Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  The one he didn’t pray for was himself, wary of what the Almighty might have to say about his recent actions. It was all well and good to be told “Stay.” Neil wished it had been explained how he was meant to do so given Willa’s resolve to the contrary.

  “Ye might’ve consulted with her before telling me such a thing.” He watched a shooting star arc a path across the heavens, two others hot on its tail. “Or maybe You did, and she simply wasna having it. Or me.”

  What, after all, did he have about his person to recommend him to a woman like Willa? He’d no great worldly goods to ease the burden of her poverty. He wasn’t a farmer, though he supposed he could learn to be. He was certainly no warrior. In short, he wasn’t the kind of man a woman like Willa Obenchain needed. Better suited was a man like Richard Waring, had he been less a brute. Or Joseph, had he not been her clan brother, which seemed to be how Willa still viewed him.

  Neil hoped it was how she still viewed him.

  But why should he hope such a thing? Capable as she was, he wanted to see her covered, shielded from those who would burn her crops and kill her livestock and shoot arrows into her cabin door. If Joseph could be that for her …

  In everything give thanks.

  He put his head in his hands and asked for the strength to expunge Willa from his heart. He asked for a revival of the passion that had called him to the frontier in the first place. The challenge and thrill of scientific discovery; the creative drive to render those discoveries on paper. It had once been all-consuming, sharp and clear in his mind, leaving no room for vague notions of wife, or family.

  Such notions wore faces now. Beloved faces …

  A sense of light and movement at the edge of his vision jerked his head up. He thought it must have been another shooting star, till a moment later, a curtain of greenish light materialized across the northern horizon.

  Aurora borealis. He’d seen it before, but never heard of it happening so many weeks out from the equinox. The glowing, rippling curtain vanished, then reappeared. At its lowest edge, above the black undulation of the mountains, flowed a ribbon of scarlet. It gave him a queer sense of displacement, like seeing the sun rise from the wrong direction. He caught his breath at the savage beauty of the sight. And understanding struck.

  “Burning Sky.”

  It wasn’t the sunset for which the Mohawks had given Willa her name. Surely it had been for these fleeting, arresting, enchanting northern lights. A burning sky.

  Four days deeper into the mountains, he saw a moose at last and, running along a distant ridge, a pair of hunting wolves. But no sign of another human being save the scattered black remains of small hunters’ fires, many seasons old. This was the land of the eagle and hawk, of stealthy panthers and shy, lumbering bear, of falling cataracts and towering forest.

  It was the place of his dreams, wider and wilder than his feeble imaginings had rendered it. He was meandering northeastward through it, planning eventually to strike Lake Champlain, then head southward toward Albany, and ultimately Philadelphia. Yet every morning he was forced to overcome a shackling resistance to pushing on.

  Around midday, the day he saw the moose, he came across a game trail leading up to a saddle in the mountains. Neil let Seamus follow it, musing on what he’d name the peaks around him were he a mapmaker instead of a plant hunter.

  That craggy summit to the north, with a rocky knob at the top, looking for all the world like his da’s weathered profile. Old Man Peak? MacGregor’s Pate?

  No. He had it. Head-in-the-Clouds … or however one would say that in Mohawk. Willa could have told him. He wondered what she might be doing at that moment. Thinking of him?

  Were he a man given to cursing, he’d have let loose with a few well-deserved invectives at himself. He focused all his effort on not thinking of Willa, dismayed it should still require such vigilance. Surely it should get easier with practice, not harder.

  The way had steepened. Ahead, the trees closed in, narrowing the trail, cutting off his view of the peaks. He’d do well to watch for snakes, as well as loose scree that might threaten Seamus’s footing.

  Even as he thought it, the horse lurched beneath him, hooves sending stones rattling down the incline to their right. The drop was only a few feet, but even a minor injury could prove life threatening with nothing but his meager medical kit to tend himself. He couldn’t count again on a passing angel inclined to offer aid.

