The Prize Page 6

  He went on combing her hair even after it was no more than merely damp, aware of the nearness of her. Finally, she had warmed and the tremors had faded from her body, and she spoke, quietly. “My maman used to comb my hair when I was a little girl,” she said. “But then she was taken by a fever, and Papa never did … ever after, I have had to comb it myself.”

  She didn’t seem to expect a reply, but went on after a long moment, “I should like another cup of tea, if you would.” He rose without a word to fetch the heavy cast-iron kettle from its hook over the fire.

  As he poured the boiling water over tealeaves in two cups on the table, he suddenly found that his hands were shaking so badly that he had to put the kettle down on the oaken surface, where it sizzled and smoked slightly. Lunette looked up sharply at the sound as he sank to the floor, shaking nearly as badly as she had been earlier.

  A note of alarm in her voice, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I … I almost killed you,” he choked out, leaning against the stout leg of the table. He sobbed for a moment, his arms tight around his knees as he rocked against the table. “For a worthless bit of gawking, you could be drowned, lying at the bottom of the lake.”

  So quietly that he could barely hear her over himself, Lunette said, “But I still live, and that is only thanks to your swift action.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded, willing himself to regain composure. After a deep shuddering breath, he said, “You father is going to kill me.”

  “Don’t worry about the canoe,” Lunette said. “You are right … it will fetch up on the shore in the bay, and you can bring it back.” She shrugged. “If not, I feel certain that Papa would rather have me home safe than his canoe.”

  “I was thinking about the burn on table, actually.”

  She giggled, a welcome and sprightly sound that lifted his heart, and said, “In truth, you may be right … that, he might kill you for.”

  Their tea was long since sipped down to dregs when the front door thudded open and Captain Mallett entered, calling out cheerfully, “Je suis à maison, ma chérie fille!” As he finished closing the door and turned into the room, his eyebrows went up to see Caleb and his daughter sitting together on the floor, and Lunette wrapped in a quilt.

  After regarding them for a moment, he spoke in a measured tone, in English, gesturing to punctuate his words. “I do not know what this is that I am seeing. I am expecting to see my daughter, cooking, maybe a fine fish, and instead I am seeing that she has been to her bed, and you sit here before my fire with her now?”

  Lunette said urgently, “Papa, laisse-moi t’expliquer. There was … an accident on the lake. He pulled me from the water, and carried me here.” A blush rising to her cheeks, she continued, “He has not been … upstairs. He saved my life.”

  Mallett rushed to her side, crouching down and wrapping her tightly in his arms, murmuring a stream of French into her ear. Looking up, he caught Caleb’s eye. “I am sorry. I misunderstood. Thank you. Thank you for my daughter.” Caleb nodded, averting his gaze from the tears he saw shining in the older man’s eyes.

  “It was my fault, si— um, Captain Mallett. I was looking away and did not see your daughter in her canoe until I had already hit it and knocked her into the lake.” He ducked his head. “I am sorry for my inattention. Your canoe was lost on the bay. I will find it or somehow secure a replacement for you.”

  Mallett nodded slowly, then chuckled. “Incroyable! Even on a great large lake, you find some way to collide with my little Lunette.” His chuckles grew into great guffaws, and he wiped away his tears, waving his hand in a grandiose gesture of dismissal. “I see that it would be of no use to tell you to stay away from her, even if that were her wish.”

  Lunette shrieked, “Papa!” buried her face in her quilt, her ears shining bright red.

  Mallett smiled indulgently at her. “I think that I have perhaps said more than she believes I should have.” The back of Lunette’s head nodded furiously. “I will speak no more of this, to keep her from finding some way to make me land in the lake next.”

  For his part, Caleb felt his face turning deeper and deeper red as he came to understand what the older man was saying. “I have not…” he began, and then, “It was not my intent…”

  Mallett held up a hand, shaking his head. “I have been speaking out of turn, lad, and you are not needing to explain yourself to me at this time.” He winked then, giving his daughter a playful jostle with the arm that was still wrapped around her. “Perhaps later, I think.” Caleb gaped at him, speechless.

