Arundel (38 page)

“Got a place to sleep, Brother?”

The boy shook his head.

“We got two bunks in the barracks,” Cap said, “but we got to move up river right away. You’re hable to be here five or six days, Brother, and get rained on if you ain’t under cover.”

The young Rhode Islander stared helplessly.

“Get your friend,” Cap said, “and we’ll trade you our two bunks for your two chickens.”

What Cap said about being rained on was true; but he was not one to give up a bed so lightly. I waited for him; and in the course of time he emerged from the barracks, carrying his pack and the two chickens, and accompanied by a shambling man with a melancholy face. This man he introduced as Lieutenant Church.

“The lieutenant,” he said hoarsely, “is the best scout in the province of Maine.”

The lieutenant looked mournfully at the chickens.

“You better get on one of these scouting parties, Stevie,” Cap continued in his hoarse whisper, “or they’ll put you to dragging bateaux. Have you dragged one of ’em yet?”

He assured me with a horrified face that the Kittery gaol would be easier to drag. “I had to move one of ’em to-day,” he said, caressing his broad expanse of back, “and it kind of took away my appetite.” I asked him how he had happened to relinquish his bunks in the barrack.

“Oh,” he said, “they were full of bugs. The lieutenant discovered ’em.”

The lieutenant poked mournfully at a chicken. “All right, Lieutenant,” Cap said. “All right, we’ll get right at it.”

“How did you get up here so quick?” I called after him, as they moved away.

“I found a horse down at the shipyard,” he explained, “so I rode it up to see if I could find out who it belonged to.”

“Who did it belong to?”

“Well,” he said, “I ain’t had time to ask.”

We worked until dark, getting up supplies from the foot of the quick water. Later I sought out Captain Goodrich’s company, so to share their supper. They had drawn cornmeal and salt pork and peas, and Phoebe had done what she could with them, which was little enough, God knows.

As we sat by our fires and ate our rations I heard amazing tales of what lay ahead. There was a mountain, one man said, alive with bed bugs, enormous and rapacious, more like the hard red crabs on our rocky coast. These insects had, for centuries, bred on its slopes; and when it was overpopulated great armies of them set out, shrinking in size from their exertions in swimming streams and climbing deadfalls, until they came to settlements where they could support themselves. Men who fell asleep near this mountain, the man said, were eaten to death. No animal or bird could five on it.

Noah Cluff piped up to tell a tale he had heard about the Chaudière River, which we must descend. “Chaudière,” he said, was a French word meaning “boiler,” and the name was given to the river because along its course were holes down which the water was sucked, boiling and steaming, into the depths of the earth; and any canoe that approached too close to a hole was never seen again.

Another said the army must march across a place called the Height of Land which had never been crossed but by ten men; and on it were bobcats the size of moose, and wolverines so fierce they would attack men for the pleasure of hearing their bones crack.

At each of these tales I laughed, expecting the others to laugh with me, as they would have laughed if I had said a sea serpent came up the Arundel River every Sunday morning and devoured two fishermen and a dory. But the only one who laughed was Asa Hutchins, and he would laugh at anything, even the Bible. The rest of them grinned discomfortably, looking sideways at each other.

“Well, for God’s sake!” I said. “Where’d you get these bogey tales!”

Jethro Fish poked at the fire with his bayonet. He was crowded off the
Eunice,
he said, and came up from Newburyport in the
Eagle.
All those aboard her had heard the tales and many more, some worse, like the one about the meadows above the Chaudière growing on top of rotted leaves, so those who set foot on them would be swallowed up.

“Why was it,” I asked Jethro, “that men aboard the
Eagle
tried to run away after they’d embarked contentedly enough?”

Jethro said he wasn’t sure; but those who tried to go ashore were Connecticut troops, men from towns, who knew less about the forests than most. It may have been, he said, they were frightened.

“Frightened by these tales?” I asked.

At this a laugh went up, a laugh of derision for folk who would allow themselves to be frightened; but I remembered how the laughers’ eyes had rolled when the tales were told.

“Was there much of a stench to the
Eagle,”
I asked, “of bilge or fish?”

“No,” Jethro said. “She was a lumber schooner.”

I asked him if he had seen the guide Treeworgy, or spoken with him. He said he had not; nor did the name have a meaning for him. There was something about the business that stuck in my gizzard; but I spoke my mind concerning the wild romances they were telling.

“Now,” I said, “the truth is this: in my younger days, as all of you from Arundel know, I traveled far up Dead River. There I met an Indian, Natanis, who had come up the Chaudière from the St. Lawrence and across the Height of Land. I saw none of these things, nor did Natanis either. Your tales are fables, such as knaves tell to children to frighten them when they come to dark places in the road. If I knew who started them, I’d take off his skin with a rope end, just as I’d lash a man who found joy in frightening children. Wipe them out of your mind, and see there’s no repeating of them! First thing you know, we’ll have all the Connecticutters and Rhode Islanders running away, and our Maine men joining them in a panic to the shame of our province.”

A messenger rode into the gate of the stockade and kindled a tin lantern so he might see the dispatch he carried. He bawled it out:

“All men to the carrying up of bateaux and stores at dawn; all captains to headquarters at Captain Howard’s house, one mile above the fort, at ten o’clock; all guides to headquarters at sun-up.”

