Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

“Sir,” I said, seeing it was his intention to commit himself to nothing until I had said my say, “I have a sloop lying in this river: the one with a girl as master.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” Mr. Tracy said. “Yes, yes, yes! Yes, indeed! The Eunice! Yes, yes!” He groaned slightly, as if the machinery that produced his yesses had run down. “A baggage, sir! Quick brain! Active! Works ahead of herself! Make a good chess player! You play chess?”

  I said I didn’t, and waited for him to go on, but he grunted obstinately and examined a pink phlox.

  “Sir,” I said, “Colonel Arnold has ordered me to Fort Western. I’d like to sail there in my own sloop. If you’ll do me the kindness to release the Eunice, Phoebe’ll take us there and return here before Colonel Arnold arrives.”

  “Bless my soul!” he said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes! Thought you wanted money! Go right ahead and send her right back! Yes, indeed!” He growled amiably at a cerise phlox. “A baggage, sir, but clever! Brain well oiled! Smart! Sees everything! Great help to a man! Go after her myself if it wasn’t for having asthma! She your sister?”

  “No, sir,” I said, bemazed to hear him run on at such length about Phoebe, and thinking how frequently men, to their undoing, will imagine qualities in a woman, especially in a young woman, that don’t exist.

  “Hm! Hm! Well! Well! Not your wife, of course! Never married, that baggage! Tell that easy enough! Hrrump! Hmp!”

  “Yes, sir. She married a man in the army, just this summer.”

  Mr. Tracy shook his head and hrumped violently. “Don’t understand it! Sailing your sloop and married to another man! Something wrong with one of you! Hrump! Well, none of my business! Nothing to do with me! Well out of any such mess! Come, come, come! Get along, now! Got to have that sloop back before Arnold gets here! And tell that baggage I want to see her when she gets back! Teach her chess! Probably beat me after one lesson! Get along, get along!”

  I got along, leaving Mr. Tracy hrumping among his phloxes; and all the way to the wharf I puzzled over what could ail him.

  If Phoebe had been gentle and fair-haired, like Mary, I might have understood his enthusiasm; but it seemed to me she had few of the things one seeks in a woman, her skin being as brown as an old law-book, and her black hair cut off at the nape of her neck for greater freedom, and scorched by the sun to a rusty color. Her body was hard and flat like a boy’s, so I had as lief put my arm around a spruce mast studded with brass nails, for all the pleasure I would get out of it.

  At the wharf I banished the matter from my mind and shouted to Phoebe that it was all right. By the time I had sculled out to the sloop Cap had raised and stowed the anchor and was getting up the jib, interlarding his labors with further accounts of our council of war with General Washington.

  “You could see,” he said, “that George was depending on Stevie for everything.

  “‘How do you think we ought to get up the Kennebec?’ he said to Stevie, sort of anxious, as if afraid Stevie would say we oughtn’t to go at all.

  “‘How do you mean?’ Stevie asked, not wanting to make any mistake on such an important matter.

  “‘What I mean,’ George said, ‘is do you think we ought to swim up, or go up in bateaux?’

  “‘Well,’ said Stevie, being a diplomat, ‘how was you thinking of getting up?’

  “‘Why,’ George said, sort of undecided, ‘I kind of thought bateaux would be best.’

  “‘Did you order any bateaux?’ asked Stevie, feeling his way along, as you might say.

  “‘Yes,’ George said, ‘I ordered two hundred of ’em.’

  “‘Well,’ Stevie said, ‘in that case I tell you frankly I know the Kennebec from keelson to whiffletree, and my advice to you, though you can take it or leave it, and God knows I don’t care which, being as how I’m a free and independent resident of Maine, is to use bateaux.’

  “With that George pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘this is a great relief and I’m certainly obliged to you, though for a time you had me fair stonied for fear you was going to recommend using blowed-up bladders!’ ”

  “Well, what could I do?” I asked sourly.

  The Eunice slipped down the river, passed Plum Island, and danced across the vicious chop on the bar. “Did you think they ought to use canoes?” Phoebe asked, letting the sloop run before the warm west wind.

  “Of course they ought to use canoes! An army can’t stop to calk leaky bateaux, the way lumbermen can: not if it’s going somewhere in a hurry. After they’ve been dragged over a few rocks there won’t be any way of telling whether the river’s outside trying to get in or inside trying to get out!”

