to the Far Blue Mountains (1976) (36 page)

We were three large boats and one canoe when we started, with Kin, Brian, and Yance in the canoe, Jeremy, Pim, and myself in the first boat with the women, Kane O'Hara and Tom Watkins in the second, Jubal and Wa-ga-su in the last and most heavily loaded.

We went up the coast from the rivermouth, staying inside the banks when possible, and came finally to the Bay of Chesapeake and the Potomac River.

We came to the landing at Jamestown to see three ships in the river and much busied they were with lowering cargo to boats-and one ship lying close in alongside a dock, being a craft of such shallow draft.

A man of some presence watched us come close along and called out, "What have you there?"

"Corn and hides," I said, "and some furs. We be seeking out someone who would buy."

"Corn? You will be speaking to the governor of that. We have had losses here."

"Aye," I said, "we heard of that and came along to help. We ask but a fair market price. As for that," I added, "we would sell the boats, too."

Climbing up on the dock, I was followed by Brian and Kane O'Hara. He glanced from one to the other of us. "It is that you plan to settle here?"

"No. We've good places yon, and crops put in, but we heard your troubles and had this grain put by."

"If you sell your boats, how then will you get home?"

"Overland," Brian said. He was a fine, handsome lad who spoke well, indeed.

"That is, some of us would, sir. My mother, sister, and I would ship for England."

"I am Captain Powell," he said, "William Powell. We are on short rations here, and the governor will be pleased to see you."

He bade me come with him to meet the governor, Sir Francis Wyatt, an uncommonly shrewd man, and intelligent enough to ask few questions. I spoke him fair, using my own name, and hoping the years would have erased it from memory, as it seemed to have done.

"We are obliged, Captain," he said to me. "You could have come at no better time. Now what are you asking per bushel?"

"As I told Captain Powell," I said, "we came to help, not to profit by your troubles. We will take the fair market price and no more."

"Commendable," Wyatt said dryly, "and unusual." He turned to Powell. "Will you see they are put up properly?" Then he smiled at me. "If you would wait outside?

I wish to speak to Captain Powell."

Here it comes, I thought. The next thing is an order for my arrest. We went outside, but I did not move from the door. Inside, I could hear Powell say, "Do you believe them, Sir Francis?"

"Believe them? I have no idea whether they are telling the truth or not, Captain. I have a colony on the verge of starvation, and am not inclined to ask any questions at all. They have grain. We need grain. They will sell it at a reasonable price. I will pay their price. Furthermore, I will let them go back to their homes with thanks, and hope they come to us again. Such men we can use."

"I could use them," Powell said grimly. "Did you look at them, Sir Francis?

That's the strongest, toughest, most able lot of men I've seen in many a year.

At least two of the older ones have been soldiers or I miss my guess."

He shook his head. "I have an idea who they are, Sir Francis. I think it's that lot we've been hearing about, from up at the edge of the mountains."

"It well may be." Sir Francis got to his feet, for I heard his chair shove back.

"Make no report on this, Powell. In London they will only want to know that we fed our people. How it was done will not interest them.

"We will buy their grain. We will house them at the expense of the colony, and we will speed them on their way. Who knows when again we may need help?"

Powell chuckled, then said, "Sir Francis, if we've to fight the Indians again, just let me recruit that lot. I'd ask no more."

Powell came out. The cabin he then took us to was well-built and strong, and there was a small tavern, or what passed for one, close by.

"Captain Sackett," Powell said, "there are presently three ships in port, two of them loading for the West Indies. The third has just recently come in, but I don't much like her looks. I'd hesitate, if I were you."

"What's wrong with her?"

Powell studied his nails thoughtfully, then he said, "She's too heavily armed for a merchant ship, and if I ever saw a craft with a pack of rascals for crew, that's it. And that Captain Delve-"

"Delve, did you say? Jonathan Delve? A kind of a taunting look to his eyes?"

"You know the man?"

"I know him," I said grimly, "and I don't like him. I'd heard he was a pirate, and I agree with your judgment of him."

Powell looked thoughtful. "We're not heavily armed here, and a ship like that could be a trouble to us, so I want nothing more than to see him gone."

When Powell was gone I explained to the boys who Delve was. That he had survived so long was evidence of his cunning.

"Kin," I suggested, "the man does not know you or Brian. Go down along the river and see what you can learn, but stay away from him and don't get into trouble."

"He's an evil man," Abby said.

"He is that, and I would like it better if you and he were not on the same sea.

He has been a pirate, and probably is yet, and more than likely has come in for supplies while he looks over what ships may be worth the taking."

"Did you see his vessel?" Jeremy asked, wryly. "She's got thirty-six guns, and she's fast."

"Fast she may be," Yance said quietly, "but she's at anchor now. They don't move very fast with an anchor in the mud."

"What are you suggesting?" Pim asked.

Yance grinned slowly, looking up from under his thick brows. "Well? If she worries us, let's take her, and remove the worry."

I shook my head. "That would be piracy on our part. So far as we know he has done nothing."

"If you'd have sent me," Yance said, "I'd have seen to it."

"That's why I didn't send you, Yance." I smiled at him.

Yet but part of my thoughts at this moment were upon Jonathan Delve. The presence of the man and his ship were but a minor irritation compared with the fact ... and it was a fact ... that Abby and I would soon be apart.

My mind almost refused to accept it. She had been so much a part of my life that I could scarcely imagine being without her, though I fully understood how she felt.

Noelle was but ten. Her feminine associations had been good. Yance's wife, although a gay, fun-loving girl as exuberant as he himself, had come from a sedate, religious upbringing. Kane O'Hara's wife, of Spanish background, was even more so.

