The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn

by Benton, Lori

  She leaned back against his arm, blinking. “A Cherokee wedding?”

  “Why not? It’s a fine ceremony. Simple, respectable. There’s a feast goes with it. I’ll just have to bring in a deer before it can happen.”

  “A deer?”

  “I’ll explain the details, if you say yes. It won’t make us any more married than we are, but maybe a ceremony’s what we need to mark it—since one of us slept through the last one.”

  Seeing he teased her, she made a fist and gave his shoulder a thump. He pretended she’d hurt him, but his grin spoiled it. “What do you think?” he asked, though he could tell she was liking the notion.

  “When?”

  “Once I ask Thunder-Going, if he agrees … seven days.”

  “Seven?”

  “They’ll want to bless the council house, prepare the feast.”

  She sighed. He sighed.

  “On the bright side, it gives these ribs more time to heal.” He didn’t say why that was important but knew she read it in his eyes.

  That a man’s own wife he’d slept beside, worked beside, argued with, swum nearly naked in front of, and just thoroughly kissed could sit on his lap blushing for shyness was a wonderment.

  But then, he reckoned, not many men went about pursuing a woman as backward as he had Tamsen Littlejohn.

  February 1788

  Jesse reckoned himself in danger. From the looks of it, so was his horse.

  “Growin’ fat and soft, the pair of us.”

  He leaned on the top rail of the paddock where Thunder-Going’s folk kept their small herd. At his whistle, the horse tore itself from the cornhusks strewn on the snow-dusted ground and ambled to him, breath ghosting in the air. Jesse took the white-splashed head between his hands while the animal chewed its mouthful. The wound where the ball had clipped its neck had healed, though the scar would never grow mane again.

  The horse’s ears perked. Jesse turned as Tamsen, wrapped in her cloak, cheeks pink with cold, joined them. She slipped out a hand and presented a winter apple to the horse’s reaching lips.

  “I see who’s to blame for his going round as a barrel. The one doing the same to me.”

  Tamsen batted her lashes, a picture of innocence. “Does that mean you’ve grown partial to my cooking?”

  He blinked back at her. “You’ve always cooked just fine.”

  “Liar,” Tamsen said, taking his hand in hers. “I didn’t come here just to feed the horse.” With her other hand she held her cloak open, revealing what she wore beneath. A pale deerskin tunic bedecked with shell beads fell to a matching knee-length skirt, fringed leggings, and high winter moccasins patterned with dyed quills.

  “You finished,” he said.

  “White Shell did the quillwork, but the rest is all mine.” She nibbled her lip, awaiting his verdict.

  “They’re beautiful.” Wearing such clothes, with her dark hair and eyes, she could pass for having Cherokee blood herself.

  Spanish, he thought, pierced unexpectedly with a stab of envy. His wife didn’t know all she wished to about her past, or her parents … but what he wouldn’t give to know as much about himself. Maybe when they finally put down roots of their own, questions about his white parents would stop haunting him.

  Tamsen was fingering the beads she’d stitched across the tunic’s front. “I’d need to work at this for years to come close to what White Shell can do. But I couldn’t resist the challenge.”

  “It makes you happy, sewing clothes?” He hardly needed to ask. She glowed with the accomplishment.

  “I never thought I’d sew, much less wear, clothes like this, but yes, it makes me happy. And reminds me of Mama.” Sorrow brushed her face, a passing shadow. “I wonder what she’d think if she could see me.”

  It had been her wedding garments—a near-white doeskin tunic and skirt borrowed from White Shell—that decided Tamsen on attempting the construction of Cherokee old-style clothing for herself. Most Cherokee women wore stroud cloth and calico anymore, but she’d been taken with the soft deerskin.

