Drums Along the Mohawk (64 page)

Few people went visiting. Lana, who had thought of trying to see her parents during the slack season in December, gave up the notion. Provisions coming up to Stanwix took two days even on
the river ice. More than once horses broke down and froze where they had fallen.

At McKlennar’s, Gil was thankful that he had stacked his hay beside the barn. He could never have found it in the woods, once the big snow came.

All day he and Lana and Mrs. McKlennar and the babies hugged the fireside. The negress suffered a strange change in her complexion. It was as if her skin had turned gray with dark brown blotches underneath. She could hardly walk for her chilblains. Joe Boleo never left the place. The idea of raiding parties coming in that cold was simply preposterous. But he took great satisfaction in his idleness. “I can’t get them Senecas out of my mind,” he said. “They ain’t got any food. I bet they’re dying every which way.” It was a comforting thought to them all.

The only thing that troubled him was having to help Gil get wood. They cut great logs and skidded them in the front door and set the butt ends in the fire. Every hour or so they would pry the log forward into the coals. They kept it going all night, taking turns at watching.

Even so it was so cold in the kitchen that Lana’s fingers were too numb to spin, except occasionally when the sun shone at noon. They became silent for long periods. And Mrs. McKlennar seemed to age during the winter, and sat more and more, close to the fire. Finally she succumbed to Lana’s suggestion of having her bed moved into the kitchen.

Only Adam went about at all, visiting occasionally at Eldridge’s or paying a dutiful visit to Dayton. The cold did not affect him as it did the others. He did all the hunting alone. But hunting was poor, and the deer, when he got one, were terribly thin. The meat was tasteless as old leather.

The wind seemed never to stop blowing. It had a high note on the crust. At night, when it came from the north, they could hear the howling and threshing of the pines on the high ridges
half a mile away. But on the few quiet nights, the cracking of frosted trees in the icy darkness was worse to listen to.

In the barn Gil had built a kind of wall around the cow and heifer and mare, banking it every day with the manure that was dropped overnight, but that was always frozen. The three animals kept close together. Their coats were shaggy as sheep’s wool. To milk the cow was an ordeal; his bare hands received no warmth from the teats; and the milk froze before he could get it to the house.

But the knowledge of their security was one comforting thing; and when the weather finally broke towards the end of February, they waited uneasily for a week, hoping for more snow. It came at last, heavy, without wind, a deep, protecting blanket between them and Niagara.

Though it came in time to save them, it did not come in time to save the Oneida Indians. On the last day of February, the entire fighting strength of the Onondaga nation, with a few white men and a party of Cayugas and Senecas, fell upon Oneida Castle. In German Flats they never learned the rights of it; all they knew was that a mass of half-frozen Indians,—men, women, and children,—and a few starved dogs, appeared at Fort Dayton and asked for food and shelter. They crowded the fort for two days, making dangerous inroads on the supplies, before Bellinger was able to get them started for Schenectady. The town had been utterly destroyed, but the raiders, they said, had gone back to Canada.

When Adam went down to see them, he found old Blue Back, his fat cheeks mottled with the cold, squatting in his blankets and watching his wife make a sort of hot mash of whole oats. The two larger children huddled against him, and the baby
on the squaw’s back was wrinkled like a nut, with two enormous eyes. The old Indian accepted tobacco wordlessly.

“They’ll take care of you all in Schenectady,” Adam said in an attempt to cheer him up.

“Sure. Fine.” But the old man obviously did not think so. He smoked, looking past Adam along the soiled snow of the parade. “You watch’m woods close,” he said. “They come some more. They mad.”

“I wish you was going to be around, Blue Back. It’d be handy having you scouting with us.”

“Maybe.” He went on puffing. Then he said, “You going back to Martin?”

“Yes.”

Blue Back reached a dirty hand inside his shirt, and felt of something.

“You fetch’m this. No luck,” he was going to say; but as he touched the peacock’s feather it occurred to him that in a white man’s town it might be lucky after all.

His eyes grew blank. He shook his head.

“You watch’m woods,” he muttered dully.

