A Moonbow Night

by Laura Frantz

  At last she looked over her shoulder. “Fetch me some spring water.”

  He took the empty piggin from her hand and returned outside, trying to shut Harper’s memory away. He kept to the shade, moving toward the spring and the big water trough that emptied down the hillside in a noisy trickle.

  The springhouse door opened and Tempe stepped out, nearly in his path. He looked briefly at the ground and then back at her. He felt as addlepated as Nate. Her eyes communicated a quick compassion, and her hand shot out to take the piggin and fill it to the brim for him.

  Smokey came between them, wagging tail brushing his leggings. The collie looked from Tempe to Sion, loyalties torn, or so it seemed.

  Tempe stroked Smokey’s head, but her words were for Sion. “Sit here beneath the sycamore if you like—or return to table.”

  “Nay,” he replied quietly, taking the piggin and returning to the west cabin.

  Was Nate asleep? His body was motionless atop the pallet, no rise and fall to his rib cage. Sion looked to Aylee, who simply put a finger to her lips. Bewildered, Sion looked back at Nate, willing him to breathe, holding his own breath till he did. A slight shudder of the sunken chest foretold Nate’s breathing was simply shallow, not absent.

  Smokey had settled in the open doorway as if trained not to enter in. Feeling the need to be near her, Sion traded the chair for the floor, her answering delight a solace as she pressed into him, her nose damp and cold on his hand. Bone weary, he let his guard down and closed his eyes, fading into the hazy oblivion of sleep.

  Tempe surveyed the food Paige had served that was now growing cold, trepidation ticking inside her. Russell pulled the pipe from his mouth, face grim. “His friend’s snakebit and doing poorly. Like as not that’s the trouble.”

  Should she leave his meal be? Wait for his return? Russell’s noncommittal shrug gave her no answers. “Raven’s out back needful of something done at the forge. I’ll leave the keeping room to you.”

  Raven? Was he fully healed? She glanced through the open door and saw his supple form half hidden behind the barn-shed door. Yet there wasn’t one but two Indians. Curiosity spiked. When she looked again they had vanished from sight as if aware of her scrutiny.

  The other boarders were finished, the women and children ready to bed down in the loft. Though the summer night stretched on, full dark hours distant, the travelers were tired, anxious to be on their way at daybreak.

  Paige and Tempe returned the kitchen to order while Russell retreated to the barn-shed. Sion’s party sprawled across the dogtrot, some smoking, all silent and preoccupied.

  “Mister Lyon ain’t even asked for any spirits,” Paige whispered as she returned her broom to a corner. “I overheard Mister Morgan tell the rest of his party to set out at first light and start whacking their way west a few miles from here. They’re to join up again when Mister Stoner’s some better.”

  Pondering it, Tempe threw out the dishwater before rinsing the basin clean and leaving it to dry.

  The usual night noises were setting in—the burry chirruping of katydids and frogs and the lilting call of the whippoorwill. On such a peaceful eve it was hard to fret about Indian unrest and snakebites or the sobering handbill left in the barn-shed. Tempe felt in her pocket for her Psalms. Maybe she’d spell Ma. Tempe’s concern for the stranger in their private quarters was on par with her curiosity. Was he Sion’s kin?

  Avoiding the dogtrot, she reached the cabin another way, bypassing the stares of too many men. It was the door her father took when he crept in and out, a small square of an opening more like a fort’s sally port, a tangle of laurel hiding it. The bushes scratched and tugged at her as she finally gained entry, her bare feet cool against the cabin’s pine floor.

  Aylee had brewed a tonic. Tempe pieced together the ingredients from the fragrant air, milkwort and fleabane foremost. With a start she drew up short in the shadows, spying Sion by the door with Smokey. His head was tilted back against the log wall, eyes shut. He made a comely picture sitting there, the strength and heft of him undiminished in sleep. One large hand with its odd pockets from rifle balls was sunk into Smokey’s fur, his lean, muscled legs folded Indian-fashion.

  Asleep . . . or only pretending to be?

  She touched her mother’s elbow, communicating a wordless wish. With a nod, Aylee let Tempe spell her. Paige came in, eyes wide at the sight of Sion before she scampered to the loft ahead of Aylee.