  Truth to tell, he hardly recalled what she’d worn at their wedding feast, held in the council house more than a month since. Tamsen had eaten with the women on one side of the structure, Jesse with the men on the other. Eaten what, he couldn’t have said either. He did recall Bears and two of his friends gleefully seating themselves shoulder to shoulder, blocking his view of Tamsen, until the feasting ended and the wedding proper had begun. Cade stood with Jesse before Thunder-Going, White Shell and Blackbird with Tamsen. He’d given Tamsen a venison roast—perfectly cooked, he’d teased her with his eyes. She’d given him full ears of corn, symbols of their promise to dwell together, seeing to each other’s needs. Then they’d each been given a blanket, which they draped together around their shoulders, whereupon Thunder-Going pronounced their blankets joined. Jesse had led Tamsen, amidst laughter and teasing and Bears’ ululating turkey call, to a tiny lodge newly built for them, warmed and stocked. There, finally alone, he’d held her face between his hands.

  “I wake each morning,” she’d said, her eyes luminous in the light of the fire laid for them, warming to him, drawing him into their depths, “thanking the Almighty you were there in Morganton. I needed you but didn’t know then that I would love you too.”

  “Then ‘the Lord do so to me, and more also,’ ” he’d quoted, “ ‘if ought but death part thee and me.’ Ever again.”

  Not Hezekiah Parrish. Not Ambrose Kincaid. Thought of them reflected briefly in her eyes too, then vanished, and it was only the two of them and the buffalo rugs and the fire’s warmth.

  The morning after the wedding, Cade had left to hunt, waving off Jesse’s halfhearted attempt to ride with him. “Stay. Enjoy your wife. You waited long enough for her.” He’d tugged at the straps of the packhorse’s saddle, not bothering to suppress his grin, though there was something melancholy about his eyes. “Come spring, we’ll leave the Watauga.”

  Jesse had held the horse’s bridle as Cade swung into the saddle. “I know you been thinking on it, but what decided you? Think this Franklin business has come to more’n court raids and fisticuffs at last?”

  “A feeling’s all.” Cade looked to the east, worry on his brow, then dropped his gaze to Jesse. “Franklin’s troubles aside, I wouldn’t want to see you taking land west of the mountains to farm. There’s good land still where the waters flow east.”

  Land the Cherokees have no hope of reclaiming. Jesse finished the thought Cade wouldn’t speak, not with the eyes of Thunder-Going’s people glancing at them as they passed. Was this Cade’s way of compromising with the life his choices were leading him toward?

  It had struck Jesse then … he might have changed, but what of Cade? His pa was a roamer, a hunter, a man even more than Jesse caught betwixt two worlds, walking the shifting line between. Would he want to settle with him and Tamsen, or was a parting of the ways looming? He’d had a notion that something more weighed on Cade’s mind than the complexities of land claims in the Watauga, or its feuding political factions.

  A redbird lighted atop the paddock rail and trilled its liquid song, bringing him back to the present. Together with his wife he watched the bird till it winged off toward the wood, a red spark against the gray and green.

  Tamsen squeezed his hand. She searched his eyes, her own questioning. “Are you wishing you were out with Cade?”

  “I was thinking on him,” he admitted.

  “Jesse Bird, are you restless with married life already?”

  “Come back to the lodge and I’ll show you how restless I am.” He bent to nuzzle her ear, breathing in the smoky scent of her hair. “Much as I fancy these new clothes of yours, I fancy ’em off you more.”

  He felt her shiver and melt against him. Forgetting Cade, the horse, the people throwing them grins as they passed, he guided his wife straight to their lodge, not stopping to speak to a soul.

  Tamsen watched from the sleeping platform as Jesse stirred the fire and add
ed wood. Flames blazed up, snapping sparks toward the smoke-wreathed ceiling. Feeling the tickle of a draft on her shoulder, she edged away from the wall and tugged the buffalo rug higher. Only in the center of the lodge—or beneath the furs—was it anything resembling warm. Yet Jesse knelt there in nothing but a breechclout, staring into the flames with distance in his eyes. “You are wishing you were with him.”

  He looked at her, having come but halfway back from wherever he’d been. “With who? Cade?”

  He rose to sit on the bench. She sat up, wrapping him in the buffalo robe that warmed her. He kissed the tip of her nose, then lay back with her on the bench and held her in the crook of an arm, her head on his chest. With his heart beating strong beneath her ear, a sense of wholeness washed over her so complete it stung her eyes with tears.

  “It was easy to stay.” His words rumbled beneath her ear.

