Drums Along the Mohawk (32 page)

Mark Demooth nodded.

“Yes. It’s got thirteen stripes, red and white ones, and a blue box in the upper corner, with thirteen white stars in a ring. They made it out of ammunition shirts, and a blue cloak, and a woman’s red petticoat.” He grinned thinly. “She’s got to be a heroine with the men up there. They say it’s the first time she ever took the petticoat off in an honest cause.”

Tygert looked solemn.

“I hadn’t heard of it before. It sounds like a fancy pattern for a flag, though.”

The party of one hundred Tories that Mr. Tygert had mentioned in his letter to the Albany Committee materialized in the form
of a party of fifteen who turned up on the thirteenth at Rudolph Shoemaker’s house.

Shoemaker was an anomalous person. Before hostilities commenced he had been a Justice of the Peace under the King. In ’75 he had signed the Loyalist manifesto against sedition and treason. But he had not chosen to move west with the Butlers and Johnsons later that spring. Instead, relying on his kinship to Nicholas Herkimer, he had joined the German Flats Committee of Safety. Since then his public house had become a sort of neutral ground, and it caused no particular surprise when the news went through the valley that the hostile party had taken up quarters there.

Captain Demooth first heard of it when he asked Nancy at suppertime where Clem Coppernol was. She flushed, as she always did when the captain asked her a direct question.

“He said he was going up to Shoemaker’s.”

“What’s he doing there, do you know, Nancy?”

“He said there was some people from the westward.”

Captain Demooth frowned, and Nancy, looking down on his dark head, saw his neat hands hesitate as they put the pudding on his plate. He hurried to finish his supper and then went out again. He said to his wife, “I ought to ask Weston about this, Sara. He may have heard something.”

Mrs. Demooth was petulant; but Nancy hardly noticed her. It never occurred to her that this news, more than any other news, could have any importance in her life. She cleared away the dishes, washed them, wiped the table, and fetched Mrs. Demooth’s lamp, and then retired to her own corner of the room.

Nancy Schuyler had not been happy in German Flats, though she had expected to be. She had thought the life would be exciting there, with the soldiers in the two forts and the young men
on the farms. In such a place she had supposed there would be unmarried men who might be interested in her.

But such men seemed not to exist for Nancy, and, if there had been, Mrs. Demooth kept her so closely under watch that she would have had no opportunity. Her one moment of excitement had been that night in early winter when Gilbert Martin had stopped in with the deer meat and she had felt so sorry for him. Whenever she thought of that night, she felt a shiver take her. She thought that she must have been in love with Gilbert Martin on that night; at the time she had thought that he was in love with her. As she had sat in his arms, she had felt her very being swim into a high kind of happiness. And then abruptly, for no reason she had ever discovered, he had left her and gone home.

Later she had recalled how her brother Hon Yost used to warn her against married men. He had said a girl should never put dependence in a married man. She supposed that must be Gilbert Martin’s trouble.

Sometimes she wished that she could talk to Hon, who was the one member of her family who had ever understood her. Perhaps that was because, as he said himself, he was light-headed too.

Nancy’s mother had made a visit at the end of the preceding year, coming, as she said, to see what kind of girl Nancy had grown into, and also to collect her daughter’s pay for the year, and Nancy had glowed with pride to see her mother in her black shawl facing up so well to the captain’s wife.

“I hope Nancy’s satisfactory to you, Mrs. Demooth.”

“Oh yes, Nancy means very well.” Mrs. Demooth used her chilly, lady voice; but it had no effect on Mrs. Schuyler’s dark dominant Herkimer eyes.

“She’s never been lazy,” said her mother. “I’m sure she earns
every penny of her wages. Now, if you’ll kindly settle the account, Mrs. Demooth, I’ll get back to my brother, the general.”

“Will you fetch my pocket, Nancy?” Though Mrs. Demooth had not apparently noticed what Mrs. Schuyler said, Nancy was aware that she was impressed. She fetched the pocket and Mrs. Demooth took out three paper bills, saying, “Captain Demooth left the money in case you called.”

Mrs. Schuyler looked at the bills.