  Tempe took the vacant stool, the candle on the sill offering ample light to study their patient. One look assured her he was neither father nor brother to Sion. This stranger looked tough as whang leather but was smallish and silver-haired. Beneath the scruff of beard his features were well drawn, even handsome, despite the pockmarks pitting his skin. Was he valuable as a member of the surveying party—or merely close as kin? Both, she reckoned, had made Sion shun his meal.

  As if sensing Aylee had gone, the stranger began to toss and mumble, rustling the cornhusk pallet. It bore the hiss of a snake and set Tempe a-shiver.

  Taking up a cloth, she began to swipe the sweat from the man’s face. It beaded again as soon as she wiped it clean, kindling a deeper worry. She longed for a full name. Then she could say it soothing-like, granting her a familiarity that befit the moment. She wasn’t used to tending half-clad men on the cabin floor—or having one behind her, even fully dressed, that rattled the daylights out of her.

  Despite Ma’s tonic, a fierce battle was brewing inside the man beneath her hands. If she failed to calm him, comfort him, she would feel she’d failed the man at her back.

  She set the cloth and basin aside and took out the Psalms. Pa said she had a soothing voice. She turned to the 139th chapter, her most beloved. Maybe it would bring this feverish stranger solace too.

  Sion came awake to the mellifluous voice of . . . Harper?

  Nay, Tempe.

  That she was spouting Scripture didn’t distance him like Nate sometimes did, with his preacherish, holier-than-thou ways.

  Sion opened an eye, not bothering to resettle his stiff limbs. No need to announce he was awake. She might stop reading and . . .

  He swallowed, tracing the candlelit line of her profile. Through sleepy eyes he noticed the delicate line of her cheekbones and the generous slant of her mouth—and that aggravating dimple made more pronounced when she spoke or, more rarely, smiled.

  He nearly wished he was Nate, the sole object of her attentions. Every so often she would stop her reading and brush his lined face gently with a damp cloth.

  “‘Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.’”

  Shutting his eyes, he bent his thoughts toward what she said. Unwillingly. Even grudgingly.

  Did the Almighty search him? Know his heart? Try his thoughts?

  If so, He then knew the wretched state of things. His past. His present. His future.

  If only Tempe’s tending could mend not only body but soul and spirit.

  Not Nate’s. His.

  She finished reading. He opened an eye again to watch as she laid her Psalms aside and silently got to her feet. Nate shifted and then moaned as if protesting her going. But go she did, slipping soundlessly out the cabin door to who knows where, Sion’s curious gaze trailing after her.

  “About time, Daughter.” August Tucker’s gravelly voice filled the whole rockhouse. “What’s kept you?”

  What’s kept me? A slew of responses flew to her lips. And then a joyful relief swept through her as she leapt from ladder to ledge. When her feet touched the rockhouse floor he swept her up in a hug, and she was overcome with the sweating, filthy mass of him, his raggety beard scraping her heated cheek.

  “You’ll be a sight better to welcome once you bathe,” she chided, wrinkling her nose.

  Chuckling, he took her in, a rough hand stroking a tendril of hair that had escaped her braid. “I only just got here. Had to hide the horses and trade goods, as there’s strangers about.” When she gave a sorrowful nod his levity fade
d. “A small party, mayhap. They’ve been a thorn to me, coming so close. I nearly plowed right into them along Greasy Creek.”

  “Surveyors, Pa . . .” She drew a breath. There was no sweetening the news. “They’re with the Loyal Land Company.”

  He swore, a rare utterance, and stood at the mouth of the rockhouse, his view obscured by a great many trees. “Who exactly?”

  “Six of them, all told.” She hesitated, momentarily frozen. Betimes Sion defied words. “Aside from the lead surveyor, there’s an older man and then an English mapmaker. Two axemen serve as chain carriers.”

  His brow knotted. “How long they been here? Mayhap the better question is, how long do they aim to stay?”

  “They came again a week ago, but we first met up with them in May. They planned to survey up Boone’s way around the settlements, but with the trouble in the middle ground they now mean to chain the Green.”

  “They’ve come by the inn, then.”

