Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  Joseph thought about this as he picked their slow way, a vague uneasiness stirring at the back of his mind. East of here … where the Scotsman had been headed?

  Over his shoulder he asked, “What were you doing on that track above the mill?”

  “Nothing that concerns you,” Crane said, with more than a little sarcasm.

  “Then we have no more to say to each other.”

  “Just hear me out.” Crane’s voice tightened with rage and what sounded like fear. “Don’t take me back to Niagara and I give you my word to leave the Obenchain woman alone. I’ll even do what I can to keep Waring from pestering her more.”

  What did the deserter think his word was worth? Joseph ducked as pine branches brushed his head, glancing back as they hit Crane in the face. Then the mare dipped and swayed and carried them down into a clearing bright with moonlight.

  Crane had kept his seat.

  More, he had said.

  “What pestering has he done?” Joseph hoped he wouldn’t have to return and kill the yellow-haired giant, if Burning Sky was still so stubborn as to want to stay among such people.

  Crane did not answer his question. Nearly across the clearing, Joseph turned his horse back until they were knee to knee. He grasped the neck rope tight. Crane had lost his hat somewhere in the night’s passage. The forehead beneath the line of his hair showed pale in the moonlight. Tempting.

  “Tell me what Yellow Hair Waring has done to her, or I take your red scalp now. They will pay me for you, either way.”

  “A-all right,” Crane choked, and Joseph eased his grip. “The fool wants her, but he wants her land more. He set me to scaring her off it—but I never touched her,” he added. “Or those little half breeds.”

  Joseph pictured the revulsion he felt for this man like arrows scattered on the ground. In his mind he picked them up one by one and bundled them, until he had them back in their quiver and himself under control. He turned his horse to continue on, having knowledge of the acts the deserter hinted at—the arrow in the door, the crop fire, the goat. Burning Sky and the children had weathered them all.

  “Just a matter of time before someone does,” Crane added under his breath. In seconds Joseph had the man by the neck again.

  “Who? Who is going to touch her?”

  “Waring,” the man bit out, the stink of his breath in Joseph’s face. “Thinks he can stomach knowing what you savages did to her, make a wife of her, once he’s rid of those half breeds. But I’ve seen the disgust in his face when he talks about what she—”

  Joseph heard no more, for that was when he knocked the man senseless again.

  Crane had been coming around to wakefulness as he was leaving to hunt—too late to fight the gag or the ropes Joseph knotted behind the tree, knots that would make struggling only draw them tighter. In the dark he’d rifled through the man’s belongings, taking his shot bag and musket as well as his shoes, but leaving what other possessions the man had had on him. Precautions only. The man could not get himself free.

  The sun had barely crested the tops of the trees before he was tying the turkey hens to the saddle of the deserter’s mount and starting back. Avoiding paths, even those of game, had served him well so far. But on his return he followed a stream and strayed too near a trail he hadn’t known the stream would cross and got himself spotted.

  There were three of them, afoot. Oneidas, by the feather placement in the headpieces two of them wore. Those two were elders with gray braids on their chests. They weren’t dressed for hunting, rather some occasion demanding of every scrap of silver and quilled and beaded ornamentation they owned, draped or sewn to their garments. The peace treaty at Fort Stanwix, no doubt.

  The third was more boy than man, though he carried a musket.

  The trio stopped to stare at him, so Joseph urged the mare forward, pulling the deserter’s mount along, hooves splashing in the stream. One of the Oneidas gave greeting with wary civility. That was before he drew near enough for them to see his tattoos.

  “Kanien’kehá:ka,” the youngest said as Joseph halted in their path. He had the supple, arrogant bearing of a warrior, though his hair wasn’t plucked. He’d probably been too young to fight in the war, but suspicion darkened his voice and narrowed his eyes.

  Joseph felt the brokenness of the Great Council Fire like his own heart in pieces, even though he’d been born to the People who long ago removed to Canada. Still he was Mohawk, had fought for them with Thayendanegea’s warriors. How long would he feel this breaking when he met with Oneidas or Tuscaroras, the nations of the Longhouse people who had fought with the Long Knives?

