Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  Because she was jealous. Because even as the bond she had seen growing between Neil and the children had troubled her, her treacherous heart had been longing for the same thing to happen with her.

  How could she? Neil MacGregor might not understand the pain he was letting himself and the children in for, but she knew.

  “Talk, then.” Barely aware of what she did, she took the kettle and went to fill it at the spring, not looking once toward the horse shed.

  Neil and Pine Bird were still in the corner when she returned, but the girl had come out from under the quilt.

  Willa hung the kettle on the crane. From an ember buried in ashes, she kindled a blaze. Putting her back to them, she knelt to rummage through their food stores, having no notion what she sought. She wasn’t hungry. How could she be when her children were dead?

  Goes-Singing. Sweet Rain. How could she have gone on eating, breathing, while they did neither? She put a hand to her mouth. Behind her, Neil MacGregor murmured, his voice drenched in kindness. It made her heart both swell and ache. Then came to her ears the sweetest sound she’d heard since the winter brought its bleak curtain over her world. A small girl’s giggle.

  Her whole being clenched against the sound, even as her heart yearned toward it with a need so visceral she’d have moaned if grief hadn’t closed her throat.

  When a hand touched her shoulder, she jumped, pressing her fingers hard against her mouth.

  “ ’Twas Owl, right enough. Maggie saw him do it.”

  Willa stood. When she neither spoke nor turned, Neil touched her again. “Willa, you could be kinder to them.”

  The soft-spoken words burned like hornets’ stings. She shrugged off his hand.

  “It is better this way.”

  “Better, how? Willa, look at me. How is it better?” It was time to speak the truth, if he would not see it for himself. “It is good, this wrong that has come between you. It will wound them less when you go.” She turned to see his beautiful, uncomprehending eyes. “Listen. Your wrist is well enough. Your horse and all your things are returned to you. Why have you stayed?”

  Surprise sparked in his eyes and something else he hid too quickly for her to read. Something that reminded her unwillingly of that morning, in the garden.

  “D’ye think I’d leave Maggie, ’twas the slightest chance she needed my care?”

  She forgot the garden in a rush of frustration. “Why do you call her that? They wish her to be called Pine Bird.”

  “Owl wishes it. She asked me to call her Maggie.”

  “When?”

  “The day after Joseph brought them. You were in the field.” He shook his head. “Why does it trouble ye so?”

  “It’s what her father called her. Do you mean to take his place? Or only win her heart with the kindness of a father, then crush it when you go?”

  She had hurt him with her accusation. That was plain. She braced herself when he started to speak, but he checked, studying her far too closely for comfort.

  “That isna why you’re angry. Is it?”

  “No? Then tell me why I’m angry, if you know so much.”

  “I’d rather you tell me,” he said, with something of the gentleness he’d used with the girl. It was a powerful thing. Little wonder the child had not withstood it. It took all her will to turn from it now. Even when she put her back to him, he waited, as if hoping she might yet speak. But would it bring her daughters back to speak of them now?

  Silence stretched, as brittle and wounding as broken glass.

  “I’m away to the yard,” Neil finally said. “I mean to have a talk with the lad, who, incidentally, you’ve more in common with than ye may think.”

  Shirt sleeves rolled high, sweat streaming, Neil set the length of wood on the block and raised the ax. It split beneath his blow with a satisfying chunk. Less satisfying was the painful twinge that shot through his wrist.

  The chore needed doing. In Joseph’s absence the task had fallen to Willa. Watching her chop the wood that cooked his meals and lighted his work of an evening had done his pride little good, never mind till recently it had been a task beyond his managing. It wasn’t the wisest thing to be doing even now. Any second he expected Willa to appear and scold him for it.

  It was Owl who came to him. From the corner of his eye, Neil spied the boy edging from behind the horse shed to creep along the corral fence. He went on cutting wood, flinging pieces into a haphazard pile, even when he knew Owl had circled the cabin and stood behind him. He sent up a prayer for the lad to muster whatever he meant to say, and quick. His wrist couldn’t endure much more.

