A Moonbow Night

by Laura Frantz

  Tonight Nate was moved to the keeping room loft, and Sion lodged there too. Glad she was Sion was out of sight if not out of mind. His unexpected sympathy touched her. Twice now he’d shown her a tender side. She much preferred his cool silences, his frugal way with words. It had taken all her will to hold herself together when he’d given her the tonic. It was nearly as jarring as Pa’s slap. She who slighted Sion at nearly every turn, paying him no more attention than she would a bug on a branch.

  A snort interrupted her reverie. She raised her head to look toward a far stall at the young colt Russell was raising to ride. Another pang shot through her at her brother’s plight. On horseback was the only time he felt whole, free of his limp.

  Lately he’d said little and toiled much. Summer always brought more work. She looked about, wanting to escape her misery by lightening his own. Leaving the briar leaves atop the worktable, she began tidying the shop, tucking a hammer away here and hanging a hoe there. Next she took a broom, sweeping up wood shavings from beneath a half-made chair.

  A gourdful of nails had spilled. She got down and gathered them up, the ends sharp against her fingertips. The colt was bumping against the stall, tired of confinement or perhaps hungry.

  She hung a lantern on a hook, took a handful of corn from a feed sack, and held out her open palm as her eyes roamed the stall. Farther back against the wall was a hide-wrapped bundle. Curious, she let herself in, unmindful of the colt nudging her for more feed. Cast in shadows, the bundle was larger than first appeared, hard and heavy. She took her penknife from her pocket and slit the leather tie.

  The hide slipped open. Wooziness swept through her. Guns. Muskets. British-made.

  Questions pummeled her like buckshot. Russell . . . was he repairing the Indians’ guns? The very ones used to make war on the settlers?

  Sore lip forgotten, she knelt and ran a hand over one weapon, marveling at the lack of quality. Dull walnut. A short barrel. Serpent side plates. The butt plate was simply a bent piece of flat brass. As clumsy and crude as Sion’s rifle was remarkable. Yet still deadly.

  If Boone or Harrod got wind of such treachery . . .

  Her first impulse was to dump the guns over the falls. To do so meant taking them in batches. There looked to be two dozen. Her fingers shook as she retied the bundle.

  Ma had made mention of the presence of more Indians. She’d thought it odd, then had quickly forgotten what with the summer gathering and this business with Pa and the surveyors.

  Half sick, she shut the stall and went out into the still night, needing to talk to Ma. But Aylee was with Pa at the rockhouse and wouldn’t return till morning. Paige was likely abed. And Russell? Something was very much amiss.

  A loneliness she’d never known assailed her. She’d seen a side of Pa that frightened her—and now Russell. Suddenly he seemed distant, secretive, unreachable. Not her beloved brother. More stranger.

  Having Sion and Nate Stoner across the dogtrot didn’t help. Though they were outsiders, she sensed to her everlasting hurt that they were better men, more to be counted on than blood kin.

  “Russell can’t be found.” Paige’s voice held a plaintive note.

  Tempe stood just shy of the springhouse, full milk pails in hand. Dusk was settling in and supper was done. Other night chores awaited. Like Ma, Russell had been gone a full night and day. Odd, the both of them. She and Paige weren’t often left alone.

  “I’ll see to Russell if you mind the milk.”

  “Take your gun,” Paige cautioned.

  “Nay.”

  Without another word, Tempe untied her apron and hung it from a peg. She wouldn’t say she knew where Russell had gone. When he was most disturbed, most haunted, he went where he knew few would follow. Behind the waterfall. She was chilled to the marrow even thinking it.

  Leaving her rifle untouched, she hurried through the woods toward the riverbank. Her gaze fell to the curtain of water hiding the secret passage behind the falls, still a roaring, writhing deluge. The hidden tunnel was best reached when the river was at its lowest lest the water sweep a body away. Few could say they’d been behind the waterfall. Few knew of it. Pa had shown her when they’d first settled on the Shawnee. He stored his valuables there, his cache of silver coin and the sword he’d worn in the last war.

