Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  There was a flicker in the distant eyes, a flinch of the fixed mouth, but she could not be sure her words had penetrated what surely must be shock.

  “Don’t listen to her nonsense,” one of the men behind her began, but Willa pressed on, desperate, fighting down panic.

  “Joseph only fought with Richard to save my children and me. I don’t know if Joseph even gave him that wound, or if Richard fell on the knife he wielded. Do you hear me, Colonel? Joseph will tell the truth.”

  The men had lingered to hear the outcome of this talk, but one of them snorted at that. “Get the Indian. Now.”

  Colonel Waring, staring hard at Willa’s face, held up a hand. “Wait.”

  For the first time, it seemed he took in her sooty clothes, her hair tangled down her back. He lifted a hand to turn her chin toward the light of the nearest lantern. His fingers brushed the throbbing place between her cheekbone and temple, where Richard struck her.

  “My son did this?”

  “That is the least of it, Colonel. While I was catching Anni’s babies, Richard was trying to kill my children.”

  “Your children?” The Colonel’s face lost what little color it held. “Where are they now?”

  Willa hadn’t known she was crying until she took a breath and heard in it a sob. “Francis got them out of the burning cabin where Richard left them bound. They’re with Charles and Anni.”

  “She’s lying. Ain’t a word of that true.” Whichever man spoke behind her, his voice sounded less belligerent than desperate now.

  The Colonel snapped a look past her. “Would you have me believe she burned her own crop, her own cabin?” He put a hand on her shoulder, where her gown was scorched through, the skin beneath showing raw and blistered. “That she did this to herself?”

  “Naw, we ain’t—”

  “Shut your gobs,” Jack Keegan snapped. “Let ’em get this straight between them.”

  The Colonel’s eyes widened as more of what Willa had said sank in. “Anni’s delivered? You attended her?”

  “Yes. Goodenough didn’t make it in time, but I was there. It is twins again. Boys.”

  Instead of the joy this news should have brought, something like anguish broke over the Colonel’s face. His skin turned an alarming gray.

  “Please, Colonel,” Willa pressed. “Let Joseph go. He will return to his people at Niagara, I promise you. He only tried to help me—he has always been kind to me. He was my strength and comfort all the years I lived with his people. He has harmed no one who didn’t harm me first.”

  That brought an uproar of protest. “A buck like him? Think he wasn’t up against us at Oriskany?”

  “He might’ve been the one to kill your boys, Colonel—or your wife and—”

  “No!” Voices stilled at the Colonel’s thundering reply. It appeared to take a monumental effort, but Elias Waring, county magistrate and colonel of militia, surfaced fully from the visage of the devastated father, and focused his mind on the matter in question. “The Indian is accused of no crime but the one witnessed this night. And no, Wilhelmina, I will not release him. Not until Richard is able to speak for himself. But neither will I see him hanged outright. He stays where he is.”

  Willa was at least permitted to see Joseph. She dodged to the rear of the store, but halted in astonishment at what she found behind the barrels and shelves. Joseph sat on the floor, knees drawn, head pillowed on his arms, black hair shining in the lantern light. Standing over him like a tiny guardian angel was Maeve Keegan, blue eyes snapping, lopsided mouth set in a lipless pucker, wisps of hair floating above her head like milkweed down.

  “I’ll not be havin’ beatings in my store!” Maeve punctuated the pronouncement with a crack of her cane on the floorboards. “There’ll be no more hittin’. No more blood. Where’s that boy o’ mine that’s gone and let this happen?”

  “Ma?” Jack came hurrying back, pushing past Willa. “Come away, Ma. This is no place for you to be.”

  Maeve glowered up at her son. With startling speed her cane shot out and jabbed him in the gut. “I’ll not come away, Jacky. I’m after guardin’ this poor young man from harm. T’ree against one … ’tis cowardly!”

  Maeve’s temper was up, though whether she understood what was happening, or exactly who she was defending, was anyone’s guess.

