by Burning Sky
Willa waited, numb with exhaustion and regret.
“I told you how Richard was kind to me the day the Colonel bought me and we started upriver for this place. You mind that?”
She had to think a moment. “When we did the wash at Anni’s.” The day she mailed her second letter to Tilda Fruehauf, under Richard’s nose. “I remember.”
“Listen, then, and hear me on this.” Goodenough’s lips trembled as she spoke. “A bit ago, the Colonel and me, we was alone with Francis, and he talked some more. We know now. That poor boy, he’s carried all these things he seen his brother do. And Richard did do a heap of wickedness leadin’ up to this night, and saw evil done, and had whatever there was left of that boy I met crushed out of his soul. We didn’t see it clear … and now I reckon you think me a fool.”
Willa shook her head. “There was a part of me, a very small part, that wanted to believe …” She couldn’t finish the thought aloud.
“Well,” Goodenough said. “He was that boy once, and when you see me grieving, just know that’s who it is I’m crying over.”
She was weeping now, though she made no sound. Willa touched her sturdy arm, then squeezed it. “I have not forgotten who Richard was. I will grieve too.”
Lips pressed tight, Goodenough gave a sharp nod. “You go on in to the Colonel. He got some things to settle with you, I reckon.”
Elias Waring was abed, propped against a bank of pillows. Francis, scrubbed and clean shirted, crouched before the hearth across the room. Lem was there, in a straight-backed chair beside the bed, looking bewildered by what had transpired this night. It might be some time before he understood. Willa remembered how long Goes-Singing had taken to grasp that her father had fallen in battle, fighting men like Elias Waring and his sons. Sam. Nick. Edward. Richard. All dead now. So many dead.
She halted in the center of the room, undone by the eyes of the man in the bed, suffering eyes sunken in a face so bloodless it was gray. What was there left to say between them?
The Colonel’s voice was weak but steady. “Does the Indian live?”
It wasn’t a thing she’d expected him to be thinking about. Her heart constricted with worry, even as it grasped at hope. “Those men who meant to hang him fled when Francis spoke against them. Joseph slipped away into the dark. That is what I saw and all I know.”
Let him fly from this place—even if I never see him again in this life—with the wings of a swift high hawk, let him fly.
“Let him stay away,” the Colonel said from his bed, uncannily close to echoing her thoughts, “and he will live. At least his death will not be my doing.”
Another chair stood at the bed’s foot. Willa sank into it, her knees unable to support her any longer. The Colonel seemed to weaken as well, sinking back into the bedding with a soft groan. At once, Goodenough was there, tugging at a blanket, fussing that he needed his rest else something worse befall.
“Sally,” the Colonel said, “I’m tired and grief-sick but not about to pass. Leave off your fretting.”
The small remonstrance only served to further agitate Goodenough. “You ain’t dying tonight, that’s certain truth. There’s living to be done yet. I aim to see you do your share.”
Even as she fussed, her hand was stroking the Colonel’s face with a tenderness so intimate Willa felt she ought to look away. Had he called her Sally? Perhaps her ears had played her false. Perhaps in another second, she would drop onto the carpet and lie there unconscious for a week.
“Mama?” Lem said from his bedside perch, worried by their talk of dying. Goodenough’s skirts didn’t conceal the hand that reached from beneath the bed covers and patted the boy’s knee.
“It’s all right, Lem.” Elias Waring shot Willa a look and drew his hand away. She could tell he had more to say to her, but he waited for Goodenough to cross to a table by the door, where a tray of tea things rested. “My stableman, Crane … He’s been a part of your troubles?”
“So it would seem.” If what Francis said was true, and she had no reason now not to believe him, it had been Aram Crane who’d watched her farm for Richard, who’d done the small things to vex and frighten them.
Francis. Having unburdened himself of his secrets, he’d retreated back into his own world, happily lining pieces of kindling on the hearth bricks. It would need some thinking, but she would find some way of rewarding him for saving her children and Joseph. It would take a lifetime to reward Francis Waring.
