Drums Along the Mohawk (42 page)

“Look here,” Emma said. “I’m not going to stand in your way, Mary. But I want you both to be sure. Will you promise me not to get married for a year?” And meeting the eyes again, “Or not to get married without talking to me first?” Her mouth twisted. “After all, it wouldn’t be easy to do that up here, without banns, you know.”

The girl gulped.

“We won’t.”

Emma believed her. “Don’t start crying,” she said abruptly.

She swung away for home, making her best pace. She didn’t look round; but kept at her work. She felt her blood restored to
its racing beat that she enjoyed so much. She was flushed and breathless when she got back to the cabin, barely in time to start the evening meal.

She looked at John’s face. “You can’t guess where I’ve been,” she said, laughing at him. “No you can’t. I’ve been to Fort Herkimer seeing the Realls.”

John blushed.

“I thought it would be nice for John to go down for me with some shoes of Cobus’s I promised. I thought while he was there, he might ask Mary to come up here for Christmas dinner.”

John had turned brick red to his eyes. George merely looked at Emma. He was used to her, but there were times when he felt quite confounded. Her and her romps in the snow!

The winter in German Flats passed uneventfully enough. The cold continued and the snow lay deep. Unmilled wheat was fetching seven shilling a bushel at Little Falls, where Ellis’s Mills were grinding for the army. Almost every week the mills shipped flour to Albany. When men heard stories of how the Continental army was starving at a town called Valley Forge, they found it hard to believe. They wondered where the flour was going to.

Occasional sleds that passed along the Kingsroad, Lilliputian in the still white world of snow, reminded the inhabitants that men were yet in garrison westward at Fort Stanwix. The sleds stopped the night at Fort Dayton and in the morning put out for the upper fort. They followed the river—hauling on the
ice, a natural road. They went without a guard. The army, evidently, had no apprehensions. It made the people feel secure. Some even came to regard the murder of the Mount boys as the trick of drunken Indians; nobody could tell what to expect from a drunken Indian, least of all the Indian himself. It made them discount the story of the presence of white men. That depended entirely on a nigger boy’s say-so.

Up at McKlennar’s, the further the winter drew along, the more Joe Boleo expressed misgivings. When he and Adam and Gil were off hunting in the woods, Joe would keep tracking along the ridges spying across country, and he never came to a creek bottom without following it for half a mile or so. “Indians always hang to water,” he said. Gil and Adam Helmer often laughed between themselves at the figure he made, bent over on his snowshoes, his long neck outstretched, among the snow-loaded balsams. “You can laugh, you twerps,” he would say. “But wait till the snow starts going down.” Then he would strike off and bring them to a deer yard, and he and Adam would begin killing deer.

Adam was inclined to be jealous of Joe’s shooting. In his own overflowing strength, Adam liked to strike cross-country, running on his shoes for miles on end. But it was generally Joe, mousing along quietly, who found the deer. Then he would squat with his narrow tail just over the snow and wait for the other two to come back to him. He would sit there, looking at the deer, who always herded to the far side of the yard and stared back at him with their queerly lambent, soft eyes. Joe would be saying, “Poor pretty, poor pretty,” in a sorry sort of way, like an old woman sort of woodpecker, according to Adam, and then when Adam came he would begin shooting. Sometimes the two of them would shoot three or four deer, picking out the marks, calling the shots, pacing off the distance from the wall of the yard, before Gil stopped their senseless killing.

“Hell,” said Joe, “we got to keep our eye in.”

“Shoot at a tree,” suggested Gil.

Adam would be scornful.

“You can’t waste powder and ball on a tree.”

Then they would select a doe that looked fairly plump and kill her and leave the rest lying in the yard. They kept not only McKlennar’s well supplied with meat, but carried deer after deer to the forts and the settlement, sometimes selling the meat, sometimes giving it away. It depended on how they felt.

In the evenings they would light a great fire in the farmhouse fireplace and lie in front of it, drinking rum and molasses; and Gil generally went down to sit with them. Up at the stone house the women took to sewing things, making things for the baby, spinning. Mrs. McKlennar liked to spin with her big wheel, working the treadle with her vigorous foot, and making a hum come out of the whirling wheel like a voice against the cold. They talked about things, the three women together. Daisy, the negress, sitting in a corner, made a rug for the baby with a wooden crochet hook and strips of rags. Daisy couldn’t sew and she was unhappy till the widow suggested that she make the rug. She embarked upon a five-foot project, though what good a five-foot rug could do a baby nobody ever figured out, unless it was Daisy herself. Sometimes she had a run on a color, like red; sometimes she spent two nights with brown, as if that were the color of her thoughts. It was no place for a man.

