MEN OF FLINT OR EATERS OF MEN
WEDNESDAY, JULY 21, 1779
I head straight for the barn to hunt for Mr. Little’s musket. I’ve determined to follow the militia without warning my mother, and I’d like to do so with a musket in my hands. I’m positive the raiders have taken it, but I look anyway. It doesn’t feel right marching out of the settlement without one. Not that I know what marching out feels like, with or without a firelock.
I’ve never been out of the settlement. That is, if you don’t count the few miles around our cabin to check traps. I try to imagine the march north—which leads me to imagine those we’ll be marching toward. They’re up there … somewhere. I picture the Mohawk warrior who is probably right now pestering my pigs to pick up their pace, and I’m reminded of something my father told me long ago: that the word Mohawk is the Algonquin name given to these people and it means “man-eater.” Their real name, the name they call themselves, is Kanien ´keháka, which means “flint people.” I wonder who we will be chasing, the men of flint or the eaters of men? And to which group does Joseph Brant belong?
Brant is definitely a man to be feared. He’s a veteran warrior, and his cruelty in battle is well known. But there are other stories, too, those that tell of his great intelligence and of the risks he takes to save settlers from being scalped or burned. He seems more legend than real.
But then I remember Mr. Little lying dead not ten feet from me. Brant is real.
I find a small lantern and light it, but I’m so unfamiliar with this barn that I don’t know where to start looking for a musket, balls, or powder. I’m just roaming around aimlessly, putting off the decision I’ve already made: returning to the fort without speaking to my mother. But then I see it, sitting on the leaching barrel outside the open barn door where I’d forgotten it yesterday evening. My father’s frock.
My father would have marched out with the militia. He never backed down when it came to serving in this war. He loved calling us Americans, instead of Colonists. “His Majesty’s subject?” he would spit. “I am no man’s subject.”
But then my mother’s face fills my head. That hard look in her eyes. It shouts the reason why I shouldn’t go—I am lame, maimed, a cripple. Although my mother has never once allowed this fact to keep me from tilling fields, splitting wood, stacking wheat, mending fences, rebuilding outbuildings, topping corn for the livestock, weeding and weeding and weeding, and all the other endless work that keeps me busy from morning to night, every day of every week. These tasks I can do. But enter the war? My mother’s logic is off and she knows it just as well as I do. What holds me back is not my mother, and it is not my foot … What holds me back is me.
I will go. I will keep my word to Mrs. Decker and stay out of the fighting so my being lame hurts no man, but I will go. “Don’t let others shoulder a responsibility that is yours,” my mother has told me many times. Well, this is my responsibility. Brant attacked us. He attacked me. He burned my home. He killed Mr. Little. It is my responsibility.
Blowing out the lantern, I hang it on the nearest peg and head over to the frock and put it on. The smoke from the Littles’ cabin catches my eye. I watch it curl from the chimney.
“I’ll be back in less than a day. Two days at the most,” I whisper.