Arundel (41 page)

When, therefore, the bateaumen went to carrying their bateaux up through this cleft, after the barrels and packs and stores had been unloaded, there were times when it seemed men would burst like eggs between the bateaux and the rocks, and other times when apparently a bateau couldn’t move another inch unless knocked to pieces with axes. Yet every bateau went up, and men lay exhausted on the point of the island above the carry, shoulders torn from their hunting shirts, knees ripped from their breeches, and crimson bandages to show where bateaux had crushed them against the ledges.

Everywhere, on both sides of the river and on the islands, men calked their bateaux as best they could; for being of green wood, and not too well made, they opened up under the pounding and wrenching as though built from driftwood. I thought it was true, what Phoebe had said to me, that she would as lief essay this journey in the ancient skiff in which she had learned to sail as a child, made out of a sunken boat patched with pitch and rotten canvas, as in one of these terrible craft.

Arnold didn’t like it. “I still think they’re better than canoes,” he told me, “but get forward to Morgan and have him stop everyone at Norridgewock for overhauling all boats. If we don’t, half of ’em’ll burst in midstream and we’ll lose our supplies.”

Hobomok and I went up past Greene’s men, struggling through the roaring water of Bombazee Rips; and by nightfall we reached the point of land my father and I had known as Norridgewock. Now it was nothing, its cabins having been leveled to make place for the farms of two settlers. We came up to Morgan at the foot of Norridgewock Falls, where the riflemen were unloading their bateaux and preparing for the carry around.

Morgan was furious. He was a strange figure, having grown a bristly beard and being clad in nothing but leggins, moccasins, and belt cloth, in the Indian fashion. Across his bare back were the crisscrossed scars of a whipping received from British officers in his younger days—a whipping that caused him to hate the English with a bitter hatred, and that cost them dear before Daniel Morgan had done with them.

“By God!” he roared, and his voice reverberated above the rumble of the falls, “it’s high time! Look at this!” He seized one of his bateaux by the thwart and heaved it on its side, so that its load of barrels and tents and bags and litter of tackle slid out in a dripping heap. Then he banged the side with his fist, sinking one of the boards below the other, slipping his fingers into the opening, and with a jerk of his arms loosened the upper part of the side from the lower as easily as the backbone of a broiled mackerel is lifted from the meat.

“A puking baby could build better boats out of blocks!” he shouted, pounding the boards back into place with two mighty blows. “Show me the perfumed dressmaker that basted these for men to risk their lives in, and I’ll calk a boat with his skin!” He named the carpenters violent names; foul names from dark recesses of his mind; so that I was filled with amazement to know so much profanity had been hidden from me.

Nor were his riflemen milder in their anger. Their supplies were soaked; and they themselves had been drenched by day and frozen by night since they had left Fort Western seven days before, so that illnesses were breaking out among them, dysenteries and throat distempers, and rheumatisms that swelled their joints.

Some of them told me in all seriousness that they thought of waiting until the carpenters should come up, and then binding them and carrying them to the top of the falls and sending them over it in the worst of their bateaux.

“No,” I said, “the fault lies farther back. The one to blame is the man who persuaded General Washington and Colonel Arnold that the Kennebec could be navigated in these boats.”

“And who’s that?” asked a tall Virginian, his wrists so swollen with rheumatism that he held his hands before him as if seeking approbation.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but some day I’ll find out.”

“When you do,” he said, “we’ll skin him for you, unless you’d rather have him covered with clay and baked in a hole in the ground.”

These men wouldn’t rest, saying they must cut the roads for the others because they were better woodsmen than our little weaklings from Connecticut and Maine, which I think they were, though Maine woodsmen are by no means useless. At dawn the next day a part of them carried their baggage up the steep rocky hill of Norridgewock—a hill a mile in length, as rough and cruel as the ledges of Arundel. The rest went to calking and pitching their bateaux. As soon as a bateau was finished, four men would hoist it to their shoulders and stumble off up the carry. By the time Arnold reached us that night the entire first division had gone over.

The other divisions came up slowly, in worse condition, I thought, than the first. They were more heavily laden, and the men less powerful, man for man, than the riflemen, so their bateaux had been less skillfully handled and were almost wrecks.

Never did I see a greater mess than these bateaux. Some carried dried codfish as provisions, stuffed loosely around casks and barrels. The fish, soaked for days, had disintegrated. Water had leaked into the barrels containing dry bread, so that the bread had swollen and burst the barrels. There were casks of dried peas, poorly coopered. The peas had swollen and forced the staves apart; and the bottoms of the bateaux were filled with a soup of fish, bread and peas, trampled together and smeared over the rest of the baggage.

Now Norridgewock was less than a third of the distance to Quebec; and beyond Norridgewock, until we should reach the French settlements far down the Chaudière, there was no house, no road, only unbroken forests to which axes had never been laid since the beginning of the world. Therefore I misliked this wrecking of our food supply. It left us with nothing except flour and pork, and not too much of that; and I had seen no disposition on the part of any of our soldiers to be sparing with their rations, nor did I look to see them so while there was any left; for their independence was such that if told to eat less food, they ate more out of cussedness.

