by Burning Sky
Time lost meaning again, day and night an inseparable blur.
Another time when the fire was not so high, he almost woke—or maybe did. He sensed them all around him. The children, asleep on their pallet. The dog lying by the hearth where another fire burned. The Scotsman seated at the table, head cradled on folded arms; Burning Sky coming up behind him in her English clothes, standing silent, taking in his weariness. Burning Sky putting a hand to his shoulder. The Scotsman’s head rearing up, his hand groping for hers, pressing it to his cheek where the beard had come in like a shadow.
She pulled away, but not quick enough. “Now it is you who must sleep.”
Her eyes followed the Scotsman as he half-staggered to his room, and there was so much behind the green and the brown of them, so much she was trying not to feel. Was afraid of feeling.
Joseph let his eyes close, but the images festered, deeper than the wound in his side.
Day. Night. Voices.
“She was not well when last I saw her. She is tired with this baby.”
“Go to her. Help her. He’s been like this nigh a week.”
“I cannot leave him. I will go to Anni when I can.”
Later …
“Wake up, Mister Joseph. Please, wake up.”
He woke up. Pine Bird’s small hand lay soft against his face, and the touch was no longer cool. The fire in him had burned itself out. The Master of Life meant him to live yet a while.
Though he was of two minds about that, he smiled at the girl, whose face lit like a candlewick dipped to flame. In her pipe-song voice, she called to the others to come and see.
Everyone slept the sleep of the exhausted, except for Joseph Tames-His-Horse. He lay wakeful until the darkest hour, then tied on the new leggings Burning Sky had made for him and let himself quietly out of the cabin. The Scotsman’s dog, used to him now, barely raised its head as he passed it on the porch. He found his bags and saddled the mare and led her to the clearing’s edge, where he paused to catch his breath—he was weak—and let his gaze rest on the cabin where she slept beneath its roof silvered in starlight. The night air was clammy against his skin.
It was hard to leave her, but he did so in hope. That was the fever in him now. Hope. It seemed impossible to quench. And though he knew it was a risk, what he hoped was that if he went away, there would be no reason for the Scotsman to stay. No one he need heal with the medicines in his box. Maybe Burning Sky would see this; maybe she would heed that fear he had seen in her and tell the Scotsman to go his way, take his paints and his plant press and be about the business that had brought him here.
Maybe that Albany letter would never come.
Maybe in the end she and the children would return with him to Niagara, to the People. There she would be his sister. Never more than that. But with him always. He could swallow back the love that must not be. He could spend the rest of his life swallowing it back, to be near her.
That is what he told himself.
Even such frayed hope had the power to tether him to this dangerous place. He would wait a little longer to do the other thing he had come here to do, to see if this was how it would be with Burning Sky.
Ohiari:ha, the time of ripening, had come while he lay fevered. Leaf cover lay thick on the ridges now, good for the hiding and watching he must do. The deserter was careful, well surrounded by those for whom he worked, rarely alone on the stretch of road between the big stone house and the village, and always mounted. He might be wary now, fearing the Indian the big Yellow Hair had shot at but not killed. He would know that the British Army sent warriors of the People to bring back their deserters.
But there would come a moment, if Joseph was patient, when the mind of the man was easy, his safety taken for granted. All he needed was to be watching when it came. But he must have his full strength when it did.
There was that peace council Burning Sky had told him about, the one to be held at Fort Stanwix at summer’s end. An idea about that council was forming in his mind. An idea that had to do with Thayendanegea and the deserter.
For now he would head toward that fort, posing as one of his father’s Oneida people—at least to any whites he could not avoid. He would see if he could gather news of who was coming to this meeting. The journey there and back would give him time to heal. And when his full strength returned, he would do his work for the British. One last time.
TWENTY-TWO
They would be, Neil MacGregor had informed her, “two laddies gone a’ plant hunting.”