  “You can get a canoe for yourself,” Phoebe said.

  “You can get anything you want for yourself in the army,” Cap grumbled, gazing darkly at the Isles of Shoals off our starboard bow, “but you don’t keep it if it’s any good. The one that keeps it is a colonel.”

  XV

  CAP HUFF refused to let us put into Portsmouth, saying he had nothing there worth getting. I suspicioned there were other reasons for his indifference, having to do with the gaol and those who had put him there. So we ran on to the eastward, rounding the Nubble into Wells Bay and dozing in the warm, smoke-laden land breeze, which brought us swiftly to Arundel on the flood tide that night.

  There was a pother on our arrival. Having felt the bitter white Kennebec mists of autumn, I put my mother and sisters to work knitting woolen stockings for the two of us out of double yarn, long enough to reach a foot above our knees, and short ones to wear over them. There were woolen shirts to be collected, and tools to be assembled for carrying in my pack, as well as fish-hooks, needles, awls and mirrors for Hobomok and Paul Higgins and the others.

  Wherever I moved Ranger moved with me, knowing I was going away, and pressing against my legs so that I fell over him a thousand times. My mother and the girls, with their hands and eyes busy at their knitting, moved like folk in a dream, so that we fell over each other as well. By midnight our dispositions were so near to souring that I declared I would make no more preparations, even though we froze and starved for it; so Cap and I sat before the fire in the gathering-room, with knitting needles clicking around us like maple branches after an ice storm, and told my mother and sisters, between draughts of flip, how our camp at Cambridge had seemed, and how General Washington had looked and what he had said, and how our men had plenty to eat, and how the British in Boston had next to nothing to eat, and how we could beat them if we had powder, which we had not, and what General Washington had worn, and how he was beloved by all, and all the other things that womenfolk must have recounted to them so they in turn can recount them, with their own additions, to the neighbors.

  When I turned to my mother’s affairs, and spoke of the difficulties she would have in managing the inn, she scoffed.

  “Tchah! she said. “What is there about this inn, with Malary and the girls to help me, that’s more difficult than the managing of any house! Put your mind at rest! All our drinkers will be gone to war, and there’s money at hand—what your father left, and what we’ve earned from trading in furs and from the sloop.”

  “If that’s so,” I said, “why was it, when Phoebe was engaged to James Dunn, that I could never leave this place for fear of her getting married and leaving you helpless?”

  My mother started up, exclaiming she had forgotten to put the beans to soak, and Phoebe yawned, declaring we should all be abed if we proposed to go out with the early tide. My sisters, who had reached the heels of our stockings, went off upstairs with her, gabbling over nothing; so Cap and I sat alone by the fire, drinking our flip and hoping the days to come would find us in no worse circumstances.

  The next morning, when we dropped down the river and across the bar, we looked back at what we were leaving and wondered, as I think those who go away to war have always wondered and always will wonder, when we should see it again—my mother and sisters and Malary on the hard gray beach a
t the turn of the shore, waving and smiling, though I well knew they felt little like smiling; young Ranger, the image of his father, his ears erect and his tail moving slowly back and forth, hopeful until the last of being called to follow me; the garrison house, gray and comfortable behind the dunes, smoke rising in a blue plume from its squat chimney; the little early-morning waves dropping weakly on the beach, as if in patient sorrow at our going; the ledges brown and glistening on the pearly surface of the sea, and the water near the shore so glassy and so sheltered from the soft west wind that the far blue line of Wells and York seemed floating in the air.

  That night we dropped anchor at Parker’s Flats, off Georgetown Island in the Kennebec, Phoebe declaring it was better to take our time about it than to hang ourselves up on a ledge. We took ten fat flounders from the flats, and Phoebe made a chowder from them, adding pork scraps and sliced potatoes and ship’s bread and butter and an onion, so that we put in our time profitably.

  We helped her to weave an instrument to wear on her wrist—four musket balls wrapped in leather and enclosed in braided strips, the strips narrowing to a tube, and ending in a bracelet. When the bracelet was on her wrist the tube lay in her hand, projecting six inches beyond it. At the end of the tube were the musket balls, tightly laced in place.

