3stalwarts

by Unknown

  She did not recognize his voice.

  “Don’t go away.”

  She hesitated.

  “Turn around.”

  Again she obeyed. Then her hands went to her hair.

  “No,” he said. He was smiling now. His eyes were deliberate. “Leave it for last,” he said.

  She felt the last drop of strength going out of her. It almost made her cry out as she surrendered. She pulled away the laces of the short gown, put it back over her shoulders, and let it drop from her bare arms.

  The lamp put a soft shine on her skin as she bent her neck and undid her petticoat. It fell round her ankles. For an instant she stood so, half bent, in its encircling rough folds. Then she stepped from it, timidly, and for a brief moment encountered his eyes, her hands raised tentatively to undo her hair. She had no will of her own under his deliberate and amorous dominance; and she seemed held for an eternity in her submissive pose.

  His nod released her. Her fingers flew to the pins, loosening them and letting her hair fall of its own weight down her back. Her breath came out of her breast with a shudder, and the pins dropped from her hair with a little sprinkle of sound on the broad planks. She stood quite still with her hands hanging limply at her sides, the palms turned childishly forward.

  For a moment more Gil watched her. Then he smiled slowly, stretched out his hand, and pressed it down over the small flame of the Betty lamp.

  3. At Herkimer Fort

  The same evening, across the river in Fort Herkimer, Emma Weaver sat on the hearth considering all the things on her mind. What chiefly troubled her was the effect this garrison life was having on her oldest son. John had turned fifteen during the winter and grown fast. Already he was almost as tall as his mother, and since he had been issued an old French musket and appointed to regular sentry go, he considered himself a man.

  It wasn’t that he was undutiful to her; but she could tell that in the last few days he no longer acknowledged her authority in his personal affairs. She had only to look up from her shed against the stockade wall and see him passing, lanky and rawboned, with stiff strides back and forth upon the walk, to know that John had passed beyond her reach. And when he came in from his duty and sat down to supper she saw the impatience in his face to be through with the meal and get off to the blockhouse on the east, where the squad of soldiers bunked and where he could listen to what he now considered man’s talk. The rough laughter, in the evenings, would pass heavily across the enclosure.

  Emma didn’t mind man’s talk. Men together were entitled to their own ways of fun; but John was too young yet. Careless ideas took hold too hard. And with the way the place was crowded, so that there was no privacy, she was afraid that John would get entangled with some girl she herself could not like. There were plenty of them, and there were plenty of times when she had seen John, with the exhibitionism of the first impulse of manhood, stretching himself out in the sun before the blockhouse. He would take off his shirt, like the other men, baring his skinny torso, and drawing deep arching breaths with his chest, while he pretended to doze.

  So far, she thought, he had not made a shine at any particular girl. It was just the idea of manhood getting at him now. But there were one or two girls her maternal eye had noticed watching John. Young Mary Reall for one, the Realls’ oldest. She had no special urge against the girl, except that the Realls were idle, shiftless, loose-thoughted people, and if John were to marry early he ought to marry a girl with a settled way of seeing things. She wished George would come back so she could put the matter in his hands. George was sure to stamp on any nonsense. For all his easy-going temper, George had an instinct for righteousness that would put a curb on the boy, as it had curbed her own quick temper in their first married days.

  The Realls, two partitions down, all reveled in the life. There was no steady work to do. They had no cattle to look after. Mrs. Reall eased about all day, letting the brats run wild. Peebles, the baby, had been weaned, and scurried like a puppy all over the parade ground on his hands and knees. In the evening he had to be hunted up and brought to bed, but Mary had taken on that duty. Mary was doing all their cooking, and it was also Mary who swept out their eight-foot square of space when she could borrow a broom, shook up the hemlock bedding, and saw that one of the boys carried their night’s pail of slops to the dumping ground outside the stockade. It was a comfort to have a child at last grow up, and Mrs. Reall let herself luxuriate. She had another baby on the way and it did her good to be idle.

  Mary Reall was fourteen now, a colorless girl, with light brown un-braided hair down her back. She had her father’s rather pointed and ef-feminate features, but in her narrow face they were appropriate. On the rare occasions when excitement or heat or worry brought color to her face, it startled one who knew it, seeming beautiful. Not until the gradual cramped settling down of all the people had she noticed the lads being handed out guns. There were thirty boys, and only seven guns, and looking at them while she leaned idly against the wall of the shed, her eyes had singled out John Weaver.

  Like the other boys he looked excited and tense. It would be an honor to be given a musket by the army sergeant— a man who knew war and men and guns. He was a grizzled old fellow with a swollen red nose and a lewd mouth and sharp eyes, and he lined the lads up before him and learned their names and looked at them. John Weaver, standing with the others, tried to keep his eyes on the sergeant, but he also felt that people were watching his back. He sent a sidelong estimating glance round the stockade, and met Mary Reall’s gaze. He did not show that he recognized her. He let his eye run past, quickly faced front, and colored to his hair. It had surprised him to see how she had grown. Her faded cotton short gown was tight over her breast and her long slender legs looked less slatty.