  “I’m big enough to use an ax.”

  Neil heaved the ax into the block and turned, pushing back damp hair as he wiped his brow. Owl shot a startled look at his forehead, then stood scuffing one of the moccasins Willa had made for him in the chip-spattered grass.

  “So you are. Help me sort this lot first. Then I mean to have a talk with ye.”

  That sounded more ominous than he’d intended, but he let the impression of impending reprimand stand.

  The boy moved with the alacrity of a slug, dragging out the stacking of wood beneath the porch, reminding Neil of himself as a lad, sent to fetch a switch from the hedgerow—to be used on his backside in punishment for some mischief. He couldn’t say the thought of tanning Owl in like manner hadn’t crossed his mind, but Willa was right. The lad wasn’t his son, and he sensed there was something besides mischief or ill will behind what the boy had done.

  A breeze freshened the air as he took a seat on the end of the porch, looking out past the chopping block and the clearing that terminated in a wall of thickening green.

  Inside the cabin, Willa spoke, too low for him to catch her words. She was talking to the girl, at least. That was good. He heard the kettle lid clang and hoped, vexed though she was, she meant to make something for their dinner.

  Her need to speak of her own children was a kind of wound, open and bleeding, one he longed to wash and anoint and bind. Joseph had said she would speak of it when she was ready. What if she didn’t recognize her need? So much had happened since her return—rescuing him, finding her parents dead, her home and livelihood threatened. Now she had these children, whom tragedy seemed to follow like a cloud of midges, to care for.

  Aye, he kent it was a fine line he was walking. He had to leave them all, and soon, if he ever meant to complete his work. That didn’t mean he must harden his heart and pretend he didn’t see the need screaming from this lad’s sullen, angry eyes.

  And anyway, ’twas far too late for the leaving not to tear a hole through his heart.

  He patted the edge of the porch. “Sit with me, Owl.”

  The boy obeyed, putting a careful distance between them.

  They sat thus while Neil sought for words suitable to address what had been done and why such a thing was never to happen again.

  “Why do you hate Indians?”

  The lad’s question caught him off guard, jumbling his thoughts like words on a page. “What makes ye think that of me?”

  Owl stared at his hands, clenching the knees of his ragged breeches. “Most white people do, but I thought, at first, you would be different. Then Tames-His-Horse went away and hasn’t come back. I didn’t think he would do that unless—”

  “Unless I made him leave?”

  “And you have that scar on your forehead. I saw a scar like that once, on a man who’d been half-scalped.” Owl thrust out his chin.

  Neil resisted the urge to brush the hair down over his brow. At least he was beginning to understand the eruption of hostility against him. The boy felt himself abandoned—surely not for the first time in his young life—and had been holding him responsible. He wasn’t. Or didn’t think he was. But neither of them had thought to tell Owl or his sister why Joseph stayed away. Francis Waring had delivered Willa’s message; they’d been collecting meat from the islet for over a fortnight.

  “You ken that arrow on the mantel, aye?
’Twas meant as a warning, Willa thinks. Joseph’s stayed away in case the warning was for him. That doesna mean he’s abandoned you. He’ll take you where ye wish to go, when he’s able.”

  The boy thought about that and seemed to accept it. “Still … He didn’t seem to like you. I didn’t think it was because you were white. She is white.” He jerked his head toward the cabin. “And he likes her well enough.”

  The notion—even so innocently stated—was disquieting. He liked her all too well, did Joseph.

  “I canna speak for what Joseph Tames-His-Horse may think of my race as a whole. As for me, aye, there was a time when a brown face was enough to cause me fear. But not hate. Never that. As for the fear, I’ve been taught to think differently of late.”

  A faint scrape of a moccasin tread was the only indication Willa had come onto the porch to bring in wood. So soft was the sound it might have been the cabin settling, or a tree in the nearby forest creaking in the breeze blowing steady now from the west, piling up a cloud bank and, blessedly, keeping the flies at bay.

  He touched his forehead, high up near the line of his hair. “Would ye care to hear the telling of how I came by this scar?”

