Calico Bush Read online

  “We want no flighty foreign critters under our roof,” she had heard one woman say.

  The other had expressed like disapproval and had even hinted that with King George at war with the French across the water, she wouldn’t feel she was doing her duty to consort with the enemy. But Joel Sargent and Dolly had not been so particular.

  “Another pair of hands and feet are what we’re in need of,” they had explained, “and so long’s she ain’t the contrary kind we’ll overlook where she was born and raised.”

  Marguerite had sat by while the papers were being drawn up and signed. She had not understood many of the strange words and phrases, but she had not missed their meaning. From that day till her eighteenth birthday she was theirs to command. She would be answerable to these people for her every act and word, bound to serve them for six long years in return for shelter, food, and such garments as should be deemed necessary.

  Hastily she slipped the cord and its treasures out of sight again and, tucking her bare feet under her, went at the wool more vigorously.

  This had been in March. Now it was June. Marblehead was well behind them. Save to herself she was no longer Marguerite Ledoux but the Sargents’ Bound-out Girl in gray holland and cotton sunbonnet, who answered to the name of Maggie when called.

  Her mistress was calling to her now. “Here, Maggie, mind the young ones while I fetch the men some victuals. Their stomachs must be clean empty, their tongues are that quarrelsome.”

  Marguerite rose quickly to take the baby, and the children flocked about her in turn, their sturdy fairness in marked contrast to her own dark coloring and wiry build. Becky and Susan, the six-year-old twins, were alike as two peas in a pod, a stocky pair with stiff little braids of yellow hair and blue eyes. They too wore sunbonnets and dresses of gray Holland, short in the sleeve and neck but gathered round the waist into full skirts that flapped about their bare ankles. Patty came next in order, being four, with Jacob, three, ever close at her heels. Their hair, white and curly as lambs’ wool, was sheared close to their round heads, and save for Jacob’s short breeches and dimpled chin they too might have passed for twins. The baby, Deborah, called Debby by them all, was eight months old and already showed tufts of light hair under her tight little cap. Her eyes were also very blue and her cheeks appleround and rosy.

  “Keep her out the sun, much as you can,” the baby’s mother cautioned from the cabin. “It’s hot enough to raise blisters on her, and this is no place for her to run a fever, dear knows.”

  “Yes’m,” Marguerite answered as she had been taught, crooking her arm to shade the baby’s face.

  “This old floor’s so hot it burns my feet, it does,” complained Becky, standing first on one foot and then on the other.

  “You should spread your dress out,” Marguerite told her; “and then if you fold your feet under you when you sit, you will not feel it.”

  She showed them how to do so, and they crouched beside her, all but Jacob, who climbed to the larger keg and sat with his feet stuck straight before him staring out to sea.

  “Prenez garde!” Marguerite cried as the boat swung about and the child all but slid off. Then, seeing the blank looks on the small faces before her, she caught herself up quickly: “Take care to hold fast!”

  “Yes,” echoed Susan, “and take care the boom do not sweep you over the side when they shift it.”

  They were used to boats, as were most seaport children of that day, and although Jacob was only three he was expected to look out for himself. He did not, however, remain long on his perch, for Caleb, happening by, picked him off by the back of his shirt and set him down with his sisters.

  “I’ll send you to join the fishes if you don’t watch out,” he chided before he hurried over to the men about the tiller.

  They were discussing charts and courses as they ate thick pieces of bread and cheese out of Dolly Sargent’s basket, washing it down with draughts of beer from a keg the Captain had brought aboard.

  “There ain’t no two ways about it.” The Captain spoke up at last. “We’ll stick to the inner course if it takes us a week from here to the Penobscot. When I said we’d go outside the shoals I didn’t lot on havin’ her so down by the head.”

  “Then we’d best put in at Falmouth,” Joel said, pointing with his big leathery forefinger to a place on the chart spread between them. “We’ll be ’most out of water and feed for the critters by then.”

