Arundel (85 page)

“Maybe I wouldn’t,” Jacataqua said, rolling her eyes at him enticingly.

“Yes, and maybe you would!” He dangled the pearls from his forefinger and whirled them in the air, at which she made a snatch at them, a snatch that was unsuccessful because of his grip on her.

“Now, now! None of that! That won’t get ’em for you. You got to be a nice quiet girl, and look out for Phoebe going home, and not run after anyone we come across, and then maybe you can have ’em.” He closed his hand over the pearls again. “Yes,” he added suspiciously, “and how did that damned red Sabatis get out here with you?”

Phoebe struggled to her feet, pulled her sealskin cap over her hair, tightened the knitted sash of her blanket coat, and buttoned the coat around her neck. “He came out of the city when the attack began, and went with Paul Higgins and his Abenakis. He guided them across the bay of the St. Charles so that they got away. His place, he said, was with his brothers from the Kennebec. He’s a good Indian. He’ll help us get home. We’re lucky to have him, and it’s time we started.”

“Where’s Paul and his men?” I asked, feeling that she was right, and that Sabatis had done what he was bidden to do by Eneas, all with no thought of doing wrong.

“Gone to Indian Lorette,” she said, “to make snowshoes and dry some meat for their trip home. They wouldn’t stay with Arnold any longer, because they say this isn’t their kind of fighting. Will you look for the priest, Steven, or shall I hunt him myself?”

Cap stowed his loot in his pockets. We packed up the silver and the picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry and scrambled down the ladder to find the leather-faced French waiting for us below.

They went readily enough to hunt the priest when they learned there was to be a marriage, with cider and brandy. By the time we had stopped at the tavern for the brandy and located the priest in the pleasant house beside the papist chapel, we had fifty Frenchies tagging along behind us, laughing and screaming in their silly twittery lingo and singing countless verses of “Vive la Canadienne.”

They brought us all the snowshoes in the town as soon as they discovered we had the money with which to pay for them. I believe Cap was right when he said there are no people more obliging or politer than the French, once they know you have money to spend and are willing to spend it.

It may be there are some priests to the papist French not blue-jowled and not powerfully scented with garlic; but all I saw looked so and smelled the same. It was so with the one who married us, Claude-Marie Delacroix.

When he stood up before us in his long black dress like a night rail and jabbered French, we would have been at a loss except for Jacataqua. At times she would poke Phoebe and Phoebe would say “Yes”; and at times she would poke Cap, who stood close behind me, and Cap would almost push his forefinger through my back, whereat I would say “Yes.”

The affair went smoothly, except at a point where Jacataqua whispered anxiously to Cap, and Cap fumbled in the pocket that held the largest part of his loot, while I wondered at his fumblings. He worried out a ring, which he handed to the priest; and all of us stood staring at it. It held a red stone as large as Ranger’s eye, a stone as brilliant and fiery as though cut from a red sunset. Around it were small glittering diamonds; and it must have graveled the priest, lying in Cap’s chapped paw, as unexpected as a thousand-pound note. Before the priest could reach out for it I got back my wits. Telling Cap to put away his bauble, I took Arnold’s ring from the pocket of my buckskin shirt, and we were wed with it.

When, later, I asked Phoebe whether she felt married with the words that joined us being spoke in such a lingo, she said she would have felt married if an Abenaki
m’téoulin
had united us in the sign language.

The day was still young when we set off up the river for the crossing place, where a passage had been cut through the tumbled mass of ice cakes that are jammed up into mountain ranges in the middle of the river by the force and strength of the current. Nor am I ashamed to say I had liefer face a dozen Guerlacs or Hooks, or find my way out of Quebec ten times over, than cross the frozen St. Lawrence. When we came to the passage through the ice cakes there were thunderous bangings and crashings on both sides of us and beneath our feet, louder than any artillery, and a trembling of the ice, and a fearful coldness that bit through our garments as though they had been made of cotton. I was in a freezing sweat for fear the ice would open under Phoebe and swallow her up.

My fears came to naught, as do most fears; and we set off down the St. Lawrence, traveling rapidly in single file, Natanis in the lead, and then Jacataqua and the dog Anatarso and Cap and Sabatis and Phoebe and myself, and in the rear Hobomok. That night we reached the town of St. Mary’s on the Chaudière, and lodged at the inn where Cap had found the keg of Spanish wine. Here they made us welcome and set out a wedding feast of chicken pasties and bear meat and apple pies and Spanish wine and a villainous brandy.

It was here, in the middle of our feast, that it came into my head to ask Phoebe why she had married James Dunn. She looked at me with a queer, misty smile and said nothing at all, so that I didn’t learn; nor did I ask her again, ever, because I didn’t care.

In spite of the weight of pork and flour we carried, we moved quickly; for our hearts were light and there were no heavy storms to hinder us, only snow flurries, and those mostly at night while we lay snugly on spruce branches in our snow-walled shelters. There was no day on which we failed to travel forty miles; for the lakes and ponds and swamps we had crossed with such labor during our march to Quebec had become broad white thoroughfares; and the jagged stumps that tripped us on the new-made trails over the Height of Land and the Great Carrying Place were hidden deep beneath a level covering.

On the third day after we left St. Mary’s we crossed the ice of Lake Megantic, ascended the serpentine curves of Seven Mile Stream to the beautiful meadow, and scaled the Height of Land as easily as walking from Saco to Arundel.

Here we found ourselves at last upon a descending trail; and although the dawns were slow in coming, and darkness fell early, we covered fifty miles a day, a prodigious journey.

