by Burning Sky
The words transported Willa to her childhood, to evenings on the cabin porch with mending in her lap and a novel tucked half out of sight, to snatches of half-heard conversation flying above her head while she stitched and stole glances at the more absorbing world between the book’s pages.
I grieve it should come to this, but am content that I have waited as long as a man can do so, praying without ceasing that this War would not force a Stand upon me, who came into this land to live in Peace. But it has done so, and here I declare it. I am for Liberty. I am for Independence. Though it has taken me long to come to it, I hope not too long, for the sake of dear Rebecca, all that is left to me on this earth, lest a day come when our beloved Willa returns to live among us—a Day such as I pray for, also without ceasing. If it proves too late, then may God forgive me, and protect those He placed in my earthly care. “This thou hast seen, O LORD: keep not silence: O Lord, be not far from me. Stir up thyself, and awake to my judgment, even unto my cause, my God and my Lord.”
It was a moment before Willa realized the Colonel had stopped reading. Looking into the faces of the three men waiting for her to speak, she saw in them the satisfaction they had been suppressing all this while. “And this is unmitigated proof?”
Stoltz chuckled at the recollection of his words. “It means,” he said, “there will be no auction of your land, not with such proof of your father’s loyalties to the Patriot cause. I matched your father’s signature to that on the land deed, and earlier this morning Colonel Waring—myself and Dr. MacGregor witnessing—made over the deed to the sole surviving heir of Dieter Obenchain.”
They meant her, Willa realized. She was the sole surviving heir. The land wouldn’t be auctioned. It was hers.
Stoltz rounded up the letters and handed them to her. Willa wiped her shaking hands on her skirt—forgetting it wasn’t her own—and held them as she would a fragile glass. The letter on top was streaked and spotted with brownish stains.
She raised her eyes to Neil, whose mouth tilted in apology. “I bled a bit on them. Sorry.”
Dear man. She wanted to throw her arms around him, to tell him she loved him, that she had been a fool, that she never wanted him to go away again. But all she could say was, “Oh …”
If she was speechless, Matthew Kershaw wasn’t.
“We don’t have to leave?” he asked, looking from face to face for confirmation.
“We don’t have to leave,” Willa echoed, but for her it wasn’t a question. She simply needed to hear the words spoken to make them finally, irrevocably, real.
“Not unless you wish to.” Neil stepped close and finally—oh, finally—touched her. His hand cupped her shoulder, then, as if he couldn’t help himself, her face. “I’m sorry, Willa, for all you faced alone. I didna want to leave ye, but there was no time to be lost.”
Lost. Willa closed her eyes, caught between all she had lost and all she had gained, and the fact of this man now standing there touching her. “Cabins can be rebuilt. Crops planted again. But this …” Opening her eyes, she raised the letters. “None of that could happen without this.”
Something in the way Neil was touching her must have communicated to the Colonel and Stoltz, even the children, for when Willa glanced around again, the assessor was showing Matthew something out of his saddlebag, the collie trailing after them, and the Colonel had taken Maggie’s hand and the two were walking toward the horse shed, which had survived the fire.
She and Neil stood alone in the yard, his hand warm against her cheek. She wanted to keep looking into his eyes forever but lowered hers in shame.
“Willa.” Neil took his hand from her face, leaving her wishing for its warmth. “I thought you’d determined to be alone, to give your heart to no one. You made that clear enough to me. But the children … they tell me they’ve proposed to adopt ye.”
She risked a glance at his face, saw in his eyes the mingling of amusement, warmth, and aching question.
“Is it just their notion,” he went on, “or did you accept their proposal?”
She swallowed and said, “I sent Joseph away without them. They are my children. I accepted.”
Both happiness and hurt crossed his eyes, much as it had Joseph’s. She knew he was remembering his proposal by the spring, after the first crop fire. The one she had spurned.
“I accepted,” she said again. “But I made them ask me twice.”
Neil searched her face, dark brows drawn, and she saw he didn’t yet understand.
“You have only asked me once.”
She was looking into his eyes the moment hope dealt his hurt a stunning blow. Then it came, the smile that made her heart melt.
“Wilhelmina Obenchain, as I stand here breathing, you’re the most headstrong, stubborn-minded—”
“Sooty?”
“Aye, that too, but I’ve seen how ye clean up.” He breathed out through his nose, shaking his head. “Now dinna interrupt me. Where was I?”
“I am stubborn?” she prompted.
“That you are. You’re also the most fearless woman I’ve ever kent, and I love ye full well. Now will you marry me and let me leastwise pretend to take care of ye?”
Fearless. Did he truly think her so? She had never been that, not in the ways that mattered, but because of him and the children, she was learning to be. By God’s grace, she was learning.
It bloomed in her throat, the great love and need she had for this man. At first she couldn’t speak around it, could only nod her head. Finally she lifted the letters, stained with his blood. “If this is how you pretend, Neil MacGregor, then I cannot wait to see what you do when you are in earnest.”
His eyes searched hers, the smile frozen on his face. “Then that’s … aye?”
“Oh, aye,” she said. “I love you. And I mean to be Willa MacGregor before the first snow falls.”