  Pausing, she removed her moccasins and tucked them away beneath a laurel bush. The back of the falls was best navigated on bare feet. Up and over boulders she climbed, squeezing through tight passages till she emerged on a harrowing slip of ledge that led to the inner chamber. Now at midsummer the river had only begun to ebb.

  Mist drenched her. Tingling and chill, it lay against her heated skin. The waterfall’s roar filled her ears. Her heart beat double time, not in terror but in awe. James was closest here. Where the danger was the thickest she felt him best. Near as a handbreadth. Watching. Waiting. Perhaps wondering if it was her time.

  Slowly she edged, one foot after another, beyond the curtain of cold greenish water. The ledge widened. She was able to face forward. Her heart settled and then started up again upon sight of Russell. At the back of the cavern he sat, staring unseeing into the torrent. She had a terrible premonition that he was pondering leaping to his death. It was a worry she had carried with her since ’73.

  She stood between him and all that water as if her simple stance could sever the frightening possibility. But he continued to stare past her, through her, as if unaware she had risked life and limb to reach him.

  He made no sign he’d heard her. Not a muscle twitched. Just that sad, vacant stare unlike anything she had ever known.

  If he jumped, would she follow?

  It was Powell Valley all over again and those long, lonely months after, when all was dark and unsettled. Russell had gone vacant, speechless, refusing to eat, only bodily present. Now she knew it for what it was. When he was most haunted he left them, his mind in a place far beyond their reach.

  “Russell!” she called over the water’s roar, extending a shaking hand.

  She stepped away from the falls, toward him, her fingers extended.

  Nearer.

  Some impulse urged her closer when all she really wanted was to flee. But to flee meant certain death, or so she sensed. Russell was closer than he’d ever been to leaving them. The darkness inside him went deep. She must break it—or lose him completely.

  Kneeling, the unforgiving rock beneath her, she put her arms around his legs, resting her head against his knees, as if she could prevent him from harm. He hunched over, fists clenched, his longish hair free of its usual tie.

  He felt like stone. And then . . . the warmth and weight of his hand atop her head told her some part of him was present.

  “Russell . . .” She raised her head. “Talk to me.”

  He didn’t look at her but his hand stayed steadfast, slipping slightly to wrap around her braid as if it was an anchor for his turmoil.

  She took advantage of their closeness. Mighten she break the power of the past by begging him to talk?

  The words she thought she’d never say tumbled one after the other. “Please . . . tell me about that day.” Yet something told her she’d get no answer. “Tell me . . . please.”

  Yet did she want to hear? When everything in her recoiled at the telling?

  His hold on her braid tightened. He set his jaw, swallowed. Could she even hear him speak above all that water?

  Lord, if it’s meant for him to tell, if there’s healing in the telling, please let him speak and enable me to bear it.

  “I wanted to die that day.”

  His voice reached her ears, each painstaking word.

  “I wanted to die so that James might live.”

  Tempe stayed rigid, as if she might halt his speech by even a flicker of movement or a word.

  “He died hard. Try as I might, I can’t cut out his cries . . . what he said . . . what they did.”

  She looked down to the damp rock beneath them, fighting the tide of emotion alrea
dy welling inside her. She would not cry. She would not ask questions. She wanted to close her ears to the details. Let him talk if it would bring healing, but she had no heart to hear.

  “We camped on the north bank of Wallen’s Creek that last night. We were slowed some by tools and books . . . a drove of cattle . . . seed. Unbeknownst to us, you and the main party were three miles ahead.”

  Three meager miles?

  “We’d slept little that night on account of the wolves howling. One of our party laughed and said we’d best get used to such come Kentucke.” He hushed, leaving her on tenterhooks. “Now I think it wasn’t wolves but Indians.”

  “They’d likely been trailing you ever since you left Castle’s Woods.”

  “Dawn brought a heavy dew.” His hand on her hair was heavy, like his voice. “At daybreak the Indians fired on us. They shot James through the hips straightaway. Me, I was hit in the leg but managed to run into the brush and hide. The Negro, Adam—he hid with me.”

  With every careful utterance, the harrowing scene was etched in her mind, never to be undone.

