Bess Streeter Aldrich - Song of Years

Emily, to tide over Suzanne’s discomfiture and the intermittent laughter at it, suggested settling down to a good sing, and began it herself by starting off a tuneless version of “Bonnie Charlie’s now awa’ ” pitched impossibly high, so that it ended in laughter and a fresh start with a more reasonable attack.

“Bonnie Charlie’s now awa’

Safely o’er the friendly main . . .”

Their voices rose lustily, Sabina’s true and strong, Suzanne’s sweet and clear, Tom Bostwick’s thin and high, Wayne’s rolling out with resonant melody, Emily’s off-key, Jeanie’s a little indifferent because she was turning her brown eyes first toward Sam Phillips and then George Wormsby, getting a good deal of fun out of their surreptitious glaring at each other.

“Mony a heart will break in twa . . .”

The candles on the shelf above the fireplace flamed up wildly in the wind, for in the deep interest of the singing, no one had heard the horseman coming or noticed the first creaking of the door which was flung open so suddenly as to knock Celia against the wall.

A man stood on the threshold, wild-eyed, breathing hoarsely. He flung it at them like a ball of burning pitch. “The Indians are coming!”

The song broke off as suddenly and definitely as a brittle plum branch snapping in the wind. Every one stared at the messenger.

It was not believable that such an evil thing could tear its way into the midst of all this friendliness. No one moved for part of a split second. The news hung there in stillness like the silence of the prairie after a crashing report of thunder has ceased.

It was Jeremiah who spoke and the steadiness of his voice brought back their reassurance. “Aw, hell,” he said scornfully, “we’ve heard that yarn before.”

“It’s true this time.” The messenger’s voice rose in a frightened crescendo. “A man run his horse all the way down from the Big Woods. They’re on the rampage above there . . . startin’ with Clear Lake . . . down through Clarksville . . . they killed all the Clear Lake settlers . . . They’re pretty near to Janesville . . . hundreds of ’em . . . war-paint on . . . killin’ and burnin’ everything as they come. All the whites are comin’ down the Cedar.”

He was gone on into the night to spread the alarm. They could hear the thud of his horse’s hoofs on the prairie to the east.

Wayne felt his heart beating wildly in that moment of awed silence which followed, realized he was standing motionless and numb when he should have been doing something. Queerly the thought went through him that the folks at home had warned him against this very danger. “A peaceful prairie country,” he had called it. “I was wrong and they were right,” he thought, staring at the assemblage, only a moment before noisy with song and laughter. There was no song now and no laughter. Bonnie Charlie was never to get across the friendly main.

Not a half minute had gone by, but it was like an hour with that silence, concentrated, frozen, in which they were all mummified figures dug from some ancient tomb.

The younger Mrs. Akin had snatched up her baby, pressing it tightly to her breast. The men were standing frowning, incredulous-looking, the women and girls white-faced, all merriment gone and joking forgot. The candles back of the gray-blue of Suzanne’s eyes had been snuffed out, leaving nothing but darkness.

For just that moment the silence and fear were merged and timeless as though some gigantic force held them all in its relentless grasp.

And then Sarah Martin, reaching for her black bonnet, broke the spell. “Let’s get on home,” she said dryly. “No old Injun is goin’ to stick his dirty thumb into my fresh strawberry jam.”

Wayne, hitching his horses hurriedly to the new wagon, experienced a definite feeling of anxiety over his move out here, the first uneasy questioning of its wisdom. Everything had appeared so auspicious, and now this. What would the night bring forth? An attack by the redskins? A firing of the cabins? Death to any of this group?

Boyishly he thought of the unwritten letter to his mother. If anything happened to him. . . ! He wished it had been finished and sent. He looked toward his newly completed cabin and, thinking of all the work he and these new friends had put on it in the last few days, lost his fright in a sudden anger and felt he could kill a dozen Indians single-handed.

The attitude of Jeremiah Martin and his sons steadied his jumping nerves. If they were frightened they were concealing it admirably as they loaded the pails and baskets into the wagon-boxes.

“By granny, I don’t believe it, yet. Somebody’s always hollerin’ about ’em,” Jeremiah was saying. “For two years now we’ve heard of hairbreadth escapes from bloodthirsty Injuns; homes burned north and west of here, stock drove off and I don’t know what all. It always turns out to be some Sioux kicked a Winnebago in the seat of his britches, and yet by the time it gets to us it’s another Injun raid.”

Yet Wayne noticed that he made Suzanne get into the wagon with the other girls and had Emily drive the team, while Henry, Phineas, and Tom Bostwick rode their horses at the wagon’s side. They made quite a cavalcade—all the Martins, the Burrills, the two families of Akins, the Mansons, Ed Armitage, Sam Phillips, George Wormsby, Tom Bostwick, and Wayne.

Some of the women were “taking on” about supplies and keepsakes left at home, but there was no talk of any one going out of his way to retrieve them. By common consent all were sticking together and bound for the Martin house, the largest and strongest of all those belonging to settlers. Mrs. Burrill, in particular, was moaning, wringing her hands, and cursing the day she had ever let Burrill talk her into coming out to this God-forsaken country. Ed Armitage, riding furiously up and down the length of the cavalcade, was not adding anything to the pleasure of the evening’s situation by intimating to each wagonload that out of all the ways to die, to be killed by a damn Injun was the worst. But the Martin girls were quiet, and Wayne, driving just ahead of them, knew now that for a Martin girl to be speechless was either to be asleep or laboring under a very strong emotion. Only once had they broken the silence. Melinda had said, “Oh, I’m not going to worry. If they come. Pa’ll thump ’em.” And they had all given way to low nervous laughter.

There was something ominous about that long snaky caravan wending its way across the prairie there toward the river trail. The silence of the people who had been so filled with song and jokes and laughter a short time before was louder and more affecting than ever noise had been. The creak of wagon wheels, the faint clank of harness, the swish of horses’ hoofs through the deep prairie growth, the odor of the crushed grasses under the night dew, the clammy mist rising from the bottom of swales, the little new moon caught by a dark rift of cloud—it was like a steel engraving etched on the mind with such strong strokes of fear that one knew it could never be erased in a lifetime.

If the Indians came at all it would be from the north or west, down the Cedar or Shell Rock, so more than one pair of eyes were constantly straining in that direction. When at last the wagons turned into the Martin inclosure behind the stake-and-rider fence, the sturdy log house loomed up as a haven.

Sarah and Emily hurried ahead at once into the main room, lighting a candle or two until the others could see to pick their way in. Already the thirty there made something of a crowd. But in two hours’ time twenty-one others from the north prairie had arrived by wagon and on horseback, turning instinctively to Jeremiah Martin, partly on account of the size of his cabin and partly because he was a natural leader and counselor.