Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 6

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It was early May when our heavily-laden coach bumped and lurched from the shade of the dense forest between York and Wells to skirt the long marshes and the tumbled sand dunes that showed us we were nearly home at last.

Nowhere is spring so vivid and refreshing as on the coast of Maine in May. The dunes are brilliant green and gold against the smooth blue ribbon of the ocean; and up from the marshes drift the sweet odours of young grass and newly-turned earth. Maples, shamed by their long nakedness, blush a little; while willows, wakening from their winter’s sleep, clothe themselves in a fragrant gauze of green. Over everything there seems to hang a web of song from the black-birds, robins, bobolinks and plovers that nest along the marshland.

I am impatient for my home, always, when I reach that strip of sea and marsh and ragged dunes; and on this occasion there was such an activity along the road that I was doubly impatient; close, even, to leaping from our clumsy coach and running the remainder of the way.

There were carts, loaded with provisions and livestock, creaking southward along the awful road—carts bound, our driver said, for Boston to feed the army.

There were knots of men with muskets, packs on their backs and kettles tied to their belts with string—shoeless, some of them; disreputably clad, and all moving south.

In Wells, where the inland road turns off from the sea road, there was a sizable crowd of men and women, simple country folk, before Littlefield’s Tavern, listening to a behemoth of a man who stood on the steps bellowing at them. His face was round and red: his garb a loose smock of dirty brown cloth, with a high pointed hood that gave him a look of a person from another world. The smock was belted at his waist, and below it were Indian leggings ending in moccasins the size of a punt.

From time to time he would hesitate in his bellowing to rub his face with a hand like a bundle of sausages. At this rubbing movement, a man who sat near by, dressed similarly, would make a quiet remark, at which his hulking companion would cough portentously, and resume his bellowing.

I recognised the quiet one as Steven Nason, a man who owns all the land at the mouth of our river, and maintains a tavern and garrison house behind the dunes across from Cape Arundel—a tavern which for food and cleanliness is the equal of any I know.

Unable to pass because of the crowd, we sat and listened to the bellower. “Look here, now!” he bawled. “We got eleven men agreed to go back to Canada, but that ain’t enough! We got to have twenty! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re rebels, all of you, just the same as me and Steven! If the British ain’t drove out of Canada, they’ll come down here and hang every damned rebel there is, and that means the whole kit and caboodle of you! Ain’t it better to go off on a nice long trip, that you’ll get paid for making, and get a uniform to wear, and free rum, and learn to talk French? Ain’t it better than getting hung? I hope to die if it ain’t!”

In the midst of his bellowing, his eye fastened on mine. He hesitated, lost the thread of his discourse, rubbed his red face with his vast hands as if to clear it of cobwebs: then came lumbering to us through the crowd.

He pushed his head and shoulders in at the open window of the coach, and darted his eyes from our faces to the packages at our feet. “Where you from, brother?” he asked. “What’s your name? Where you live, and what’s your father do?” His breath was so redolent of rum that a whole distillery seemed to me to be crowding into the coach with us.

Before I could answer, his head and shoulders were withdrawn from the window even more suddenly than they had been inserted. Beyond him I saw Steven Nason, his hand still clutching the bawler’s shoulder. “Cap,” Nason said, “you got to be more careful around here! I know these people. They’re from Arundel.”

“Where they been?” Cap demanded belligerently.

Nason pushed him to one side, gave a glance to sleepy-looking Mr. Leonard, and shook hands with Nathaniel and me. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “We need people like you. These people around here, they won’t fight unless you guarantee ’em half a dozen cows bounty, and sometimes not even then.” He smiled at us apologetically. “It’s made Cap Huff kind of fretty. He’s peaceable enough when he’s marching or fighting.”

He looked over his shoulder at Huff, who stood glowering at us. “Or when he’s drunk,” Nason added. “When you get to know him better, these little ways of his won’t mean a thing to you! Not a thing!”

He stepped back and motioned our driver to go ahead. “We’ll be over to see you later!” he shouted as we creaked onward.

So the last five miles of our travels were thoughtful ones, and we were happy indeed when our coach rolled along the edge of the plateau that lies above the marshy, winding valley of the Arundel River, and we caught at last the smell of oak chips and marsh mud that rises from the shipyards at the river’s edge.

From the look on Mr. Leonard’s face, when we bumped to a stop before our front gate and the door flew open to reveal my sister Jane, her hands upraised and her eyes saucer-like with amazement, I could see he had expected no such house as ours.

That is the way of it with Englishmen and Frenchmen, I have found, to say nothing of people from Virginia and New York and Boston. They think we are savages in our Province of Maine, living in log huts with dirt floors, dipping our fingers into one iron pot for our dinners, and talking a strange and unrecognisable language; whereas the truth is that most of us learn our English out of the Bible through being made to read it aloud when young; and we live about as well as any one anywhere—some of us poorly, and some of us in style, but all of us sensibly and quietly.

... It is for the sake of folk who know nothing of us that I tell here a few things about this howling wilderness in which we Maine men live. Half the wars that are made would never be fought if those who have the directing of affairs, like Lord Germain, should know the truth about the people and the country where the fighting must be done.