  Looking out through the window at the sun, low over the lake, he said, “I am thinking that you will need to start off now if you wish to be at home before it becomes dark.”

  Fixing the younger man with a fierce gaze, he said, “I will see you tomorrow, I think, to look for my canoe.” Looking up at the kettle and sniffing the air, he added, “And to repair my tabletop.”

  As he paddled for home, Caleb’s head was awhirl, thinking about Lunette and her father, and the fact that he would have to see them again tomorrow. He was still lost in thought as he beached the dugout and walked up the slope to the farmstead. It was only then that he realized that his jacket must be lying on the floor still … amongst her wet clothes. He suppressed a shiver from the evening chill as he approached the house.

  As he walked in the door, his mother cried out, “Caleb!”

  His father was seated at the table, his head on his arms, but sat up abruptly at Polly’s exclamation. Samuel’s head whipped around where he sat opposite Elijah, to look at his brother. “Son! We thought you had had some sort of accident.”

  Caleb nodded grimly, squaring his shoulders. “I did, Da, in a manner of speaking. I ran into Lunette’s canoe, and I had to pull her from the lake.”

  Elijah swore, leaping up from the table, and then added, “She is dead, then?” Polly gasped, horrified, her hands flying to her mouth.

  Caleb held his hands up before himself and hastily said, “No, no, I got her up to the house and warmed up. She will be fine.”

  Elijah’s eyes narrowed. “How, exactly, did you come to a collision with her? The lake in March is no place for childish games.” Samuel’s expression, which had been one of concern, turned into a barely-concealed smirk at this, and Caleb favored him with a quick glare.

  “It wasn’t like that, Da. It was my error … I failed to keep watch where I was going as I rounded the point, and then she was there, and in the water. But at least I was able to save her and bring her back to her father.”

  Elijah relaxed and resumed his seat. “I see.”

  Polly spoke up then. “This Lunette is the daughter of that Frenchman, Captain Mallett?”

  “Yes, Ma,” Caleb said, bracing himself.

  “And you are already on a given-name basis with this girl?” Somehow, the word “girl” sounded worse in her mouth than the oath Elijah had let fly a few minutes prior. Samuel lowered his head over his meal, not wanting to be caught up in this.

  “We have … encountered each other on a couple of prior occasions,” Caleb said, but he could feel his blush betraying him.

  Now it was Polly’s turn to give him an unpleasantly suspicious look. “I see,” she said. Her tone said that she did not see at all, and would not likely ever want to see.

  Elijah reached out to his wife and took her arm, gently. “Polly, Mallett is not the man who killed your father. He no longer makes his home in France, nor even in Quebec, where they at least speak his milk tongue. He has made his home here, for many of the same reasons that we have.”

  Elijah looked over at Caleb, though he continued to speak to Polly. “Lunette is a fine girl, and if she does not hunt Caleb down and put a bullet to him for tipping her into the lake, I see no reason that we should interfere.” Caleb blushed anew.

  Polly looked at Elijah as she considered her husband’s words. Finally, she spoke, a fierce tone in her voice. “‘Tis true that Captain Mallett is not the same Frenchman
who stole away my childhood. I have heard rumors that he may have killed men before he settled here, that he was running from the French Navy when he arrived. Blood will run true, Elijah, and blood runs all around that man’s past.”

  “Polly, I have spoken with him directly about his past. True, he came here after making a career as a privateer in the Bahamas, at war with Bermuda.” Caleb now gasped, but Elijah paid him no attention and continued, “But he gave up that life when he came here to start a new life. He is genuinely filled with repentance for many of his actions, and he seeks now always to find ways to atone for his sins.”

  Elijah again looked Caleb in the eye as he spoke. “As we in this household know personally, he has served as a valuable conduit for critical intelligences during the present contest with England.” Turning back to Polly, he continued, “His is a singular position here … a man born in France, with no love for the land of his birth, and yet even less love for England, who can speak freely to the Canadians, regardless of their tongue, and who seeks to repay a debt to Creation by serving these Colonies.”