  “You first,” said the sergeant, and tapped John with the point of his forefinger. John turned quite white and weak and unbelievingly stepped forward to accept the musket. Though some of the boys were older, he had been singled out the first. He felt the envious stares of the other boys on his back, as surprised as himself, then, following the sergeant’s nod, went forward into the door of the blockhouse, walking a little stiffly like a young dog, into the company of men.

  Mary Reall did not change her position for several moments, but leaned where she was, thinking about how often she used to meet John Weaver up in Deerfield and how he had seemed to her just any dirty boy. But now she saw how tall he had become, how his shoulders had begun to fill at the back like a man’s; and it came to her with a sense of awe that she had been brought up almost next door to him, so that in a sense she shared the honor of his first promotion.

  When she went inside their hut, she was ashamed to see that supper had not yet been started. Mrs. Reall snickered when the fact was pointed out. “What difference?” she wished to know. “What difference?” Mary could not say rightly even to herself. But there was a dim apprehension that if John could do a man’s part it was time for her to think of a woman’s. She set to work at supper, and then cleaned out all the magpie mess of their inhabiting, picking up the children’s shirts where they had been trodden into the dusty earth of the floor, shaking them and hanging them up, and borrowing a broom from the next shed to sweep with. “I declare,” said Mrs. Reall. “You’ve made it look real homey.”

  Mary felt proud and tired, but also ashamed when she was through and, looking up, beheld John, for the first time, marching back and forth across the opposite sentry walk. His beat took him behind the church, so that she saw him first at one end, then the other. She could have cried because they had not even a tallow dip that she could light, for him to see her work, and herself sitting in the entrance. Instead she had to move over to another door and stand there, trying to be noticed by him while at the same time she kept out of sight of the people whose light she had unobtrusively borrowed.

  It was there that Emma first noticed her, and it was there also that John saw her again, for he was paying as much attention to the interesting in
terior of the stockade as he was to the outside and faceless night.

  And on being relieved he went back to the blockhouse the long way, passing the hut, and finding her still there.

  “Why, hello,” he said carelessly, “ain’t that you, Mary Reall?”

  “Hello,” she said, with an effort at surprise. “I hadn’t seen you before, John. How are you?”

  “You didn’t?” he couldn’t help contradicting her. “I thought you was watching when they passed the muskets out.”

  “Well, I was,” she said. “But I didn’t notice anyone particular.”

  He was huffed. But he didn’t like to say he was the first selection. So he said, “I hope you’re all well.”

  “Nicely,” she said. “And you?”

  “We’re fine,” he said. “It’s funny you didn’t see us, though. We came in this morning.”

  “It’s so crowded,” Mary said. “You know how it is.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re awful crowded.”

  He paused a moment, then shouldered his musket awkwardly.

  “Well, I got to report to Sergeant,” he said, and stalked off. “See you again, maybe.”

  Mary watched him go. Then she hurried back to her own space and crept in over the sleeping bodies of her family. She lay down in the corner space reserved for her, glad that there was no candle now. For she was crying, and wondering what in the world had made her talk the way she had.

  The fort was a stifling place. The twelve-foot pointed logs of the palisade cut off what air might move. The bark-sheathed roofs of the sheds, only a foot over the people’s heads, were their only shelter against the sun, which burned through the heavy air with the intensity of a burning glass. Even in the church, whose stone walls kept it relatively cool, the air grew so stale that people left it for the outdoor heat.

  The life was enervating; there was no chance to exercise, except to walk round the fields in sight of the stockade, keeping a safe distance from the woods or fields of standing corn that might give cover to an Indian. They dared go only to the nearest farms, since the garrison could offer them no protection beyond the walls. And after their first few morning chores were performed, the pails emptied in the ditch, the sheds brushed out, and the water drawn, there was nothing left to do but get their meals and talk.

  Even the talking petered out. There was not a family who didn’t have a father or brother or son in the army that had gone west with Herkimer. Once the first conjectures had been interchanged and the family news caught up with, nothing remained to be talked about except the heat.

  They had no news from the army. They had no news from Fort Stanwix. They had no news from the east. All they could do was to listen and wait, and watch with a growing concern for the first possible appearance of the enemy.

  Only the squad of Massachusetts soldiers in the blockhouse kept up a kind of conversation in their nasal Yankee voices; but they kept their talk to themselves. They feared and disliked the Palatines as much as the Palatines disliked them. Most of the time their captain, who commanded at the fort, went over the river to pass the time with Colonel Weston, at Fort Dayton, returning after supper in the dusk, giving the countersign outside the gate, marching through in his rust-colored coat and cocked hat, looking neither to left nor to right, as if he held his breath against a troublesome smell, until he reached the blockhouse. He passed through the guardroom with a curt good-night and mounted to his quarters in the upper room. The people could see his shadow there at times, drinking brandy by himself—or sometimes he leaned from the window, smoking a last pipe.

  It was queer how quickly all these things became familiar parts of their existence, as if they had spent long lives already in a confined space. It made them apathetic, resigned, and fearful, and the soldiers spoke contemptuously about the German race.

