The New Land

by The New Land (retail) (epub)

  He gave her a serious look. “I worked this afternoon with Robert McDonnell.”

  She blinked. “He told you.” She grabbed the hands he was drying on the cloth. “I’m so ashamed, Johann.” She began to weep. “We quarrel like children. We act like children. We say terrible things. It’s like being on the ship, but worse because we’re not ever going to get out of here. It’s going to go on and on. It’s purgatory. Johann, I swear, I don’t know how much of this I can take. I’m losing my mind.”

  He dropped the towel and pulled her to him. He was smiling. After a moment, she pulled back and looked angrily at him. “I make a fool of myself and my family, disgrace myself forever in Broad Bay, and you sit there like some happy child who’s just been given a second pudding. Do you care nothing for what people think of me, what they think of you to be married to such a lunatic?”

  Johann tilted his head back and laughed out loud. She threw the cloth at him and stood. He grabbed her hand and pulled her to him.

  “Christiane, Christiane, my love,” he said. “Now everyone in Broad Bay knows what I’ve always known. That my wife, the mother of my children, is a lioness. That we are a family of lions. They won’t forget.”

  He leaned back and gave a loud roar that ended in another happy laugh. “Walther,” he called to the boy, who sat on the bench, staring with wide eyes. “Come here and roar with me and your mama!”

  The boy ran into his father’s arms, and the three of them roared. A small voice came from the bed. “Mama.”

  “Oh, Hanna, lambie.” Christiane fell into the bed and dug the little girl from the blanket. “What a mother you have,” she said, cradling her.

  “A lioness of a mother,” Johann said.

  They laughed again. When Richard started to cry, they decided he was roaring too.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  †

  Through the spring and summer, the grim reports trickled in. A farmer was found scalped and dazed near Brunswick. He died. Another in Pemaquid fought free from captors. A raiding party burned three farms in North Yarmouth. The royal governor in Boston offered a bounty for every Indian scalp, inciting whites to match the Indians in preying on the weak and defenseless.

  On a cloudy day in June, two settlers noticed that loose cows were trampling a common field of cabbages on the river’s west side. Bringing muskets, they crossed the river to gather up the cows. A war party killed and scalped one and carried off the other.

  The drumbeat of grim news drove some settlers to Boston, which was too big for the Indians to attack. The departures—about thirty families so far—left more room inside the stockades, but also shrank the number left to guard them.

  When Frau Schultheis and her family left, Ursula stirred from her despondency. She announced she would help with births in the settlement. As midwife, Ursula began to make a place for herself. Her assistant was nine-year-old Sigrid, grown solemn and diligent since her father’s disappearance. Ursula refused to consider leaving Broad Bay. This was their home, she insisted, and where Fritz would come if he escaped. Some Indian captives had emerged years later. She and Fritz came for the land. She wouldn’t give it up. Johann and Christiane lent her the money to pay General Waldo. They also helped her and her girls with food.

  Within two or three weeks of each bulletin about fresh Indian depredations, the settlers’ fears would begin to dissipate. They grumbled again about stockade life, about venturing out only under armed guard. One time or another, most sneaked off on their own to work on their farms, to see to a chore, to pick some berries that should be ripe, to fetch clean water, or simply to breathe in an open place, looking at the river, no one else around. The world outside the stockades taunted them. It was so wide and exciting, filled with adventure and riches waiting to be gathered, yet so deadly.

  Armstrong, during a trading visit, reported that settlers down the coast had started using dogs to guard them. When the Penobscots go to war, he explained, they smear their bodies with bear grease, which dogs can smell from hundreds of yards away. The dogs alerted settlers to danger better than any human senses could.

  By a lucky coincidence, Armstrong brought two dozen scruffy dogs with him, along with bear grease for training them. In a vivid demonstration, he had someone wave a cloth stained with bear grease from a distance of nearly a quarter mile. In a matter of seconds, each dog erupted in a frenzy of excitement. The reaction was the same if the animal was a hound or a terrier or had mixed ancestry.