In the farmhouse atmosphere, with the two woodsmen sprawled on the floor before the fire, telling each other tales or passing off the gleanings of the valley news, a man could be at ease.

Joe liked to have the news from Herkimer’s house. There was talk of raising a monument that had been voted down in Albany, on the other side of the house from the well. Five hundred dollars had been mentioned. Joe went down one day to see how it would look. He returned still wondering.

In February there was some talk that the Massachusetts garrisons of Dayton and Herkimer were returning to their homes, having completed their service. It was said that they would leave in March. No provision was made for their replacement. Demooth and Bellinger had been down to Colonel Klock in Palatine to organize a protest. All three men were trying to have Fort Stanwix abandoned and the German Flats forts strengthened. But Congress would not listen to their arguments. Congress held that Stanwix was the strategic defense of the valley. It was intimated that they might send some troops to Cherry Valley, but that was all.

Joe shook his head about it.

“They might just as well have nobody at all. You wait till the snow leaves. You’ll see.”

“See what?” asked Gil.

Joe grunted. “Indians.”

Adam Helmer said skeptically:—

“They got their medicine up there at Oriskany.”

“That’s the trouble. If they hadn’t been whipped so bad, they might wait to come along with the next army. But the way it is they won’t wait. They’ll want to get their face back. They’ll be after scalps. They won’t care whose. They’ll feel they’ve got to. Hell, boy, I’ve lived with the Senecas, and I know.”

“You lived with them, Joe?” asked Gil.

The gangling trapper stretched himself on the hearth to kick over a log with his heel. The fire blazed upward, pouring a ruddy light across his sweating body. The room reeked of the men’s smell, tobacco, and rum. It was stifling hot, making them all drowsy, and Joe’s voice was pitched low.

“Oh yes, when I was young, like you lads. I used to trap up the Chinisee. I got along real good with the Senecas. I had a wife out there. She was a real nice girl, too.” He stirred himself lazily. “They ain’t as light as the Mohawk girls, but they’re thinner.”

He drank a little rum and turned his eyes thoughtfully on Gil and Adam. Outside the wind had died down with the coming of darkness, and the burning of the fire was even and fierce.

“I never knew you was married, Joe.”

“Sure,” said Joe. “I stayed there with her four years, without ever coming out.” His reminiscent grin made his face unbelievably homely. “My God, that girl was set on me!”

Adam was crouched in front of Joe. The firelight made his big face scarlet and threw lights in his long yellow hair. He held his glass in both hands, his hands passed over his knees. The shadow of his broad shoulders filled all the opposite wall. Now he turned a facetious eye on Gil. Gil grinned.

But Joe knew what was going on in their minds. He said seriously, “You ought to have been along with me, Adam. You’d have liked it. Gil, now, he’s a settled kind of man.” He drew his breath, slowly, and belched. “Along in those days, a white man was just about the finest thing that could happen to an Indian girl. It made her important in her town. When I first went out there, the Indians treated any white man like he was one of their sachems. Like a big bug, see, come visiting. They gave him a house in the town and then they sent in all the best-looking girls so he could take his pick and feel comfortable while he was staying. It was a good idea. Only it wasn’t so easy making your pick. Some of them girls was pretty nice.” He poured himself another drink and stirred the molasses in with his finger. “Some trappers got the idea of staying and then going off for a day and coming back and beginning over. There wasn’t any harm in that. It don’t matter what a girl did till she got married, see? But it didn’t happen that way to me. I got to the Chinisee Castle, the one they call Little Beard’s town now, and they sent in eighteen handpicked ones. But right away I knew the one I wanted. I knew she’d suit me fine. I was young-and-coming, see, and I suited her too. Don’t laugh, you timber beast. It’s truth. She stood with the rest of them looking on the ground,
the way they all done, but as soon as she made out all the rest was looking down, she just took one look at me and it fixed me. Boy, she could throw her eyes at you!”

“I believe you,” Adam said.

