Drums Along the Mohawk (47 page)

The sunset was fading when Gil came out on the top of Shoemaker hill. He paused for a moment to get his breath for the last miles down to the river.

The sky was like a great silken sheet over all the world, misty in the north, but edged with sunset to the west. Under it, on
a level with Gil’s eyes, the wilderness rolled northward—mile upon mile, ridge upon ridge, until the mountains lifted against the sky. The color of it in the late spring was like water, gray-green, with darker shades where the evergreens marked out the long pine ridges or the balsam swamps, and with occasional frothy streaks of white of the wild cherries in bloom. As the light waned, the whole panorama conveyed a sense of motion; the ridges rolling higher and higher, as the hollows of the balsam swamps were deepened.

The valley itself was like a crystal under his feet through which he could look down on a picture painted in miniature. The bright line of the river was still tinged with the sunset; the two forts—from this elevation they looked close together—were geometrical shapes in the irregular varicolored fields; the fences between the fields were like small stitches painstakingly made to patch the surface of the flats. But the houses and barns alone in the farther clearings were infinitesimal blocks in the crooked fingers of the wilderness.

As he started down the bald slope of the hill, Gil’s eyes searched across the river, picking up the line of the Kingsroad and following it towards McKlennar’s. He could see house and barn, and the stone house behind the blooming apple tree. The sunset made the windows blind burning eyes in the stone face. But the rest of the place was clear, even to young John Weaver turning the cows into the yard. Lana, of course, would not be milking. She was two weeks overdue. Gil trotted downward.

Then he saw a familiar figure moving along the road. He knew at once who it was. It moved into a lighted stretch, showing the gray horse and the heavy, upright, black-clad rider. He was going out from German Flats. He was approaching McKlennar’s. Now he turned in, and John Weaver’s small dog rushed out barking to meet him.

It was Dr. Petry. For some reason, Gil remembered what Mrs.

McKlennar had once called the doctor, when she saw him riding his gray horse along the road. “Like death on a pale horse,” she had said.

Young John Weaver tingled with excitement, curiosity, and dread. He could tell by Daisy’s voice that things had started in the stone house. He had just finished the milking; it had taken longer with the spotted cow freshened, as she had that morning; one hind quarter of her bag had shown a sign of caking and he had to work on her. The negress stuck her calico-wrapped head in the barn door and called, “You, boy!” He knew it then, but he didn’t like being called “You, boy,” by a nigger, even though he was hired help; and he didn’t answer. Daisy peered in and said, “Oh, white boy!”

“What is it?” John asked gruffly.

Immediately Daisy put on her importance.

“You got to fotch me mo’ wood.”

“I took it in before I went after the cows.”

“Dat trash! I want birch. I want a lot of it. Fust thing dey’ll holler fo’ hot water, and whar Daisy den? W’en ol’ Miss wants something she wants it first off, immeedjut, and now. I got to have birch split fine to fotch de bilin’ wid de fust bref. Here, give me dat milk and get on de mare and go tell Doc Petry. And don’ you spare de hickory stick on’r.”

John wrenched the halter off the mare, bridled her, and mounted bareback. He rode hard, hunching himself over the
withers, and wondering, “Will I be in time?” He drew up at the doctor’s and called in through the window.

“They just told me to fetch you.”

With agonized eyes he watched the doctor pop in a tart of preserved currants and wipe his mouth. “I thought it might start to-night,” said Doc. “Well, well. You might unhitch my horse—he’s all saddled—and bring him round here.”

John flung off the reeking mare and got the doctor’s horse, lugging him by main force. He waited till the doctor came out and mounted. “Hup,” said Dr. Petry. It was like winding a piece of clockwork: the spring seemed jammed for a minute; then the insides of the gray animal whirred and rumbled and his legs started to gesticulate, and all of a sudden you realized that he was actually walking away. John clambered onto the mare and caught up. The mare was hot and full of fettle.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Doc. “I think I’d better get on back. They want me to split some more wood.”

