by Burning Sky
It was chilly in the yard. Willa hugged her arms to her ribs. “Why would you do this work?”
This time Joseph did not flinch. “They pay me well to do it, and I have a family with bellies to fill. There are thousands of our people at Niagara, living poor and hungry all around the fort, waiting for the British to find places for them. Game is hard to find and so are men to hunt what game there is. If I have learned a thing, then it is this: war does not end when bows and guns and cannons are put away.”
“True,” she said, her heart wrenched for all the Longhouse people and the remnant of her own village, living in such misery and uncertainty. “It does not.”
His expression softened, as if he regretted his words. “I meant to come back to you. I always meant to do that. But I did not mean to come empty-handed. Tracking these soldiers takes time. Longer if they reach a settlement, find a place among the Long Knives.”
An Indian would be a fool to walk openly into such a settlement if he valued his life. Even one such as Joseph, who could pass as Oneida—the tribe that had broken from the rest of the Longhouse people and allied themselves with the colonists in the war. With a creeping chill, Willa thought of Richard’s hatred, of Anni’s haunted eyes, and glanced around at the darkness. Were they watched even now? Then something else Joseph said registered and gripped her heart tight.
“You have a family? Do you mean a wife and children?”
Joseph held her gaze. “My father and uncles are gone. I speak of my mother, my sister and her children.”
She remembered his mother and sister well, though they had moved to another village shortly after Joseph rode to war. The news should not have eased that clenching of her heart when she thought he might have found a wife at last. There should not be such a clenching. It was unfair of her to begrudge him loving elsewhere.
“Thayendanegea has promised them fields to sow,” Joseph continued. “But until it is settled between the sachems and the Canadians, I am the one left to hunt or trade for them.”
“Or track deserters.” She paced to the side of the porch and back, hoping he had not seen the confusion in her heart showing on her face. “How many such men have you tracked?”
His eyes caught the light from the cabin as they followed her. “Four. I have brought in three living.”
“And the fourth?”
“I am on that trail now.”
“Then why have you come here?” She returned to the porch and sat beside him. From the corner of her eye, she watched his hands, resting on his knees. They were large and lean, with fingers strong and brown. She had always thought them beautiful.
“Because I saw you in a dream,” he said.
The urge to smile overcame Willa. “Of course you did.”
It was a dream that had brought him to her in the first place, after all, so many years ago.
Arriving home to Canada after three years at the Oneida town of Kanowalohale, where he had embraced the teachings of the missionary there, Samuel Kirkland, Joseph had not found his family eager to embrace his newfound love for the white man’s God—at least not his insistence that being a Christian meant more than obeying rules. “It is about the heart and knowing the voice of the Great Good God in your spirit,” he’d told them in his newborn fervor. “It is by grace we are saved. By His goodness, not our own.”
His mother’s brother had been particularly displeased, angry with Joseph’s father for having sent him to the Oneidas. After that disappointing homecoming, Joseph had gone to the women’s fields to think and pray, and there he’d found her, hiding among the cornstalks, hunched among the squash vines that shaded their ground, three months adopted, miserably homesick, and crying her heart out. She had bolted to her feet at sight of him.
He was taller than any Indian she had seen, and so lean he had looked like a giant heron standing there with one foot raised to take a step, gazing at her with brows shot high. Mindful of her tear-streaked face, her greased and braided hair, the hateful deerskin clothing she wore, she had raised her chin to him and said, “What do you want? I suppose you’ve killed something and want me to skin it for you. Well, I won’t! You killed it—skin it yourself!”
In her defiance she spoke English, not expecting to be understood. She suspected some of the women, including the one who called herself her mother, spoke some English, but all she earned was disapproving silence if she spoke anything but their heathen tongue—and once, from a warrior, a cuff on the head. She expected as much now and braced herself for it.
