Drums Along the Mohawk (44 page)

“Yes, Hon. But what is he like?” asked Nancy.

Hon poked her.

“Gee,
you
ought to know!” He burst out laughing, flinging himself back in the straw so that his long hair gathered chaff. Hon had a nice voice, for all he was dim-witted like herself. She loved to hear him laugh, and she smiled a little herself. Sitting in the cool light of the barn window that day, Nancy looked like a goddess of fecundity. With her yellow hair down her back and the lids of her eyes full and her lips half parted in the remnant of the smile, she might have been the original mother. Hon always made her feel that her accident was a distinction.

But now that he was on the subject of McLonis he liked showing his familiarity.

“Jurry,” he said, “he’s a fine, ruthless man. That’s quite a word. I heard Major Butler call him that. I was right close to Major. It was the night we camped at the Royal Blockhouse coming down here.”

“Do you think we’ll ever see him?”

“I will,” said Hon.

“But I’ve got to see him, you know.”

“Well, maybe you will.”

“Do you think he’d like me now?”

“Say,” said Hon. “If you ever got to Niagara you’d be just about the queen of the company there, Nance.”

“What do you mean?” She was breathless.

“Why, there’s not a white woman there looks half of you.”

“Oh. Then he might marry me out there.”

Hon suddenly was silent.

“Mightn’t he, Hon?”

“Well,” Hon shook his head wisely. “If he gets to be an officer, maybe he wouldn’t.”

“But you said he would.”

“That’s when he was a corporal.”

“Yes, but I’m me, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” said Hon. Hon did have a few ideas. He had seen
enough to know that an ambitious man would not marry a girl like his sister. The trouble with Nancy was that she had been happened on by an ambitious man. He liked Jurry and he wanted to keep friends with him. And it didn’t seem important.

“But I’ve got to get married,” Nancy said urgently. “Mrs. Demooth says I am the living sin.”

“Old Clem said he’d marry you.”

Nancy shuddered. “I couldn’t marry Clem. He always smells so sour every morning.”

“Listen, Nancy. I used to say for you to marry. But now I don’t know. Out there at Niagara lots of the women ain’t married. They’re nice women too. Some of them in the officer barracks. Maybe you could get in the officer barracks.”

“Couldn’t you take me out there, Hon?” she pleaded.

Again he slapped her belly.

“With a load like that, Nance?”

“I can walk all right.”

“If you had it on your back, maybe.” Hon laughed at his own joke. But Nancy looked as if she were going to cry.

“Sometimes I get scared you’ll leave me here.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“I get so scared, Hon.
She
keeps talking at me some days. She says it makes girls awful sick. She says sometimes they die—bad girls do. It ain’t like having honest children.”

For the moment Hon was troubled. He was fond of Nance, in a way. After a minute or two he said, “I don’t believe you’ll die.”

She was called to the house by the tinkle of the captain’s bell, to Hon’s immense relief. She was the devil to reason with. He took himself away from the barn before she could return.

Nancy had thought of late that Hon was getting restless. As the snow softened towards the end of March, and mists rose in the valley, he had been acting more and more uneasy. He kept making excursions into the woods. At last he spent a night away.
Nance was terrified. But he had come back the evening after; he was in the barn at supper time when she carried out his plate of left-overs. He was sitting on some straw he had raked out of the mare’s stall, whetting his hunting knife on his boot sole. She thought he looked excited.

“I found tracks where a party had been across West Canada Crick,” he said. “Three or four days ago.”

“A party?”

“About twenty. I guess they was some of ours.”

“Ours, Hon?”

He was impatient with her. “Sure. What do you think? From Niagara, maybe?”

“Oh, Hon! You don’t want to go with them?”

Immediately he was sly.

“How could I go with them? They’re way the hell off by now. I wish I knew where they went to, though.”

In her relief she wanted to please him, and she repeated everything the soldier had told Demooth. But as soon as she was done, she saw that she must have been dim-witted. Hon didn’t say anything at all. He reared up like a dog and looked through the open door towards the woods.

“Please don’t go, Hon. Not till I’m through.”