“Why,” she said, “these aren’t pound notes.”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Demooth. “They’re Continental dollars. They’re five-dollar bills.”

“They are pretty with those harps drawn on them,” Mrs. Schuyler said, “but I’d rather have the money in English if you don’t mind.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s all I have in the house. Of course, if you like, I’ll speak to Captain Demooth about it. But he says these are just as good.”

“The contract called for three pounds a year,” Mrs. Schuyler objected. “I’m not used to these new dollars.”

“They’ll buy just the same, Mrs. Schuyler. As a matter of fact Captain Demooth said you were getting more than three pounds’ worth, but as we did not have the change and Nancy had been a good girl he said you might give her the change as a present if you did not want to take more.”

That was what her mother wished to know.

“Thank you,” she said. “Maybe I’ll buy her something with it. But, you know, I think she’s better without money of her own.”

The two women bowed to each other, and then Nancy walked out with her mother to the corner of the road.

There they had parted.

“Mrs. Demooth speaks highly of you, Nancy,” her mother had said with satisfaction. “I am pleased. Your uncle will be pleased. Be a good girl.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“You don’t get homesick, do you?”

“Oh no,” said Nancy.

“Well, good-bye, daughter.”

That was the way her mother always said good-bye. Calling Nancy “daughter,” as if the word were a gad she pricked her own heart with. But it was a relationship that had no meaning. Her mother did not really belong to her. She was the general’s sister. All her talk was about the general, or his big house and the figure he now made in the nation. She never mentioned Nancy’s father. That was a mistake the general wished to have forgotten, since the man was dead. Nancy and her brother Hon were the only reminders of their mother’s indiscretion, for the other brother, Nicholas, was black-complexioned and quite steady. Mrs. Schuyler never talked about Hon any more than she did of her dead husband.

Sometimes, sitting by herself in the corner of the room, Nancy could feel her heart swell with her own loneliness, and then she would pray that Hon might come down to German Flats as he had promised a year ago. She wished that he could write and she could read, so he might tell her what he was doing. He was such a light-hearted man that Nancy felt that it would do her good just to hear what he was up to.

Now, as she stitched away on her piece of handkerchief linen, she amused herself with remembering all the things she could about Hon Yost. She knew, for instance, that he had joined a regiment of regular troops. She even remembered the name of it—the Eighth King’s Regiment. And she remembered his last message. She had once repeated it to Mrs. Martin when they were in Deerfield. The very words came back to her. “He said he’d try to fetch me an officer, too.”

Her mouth curved over her sewing, and Mrs. Demooth, looking across the room, thought petulantly how easy it was for a simple-witted woman like Nancy Schuyler to be happy.

It startled both Mrs. Demooth and Nancy when they heard the captain’s voice outside hailing Clem.

“Where’ve you been, Clem?”

“Up to Shoemaker’s.”

“What did you go up there for?” The captain sounded stern.

Clem answered gruffly.

“I heard there was some British there. I thought it wouldn’t do no harm to hear what was going on.”

“What were they doing?”

“Nothing much.”

“Look here, Clem, if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll have to take you to the guardhouse in the fort.”

“Why don’t you ride over there yourself?” the Dutchman said sourly.

“Stop your impudence.”

“They ain’t doing nothing but set around and drink. Ensign Butler has a paper he’s reading out of.”

“Butler?”

“What I said.”

“John Butler! No, he’s a colonel.”

“No, this is a young man. Nice-spoken, too. He’s Ensign Walter Butler of the Eighth King’s Regiment, he says. Wears a red coat. They all do, barring the Indians.”

“How many are there?”

“Ten or a dozen. I didn’t count. They was reading this paper saying how anybody going over to their side will be pertected. And anybody not will be cut up by the Indians. There was only four Indians, so I didn’t put stock in that part.”

The Eighth King’s. That was Hon’s regiment. In spite of Mrs. Demooth’s “Nancy!” she went out to the two men.

“Clem,” she said breathlessly. “Did you see Hon?”

“Hon?” Both men turned. Then Clem guffawed in the midst of his aura of rum. “Yes, by God! I did see him. Why?”