“I understand why Francis kept that knowledge to himself,” the Colonel said after a heavy silence. “But why did you not come to me with it? I would have dealt with Crane.”
“I only had suspicions, Colonel. No proof of who was bothering us. But …” She hesitated, having second thoughts about telling him what else she knew about Aram Crane, who had once faced men like Colonel Waring across the line of battle. She studied the Colonel’s stricken face, debating whether she should add one more thing to burden his mind. “Where is Aram Crane? Do you know?”
“That is a very good question. I haven’t seen the man for days.”
Willa looked at her hands in her lap.
“You said you didn’t know whether he was harassing you, but there’s something you know about—or against—the man.” When she didn’t raise her head, the Colonel added, “I am stronger than I must look, Wilhelmina. I can bear it. Tell me.”
She raised her head. “He is an army deserter. From the fort at Niagara.”
From across the room, Goodenough turned to stare at her. Lem looked from face to face, his expression puzzled, his little legs swinging.
Elias Waring’s face had fallen blank. “Fort Niagara? That’s still in British hands.” Understanding made ripples through the blankness, drawing lines ever deeper across his brow, beside his mouth.
“Joseph was sent from Niagara to find him,” she said, “and take him back to his regiment—the Eighth I think it is. That is what my brother does. He’s tracks deserters for the British.”
Anni’s father absorbed all this with remarkable composure, yet Willa could see what it cost him, could see the look of sickness in his eyes, knowing he’d sheltered the man for so many months. “Do you think he—your brother—has Crane in custody now?”
“That is what I thought, until I saw him trying to save my children while my fields and cabin burned. Now … I do not know.”
She hadn’t meant to further distress him, but at her words, the Colonel winced.
“Yesterday I questioned Richard—” His voice caught on the name; a glint of tears came into his eyes, and his chin quivered. “He claimed to have no knowledge of Crane’s whereabouts.” He drew a breath and clenched his jaw. “If ever I lay eyes on the man again, your Mohawk brother will have no further need of seeking him—unless it be to collect his scalp.”
Willa was beyond even shuddering at such words. As long as Joseph is safe. And Neil is safe … somewhere. And the children …
Desire to see Matthew and Maggie Kershaw welled up, overwhelming all other needs. It pulled at her with such urgency she thought she might just make it as far as Anni’s before she collapsed to sleep on a rug by the hearth, with their small bodies curled warm against hers. Without a word she stood from the chair and started toward the parlor door.
“Willa. Bide a moment.” At the Colonel’s voice, she paused, finding it hard to focus her eyes on him, much less her mind on what he was saying. “I’ll have someone send to Anni and Charles, have the children brought here, if you’ll agree to stay.”
“Stay?”
“For as long as you need.”
Beside the bed, Lem kicked his feet. “Matthew and Maggie? They’re comin’ here?”
“If Miss Willa says,” his mother told him. “Now hush.”
But Lem jumped off the chair, bouncing with excitement. “Please, Miss Willa?”
“Miss Willa don’t need your help makin’ up her mind.” Goodenough grabbed her son as he tried to scoot past her. “Francis? Take this boy down t
o the kitchen and his bed.”
There were groans. There was pleading. Finally there was quiet as Francis led Lem from the parlor.
For an instant, before Francis’s blond head—combed into order now—passed from view, Willa thought it could have been Richard ushering out a younger sibling. The Richard of long ago, not yet twisted and hardened by the violence he’d seen and done, by hate and grief and greed.
Perhaps Richard hadn’t meant to kill her parents, only to raze their farm and drive them off, as others whose loyalties were suspect had been driven out along the frontier all the years of the war. Not an admirable thing, but something many men had done to one another, men who now reaped in their fields or minded their shops and trades, no one thinking the worst of them. But he had meant to kill Matthew and Maggie. Could she spend even one night in that house, seeing the ghost of the boy, as well as the man, in every corner?