The doctor, who had got the hiccoughs from starting out on a new-filled stomach, put his hand to his mouth, and then turned his staring eyes on John.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Split wood. Just what we need. Half a cord.”

But the mare was already helling away up the road like the backsides of forty rabbits. John rushed her into her stall and yanked his axe out of the shed and got to work on the wood. As soon as he had three or four armfuls he delivered them to the kitchen. He could hear Mrs. McKlennar moving round the front room and talking. Daisy bustled in. “Dat’s enough in here,” she said. But John still stood there. He wasn’t sure. Yes, it was—her voice! Mrs. Martin was talking! Thank God she was still alive!

He went back to the woodpile and chopped and split enough wood to boil water for all the babies this side of China. But he was thinking, wouldn’t this be an awful time to have the destructives
strike the flats? Of course the scouts were out. Of course there would be some warning. But to move her! Move her now! It was too late. Why hadn’t she moved into a house close to the fort? When the doctor came there would be two of them, though. John left off chopping and got down his musket and reprimed it. He wished that Gil was back. He felt a tremendous responsibility. But he wished now that the doctor would hurry up. Then he remembered that he hadn’t turned the cows out, so he did that. And then the doctor arrived.

“Chopped the wood?” he inquired gravely as John took his horse.

“Yes, sir,” said John.

The doctor went into the house. When John came back to the porch and sat down with the musket on his knees, he could hear the doctor’s heavy voice rumbling away to Mrs. McKlennar, a pause, laughter, and then Lana’s voice joining in.

Young John felt the blood rush all through him. He positively burned with the thought, “By God, women were brave!”

He thought what it would be like when he and Mary got married. What it would be like, being in there, watching her, seeing her go through it. It seemed awful. Mary was even slimmer than Mrs. Martin was. But it had to be. A man couldn’t get away from facing it. It was right, too. It was what you expected.

He heard silence fall heavily in the room. Then he heard Mrs. Martin give a gasp and the doctor say with unction, “They’re picking up, aren’t they?”

“Well, for God’s sake, John Weaver!”

He turned to see the widow looking at him. Her horse face was flushed high with excitement. But she appeared to struggle with something in her own inside.

“What on earth are you doing, John?”

He tried to explain. But Mrs. McKlennar seemed to understand. “Very good idea,” she said. “Yes indeed. But I think you ought to patrol the place. You better keep marching round the buildings. Suppose an Indian should be coming up from the back?”

John wasn’t a fool. He blushed. He knew that she meant he wasn’t to sit there right outside the window. He couldn’t imagine how he had come to do it.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Now he was marching round the yard. Now he was down on the road, looking to see if anybody were coming. He leaned against the fence rails, and thought, “Even if we get able to marry this summer, that couldn’t happen for quite a while.”

For he and Mary had it all settled. They had realized last winter that John’s mother still didn’t want them to get married, and that she had asked Mary up just for John to see how little Mary knew. But Mary had been apt at picking things up, and Mrs. Weaver hadn’t liked that. She had stopped asking the girl in March.

George Weaver had taken it pretty much to heart. He had said to his son, “That’s how your ma is. You’ve got to take her the way she is, John. I’ve done it, and she’s been an almighty good wife. She’s been a good mother, too. If times were different I could give you something to get married on. As it is, you’ll have to work for yourselves. When you get enough, you’ll have my agreement, and I’m not going to take your pay, as I might otherwise. You go ahead, and you work it out when you can, and you get married. Mary’s a fine girl, and your ma’s just notional now. Once you’ve gone and done it, she’ll come round.”

It was the longest talk he had ever had with his father. He had gone down to see Mary about it the next week. That was the day when Mrs. Reall had announced that she was going to go back to Massachusetts with Corporal Rebus White. Mrs.
Reall was taking her family, but Mary had refused to go. She was ashamed. She broke down with John and explained that Mrs. Reall would not marry Mr. White until the state had paid her widow’s claim. It was shameful.