  “James couldn’t move, shot as he was. Some of the Indians were rounding up the horses and supplies whilst the others taunted James. I recognized one as Big Jim, the very Cherokee the Boones had befriended along the Yadkin. James called him by name, begged him to spare his life. But the Indians were beyond listening.”

  His hand clenched, tugging her hair so taut she nearly felt scalped.

  “When the Indians ran up to stab James, he tried to fend them off with upraised hands . . . I’ve never seen such a sight, his skin slashed to red ribbons.” His breathing grew labored, as if the exertion of the telling was taking a toll. “James called out, saying he suspected you and the main party were already dead, killed by these same Indians. He cried out again—this time for his ma.”

  Rebecca? Tempe knew of their close tie. Her heart, always bruised, broke anew. Did Rebecca know her boy had wanted her? Wanted the solace only a mother could give? It did not grieve her that it was Rebecca he needed at the last.

  “At the end, they tore out the nails of his hands and feet.”

  She shut her eyes. Big Jim had done this? The very Shawnee who had shared the hospitality of James’s father’s house? Was there no mercy? Was heaven shut and silent that day? Could not the Lord have reached down and stayed the Indians’ brutality?

  “I’ve never seen a man so mangled. They shot James and another man full of arrows and left a war club beside them. But they did not scalp them.”

  Nay. This much she knew. When Daniel had sent Squire back to bury the dead, he had recognized James by his tangle of fair hair.

  “I stayed low in the brush, bleeding heavy as I was, whilst the Indians made haste to leave. Charles, another slave, was taken prisoner. Another man escaped.” He hung his head lower. “The war party wanted the horses and provisions more than anything.”

  Yet those very provisions—all the livestock and farming tools—must have ignited the Indians’ fury. They were evidence of white encroachment, a foretelling of white settlement to come and a lost way of life to any Indian in their path.

  She swallowed down the few questions he had not answered. Had James and Russell and their party not posted a watch that night? Why had they not pressed on in the dark to rejoin the main party? Had they thought them farther ahead than a mere three miles?

  Would she ever know?

  She looked up at Russell, who was still staring at the torrent of falls. He was done with the telling. And it had exacted a high price. Gooseflesh lined his bare arms, and his face was more gray than tanned. She still held on to him, her cheek pressed against his bony knees. She would not let go till he agreed to leave this place. Yet what if he threw himself off the ledge as they left? It was her ongoing fear.

  Lord, please.

  The short, beseeching prayer was as much for her as for him. She felt weighted—leaden—with the knowledge of what had happened in Powell Valley. The details crowded her brain, bloodstained and agonizing, carving a deeper hurt. Too much for heart and head to hold.

  She felt Rebecca and Daniel’s sorrow, the fears and tears of James’s brothers and sisters. She recalled her own grief like a blow, fresh again from Russell’s telling, their hurried, harried flight away from the Gap and Kentucke, every stunned, sweat-stained mile.

  Jesus, heal us.

  13

  I was most afraid coming down the Cumberland Mountain. The place was narrow and rocky . . . woods more beautiful in Cumberland Valley than any other place.

  —JANE GAY STEVENSON

  That night Tempe had no memory of climbing into her loft bed, Russell’s words had so upended her. She was cast back, mired, in ’73. Just when she’d thought her brother’s memories would send him over the edge of the falls, he’d snapped to, as if sensing the peril of the moment. And then he’d left the cavern ahead of her, taking her by the hand, his limp hardly slowing him, as if his unburdening had left him lighter, less lame.

  Now she lay still, Paige’s soft snoring hardly noticed. Her eyes fixed on the moon’s slender crescent beyond the loft window. Where was the girl she’d been? The one she’d left behind in Powell Valley?

  Dare she revisit her own memories, those last days of her girlhood before tragedy took hold? Could she even resurrect them, hidden away in the darkest corners of her conscience? The recollections, dusty and bittersweet, seemed as fragile as Ma’s chipped china from Virginia, the few pieces of porcelain that had survived their hasty flight over mountain after Pa’s misdeed.

  Sweat that had little to do with the searing heat limned her lip and brow.

  What would the price of remembering be?