  She moved her hand across him, feeling the contour of hard muscle, the slope of his ribs—no longer hurting him—reveling in the sinewy strength of his body. “But?”

  His chest heaved beneath her cheek. “I’d hoped to take this last crop of furs to put toward some land, if you think you could abide being a farmer’s wife.”

  She knew what he wasn’t quite asking. She’d been reared to finery, intended for the pampered wife of a wealthy planter—if only to broaden her stepfather’s business and line his pockets. Did she miss it, the silk and lace, the pretty linens on table and bed? For that matter, the table and the bed?

  She did not. Not with the price they’d carried—a price exacted from the hearts and backs of slaves, and her soul. Besides, what was such needless frippery compared to the treasure of the man lying entwined with her now? Whether it was his singular raising or simply the manner of man he’d have been in any case, Jesse Bird didn’t see her as a possession to be used. He didn’t want to dominate her or drive her to some end suiting his own purpose. He wanted to pull with her, whatever furrow they chose to plow. How rare and priceless a man was he.

  She raised her head to meet his gaze. “Wherever you settle, Jesse, whatever work you set your hand to, I’ll be beside you. Trading corn for venison.”

  He had lovely eyelashes for a man, thick and dark. His eyes, keen in the firelight, reflected his pleasure as he took her hand lying on his chest and pressed it to his lips. “I chose well.”

  “As did I.” She ran her thumb along his lower lip, knowing he liked that, but he didn’t respond as she’d expected. He kissed her fingertips, then returned her hand to his chest, holding it there. That far-looking glaze stole over him again. He was worried over more than whether or not they’d be farmers, poor or otherwise.

  Not since their second wedding had they spoken of her stepfather or Ambrose Kincaid. By mutual consent they’d held those shadows at arm’s length, wrapped in the cocoon of their intimacy. But they couldn’t hold back the rumblings of pursuit forever.

  “You’re thinking about them, aren’t you? Mr. Parrish and Mr. Kincaid.”

  Jesse reined in his gaze, a corner of his mouth curving. “You turning mind reader on me?” He closed his eyes. “Reckon we got to face it, sooner or later.”

  “But not alone.” She raised up on an elbow, hair spilling onto his chest. “Remember what Cade and Thunder-Going were talking about last night?”

  Jesse took up a strand of her hair and looped the curling end around his finger. “They talked on a lot of things, those two.”

  On the eve of Cade’s setting out again to hunt, the two men had been having one of their God Talks, as Thunder-Going called them. As far as Tamsen could discern, Cade had been hoping to win his Cherokee friends to faith in Christ for years, to no avail, though it made for what seemed like lively discussions. Last night’s had gone on for hours, and because it was mostly in Tsalagi, she’d barely followed it. But whenever Cade read from his Bible, it had been in English.

  “ ‘He that spared not his own Son,’ ” Tamsen quoted, “ ‘but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?’ All things, Jesse. He knows what we need and when. He’ll deliver us and find us a place—a good place—to settle. That’s what I have to believe.” Even when the trail toward that hope seemed buried deeper than the mountain passes, there in the midst of winter.

  “Amen to that.” Jesse pulled her close by the tether of her hair, enfolding her in his arms. His heart beat steady and strong against her cheek. “I don’t know how to put this any plainer, my Little Wildcat, save that you make me whole.”

  The warriors from Dragging Canoe’s town stood outside Thunder-Going’s lodge, making their final case for war to Catches Bears. Or that’s what Tamsen presumed they were doing as she peered past the door-hide. She couldn’t follow their words, but their gestures spoke of urgency, and with their faces painted black, war was clearly why they’d come. And it looked as though Catches Bears, listening intently to their urgings, might finally have been swayed to their cause.

  “Tamsen,” Jesse said behind her. “Bears’ll tell us what he means to do when he’s ready.”

  She let the hide fall shut. Though the formal talk with the Chickamaugas had ended some time ago, Thunder-Going was still at the council house with Blackbird. Tamsen and Jesse were alone in his lodge, where Jesse had come to work one of the hides Cade last brought them. She watched him at the smelly work, marveling at his calm amidst this stirred up, knife-edged atmosphere that had invaded the little town, despite Thunder-Going’s hope for peace. Jesse pulled the scraper across the stretched pelt, wiped the blade clean, drew it again. The fire crackled beneath a pot of boiling beans and corn she was meant to be watching.