  In the midst of it, Mary and John continued their gradual approach in a kind of hushed expectancy. They moved their separate lives through the crowdedness and the dirt and the hostility as if they made a mist in which they apprehended each other’s shapes, dimly. Yet the meetings had poign-ance that only two such beginners could be aware of.

  The time when Mary, rising in the middle of the night, heard the sentry steps halt overhead and recognized them for his, and realized that he must have heard her stirring, was mysterious and intimate; and the next morning when she encountered him at the well and they said good-morning to each other with formal politeness, they saw in each other’s face that both had shared it.

  In spite of Emma Weaver’s doubts, that was as far as either of them had got till the night of the sixth, when, long past sunset, a boat was rowed across from Fort Dayton and the news of the retreat delivered.

  Then, three hours later, the first bateaux had arrived with General Herkimer. The fort had been hailed. The gate opened, and the general was carried in past the waiting silent people, holding torches here and there, to the church. After the gates were closed the people moved up to the church windows and talked softly to those who had their beds inside, and learned that the general was wounded in the leg. The men who had brought him lay down in the western blockhouse and would not answer any question. They slept like animals.

  In the next few hours other boats arrived. One of the first brought George Weaver home, and John was one of the garrison sent to help him to the fort. As he entered with his father, he saw Mary standing beside the gate, her eyes searching the faces of the new arrivals, and it came to him that alone of all her family she had the interest to look for her father.

  He helped put his father down on the hemlock bed and stood back while his mother unwrapped the bandage from his chest.

  His father said, “Hello, John.”

  “Hello,” said John.

  Emma said, “I’ll tend to Pa. You’d better get back where you belong. Cobus can fetch me things.”

  “I will,” said John. He looked down on his father’s big body hesitantly.

  “Where’d you get the gun, son?”

  Emma said, not without pride, “He’s one of the watch.”

  “You’d better get along.” His father lay back and groaned as Emma ruthlessly pulled away the cotton. Then he opened his eyes and met John’s. “What’s on your mind, son?”

  “Did Christian Reall … ?”

  He saw his mother’s back stiffen.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see him. But Jeams MacNod’s outside. He’ll know.” George closed his eyes. Without opening them he said almost apologetically, “I got this at the first beginning, son.”

  John left them with a sudden realization that they might like to be alone. He returned to the gate where the schoolmaster sat in his tattered black coat, hatless and unshaven, a venomous kind of terror still printed on his face.

  He looked up at John’s question.

  “Kitty Reall?” he said. “You want to know where Kitty Reall is? Well, I can tell you. He’s laying with his face over a log. He’s scalped. But he ain’t half of what there is to see. …”

  John said savagely, “You know he’s dead?”

  “I’m telling you… . What do you think? They ain’t satisfied with just killing. I never saw Indians before. It ain’t war. My God!”

  Turning away, John saw Mary Reall standing by the corner of the church. She was watching him still, her thin pale face a little lowered, looking out from her brows.

  A wave of sick pity went over John and he walked up to her, taking her arm without a word. She didn’t protest, but went with him quietly. As he walked her forward he kept searching for a place they could be private in. But there was no unoccupied corner within the stockade, till it occurred to him to look up at the sentry walk.

  All the men were round by the gate, looking down over the points of the palisades at the river.

  “Come up with me,” said John, and climbed the ladder. They could stand in the angle of the walk made by the palisade and the blockhouse wall. No one could see them from below.

  John waited for her, with hi
s eyes on the faceless night beyond the stockade. She came up quietly beside him on her bare feet and leaned with him against the pointed upright logs.

  It was the nearest to him she had been since he had first become aware of who she really was. Her dress touched his side, and through the dress he could feel the slim round hardness of her body. Her hair had a faint smell of its own, like spice over the body scent.

  She waited for him to speak. She had not yet said a word on her own part. But she leaned beside him against the stockade, taking one point between her breasts like a spear, and when he turned his head she did not turn hers.

  “Mary,” he said.

  “Yes.” She waited again; but when he could not go on she asked quietly, “Did you hear anything about Father, from that man?”

  “Yes.”

  It seemed an awful thing to say. As if he were killing Christian Reall with his own words.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  She was making it easy for him.

  “Yes, Mary.”

  She did not cry or do anything that he might have expected. But she turned suddenly to him, so that he saw her face oval against the peeled logs of the blockhouse.

  “It was kind of you, John, to find out. I wouldn’t have known how to ask.”

  “It’s nothing. I wanted to help.”

  “I’m grateful to you.”

  He felt himself grow stiff and his voice tightened.

  “It’s awful. But, Mary, I’ll always be willing to help you. Whatever there is you need, you’ll let me know. I think you’re the finest girl in German Flats.”

  It wasn’t what he had set out to say, but he meant it. And she was standing just as stiff as he. “You’ve been so good,” she was saying. “I’ll always remember how good you’ve been, John.”

  “I wanted to tell you myself,” he said. Then suddenly he leaned forward over his musket. She bent a little towards him and they kissed each other, briefly.