A voice from two ranks back snarled: “The point is the officers figure out what to do. We just do it.”
“Yes, Corporal Hook,” she said. He was a bad one to cross, doubly so now he’d been promoted. Granted he deserved it, but ...
“We’re luring them into a trap,” a cheerful voice said.
She looked up, started, and almost stumbled again. Colonel O’Rourke was leading his horse back down the column.
“If you say so, sir ... When they catch us, they try to make us run; when we run, they try to catch us. Maybe they’ll be so tired from chasing us they’ll be easy meat?”
O’Rourke chuckled. “Not quite, Private. Tell me, how have the rations been?”
“Fine, sir, can’t complain, haven’t touched my iron rations ... oh.”
She looked over her shoulder at the desolation that was in their wake.
And this miserable road to haul supplies on,
she thought.
“Oh, indeed,” O’Rourke said, and led his horse on down toward the end of the column.
“And what did he mean, then?” Vaukel asked.
“That the enemy are going to get hungry before we do,” Johanna chuckled. “Now that we’ve eaten the land bare, or burned it.”
The weight of rifle and pack seemed lighter than they had a minute ago. She scratched again, hoping it was just sweat and that she hadn’t come down with lice. Besides the medics’ warnings about how they carried disease, one of the pleasures of Camp Grant—after the shock of having her head hair cropped to a quarter inch and the rest shaved—had been
not itching
for the first time in her life. You couldn’t always avoid them in the field, but the knowledge that you didn’t
have
to have nits all your life had been inexpressibly wonderful.
Nantucket was wonderful itself. She hoped she’d live to see it again.
“This is it, then,” Jared Cofflin said aloud.
They were about a mile off the shore of the North Fork; it was a low line in the distance, lime-green of marsh and the green-gold-scarlet colors of autumn trees. He leveled a pair of binoculars.
“Well, not a bad job of navigation, if I say so myself,” he said. And it wasn’t, not with only a compass and logline to find his way on the map.
The wind was out of the north now, and he squinted beneath the brim of his cap as they scudded a little south of westward before it, the sun low enough on the horizon to be a nuisance.
Good boat,
he thought with a burst of affection.
She answers sweet.
“Ready to come about,” he said, busying himself with the line that ran through pulleys on the boom to a sliding track behind him along the stern. “Prepare to gybe.”
Oddly enough, running before the wind was the most difficult sort of small-boat sailing. He pulled the tiller toward him, and hauled in the line with his left, to get the boom amidships; you didn’t want it crashing back and forth across the cockpit.
“Gybe ho! ’Ware boom!”
The catboat was pointing due south now, and the boom swung out to starboard from the midships position. The sail thuttered as its unstayed edge caught the wind for a second, then cracked as it moved out, filled, and settled down. Time to build up just enough way on her, then—
“Lower away,” he said. “Reef her.”
Martinelli and Martha were on the rope, lowering the gaff and the sail with it. The children stood to the inboard edge of the boom and fastened the loose folds down with the ties sewn into the sail; they made a creditable job of it, too, if not Guard-neat.
The channel in was marked by poles with string pennants; there was a creek flowing into a shallow inlet, with salt marsh full of osprey nests perched in dead trees on the port and a spit of dry land to starboard. One of the big fish hawks punched the water not far away in a fist of spray, flogged itself back into the air with a foot of thrashing silver in its talons. He could see the mad lemon-yellow ferocity of its eye as it went by the
Boojum,
intent on its own business and ignoring him. The dock poked out into the water, a board surface on hemlock piles, with rope fenders along the sides.
He let the feel of the water and wind flow through his hands on line and tiller, up from his feet on the deck. He could smell the land now, silt and brackish water and growing things with an autumnal muskiness under it, strong even against the breeze.
“Lower away all ...
now!”
he said.
The gaff came down the rest of the way with a run, and the two adults leaped to secure it. Martha and the petty officer took up the oars and fended off, the
Boojum
coming to rest against the wharf behind another boat that might have been its twin. There were plenty of hands on the dock to grab the lines thrown to them and make fast, not to mention a brace of excited dogs that looked to be mostly collie. They barked and dashed about until called to heel, then lay with their eyes bright and ears cocked forward.
