Arundel (60 page)

These men were clustered around a little light kettle suspended over a fire, and were talking about food: squabbling as to whether there was nourishment in boiled leather. Indeed, I could get nothing out of them concerning the rest of the company until I had given my opinion on leather-eating. Each one had cut a piece from the top of his moccasins, a strip three inches wide and eight inches long, and had washed this and his leather shot pouch in the river so they could be cooked. Some held that if roasted until crisp and scorched, they would crumble in the mouth and give nourishment when swallowed; while others held that if boiled they would become pulpy and more easily digestible.

Thinking their strength might hold out better if they amused themselves in this way, I said I thought it would be wiser to boil their leather. If it didn’t dissolve, it could then be recovered and roasted; whereas if it was roasted first it would be useless for boiling.

At this they put private marks on their pieces and popped them into the kettle; and one of the men took from his pack a jar of pomatum, such as is used to grease the hair, and offered to put it in the broth on the chance that it might prove nourishing. I felt guilty about the raccoon fat in my breeches pocket. Yet it would have done these men little good, and I was determined to save it until I reached Phoebe.

While the leather stewed, one of the men deigned to answer my frequently repeated demand for information concerning Noah Cluff, but the others embarked on a discussion of cookery, in which they had evidently been involved before my arrival.

“Noah’s close behind Goodrich,” the soldier said. A square of birch bark was roughly stitched to the seat of his breeches.

“How far ahead?” I asked.

He had, however, injected himself into the argument. “They ain’t no good unless you parboil ’em three times before you bake ’em!”

“That don’t take the place of soaking overnight,” another objected.

“Who said it did! Soak ’em all you damned please, only they won’t soften up till you parboil ’em.”

“Gosh,” said another, “I could eat a kittleful, parboiled or not!”

“A kittleful!” The speaker’s hair stuck out on all sides of his head like straw out of a wagon. “I could eat a barrelful!”

“With hot bread!” added a small man with no teeth in his upper jaw.

“And sour milk cheese!” said another.

A man whose coat lacked a sleeve raised an angry shout. “What you want to mess up baked beans with sour milk cheese for! You can’t improve on hot bread and plain beans with lots of juice to ’em! Sour milk cheese, for God’s sake!” He snorted contemptuously.

“I’ll tell you this much,” said the one with the birch-bark seat. “If you don’t parboil ’em three times you’ll get so much wind in your stummick it’s apt to press your heart up against your backbone so it can’t beat.”

“Hell,” said his wild-haired friend, “it ain’t parboiling that stops wind: it’s putting mustard in ’em when they’re baking. You put in a couple pinches mustard and there won’t be no more wind to a barrel of ’em than there would be to a humming-bird!”

“Well, by Gosh,” said the owner of the birch-bark rear, “I wouldn’t
tetch
a bean that hadn’t been parboiled three times!”

“No, I s’pose not,” the wild-haired man sneered. “I s’pose if somebody come up behind you and held a great big plate of beans, all brown and juicy and smelling of pork and all, over your shoulder, you’d say, ‘If those ain’t been parboiled three times, take ’em away! I don’t choose to have nothing to do with ’em!’ I s’pose that’s what you’d say!”

The soldier with the birch-bark seat looked quickly over his shoulder, as though hopeful of seeing the plate of beans, but saw only my face.

I seized the opportunity. “How far ahead is Noah Cluff? Is Phoebe Dunn with him?”

“I dunno,” he said. “I got awful tired and laid down and slept. If they ain’t slept any, they’re six hours ahead of us.”

“Keep going,” I told him. “There’ll probably be food to-morrow or next day.”

The wild-haired trooper called after me as I moved on. “Tell ’em to parboil it three times, or we won’t eat it!”

Natanis had saved the body of one of our owls of the morning, and Cap had with him a piece of raccoon fat the size of Jacataqua’s fist. These we divided into four equal parts, and were glad to have them. There is something, I learned, to be said for owl meat: it can be chewed longer than anything I have ever eaten, though Natanis told us it is not to be compared with a piece from the neck of a bobcat, which, if chewed discreetly, can be made to endure for a day with no noticeable shrinkage.

To this moment my memory is dim concerning the following day. We were dizzy when we started at dawn, and there were blank spots in my mind for long stretches, together with periods when I felt light and unreal, so that my feet seemed to skim the ground; then hugesome and heavy, as though I carried anvils in my shoes. Cap angered me by stumbling, then tittering like a silly girl, so that for a time I could think of nothing save when he would stumble and titter again, and in so thinking I would stumble myself. Yet we were better off than any of those we passed; for the four of us had eaten meat and fat within three days, whereas the others had eaten nothing.

It seemed as though we passed a thousand men, which was impossible since the whole army had dwindled to little more than six hundred. When I saw the snail’s pace at which they traveled, and their stumblings and slippings, I knew God was good to give us fair weather on that first day of November; for if there had been a fall of snow with a bitter wind to lash it into our faces we’d have lain down and died, and nothing could have saved us.

Thirty miles we made that day, the last of it along the top of the bluffs. When we came down to the river’s edge we found Goodrich’s men digging in the wet gravel for the roots of water plants. Noah Cluff was stretched beside a fire, which Phoebe tended, while Nathaniel Lord and Asa Hutchins scratched feebly in the dirt. They were a miserable-looking company. Their movements were slow; their eyes sunk deep in their heads.