  Men, Phoebe said, were a pest, continually clawing and mauling at a woman; and with this in her hand it would be easy to discourage them.

  “Ho!” Cap roared, slipping his arm around her waist and pulling her so tight against him that she looked like a coonskin against a barn door, “what could you do with that when a man does this to you?”

  He bent his big red face down toward hers. Misliking his rudeness, I set out to pull him away and throw him overboard, when Phoebe flicked up her hand so that her new machine tapped against the back of his head. He released her, his eyes as loose and rolling in their sockets as those of a bass staring up at a grasshopper; and after he had wobbled around, as though he had drunk too much rum, he leaned against the mainsail and slid sidewise onto the deck, where he lay looking thoughtfully at the stars.

  We came to anchor the next morning off the lower tip of Swan Island; and before the anchor rope had done thumping on the deck a canoe put out from the headland and twisted toward us down a guzzle. The Indians in the canoe were young men, strange to me, so I ordered them back with word that Steven Nason had come to visit with Jacataqua and Hobomok. They shook their paddles at me, shouting “Brother!” to let me know my father’s name had not been forgotten, and when they had taken word back to the headland, five canoes returned.

  I recognized Jacataqua among the paddlers, for she was like her mother, only smaller and rounder; but Hobomok I would never have known. He had grown thick through the chest and shoulders, and his face was loose-skinned and deep-lined, like that of a clergyman addicted to discourse and praying.

  They brandished their paddles and whooped at me, keeping up a doleful howling until they had swarmed over the sloop’s thwarts, when Hobomok seized me by the wrist as though it had been a pump handle, and Jacataqua took me by the waist and wedged her shoulder under my arm. She was pleasing and soft, with the same red glow on her cheekbones that her mother had, as though a light were shining up at her; and neat, too, with blue wampum at her brow and throat, and a deerskin jerkin over her leggins, such as her mother wore.

  For one who so powerfully disliked Indians, Cap Huff’s behavior was strange. Engulfing Jacataqua’s arm in his bear’s paw of a hand, he pointed first to me, roaring, “Brother!” He then pointed to himself and said, “Brother!” after which he poked Jacataqua in the chest, unnecessarily hard, it seemed to me, and bellowed, “Sister!” Jacataqua laughed, threw her arm around his neck, and kissed him, at which this hulk of a man whooped more loudly than any Indian and scrambled up the sloop’s mainmast in an excess of emotion.

  Phoebe scrutinized Jacataqua with care, and from time to time coughed a hard, dry cough, which I had long ago learned was a sign matters sat ill on her. Therefore I put an arm around each of them, saying to Jacataqua, “This is my sister.”

  Phoebe pulled away, saying, “No! No! No sister!”

  Jacataqua smiled up at me. “I speak English better than my mother.” She went and sat by Phoebe, picking up her hand and holding it. “Steven knew my mother,” she said. “His father made us brother and sister long ago, when they were following the white girl.” Phoebe freed her hand, then put it back in Jacataqua’s again.

  “How did you learn to speak English so well?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Boys come to see me from Gardinerstown and Pownalborough; sometimes from Fort Western and Arrowsic Island and Brunswick—oh, many places.”

  Cap Huff descended the mast and regarded her with admiration. “Wait till you see what’s coming up from Boston in a week or so,” he said. “You’ll speak two or three languages after that.”

  “What languages?” Jacataqua asked, wide-eyed.

  “Oh, Irish,” Cap said, “and Connecticut, and Harvard, maybe.”

  “I speak a little German,” Jacataqua said.

  “German!” Cap bawled.

  “Gottverdamte!” said Jacataqua. “There’s nothing but Germans across the river in Pownalborough.”

  “Well, I’m a—I’m a sculpin!” Cap muttered.

  Jacataqua couldn’t keep her hands off Phoebe’s cat’s eyes and brass-studded belt and the rest of her odd belongings, so I left them for Hobomok, and found Natawammet squatting with him on the sunny side of the hatch, looking little different than I remembered him. His throat was scrawnier and his knees showed signs of wear. I was glad to see them; and from the tone of their voices when they called me “Brother,” they were equally glad to see me.