  “Yes,” agreed Ira, “it’ll give us all a chance to stretch our legs a bit, and Dolly won’t look so glum if she knows she’ll have another sight of folks and fashions.” He smiled his long, slow smile, cutting off a hunk of tobacco from a plug he carried.

  “I guess it’ll be my last sight of them, and no mistake,” she answered him with a sigh. “’Twas hard enough takin’ leave of Marblehead, but I declare I’d feel ’most content to settle down in any huddle of houses now.”

  “That’s the woman of it,” her husband retorted. “Neighbors and gossiping from morning till night—that’s all you think about. But when it gets so settled a body can see houses on three sides from his own door then I say it’s time to be off where there’s land to spare.”

  “Plenty of elbow room, that’s what a man needs,” put in Ira. “I was commencin’ to feel cooped up in Marblehead long afore that man happened along to sell you his eastern land.”

  “Lots of folks never know when they’re well off,” Dolly remarked sagely between bites of bread.

  “And lots would live and die on a measly acre or two when they might help themselves to a couple o’ hundred.” There was a light in Joel’s eyes that showed he had already taken possession of those new lands. His great hands were crooked a little as if they itched to hold an ax. “Marblehead was gettin’ so full of folks you couldn’t rightly stir about in it. Sometimes the harbor was so cluttered ’twas as much as you could do to edge a dory in; and the highway the same, with such a lot o’ coaches and rigs ’twas a caution to cross it.

  “Well, you won’t be troubled in no such ways where you’re a-goin’.” Old Captain Hunt wagged his head knowingly. “If folks depended on coaches to go places there, they wouldn’t get very far—no, by Godfrey, they wouldn’t!”

  “I’m not so sot on farmin’ as Joel here,” Ira went on, “but I figure if you’re by the sea you can always make out.”

  “You’re right about that,” the Captain agreed. “You’ll never want if you’re near salt water. It does you for food and takes you places without waitin’ for no road.”

  His last words jogged Marguerite into sudden interest. She had been listening to the talk idly, her eyes on the endlessly parting waves that the Isabella B. plowed through. Now she knew in a twinkling what the Captain had meant. The sea was a road, too—a great, watery highway going all round the world. You had only to put out upon it, and it would take you wherever you wanted to go. She smiled to herself, thinking of it so, likening the hollows between the waves to ruts, and themselves moving over it in a coach without wheels.

  Now Dolly Sargent was dividing the remains of the bread between the children, breaking it into as many parts as there were mouths, and smearing each piece with molasses from the sweet-smelling wooden piggin. Caleb was sent to milk the cow for Debby, who had awakened crying.

  Soon he was back with a hollowed gourd full, warm from old Brindle. The neck of the gourd had been scooped and perforated to make a nursing bottle, and Dolly Sargent let the milk fall drop by drop into the baby’s puckered mouth.

  “Take the young ones out from under foot, Maggie,” Joel told her. “I can’t have ’em raisin’ a racket hereabouts.”

  “And watch out Patty and Jacob don’t gaum theirselves all over with molasses,” cautioned their mother, “for the Lord knows when I’ll get to wash them clean again.”

  They found a spot in the shadow of the settle and other household goods. Here Marguerite returned to her woolwinding, keeping an eye on the four beside her. Becky and Susan got out their most ch
erished possession, a corncob doll clothed in a scrap of bright calico, while Patty busied herself with a handful of shells and Jacob pulled up imaginary fish with a bit of rope dangling over the side.

  Toward evening the wind changed. It was necessary to tack and veer continually to make any sort of headway. Captain Hunt kept up his grumbling about their overloading and squinted warily at a low bank of clouds the setting sun turned to a fiery rose.

  “Those there clouds are lee-set,” he muttered. “They’ll mean no good to us.”

  But for all that the evening was fine and clear. Twilight held long over the water, and with the sun down the air grew cool. After they had all eaten what remained in Dolly’s basket and the children had had a drink of milk all round, the three youngest went below to the tiny cabin. Their mother returned from putting them to bed on the hard benches. For a while she sat with Marguerite and the twins, watching darkness come over the water and the first stars appear, very large and sharply pointed. Presently Ira joined them, and even Caleb did not feel it beneath his dignity to draw near.