While we stared at them, a battered canoe shot down through the white water. In the middle was Captain Dearborn, gaunt and bearded, holding to his big black-haired dog. The canoe was guided by the chief of the axemen who had worked at clearing the portages, a Mr. Ayres, a strong and tireless man. Natanis wagged his head as he watched him, declaring he had done two great things—first to venture to take a canoe from Lake Megantic to this point, and then to succeed in doing it. Even with a good canoe, he said, it was a great feat; whereas this canoe, he could see, was worn out and on the verge of breaking in the middle. In the bow was a soldier, sitting as close to the end as he could get. When the bow dipped beneath the white surges, the water foamed against the soldier’s lap and chest and fell away on either side. Otherwise the canoe would have foundered. It came inshore and grounded near the fires.

Natanis spoke quickly to Jacataqua, and she caught her dog by the scruff of the neck and held him. To me he said: “There’s still enough light for us to see. We’ll try to reach Sartigan to-night, so to send out all the rest of Paul Higgins’s men to help these poor people. Tell them they’ll reach the inhabitants to-morrow; and say to the sick captain there’ll be another canoe for him at the Great Falls.”

They vanished in the dusk. Cap Huff and I moved closer to the fires.

“Hey!” said Noah Cluff when he saw me. “Is that you?”

“Who’d you think it was?”

“Can’t be sure of nothing nowadays,” Noah said. He had trouble getting his breath. “Seemed as though the river was all mud flats this afternoon. Thought there was clam holes in it. Thought I saw water squirting up out of ’em from the clams.”

Phoebe lay back to look up into my face. I was glad my mother was not there to see her and to put the blame on me—not that she’d have thought me to blame; but the sight of Phoebe would have made her angry at all the world, and she’d have known that I could best endure her anger.

She had found dried grass somewhere and stuffed it into her jerkin for warmth, and her poor thin neck and face stuck out above this swollen jerkin like a doll’s head fixed on a body too large for it.

“He started to walk in and dig clams,” she said, and smiled up at me. It was a terrible, strained smile. I looked at Cap, and found him opening and closing his hand, as I had seen him do before hitting someone, and I knew the same thought had come into his head that had come into mine: the thought that somebody must pay for all this.

“Can you hold out, Phoebe?” I asked. “It’ll only be till to-morrow.”

“To-morrow!” Nathaniel Lord whispered. “I’d like four pork chops and a chicken and two dozen ears of green corn!”

“Corn!” Phoebe cried. “I’d forgot there
was
such a thing as corn! I couldn’t think of anything but pumpkin pie.”

“My God!” Cap Huff said. “I never found out who stole that pumpkin pie off me!”

“Listen, Stevie,” Noah said, “you don’t need to worry about
her
not holding out. It was her kept me from walking into the river to dig clams!”

“You were going to give me some, weren’t you?” Phoebe asked.

“Yes,” Noah admitted.

“Well,” Phoebe said, “I didn’t want them. That’s why I stopped you.”

“Gosh, Phoebe,” said Noah helplessly, “I don’t rightly know what you’re talking about!”

She edged over and slipped her arm through his. “Keep everything full and by, Mate.” She smiled at me, that same terrible, strained smile. “Noah can sail on the
Ranger,
can’t he, when we get home?”

“Why, yes, Phoebe. Anyone you say. That’s your job.”

I took the raccoon fat from my breeches pocket and held it behind my back. “Here,” I said, going down on one knee beside her and speaking the lines my mother used to say to me when I was little: “Open your mouth and shut your eyes and I’ll give you something to make you wise.” When she did so I popped into her mouth as big a lump as I could get on my forefinger, knowing that if I gave it into her hands she’d eat none of it herself. I held her arms until she swallowed; then gave her the rest of the package. It had scarce left my grasp before she was sharing it with Noah.

“Take some, Steven,” she said, before she turned to Nathaniel Lord.

I told her Cap and I had eaten recently and could hold out until the next day, expecting to hear a bitter outcry from Cap; but he was watching Asa Hutchins and a good-for-nothing rogue named Flood who hailed from Wells or York. These two were standing together, near poor Captain Dearborn, who had climbed weakly from his canoe with his big black dog clumsily striving to be kittenish before him, delighted at being on dry land again.

What ailed Captain Dearborn I don’t know; but he was close to dying of it, whatever it was. All of us went about our duties for more than two weeks thinking he was dead and buried; and indeed he looked ready for burying, even now, his face dead white, and sunken around his mouth and eyes, and a ragged black beard making his face seem more waxy and deathlike than it was.

Ayres held him up and guided him, to keep him from pitching on his face. Even when guided he put down his feet as though he expected to find nothing under them.

Asa and Flood approached Dearborn, quiet and hesitant-like, as hunters steal up to a river bank. Remembering Natanis had given me a message for Dearborn, I went along behind them.

When they reached Dearborn they went around and stood in front of him. Asa did the talking, while Dearborn, being a fine and thoughtful gentleman, stopped and listened.

“Captain,” Asa said, “our bateau got wrecked. We ain’t had any food since the morning we got lost in the swamps. We’re real hungry, Captain.”

“My boy,” Dearborn said, “I know it! I do, indeed! I feel for you and for all the others, and I’m sure God will soon deliver us out of these tribulations.”

“Captain,” Asa said, “there’s a lot of us here that ain’t far from dying and we’d like for you to help us.”

“Why,” said the captain, “I’ll do what I can, but there’s nothing I can do, my boy. To-morrow, I hope—”

“Captain,” said Asa, “this dog of yours, he’s a fine dog. We’d like for you to give him to us.”

The dog, clumsy, fond creature, galloped up to us with his tongue lolling out, and blowing pleased, audible breaths. He pranced a little before Dearborn and then went over to grin amiably at Asa and Flood.

“Why,” Dearborn said, “I wouldn’t—do you mean to eat?”