When he didn’t answer, she sneaked back to the house. She thought if Hon went she would surely die.

He was gone in the morning. Clem told her. Clem was feeling pretty grand; he had thought for some months that things were bound to come his way. With that damn fool out of reach, maybe he could work on Nancy.

The way she drooped in the soft morning sunlight, there in front of him at the barn door, he felt lustful. He didn’t want to be a lustful man, particularly, but he thought what a damn fool he
had been to be drunk that night when Hon was captured. Any sober man could have horned in on the game.

“Don’t cry, Nance. You’ve always got me to look out for you.”

She just looked wilted.

“Do you know he’s gone, Clem?”

“Yes, he told me to tell you good-bye.” Seeing her frantic glance at the woods, he laughed. “He didn’t go north. He went by Unadilla. He’ll need to get food in the Indian villages. Him and Indians get on good. He’ll be all right.”

“That’s why he didn’t ask me for any.” Nancy gave a small miserable nod.

Clem said harshly, “You needn’t figure on catching up with him. He’ll be going like a wild hog. You couldn’t ever keep up with him, girl.”

“Why?” she said like a child.

“He don’t want anybody catching up with him.” Clem thought it might be just as well to give her a little plain sense. “Hon may be a half-wit, but he knows what’ll happen to him if they catch him another time.”

Only a little over a week later a second attack was made on Snydersbush. Word came to German Flats on the fifth of April. This time the information was complete. The enemy were over fifty strong, half white, half Indian. They had left the stockade alone. The people inside the stockade possessed a swivel they had let loose when the enemy first appeared in the road. The
roar of it had kept them from the fort. They sashayed up the road instead.

They took Garter at his mill and burned the mill in plain sight of the fort. At Windecker’s they cut off a threshing party, four men and two boys, and took them prisoner. They sent Indian scouts ahead to pick up the four settlers on the edge of the town and took them all: Cypher, Helmer, Uher, and Attle. They moved with great swiftness and discipline. They burned the farms, houses, barns, barracks, even Attle’s brand-new backhouse. They killed all the horses and cows in their way. They headed for Salisbury; and swept that settlement at dusk. There they captured only three men, for the other inhabitants had moved into the Mohawk Valley down around Klock’s and Fox’s Mills and hadn’t yet returned. But the destructives razed the town. Then they headed out along the old Jerseyfield road, northwest, past Mount’s, the scene of their first irruption.

The leader of the party had attracted a good deal of attention in Snydersbush because of his uniform. It was a strange one; nobody had seen anything like it. A green coat, it was said, and deerskin breeches, and a black leather hat like a skullcap with a brass badge on the front of it. He roused a great deal of morbid speculation. Some of the old settlers said it reminded them of the uniform worn by the French commander, Beletre, back in ’58. It was over a month before a report from James Dean, outside Niagara, informed them of Butler’s Rangers. With his usual precision in detail he included a description of the new uniform.

The conviction gradually took root that John Butler was making an attempt to cut off German Flats. They knew that he had always hated Germans; and he had always been jealous of their rich soil.… They pointed to the fact that the number of each party had been just adapted to the strength of the place struck. Each party had burst out of the woods unheralded, had burned and killed and taken prisoner, and then hightailed it back for Canada. There was
no point in even calling out the militia, let alone chasing them. They had the whole northwestern wilderness to make cover in.

Mrs. Demooth was terrified. Mark would not take her away, he would not even send her. She stayed in the house all day, but she was always listening. She had nothing to distract her, no one to help her in the house but that miserable wench, whose mere presence was an insult to a decent woman—first with her constant sickness, now with her swollen belly and her great blue stupid staring eyes. Whenever Mrs. Demooth saw Nancy she had something to say to her; whenever she sent Nancy out of her sight, she began to think of sayings that would give her pain.

Mrs. Demooth was not consciously torturing a half-wit. Far from it. Having, like a dutiful wife, been forced to violate the nicer feelings, in her own household, she told herself that she was merely trying to make Nancy understand the enormity of her fornication. At first she had started her tongue lashings in the captain’s presence, but he had not liked it, and now she never spoke to the girl until he had left the house.