The tall young Indian put his foot down. His eyebrows lowered like the wings of a blackbird settling. Beneath them his dark eyes shone. “You are her,” he said, in a voice unexpectedly resonant for his gangly build. “At least the hair is right. Had I a rag, I would wash your grubby face and be sure.”
She stared, mouth flung wide. He’d spoken English—heavily accented, but clearly understandable English. The sound of it made her knees buckle. She sat down hard among the squashes.
The tall Indian stepped gracefully through the bean-entwined cornstalks, trampling not so much as a leaf. He knelt and put a hand on her long skinny arm.
“Please,” she said, fearing she’d imagined it. “Say that again.”
“That your face needs washing?” His eyes met hers, and widened. “One brown, one green. You are her.”
What did he mean? Had he been spying on her?
“I haven’t seen you.” She wiped at her eyes, hating the weakness of her tears, hating the eyes themselves with their contrary colors the Mohawks said made her special. And she wiped them to get a better look at this Indian. Most of her time with the Mohawks had been spent among women. Their men’s faces still looked much alike to her, grim and fierce and ugly. But she would have remembered this one. He wasn’t so ugly, not too grim … and he was so tall. She was nearly fifteen now, getting taller by the day, but he’d towered over her when they both stood. Now he smiled, and the smile did something very agreeable to his not-so-ugly face.
“You have not seen me because I have been in the south, with my father’s people. I had a dream while I was with them. In that dream I saw you.”
Despite her misery, she began to be interested. “How could you have dreamed about me?”
Instead of answering, he asked, as if it was of greatest importance, “What clan has adopted you?”
“No cla—” She broke off with a sigh. He could ask anyone about that horrible day the women took her to the river, stripped her and scrubbed her roughly with sand and water, to cleanse away her white blood. Then they dressed her in Indian clothes and marched her into a longhouse where they fed her and petted her and called her daughter … sister.
“Okwhaho,” she said bitterly.
The Indian’s face lost some of its color, as if her answer dismayed him. She found herself perversely insulted by his reaction.
“Is there something wrong with being Wolf Clan?”
“No … no. Only I thought it would be Turtle, or Bear.” Despite his words, he was still frowning. “Do not be offended. I am Wolf Clan, your … brother.” He looked at her with the strangest mingling of warmth and confusion in his dark eyes. “What name were you given?”
Loathe to make the hateful sounds, she said, “Burning Sky.”
He held out his hand, like her father—her real father, Papa—would have greeted another man at the mill. It seemed an outlandish gesture for an Indian to make here in the middle of a cornfield, wherever in the world this might be, so it must have been because he smiled again, or had carried on this entire conversation in English, that she slipped her hand into his. His grip was warm, encompassing. And to her great surprise, steadying.
“Sister,” said the Indian. “I am called Joseph Tames-His-Horse, and I have come far to say a thing to you. In my dream of you, I was saying it. Will you let me say it now?”
For the first time, she didn’t recoil at a Mohawk calling her sister. She would listen to anything this Indian had to say, as long as he sa
id it in English. But what he said was one of the very last things she’d expected. A verse of Holy Scripture.
“ ‘A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.’ Believe this, my sister, because He who said it is both great and good, and cannot lie.”
Sitting now on her cabin porch, Joseph told her his new dream of her, the dream that had brought him back to her at last. “You were walking a path alone, but at every bend in this path, you would stop and look behind you. You were looking for me to be following you. In the dream I knew this. Yet you were also laying branches across that path, as if part of you wished to hinder me too.”
“Joseph …” She said his name both to comfort and to plead. That path he saw led to her heart, and he would remove every branch in his way if he could. You cannot, brother. Please … do not try.
“God still speaks to you in dreams,” she managed to say. “I’m glad some things do not change.”
Inside the cabin the fire had died to embers. Still, Willa could see the gleam of Joseph’s teeth when he smiled. “He did not mention that white man in there, who I think would have killed me, had he the strength.”
“Him?” she said, startled by the reminder. “He is called Neil MacGregor, and he is no warrior. His dog is the better hunter, I think. But he is injured and sick, so I may do him discredit.”