  He saw the same bleak thoughts in the expressions of these three, especially the sad, seamed faces of the elders.

  “I give you greeting, Grandfathers, Brother,” he said in the language of his father, and slid from the saddle. The threesome gaped, for he towered over them still, shoulders as well as head. “Do you make for the council at Fort Stanwix?”

  He hadn’t wished to ask after their business so directly, but was in a hurry to see that his prisoner was still in his custody—though he was confident of his knot work.

  The more wrinkled of the elders wore a British soldier’s coat, too big for his frame. He said, “We have been to that council. Now we are going home.”

  “Has the talking ended so soon?” Joseph noticed the other elder was staring hard at him. His broad features were faintly pitted with old scars of the spotting sickness.

  The old man’s wrinkles gathered into a sudden smile, a true smile that reached his eyes. “You came to Kanowalohale, many summers past, before the whites started fighting one another and made us choose sides. You came as Tames-His-Horse, but after you listened to Brother Kirkland, you left that place as Joseph. You were born Mohawk, but your father was Oneida. Bear Clan, I think.”

  Joseph peered at the seamed face, studying the bones beneath the pitted skin, until the face of a slightly younger man formed in his mind. “You are the one called Clear Day—Daniel Clear Day?”

  The old man nodded, pleased to be remembered in turn.

  Joseph would have liked to speak at length to this man, about Kirkland and the people they had both known years ago, but his need to deliver his captive beat strong against the desire.

  “Grandfather, was the war chief Thayendanegea, called Brant, at the fort with the sachems and the white chiefs?”

  Wisps of hair lifted on the breeze as the old man looked up at him. “Brant was there, but he has gone back west to Niagara. He went yesterday, and all the Mohawks with him. But do not be cast down about it,” he added when Joseph could not hide his dismay. “There is to be another council with the chiefs from all the Thirteen Fires.”

  “Another council? Was nothing decided at this one?”

  Clear Day shrugged, the furrows around his mouth bowing downward. “Only the chiefs from New York came to treat. We wanted to treat with those who are over all the Fires—the Great Chief Washington or one who speaks for him. The People wish to know about their hunting lands. The whites want to know about those same lands and say some of this land must be given up to them.”

  “The Long Knives will honor their promises to the Oneidas, who stood with them, and leave your land unsettled,” Joseph said to encourage the man, but in his heart he didn’t half-believe it.

  Neither did Daniel Clear Day. “That is what I went to that fort thinking, but I have not told you all. When Brant stood to speak in his turn, he said he was not given leave to offer land in trade for peace, but that he would go back to the sachems at Niagara to speak of this request, for he deems it reasonable.”

  Clear Day’s words stunned Joseph speechless.

  The old man talked on. “But this is the question I am asking now: After all the lands are divided and all the peoples put in their places, what will be divided next? Will the white chiefs say to us, ‘You Oneidas cannot have the sun for warmth because we have bought it from some other red men in another place, and now you
must go live in darkness’?”

  The bitter words settled low on the ground between them.

  “I am very sorry for it, Grandfather. It is not right for you. For any of us.” Half of Joseph’s mind was flitting ahead to what he was going to do with his prisoner, since going to Fort Stanwix was pointless now, when his gaze snagged on a thing one of the Oneidas carried. The young one had turned away to look down the path, revealing not only his impatience to be moving on but a leather satchel slung across his back, one that Joseph had seen before. He’d left it in camp that morning, with Crane.

  Clear Day caught his look and his surprised recognition.

  “A short while ago,” the old man said, “we found the man who claimed to own that bag. A white man tied to a tree. Someone had put him there beside a nest of ants, and he was in torment from their biting.”

  It had been dark still when Joseph left his prisoner. If there had been ants, he hadn’t seen the nest. “Grandfather, did this man speak to you? Did he say anything of himself?”

  “Once we freed his mouth, he asked us to help him. We took pity and cut him loose.”