  “Two of their party are there now. The rest are camped near here—”

  “Why have they divided?”

  “One man’s snakebit. The lead surveyor, Sion Morgan, brought him in. Ma’s tending him as best she can.”

  A medley of emotions played across his face. She stayed stoic despite her sympathies, torn between Nate Stoner’s plight and her father’s predicament.

  “What do they know of you?”

  “They ask few questions. They know our name.” Alarm leapt into his eyes. She hurried on, serving him the paltry pieces that would not satisfy. “I heard one refer to Ma as the widow Tucker.”

  “They have no guide?”

  She hesitated a tad too long, earning his sharp scrutiny. “They’ve been asking for one.”

  He hunkered down, hands fisted, and peered through the screen of trees as if fearful the men had followed her. All talk of Virginia, the Loyal, turned him almost feral. Irrational. “Get rid of them.”

  She stared at him, mouth open. “Get—what?”

  “I said, get rid of them.”

  Light-headed from thirst, she stooped beside him and uncorked a canteen of spring water, hoping she’d misheard. “They’ll likely be on their way as soon as the one man heals.”

  Or dies.

  “Go tell him—this Morgan—you’ll act as their guide. With you along they won’t tarry long. Send them upriver by way of the falls when you’re through. There’ll be no call to pass by here again.”

  She nearly choked on her swig of water. “But Pa—me alone—with so many men?”

  He snorted. “You fancy a chaperone in the wilderness?”

  She flushed. The rockhouse turned sweltering. She tried a different tack. “And you would send me knowing the Indians mean so much trouble? Knowing the British have rallied them to feast on surveyors and drink their blood?” The ugly wording in Alexander Cameron’s handbill was bitter to the taste. Desperation crept into her voice. “These land stealers are shown no mercy but are drawn and quartered or burned at the stake—”

  “And what of me? Rotting in a Tory prison? Hanging by the neck from the nearest tree?” With a hard hand he struck her, the searing pain lightning quick. Her head was jarred by the force of it.

  Never had he hit her. Not even in her childhood had he lashed or switched her. Her fingers went to her mouth, the bottom lip split and bloody. Tears blurred her vision and she struggled to stand.

  “Tell your ma to come here tonight. In the meantime, do what you have to do.”

  She grabbed the rope and began her descent, unable to speak past her throbbing lip. He would not apologize. She knew him too well for that. He was hell-bent on ridding the land of the Loyal. He would make her obey, come what may.

  And she? Would she do his bidding? Trembling, half sick, she nearly stumbled as her feet touched solid ground. Embarrassment flushed her from head to toe at the prospect of returning to the inn with such a blow. There was no disguising, no explaining her torn lip.

  But the stain on her spirit was worse.

  12

  When she I loved looked every day

  Fresh as a rose in June,

  I to her cottage bent my way,

  Beneath an evening-moon.

  —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  It was the forenoon when Sion realized Tempe was missing. The sounds of crockery and the steady banter of Aylee’s and Paige’s voices issuing from the kitchen told him she was gone. Every half hour or so Aylee would cross the dogtrot and see about Nate.

  “He’s resting easier,” she’d sometimes say, or, “Once his fever breaks he’ll take some nourishment.”

  Sion kept occupied splitting wood for the cookfires, creating a hill of hickory and oak in back of the woodshed where the roosters strutted cockily and the hens preened.

  Farther back in a little meadow was Tempe’s makeshift kingdom. For a week or better he’d surveyed her comings and goings, half amused and half admiring. Slabs of chestnut bark lay across sawhorses, laden with a staggering abundance of berries, some he couldn’t name. Clover, bee balm, and mountain mint were strewn about in baskets, ready to be strung up for drying or brewed for tea.

  He was reminded of his mother’s quiet industry those peaceful days along the Watauga. There she’d gather her bounty beneath the noon sun when the dried blooms would have the most potency. Did Tempe believe the same?

  She’d paid him no mind other than to ask about Nate. Sometimes she bypassed him altogether, disappearing inside the west cabin to see the patient for herself.

  Today he’d seen no sign of her. Her absence added to his angst. When he wasn’t helping with some needed task, he appointed himself guardian of her workplace, shooing off birds and other critters that swooped to steal her berries.

