The hat was a skullcap of black leather, with a leather cockade over the left ear and a brass plate over the forehead. The waistcoat was of heavy green woolen, and the full-length leggings of Indian tanned deerskin. It was a good uniform, Wolff thought, fixed for use in the woods.