  “Get back now.” She brandished her cane but spared Willa a nod. “She can stay for she’s a woman and may be of some use. The rest of ye—and ye, Jacky—back!”

  Joseph’s tomahawk was plucked from Willa’s hands before they let her near him, still she had the absurd impulse to laugh as she knelt. Joseph had lifted his head at this unexpected championing of his person, and there was an answering flash of humor in the one eye not swollen shut. Pain doused it quickly. And sorrow.

  “How badly are you hurt?” Willa looked him over. A battered face. Shallow gashes on his arms, his hands. That seemed to be all. Had he not been bound, he might have fought his way free without aid. “You will have a chance to speak in your defense. I will speak for you …”

  She’d tried to keep her voice steady, strong, infused with a confidence she didn’t feel, but something in Joseph’s expression made her falter. He looked at her through the snakes of blood congealing on his skin, and she knew something was changed.

  “I heard how you spoke to those men,” he said, “and to the one you call the Colonel. You spoke of the Kanien’kehá:ka, but you called them his people. ‘He will go back to his people at Niagara,’ you said.”

  “Joseph …” The floorboards pressed hard against Willa’s knees, but she didn’t shift a muscle. The pain pressing her heart was far worse.

  Joseph lifted his hand as if he would touch her face, but let it fall back. She knew then what was changed about him. It was the absence of something that had been there from the day they met, in that distant cornfield. He no longer hoped for a future with her. Even as his sister.

  “Once,” he said, “they were our people.”

  It was as if a curtain had swung between them, cutting them off from each other. He from her world. She from his. A pit of sorrow opened in her belly, deep enough to match that in his eyes.

  She had long known in some part of her soul that this moment would come. She’d thought when it did there would be some measure of relief in it, for both of them. There was none. A grief and loss she’d never expected washed over her, while old Maeve Keegan stood by with her scowl and her cane.

  There were no words to express this grief. Had there been words, there would have been no time to speak them; someone else had come into the store, someone in the throes of their own anguish and loss. A woman’s keening wail sent a coldness racing up Willa’s spine. She was on her feet and moving to where she could see the front of the store before the sound of it died.

  Goodenough stood in the doorway, the front of her stained with blood from breasts to thighs.

  “He’s dead!” she said, voice still high with wailing, and though she faced them all, it was to one person she spoke. Elias Waring. “Our Richard is dead.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  They came for Joseph, the three who aided Richard to his last violent deed. Before Willa emerged from shock, they were hauling him toward the door, Maeve Keegan’s cane unavailing. Colonel Waring and Goodenough—one dazed, the other inconsolable—were gone. Willa alone was left to protest the men dragging Joseph out into the night.

  “The Colonel said he is not to be hanged!”

  Two of the men kept their hold on Joseph, while the one holding a lantern dealt her a shove with a meaty hand. “It wasn’t murder before.”

  Willa staggered off the porch but didn’t fall. Looking wildly around for an ally, she glimpsed Goodenough and the Colonel moving away toward the smithy, leaning into each other as if neither could stand alone.

  “Colonel! Wait! Will you permit this?”

  As one, the pair swiveled back to view the scene: Joseph pinioned between his captors, the rope dangling from th
e oak that overspread the store yard, the gathering onlookers, many starting to raise taunts, demands, a few protests—all faceless to Willa. All save one. A face starkly white beneath soot smears, hovering at the edge of the shifting light cast by lanterns in the milling crowd.

  “Francis!”

  The name carried above the escalating voices, silencing many but alarming the one Willa meant to draw in as an ally.

  Francis backed toward the cloaking shadows beyond the oak. By a sheer act of will, she didn’t pursue him, which would have hastened his retreat. Instead, she held out a hand and as calmly as she could said, “Francis, please. Twice you have warned Joseph and kept him from being discovered. Will you help him now? Will you help me?”

  That raised more murmurs from all sides; Willa paid them no heed. On the edge of darkness, Francis teetered, as the gazes of those gathered, including his father’s, turned their weight upon him.