He was away nearly all day now. He was down at Palatine, seeing Colonel Jacob Klock. Mrs. Demooth could always tell when he had been to Klock’s because he smelled of manure. It made her think that the Klocks must keep the cows in their kitchen.

The men were trying to reorganize the militia and above all to get regular troops sent up from Albany. Demooth even went to Albany to confer with General Stark in person. But all the great hero of Bennington would say was that he needed every man he had to defend the Hampshire grants, and the Hudson Valley north and south. He refused to consider the opinion that these raids were parts of a larger plan. He called them mere riotous excursions. He cursed about the useless militia and said that if German Flats and the Mohawk Valley could not take care of themselves like other frontiers they might as well lie down and die. Even Philip Schuyler spoke in the same vein. The security
of Albany made all of them sound patriotic. Schuyler showed Demooth General Washington’s reply to his reports of Klock’s demands for troops. Washington said the same thing exactly. Let them take care of themselves like the other frontiers: the New York militia had been the least effective of any state’s. The logic seemed thin to Demooth. He pointed out that troops were being sent to the Virginia frontier.

He returned, worn-out and hopeless. By the end of the month, the sum total of encouragement was the announcement that Alden’s company of Massachusetts troops would be sent to Cherry Valley as a base from which they could operate against any important incursions of the enemy. It made one want to laugh.

At the end of the month the hamlet at Ephratah, to the north of Stone Arabia, was struck. This time the invaders were a small party, entirely of Indians, according to first reports. They burned the Hart house, killed Conrad Hart, took his son prisoner, and murdered a four-year-old boy. But a day later, the word reached German Flats that the man who had killed the boy had been seen by Mrs. Rechtor to have blue eyes, and when he raised his sleeves to rinse his hands, his wrists showed white skin.

Colonel Bellinger, sitting with Demooth and Petry in the Herter kitchen, nodded.

“It was bound to start some day. That’s not a regular raid. But there’ll be plenty more like them now they’ve seen how easy it is.”

Dr. Petry also nodded. “They’ll start picking off all the little places. They’ll start hanging round the field fences. And it’s time planting began. Already they’re ploughing at Weaver’s.”

Demooth said bitterly, “Schuyler told me the Indians had never been effective in battle. He said we’d demonstrated that ourselves at Oriskany. Couldn’t we act like men?”

“If we had wings,” said the doctor in his heavy voice. “But my feet weigh too much.”

Nobody even grinned, it was too true. No one could be
expected to rush off after raiders leaving his own place undefended. They couldn’t make anybody realize that the valley was ninety miles long, that the Tories had the whole of the wilderness to hide in, but that everything the militia might do would be plain to see. It was as if the leaves of the trees had eyes.

“There’s one thing we can do,” said the doctor. “Everybody out of reach of the forts should be told to move in. If they want to work their farms from the forts, they do it by themselves.”

They all agreed.

Demooth made another suggestion.

“We ought to have a company of rangers of our own. Somebody to watch the trails. Mostly to the south. Any big force will have to come at us from Unadilla or Tioga.”

“What can they do?” demanded the doctor.

“Give us warning. If we can get inside the forts we can hold them off, barring cannon, no matter how many of them come. It’s a long way to bring cannon. And men like Adam Helmer or Joe Boleo could make it risky for their scouts.” He paused. “They might be able to pick up a few of these murdering parties, too.”

“How’ll you pay them?”

“Militia money. We’ll list them in different companies and work out ‘service’ for them.”

“It’s not regular. They’re good at making smells in Congress.”

“I’m responsible,” said Bellinger. “I can stand some smells.”

The doctor got up. “While I’m here I might talk to that Nancy. How is she?”

“All right. You’ll probably find her out in back.”

Dr. Petry stamped heavily into the small back room. He found Nancy sitting white-faced, very upright, on a chair. Her hands were on her knees.

As he saw her, the doctor’s brows gathered.

“What’s the matter?” he asked in his harsh voice.

Nancy’s lip quivered.

“Doctor, what does the fornication look like?”

“What!” he exclaimed.

“She said the fornication would be my death.”

Dr. Petry started a German curse.