The Household Spirit by Wodicka Tod

Author:Wodicka, Tod [Wodicka, Tod]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-09T07:00:00+00:00

16

Drew looked back at Harri’s painting. He snapped on the overhead light. “It’s amazing to think, isn’t it?” he asked Howie.

“The French and Indian War?”

Drew guffawed. “What?”

Howie had been thinking about the French and Indian War.

“I mean, it’s amazing that she’s still sleeping under that,” Drew said. “But sure, that French and Indian War was something!” Drew looked at his metal flask. “Maybe it’s time I had some of what you’re having?”

“I thought because the painting—” Howie started.

“Howard, that is not a painting of the French and Indian War,” Drew said. “You sure you’re under the legal limit there, boss?”

“Yes.”

“Well, besides the wife, I can assure you that there are no people in the painting. French, Indian, otherwise.”

That was the point, Howie wanted to say. They were hiding. It was likely that Harri herself didn’t know the full story of Rogers Rock. Howie, feeling misunderstood, and in an atypically loquacious turn, decided that Drew might appreciate the history. “Do you know about Rogers Rock?” he asked.

—

In 1758, during the French and Indian War, Robert Rogers was an English officer known for the wily, brutal guerrilla warfare that he deployed against the French and their Indian pals. Howie didn’t say pals.

Robert Rogers was more bear than man. The story, which Howie only partially told Drew, and only in the most basic and likely dull fashion, went that Robert Rogers and about 180 of his men, who were rangers and ex–fur trappers, a ragtag group of woodsy, godly, eccentric wanderers conscripted into the English army, made a deep-winter trek from Queens Falls up to the northern end of Lake Jogues toward the French stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga. Howie was not sure why. Usual French and Indian War reasons, he assumed. Famously, Robert Rogers had gone up there before and freed captured English officers, plus had led the occasional provisions raid and Indian massacre. But so this winter became brutal. The snow was deep. The frozen sky a taunting, uncharitable blue. Rogers’s men, especially the less hearty ones, began dying off after a week: some were taken by coughing diseases, others by the endless trudging. There were wolves. Toes felt like pebbles stuck in their boots, then fell off. Like teeth. One by one. Fingers and ears fell off. There was little to eat. Then there was nothing to eat. No fires, Rogers insisted, not even little ones, because fires would compromise the whole operation, whatever that operation happened to be. Nobody asked. These were, Howie imagined, silent, staring types, every last one. But he did not tell this to Drew. To Drew, he said, “Many of them died of the cold.”

They gnawed on carcasses left by wolves. Some died of that, too. But not Rogers. By the time that they reached what is now known as Rogers Rock, at the northern end of Lake Jogues, he and what remained of his men were finally ambushed, beset by hundreds of murderous Francophile Indians. They’d been hiding. They had obviously been tracking Rogers for miles, waiting until the climate and the lack of provisions had done most of the work for them.

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