  “There’s the new moon,” said Becky, pointing to the pale sickle that hung low in the west. “I made a wish on it.”

  “So did I make a wish on it, myself,” Susan said, not wanting to be outdone. “An’ they do say if you bow to it nine times you’ll get what you wished for.” She began bobbing her head so fast her braids jerked up and down stiffly.

  “If I had my wish,” sighed Dolly Sargent, “this here boat would be headin’ back the way we come from.”

  Marguerite heard Caleb sniff at these words, but before he could make any retort, Ira Sargent spoke up in his slow, pleasant voice.

  “Ever hear tell ’bout the moon an’ the powder horn?” he asked. “An old man told me once, an’ he got it from his Granpa back in Scotland.”

  “Tell us, Uncle Ira, go on.” The two little girls pressed closer to him, their eyes bright in the half darkness.

  “It was this-a-way,” he told them. “Once there was a man out huntin’ an’ he went a long, long ways, so far he got tired with night comin’ on an’ all. So he stretched himself out to sleep. But first he reached up an’ hung his powder horn up on a little bright yellow hook that he seen hangin’ right over his head. Well, he shut up his eyes an’ he went to sleep, but come mornin’ when he woke his powder horn was gone. Look high he did, an’ look low, an’ there weren’t nary a sign of it.”

  “What did he do then?” asked the twins together.

  “Weren’t nothin’ he could do, ’cept go on home without it,” their uncle went on. “But next e venin’ when it got dark he went back to that place where he slept, an’ there right over his head was the new moon with his powder horn a-hangin’ on it, hooked as nice as could be! So he reached up an’ took it back home again.”

  “Mercy, Ira,” chided Dolly Sargent. “You hadn’t ought to fill their heads with such foolishness.”

  Marguerite smiled to herself under cover of the darkness. She felt glad of Ira Sargent and his stories. They made her think of those Grand’mère had told her so often of an evening. She was sorry when he left with Caleb to help light the lanterns from a fire kept burning in an iron kettle.

  Dolly Sargent went below, but the twins and she sat on together, their bodies huddled close against the sea chill, their eyes on the star-spattered sky overhead. Many planets and constellations she knew from the nights when Oncle Pierre had taught her to call them by name. These she pointed out to the children, naming them over familiarly as one would mention neighbors.

  “See, there is Mademoiselle Vénus. Is she not beautiful tonight? And Monsieur Orion with his belt of little stars, and Les Pléiades over yonder.”

  Presently their mother called the twins to come below, and Marguerite reluctantly followed. She would far rather have stayed out there as the men were preparing to do than creep between the sleeping children in such narrow, boxlike quarters. Even when she had settled herself on one of the hard benches with her head on a bag of meal, she lay awake long after all the young Sargents and their mother were asleep. Through the open hatch she could see a bit of the night sky. A fitful brightness came from the stern lantern as it swung with the vessel’s motion, and now and again the moving shadows of the men showed as they handled ropes and shifted sail. She could tell from the sound of their voices whether they were talking among themselves or whether the Captain had issued orders. Sometimes she heard Caleb also, his boyish tones shrill against the deeper ones of the three men.

  She slept at last, only to waken to shouted orders and a great pitching and rolling. The Isabella B. was behaving in a very different manner from her earlier one. Her beams shivered and shook, her bows plunged and reared, and her mast seemed about to be snapped off short at any moment.

  “Ciel!” she cried, starting up in the darkness, one hand instinctively reaching for her rosary beads. Remembering in an instant that she no longer possessed any, she slipped from between the children, who lay in a warm heap of arms and legs about her, and made for the hatchway.

  How she got up the steps she did not know. Icy-cold water poured down them, and the whole place was awash. The Isabella B. was careening at such an angle that it was impossible to keep a footing except by clinging to the rails and inching along. She could make out the figure of Joel Sargent crawling in this fashion to join Ira, who was struggling to reef in the canvas. Captain Hunt clung valiantly to the tiller, though waves swirled up and about him till it seemed he must be swept away with each fresh deluge. As he threw his weight against the tiller, he shouted out orders to the others. But the noise of wind and water was such that even his deep-sea voice sounded faint and broken.