As we went over the snow, and at night, lying upon spruce boughs, I thought a thousand times—as I have thought ten thousand times since then—of all our labor and our anguish as we struggled along this same way upon the march to Quebec. I thought of the groaning and sweating men of that little army, half dead with exhaustion and the pain of torn and ailing bodies: starving and freezing, yet ready with heroic laughter, and never stopped by what still seems to me the very incarnate demon of ill-fortune.

I thought of lost muskets, of broken bateaux, of torn fragments of tents, down below us, frozen into the ice; and more, I thought of terrible stark forms, staring upward, eyeless, from deep beneath our feet. And it seemed strange and like a dream that we should pass now so easily and lightly over the way that had been agony. And in the murmur of the forest it seemed to me always that I could hear, as I can hear in the woods of Arundel to this day when I go into them, the voices of the bateaumen, the cries of stragglers, the shouts of officers—all the voices of Arnold’s army.

Three days after we passed the Height of Land we came to deserted Norridgewock and lodged there; and on the following day we came to Fort Western, whence we had started four months earlier. Here we learned how the British captain, Mowat, who must have been, as Cap Huff firmly swore, the lousiest knave that ever wore a British uniform, had warped his two ships of war up to the Falmouth docks on the eighteenth day of October, bombarded the defenseless town, and burned more than four hundred buildings, leaving the entire population of the town without shelter for the winter. For that reason there were none of the settlers left along the Kennebec. The burning of Falmouth had destroyed their source of supplies, so they had gone down to the coast, all of them, to live on clams and whatever else they could take from the salt water.

It was two days later, toward dusk of a gray January day, that we reached the marshy banks of the Arundel River. The tide was on the make, and the steel-gray water brought up to us the fresh, heartening smell of the sea. There was a familiar odor of wood smoke blended with it; and as we followed the river toward its mouth I found myself short of breath, as I ever do when I near my home after an absence.

Cap lifted up his voice and began to bawl about old Benning Wentworth, and Phoebe came back beside me and pushed her hand into the sash of my coat. In no time at all we stood on the little sandy beach across from our garrison house. We could see a light in a window, and hear the far-off barking of a dog; and the plume of smoke that rose from the chimney wavered and flattened itself above the roof as though it had no notion what to do.

It seemed to me I could smell baked beans and new bread mixed with the salt tang of the sea; and I stood on the shore, wavering like the plume of smoke, gawking across the dark water and clutching Phoebe to me. I might have stood there until midnight except for Cap, who blew at the ferry horn as though to blow its insides out.

A new ferry boy came to us, rattling his oars and staring white-eyed at Natanis and Hobomok.

When he had set us across we went around by the kitchen door and Phoebe opened it. My mother, with Ranger at her feet, sat at her spinning wheel, and my muscles tightened at the clicking it made when the door flew open. My sister Cynthia stood by the brick oven holding a bean pot cover in her hand and peering at the beans; while Malary, moaning querulously, prodded at the crusts of brown loaves with a long-handled fork.

At the opening of the door my mother looked up; her eyes widened and widened, as if never in her life could she come to believe that she saw what she saw before her; and then, as her face slowly changed from that blank disbelief and became radiant, I could see it no longer, nor anything else with distinctness, for the room and all it contained grew wavery before me with the wetness in my eyes. I was home again—in Arundel.

… The further adventures of Steven and Phoebe Nason, Cap Huff, Marie de Sabrevois, and other Arundel folk are told in
Rabble In Arms,
a romance of the Northern Army’s two-year struggle following the defeat at Quebec.

… Richard Nason, the son of Steven and Phoebe, became a sea-captain and took out an American privateer against the British. The tale of his cruises and engagements in British waters, and of his life in Dartmoor Prison is narrated in
The Lively Lady,
a chronicle of Arundel.

… Daniel Marvin of Arundel, at the outbreak of the War of 1812, was first mate of the barque
Olive Branch.
How he was taken by the British, imprisoned in the hulks at Chatham, fought his way to freedom, and achieved his ends through the invention and use of the Gangway Pendulum is set forth in
Captain Caution,
a chronicle of Arundel.

On the Abenaki Indians of New England, on their relations with the early settlers of Maine, and on Indian warfare, magic-making, hunting, folk-lore, and customs: Baxter, Rev. J.,
Journal of Several Visits to the Indians on the Kennebec River;
Bourne, E. F.,
History of Wells & Kennebunk;
Bradbury, C.,
History of Kennebunkport;
Colman, E. L.,
New England Captives Carried to Canada;
Drake, S. G.,
Book of the Indians
and
Tragedies of the Wilderness;
Hanson, J. W.,
History of Norridgewock & Canaan
and
History of Gardiner, Pittston &
W.
Gardiner;
Leland, C. G.,
Algonquin Legends of New England;
Lincoln, Gov. E.,
Language of the Abenakis;
Nash, C.,
Indians of the Kennebec;
Nicolar, J.,
Life & Traditions of the Red Man;
Parkman, F.,
Half Century of Conflict
and
Montcalm & Wolfe;
Pope, S.,
Hunting with the Bow & Arrow;
Pote, W.,
Journal During His Captivity in the French & Indian War;
Reed, P. M.,
History of the Lower Kennebec;
Remich, D.,
History of Kennebunk;
Vetromile, Father E.,
The Abenakis & Their History;
Whitney, S. H.,
The,Kennebec Valley;
Williamson, W. D.,
History of Maine;
Willis, W.,
History of Portland,
Vol. 2.