Peter Fitch's Catawba wife moved with a grace and conducted herself with a decorum that would have done credit to any great lady. She had taken on European ways easily and naturally while losing none of her own, and it was a rare thing, I thought, who had little experience after all, that so many women could live together ... or near to each other, without friction.

John Quill had been almost a second father to Noelle. A man married to his farm, he thought of little else, yet he was forever bringing her the largest strawberries, birds' nests, or flowers from the woods or the edges of his fields.

It had been a good life we lived, and what school we had was conducted by the various wives and by Sakim, whose depths of knowledge none had ever plumbed.

Like the boys, Noelle had grown up on stories known to the Catawba and the Cherokee, to the Irish (from Kane O'Hara) and Sakim's stories of Scheherazade.

Sakim read also from the Katha Sarit Sagara, the so-called "Ocean of Story" as gathered together by Somadeva, a court poet to King Ananta of Kashmir, and his queen, Suryavati.

Often I wondered what their vision of life must be, learning, as they had, from such oddly dissimilar storytellers. They had learned the Catawba story of the beginning of things. Kane O'Hara told them stories of Cuchulainn or of Conn of the Hundred Battles, and of the Irish longs who lived on Tara. From Jeremy they had stories of Achilles and Ulysses and of Xenophon's retreat of the Ten Thousand. From Sakim, stories of Ali Baba and Sinbad, of Rustum and his fabled horse, Raqsh, who killed a lion to protect his sleeping master.

From Abigail they had the story of God and of Jesus and Mary, and from Sakim, of Allah and Mohammed, and from Sweet Woman the story of Wakonda the Sky Spirit.

From Barry Magill they learned something of weaving, from Peter Fitch a love of good wood and the uses of it, and from John Quill a love of the earth and the magic of making things grow.

What was left for me? A little of each, and the pointing out of things along the trail, and something of England's history, of the Normans, the Danes, and the Celts, of the Norsemen and their raids and wanderings.

Yet there were strange gaps in their knowledge, realized suddenly when after hearing the story of Rustum and Raqsh, Noelle asked me, "Papa, what is a horse?"

Chapter
32

The cabin with which they provided us was no place for a man, what with all the sewing and stitching, and the talk of the women as they stitched skirts and petticoats, and tried on and fitted, and exclaimed over this and that. For neither Abby nor Noelle had the proper clothes for shipboard nor for landing in England, either.

Kin returned and we sat against the log wall outside the cabin. "Jonathan Delve has something on his mind," he said, "But nobody has a notion of what. This much I did learn. He was taken by a British warship and was in Newgate for a time, and somehow bribed his way out."

"He is not idling here for nothing," I said.

"Aye, that he is not. Brian is just now sitting over ale with a sailor who's been aboard her, and if I know Brian he will soon have all the man knows."

Kin ran his fingers through his long hair. "Pa, we may be late tonight. There's some looking about we'll do."

"Be easy with it, son. The British are no fools, and are sharp upon the form and manner of things."

A thought came to me. "Where's Yance?"

"Him?" Kin said, almost absent-mindedly. "He's helping the blacksmith who is behind in his work. You know Yance. He must be busy all the time."

Aye, I knew him. Busy indeed he was, but with what? Yance was never one to be idle but often enough his business was trouble.

However, the day was a quiet one, and I enjoyed sitting in the sun and watching what went on about us, for it had been long since I'd seen any settlement but our own. From time to time some of them would stop to pass the time with me, and so I heard much of the story of the early settlement of Jamestown, which had been only a shadow-tale until now.

Indians had told us a bit here or there. How the colony came near starving, and how many had died. And how at last John Smith was given the command he should have had at the beginning and then all began to come right. They told us also of some of his explorations up the coast, and how he had gone to islands far off the north coast to another settlement for supplies.

That night, warm, bedded down, I lay awake beside Abby and looked up in darkness at the hand-sewn rafters. A knowing hand had shaped them, a knowing hammer drove the pegs. There is a quiet beauty in such things as these, a beauty more than paint or chisel make, the beauty of quiet men, making strong things for their own use, shaping each piece with loving fingers.

At last I slept, awakening slightly when the boys came, and wondering in my half-sleeping way why they came so late when the dawn was in the sky.

Captain Powell came the next morning.

"If there's trouble," he asked, "will you and your lot fight with us? For Captain Delve is with us still and a ship comes in this morning with a thousand weight of powder aboard, and as much of shot and lead. She'll have clothing aboard, and seed and much for which we've waited."

"When she leaves, where does she sail?"

"To London, Captain Sackett, straight to London town."

"Will she carry my wife and my daughter and my son Brian?"

"She will if you help us. For I fear that Delve means to take her. We've lately discovered he's low on powder, and needs all she carries for whatever it is he's about, and he has put his ship around this morning and his guns aim at the town."

"We'll stand by you," I said.

"Aye," said Kin, "that we will, if needed. But do not worry, Captain Powell. Arm your men and have them stand by, too. But they need fear no cannon fire."

"No cannon fire? He has thirty-six guns, man. Can you mean to say no cannon fire and him with thirty-six guns?"

"Aye." Kin smiled his slow smile and looked up, his gray-green eyes alight in his lean brown face. "And not a one of them will fire. Last night we went aboard, my brothers and I, with O'Hara and Jeremy Ring and Mr. Burke, and while two of us guarded the doors just in case, we spiked every gun!"

"Spiked them!" Powell exclaimed. "How could you, with men on watch, and-"

"We be woodsmen, Captain Powell, who move quietly even among Indians. They heard us not. One man on watch was put quietly to sleep. The other ... well, I regret to say it, but one was strong and made a fight and took the blade like a good lad. He's down in the river now, drifting toward the sound.