  Johann bought one with a russet brindle coat and vague forebears. He named her Freya, after the goddess of war. Christiane and the children spoiled Freya with their own food through the summer, indulgences that didn’t soften Freya’s disposition when she joined Johann on patrol. Unfortunately, her barking could be indiscriminate. Squirrels, rabbits, and windblown leaves set off the same raucous warnings. But she also reacted to bear grease.

  “I don’t mind a nervous dog,” Johann told McDonnell one day in late autumn, when they were walking three farmers in the direction of the Pemaquid peninsula. Two of the farmers had each brought a son along. All of them carried hoes and buckets. “Freya is nervous for me.” The dog crossed the path to roust some dark birds from a bush. Johann noted the red chevrons on the blackbirds’ wings. They were the sergeants in the winged army.

  As captain and lieutenant of the guards, Johann and Robert huddled each week to adjust schedules and talk over developments, but they rarely patrolled together.

  “If you want someone to be nervous for you,” McDonnell said, “pick anyone in Broad Bay. The whole place is jumpy as hell.”

  “Better too jumpy than too relaxed.”

  “Sure,” the Scot said, “but too many false alerts make people indifferent, too relaxed. You know that.”

  Johann knew that. Alarm shots thundered across Broad Bay at least twice a week, sometimes more. They drove settlers into the stockades and brought guards on the run, guns in hand, powder and cartridge bags over their shoulders. So far, only one alarm had produced an actual Indian ambush, but that didn’t mean the savages weren’t there. The Indians’ ability to melt into the forest still impressed Johann. What the false alerts did mean was that the settlers responded more slowly each time. Some might even ignore an alarm. When there was real danger, that could be fatal.

  “What did Armstrong tell you?” Johann asked. “Anything new?” The trader had landed the day before. He and McDonnell sometimes drank whiskey into the night, having grown friendly since discovering that they both refused to enter the stockade named for the Duke of Cumberland, the scourge of Scotland during the Jacobin rising ten years before.

  “Nothing good,” McDonnell said. “There’s rumors of war parties coming down from the St. Francis. The Indians’ve got their crops in, so they’re ready to raid.”

  Johann grunted at the mention of the St. Francis bands. “They’re fierce,” he said, “and they know war.”

  “That they do,” the other man agreed, “and the French have armed them. If we have to fight, we’ll run out of powder and ball before they do. Also,” McDonnell said with emphasis, “they travel in numbers. In the last war, Armstrong says, they’re the ones who took on whole settlements, like this one, instead of picking off one or two at a time like our locals do. That attack on the Kennebec last fall—that was the St. Francis tribes, and it was damned bloody.”

  “They come a long way to make war.”

  “A couple hundred miles. That’s why they like to bring some trophies back, like women and kids.”

  “So, what do we do?” Freya started barking at the forest to their left. The men crouched, and Johann held out a hand to halt the others, who also crouched. After about ten seconds, the dog fell silent and started sniffing around her, then alerted again to the same spot in the woods.

  “See anything?” Johann whispered.

  McDonnell shook his head. Freya started sniffing off in another direction, no longer interested in the woods. McDonnell shrugged. “Maybe a deer.” The group start
ed walking again.

  After about twenty paces, Johann said, “We don’t have enough guards to increase the patrols, and the folks in the stockades want to get out more.”

  “I know,” McDonnell said. “We need to lose a scalp or two to get everyone’s attention again.”

  “If they attack a whole settlement, they come just before dawn, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “How about having at least two men take that last shift before dawn up on the watchtowers? Maybe one of them’ll stay awake.”

  “Maybe make ‘em take dogs up there.”

  “They’d have to carry them up the ladders.”

  “Small dogs.”

  Both men smiled. “All right,” Johann said. “We’ll get the men together on Sunday after prayer meeting and talk it over.”

  They neared the three farms on the peninsula. Each farmer moved to his own land. One pushed his son toward potatoes that should have been dug a week before. By hand gestures, Johann and Robert divided the visual fields each would monitor.