But Nancy had stepped back into the house. Already she had made up her mind to do a desperate thing. She would go up and see Hon herself. It might not be safe for him to come so near the fort, so she would go to him at Shoemaker’s, no matter what Mrs. Demooth would surely say. She wouldn’t even let them know.

As she sat down on her stool her heart beat so fast that she was unable to thread the needle. She tried again and again, knowing that Mrs. Demooth’s unsympathetic eyes were watching her. Finally, in desperation, she merely pretended that she had succeeded. She made the motion of drawing the thread through the eye and with the empty needle began to take fine stitches in the handkerchief seam.

The color glowed in her soft cheeks. She realized that she had fooled Mrs. Demooth. She had never been clever like that before. It seemed like a good omen. Outside of the house the night was uninterrupted. Clem had gone off tipsily to his bed in the barn. The captain had hurried back to the fort. All through the grass crickets were singing. The rhythm of their united notes swung into the beat of Nancy’s heart, bringing the darkness close to her.

All she need do was wait until Mrs. Demooth should go to bed, and Mrs. Demooth was already yawning.

It was nearly a two-mile walk to Shoemaker’s. Nancy followed the road as fast as she could, but though she knew her direction, and had traveled the distance before, the darkness handicapped her. Now and then on a good patch of the road the ruts failed
to guide her and she found herself walking in the rough grass at the side.

There was neither moon nor stars. No sign of life showed anywhere except the light of two torches that appeared in the main gate of Fort Dayton. But they were too far behind Nancy to look like more than sparks, and shortly after she had first noticed them, they vanished. With their going the intensity of blackness became deathly. Even the crickets were still, as if they felt the imminence of storm.

In her secretiveness she had pulled a dark shawl over her head, so that with her plain dress she was nearly invisible. A man rising suddenly in the darkness on the other side of the road never saw her at all, and she had time to shrink into the grass with the timid stillness of a deer.

He was coming away from Shoemaker’s, and like herself he seemed in a hurry and anxious not to be noticed. She could not tell who he was, but she smelled the rankness of tobacco in his clothes and a strong breath of rum was left behind him after he had gone.

Nancy waited until his footsteps had faded out before resuming her own way. She was not frightened, but she did not wish to be seen by anyone who might know her, lest the word of her adventure might get back to Mrs. Demooth. She was too absorbed in her desire to see Hon to feel afraid.

It took her half an hour to reach Shoemaker’s house. As she approached it she encountered more men coming away; and one or two men overtook her, going in her own direction. The queer thing about them was that none of the men spoke. They moved furtively, and they seemed anxious even to avoid each other. Since her first encounter she had traveled more cautiously, listening for every footfall on the road, so that she had time enough to step out of the way, sometimes standing by the side of the road, and sometimes finding one of the old river willows near enough to hide behind.

Shoemaker’s house stood back a little from the road. When Nancy reached it, it was merely a darker square against the sky. The shutters were closed over the windows, so that the frames were barely indicated by threads of light. The only sign of life was the recurrent faint mumble of voices.

Nancy stood on the far side of the road, pressing herself against Shoemaker’s pasture fence. Now that she had come so far, doubts overcame her and she felt suddenly shy of Hon. It seemed to her that the business the men were conducting must be very important, and her original plan of walking up to the door and asking for Hon, if he were not outside, was quite impossible. She did not want to do anything that might embarrass him in front of so many people. Not that she thought that Hon would be annoyed with her; but all her life she had been made to realize her unimportance before people.

With the opening of the front door, she suddenly discovered herself full in the light. She had one glimpse of the interior of the house. It was full of farmers, standing along the walls. They did not appear to be saying anything. Their faces looked stupid in the tobacco smoke. They were all staring through the door into Shoemaker’s taproom.

Nancy could see through the door also, but only enough to have a flashing glimpse of a scarlet coat or two, and, beyond, the face of one man, pale, young, and dark-haired. He was addressing the gathering in a high, decisive voice.

Then the men who had come out on the stoop closed the door, and the darkness was returned. As the men stepped off the stoop. Nancy felt herself seized from both sides. She was taken by the arms and hauled stiffly erect. She started to cry out, but a hand put over her mouth checked the cry. The men who held her did not move until the men leaving the house were well away down the road.