Adam told Bellinger what Blue Back had said that afternoon, and Bellinger wrote letters to the governor, and to General Clinton, and to Schuyler. Three weeks passed before he got a reply. All three sounded upset and indignant. The army last fall had been organized to wipe out the Indian towns. It had done so. The Indians were bound to be crippled for years to come. The menace had been removed at a vast expense; no other single campaign of the war could compare to it in cost. Over a million of dollars had been expended, purely for the benefit of the frontier. There was some mention of common
gratitude. And let him be reminded that such continual fears and apprehensions and baseless alarms would have deleterious effects upon the inhabitants. It was felt in Albany that the time had come for the frontier settlements to stand on their own defense.

In German Flats, the settlers began to look for spring.

Gil was getting some hay into the barn. There wasn’t much left. He had been feeding the three animals one good forkful between them. They showed it. The mare was gaunt, and, as Joe said, the hip bones of the cow and heifer stood out sharp enough to hang the milk pails on them.

He heard a man’s boots squash through the wet snow in the yard, and then the door opened to let Casler come in. “You in there, Martin?”

“Yes. I’m just feeding the stock. Walk in.”

Casler closed the door behind him and walked up to Gil. The light in the barn was a dim, dusty twilight gray, in which the animals looked even more meagre than they were.

“How are you all?” asked Gil.

“We’re in pretty good health. How’re you, Martin?”

“All right.” Gil leaned on his fork and looked at his neighbor. Casler was a good neighbor to have, even though Gil did not see a great deal of him. He was a thin, earnest-looking man, with a
slow way of speech, and a hard worker. He had rebuilt on the site of his old house across the river—a tiny cabin, in which he had wintered his wife, his two young daughters, and his three-year-old son.

“It’s getting bad footing,” he remarked, picking up a straw to chew. “It looks to me as if the snow was going pretty quick now.”

“I’ve been thinking so myself.”

They considered that fact in silence for a few minutes, before Casler asked, “You folks going back to the fort soon?”

“I hadn’t planned. Mrs. McKlennar is against it till we have to.”

Casler nodded slowly.

“She’s a stout-hearted woman, ain’t she?”

“Yes. I hate to move her, too. She’s been poorly, off and on.”

“Yes. I hate to move, myself. I was figuring on getting pretty near all my ground working again this season. Now I don’t know.”

Gil had the feeling that Casler had only got round to part of what was in his mind.

“Listen,” he said, “if anything happens, why don’t you folks plan to come over to this place? We could hold that house against quite a lot of them. It’s as good as Klock’s fort.”

“That’s right,” said Casler. “How about her? Would she mind?”

“Mrs. McKlennar, you mean? No.”

“I don’t allow that anything’s going to happen somehow. I ain’t really bothering about that, Martin. How about her? Has she got one of these tax papers?”

“Tax papers?” repeated Gil. “I hadn’t heard of any tax papers.”

“Then they ain’t got down this side of the river yet. They’ve been around Herkimer and they got down to my place this noon. They served them on me. It’s that tax law they passed in Albany. It’s got to collect eighty thousand dollars out of Tryon County.
They said what German Flats had to pay, but I forgot. I know what I got to pay,” he finished grimly.

“How much do you?”

“A hundred and seventy-seven dollars and forty-eight cents!” Casler’s mouth closed suddenly and he stared at Gil.

“Did you say a hundred and seventy-seven dollars, Casler?”

“And forty-eight cents. What in God’s name is that forty-eight cents for?”

“But you can’t pay that!”

“You don’t need to tell me, Martin. I ain’t got the forty-eight cents, even.”

“They can’t make you pay it.”

“The paper says if I don’t pay it in cash and half down in two months’ time, it will be collected from me. They’ll take my stock—I ain’t got only the cow and she’s dry now. And they’ll forfeit my land for taxes.”

Gil said again, “They can’t do that, Casler!”

Casler nodded slowly.

“The man told me it’s on account of all the cost of that army last year. He said we got the benefits of it, but he said our rates wasn’t as high as other parts of the state. But I can’t pay it. I want to do what’s right, but I can’t pay that.” His voice began to rise. “I’ll do my share; I ain’t never missed muster; but if they take my land I can’t feed my folks. I thought the reason them Boston people started this war was so we wouldn’t have to pay taxes.”

