Arundel (55 page)

“Keep the fire up,” I said, “and don’t be afraid to use your lungs.” I waded into the swamp, knowing I would have no trouble while I could see the light of the fire.

The snow was falling steadily, in small flakes, and the swamp had scummed with ice. Ordinarily this would have been unpleasant; but now, it seemed to me, I might find it a help in returning. As I went I cut saplings, feeling for them in the pitchy dark and hacking them clumsily until I could break them down; then, when they were down, laying them in a line toward the lake, sighting back to the fire across the stumps to make sure I was going straight.

I would not recommend walking for pleasure in any swamp on such a night; yet it is bearable so long as there is an object to be reached, and while the mind is occupied. Mine was busy indeed, holding a straight course, lopping saplings, feeling for footholds so not to sink over my waist in the icy water, and counting my steps to be sure how far I’d come.

When the fire grew dim to my sight, I felt around for higher ground, and found patches of icy moss through which the feet sank little more than ankle deep. Here I stood and bellowed, “Phoebe! Phoebe!” into the darkness until my throat felt raw.

By the grace of God I heard a sound off to the northwest, more of a movement in the air than a sound. When I had bellowed again, and cocked my head so my ear was toward what I heard, and raised and lowered myself to have the benefit of air currents, I heard it again and knew it for a voice, a weak, faint voice, but one my imagination said might be Phoebe’s.

I went to cutting saplings again, determined not to lose my way, and moved slowly toward the voice, shouting from time to time, and each time getting a response that came clearer.

So I came closer and closer, laying my line of saplings, feeling among the alder roots with my feet, the snow coming ever thicker on my face, until I could hear Phoebe cough, and snuffle a little after each cough, and was close enough to speak to her without shouting.

“What’s the matter with him?” I needed my breath and had no words to waste.

“I don’t know,” said Phoebe, her voice thin and wavering from cold. “Just worn out, I guess.”

I could see neither hide nor hair of her or James. When I had laid my saplings up to her, so that I could get my hands on her, I found her crouched against a rotted stump, with James lying against her, his legs drawn up out of the water, and his blanket, wet, laid over him.

I thought at first he might be dead; but there was warmth in him, though not much, and a movement of his heart.

I felt of the handkerchief on Phoebe’s head, and her flat back, and the brass-studded belt under her buckskin jerkin. A sort of tightness went out of my chest at the feel of her. She was wet from her breast down. Her ribs, under her jerkin, were like those of a lamb with the fleece off.

“You all right?” I asked her.

“I guess so. Can we get to a fire? Did the bateau come back?”

“Pick up his blanket,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. Listen, now: follow the cut saplings. Don’t lose them. Don’t move till you have your hand on one of them. Keep them on your right. It’s ninety-eight of my steps to the turn, and a hundred and sixty-one from the turn to the fire. Go ahead, and don’t lose the saplings.”

She stumbled into the water, and I after her, with James balanced over my shoulder. I could feel this would never do. My legs bent too easily; the added weight forced me deep into the swamp.

“Wait, Phoebe. Does he know what’s happening?”

“No. He’s asleep. I can’t wake him. Even when he wakes, he only half wakes. He makes the wrong answers, and gets angry when spoken to.”

“I’ve got to drag him,” I said. I lowered him into the water and hauled him as I might haul a canoe. After a time I stopped and buttoned his arms inside his coat to keep them from catching in alder roots. He was heavier than a canoe, and hard to hold because the hand with which I held him became too numb to grip.

“I can see the fire,” Phoebe said.

“Follow the saplings,” I told her. “Take no chances.”

We came to the turn, and for the first time I could see Phoebe, outlined against the distant firelight, little and blundering, like a fly caught in a pan of molasses, moving forward through the swamp as though the legs would be wrenched out of her at each step.

In due season we reached the mound, where some of the men had come to life and were chopping at the fallen trees. Asa Hutchins was still chewing the last of his broiled moose hide. Some had put their feet to the fire and fallen asleep, their bodies pointing outward like the spokes of a wagon wheel, and their heads two feet or so from the swamp. I hoped the weather wouldn’t moderate, letting the snow turn to rain, lest the waters rise around us and drown us into standing.

When I dragged James onto the mound, the men stopped their chopping, and gathered around us.

“Ain’t done any talking, has he?” Noah Cluff asked.

“No,” I said. “He just laid.”

“It’s been three hours since I waked him last,” Phoebe said.

“He’s tuckered,” Asa said. “I told you he was tuckered this afternoon.”

Phoebe looked down blankly at the inanimate James. “We got to do something for him. What’s the best thing to do?”

“There ain’t nuthin you can do,” Asa said. “You just got to leave him lay.”

“But he’s got to be dried off! Cut poles and we’ll prop him back and front and under the arms, so to stand him in front of the fire.”

“’Twon’t do no good, Phoebe,” Noah Cluff told her. “He’s as well off wet as dry.”

“You do as I say!” she cried, her voice shrill and cracked.

Some of the men silently went to cutting crotched poles. Asa knelt down and looked in James’s face, then opened his coat and felt of his chest. Not content with this, he put an ear close to James’s mouth; then the other ear.

