The Burning Sky
Wil could see and smell the colonnades
of acrid smoke rising from Fort Jenkins
across the river from the Munson farm.
His packhorse, loaded for the journey back
to Farmington, stood stock-still in the heat.
He quickly gathered up his frightened siblings,
gave Rebecca Jones a haversack
of money for Benoni, and departed,
taking—as Diah had—the east-west road,
assuming they would meet up on the trail.
Rebecca Jones was ready. When she heard
the drumbeats and the fifer’s piercing notes
of On Saint Patrick’s Day, and soon thereafter,
musket-fire and whoops, she grabbed Wil’s cash,
the proceeds from the shad sales, the saltpeter
ten-pound bounty she had earned, and laid
Susannah and Benoni in the boat,
hopped in, and paddled down toward Fort Augusta,
drifting when the babies wailed for milk
or when she took a snack of bread and rum.
Stephen Munson stayed behind. He’d taken
the ferry to Forty Fort and volunteered.
Though wounded in the foot, he made his way
across the meadows and the fields, until
he reached the riverbank. Then, after dark,
he slowly swam back to the eastern shore,
unhitched the horse he’d hidden the woods
and rode away, the air pervaded by
the stench of burning flesh and by the howls
of Patriots he was helpless to set free.
The Chapter titled The Burning Sky comes from the following poem by Amy Lowell:
The
throats of the little red trumpet-flowers are wide open,
And the clangour of brass
beats against the hot sunlight.
They bray and blare at the
burning sky . . .
Splitting the sunlight into
ribbons, tattered and shot with noise.
~Amy Lowell, from “The Trumpet-Vine Arbour”
COMING SOON - PART THREE, CHAPTER SEVEN