Gil tried to comfort him. He tried to show that nobody else could pay more than a small share of such a tax in German Flats. Most of them couldn’t pay a cent, any more than Casler could. Even Congress couldn’t wipe out a whole community. There was something wrong about it.

“There ain’t nothing wrong in what I told you, Martin. It’s all wrote out. I’ll bet you’ll get one yourself for the land you had in Deerfield. You wait. There ain’t any money in my house. I
got to buy some seed potatoes, as it is, this spring. I got twenty-five cents.”

“I’ll let you have some seed potatoes and welcome, too. I got more’n enough, Casler. Did yours get froze?”

Casler explained that he hadn’t had time to dig himself a cellar last fall. They had sacked the seed potatoes against the chimney, but they had frozen even there.

As Casler turned to the barn door, Gil added, “You remember what I said about coming over here.”

“Thanks,” said Casler. “That’s kind. But I ain’t really figuring the Indians will come this spring.”

Gil stood in the door and watched him trudge down through the wet snow to the river. The tracks he had made coming showed on the river and up the far bank and across the flats. In the damp air they collected violet shadows for every footprint, over the fields, all the way to the tiny cabin from whose stick chimney a thread of smoke trailed uncertainly.

Gil had Casler and his tax on his mind all the rest of the day. Before supper he told Mrs. McKlennar about it. Adam was out, probably hunting up a girl of his,—the spring unease had hit him a month ahead of time,—but Joe Boleo was there, squatting down in the corner and watching Lana suckle the baby. At first he had been a good deal embarrassed, when the cold forced Lana into the kitchen to feed her child; and he had offered to leave. But Mrs. McKlennar said that was ridiculous, Joe must have played the same game himself, once.

The process, as Lana and the young boy carried it out, took hold of Joe’s imagination; and he made up all sorts of reasons why he ought to get back to the house about feeding time. There was something in the full white springiness of the breast and the way the child mishandled it that softened Joe’s ideas, so that he
seemed to get drowsy with the baby; and he would sit there on the floor, nodding his bare cranium and trying to figure what it must have been like when he used to be doing a similar business.

Sitting on the settle, with her feet wrapped in an old blanket, Mrs. McKlennar held Gilly on her lap. Somebody had to hold Gilly to keep him from getting one of his jealous fits of screaming. He hated cow’s milk so, and, though he was only two years old, Mrs. McKlennar maintained that he had all the passions of a grown-up man.

The negress stumped from fire to table, preparing the adult food—the last of the hominy, part of a dark loaf, and some salt pork. Now and then, if she moved unexpectedly, she would give a kind of singsong moan that was an echo of her winter’s chilblains.

The sound of Gil stamping his feet in the shed was the signal for all of them to hurry. Lana looked down at her breast and saw the baby’s mouth languorous round the nipple and pushed it away.

“He’s had plenty,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “He’s greedy as all get out. He’d wear you to the bone if you let him.”

Gil watched from the doorway, his dark face sharp and quiet, while Lana took the baby away to its cradle. Gilly slid down from the widow’s lap and started crawling after his mother and had to be fetched back by Daisy, who dandled him and whispered “Honey boy” in his ear. Joe looked up sheepishly and said, “Evening, Gil. What’s the news?”

“I was talking to Casler.”

Briefly he told them about Casler’s tax papers. He turned to Mrs. McKlennar. “If they tax Casler that much they’ll try to get three hundred dollars for this place.”

Mrs. McKlennar let out a snort that sounded like old times.

“I wouldn’t pay it, Gil. I can’t, for one thing. And for another, I’ll be damned if I do.”

Joe let out a shrill “Hurraw!” causing the widow to look down her nose at him.

“What do you mean by that?”

Joe grinned like an old half-rabid wolf.

“I was thinking it would be fun to be around here if they tried to put you off this place.”

Mrs. McKlennar snorted again.

“I don’t know what I’d do if they did that. I’ve used up almost all the money Barney left to me. I used to think it was enough to put me in my coffin, till Congress started printing this new-fashioned currency.”

Joe said quickly, “I guess you won’t have to move.”

“I suppose they’d send soldiers. I couldn’t do anything if they did that.”