“Afternoon, Chief,” Thomas Hollard said.
The Marine commander’s elder brother was in his late thirties, Cofflin knew, a little shorter and darker than Ken. He looked older than his years to pre-Event eyes, the way most people over twenty or so did nowadays; solid and troll-strong, his skin weathered and roughened by outdoor work in all weathers. The hand that shook Cofflin’s was hard with callus, with knuckles like walnuts.
What Dad would have called workingman’s hands,
Jared thought as he shook the offered palm.
The elder Hollard’s long straight nose had been broken at some time—during the Alban War, he remembered from the file he’d read yesterday—and reset a little crooked. The farmer sported a short-cropped beard, and wore dark woolen pants, white linen shirt, anorak-style jacket and high, laced boots. Probably his company clothes, and most of the rest of the farm’s folk—eight adults, a dozen kids—were in clean, coarse linsey-woolsey bib overalls. Some of the kids barefoot—not surprising on a dry autumn day, seeing that a shirt cost a week’s wages for a laborer, and a pair of shoes took a month’s pay. One of the definitions of
affluent
in this Year 10 was having more clothes than a set to wear and a set to wash and a set for church or Meeting. Beside Hollard was his auburn-haired Fiernan wife Tanaswada, carrying their ten-month-old youngest ; she was in her late twenties, had been a young widow with a baby at the breast in the aftermath of the Battle of the Downs when she met and married the Nantucketer. That boy must be the oldest child, now a red-haired, straw-hatted youngster giving the chief bashful glances, and admiring ones at Martinelli’s Coast Guard uniform.
Let’s see, three of their own, and another adoptee, five all up, and they’re young yet
—
Tom here must be trying to raise himself a labor force from scratch, to be ready when his immigrants set up on their own.
“Bill, Mary, why don’t you give a hand with the Cofflins’ stuff?” Hollard said with an easy authority. “Chief, Ms. Cofflin, you want to see the old Alonski place now, or tomorrow?”
“Might as well take a first look now,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” Hollard said genially. “Hey, what’s that?”
“Tuna,” Martha said. “We ran into a catcher boat on our way over, thought you might like some.”
“Thanks; we can find some room on the grill,” Hollard said. His wife gave a frank cry of delight; fish was a staple nowadays, but that meant salt cod, not this. “Neighborly of you.”
Cofftin nodded acknowledgment. They’d met fairly often, since the farmer was something of a leader among the Long Island settlers and acted as delegate to cast their votes in the Meeting, but not often enough to be more than friendly acquaintances.
“Chuck, you finished the chores, didn’t you?” Hollard said.
“Ayup, Dad. Checked the water troughs, an’ everything.”
“Why don’t you show these youngsters around, then,” he said.
His wife cut in: “Make sure your sister isn’t left out.” A slight scowl went with the boy’s nod; the natural reaction of a ten-year-old burdened with someone half his age. “And don’t turn up for dinner covered in mud, either!”
“Thanks, Dad—sure, Mom—you guys want to see the place?”
The children dashed off up the dirt track that led up the low slope inland, followed by barking dogs and more sedately by most of the adults. The farmer and his wife walked more slowly still with the Cofflins.
“Just through here,” Hollard said. “It’s a pretty enough place.”
Cofflin nodded silently when they passed through the belt of trees along the shoreline. A big field had been cleared from the forest, forty acres or so, even most of the stumps gone. Shin-high autumn grass waved green-gold in the afternoon light, starred with late wildflowers, tall orange-yellow butter-and-egg plants, red-purple deer grass and hound’s-tongue. A few black-coated steers raised their muzzles to glance at the newcomers, then returned to their cropping, their jaws making wet tearing sounds; only a slight ranginess in the legs and the wicked look of their horns broke the Angus look of the three-quarter-bred cattle. Across the pasture lay a house made of squared logs weathered brownish-gray, sixty feet by thirty, with a shingled roof and a fieldstone chimney in the middle of it. Several long clapboard sheds stood nearby, and a scatter of big trees left when the land was cleared, their leaves turning maple-scarlet, oak-yellow, and beech-red with autumn. They walked up to it through a neglected lawn and peered into the windows, seeing darkness and bulky shapes.