“Go to hell. I reached out at her and I said, ‘You, you me fine!’ I hadn’t learned the language then. But she understood all right. The others went out, leaving just her. And as soon as they’d gone she just looked up at me, kind of scared and shy. I was pretty young, I guess, but it made me feel big.

“She didn’t come only to my shoulder and she had braids reaching down to the middle of her thighs. She wasn’t only medium dark, too, and she was pretty in her best clothes. She had on a kind of red overdress, what they call Ah-de-a-da-we-sa, and a blue skirt with beadwork on it. She was a great hand with beadwork. It was what made her come high in marriage. And her pant things was doeskin with more beading on the foot.”

“She come high?”

“I didn’t know how I could pay her ma,” Joe said seriously. “I didn’t have only a bare stake. No beads for trading. I needed everything I had, see? The girl’s ma was something big. One of the chief’s lines. They keep their family on the female side. The way the girls act up they’ve got to if they’re going to keep the children anywhere near straight.… But I’ve got away from me and the girl. Soon as we was alone she signed for me to set down by the fire and take off my shirt. She took a bone comb out of her belt and started combing my hair. She greased it and picked out the ticks and took pains where it was curled. She liked them curls. I had fine curly hair, you know.”

Even though Joe looked so serious, they had to laugh. They stared at the shiny expanses of bare scalp between the remnants of his past beauty. Joe rolled over and turned his back and lifted his shirt to let the heat strike against the rum in his belly.

“Lord,” he said over his shoulder. “When I went to bed with
her it was pretty dark. But I didn’t have to see her to know she was good-looking. I told her in the morning I’d like to marry her.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t speak the language.”

Joe looked hurt. “You don’t have to when you’ve done that to a girl. I just said so, and she caught on all right. She colored some. Most Indians don’t show color, but that was one of the things about her. That and teaching her to kiss. The way she caught on. You can fool around with all the heifers between here and Albany if you want to, but you won’t know just what teaching a wild Indian to kiss is like. Well, she said she’d like to fine, so I said fine, and she said what did I have to buy her with? Well, I opened my pack, and she went through it like a dog after a rabbit. She shook her head. She made it plain there wasn’t anything good enough. I felt bad, and she looked sorry. Then she clapped her hands.”

“Yes,” said Adam, “she clapped her hands.”

“God damn you, Adam. She did.” Joe began to look embarrassed. “I’d been getting dressed and she come up to me and put her hands on my waist and made the motions I was to take my drawers off. I had red flannel drawers.”

The two young men guffawed.

“Honest to God,” said Joe. “I told the chief how I felt, and I got him to take them round to the old lady and she went near crazy over them. Later I heard she’d gone right in and tried them on. They was some tight, but they stretched enough. Though she had to rig a kind of tassel in front when she wore them in the turtle dance. She made a little bark box for them and hung them over her bed. They were still in good shape four years later when the old lady led the Okewa for Lou.”

“What’s that, Joe?”

“It’s the woman’s all-night Dead Song.”

“Your girl died?”

“Yes,” said Joe. He blew smoke against the logs and watched the flame snatch it up the chimney. “After we got married, I and
Lou went up the Chinisee. I built us a hunting cabin up there. It was good beaver country and a wonderful range for fisher. And she was a first-rate woman for a man. Knew how to take care of me. She was the only woman I ever had around that didn’t get on a man’s nerves. When I felt like laughing, she was ready to bust with it herself. Never saw anybody so always happy. She wouldn’t call me Joe. Just Boleo, only she couldn’t ever say the B. She called it Do-le-o.” Joe’s face was deeply concentrated. “And when the trap lines weren’t bearing so good, she didn’t make a lot of talk—what a white woman would call distracting you. She minded her business. I knew she was around, that’s all. She was good to have around. And she never got lonesome. Seemed as if I was good enough for her. Of course we’d go down to the Castle every once or twice a year. I had to trade my fur pack, see?… It was a good life. And healthy. The way she kept me healthy. Used to make me hemlock tea to keep my skin open. Her cooking was Indian cooking, but she learned a few things, to please me. I told you she learned kissing. But it was a funny thing, she never got to be like a white woman. She was always shy about the way she acted with me. She wouldn’t wash with me in the crick. Sometimes it got me mad. I never saw her naked in plain light. A bear kilt her while she was berrying.” Joe drank and drew a breath. “The queer thing was we never had no children.”