Arundel (5 page)

“Ain’t you heard that?” Cap persisted. “That’s what they’re going to give ’em at Quebec. Ain’t you heard the song they’re singing?”

“No,” the stranger said, “I haven’t heard it One who buys lumber in Falmouth hears few war songs.”

“That’s strange you ain’t! Everybody ’twixt here and Boston knows it. Quebec’s about the only place where they ain’t heard it.”

At this my father moved out from his comer and tapped Cap on the shoulder. “Cap, this here’s our country, and we got to live in it. Ockawando’s all right. He’s square with us and we’re square with him. If you go shoving your big fat face into his affairs he’s liable to come over here and scare the gizzard out of these women. You know what Indians are.”

“Gosh Almighty, yes!” Cap cried. “They do anything; they’re dirty bug-eating—”

“They ain’t as dirty as you are,” my father interrupted calmly. “Ockawando takes a sweat bath twice a week for the rheumatiz, and I bet you ain’t had any kind of bath since Pharaoh’s army took one in the Red Sea.”

“Hell, Steven, I never got wet there,” Cap protested. “Anyways, you needn’t be afeared I’ll hurt your damned Indians; but if they ain’t what I say, I’m a Frenchman!”

“To the pure all things are pure,” the stranger murmured enigmatically.

Cap looked at him again. It seemed to me the two men were erecting a screen of cold air around themselves: a chilling, burdensome screen that made their movements slow and unpleasant to watch.

“If you’re in lumber,” Cap said, “we might sing ’em that song about Benning Wentworth they’re singing up in Portsmouth.”

“We might,” the stranger said graciously, “but I don’t sing.”

“You don’t say! Well, mebbe you could put me right on how much Benning paid the surveyor gineral to get out of his job, so’s he could grab it himself and get the money. You’re in lumber and you ought to know.”

“Indeed,” the stranger said, and the dry, swishing note in his voice sounded more than ever like a snake in dead leaves, “some say one thing and some say another.”

Cap smiled into his empty cup and flapped his huge paw at Noah Gooch, whereat Noah came stumbling up with the rum jug, carefully avoided the stranger, and lurched against Cap’s shoulder, pouring until the rum overran Cap’s thumb and forefinger, whose width had again been added to the cup’s height.

“What’s the song, Cap?” asked Humphrey Bickford. “Lieutenant Wattleby’s got a tenor.”

“Hot stuff,” said Cap, “and if he don’t use it right, you can all hit him with a rum jug.” He shot a glance at the stranger’s cold smile and then went on: “What you think of a man that’ll be governor of a province and then turn around and buy the surveyor gineral’s job? Pays two hundred pound, that job does; and there’s so much money in it, waiting to stick to a man’s fingers, that Benning, the old rat, paid him two thousand pound to get out!”

Kezer clicked his tongue admiringly against the roof of his mouth. “Better’n trading,” he opined.

“Trading!” Cap Huff exclaimed. “It’s better’n smuggling or privateering! Less trouble and more money!” He tilted back in his chair, grinned widely and sang the song, which I remember well, for he was given to singing it in after years, when things were going a little wrong with us:

He sang a dozen more stanzas, enjoying himself the more, the louder and longer he sang; and as he sang his companions banged on the table with fists and pewter measures, so the song was a stirring one, albeit I was uncomfortable at hearing such ribald things about the governor of New Hampshire, who must, I thought, since he was rich and powerful, be also good.

“It’s harmonious,” said Lieutenant Wattleby, when the pleased shouts had subsided, “but if you go on singing it, Cap, they’ll be citing you for slander.”

“Slander hell!” Cap said. “Let somebody try it if he wants his nose pushed around into his ear! There ain’t no law court powerful enough to stop me saying what I think!”

Here my mother came in and ordered the men to the stockade, so that she might clean the room and place the supper. The stranger leaped to his feet and bowed politely, and all of us were offended and displeased, without knowing why. I think it was because he made us feel rough and uncouth. At all events, we had the desire to be even more uncouth and rough before him than we hitherto had been.

The others followed him out; and Cap stumbled clumsily over his own feet and shrank sheepishly from my mother, so that she threatened him in fun with an iron spoon and restored him to composure again.

The fire was made bright, the floor swept smooth and resanded; and Malary set on the table two pots of beans with a relish of chopped cucumbers steeped in brine and flavored with onions, and two haunches of venison, and brown bread hot from the oven, and butter fresh from the churn. Close beside the table, on wooden scissors, was a barrel of my mother’s small beer, though I know not why they call it small, for scarce a man can drink a gallon of it without a thickening in his speech.

Also there were six mince pies laced with rum, and a bowl of creamy cheese made from sour milk. If I had been a rich man in those days I would have traveled far to enjoy such a meal as that; for good provender was hard to come by; and our inns were rightly called ordinaries, especially in the matter of their food, which was so coarse and grease-laden as to bring on heartburn or even apoplexy. Nor was the charge of one shilling that my father made for supper an unreasonable sum, considering that poor travelers were never pressed for payment, and that those who supped at the inn might buy an oval flask of rum for one shilling. Such a price was possible because my father’s shipmaster friends bought rum in the French Sugar Islands for two pounds a keg and smuggled it from their brigs at our back door.