  There was no point in showing the frustration that twisted his gut into knots tighter than any he’d tied for his prisoner. “Did he repay you for this kindness with that satchel?” he asked, pointing with his chin to the bag the young one wore.

  That one barked a laugh. “Once he had the feeling back in his hands, he stole this grandfather’s musket and shot bag. He tried to take our food too. That is how he repaid our kindness.” The young man showed his teeth in a grin. “But I fought him and stole this bag from him instead. He got away with the rest, though. It was a good musket.”

  Clear Day was watching Joseph’s face. “Part of me did not want to show that man kindness. I am thinking now I should have listened.”

  Joseph closed his eyes, already devising what his next move should be. “I do not fault you for it, Grandfather, but that man belongs to the British. He deserted his post with the army. I was sent to bring him back.”

  His options amounted to exactly one: return to the camp and track Crane from that point.

  When he opened his eyes, Joseph caught the other elder eying the turkeys. “If you will give me the satchel that belonged to that man,” he said on impulse, “I will give you these birds—and the musket I took from him when I left him in the camp, to repay you for the one he stole.”

  It was daylight now, and he wanted a look at the contents of the bag Crane had carried on his person; in the back of his mind was the memory of the smith and that strange encounter with Crane on the track to Burning Sky’s cabin.

  The warrior put a hand over the satchel, as if he meant to protest, but at a look from his elders, he relented and slipped it from his shoulder. “I should have killed him for you,” he said, moving to the horse to take the turkeys and the gun. “Shall I go with you now? Help you bring him in?”

  Joseph smiled. “It is well offered, young brother, but no. Go with these grandfathers and see them safe to their fires.”

  The young Oneida reached for his arm, and Joseph felt a warming in his soul as the warrior gripped it. “Good hunting, then.”

  He found the letter Neil MacGregor had meant to send to Burning Sky, its seal broken, in the satchel the Oneidas had taken from Aram Crane. Instantly, he understood why it was there. The Scotsman had not abandoned her, as Joseph had hoped, but Crane—or Yellow Hair Waring—wanted her to think he had.

  Joseph hunkered at the edge of camp, where churning footprints in the pine straw led off from where Crane and the young Oneida had scuffled over guns and provisions. Headed east, where the man had said he needed to go.

  Thought of the Scotsman stirred uneasily in his mind, but it was buried behind his more pressing worry for Burning Sky and the children and this onerous burden of recapturing Crane.

  Though the stolen musket was worrying, with no horse, no food, no covering for his feet, Crane was as near to helpless as such a man could be. Briefly Joseph regretted knocking him unconscious so soon as he had done. He wished he’d learned more about what Waring had meant for Crane to do, sending him east.

  He would follow the man for now. If his trail veered toward Shiloh after all, Joseph would have him again. But if Crane was intent on vanishing elsewhere, then so be it. Joseph knew where his own trail must now lead.

  He stood, feeling release in his soul about the deserter.

  Regretting more than anything that he hadn’t captured Burning Sky instead, regardless of her protests, and ridden hard and fast with her to Canada, he took up the lead of Crane’s horse and swung onto the mare to go to her now, his belly empty as if for war, his mind fixed like an arrow launched.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The corn had faded from its summer lushness. The drying leaves rattled in the wind now rather than rustled, and Willa prayed daily no heavy rain or damaging wind would sweep through before it was ready to harvest. There was work aplenty to occupy her and the children until then, with beans to pick and string, squash to slice and dry, and pumpkins soon to ripen.

  The long grass edging the field had crackled as their feet passed through that morning, scattering grasshoppers with each step, some leaping up to smack their hands or land in the picking baskets they toted.

  At the edges of the field, the trees were beginning to show red and gold. The morning air had been chill.

  Even at midday, it was cool against Willa’s face, but the sun was warm where it touched her skin. She’d worn a shawl to the field, but with the sun now high, she had it slung across her chest, filling it with more beans while she waited for the children to fill their baskets and walk back with her to the cabin.