“I won’t insist, but I hope you’ll consider it.” Elias Waring’s face was grave as he turned to Goodenough. “In my desk, Sally … the papers?”
Goodenough sighed. “I’ll get ’em. But then you finish this and get some sleep.”
“Yes ma’am.” The Colonel’s mouth slanted with amusement. On any other night, it might have been a smile.
Goodenough crossed to a large, finely crafted desk and opened a drawer. “This the one you want, on top?”
At his nod she withdrew an official-looking paper with a broken seal and brought it to the bed. The Colonel beckoned Willa, who drew near to take it. “It came over a week ago, but I hadn’t the heart to bring it to you.”
The notice of her eviction and the time of the auction where her land was to be sold, to be held at German Flats in a matter of days. While it would never be Richard who owned it, someone, most likely a stranger, soon would.
She was almost too numb to feel defeat. Almost. “I see it would be wise to accept your offer of a roof.”
“It’s the very least I hope to do. Francis has related all he saw this night, including”—the Colonel’s lips clenched as his gaze went to her bruised cheek and temple—“including Richard’s attack upon your person. Wilhelmina, can you forgive the sins of my family against yours?”
Willa opened her mouth, on the verge of saying words born of the rawness of her grief, when something like light shot through her, giving understanding in the midst of weariness and shattering loss. This thing that was asked of her was not impossible, however much it felt so. Moreover, it was a thing she must do now, right now, while she was too numb for the tumult of emotion sure to come in the days ahead to cloud her mind and dim that sudden light. And that light was telling her that though she had twice lost all that was dear to her by no choice of her own, to forgive or not was her choice to make.
“I can forgive them, Colonel,” she said. “And I do. Please send for the children to come to me here. For tonight at least, we will stay.”
Later, when they were all safe beneath one roof—even the collie—and she had touched them, seen the children’s dark heads side by side on a pallet in the room where she would sleep, and Goodenough had laid out one of her own clean shifts for her to wear, Willa caught the housemaid’s sleeve as she started to take her leave.
“Goodenough,” she said, low so as not to wake the children. “Did I hear the Colonel call you Sally?”
“You did.” Goodenough’s face bore the marks of weeping, but into it came a light undimmed by the heartbreak of the past hours, brighter than the candle she carried to light her way through the darkened house. “I made a gift of it to him—my name from before—the day Lem was born. Only thing I had to give was truly mine. I’m named Sarah, same as was my mistress.”
The crop wasn’t an utter loss, though it might as well have been. Half an acre stood, somehow spared by the flames. Not enough to feed one person through a winter, let alone three—one of them a boy who’d grown a hand’s breadth over the summer and was eating to make up for it. And it began to look as though there would be three of them, at least for a while.
It was two days since the fire, one since they buried Richard.
Willa walked among the cornstalks, bending now and then to brush her fingertips against a pumpkin’s cold rind. The acrid smell of burning suffused the damp autumn air. A smoke pall hung over the blackened field and clearing, awaiting a breeze to bear it away.
Another kind of pall hung over her spirit.
Neil MacGregor was lost to her, and she hadn’t seen Joseph since the night he was almost hanged. She wondered in her heart about the children and whether Joseph—if he was safe—would come for them, whether they would want to leave her now that she had nothing.
Weariness dragged at her as if stones had been sewn into the hem of the petticoat Goodenough had lent her. Though pieced from modest homespun, likely it was Goodenough’s best, and here she went trailing it through the sooty remains of her field.
They hadn’t wanted her to come there, Goodenough or the Colonel. But she’d had to come, had to see the devastation by the unforgiving light of day. She’d brought the children with her, unwilling to let them out of her sight again so soon. The horse borrowed from the Warings’ stable was tethered between the field and the cabin’s remains. The children’s voices and sometimes the collie’s carried across the blackened ground from the yard, where they poked about the rubble for anything that might be salvaged.
