“Just a door,” he yelled.
Ben realized he was shaking. The lock would need to be looked at, but not now. He used the knife to pry the latch loose so the wind wouldn’t push it open again. It was caked with a sticky residue, which surprised him, because all the locks were new. On his fingers it had the pine tang of tree resin. The door’s dead bolt worked fine, and he slid it closed. He ran his fingers along the door’s glass paneling, surprised that it hadn’t cracked in the repeated assaults.
He turned on the exterior lights and looked out the glass. Placed in the center of the stoop like the morning’s newspaper was a severed deer’s head, staring at him with black, blood-flecked eyes.
November 9, 1777
My Dearest Kathy,
The road is closed and I do not know when I will be able to post this letter. The snows fell early and heavily, but even if they had not, the Iroquois are certain to kill any horseman. It has been some four weeks since we have had contact from beyond the valley.
We heard rumors of the Iroquois alliance with the British, but before Father gave any credence to the idea, a raiding party burned Swannhaven. The church, Porter’s Store, the Hall, the Coplins’ Farm where we used to play—all of it up in flames. I cannot do justice to how it looked from the porch of the Crofts, the gleam of flames and tiny figures fleeing like motes of shadow against the frosted fields. I watched as they lost ground to the marauders and fell still against the cold of the earth. I was not certain it was real until I smelled the smoke for myself.
The Porters, Van Epps, Stevensons, Cartwrights, all of the Coplins dead, except for Raymond Coplin. There are more, but what good would it do to tell you? Thirty souls found their way here, and the rest made for the northern gap. We and the tenant families here on the Drop took in those who fled up the mountain, but for the others, I dare not guess what became of them.
The Indians have long feared the mountains, and Father believes they will not venture here. He has established a rotating watch. His sermon this Sunday was of David and Goliath, and all of us left in elevated spirits. He has ordered the forest to the east chopped down. The widened visibility gives us some comfort. And with all the firewood, we will not freeze this winter. But for food, there is concern. The thirty extra mouths will push us beyond our limit. But we’ve already reduced our daily portions, and the men still hunt in the northern fields with some success.
These hunters saw smoke from the south this afternoon past, and we fear that the trading post on the Albany Trail has also been destroyed.
I am not permitted outside unaccompanied, but I went with Jack to review the men on watch. They do not see the Iroquois, but they hear noises in the wood.
It is so empty here. Do you remember what it was like on winter mornings when we were children? How from the porch we could peer into the face of the wild with nothing but the smoke from Swannhaven’s hearths to remind us of civilization? Now Swannhaven is gone, and it is as if we were the last people in all the world.
Pray for us, dear sister.
Your Bess
8
Ben swirled the remnants of his coffee. It was cold, and had been for a while.
He watched Bub in his exersaucer, where the baby played with his unspillable cup. Bub held the cup out by one handle and Ben clinked his mug against it, sending the boy into a series of delighted noises.
The kitchen was bright: a relief after the week they’d had.
The storms had been a sight. The dark cumulus clouds had billowed from the west, turning the sky a trembling green before unleashing torrents of rain.
Ben now understood the warnings about the wind on the Drop. It had a way of finding weaknesses under the eaves, generating drafts throughout the house. He’d wake in the night to its screams when it collided with the rough angles of the roof; it sometimes electrified entire rooms with a tremendous, unwavering hum. And it shook the forest into a frenzy, filling the house with a riot of branches rapping against one another.
After the deluge came gray days of drizzle. Ben had found himself with the animal need to escape the Crofts, coupled with an agoraphobic revulsion of leaving it. He wondered if this was just a preview of what the winters would be like: endless months of cloistered suspense.
He hadn’t told Caroline about the deer’s head he’d found on the stoop. The mutilated body had been easy enough to dismiss as an animal attack, but the dismembered head was not the work of forest creatures. Ben threw the head into the forest and wrote the episode off as a prank, some sort of initiation by the village’s men. The animal had probably been hit by a car or killed by a hunter who figured he’d try to get a rise out of the new guy, the city guy with the pretty wife and the big house. He didn’t see the point of worrying Caroline and Charlie about it. The most they could do was file a police report, and, in a village as small as Swannhaven, that was certain to cause more harm than good.
“Wah?” Bub asked him, again holding out his cup.
Ben accepted the cup and filled it with filtered water from the fridge. He could hear Mick Jagger upstairs. Caroline was on the third floor, sanding the hallway. Ben was supposed to be working on his novel; Bub was supposed to be napping.