  Johann looked at the sun to mark the beginning of the two hours they could stay. The days were shortening and the leaves beginning to turn. Another winter in the stockades lay before them, but this day was a gem. The sun heated his face and hands as the early chill lost its bite. Fluffy clouds hurried across the sky, their shadows racing over the land. Christiane had suggested they eat dinner that night just outside the stockade, looking out at the river. Johann was looking forward to it.

  The yellows and greens and oranges of the leaf trees danced in the breeze next to sober, dark firs. In addition to their guns, each guard carried a knife and a tomahawk. They couldn’t fend off a sustained attack, but the Indians usually wanted easy pickings, not battles.

  Then again, attackers might come by canoe before dawn, conceal their canoes and hide in the narrow strip of trees between the path and the bay. They prized boys as captives, young enough to be raised in the tribe. There were stories of abducted whites who refused to return home after years with the Indians. Johann always wondered about that.

  Indian life might not be any worse than life in the stockades. Once, while hunting, he had watched a small Penobscot camp. Three or four families lived there, doing the sorts of things that Johann and Christiane did with their family—preparing food and clothes while children played, scolding when necessary, speaking to each other, sometimes smiling. The Indians didn’t believe in the Word of God. They had their own ideas about how the world was made and the spirits that fill it. The part of their world he never understood, even less than he understood scalping, was that no one owned land.

  “Robert,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t the Indians own land?”

  “By God, they own land. They think they own this whole bleeding continent. That’s why they’re so dead set on driving us back into the sea.”

  “But that’s the whole tribe that owns the land, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why don’t individual Indians, the families, own land? They don’t have that, right?”

  “You’re quite the philosopher today,” McDonnell took a moment. “I guess it’s how they live, hunting and fishing. That needs too much land for any one man to own.”

  “Not back home in Hesse it isn’t. Our nobles own the hunting land.”

  “You’re right.” McDonnell was quiet for another spell.

  “But,” Johann started again, “they plant and raise crops, like we do. Yet none of the Indians owns the land they farm, right?”

  “Don’t believe they do.” McDonnell chuckled. “Are you thinking on trying to buy some from them?”

  “They might offer a better deal than General Waldo.” They both smiled. “You know, it just seems like the thing we’re most different about. We’ve both got religions. We’ve both got boats and weapons and war and shelters and families and farming and hunting and fishing.”

  “We’ve got lumbering,” McDonnell said.

  “They use the trees too. They cook over wood fires, and their wigwams have wooden frames. Their canoes are made from bark. All I can figure out that’s really different between us is the land.”

  “You may be right, John, but I doubt that changes much. Even if we only wanted to hunt and fish the land without sharing it out to each other, we still would be moving the Penobscots off of it. The Indians fight each other over land, over which tribe gets to hunt where. To them, we’re just another tribe.”

  “Maybe so. But their friends are the French, who sell land like we do.”

  “The French,” McDonnell spoke with a deeper voice, “don’t settle the land the way we British do.”

  “Or we Germans.”

  “Or you Germans. The French just set up trading posts and make money by cheating the savages. We come to stay, to build homes, to be part of America.”

  “That’s it, you see. We come for the land.”

  “All right, then. We come for the land. So, tell me, is all this deep thinking somehow connected to what Maggie says, that you folks are having another child?”

  Johann smiled and nodded over his shoulder at his friend. He felt his ears redden.

  “It’s little wonder the Indians are angry,” McDonnell said. “I swear that the Overstreets are going to overrun the entire continent all by themselves.”

  “We’ll still be two behind the McDonnells.”

  McDonnell grinned. “It’s a punishing thing,” he said, “this business of enjoying your wife and what it leads to. Maggie says that’ll be three in four years for you. You need to start leaving that woman alone.”

  “My Bible tells me to go forth and multiply.”

  “God was talking to the Hebrews, not to the Germans.”

  “Or to the Scots.”