  Owl shot him a look through tangled hair—he hadn’t permitted Willa to put a comb to it. His eyes still held wariness, but his grip on his knees was no longer a clench. “I will hear it.”

  He was a lad, after all. And a story was hard to resist.

  EIGHTEEN

  Neil had left Philadelphia in the summer of 1778, intending to compile his field guide and add his own contribution to the accumulated works of botanists like Catesby, Colden, and the Bartrams, while doing his best to stay clear of the escalating hostilities between the colonists and the Crown. He wanted no part in that quarrel, if he could avoid it.

  He’d decided to traverse the Catskills first, though others before him had covered that ground, spend the winter in Schenectady, then head north of the Mohawk in the spring.

  “I followed the Schoharie Creek north,” he told Owl, gazing over the cabin yard as he spoke. “There’d been a raid by the Tories along that stretch earlier in the year, but it seemed the war had shifted to other parts of the frontier. I passed through the Catskills unhindered and made my way west along the Cobus Kill. By mid-autumn, I was just south of the Mohawk River, in a settlement called Cherry Valley.”

  There, he’d learned of trouble farther west along the Mohawk. The British and the Iroquois had struck from Fort Niagara and the west, burning homesteads and skirmishing with colonials, but he’d thought keeping to the east where the militia presence was stronger would render him secure while the colonists took their revenge.

  “The Americans burned the crops and houses at a place called Onaquaga, where some of the Tories and Brant’s warriors took refuge. You’ll ken the name of Brant?”

  Owl nodded. “He’s a big chief of the Mohawk.”

  “Aye. Well, ’twas presumed that strike against Onaquaga would be the last of the trouble for the year. I took on a few provisions in Cherry Valley, planning to head north to Schenectady.”

  It was then November. It rained that night, snowing by fits as the temperature dropped. He’d hoped to lodge within the fort, but the commander there denied civilians entrance despite rumors of an enemy-raiding party being sighted, saying his scouts would give fair warning, need be.

  Next morning at dawn found Neil breaking camp in the woods to the east, when the first war shrieks raked the hair of his scalp on end, and the sputtering pop of musket fire crackled on the cold, wet air.

  He was told—weeks later, when he was able to pay heed to such things—that had the fort alone been attacked, Cherry Valley’s settlers might have fled to the woods or remained barred inside their homes unmolested. But the Indians, impatient with the British regiment’s assault that failed to immediately take the fort, spread through the settlement, eager to avenge Onaquaga. So the burning began, the plundering, the scalping.

  “I was keeping to the woods, trying to skirt the attack and head north, when I came upon a warrior with a white woman and two lassies in tow.” Neil had had a musket. Though no great shakes at firing the thing, he’d been prepared to use it. “But the warrior called to me in perfect English, asking would I be so obliging as to take the woman and her daughters into my custody, for he’d other friends in the village he aimed to protect.”

  Too stunned to refuse, Neil had dismounted and swung the children onto his horse. “We picked a way through the wood, stopping at the crack of brush or a shout nearby, moving on when it seemed safe, me all the while praying the Almighty Lord to blind the eyes of any who would show us less than that Indian’s mercy.”

  While he spoke, Neil had grown aware of the smell of stewing venison. His stomach growled, answered by a gurgling from Owl’s.

  The boy started to return his grin, then firmed his mouth and looked away.

  Cap, back from who knew whence and freshly tangled in cockleburs, had come onto the porch and crept between them to lie against Neil’s thigh. He lifted a hand to the collie’s head but drew back when he saw Owl’s small hand doing the same. It was the first he’d seen the lad show his dog affection.

  “The woman later told me that warrior was Brant,” Neil said, catching up the thread of his tale. Having met with a band of Cherry Valley refugees a mile to the north, he left his charges in their care, to continue toward Schenectady. He’d been shaken, true, but he’d made it out of Cherry Valley alive and surely—surely—this squabble between the colonies and the Crown would be settled before the spring. “Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit. Man proposes, but God disposes.”