“That’s the Alonski place,” Hollard said redundantly. “We were partners, when he started. He wanted to do some serious fishing here, hence the drying sheds—there are oyster beds, right enough, good lobstering, and God knows plenty of fish out there in the Sound; and he thought he could start a bit of a town here eventually, inn for travelers, smithy and suchlike.”
He jerked a thumb southward over his shoulder toward the Great West Road. “It’s not that he wasn’t a hard worker. It was the transport costs killed him—couldn’t compete with the boats working out of Fogarty’s Cove, and it ate his mustering-out grant and everything he could scrape together, beg, or borrow. I liked him, he was a man you’d want to have at your back. But stubborn?”
“Stubborn as a whole sounder of pigs,” Tanaswanda said. “With a mule thrown in.”
Her husband nodded. “His cousin Pulakis has the farm two sections east toward the Cove. When Alonski drowned in the storm of ’07, his wife and kids moved in with them.”
Hollard shook his head. “He was a good man.”
“Indeed he was,” Martha said quietly.
That’s right,
Cofflin thought, glancing aside at her.
He was in Marian’s commando group, when they got Martha out of the Olmecs’ hands.
Hollard nodded at her. “Right you are, Madam Councilor,” he said formally. Then he went on: “The parcel’s one hundred sixty acres, not counting the salt marsh—it was exempted from the Coastal Reserve on the off-chance that it might actually become a town. I think in another five, mebbe ten years that might have worked, but not now. There’s this clearing, I’ve been turning my cattle in for summer pasture, and the house—I’ve kept it weathertight, used it for storage—good tube well, no trouble to fit up a water system with a wind pump, and run it out to the drying sheds, they’d do fine for stables. Another thirty or forty acres fit for clearing. the rest good woodlot, and there’s the dock. Nice sheltered little inlet, this here is actually sort of a peninsula between the creek and a marsh.”
“Looks good,” Cofflin said. “For the buyer’s needs.”
Martha gave a slight dry chuckle at the younger man’s startlement. “It’s not for us,” she said. “Commodore Alston and her partner want it. For vacations, at first, and then as a retirement place. And to raise horses.”
Hollard blinked; then his face split in a grin that took years off his age. “The
skipper
for a neighbor?” he said in delight, then wiped away the smile with an effort. “Well, you realize I do have to see that Betty—Alonski’s widow—gets what she can ...”
“Indeed you do,” Martha said, touching him on the arm. “But we can discuss that tomorrow.”
They walked up the dirt lane with its wagon-wheel ruts, through a broad belt of uncleared timber where leaves lay in drifts like old gold and scraps of crimson velvet—some still floating from the passage of children and dogs. Squirrels went up the trunks in streaks of fire, or hung from branches ratchet-chattering anger at being disturbed; a raccoon eyed them dubiously and waddled off, fat with autumn bounty. Beyond the wood lay the imperfectly graveled surface of the Great West Road that ran along the northern shore of Long Island, finishing as a forest trail opposite the lonely little outpost on Manhattan. Right now it was far from empty.
Been a while since I heard that sound,
Cofflin thought. Booted feet moving in unison, crunching on gravel; his mind filled in the arms swinging, the whole like a great centipede built up of human beings.
’Bout a hundred, hundred-odd.
Camp Grant, the Nantucket Marine Corps training enclave, was five miles or so west of here. They halted; the rest of their party had, too, on the other side of the road, probably at the children’s insistence.
They do love a parade,
Jared thought grimly.
Wish it was the Shriners or the Fourth of July.
A mounted standard-bearer walked his horse around the curve to the eastward, Old Glory streaming out from the staff socketed in his right stirrup with a flutter and snap. Jared Cofflin removed his hat, holding it over his heart; the others did likewise, Hollard’s wife and a few of the others making the Fiernan triple-touch gesture of respect to the Republic’s banner first. The fifty states the stars represented might be far away on the oceans of eternity. but the ideas it stood symbol for were very much alive. Behind the mounted man came another leading a horse, the company commander.
Walks where his troops do,
Cofflin thought with an inward nod of approval.