  “Make the stays fast!” Marguerite heard him bellowing, and then the next moment when he caught sight of her, it was, “Below! Keep below there !”

  She would have obeyed had it not been for a sudden shrill cry from the bow. Caleb and the livestock were in trouble. She knew this without the splintering of wood and the terrified lows and bleats to warn her. Hardly realizing what she was doing, Marguerite set herself to go forward. Flattening her body against the side of the cabin she edged along, clinging with one hand to the low wooden rail, and bracing her bare feet against any board that could help her keep a foothold. Whatever headway she gained she must make in the second of lull between waves. They swept over and about her, filling her nose and mouth with salt water. The wind whipped at her wet braids, but she hung on. The men shouted to her; she was past heeding.

  Halfway along, a particularly high wave washed over the straining bows, burying them in spray. Seeing it upon them, Marguerite lowered her head, flinging all her strength into the grip of her hands and feet. There came another sharp cry from Caleb, and she looked up in time to see a white mass swept overboard. She did not need the agonized bleating to tell her what it was.

  Caleb’s makeshift pen had been washed away, but the forward rail still held. Somehow he had managed to lash the cow and her calf to this. By twisting his own body between these ropes he kept himself from going over the side, while with both arms he struggled to hold the three remaining sheep. Earlier in the day their legs had been hobbled, the fore and hind ones being tied together to keep the animals quiet. Now this only increased their helplessness. They were like so many bags of wool at the mercy of every wave. Even as Marguerite crept nearer, there came another lurch and Caleb lost his hold on one. Without knowing how she did it, she freed one hand and clutched at the woolly body.

  “Keep a-holt!” she heard Caleb shouting in her ear, and she dug her fingers tighter into the thick wool.

  They could barely make each other out in the dark and wet, but the whiteness of the sheep helped to mark the places where they clung. Now and again in any slight lull they shouted a word or so to show that they still hung on. But for the most part neither had any breath to spare.

  “Ah, my arm—you will twist it off!” gasped Marguerite as the sheep struggled in a panic of animal terror.

  She caught
her lips between her teeth lest Caleb should hear her crying with the pain. After a little it did not hurt so much. Either the sheep had tired itself, or she had grown used to the strain. She felt very cold and numb and almost too spent to be afraid when the Isabella B. took some especially high sea or plunged from watery height to hollow.

  And then it was over. The squall passed almost as suddenly as it had come upon them. The wind no longer tore and tugged at the rigging, and in the early light of morning the sea grew quieter. Ira Sargent was the first to reach them. His face looked pale under his sunburn as he peered over the wreckage to see if they were still there. Without a word he took the sheep from Marguerite’s hold, leaving her free to crawl aft. She could scarcely grip the wooden rail with her fingers so cramped, and she was too soaked to care that a foot of water slopped about the cabin floor with every lurch and roll.

  “Never lotted on seein’ that pair of young ones alive,” she heard Captain Hunt saying to Joel as she stumbled down the hatchway.

  “Well, I guessed Caleb would stick fast,” the other answered, “but why she ain’t gone to bottom traipsin’ out there in all that blow is past me. She’s got grit, wherever she was raised—I’ll say that for her.”

  “Yes, she’s quite a craft, that girl,” the Captain added, and then he was shouting orders to Ira about letting out more sail. Marguerite tumbled in a heap on the hard bench below. The children whimpered on all sides, and Dolly Sargent scolded her for her rashness, but this was nothing to the inner glow she felt as she remembered the words she had just heard. The Captain had praised her, and Joel Sargent had admitted that she had grit. Perhaps even Caleb would be less scornful of her now. She fell asleep and dreamed herself back in Le Havre in the sunny garden of the convent. The Sisters were moving about in their soft blue robes and starched headdresses that were like crisped white wings, and the chapel bell was ringing for noonday mass.