Yet Colonel Arnold stayed cheerful, nor did I ever see him in an evil mood so long as he could go forward. At a delay he was in a frenzy of anxiety and querulousness; but while he could move toward his goal there seemed to be no blow great enough to lower his spirits.

“Now,” he said, when I reported to him the bursting of all but two of the bread barrels in the third division, “now they’ll travel faster; for they’ll travel lighter and be more eager to come to food.” Nor could I quarrel with his determination to press on, for I had long ago made up my mind that I would press on to hunt for Mary, even though every man in the army turned back and left me to go alone.

Knowing what I knew about our food, I tried to send Phoebe back. I found her perched beside James Dunn in the warmth of a roaring fire, like a half-drowned mouse sitting beside a sleepy dog. She was roasting strips of pork on the end of a stick, wrapping them in cakes made of flour and water, and pushing them into James’s mouth. There was mud on her face, and a welt across her throat where a briar had slashed her. From her breast to her moccasins she was black with water and muck, and her extra moccasins had been fastened at her neck, where they hung under her ears like pendulous lobes.

“Where are your cat’s eyes?” I asked.

She popped a piece of pork into her own mouth and went on feeding James, pausing only long enough to show me a lump tied into the toe of one of her extra moccasins.

“Phoebe,” I said, “take James and go on home before food runs short. There’s no houses beyond here.”

James Dunn regarded me calmly. “When are you leaving?” he asked.

“That’s my James!” Phoebe said thickly, her mouth full of pork.

“Why,” I said, surprised at this unexpected burst from the silent James, “I’m not leaving, but I don’t want to see you two get into trouble.”

“Of course you don’t, Steven,” Phoebe said. “None of us would have dreamed of coming with this army if we’d known there’d be trouble.”

“I’m used to trouble,” James said.

“We wouldn’t know what to do if we couldn’t be in trouble,” Phoebe said.

“You know what I mean,” I told them.

“From the way you talk about us going back,” James remarked, “you must think we’re a couple of rats from the Fourth Division.”

“No,” I said, taken aback by James’s newly found independence and willingness to use his tongue. “No, no! No, no, no!”

“I’ve got the flux,” James said. “My stomach’s ached me for two days, but even so I can march better than most of these soldiers. There ain’t none of ’em passed me. I’m as good as any of ’em. There ain’t any of ’em that’ll do better, not while I stay alive.”

“Good!” I said, wishing I’d never touched the subject, and earnestly desiring to speak of other things, but unable to think of anything.

“If there ain’t food,” said James with an air of thoughtful meditation that made his face almost beautiful, “I can eat dandelions, or pine cones, maybe; maybe leaves.”

Phoebe slipped another slice of pork into James’s mouth, jeering at me with her eyes; so I left them hurriedly, swearing I would interest myself no more in the affairs of so unaccountable a female as Phoebe Dunn.

The colonel stayed at Norridgewock for seven days—seven dreary days of rain and cold; of whistling winds and brown leaves that whirled out of a leaden sky, smelling of sadness and the dying year—seven days of driving each division at top speed in the repairing of its bateaux; in the sorting and repacking of its diminished provisions; in the dreadful mile-long carry up the rocky sides of Norridgewock Falls.

Not until late on the seventh of October did Colonel Enos’s division get the last of its baggage across the carry. All his men were grumbling bitterly because they were more heavily burdened than the other divisions. I looked for Treeworgy and found him carrying loads as weighty as any man; albeit with a face so gray and dolorous that if I had been forced to see it often by my side I would have sickened with sympathetic misery.

I have often wondered what evil of Nature is the most unsupportable. There are times when I think heat is the worst; times when I’m sure there is nothing so bad as bitter cold. But oftenest I have been led to feel that long-continued rain is the foulest of all, with its gloom and discomfort, the trees and rocks and houses weeping and weeping until every man’s spirits are lowered in fellow feeling: the earth a morass that plucks at the feet; the bodies of men and animals steaming and reeking with the chilly damp from which there’s no escape.

It rained hard the day we wished to leave Norridgewock, which was the eighth of October. We could get no foothold in the mud of the steep carry, and feared to burst our canoes and supplies by falling with them. We waited until the ninth, hoping for a let-up; but there was more rain, so the colonel decided we must have a shot at it. This we did, coming through safely, and so set off after the army.

If all our journey could have been through country as rich as that between Norridgewock and Carritunk Falls, and over water no more violent, we might have made a picnicking party of it, regardless of the rain. The stream was full of trouts, which we caught by thousands. There were grassy islands in the river; and the banks were fertile and sloping, cut with the indentations called logans on the Kennebec. Above the logans were stands of oak and maple, elm, beech and ash, as well as pines and hemlocks; so the army struck up on the slope to avoid the logans and marched through this unspoiled forest, free of rocks and tangled undergrowth.

We camped on a high island covered, like all this section of the Kennebec, with a blue joint grass that grows six feet tall. Out of this we made soft beds. We caught trouts and dried ourselves by driftwood fires, saying to ourselves that marching through the wilderness wasn’t bad, once we were hardened to it.