She doubted they would find anything. The cabin and all it held was lost. The drying beans. The rings of dried squash and pumpkins in the loft. Clothing, cooking pans, cups, plates. The small cherished things brought from the north to remind her of Goes-Singing and Sweet Rain and her years with the Kanien’kehá:ka. As if the Almighty had chosen to wipe away both her former lives with one searing stroke.
Leaving her with what? Not the solitary life she once thought to lead, free of the terrible pain of loving. But she couldn’t yet see the shape of a new life rising from these ashes, though she supposed there would be one, since she still drew breath and must live it.
“Burning Sky.”
Willa caught that breath at the sound of her name, but the voice that spoke it sent relief washing over her.
She was smiling when she turned.
THIRTY-NINE
At the edge of what remained of her cornfield, looping the reins of his spotted mare around a beech sapling, was Joseph Tames-His-Horse, still whole, though marred by the fresh scars from his fight. Willa all but ran to him.
She hadn’t yet shed tears for Joseph. They came now as his arms went around her. His chest was strong and warm beneath his bloodstained shirt. Her heart opened to him, her brother. “I feared I wouldn’t see you again.”
Joseph pulled her tight against him, almost crushing. She was glad, for it told her he wasn’t badly hurt. Too soon he put his hands on her shoulders and put her from him so he could look into her face. “I would not leave you without a word.”
“Even if half of Shiloh was after your neck?”
Joseph raised a brow—the one that didn’t have a cut slicing through it. “Are they?”
Willa grimaced through her smile, hurting to see him wounded. His eye at least was open again, the swelling subsided, though under it the skin was dark with bruising. “You won’t be hunted. Not by Colonel Waring. But he says you must never return.”
Joseph stared beyond her to the ravaged field. “I will go for now because I must. I make no promise about never returning.”
His gaze fell to her face, sorrowed, and she knew that it would be a long time before she saw him again.
The column of his throat convulsed as he touched her face. “We met in a cornfield. Now we part in one.”
Willa’s throat was too tight to speak. There was a second horse, saddled, tied to Joseph’s mare. With a small jolt of surprise, she found her voice. “Aram Crane—did you find him? Is that his horse?”
“I found him, and that is his horse. I plan to keep it for my troubles. But him, I let go.”
“You let
him go? Why? Will you go after him again?”
Instead of explaining immediately, Joseph unlaced a bag behind his mare’s saddle and withdrew a letter, battered and creased. “If I am to hunt meat for my family before the winter, then I must return to them. There is no more time for tracking men. But here is a thing I found among that man’s belongings. It was meant for you.”
Frowning, she took the letter from Joseph’s hand. “Aram Crane had a letter for me?”
The corner of Joseph’s bruised mouth drew in. “He was not meant to have it. I think it was given to the smith to bring to you, and maybe it was that man who also penned it, but the words are—”
“Neil MacGregor’s?” she interrupted, having already made out the name of the sender. Fingers trembling, she unfolded the single page. It wasn’t a long missive—far too brief, when her heart craved a book of his words—but she devoured it with an eagerness she was helpless to conceal.
My Dear Willa,
And now abideth Faith, Hope, Love, these three; but the greatest of these is Love. If there is also Pain, that is Love’s mirrored side. Even the love the Almighty Lord gives to us, His Children, brought Him a Pain and Loss immeasurable and yet … He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us All, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all Things? Trust in His Goodness, Beloved, and the path He has prepared for you, and do not be too angry when you learn of the Doings of your Devoted Servant …
Neil MacGregor
She read the words again, grateful for them, comforted by them yet pierced with regret that she had denied such a man her love. Her heart underscored what were surely his last words to her with a silent and belated amen, though she puzzled over that last line. What doings did he mean? His leaving? She couldn’t be angry with him over that. She’d been so certain she wanted to walk her path alone, had bent all her will toward making Neil believe it.
But the heart is more courageous than the mind, and sometimes wiser.
When at last she looked up, Joseph’s strong brown face swam in her tears. She blinked them away and saw the hurting in his eyes too.