  Polly started to protest, but Elijah held up a hand and said firmly, “Captain Mallett is a good man, and his daughter is welcome under my roof.”

  Though the news of the war continued to be dark, it was springtime enough in his heart to sustain Caleb. The wonderful birch bark canoe had disappeared by the time Caleb returned the next morning to look for it, and Captain Mallett was loathe to buy a replacement from the Indians.

  “They would likely be trying to sell me my own canoe back, as I have little doubt in my mind as to where it wound up. No, we will undertake to build one for ourselves, you and I, lad. And while we are at it, we will build a second beside it, to make things some more even, should you try again to drown my daughter. As fast as you are in that monster of a dugout, I can only imagine that you would fly like the very wind in a proper canoe.”

  Caleb did not know whether to be offended or pleased at old man’s comments, but he had to admit to himself that the prospect of being able to navigate the lake in a lighter craft was an exciting one. Mallett continued, “When I purchased that canoe from those Abenaki, I am watching carefully as they build it. There are some tricky bits to it, but I am good at seeing. We will figure it out, you and I.”

  Caleb spoke to his father about it, and Elijah said, gruffly, “Won’t hurt to have a second canoe. We can spare you a few days of each week, I think, so long as Samuel can pitch in. Sam, you’ll get the dugout when Caleb’s done, if that suits you?”

  “Yes, Da, I’d like that very much. ‘Twould be wondrous good to be able to reach the middle of the river for fishing.” And with that, Caleb suddenly found himself free to spend most of several months working alongside Captain Mallett—and his daughter.

  They started by felling and splitting several white cedar trees, stacking the wood to dry in the late spring warmth. Next, working with some maple saplings, they roughed out how they would shape the gunwale, which would form the top lip of the craft, and the center rib. After a series of attempts, by a process of trial and error, with Lunette sometimes coming out to where they worked to make helpful suggestions, they had a template that they could use in the construction of the actual canoes.

  As spring stretched into summer, Caleb and Mallett took the dugout into a swampy area near the sand bar between the mainland and the island, where Mallett directed the younger man to the foot of a spruce tree. Mallett scored the sides of the tree with a hatchet, after which he said, in reply to Caleb’s wondering look, “You will see the sense in this when we come back later.” He nodded to himself and gave the tree another column of shallow scars.

  They pulled up great lengths of roots from the spruce and brought them back to soak in a barrel of water. Once it was softened, they drew it through a notched plank, stripping the bark off, and leaving them with a tough, fibrous, and supple material with which to sew the canoes together.

  As temperatures rose and summer proper got underway, Captain Mallett, Lunette and Caleb walked together to a copse of birch up on the far side of Mallett’s bluff. Lunette watched as they cut carefully so as to strip away just the bark, leaving the living pith below intact, and then they pulled off great long strips of it, from ground to as high as a man could reach. “If we have done correctly, the trees will survive.” Mallett shrugged. “If we have done incorrectly, I will cut these for the hearth later.”

  When they were done stripping the birches, all three carried a heavy load back down to the homestead, and immediately set to winding the bark tightly around straight saplings, forcing it to curl around in the direction opposite to its natural inclination. Fastening it with twine along the length, they stood the bark-laden saplings in a shady corner to dry.

  Returning to the swamp with Mallett, Caleb saw that each of the cuts he had made in the spruce, and another pair of spruce nearby, had oozed out a blob of sap perhaps as large as a British penny. Mallett handed him a bag of coarsely woven hempen cloth, and said, “Scrape the sap into here.” He laughed, “Our hands, they will be a sticky mess by the time we are done. We must hope that we have gotten this right so that we do not have to do it all over again!”

  When they got the bags back to Mallett’s homestead, he put them aside and said, “Let us be started on the frames, eh?” Taking up lengths of the cedar, they shaped the gunwales for the boats to match the template exactly. First one strip of cedar, then a sheet of birch bark, and then another strip of cedar were laid together and bound tightly with the stripped spruce roots.