  It was the shawl she’d carried her babies in when she fed them or wanted them closer than a cradleboard. The weight of the beans sagging the cloth, the bulge it created against her breast, made an ache swell beneath it. An ache she hadn’t felt in many days.

  Fingers falling still, she stared at the bean vines twining green among the browning corn. Goes-Singing. Sweet Rain. She tried to call up their faces and found she couldn’t do it.

  Panic jolted through her limbs. She couldn’t see the faces of her children.

  Her heart slammed the way it had when Goes-Singing, at two years, wandered from their place in the longhouse while her back was turned. Just as she had searched every corner of the long, bark-covered lodge that day, finally finding her daughter hiding under a neighbor’s sleeping platform, Willa scoured her mind for the memory of her children’s faces. Goes-Singing had green eyes like my one. Sweet Rain’s eyes were brown. But were they dark like her father’s or light like my one?

  The pattering thump of moccasined feet intruded into her anxious search.

  “Miss Willa, Miss Willa! Where are you?”

  Willa opened her mouth, but like a fish out of water, her lips moved without sound, as Maggie’s shining-eyed face came between her and her fraying memories.

  “Miss Willa—a pumpkin!”

  The girl took her by the hand and tugged. Willa made her lips move again. This time words came.

  “Yes. I see them all around.” Pumpkins sprawled around the base of every hillock, many of them still green, some with a faint blush of ripening orange. What had the child so excited about pumpkins?

  “Not like these. Come and see!”

  “You are meant to be picking beans. Have you filled your basket? Where is your brother?”

  “Yes. I don’t know.” The child was nearly jumping up and down with impatience. “Come!”

  Willa left her basket and followed the girl, winding in and out of the hillocks until they’d covered nearly half the field. Maggie raced ahead to where her basket lay on the ground, its contents listing.

  Halting, the child pointed like a dog scenting quail. “Look!”

  Willa looked, and in surprise said, “A pumpkin!”

  She picked her way over vines to the one pumpkin in all the field a week ahead of the rest, fully ripened, smooth a
nd deeply orange. As she looked from the bright squash to the child standing by with a smile as eager as her own daughter’s might have been, something hard and shell-like inside Willa cracked and began to crumble. She felt an answering smile spread over her face, heard a sound leave her lips. Laughter.

  “A pumpkin,” she said again, and took the knife from its sheath at her breast. “We have picked beans enough for today. It’s time to make a pie.”

  Willa was fairly certain they would make a pie, though thus far what they’d mostly made was a mess—of the hearth, the table, and the floor between. She didn’t care. Not with the bright eyes and laughter of a little girl beside her. Matthew had gone to the hens for extra eggs and stood now watching Willa crack them. She looked up while Maggie, splattered with boiled pumpkin, mashed the soft flesh in a wooden bowl with the eggs. The boy had one foot outside the cabin, one inside.

  “You needn’t stay inside,” Willa told him. “Take that dog out and find something to do. Or,” she added, hiding a smile, “would you like to measure out flour for the crust?”

  Betrayed by the longing in his eyes, the boy nevertheless lifted his chin. “Men don’t make pies.” He cast about for some task befitting his masculine attention. “I’ll chop wood.”

  “That is a thing for a man to do.” Willa kept her face sober long enough for Matthew to leave the cabin. Then she looked at his sister. The child burst into giggles.

  “He’s not big enough to chop wood,” Maggie said.

  Willa dabbed her small nose with a streak of flour. “Perhaps he will make kindling. He’s helping without arguing. Awiyo. It’s good.”

  “Helping like me.”

  “No.” Willa nudged her with a hip. “In this I am helping you. Do you wish to make the crust while I see what spices I have?”

  The girl nodded, pleased. “That is easy. I’ll show you.”

  Though she recalled well enough how to make a piecrust, Willa stepped back and let the child be the teacher.

  Outside the cabin came the chunk of the ax hitting the cutting stump, now and then a sharper crack when the blade made contact with a piece of firewood. Inside the cabin the pie had just gone into the oven beside the main hearth. Willa had been saying how long she expected it would take to bake, when the collie began barking.