  Rabomis, they told me, was dead, having pitched from a canoe in the Five Mile Ripples and broken her neck against a rock. Jacataqua had been made sachem in her stead because she was known and liked in all the adjoining settlements, and received many favors from white men. Woromquid had set off for Quebec two years before with three Assagunticooks, and none of them had ever been heard of again. All of the Norridgewocks had gone to St. Francis and Beçancour to live, and most of the Swan Islanders too, for the settlements had pressed so close around them that there was game for only a small number.

  With the turning of the tide Phoebe left us, declaring she couldn’t lose the favoring wind. We sent two men with her, to ride through the Chops on the sloop and make sure she came to no harm. Beyond the Chops I knew the wind would take her safe to Arundel.

  I watched her at the tiller, fingering her cat’s eyes and squinting into the west, little more than a shadow larger than on the day when she fastened my hunting shirt to her father’s cabin; and I wondered what it was that Nathaniel Tracy had seen in her. I was reminded, too, to ask Cap, some day, what possessed him to want to put his sweaty paws on her.

  Fearful of what cussedness Cap might inflict on my friends because of his dislike for Indians, I consulted Hobomok, saying it might be well to tranquillize Cap by showing him something he couldn’t understand. Also I said I had heard Hobomok had become a skilled m’téoulin, able to walk ankle deep in rock and scream terribly.

  I have never learned why these two things—screaming and seeming to walk ankle deep in hard earth or rock—are the signs of a great m’téoulin among the Abenakis; but it is so and always has been so. There is no trick about the screaming, which a m’téoulin practises in remote places, starting when a young man, so that in time he is able to scream fearfully, in a manner beyond the comprehension of those who have never heard the scream of a m’téoulin. About the walking there is a trick, though I have never learned it; nor have I understood why it should so fill the Abenakis with amazement and terror. When a m’téoulin walks thus his feet appear to sink deep into the ground, as though he walked in the soft sand at the bend of a tide river; and I have heard it said that the footprints of a powerful m’téoulin are often found sunk deep in stone.

  When I invited Cap to smoke
a pipe in Hobomok’s cabin, he protested that he would not smoke with a dirty bug-eater, especially since the tobacco would be mixed with rat’s fur and stink-bush leaves; but I told him that even though what he said were true, which it was not, we had been sent to make ourselves useful, and this was a part of it.

  We entered behind Hobomok, who took a pipe from a shelf at the far end of the cabin, filled it, and gave it to me while Cap looked on, grumbling. Then he turned from us without a word and left the cabin.

  “Now what ails this ill-begotten bug-eater?” Cap asked; but in that moment Hobomok rejoined us. He seemed to swell and tower upward toward the roof, and his face was hideous. He took three short steps toward us, dragging his legs like a man wallowing through a snowdrift. I could feel Cap, breathing hard, fumbling at his waist for his knife. Before he could reach it, a convulsion swept Hobomok’s face and body. His eyes bulged, and from his contorted mouth came a shriek so piercing and so awful that, although I had prepared myself, it came against me like a clammy hand, drawing frozen fingers along my spine, and piercing my ears like knitting needles.

  Then he turned from us and went out. I looked at Cap, and found him staring glassy-eyed at the door, his hands and his mouth half open. I had heard my father say that when a good m’téoulin screamed unexpectedly in a room, no person in that room could move. Perhaps the strange walk of the m’téoulin, followed suddenly by his scream, first holds and then numbs the attention of those who hear him. It may be that which happens to a hen when a boy holds her beak against a board, draws with a piece of charcoal a long straight line from the tip of the beak outward along the plank, and presses her head against it. The hen remains there, helpless and unmoving; and so, too, did Cap stand until I shook him. During the remainder of the time we were together he called no Indian either lousy or ill-begotten until he had first looked over his shoulder to see whether he was overheard.

  What with the vagueness of Colonel Arnold’s orders, and General Washington’s mislike for Indians, and the low opinion both those officers held concerning my thoughts on bateaux, I scarce knew what to do. I considered myself handy with a paddle; but I could no more navigate the upper Kennebec without Indians who knew the waters and the country than I could visit Boston without breeches. The Kennebec country is wild: more tumbled and torn than can be imagined by any man who has not struggled through it. Therefore I decided I would do for Colonel Arnold what I would do for myself.