I do not know that Cap spoke ill of the stranger to the others during the time they spent in the stockade; but when they returned for their supper, it seemed to me, they stared at him even more furtively and suspiciously. It seemed to me, also, that his smile grew colder and colder, and yet that he took pleasure in saying things that befuddled or inflamed the wits. It gave me such a feeling as I have had at seeing a swordsman playing with a country bumpkin, threatening him with a cruel wound from the shimmering tongue of steel in his hand, and unconscious that the bumpkin, in rage or despair, might beat down his guard by main strength and hack him in pieces.

Mallinson, far gone in liquor when supper was over, told my father with an air of drunken pride that he had signed an agreement with the commissioners from Wells establishing the boundary between Wells and Arundel at the Arundel River, and that this question would no longer vex us. Upon that my father roared violently and brandished his fist under Mallinson’s nose. He must be a fool and worse, my father shouted; for by this agreement the town of Wells would be seven miles in length, and Arundel less than two.

“Nay,” Mallinson said, “we’d been here so long we had no money to pay our reckoning! The Wells commissioners paid for us. What could we do but let ’em put the boundary where they pleased?”

My father grew purple with rage. The others stared at Mallinson with dropped jaws for being such a drunken zany; all but the stranger, who smiled his hard, bright smile and said that since the people of Maine had been willing to fight a barbarous war over so small a thing as fish, he feared for their future if they must hereafter be confronted with such serious matters as this.

The company forgot Mallinson. A muttering arose among them, an angry muttering, at the stranger’s words, even though they could not quite understand them.

To me he had become hateful. He put me in mind of a hostile Indian, the way he lurked silent and motionless for a time; then shot a knife-tipped dart among us.

“Well, now,” said my father, moving behind a chair, which he did when violence was brewing, “those here know little concerning wars over fish, and less concerning barbarities except those inflicted by Indians from the northern settlements.”

“The dirtiest crew of bug-eaters outside o’ hell!” interposed Cap Huff, mopping his plate with a piece of bread.

“Surely,” said the stranger, with an air of wide-eyed surprise, “surely you haven’t forgot the siege of Louisbourg, as well as the wars before it, came about over who should have the taking of fish on the Grand Banks.”

“Fish me no fish,” my father said. “I was there! I helped to take the Grand Battery and haul the cannon across the great swamp on sledges, which men said couldn’t be done. I went to Louisbourg because of no fish. I went to Louisbourg because the French pestered me and my father and my grandfather with their damned pirate sloops and brigs out of Louisbourg, and because they paid their sneaking red men to hatchet and murder and steal our women and children, and keep our whole damned country in a stew!”

“None the less,” said the stranger, smiling frostily, “there’s been naught but fish at the bottom of these wars, as you’d know if you spoke with men whose knowledge goes beneath the surface. What, then, will be our future if our neighbors throw away our children’s land?”

“Now God knows I’m a frail reed at argument,” said my father, “but I like not your use of the word ‘our.’ From your speech you’re not one of us at all. Over half the men that took Louisbourg were from this little part of Maine. It was our war, by God, and if you’d had a part in it, you’d have seen no fish anywhere about it.”

“Give him hell, Steven,” said Cap Huff, planting his elbows on the table.

“Furthermore,” my father said, “the disposition of our land is something we’ll settle peaceably among ourselves. There’s enough of it hereabouts to supply our children for hundreds of years to come, even with psalm-singing deacons from Boston gobbling it up for speculation by the million acres. You spoke, though, of a barbarous war. Since I had a hand in it, I don’t choose to hear it so miscalled in this house.”

“Why,” said the stranger in a tone like the swishing of a whip lash, “I’d been thinking how Parson Moody chopped the altar and the images in the French church at Louisbourg, and how the Boston troops killed Father Rale at Norridgewock.”

“Well, God alive!” my father cried, “and what’s the reason for all this delving into ancient history! I only know Parson Moody was a bigot from York, crabbed and irritable; but I saw the French troops march safely out of the fortress, after we’d taken it, with all their arms and colors. There was nothing barbarous about it, except the stupidity of the French commander. If you must talk about barbarities, talk about the way Frenchmen stood silent at Fort William Henry and watched their stinking Northern Indians murder our women and children. As for Father Rale, the Boston troops that killed him were told he had promised the Norridgewocks eternal salvation in return for colonial scalps, and headed them himself, musket in hand, like that rat LeLoutre of Acadia. It was Rale’s life or the lives of defenseless women and children from our own people, or so they thought. So they did what anyone else would do: they lodged a ball in his brain and counted the deed well done.”

The stranger lifted his shoulder; and his smile belied his words.

“Such things must happen, belike, when good Calvinists are chosen by God to do his work. We aren’t to blame if things go wrong when we joyously attempt, as we so often do, to teach papists and other sinners their duty with our pens, our voices, or our bombshells.”

Those at the table looked furtively at each other, and their glances foretold upturned tables and broken bottles.

“I’m no Calvinist,” my father growled. “I hate all praying hypocrites; so have done with this talk of what it is we do. Speak for yourself: not for us!”