Our Province of Maine, then, is larger than all of England; it has fine harbours and rivers and mountains; tremendous rich forests, and a wealth of game. Our people are willing and enduring—friendly people when treated properly, but the very devil when put upon and their rights disregarded: as much so as Virginians, though the Virginians have talked the world into thinking bravery and honour are almost exclusively restricted to Virginia. Maine men can fight, too, if properly led; for it was mostly men from Maine who sailed to Louisburg, in 1745, and took that granite fortress from the French—as handsome a piece of fighting as any soldiers ever did anywhere.

Nor are our towns to be sneezed at. Falmouth was as beautiful as any seaport I know before the British captain Mowat sailed up to its unprotected and undefended wharves and set the place ablaze. It is true our towns are poor, because of the wars our people fought for England against the French and Indians for so many years; and there is a deal of rum drinking in them, and over-much prying from behind curtains at the doings of others. We do not have the palaces and churches and statues to be seen in so many English towns. But neither do we have the trulls and rakes and footpads and debtors’ prisons and diseases with which English towns are cursed; so all in all I think our towns are better than most.

Our home in Arundel stands at the double curve in the river, a mile and a half from its mouth, on the same land where my great-great-grandfather settled when he removed from Ipswich because of being deprived of his vote by that town as a punishment for harbouring a Quaker.

It is a square house of two stories, painted red, with three gables protruding from each side of the four-sided roof. Perched on the top is a cupola with windows on all four sides, from which my father can look down into the shipyards behind the house and shout at any shirking adze-man or carpenter. From this vantage-point, too, he can train his glass on the mouth of the river, and know what vessels are making port, and how they are progressing with their loading and unloading as they lie at anchor beyond the bar.

Our river is small—so small that we build our vessels parallel to its course and slide them in sideways. Yet it is large enough to accommodate a brig of two hundred tons, which is as big as a man needs, no matter to what part of the world he wishes to sail. I can stand on one side of our river and shoot a duck as she rises from under the opposite bank; and in the spring of the year, after the salmon have stopped running, I can sit on the ways of our shipyard and cast a line entirely across the stream, as the tide turns upward, and take sea-run trout from their feeding-places under the edge of the foam that comes slipping along the shore, fresh from the ocean; so, in more ways than one, the very smallness of our river is an advantage.

Our house is large, as are the houses of most of our Maine shipbuilders. The rooms above and below stairs are plastered; and painted on the plaster are imaginary scenes, done by one of the Germans who travel periodically through our section, coming from the German settlements on the Kenebec—scenes showing merchant brigs breaking bulk in the lee of ruined castles, and scantily-clad people performing on musical instruments in the vicinity of heathen temples. Over the mantels in the dining-room and the front room is woodwork carved with jack-knives by two of the best workers in our shipyard; while over the dining-room mantel is a painting of my mother, done the year after she and my father were married, by John Smybert in Boston—excellently done, too, although my mother declares there is a little something wrong with the mouth.

We have nothing so elegant as Benjamin Pickman in Salem, whose house has a codfish carved on every stair-rise in the front hall; but our silver is good, some of it made by Paul Revere in Boston, and our feather beds cannot be beat anywhere, unless there is some place where goose feathers are softer than in Arundel.

Under the house is a dry cellar, stored with crocks of mincemeat made from properly cooked bear meat and venison—which is to say scarcely cooked at all—mixed with French brandy and the red eating apples from the tree that shades our kitchen windows: also smoked goose-breasts, hams, smoked eels, dried apples, dried corn, and cucumbers in brine, as well as tubs of pigeon, plover and partridge breasts packed in melted fat, so they can be eaten when fresh meat is scarce in the winter.

... It was my middle sister Jane who saw us first; and her scream was one to wake the dead. It brought my mother out of the kitchen, my father up from the shipyard, and Judith and Susanah down from the bedrooms. There was warmth in their welcome, and more; but there was a quietness about all of them that I had never before seen.

Instead of hurrying us into the front room, as they always did when I returned from a voyage, they stood in a row, looking at us, as though they thought to find in our faces the answer to a question they feared to ask.

“They treated you well in England?” my father inquired, after all the family had shaken hands with Mr. Leonard and had our explanation of the convenience he had been to us.

“It was wonderful!” Nathaniel exclaimed. “It was an education, the time we spent there.”

My father continued to stare at me.

“They treated us well enough,” I admitted, “but the only good thing I have to say of ’em is that they’re careful in money matters. The government’s a pack of blundering fools! If our ships and trade are going to be regulated by corrupt incompetents three thousand miles away, we might as well take to cobbling shoes.”

My father smiled sourly. “We didn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t know! We had a letter from Nathaniel, speaking highly of the English. It got around. Somebody saw it—somebody opened it. It’s easy to be misunderstood these days. Some of the best folks are Loyalists: some of the finest: but mostly they keep their mouths shut. We didn’t know—we didn’t know——”

Nathaniel laughed. “No great harm in seeing the good side of the English, I guess.”

“Well,” my father said, studying him, “outside of having all your property seized and being driven up to Halifax to live, there’s no great harm in it, unless somebody takes it into his head to tar and feather you.” He shot a quick glance at Mr. Leonard, whose eyes were almost hidden by their heavy lids. Mr. Leonard concealed whatever lack of interest he may have felt in our personal affairs by coughing pleasantly and making my father a slight bow, very polite.

“Don’t fret about Nathaniel,” I told my father. “He’s only being contrary, as he was taught at Harvard.”

My father sighed. “Let’s go into the front room,” he said, “where we can all sit down and have a thimbleful of something to better days.”