  The trees pressed close, pine and balsam fir forming a corridor of green that swiped his knees as they passed. He urged the roan over a rise where the trail switched back on itself. Boughs brushed his face, fragrantly needled. They maneuvered another sharp turn, and Neil reined the roan to a halt. Thirty feet ahead the trail ended in a wall of rubble.

  “Ye canna be serious.” He hadn’t been speaking to Seamus, but the gelding tossed its head, as though in the affirmative.

  Stubbornness congealed in his chest. He wasn’t going to retrace their steps, losing a day’s travel to find another trail. He wanted to be over this pass and off the mountain. He’d envisioned a quiet stretch of water, a bit of fishing for his supper. Lake trout rolled in cornmeal, fried to perfection …

  Leaning back, he gazed upslope, trying to recall his last glimpse of the saddle he was attempting to cross. From that vantage he couldn’t see the forest—or the mountain—for the trees. But it couldn’t be far. He could pick his way up the remainder of the slope, tangled and wooded as it was. Spotting a break in the trees, near where the trail ended in jumbled rock, he urged Seamus toward it.

  The horse laid back its ears and didn’t budge.

  “None of that, now. I dinna mean to fight this mountain and you.” He gave Seamus’s sides a kick. The horse lurched forward.

  At the break in the trees, the ground was fresh cut by cloven hooves. Perhaps the slide had come down recently, forcing the game that used this trail to find a way around. This had to be it.

  One hand on the slackened reins, the other raised as a shield, he urged Seamus up and through the break. With a scrabbling of hooves, the horse went, carrying him blind, scratched and poked by protruding branches.

  Without warning Seamus balked again.

  Caught in the thicket, unable even to see the horse’s head, Neil felt more than saw what Seamus was attempting to do—turn on the steep ground back toward the trail. The horse swung sideways, thrusting him against a pine snag studded with broken branches, one of which gouged a furrow in his leg just above his boot top.

  With a growl of pain and frustration, he got the leg up and over the roan’s neck. He hit the ground, keeping hold of the reins, and shouldered his way to the horse’s head.

  Seamus was white eyed and snorting.

  “Come on, wee gomeral. No way now but through it.” Sweating and cross, he led the unhappy horse upward through the trees, coaxing it when he felt again like cursing.

  Not two dozen paces on, he came across the trail again, winding up the pass as docile as you please. He’d been right. A short section of it had been buried in a slide, was all.

  “See? Ye didna need to fash so.”

  But they’d barely reached the trail before the fool horse balked again, this time with conviction enough to nearly yank Neil’s arm from its socket. He fumbled the reins as the horse shied across the broken ground, on the verge of bolting.

  Above the clatter they were generating, he heard a noise, a deep animal grunt. He whirled to face upslope where the trail, still walled in by trees, topped another stony rise. On that rise in the center of the trail stood a bear, enormous and black, filling the gap in the trees like a sentry at a gate.

  He ought to have been afraid; startled at the least. Likely on some level he was both, but what struck him most vividly in that moment was enlightenment—and a gripping amusement at the Almighty’s sense of humor in its dispensing.

  Though he hadn’t in all his prayers dared broach the subject of his disobedience, God had been speaking pointedly to the matter all the while�
��in metaphorical language he ought sooner to have heeded. Biblical allusion. Signs in the heavens. Now they were back to Old Testament reference, with his horse engaged in the dialogue.

  Standing not a dozen yards from the biggest bear he’d ever seen, Neil MacGregor began to laugh. He laughed till the force of it doubled him. “All right,” he sputtered through the spasms. “I’ll go back. Though heaven kens how I’m to explain it to her.”

  Or anyone else, for that matter.

  When he got his breath back and looked again, the bear was gone. Seamus no longer showed the whites of his eyes, but had fixed him with a look of disgruntled accusation as eloquent as speech.

  Hysteria threatened to bubble again, but the release of belated understanding—and his choice to obey—capped the urge. He managed a semblance of decorum as he apologized.