Joseph stood. Behind them in the doorway, Neil’s collie leaped to its feet from where it had been lying, watching them. Ignoring it, Joseph went to his saddlebags. He returned with a leather pouch. It clinked when he placed it in her lap.
“That is part of what the British paid for the last man I returned to them. There’s every type of coin under the sun there. It is not much, but … it is something.”
Willa felt the weight of the coins against her thighs. “I cannot take this. Your mother and sister—”
Joseph knelt, silencing her with his fingertips. With his thumb he traced her jaw, then ran it along the line of her collarbone, sharp beneath her skin. “You are starving, my sister. Take it, or I am dishonored. And since you cannot eat coins, I will hunt for you … while I can.”
She shook her head. “We will manage.”
“You and the crippled one in there, whose dog is a better hunter? I saw you are planting the fields, but who will tend them while you hunt? Or does this dog have other skills uncommon to its kind?” He reached to ruffle the collie’s ear. The dog stiffened, but Joseph made a soothing noise, and it wagged its tail.
Willa said, “It would please this dog to be put in charge of the goat.”
Joseph smiled at that, then looked at her, sobering. “I do not doubt your strength. But what sort of man would not provide meat for his widowed sister if he could?”
“And your deserter?”
“Will keep,” Joseph said, enigmatically. “You are my more sacred duty.”
Willa searched his determined face, then sighed and gave in to what felt a great weariness. She leaned against his chest. He spread a hand over her head and held her against his beating heart.
“You asked what sort of man would fail to provide for his sister. Not the man I know you to be.” She drew a breath of resignation, which did not altogether conceal from her the relief flooding her limbs. “Nia:wen, Joseph,” she added, thanking him.
Then she straightened, relief all too quickly replaced by fear. “But it is not safe for you to be here.”
“I know.”
“Did your dream tell you this too?”
Joseph held her gaze unblinking. “Your eyes are telling me now.”
“Then hear these words of mine,” she said. “Because my hungry belly will not be your death.” Though Joseph listened—with the respect men of the Kanien’kehá:ka were raised to show their clan sisters—while she told him about her parents, the land auction, and Richard Waring, she could not sway his resolution to stay and provide meat for her.
“And something on which to eat it.”
Those were his last words on the subject early the next morning, before he strode into the woods with the felling ax, bent on hewing boards to make a table.
EIGHT
Neil MacGregor awoke on his pallet, in his nose the scent of stewing meat, in his mouth the lingering taste of laudanum. Muzzy headed, he lay there trying to recall taking the laudanum, but couldn’t. He did recall an Indian, tall and brown as an autumn oak, filling the cabin doorway. Or had that been a dream where Richard Waring turned into an Indian, come to take Willa away?
Willa. Hearing the muffled rise and fall of conversation, he raised himself to listen and felt relief at recognizing her voice. Until he heard the man’s. He tensed, his first thought again of Waring, come to cause more trouble. But the voice was different, too deep for Waring. He strained to catch their words.
“… neighbors near enough to hear your rifle fire,” Willa was saying. “I have not forgotten how to use my bow,” the man said. “You say it is dangerous for me to be here, but is it not for you? This Waring you spoke of … I can protect you from him but not in a way that will help you win friends among these people.”
“I am not concerned with winning friends.” A pot lid clanged, punctuating the statement.
“You will need them if you mean to stay.”
Willa made no answer to that. Instead, she picked up what must have been an earlier thread of conversation. “If my parents were not Loyalists, I will find a way to prove it.”
“And if they were?”
But to this, she said nothing at all.
“Thayendanegea told me how it was with the people here—here and down along the Mohawk River,” the man said into the silence, “after William Johnson’s death. The whites, who took sides in secret, declared themselves openly, Whig and Tory. Did not your parents obtain this land from Johnson?”