  Bedeviled past the point of sense, he took cover in the shade of a chestnut, knapsack beside him. Removing a cedar pencil and scrap of paper, he gave vent to his thoughts. A line there. A curve here. Some shading. The face of a woman soon took shape, not the quality of Cornelius’s artwork but telling nonetheless. Anyone who knew her would recognize it was she. Just Tempe of the indigo skirt. He even drew her dimple and the line of her brow that made her face so expressive. Studying it, satisfied, he thrust the paper among his field notes to better stay hidden. Somehow it solaced him that her likeness would go with him once he left.

  Near noon the midday meal was partaken of by Sion, Russell, and two longhunters passing through. Paige served blackberry cobbler, no doubt made from Tempe’s forays. It sat rich and heavy as he listened to the men talk about an alternate route to Virginia in light of the unrest.

  “Boone and Harrod sent word to Patrick Henry in Virginia they need reinforcements if they’re to stand . . . and survive.”

  “I misdoubt any men’ll be spared what with Washington’s war.”

  “There’s war, war everywhere. What say you we head west where the French and Spanish ain’t fightin’?”

  The kitchen door opened and Tempe appeared at long last, murmuring something to Russell, who regarded her with concern before clearing away their empty dishes. Sion’s attention left the longhunters.

  Her eyes were down, chin tucked in low, but there was no disguising her lip. Busted open, looked like. He’d seen tamer in a tavern fight.

  He leaned back in his chair, clenching and unclenching one fist as he watched her. She seemed . . . wilted. As if somebody had knocked all the fire out of her.

  Uneasy, he went out onto the dogtrot, where Smokey waited. He bent and rubbed her ears, thoughts elsewhere.

  Who had struck her?

  He felt a bit queasy pondering it. A human hand had left that mark. It wouldn’t have been Russell or the women. The longhunters had only just arrived, with no time to make mischief.

  He took a step off the dogtrot. The sun was at one o’clock, the cicadas shrill. He wondered how his party was taking the heat. Nigh blistering, the sun had leached the last of the indigo from his shirt and baked his exposed skin a deep russet.

  A great many gourds wer
e growing along the rail fence where they’d held their shooting match. The vines climbed the weathered wood, a tendril threaded through. Reaching out, he stripped some briar leaves and crushed them. So used, they made a fine tonic for swelling. Or so his mother always said.

  When Tempe appeared to throw out the wash water, he was waiting. She stood at the edge of the woods where the spring ran off down the mountainside, unaware of him. Shoulders bent, she stared dully into the trees.

  Coming behind her, he stole the empty basin away and set it aside. She spun to face him, putting her hand to her mouth as if to hide it, her eyes holding his in question. Taking her idle hand, he pressed the briar leaves into her palm. Understanding dawned. When she looked up again, tears glazed her eyes.

  His chest swelled tight. The leaves seemed a paltry offering. He took a step back, wanting to comfort her, touch her. He had no call to ask who had hurt her. He hardly knew her. But the small familiarity they shared made him want to do more.

  Aylee appeared just then, offering him an escape. “Mister Stoner is asking after you.”

  Sion walked toward the cabin and didn’t look at Tempe again.

  Where was Russell? As night settled in, Tempe sought the solace of her brother. But the barn-shed was wanting, overwarm and empty. The heat was making Paige cross, so Tempe had fled the cabin, unable to countenance the girl’s whipsaw moods. Usually she bore them gladly, teasing or talking Paige out of any sourness, but since she’d left the rockhouse she wanted to avoid any questions. She touched her tongue to her hurt lip, uglier now hours later.

  Once in the barn-shed, she determined to wait for Russell. She took a stool by his worktable and rested her head on her folded arms, pressing the crushed leaves to the sore place. Tonight Smokey was keeping close to Sion, and Tempe missed her sweet presence.

  Thankfully, Nate Stoner had taken a turn for the better, able to keep down some broth. Ma was nearly worn to a frazzle tending him and the kitchen too, though Tempe had noticed them talking together in Aylee’s spare moments. Nate often had a Bible in hand. Sion had fetched it from a saddlebag once Nate was rid of fever.