Owl appeared as taken with the notion of spending the following day traipsing the hills in search of likely flora to put in Neil’s book as was the naturalist himself. Willa didn’t voice her misgivings about the time he was spending with the boy as the pair poured over each item to accompany them: plant press, specimen tin, the paints, brushes, quills, clamshells, pencils, and paper nested inside the field desk.
Next they gathered provisions—a sack of elk jerky and a batch of dubious-looking cornmeal cakes Neil was minding on the hearth.
Pine Bird, crestfallen that it was to be a males-only excursion, hung by Neil’s side, gazing at the things laid out on the table. Her wistfulness cut straight to Willa’s heart, but no one was more surprised than she to hear herself say, “Let these laddies get themselves scratched and bug bitten hunting plants in the hills. You and I will visit Anni tomorrow. She has children. Twins.”
Pine Bird raised melting dark eyes to her. “Two born together?”
“Yes. A boy and a girl. Would you like to see them?”
“Are they babies?”
“They are five summers.”
Owl shot his sister a smugly superior look. “Even you are older than that.”
Pine Bird raised her chin. “I want to see them.”
“I want to see a bear,” Owl said. “Or a wolf. No—a panther!”
Neil looked up from the hearth, brows raised. “Whoa, young man. I dinna recall Felis concolor being on the list of things I aim to see.”
“Yes,” Willa said, catching his look across the children’s heads. “We have enough to contend with without inviting panthers into it.”
The two laddies and the dog were away into the hills before Willa finished tidying breakfast next morning. From the porch, she saw Pine Bird out by the shed, feeding the goat grass cut from the old horse pasture. The girl had taken over the animal’s care and in the process made a pet of it.
“Time to go!” At her summons the child dumped her last armful over the slatted fence. Grass cascaded over the chewing goat, leaving it sprinkled in green. Willa had replaced the falling-to-rags garment the girl came to them wearing. As Pine Bird reached the porch, she saw the child’s new petticoat was stained at the knees.
The sight brought a lump to her throat. It was all too easy, as the days passed and the children stayed, to fall into mothering them. Far too easy. She must guard her heart.
“Let me do something with your hair,” she said briskly. “Would you like a braid?”
Pine Bird nodded and presented the back of her head to Willa, who quickly sectioned and plaited the long strands. The child’s hair wasn’t a true black, like her brother’s. Sunlight revealed sparks of brown, like it did in Neil MacGregor’s hair, though the girl’s was as straight as if it had been ironed. Willa tied the braid with a leather whang threaded with two blue beads—beads the same rich shade as Neil’s eyes, she thought, as the girl swung her braid around to admire them.
What was all this thinking of the man and his looks? She must stop it. She was letting him as well as the children too close, letting herself become used to them.
That path to her heart was becoming dangerously clear.
She was silently berating her foolishness, reminding herself that all of them were meant to follow their own paths away from her—including Joseph—and that their going was for the best, when Pine Bird turned her sweet smile up to her and said, “Istah put beads in my hair too.”
Istah. It was the M
ohawk word for Mother.
The ache took Willa in the center of her chest. For the time it needed to draw a ragged breath around it, the face of the girl raised to her changed, became a little browner, wider, the eyes a startling hazel green. Goes-Singing’s face.
Willa blinked, and it was a stranger’s child looking up at her again, brown eyes sparkling because someone had thought to put beads in her hair. Because I thought of it.
It was exactly the sort of thing to put her heart in greater peril. The sort of thing she should not be doing.
“Come.” Willa stepped off the porch. “It is a long walk.”
She wasn’t keen on leaving the cabin and fields unguarded, but there had been no cause for alarm in the days since Joseph left them. No unexpected visitations. No arrows shot from hiding. No sense even of being watched. Still she was more than half-regretting this decision; other threats existed, deer and rabbit foremost among them. She would probably spend the next few hours imagining voracious teeth chewing and chewing at her crops.