  “You saved my children—” Willa fought to steady her voice, which rasped with the smoke she had breathed. “You saved them, Francis. Whatever Richard forced you to do, I’m not angry with you. You didn’t want to lie to me so that I would leave the cabin, did you?”

  Francis was looking only at her now. Slowly, he shook his head. Around them, voices rose again, but no one interrupted, not even the men holding Joseph between them.

  “It turned out that Anni did need me—you have two new nephews now. You did a good thing for your sister, Francis. But it was Richard who made you tell me what you thought was a lie, was it not?”

  Francis had begun to grin at her news of nephews, but now his bony face stiffened, and his eyes, enormous and afraid, scanned the crowd staring at him. Seeking his brother’s towering figure somewhere among their ranks, bearing down on him with fists clenched?

  Willa dared a step toward him. “Richard cannot hurt you now. Never again.”

  Goodenough, the Colonel close behind her, had come forward into the ring of lantern light, those nearest making way. Face wet with tears and voice thick, she said, “Francis, honey, you got something to say ’bout this terrible thing, go on and say it.”

  Francis opened his mouth, but no sound came out. It was too much—the stares, the faces. They were confusing him, frightening him.

  “Francis,” Willa said. “Look at me, just me, and tell me what Richard did.”

  Later she would wonder how the rest of her life—how all their lives—might have unfolded had she worded that last request some other way.

  “He b-burned down your father’s b-barn,” Francis said.

  The unexpected words hovered in the night air, suspended by Willa’s indrawn breath—and that of every soul within hearing. A murmur was borne back through the crowd to those who hadn’t heard.

  “What’s he saying? Does he mean Dieter Obenchain’s barn?”

  “Back during the war? ’Twas Indians burned that barn, wasn’t it?”

  Willa heard their voices, sensed the confusion sweeping out from the center of this drama, and struggled with her own. She stood blinking stupidly, knowing she must say something.

  “Papa’s barn?” She could barely feel her lips moving or her feet on the ground or the hands limp at her sides. Only the hammering against her ribs was solid and strong, a beat so slow it didn’t seem like it could be her heart. “That barn burned long ago. There is nothing left of it but ashes.”

  Francis nodded, refuting none of this. “Your pparents were inside when Richard b-b-burned it. They screamed …”

  The night and the lanterns and the staring faces tilted around Willa. She felt hands on her, steadying, and looked into Jack Keegan’s constricted face. His mouth moved, but Willa heard no words. There was a roaring in her head.

  The Colonel stepped forward, pulling away from Goodenough, staring at his son alone in the lantern light. “Are you telling us Richard killed Willa’s parents? That he burned them—alive—in their barn?”

  “He started the f-fire,” Francis said. “They went in to g-get the animals, and they never came out. I saw him—Richard—after. He was afraid. He buried their b-bones.”

  Willa saw the horror of it on Elias Waring’s face. “At the lake,” she said to Francis, fearing she would be sick, “where you didn’t want me to see their graves.”

  Francis locked his eyes with hers. “Richard didn’t want you to f-find them. He was angry that I m-made them pretty.”

  “With the stones,” Willa said. “And the crosses.”

  “It wasn’t right, no c-crosses.”

  Those around them pressed closer, not wanting to miss a word. Francis’s shoulders drew in tighter. His hand dropped to his thigh, stiff fingers tapping. At any moment, Willa knew, he would bolt into the darkness.

  His father spoke in a voice so broken it held no threat. “Son, if there’s more to tell, say it now.”

  Willa waited. The Colonel waited. All of Shiloh waited.

  Francis closed his eyes and stood his ground. “Then you came b-back and Richard was afraid you’d know, so he got Mr. Crane to shoot the arrow in your door to scare you off—and steal your spade and k-kill your goat and b-burn your cornfield when it was green. You wouldn’t leave or m-marry him, so he m-made me help him b-because you trusted me, and if I didn’t, he’d hurt me w-w-worse than b-before.”

  There was a groan from somewhere in the crowd, but Willa didn’t take her eyes off Francis, who gasped in a great breath and plunged on before anyone could stop him.