  Each man continued to watch his share of the woods. Johann checked the sky. Another hour.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  †

  The birth of Franklin Overstreet came at the end of a frigid March. The people of Broad Bay had marveled over a warm January. The river didn’t freeze until nearly the end of the month. Even February wasn’t so bad. No one risked pulling a full sled across the Medomak until the gales of March blew away every hope of an early spring.

  As befit the squally month, Franklin’s arrival was stormy. Christiane’s labor lasted much of a day in the smoky stockade room while a blizzard howled outside. Ursula, assisted by Sigrid, did what she could, but Christiane’s torment dragged into the night. The storm trapped Johann in Ursula’s room with the children—his three and Ursula’s small one, Herta. A neighbor came with a pot of warm porridge. Johann told Bible stories he had heard as a child. Walther loved the one about Daniel in the lion’s den. Then Johann had to tell more stories. He tried to remember others he had heard Christiane and Ursula tell, but Walther kept correcting him when he got them wrong. In Christiane’s final hour, just before dawn, her shouts competed with the winds that screamed through the stockade.

  The ordeal drained Christiane more than the earlier births had. She was too weak to leave the compound for several weeks, seeming to grow paler and thinner. It didn’t help that Franklin arrived angry with the world, his temper worsening as spring tiptoed into Broad Bay. He was quiet only when he ate, which he did voraciously, and when he slept, which he did rarely. If Johann tried to hold his new son, Franklin’s little body went rigid with rage. His face turned scarlet. Only Christiane could comfort him, so she spent every day with this tiny tyrant, shuffling across their room with Franklin in her arms until she collapsed on the bed, which was Franklin’s signal to begin screaming. The other children, even Johann, learned to sleep through Franklin’s fury, but Christiane wasn’t allowed. She sometimes wept as she tended to him. His cries, erupting through the night, drove Ursula and her daughters to move to an empty room farther from the Overstreets. Neighbors assured Christiane that the baby would grow out of it. A few whispered that he was possessed by demons.

  Watching Christiane grow mor
e haggard, her energy ebb, Johann felt helpless, snared by his obligations. During the days, he had shifts with the guards, both on the watchtower and escorting settlers. As captain, he fielded problems all day and many nights.

  He had agreed to McDonnell’s proposal that the guards earn money for the whole settlement by hauling firewood for shipment to Boston. The farmers could never bring in decent crops under these conditions, McDonnell had argued, so they had to draw on Broad Bay’s one source of wealth. Some guards complained that they wouldn’t be able to take care of their farms. “We’re in a war,” Johann said. “This is what war is like. Small people like us, we suffer. We do the best we can. We take the fish, we take the shellfish, we take the wood. And we pray for victory and peace.”

  When a few were unmoved by Johann’s words, McDonnell stepped in, speaking slowly in the hope they could follow his English. “You can’t take proper care of your farms, am I right?” He made a hoeing motion, then wagged his finger. “So”—he wielded an imaginary ax—”why not do something that you can make a little money at?” He rubbed his fingertips together in the universal gesture for funds. The men nodded.

  Johann organized logging parties and shipping schedules. They took the trees from land the settlers hoped to farm when the war ended, then shipped the wood out on coasting sloops that had to evade the French.

  In the evenings, while his family tried to sleep through Franklin’s fits, Johann worked on his carpentry. He brought his tools into the room Ursula had vacated. He made it his workshop, daring anyone to challenge him, the captain of the guard. Working by firelight, he built furniture for their room. A bed for the children. A second table. Stools to sit on.

  As he worked, Johann ached for his real wife to return, not this spectral figure enslaved to the baby. When he brought her mayflowers in the spring, she barely noticed. The idea seized him that childbirth was war for women. So much was the same—the pain, the fear of the unknown, the risk of death. And it had to be endured over and over. He couldn’t stop resenting Franklin and his constant demands, even thinking of the helpless baby as their enemy, an evil force dropped into their lives. The thoughts shamed him, made him promise God that he would be a better person, but then the thoughts stole back into his mind.