But there was another reason for going into Shiloh—a letter to mail, tucked inside her pocket. They’d received no reply to the first letter sent to Tilda Fruehauf in Albany. Neil had urged her to be patient with the vagaries of the post, but had agreed sending a second letter couldn’t hurt.
Such were the thoughts the girl interrupted as they strode along the shortcut to Anni’s.
“Where did Mister Joseph go, and when will he come back?”
It wasn’t the first time the girl had asked such questions. “He is away hunting or else tending to business of his own. I do not know how long he will be about it. He will come for you when he can and take you and your brother to Niagara.”
She doubted such answers satisfied the child, but it was all the answer Willa could give. She’d found it hard to conceal her own distress and frustration the morning they woke to Joseph’s absence. For a week, they had seen nothing of him, then twice in the past few days, a fresh kill had appeared on the islet.
She’d begun to think Joseph didn’t mean to come back to them, or not before he regained his strength and fetched his deserter back to the British, now that he knew where the man was hiding.
When Neil had asked why Joseph left so abruptly, before he was fully healed, she’d had nothing to say. She had only her suspicion, one it would be unwise to share.
It is different between you, from when I first found you here.
Still, he might have bothered to tell her what he planned to do, how long he thought it would take him to do it. She couldn’t hope to feed herself and the children through the winter, even if she still had a roof over her head. Neil MacGregor would be gone by then at least. In fact, with Joseph no longer there to tend, and the girl’s leg healed, there was no reason for Neil to stay another day. But was he gathering provisions and making plans to be on his way? No. He was off prowling the hills with the boy.
Willa set her face in a frown as her strides devoured the path, thoughts fixed on the vexing whims of men.
“I hope Mister Joseph doesn’t come back.”
Pine Bird’s utterance was in such opposition to Willa’s thoughts, and the thoughts she’d assumed were behind the girl’s question, that she broke her stride to look at the child, who’d been trotting to keep up.
“Why wouldn’t you want Joseph to come back?”
Pine Bird lowered her eyes, too shy to answer, but as Willa started off along the path again, she felt small fingers curl around her own.
“My Lem’s taken with that girl,” said Goodenough, the dark skin of her face glistening as she lifted a pair of breeches from the boiling kettle.
It was wash day again at Anni’s. Goodenough and the smith’s wife, Leda MacNab, were already deep into the backbreaking chore by the time Willa and Pine Bird arrived, but now many hands were making light of the work.
Manning the rinsing bucket, Willa looked to the children playing an energetic game of battledore and shuttlecock, using a whittled cork adorned with a feathered topknot. They’d divided into pairs to bat the shuttlecock back and forth using wooden paddles. Willa had assumed Anni’s Samantha would have paired up with Pine Bird, but it was Lemuel who’d latched on to her, showing her how the game was played.
“One, two, three, four, Mary at the cottage door!”
Willa smiled at the rhyme. It was the same one she and Anni had used as girls, a line uttered each time the shuttlecock was batted, the goal to race through as many verses as possible before the shuttlecock fell to earth.
“Five, six, seven, eight, eating cherries off a plate!”
Pine Bird had proved agile, and quick to pick up the rhyming.
“She is used to boys,” Willa said to Goodenough. “Her brother is with Neil MacGregor, looking for plants to put in the book he’s making.”
“I heard Mr. MacGregor telling Gavan about his field guide.” Leda MacNab handed Willa a scrubbed frock, pausing to watch the scene of noisy play across the yard. “She’s a pretty child. What did you call her?”
“Margaret Kershaw.” Willa had thought better of introducing her as Pine Bird, but hadn’t expected the girl’s bright smile upon hearing her English name spoken.
“Had a white daddy,” Goodenough said. “Thought so, to look at her. How old she be?”
“Seven.” The age Goes-Singing would have been in a fortnight.
“On the puny side of seven. She need feeding up.”
“She does.” Anni returned from spreading pieces of wash on the hedges in time to catch Goodenough’s comment. “Did you see the size of her eyes, Leda? She’s half-starved, the little thing.”
“She is not a thing. She’s a child.”
