Arundel (20 page)

The doltish figure, Ivory Fish’s brother Jethro, came to life, flapping his arms, and hurried to the house, while Ranger plunged in and swam toward us.

Then there was a hullabaloo. My mother and sisters and Malary and others came running to the beach; and Jethro Fish set out after us in the skiff. Ranger was dragged aboard, and leaped on me, knocking me down to lie wetly on my chest, striving to lap the skin from my face. Manatqua and the
m’téoulin
piled the skins into the skiff; then all of us, bidding Arnold good-bye, got in as well.

Our new friend stood at the rail, his white coat unbuttoned in the warm sun. My father looked thoughtfully at him. Then, pulling two otter and two beaver skins from the bales, he handed them up.

“I find,” my father said, “I’m not as good a trader as I thought.”

Arnold took them, nodding gravely. “We New Englanders,” he said, “are sometimes overburdened with conscience.”

The schooner’s crew stowed her anchor and she moved off toward York, Arnold’s white coat gleaming above the
Black Duck’s
sides.

“We’ll be looking for you some day,” my father shouted.

Arnold nodded and waved.

When I leaped at her from the bow of the skiff my mother screamed, then passed her hand lightly over the scar on my forehead before she kissed me. My father picked her up in his arms, and my sisters pummeled me, looking doubtfully at Manatqua and the
m’téoulin;
and with Ranger careering about us in a frenzy of joy, we started for the house, followed by Malary and Ivory Fish and Jethro Fish and Lieutenant Wattleby and a few others whom I scarce saw in my excitement. Among them, suddenly, I was amazed and horrified to become conscious of brown-faced Phoebe Marvin, in her dress made from a French blanket. She was quiet enough when I looked hard at her, so I thought no more about her until I went off the path to inspect a hole that Ranger was imploring me to see. Thereupon this skinny creature moved quickly after me and said in a high, mocking voice, though not loudly: “What did they do to Mary?”

I leaped for her in a fury. She fled around the stockade into the dunes and I after her. After some dodging and leaping, I caught her attempting to duck past me.

I held her by the arms, shaking her rigid body and saying over and over, “If you weren’t a girl I’d pound your face in.” Then I felt her go limp, and saw her staring at the scar on my forehead.

“What’s that?” she asked.

I took my left hand from her to feel the scar. “Why,” I began, “it’s nothing much…”

With that she jerked free, fetched me a clout on the side of the jaw that hurt me more than Guerlac’s hatchet, and fled with an eldritch scream of laughter.

I put her quickly from my mind; for Eunice came coughing to the kitchen door and got under my feet so that I fell on her. For dinner we had baked beans with my mother’s cucumber relish, and I was given small beer to drink in recognition of the hardships I had endured. But despite all these things, which should have made my happiness complete, I knew, when I laid myself on my mattress that night, lapped in the kitchen’s warmth and the sweet, faint odors of dry pine and spices and coffee and wood smoke, that Mary was fixed so firmly in my heart that I could neither forget her nor give her up: that only through finding her could I find ease for the hurt within me.

X

W
INTERS
in Arundel and all our Eastern country lie hard and burdensome on idle folk. There are heavy skies and spittings of snow in November, a weighty fall or two in December, and through January and February and March enough snow and ice and bitter wind to make the devil himself press close up to the flames of hell, and still feel a chill on the side removed from the fire. The birches are bent out of shape by the weight of snow. Ancient pines, weakened by rocky soil or overcrowded by their neighbors, sink to their knees under the snow bundles on their exposed polls, thus forming the deadfalls that madden us when we travel forest trails.

Our winters are not, as some would have you think, seasons of silence and stagnation. There are splitting sounds behind the walls of our garrison house, as though a furtive giant tested boards across his knee. The eaves drip, seeming to weep for the sins of those the roof has sheltered. At night the mournful plaint of horned owls—
whoo; who-who
—emerges endlessly from the pines across the creek, punctuated occasionally by the howls of hunting wolves or the distressing scream of a wildcat. When there is ice in the river, it complains and ejaculates as the tides rise and fall beneath it. There are always chickadees clinging upside down to trees and bushes, sometimes alighting on one’s musket barrel in their trusting blindness, forever uttering their dreary, weary song. There is always the quawking of ducks and geese and night-herons; the wailing of gulls; the abrupt tapping of woodpeckers; the squeaking and clattering of mice between the floors; the moan of the wind fingering at the sashes.

I have long held that if a person plans chores to keep him busy, he will find our Eastern winters a time of relief from the blinding sweat and the countless small tasks of summer, instead of a stagnant period during which each man comes to hate his neighbors, his family, and at last himself.