Mary had stayed. She had, through March and April, eked out enough, by working for the garrisons, to feed herself. But it had seemed pretty desperate to them both. At first John could not get work. Then when the spring came there was plenty of work to do for widow women, but there was no cash money involved. There was almost no money left that people were willing to lay out in hired help.

But at the end of April they had had a great stroke of luck. Captain Demooth’s hired girl had run away and the captain had been willing to let Mary go there and try the job. And then Gilbert Martin had joined the Rangers, which took him away part of the time, and while he was gone he paid John half a shilling a day to look after the McKlennar place. They realized they were getting along. For a while they even talked of getting married right away, until it occurred to Mary that it might interfere with her job; so they decided to wait a few months longer and save maybe twelve or fifteen dollars.

John had wanted to join the Rangers, but they said he was too young. They did promise to enroll him in the militia, though, when the companies were reorganized. He told Mary about it.

His mother never spoke about Mary. Every time John returned to see his family, she cooked some dish she knew he would like, but she froze all over if he mentioned the girl. She seemed bitter and unhappy. And now John, thinking of what one day Mary would surely have to go through, never considered that his mother had been through the same process to bring him into the world.

All he thought of was Mary. Since she got her job, she had taken to winding her braids round her head. Her neck showed
slim and pliant. There were moments when she greeted him with a dignity and fondness through which her slim ardency emerged as a thing so surprising that it took the breath of them both. It gave John a queer feeling that her visible maturing, instead of giving her defenses against himself, was putting her in his power. She was so anxious to improve herself, she was so conscious of the fact that she had come between him and his mother, that she wanted to do everything to please him.

Even John did not think she was pretty, except in the way any girl that wasn’t too fat was pretty. He didn’t know why it was he had fallen in love with her. She was long-legged and she had an abrupt way of moving; but every now and then, when she looked at him, she seemed struck in a moment with grace.

He tried to figure it all out. She was never malicious, and she was always honest; and yet she was shy. He realized vaguely that she was fine, but it was hard to understand that, with her parents and her upbringing. That was what he called her to himself. She was fine.

It was quite a beautiful discovery for a boy so young as John to have made.

He tried to imagine how it would be when they were married, what kind of room they would have, and what Mary would have on. He wondered whether he would be shaving by then. Mary had once said she hoped he would never let his beard grow. He thought of her lying slim and snug under the blankets, and himself shaving over the slop basin.

Young John shouldered his musket and marched back to the road with his little brown dog trotting before him like a fox. He wondered how long the dog had been with him; he had not noticed; he had not even noticed that he had strayed away from the road. With surprise he saw that it had become dark. A still, black night, in which sounds carried long distances. He could hear a whippoorwill in the cornfield as plain as though it were
in the road beside him. The peepers down by the river began to whimper into their night singing. John shivered, and looked back up the slope towards the stone house.

The windows of the bedroom were lighted. Against the curtains he saw the silhouettes of the doctor, bent over like a grubbing bear, and the dragoon-like figure of the widow.

“God,” thought John. “It’s happening now.”

The sweat came pouring out of him. Then there was one uncontrollable welling of sound that he would never have taken for Mrs. Martin’s voice. The doctor ducked down. Mrs. McKlennar bent forward. They were like people smitten out of the power of life.

And then the doctor straightened up, and John suddenly relaxed weakly against the fence. He had forgotten all about destructives, Indians, war, Mary, his mother, himself. It was over. But John stayed still and struggled with himself, to make himself go up, to find out what had happened.

Then the little brown dog started growling.

“Shut your mouth,” said John savagely. He aimed a cuff at the beast, but the dog eluded him and spun off down the road barking high and shrill. Then John heard a man running towards him.

“Hello, hello. That you, John?”

“Is it Mr. Martin?”

“Yes. I saw Dr. Petry coming up when I was on the hill. What’s happened?”

John said with a strangely controlled voice:—

“The baby’s just got born.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I was just going up to see,” said John, “when I heard you coming.”

They turned towards the house. They saw the door open and a path of light shoot towards them down the slope. Mrs. McKlennar was standing there with a bundle.