Neil recognized the name of Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs among the northern tribes until his death just prior to the outbreak of war. Trusted by the Mohawks like no other white man, Johnson had remained loyal to the British, a legacy that led in no small part to most of the Iroquois fighting against the colonials.
“They did,” Willa said. “But that was long ago. And it does not make them Loyalists.”
The man’s voice lowered. “Does it really matter, when this life for you is past?”
Neil rose from the pallet and waded through waves of dizziness to the doorway. Peering around the frame, he could see only a portion of the room. That portion contained what he’d assumed he’d dreamed—an Indian, seated on a block chair, black hair tied with hawk feathers hanging long down his blue-shirted back. His legs were folded under a table, a tin cup engulfed in one large hand.
When had Willa Obenchain acquired a table?
“Where would you have me go, Joseph?”
Neil couldn’t see Willa, but he saw the Indian’s shoulders tense beneath the pull of his shirt. “Come back to Niagara with me. Thayendanegea means to speak with the governor there about a settlement on Grand River. The Canadians promise mills and a school, ministers, teachers. There will be land for us. I will build a house for you there.”
“A man goes to the house of his wife, not the other way.”
That drew from the Indian a surprising response. His head tilted and his voice warmed to teasing. “Is this you asking me to do so?”
“Do not even make a jest of it,” Willa replied sharply. “We could never be together like that. Not among the People. You know this.”
“As my sister, then.” The teasing was gone from the Indian’s voice. “Still, you would be with me.”
Fear prickled the scar at Neil’s hairline. Did this Indian, wherever he’d come from, intend to coerce Willa back into captivity, or woo her back? Alarmed by either prospect, he stepped into the front room.
Willa stood at the hearth, bent over a steaming pot with a spoon poised to stir its contents, her face raised to the Indian with a look of naked emotion—affection, exasperation, and, unbelievably, indeci
sion.
“Could it be enough for you if …,” she began, but clamped her lips tight when she saw Neil. The Indian turned on the block chair to look at him.
Neil cleared his throat. “Willa. Everything all right here?”
Neil had misgivings about leaving the Indian alone at the cabin the next morning while he and Willa made the trek into Shiloh—she hoped to find there the provisions and necessities Anni’s charity hadn’t provided and was determined to do so now, before the planting demanded her attention—but decided to keep those misgivings to himself. The Indian had spent the night on the porch, despite Willa’s protests—apparently he’d spent the previous night beside the hearth—and now was out in the yard splitting cordwood.
Willa had explained their relationship succinctly the previous evening. “I was adopted by his clan—Wolf Clan, of the Seven Nations Mohawk in Canada—near kin to the Mohawks of the Longhouse people. Joseph is my brother.”
’Twas maybe a shadow thrown by the fire, but Neil could have sworn at the word brother a wave of deeper color darkened the Indian’s face, before he’d left them and gone out to the yard.
Now Neil sat at the table the Indian had built, a rough puncheon affair but sturdily made, waiting for Willa to descend from the loft. He heard the splash of water, a mutter of discontent. Not best pleased with the results of her toilette, he supposed.
As for himself … he ran his hand over his sprouting beard, resisting the urge to scratch. If in the settlement ’twas a razor to be had, it would be his by day’s end. He’d found a neck cloth at the bottom of his satchel and done his best to brush clean his frock coat with its wide, turned-down collar. The brown broadcloth seemed permanently creased, but at least it covered his filthy shirt.
When at last Willa made her descent, Neil stood. And stared.
She wore her quilled moccasins—the only footwear she possessed—but had dressed herself in the gown Anni Keppler sent, a faded blue linen trimmed in yellowed lace. The cut would have been woefully out of fashion on the streets of Philadelphia, and the elbow-length sleeves and the hemline were more than a tad short for its present wearer, who was blushing brighter than the braid she’d coiled around her head like a crown. Yet even in a borrowed gown, outrageously tall and painfully thin, Willa Obenchain appeared not only respectable but regal as a queen.