  The Cherokees observed no formal mealtimes. Food was kept ready at every hearth for anyone who happened to be hungry.

  Tamsen gave the stew a cursory stir. “Thunder-Going doesn’t want Bears to fight with Dragging Canoe … right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Bears will do as his father says, because he’s chief of this town?”

  “Bears’ll keep his father’s wishes in mind ’cause he respects his wisdom, but in the end he’ll do what seems best to him.”

  What seemed best to Bears, who came in with a gust of frigid air, remained an issue in the balance. “Georgia will not go up to fight the Creeks. It is settled. The Thirteen States big council … What is it called, all of them together?”

  “Congress,” Jesse said. Cade had brought word of the grand convention in Philadelphia that had taken place over the previous summer, where men from each of the states had gathered, presided over by the celebrated General Washington. Months of discussion and debate had produced a Constitution, laws to govern all the states. Copies of this Constitution were making their way Overmountain. Cade hadn’t seen it for himself, but he’d spoken with a man who had.

  “In Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, and ensure domestic Tranquility,” Cade had said, quoting the opening words of the document the man had recalled for him.

  Jesse couldn’t imagine a less perfect union—or domestic tranquility—than what was afoot in the west where, as far as Cade could discover, Franklin still hadn’t been named the fourteenth state. “It goes worse for Sevier,” Cade had told him. “North Carolina levied a tax on his property. While he was away training his militia for spring campaigning, Colonel Tipton ordered a sheriff to seize Sevier’s slaves in payment of the levy. They’re being held at Tipton’s house on Sinking Creek.”

  “This Congress,” Bears said now, “told the Georgians to put down their muskets. But Sevier still makes ready for a spring raid against the Chickamaugas. Even in this cold he drills his soldiers. One of the two who spoke in council with us saw him at it, saw with his own eyes. That is why they have come. To tell all the Ani-yun-wiya of this, and to ask these questions—Do you think it will stop with the Chickamaugas? And how will these soldiers know a Chickamauga town from a peaceful town? In the heat of killing, will they even care?”

  Jesse made a nois
e of acknowledgment. Too many times settlers, acting on their own, had taken revenge for deaths and thefts on the nearest Cherokees available, whether or not those Cherokees were the guilty parties. So had the Cherokees done to the settlers. “They’re certain Sevier isn’t drilling his men to fight with Tipton’s Carolina troops? Not just more Franklin trouble on the boil?”

  “That one who saw them, he went to a trading post and spoke with the white man there. This man warned of Sevier’s plans for the spring.”

  Tamsen could no longer stand the suspense. “Will you fight with Dragging Canoe?”

  Bears glanced at her, eyes narrowed. At first she thought she’d overstepped some bounds in interrupting. But Bears said, “This may be the time, if the Ani-yun-wiya are ever to take back our hunting lands in the Tennessee. Now, while the Wataugans fight among themselves over what they are to be called—besides Wataugans.”

  “Has your father changed his mind on the matter?”

  “He has not.”

  Jesse paused in his work, waiting.

  “For now I will stay. There are not enough men here to hunt for our old ones. Maybe in spring …” Bears stood, radiating restlessness, clearly not at the end of his thinking on the matter.

  Tamsen heard the scratch of moccasins on the frozen ground. Thunder-Going ducked beneath the buffalo hide, trouble on his brow as he looked across the fire at his son, who wore the warrior’s scalp-lock.

  “I will pray and make ready to hunt,” Bears said and brushed by his father on his way out of the lodge.

  Though expected to be gone for days, Catches Bears returned before nightfall with news that he had met a hunter from Chota who’d brought down two woods buffalo and needed help bringing in the meat. For the use of a horse and travois, he would give one of the buffalo to Thunder-Going’s people.

  “Take my horse,” Jesse told him at the stock pen. “He’ll welcome the exercise.”

  Bears eyed him. “What of you? It is many sleeps since you hunted. Not since you got your deer for your wedding feast.”