  “If you got away from Cherry Valley,” Owl interrupted, “how did you get that scar?”

  “I’m coming to that. I did get away. I just didna get far.”

  Among the band of refugees hiding from the attack was a young Oneida hunter who offered his service as a guide. He was vouched for as a friend to the Americans, as were most of the Oneida.

  “So he proved, till we ran across a band of Tory Indians still bent on plunder.” At which point his guide had experienced an alarming turnabout of allegiance. “All I mind is a screech in my ear and a blow to my head. I came to on the ground, in the midst of losing my scalp.”

  He’d come to screaming, sensible of what was being done to him, just as a rifle ball took his erstwhile guide in the chest. They’d both fallen back into the mud, whereupon he’d lost consciousness again, learning later he’d been rescued by a party of militia come too late to aid Cherry Valley, but soon enough to rescue one hapless naturalist.

  “I was taken to Schenectady, laid out senseless in a wagon. I’m told I came nigh dying, but I canna call it to mind. There’s a great lot of it—weeks—lost to me. Something was knocked awry,” he said with a tap to his skull. “More than just my memory. Some things that came easy to me once, they’re beyond me now.”

  Not until he attempted to pen a letter to Dr. Rush, and his benefactors in Philadelphia, apprising them of his situation, had he discovered the worst damage wrought upon him by that blow to his head. He closed his eyes briefly, recalling the horror of finding that he, a man of scientific study, fluent in the classic languages, could no longer read or write the simplest phrase—in any language.

  “Things like reading?”

  He looked at the boy, surprised. “How did ye ken that?”

  “I’ve seen how she … Miss Willa … helps you with your work.” The color deepened in Owl’s dusky cheeks, but his gaze held steady. “I’m sorry for putting ink on your drawings. I don’t know why I did it.”

  Neil now had a good idea why and felt more than a twinge of conscience about it after Willa’s accusation. He hadn’t sought the attachment Owl’s sister had formed with him, but true, he’d done nothing to discourage it. Would his leaving be as hard on her as Willa predicted? Or on this troubled man-child beside him, awaiting an answer to his apology? He had a thing or two he wanted to say to the boy, before he addressed the i
ssue of his ruined drawings.

  “If ye’ll suffer a word of advice, lad. Dinna put your trust in men—not foremost. Men will come and go from your life, even those who love you, some before you’re ready to see them go. But I’ll tell you this I’ve learnt: the Almighty loves you more than any man could, and He willna forsake ye. Not ever. D’ye ken that?”

  He said the words with his whole heart behind them, having learned them again so recently himself.

  Owl kept his eyes cast down, his hands busy pulling burs from Cap’s belly hair. “That sounds like what our father would say.”

  “Well, he’d be speaking truth. And, lad, I’m sorry you lost him and your mother. I’m verra sorry for that.”

  Moisture welled in the boy’s eyes. He brushed hastily at a tear, then jerked his chin in affirmation and picked another cocklebur from Cap’s fur.

  A lump grew in Neil’s throat. His voice tightened around it as he went on. “As for my drawings, I willna say it didna do me hurt, what you did to them, but I accept your apology, and I forgive ye.”

  The boy looked up, relief on his face. “Can I fix them?”

  “No, lad. Some things we do canna be undone. But maybe in a day or so, ye’ll come out with me, see can we find those plants to draw again?”

  As the boy accepted his offer, Neil grew conscious of Willa standing behind them in the cabin doorway. The porch boards creaked as she stepped nearer.

  “Owl, there is meat on the table for you. Come inside and eat with your sister.”

  Whether on account of repentance or hunger, Owl got to his feet without being told twice and went into the cabin, leaving Neil with his legs dangling off the porch, the breeze in his face, glad for what had just passed between them. Cap leaped down and crossed the yard to investigate something his keen nose had discerned.

  Willa’s petticoat brushed Neil’s shoulder. The sight of beaded moccasins beneath a homespun hem no longer seemed an incongruous sight.

  “Today in Shiloh, I remembered something.”