Knowing we had need of sleep, I went back to Hobomok, and found he had made beds for us out of spruce branches. I said to myself, as I pulled the blanket over my face, that now, indeed, we were committed to the enterprise, and there was nothing to stand in our way, so that I could think of Mary as much as I wished. Before I could start to think I found Hobomok shaking me, and heard the trumpeting of geese overhead, and saw it was dawn again.

XVIII

I
HAVE
heard times without number, from folk who had no part in our march to Quebec, of the banquet held at Fort Western while we lay there waiting to start, a banquet of roasted bears and pumpkin pies and watermelons and rum punch. These tales have always come to me in after years, when the wood of our bateaux was rotting in the crevices of the river walls. If there was a banquet I saw none of it, nor did those who went with me; yet when I say so, I am rebuked by those who tell the tale. They say I wish to rob our march of its romance; but there was no romance to it that I could see, not even to that early part of it: nothing but haste that blistered our hands and toil that blinded us with sweat.

To this day I can hear the snarling bellow of Daniel Morgan driving us through the woods with our loads, and see him go charging up past us, dragging at a bogged wheel or heaving on a bateau, cursing the curses he learned as a teamster with Braddock’s army when it marched to its ruin on the Monongahela.

I can see the ledge that blocked the road. Captain Dearborn, who has since become Secretary of War and a major general and an ambassador to some country in Europe, stood at the top of it, his shaggy black dog beside him, and at the bottom Captain Thayer, a most deceptive man, gentle and mild, yet an ex-officer of Rogers’ Rangers, deadliest of all bush fighters. As we came laden to the ledge Thayer would push at us and Dearborn would pull, and the shaggy black dog would prance and bark, and we would bounce up the ledge as if it were no more than the feather bolster that separates children from their parents when all of them sleep in one bed.

Above all, I can hear Colonel Arnold shouting at us in a voice that was excitement itself, so that it put new iron into our sagging legs: “Get it up, boys! Up with it! No time to lose! If we lose a day we may lose everything! Get it up! Get it up!”

Those that talk of banquets never dragged up more than two hundred bateaux and the supplies to fill them, and made their camp and cooked their meals, and shifted the bateaux to starting places and loaded them, and learned their stations.

Yet I think I know how those reports of banquets had their start. Many of the officers were fed and lodged at Captain Howard’s house, which he had built after he had ceased to be the captain at Fort Western; and at the end of our day of carrying, just after Colonel Arnold had passed up through us on his way to headquarters, Captain Hanchet, a Connecticut officer with an under jaw that stuck far out beyond his upper, came inside the stockade and made a hullabaloo about pumpkin pies, looking among all of us, and even under the bunks in the barracks.

Cap Huff had come to sit beside me, somewhat moist and breathless. He growled at Hanchet there was no use looking in the barracks, for if pies had been brought there, they would have been instantly gobbled by the vermin—which were plentiful enough to eat pies and tin plates to boot.

Eight pumpkin pies, I gathered, had been placed in the rear windows of Captain Howard’s house to cool, and some ill-wisher had made off with them.

I would have thought no more about it had not Cap Huff whispered hoarsely that Hobomok had spitted a mess of partridges and ducks on ramrods, and that Phoebe was tending them by my lean-to with James Dunn, and that he had left Lieutenant Church there, and Jacataqua cooking pone, and a friend of Jacataqua’s named Burr. Ravenous at the mention of partridges, I made off to the lean-to, followed by Cap; and when we got there Cap pointed up under the canoe in a meaningful manner. I dropped to my knees and peered into it. Resting on the bottom of the bow seat were five pumpkin pies.

Knowing eight had been taken, I asked where the other three had gone.

“Three!” Cap bawled. He crawled clumsily beneath the canoe to see for himself, and scrambled out roaring like a wounded bear. “You can’t trust anyone!” he grumbled, staring first at Burr and then at Church, who studied his moccasins morosely. “Six there were, by God, when I went to get Steven.”

“What did you do with the other two?” I asked.

“I dropped one. It fell on my foot. The other I had to eat.”

“Well,” Burr said, “seeing all of us must swear we don’t know what you’re talking about, I trust you’ll control your anger long enough to let us deal with the others while we still have the chance. You should feel flattered to think you’re eight times better than any of us. We made way with only one.”

It was plain this thought pleased Cap, for though he continued to rumble concerning untrustworthiness, I caught him glancing admiringly at Burr from time to time. This he did, too, despite the manner in which Jacataqua leaned against Burr while she ate, looking up into his dark, pretty face so sickish-like that Phoebe withdrew from us and went to sit with James Dunn. James, embarrassed by the presence of officers, had perched himself on a log at the edge of the firelight, where he bit into a duck with such profundity that he seemed to be planning a reform of the currency.

It was well Burr had spurred Cap to silence and greater speed, for we had barely finished the last of the pies when a messenger came down the path, shouting again for all guides, scouts, and officers to report at headquarters. We found Colonel Arnold laboring at a desk in Captain Howard’s sitting room, checking lists and making new ones and dictating orders to his secretary and calling for this captain and that captain, no more interested in a banquet than we were in having our hair powdered.