He hunkered back on his heels and looked up at Phoebe. “He’s dead!”

Phoebe stared hard at Asa. “It ain’t so!”

She dropped to her knees and looked into his eyes; then she felt again and again of his chest; held her cheek over his mouth, and then the inner part of her forearm. She got to her feet at last, pushing close to the fire and looking half dead herself, black smudges under her eyes and the skin tight over her mouth.

“It’s true,” she said, and her voice was a dry whisper. “He’s gone! I felt he was going, late in the day, before I got him to that stump where you found us. I felt he was going then.”

Just for a minute I wanted to get away from her. I didn’t know anything I could say.

I stared at the still face of James Dunn. It looked like a good man’s face to me; so I just stood there looking down at him and wondering why I hadn’t thought more of him than I had; for it seemed to me that I had always been pretty hard on him in my thoughts, and that there hadn’t been any reason for it.

I wondered and wondered why I had ever had hard thoughts of him; and when I thought what a good soldier he’d tried to be—tried to be so bravely right through to the end—I could only swallow and wish I could get a decently kind word through to where he was now, so that he’d know I felt sorry about the hard thoughts I’d held of him, and would like to be more appreciative of him than I had been.

But after a while I saw that just standing there like that wasn’t doing any good to me or anybody else, so I turned back to Phoebe.

She’d sat down by that time, looking into the fire; and I did the same, sitting beside her and coughing now and then because I didn’t know anything to say.

It was long, that night, what with the snow coming down on us all the while, the coughing and snoring of the men, choking and muttering in their sleep, their heads lower than their feet, and the hissing of the fire and the
chock, chock, chock
of the woodcutters.

Knowing James Dunn must be left on the mound, I smoothed a pine slab and carved his name on it, and the date, which I was hard put to it to remember, though it finally came to me that it was only Saturday, October the twenty-eighth or even Sunday, though I think it was still Saturday when he died.

Phoebe rolled herself in her blanket and lay close beside Noah Cluff. I couldn’t see that she slept overmuch. She kept starting up and looking around; then lying down again and shivering in spasms, all through the night.

When it came to an end, at last, I waked Phoebe and told her I was going for someone to take them out of the swamp. “Listen carefully when I’ve gone,” I told her. “When you hear me shout, send Asa Hutchins after me. I think I’ll have trouts.”

I had meant to tell her I was in disgrace: that Arnold thought me a spy, and had put me out of the army; but what with the dirt on her face, and the way she strove to square her shoulders when she looked at James Dunn, wrapped in his blanket with my pine slab on his breast, and the rents in her buckskin jerkin, and her poor attempt to smile when she saw me ready to leave, I had no heart to put any other burden on her mind, and so held her by the arm for a moment and then went into the swamp.

When I had floundered to the edge of the stream I saw Natanis fishing, as I had expected. He came over to me with all of a hundred small trouts strung on alder whips; and as he came he continued to fish, shooting his hook into the water and instantly flipping it back with a trout on it. I shouted for Asa, and went a little way to meet him, handing him the whips and sending him back to the mound goggle-eyed with amazement, but not so goggle-eyed as to prevent him from pulling off one of the trouts, squeezing out its entrails and eating it raw.

We pushed out into the lake and saw a canoe coming toward us from the direction of the bark house where we had left Cap Huff. This, I knew, would be Goodrich and Dearborn, so we signaled to them, and when they had seen us we went back up the stream again, with them following. Opposite the mound we shouted, until we heard someone splashing through the swamp.

“Here’s Goodrich!” I called. “Come over to the stream!” There was a triumphant whooping from the waders, and more whooping from the direction of the mound; so we knew we could leave them and go about the rest of our sorry business.

XXV

W
E COULD
hear Morgan’s riflemen coming down Seven Mile Stream in their seven bateaux, spirited and noisy from their good night’s sleep in the meadow, and so for safety’s sake we pushed our canoe into a clump of spruces until they had gone by.

I wondered, as I watched them passing, cuffing each other and hurling insults at the occupants of the other bateaux, whether they had made an honest division of their rations with the other companies in the meadow, or whether they had concealed some of their stolen goods in powder kegs. I say again that these Virginians of Morgan’s were great fighters; though to me, at times, their high spirits were wearisome, especially when they felt the need of enlivening their fighting by playfully cutting buttons from their companions’ breeches, or stealing food from the haversacks of starving friends.

In one of the bateaux I saw Burr; and the thought came to me that he had a knack for discovering which side his bread was buttered on; that he had doubtless smelled out Morgan’s extra provisions and abandoned Jacataqua for them, since food can be more important than a woman to some hungry men.

There was no trace of the army when we reached the meadow, save at the lower end, where Morgan’s men had lain during the snowfall. The remainder of the meadow was smooth beneath its white blanket; and from the upper end rose a thin column of smoke. While we watched it Hobomok came out from under the trees and signaled to us; so we laid up our canoe in the thickets and went to him. He had two partridges for us, and a piece of bear’s fat that Paul Higgins had left, and this food we ate at once, fearful of suffering James Dunn’s fate.