  Carefully sewing additional strips of bark to the first course, they formed an elongated, tapered sling as they bound the opposite side of the gunwale into place. Setting cross braces between the two sides, they now pulled the ends together, forcing them to bend into a graceful, tapered shape at each end, which they bound and pegged together so that they would hold tight.

  This much done, they laid off for the day, walking in the loose, relaxed fashion of men who have done a hard day’s work, until they reached the tavern.

  The news there was not good. The threatened reinforcements arrived at Quebec City, and the Continental forces fell back to Montreal. Caleb sat between Captain Mallett, and his own father, who’d appeared shortly after their arrival, listening to a veteran lately released from the campaign by reason of having being stricken by smallpox. The man had recovered from his illness, but his face bore the telltale disfiguring scars.

  “We could practical hear Carleton’s army approach,” the man said, and paused to drink deeply from his third mug of hard cider. “’Twere a fearsome time, and we had loaded up most everything of use what weren’t bolted to the place, and some of what were, and burnt what we left. I was on nearly the last bateau to leave, and behind me, I saw General Arnold ride to the water’s edge, dismount and shoot his horse dead before he leaped aboard his bateau and we all shoved off.”

  Caleb looked up, distracted, as Lunette brought him a mug of cider. She smiled quickly at him, and then went back to the kitchen area, where she busied herself with a rag, polishing the top of the bar as she listened in on the conversation.

  “We laid to at Saint John’s, but Carleton kept pace with us, and we had to wreck that as quick as we could, too. By time we got to that Island of Noe place, I was starting to show pox, and all of us who was sick laid there in tents, and them who wasn’t as sick tended us.” Taking another deep drink from his mug to steady himself, the man concluded, “I been there for most of a month, and let me tell you, if I ever come so close as that to hell again, I should like to have gotten some proper sinning in first.”

  Elijah looked at the man’s ravaged face and said quietly, “There’ll be no need for any sinning here, nor need you to visit hell again ever. You need only give confession … if that is your way, I mean … and then go on living as you know you ought. ‘Tis easier to look your fellow man in the eye when your heart and soul are free of guilt.”

  “Right you are, good man. Right you are.” The man ra
ised his mug overhead to beckon Lunette to bring a fresh one.

  The next day, Captain Mallett and Caleb went back to work on the canoes. First, they set wide, thin slats of cedar to boil in a massive cauldron in the yard until it was supple enough to work, and then shaped the center rib around the template they’d worked out for that. Clamping it into the jig, Mallett quickly brought over the next slat, cursing in French as the hot wood scalded his hands while he fitted it inside the first.

  “There, now, you take a turn,” he said to Caleb, who selected another slat from the cauldron with tongs, and then hurried it over to the jig to fit it in. They continued in this fashion until they had enough ribs placed within one another to supply the bow of the first canoe. With nothing else to do until they cooled and dried, Caleb suggested that they have a look out over the lake.

  Nodding agreeably, Mallett set off toward his clearing, Caleb trailing behind him. “It will be two, perhaps three days before those first ribs will be ready to fit into the canoe,” the older man said over his shoulder. “Perhaps, while the weather is nice, you and Lunette should bring in some fish, eh?”

  Caleb blushed involuntarily and replied, “We can do that, yes.”

  Grinning slyly at the younger man, the Frenchman said, “Just promise me that you will not try to drown my daughter a second time, hmm?”

  When they reached the top of the bluff and stood in the clearing that Mallett had made for the purpose of observing the lake, he said, almost immediately, pointing out across to the far side of the water, “Look. There! And there. All along there, bateaux, all headed south.” He shook his head. “This, it cannot be good news. Perhaps they are only moving more men with the pox to Crown Point.” He paused, and then continued, quietly, “Or perhaps we will not be safe here on the lake for very much longer at all.”

  Then he clapped Caleb on the shoulder. “But! We should not be worrying until we see the ships full of English pigs sailing on the lake. For now, these appear to be your Continental forces; I do not think that the English would contest the lake in anything that could not bear cannon. So! You go down to the house, go fishing with Lunette. Better yet, set the trap … she knows where it is … down by the rocks there, on the shore, see if you can maybe catch us some eels.”