Willa’s words hung in awkward silence.
“I didn’t mean—” Anni broke off with a wince, rubbing her belly.
Goodenough eyed her sternly, wet hands on hips. “Didn’t I tell you to rest whilst we’re here to give you the chance? I brought you out that chair. Sit, afore you bring on the pains again.”
“I think I will.” Anni lowered herself into the straight-backed chair set near the wash kettle. At six months along, the baby seemed healthy and vigorous, but already Anni had twice feared she was losing the child. Leda and Goodenough came to help with chores as they could. Willa thought she should do likewise, but it would mean leaving the fields untended far too often for their health. Unless Neil stayed a little longer …
No. She must not find excuses for that. It was time—past time—for him to go.
What if he had left before Joseph came to the cabin with a bullet in his side? she wondered. Even if she’d removed the ball herself, would he have taken a worse fever and died of it?
What if Anni’s baby was born too soon and needed a physician’s skill to help it live?
“Willa, I meant no offense.” Anni’s voice held hurt.
Willa fished a small petticoat from the rinse bucket and began to squeeze out the excess water. “I did not mean to snap at you.”
“The heat has all our tempers on edge,” Leda ventured.
Though early in the day, it was already warm, the air muggy enough to mold shifts and gowns to sticky flesh. A heavy rain in the night hadn’t lifted the humidity. Thick clouds still overhung the sky.
“The Colonel stopped by the smithy yesterday,” Leda said, filling up the silence. “He’d news about that treaty with the Iroquois, over to Fort Stanwix. It’s going to happen around the first of September.”
“I pray God they don’t let the Mohawks come back,” Goodenough said. “I can’t see it coming to nothin’ but bad, after everything.”
Willa felt the women’s gazes, as if they’d each suddenly remembered where she’d spent the past twelve years. Her own heart constricted, not because of the awkward silence, but for thinking of the refugees gathered around the crowded British forts, among them Joseph’s family. Her own clan. Ought she to have abandoned them?
But what good would the presence of one more widow have done? Another mouth to
feed, that was all she’d have been. At least here she could make shift to sustain herself, if she found a way to keep the land. But her heart ached for those who didn’t have even an acre of land to call their own now, whose choice of sides in the war had cost them everything—and pushed aside the thought that her parents’ choice might yet cost her everything.
In the absence of conversation, the children’s voices intruded, high spirited, carefree. Willa wrung the petticoat and took it to the hedge. She was smoothing out its wrinkles when she looked past the mill below to the tracks that converged just above the cluster of cabins around the trade store and smithy.
Coming down from the west, the direction of the Warings’ land, was a solitary rider, tall in the saddle. Richard. He saw her there on the ridge above the mill and reined his horse to a halt. Thrice the space of a stone’s throw lay between them, and a rushing creek tumbling over the mill falls, yet she felt the scorch of his stare as if they stood at arm’s length.
Richard touched his hat before turning his horse down the track. He didn’t look back at her.
“There he goes, my sweet boy.”
Willa started. Beside her Goodenough stood, holding a pair of little Sam’s breeches. Her dark eyes, usually so snapping in her handsome face, had softened and saddened as she watched the Colonel’s eldest son riding into the village.
“Did you know Richard was there in Albany, that day the Colonel bought me for his missus?”
This was unexpected. Goodenough had never spoken of how she came to be the Warings’ slave. As a girl, Willa had never thought to ask.
“He weren’t much bigger than my Lem is now. Me, though, I was a strapping girl, long since taken off my mama. But when that wagon started rolling, taking me off to this wild place, I couldn’t help looking back to Albany and crying my eyes out.”
Goodenough pressed her lips tight, then made a noise through them that might have been laughter. “There we was, back of that wagon heaped with plenishings bound for the Colonel’s house, with that blue-eyed boy-child staring at me blubbing into a wad of my skirt. And what you think that little towhead up and do? He grab my hand and don’t let go till that wagon stop for the night.”