  “I’m sorry, aye?” Taking bridle in hand, he turned the horse back the way they’d come. “But next time, save us both the bother, and just tell me ’tis an angel in the path.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Francis was sitting on the porch when Willa stepped from the cabin with a bucket, headed for the spring. The collie pushed past to sniff with interest at what was laid out across the steps at Francis’s feet, the gutted carcass of a doe. Willa set down the bucket.

  “Francis, did you—?” She broke off the question, spying the answer for herself—the arrow wound in the doe’s neck. Instead, she asked, “Did you see him?”

  Francis unbent his bony frame. “I f-found it. At the lake. I d-didn’t see your Indian.”

  With the morning breeze on her face, Willa scanned the clearing’s edge, struggling to control a surge of exasperation. Why did Joseph stay away? Did he not know Neil MacGregor was gone? What did he mean to do about Aram Crane? And the children?

  Having heard her talking, the pair of them came sleep-tousled from the cabin, exchanging grins with Francis. Anni’s brother had become a frequent visitor since Neil’s leaving. Usually he spent his time with the children, helping them shoo crows and deer and rabbits from the field, or tagging along while they did their chores.

  Today, he had a request to make of her.

  “Anni says for m-me to say”—he pitched his voice in mimicry of his sister—“ ‘Tell-Willa-Goodenough-is-bringing-Lem-to-visit-this-morning-while-we-quilt-and-he-has-asked-will-she-bring-Matthew-and-Maggie-to-play.’ ”

  The children pealed with laughter, then promptly fell to begging, and though Willa chuckled too, her first instinct was to refuse the request. She didn’t wish to leave the farm untended; she’d done so only twice since Neil went away—to check for an answer to her letters. Both times Jack Keegan had met her with a look of regret, finally telling her that if a letter came, he would send someone with it, so she needn’t keep walking into town.

  As anxious as she was for that letter to arrive, there was no pressing need for her to leave the farm now. Certainly not to take the children to Anni’s to play. But she made the mistake of looking at their pleading faces.

  “All right,” she heard herself say. “For a short while—after chores.”

  They darted inside to wash and dress and soon were racing out again to gather the day’s eggs, and kindling for the hearth.

  “I will not go with you,” Willa said on her way to the spring, Francis trailing her. “Will you promise to take them straight to Anni’s and look after them?”

  “Like he t-told me.”

  Willa halted. “Like who told you?”

  “He t-told me,” Francis repeated.

  Willa frowned. “Joseph?”

  Francis wouldn’t look at her. If it wasn’t Joseph …

  “Francis, did you see Neil MacGregor before he left?”

  She didn’t need to catch the quick jerk of a nod to deduce the truth. Neil had set Francis to be their guardian angel. Neil.

  “He didn’t need to do that,” she muttered, trying to be annoyed, or even amused, when in truth she was pathetically grateful, and touched.

  With their chores done, Willa bade the children be back for their dinner. “Anni is meant to be resting. I do not want you wearing on her. And, Francis, don’t take them by the road.” That would be too dangerous. They must go by the path, straight to Anni’s cabin.

  “I never go b-by road,” Francis said, which was true enough.

  Willa smiled, remembering how he had, at three years of age, discovered the path she and Anni used to go between Shiloh and the Obenchain cabin. It crossed Black Kettle Creek upstream from the cabin that had been built above the mill by Charles Keppler’s father.

  They had had to skirt that cabin as girls, to keep from being seen. Now, it was Anni’s home.

  Francis had followed her and Anni that day, even at three years so stealthy they’d nearly reached the Obenchain’s cabin before they found him out.

  No one could conceal himself in the woods as well as Francis. He would be wary and watchful as a deer. She could trust the children to him, just to Anni’s. She told herself this and believed it, but couldn’t quite banish her worry as she watched them walk away into the green-shadowed woods.

  The collie trotted to the clearing’s edge and looked back at her. “Go, if you wish.” She made a casting motion with her hand.

  The dog went. As the brush closed behind it, a sense of solitude fell over her. Instead of relishing it, she grew jumpy as the clouds cleared and the sun rose and the air warmed to a swelter. She kept pausing to look toward the woods for Joseph. Or her mind would stray to Neil, out there somewhere too, with his nose in a thicket. Did he think of them? of her?