For all that, I am glad, in late March or early April, when the first thunderheads of the year roll up over the long blue coast line of Wells, and the rumble of distant thunder comes to us from the towering masses of silver-edged clouds. We know then that within the week the last of the drifts and the slabs of ancient ice must vanish from the easterly side of ledges; that the salmon are in the rivers; that mayflowers will soon lie hid among their rough leaves at the edges of clearings; that before we know it the baby frogs will set up their pipings in the roadside pools. They are a sign, these first thunderheads, that a new world of rich harvests, lush meadows and billowing groves is on its way to replace the barren fields, bleak outlines and devouring chills that have so long oppressed us.

That first winter after my father and I returned from our pursuit of Guerlac and Mary, whenever I could steal a few moments from my chores, I practised the tricks I had seen Arnold perform aboard his schooner; but toward the end of the winter a terrible occurrence put an end to such practising, and left no part of any winter hanging heavy on my hands.

It was a bitter afternoon in February, with the wind in the north and a dirty scum of gray clouds across the sky, when my father heard a blast on the horn that hung from a post on the far side of the ferry. Being in his smithy, he called for Jethro Fish, but got no answer; so he went himself to the skiff and pulled across. The tide was low, the water running out swiftly in the narrow bed: so as he swung the skiff alongside the tall, gangling passenger who stood on the far bank, he leaned over and set his oar in the sand to hold it in place. Feeling by the motion of the skiff that the man was aboard, he withdrew his oar and dropped
it into the
oarlock,
looking
up at
his
passenger as the skiff swung off into the stream. The passenger was the Reverend Ezekiel Hook.

Hook recognized my father at the same moment and stepped backward, croaking, “I’ll cross with no blasphemer!”

It may be that in staring so intently at my father he forgot the skiff had left the bank and thought to step off, or he may have lost his balance; but for whatever reason, he fell backward over the stem. From the way he bobbed beneath the surface and up again, beating the water with his arms, rigidly, his mouth open to scream but emitting only gasps and gurgles, my father saw he couldn’t swim; so he pulled alongside him, reaching down to grasp his coat. Hook gave a convulsive flop, clutched him, and pulled him in as well.

Unable to cope with his thrashing arms, my father hit him on the chin and knocked him unconscious, breaking his jaw at the same time, I am happy to say, though it would have been better for all of us if he had broken his neck. He pushed him into shallow water; then struck out after the skiff, which was whirling downstream. Overtaking it, he climbed in, pulled back, picked up the senseless Hook, and rowed him to our shore. When he had drawn up the skiff and made the rope fast, he carried Hook to the house, where my mother bound up his jaw and put him to bed.

It must be my father had sucked overmuch bitter cold air into his lungs on top of a throat trouble he had caught from travelers—such a trouble as spreads out of the cities, now and again, like a flame running through the woods—for he fell to shivering and shaking and burning up with fever. Hook departed the next day, saying nothing because of his bound jaw, but glaring maledictions at my mother and myself. My father had taken to his bed, breathing with difficulty, so we sent Jethro Fish posting to Portsmouth to pray a doctor there to come at once to my father’s relief; and to make sure he came, we sent him an otter skin.

That night my mother called me to her room, where my father lay between the feather mattresses. As well as he could, because of the pain in his chest, he told me how I must be governed by my mother in the management of the inn and the ferry; how I should invest our earnings in beaver and otter skins, and especially in sables when I could get them, always sending word to the governor’s house in Boston when there was an accumulation of sables, so that the Boston bloods could ride down for them, and get drunk doing it; how my mother and I should continue to deal with Captain Callendar of Boston, sending skins to England by his brig, so that with them he could buy tea in Holland, wine in Portugal and molasses in the French Sugar Islands, and smuggle all of them into Boston, like so many of the Massachusetts and Connecticut merchants; and how we should add to the gold in the barrel buried under the kitchen until we had enough to build a brig of our own.

With that he patted me feebly on the arm and motioned to my mother to send me away.

I went into the kitchen and sat unhappily with Malary. Late that night the doctor came from Portsmouth, half frozen. He put blisters on my father’s chest, but shook his head, for my father recognized neither him nor my mother. The next morning, just after the sun had risen and the wind had swung into the south, my father died.

We made out after a fashion. Seemingly Guerlac’s hatchet had released some spring in me; for I shot up to a great height for one of my years. From necessity I worked in the smithy when there were musket locks to be mended or horses to be shod; and between times I raced from the smithy to the sawmill, and from the sawmill to the ferry, getting this done and that done by asking those who worked for us to show me how they should be done; for my father had often said to me that people in our part of the country were independent-minded, and wanted less to be told how things should be done than to tell others how to do them.