  “Richard said, ‘Burn the cabin and leave the half breeds inside,’ b-but I couldn’t. Then Richard made me leave so he could do it, but I only went into the woods, and I saw what he did, what they did—” Francis swung toward the men still clustered around Joseph. There were only two now; one had slipped into the darkness unnoticed. “Him … and him. They tied the children in the c-cabin, and Richard threw in torches. Then Joseph c-came from somewhere and tried to save the children, b-but Richard fought him. Someone had to get them out, so … I did. I didn’t want them burning up to b-bones.”

  It was the single longest speech Willa had ever heard out of Francis Waring’s mouth, one she would never have thought him capable of making. One she would never, in all her days, forget. But for the present, the horror of it overshadowed all else, dulling her awareness of a shifting in the crowd, making her slow to realize that while Francis had been speaking his chilling revelations, a quieter drama had been taking place a few paces away.

  The Colonel had slumped against Goodenough, who was struggling now to hold him upright, arms locked around his chest. His head was fallen limp against her bloodstained breasts.

  “Elias! Someone help!” Goodenough’s cry held the same panic Willa had known while her cabin burned and her children were nowhere to be found.

  Jack Keegan was the first to reach them. Bodies moved in and out of the swinging light, blocking Willa’s view of the Colonel and Goodenough. Then she remembered Joseph and turned dazed eyes to find him. Having become the accused, his guards had fled.

  Still bound but free, Joseph was backing into the shadows beneath the oak where the empty rope still swayed. She’d turned in time to glimpse his face, still readable despite his swollen, bloodied features. For an instant his regret and loss seemed to fill the night. Then he took another step back and vanished into the darkness, as though he simply ceased to be.

  Willa turned her back on the spot where he’d been, lest others be drawn to look thence, and with a heart too heavy to feel relief, she crossed to the knot of people hovering around the Colonel.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Elias Waring insisted on going home, though any number of cabins nearby would have opened their doors to him in need. He rode under his own power, but with a man at either stirrup prepared to catch him should he fall.

  Willa followed on foot, entering the big stone house only after Goodenough had seen the Colonel to a bed and changed out of her bloodied garments. At some point a basin was brought, and Willa washed her face and hands until the water blackened, and f
ingered her snarled hair into a braid.

  Though other shadowed figures lined the hall that ran the center of the house, waiting for word of the Colonel, Willa stood alone, her back against the paneled wall. She spoke to no one, though she felt their stares—sympathetic, curious, a few wary with suspicion. She supposed it would always be so, no matter if she lived among them twice as long as she’d lived with the Mohawks. Just now she didn’t care. The tumults of the day and night had left her raw as broken eggshells, all her pieces scattered.

  She thought of Joseph and prayed fervently, wordlessly, for his safety. She thought of the children, safe at Anni’s, and thanked God for them. She tried with all her heart not to think of Neil MacGregor, wherever he had gone.

  Oma, she thought at some point, as people came and went around her, talking softly to one another, waiting. Francis did not speak of Oma. Where into all that tale of fire and death and betrayal had her grandmother fallen and been lost?

  She closed her eyes at last, too weary to think at all, just as Goodenough emerged from the parlor, closing the door behind her and jerking Willa wide awake. The housemaid set a lighted candle on a nearby sideboard. “You’re still here. Good. He’s wantin’ to see you.”

  Willa looked into the face nearly level with her own, brown and handsome, but terrible in its composure. The candlelight picked out the grief in Goodenough’s eyes.

  “It’s his heart, but he says we’re not to fret. You ever hear such foolishness? I wish that Mister Neil …”

  “So do I.” Willa couldn’t swallow back the longing she felt for Neil’s calming presence. His gentleness. His care. The longing went deeper every time she let it in, but she knew it was shared with half the settlement on this night of death and birth. If she could go back and not send him away, if she could undo that one thing—say yes instead of no—would everything else have turned out differently? better?

  Goodenough was watching her in the candlelight. “There’s something I need to say to you, too, so things can be right between us.”