  Annoyed with herself for wondering, she went into the field to check the corn and scare off any marauding deer. Though she planned to let most of the corn dry on the stalk, the green corn that was best for eating fresh had ripened. She picked six ears to boil for their dinner and stood at the edge of the field surveying the tasseled stalks, the beans and squash plants clustered around each, thought about her mother’s cousin, and for the first time faced the possibility that no letter was coming.

  She stopped seeing corn and squash. Instead, she saw the paths it seemed were left for her to choose.

  She could take Richard up on his offer. She could stay on the land and be his tenant. Maybe one day she would have enough to buy the land back from him. But that path was fraught with perils, ones she could see coming, probably many she could not. Most of Richard’s devising. Thought of being so closely linked to him made her recoil from that path.

  There were others to look at. She could abandon this crop in a risky gamble and walk to Albany, there to go from house to house until she found her mother’s cousin or determined she was never to be found. The problem with that path was the children. Unless Joseph came and got them very soon, how could she depart in time enough for it to make a difference? August was passing. Autumn, and the land auction, were rushing up fast.

  There was a third path. It led back to the People, huddled up to that British fort at Niagara, waiting to be told what to do, where to go. There were many risks to her heart on that path. Joseph. The children. The People ready to embrace her, draw her back into their circle of mutual need and caring …

  She turned from the field with her corn to boil and busied herself so she wouldn’t think of paths anymore, telling herself to wait another day. Or two. The letter would come. It had to come.

  She swept and tidied the cabin. Then the yard.

  She found a shirt of the boy’s needing mending and sat in the porch shade to stitch a rent in the sleeve.

  She fetched water for the corn, lingering at the spring to cool her sweating face and neck, hoping to see the children coming along the path home. Save for the hum of insects, the wood was quiet. The air lay heavy as soaked muslin, sticking her shift to her flesh as she toted the bucket back to the cabin.

  Not until the high sun began to slip westward in the milk-blue sky did she acknowledge her fear. With the musket primed and loaded, she pinned up her braid and, despite the heat, star
ted down the path at a run.

  The old foot log still spanned Black Kettle Creek at the narrow point where the path crossed it. It was another short stretch to the miller’s cabin. Willa’s breathless appearance, bursting from the woods, made Anni squeak in surprise and half-rise from her porch chair, thrusting aside the baby quilt she was stitching.

  A glance told Willa no one else was present. She halted at the steps, streaming sweat, to say in breathless snatches, “Anni … don’t get up. You are meant … to be resting.”

  Anni grimaced as she ran a hand across her belly. Tired half moons still hung beneath her eyes. “Willa, is everything all right?”

  “Where is Goodenough? Where are the children?”

  Anni’s expression brightened. “They went down to the mill, though by now they’ve likely gone into town.”

  “Town?” Cold alarm gripped Willa. It wasn’t safe for the children to be in town, even with Goodenough looking after them. What if Richard saw them? Or Aram Crane?

  “Why did you let them go?” Leaving Anni on the porch, Willa hurried across the yard, long strides eating up the ground.

  “Willa! There’s no cause for worry. I was about to tell you—”

  Anni’s words were lost beneath the swell of the mill falls as Willa reached the descending path. A glance across the creek showed no sign of the children or Francis or Goodenough. The mill itself was silent, the great stones still. As she stepped inside, Willa heard voices in the yard beyond the far door, which had been blocked from her view at the top of the path by the mill itself. Even with the rush of water beneath the floor echoing off the high walls, one of the voices sounded very much like …

  It couldn’t be. But it was.

  She halted just inside the mill as Neil MacGregor strode through the opposite door. He moved at the center of a knot of chattering children. His shirt sleeves were turned up, showing sun-browned forearms. Those arms encircled Maggie Kershaw, who rode his hip, skinny legs wrapped around his waist. Matthew walked beside him, clutching his sleeve as though Neil might vanish if he let go. Anni’s twins and Lem bobbed around him like little moons, and the collie frisked like a shooting star at their edges.