  She recalled a timeworn thought . . . that sitting atop a horse sixteen hands high made a fine target for a flint-tipped arrow.

  Tempe pushed the worry to the far reaches of her mind as the mare took a hairpin turn, hooves a-clatter on the steep, stony trace. The horse stumbled, sending Tempe’s arms around the sleeping child astride the pommel in front of her and an avalanche of rock into the ravine below.

  Danger was quickly followed by delight. A spider had spun some enchantment overhead, the gossamer web catching the sun as it slid across the forest floor. It was on this she focused. Not the dizzying heights. Not the mare’s missteps. Nor the swelling stings of a yellow jacket’s nest they’d encountered farther back. Though she was glad to have flung herself like a cape around little Lavina, taking the hurt instead, her bare arms and cheek throbbed a reminder.

  Autumn had taken hold of the woods, creeping softly as if on moccasin feet. The whisper of falling leaves pierced her tiredness and reminded her it was her favorite season. Another hundred miles and the woods would be layered with gold. Shutting her eyes tight, she prayed they’d live to see it.

  She sent her gaze to the head of the long, snaking column. The men led off, able woodsmen most of them, some forty guns, all told. Beneath their wide-brimmed, dark felt hats, Tempe read their consternation. While a man could cover thirty miles or more on foot a day, they’d gone but a hundred in two weeks, only as fast as the livestock would allow.

  “Devilish rough,” her pa called this new country. Devilish and dangerous.

  Their party was mostly women and children, a great many curious dogs and skittish horses, unruly pigs and beeves and sheep. Such a ruckus they were raising!

  Here we be, come get us, their passing seemed to shout.

  Ahead of her rode several stoop-shouldered women, babies and small children tucked in hickory hampers slung across horses’ backs, packsaddles bearing the brunt of feather beds, coverlets, and kettles. The older children walked along what was little more than a bridle path. All but Lavina, who shared Tempe’s mare. Slightly feverish, Lavina slept, unmindful of their trek, her tiny chin tucked to her chest.

  They made camp at dusk. Soon half a dozen fires, nearly smokeless from dry oak, lit the darkening woods. There were cows to milk and supper to fix, mostly cornbread and meat that tast
ed of wood smoke and ashes.

  The music of some nameless creek called to her, wooing her away from the bustle of so many folks. Having eaten, Tempe sat atop a mossy log, her linsey skirt embroidered with briars and burrs. She allowed herself a moment of stillness before washing up plates and cups.

  At the edge of camp, her pa stood guard whilst Ma busied herself with their bedding beneath a sugar tree. All around them men’s voices rose and ebbed, their words flitting through Tempe’s mind like fireflies. Moccasin Gap. The Narrows. Sand Gap. Shawnee River. The Great Meadow.

  Kentucke.

  She looked west, finding a break in the trees. The sun was sinking in a blaze of red and gold, the sky pretty as a party dress. So lost was she in the winsome sight she nearly missed the voice in back of her.

  “Tempe.”

  James? She turned and took him in, the blue of his eyes like cold, quenching water. She felt a little start at his warm scrutiny. He leaned on the barrel of his rifle, and for a moment the busy encampment faded away.

  “The sunset’s better seen at the mouth of the creek.” He angled his head west. “Care to walk out with me?”

  With a glance at his family encamped near her own, she smiled her answer. But before she took a step in his direction, the least ones rushed him, hanging on to the hem of his worn homespun shirt.

  “Mind if we come too?” The plea would have snapped the hardest heartstrings. Tiny Becky, barefoot and begrimed with trail dust, smiled up at him, little Daniel on her heels.

  “Hush, sissy.” Farther down the creek bank, James’s sister Susannah paused from searching for wood ticks on Jemima’s scalp. “Can’t you see them two lovebirds want to be alone?”

  Flushing, Tempe plucked at another briar embedded in her petticoat, wishing for a comb . . . a clean cambric apron . . . room to breathe. But privacy wasn’t to be had in a busy camp.

  “Best bring Livvy too.” James leaned his rifle against a near tree and picked his sick sister off a pallet, her arms open wide, eyes still fever bright.