For a moment, Neil looked at her, breath coming deep, as though he’d held it too long. Then he took her soot-stained face between his hands. Never minding the two men and two children who’d stopped pretending not to watch them—he kissed her, and in it Willa felt a fierceness of possession that startled and thrilled her. It entwined like a fiery thread with the tenderness he’d always shown her, weaving of the two a rich new cloth, strong and beautiful and whole.
He drew in his breath then, breaking off the kiss to hold her away from him. “I canna believe I nearly forgot. I’ve more to tell ye.”
Willa’s heart was overflowing, but she laughed at his eager expression. He looked like one of the children bursting with a secret to share. “What more can there be?”
Something in his eyes made her heart skip, even before he said, “I’ve another letter for ye.”
“Another of Papa’s letters?”
“No.” He reached again into his coat. “This one’s from your grandmother.”
“Oma?” When had her grandmother written any letters? Then Willa looked at what Neil held out to her. Not an old letter like Papa’s, faded with age or worn with much reading. Its seal was unbroken.
She took it then, stunned, sat down on the ground, placed her papa’s yellowed letters beside her, and said, weakly for someone moments ago called fearless, “Oma is alive?”
Neil lowered himself to sit beside her, careful of his wounded arm. “And sends her love, from Albany.”
“She has all this time been in Albany? Why did no one know?”
Warmth spread from her shoulder as Neil MacGregor leaned against her and kissed her temple. “Open it. She’ll speak for herself.”
Willa glanced up to see the children and the collie coming across the yard to them. She broke the seal and, when her family was gathered around her, read to them of a miracle.
6 September 1784
To Wilhelmina Obenchain
Shiloh, New York State
Dearest Granddaughter,
This is a Letter I have composed many times in the past twelve years, often in the darkness on the edge of sleep, always with Tears.
But never in all my wishing and composing did I expect the Almighty to grant me Opportunity of writing it in Truth. That will show an Old Woman she still has much to learn about her God.
Your young Scotsman tells me with Gravest Certainty and Regret that Rebecca and Dieter are no more. This I did not know for Fact, though I was all but certain of it. Let me explain why this is so.
I left Shiloh in the autumn of 1777, sent away by your parents to Albany, where they believed I would be safe from the escalating Dissention and Violence on the frontier. I went by night, escorted by a trusted friend of Maeve and John Keegan—the only souls in Shiloh to whom I confided my intentions. Here with my niece, Tilda, I have remained, with no sure Word of my vanished daughter and her husband until your young Man’s arrival yesterday.
I have seen those drawings of his, the ones he sent on to that Society in Philadelphia that had the Temerity to imply he is on the brink of losing his Privilege of fulfilling the Commission they sent him to undertake. The more fools them, if they let him slip away. He seems not to mind one way or the other, and has told me an Astonishing Thing—that his Reason for venturing into the Frontier was but a Means, not an End. A Means to bring him into your Path. I hope you will not think badly of him for his telling me of you, how you met, what you did for him, and how he learned to know you as a woman returned from Captivity—though I am made to understand that what began as Bondage you through Resiliency transformed into a Life, one encompassing a husband, children, and, I am certain, much Joy. Though the ones who took you from us have been the cause of my Loss, I grieve with you for those you loved who are no more. No Mother should have to see her Children pass before her. How my heart yearns for that Day all Tears will be wiped away! When we both shall see our Precious Ones again.
Mr. MacGregor tells me your Ordeals have not broken your spirit, but on the contrary have made you Strong. Never, he confesses, has he met a Woman such as yourself, unmatched in Courage and Conviction (Granddaughter, I believe this Scotsman is more than a little in love with you). Through his eyes I see you now, tall and shining and clean of Heart. Soon, I pray, I will behold you with my own eyes, which are still clear-seeing—not a Boast every woman having reached the age of seventy-and-eight may make. In the spring, he promises, he shall fetch me back to Shiloh, and to you, Granddaughter, if you wish to see this foolish Old Woman again.
Oh, my dear, if I could turn back the years … but we are not given such Powers in this life. Rather, having repented of old Works, we are left to walk forward in the New. But there is one memory I must stir—that book you went off to read that Terrible Day we lost you. Are you surprised I remember it? Would it Surprise you more to learn I obtained a copy years ago and have read every page of it—twice? When I come to you in the Spring—if you permit me—you will have it for your own. I will forbear spoiling the ending, only to say it is well worth the Effort and I promise you, Wilhelmina, that I will let you finish it—and any other book you desire to read—in Peace. I have come to see the Merit in books, and in Granddaughters reading them, and nothing will please me more, after I have seen your Face again, than to place this copy of Richardson’s Pamela into your hands, then spend my evenings watching you sit by the Hearth (without need of a pile of mending to hide behind), and discover for yourself how the Story ends. And after you have done so, there is here by my chair a Trunk full of books set aside for you by Your Loving Oma,
Dagna Fruehauf Mehler
“Oma …” Willa breathed out the word, tears streaming as she finished reading. She looked up to see Neil watching her with shining eyes.
“I dinna think I need ask whether you want me to fetch her from Albany,” he said.
Willa wiped away a tear, then felt a slender arm come around her waist.
“Why are you crying, Istah?” Maggie asked her, looking up with worried eyes that longed to comfort. “Who is Oma?”
Matthew, hunkered beside his sister, was frowning in an effort to understand. “Don’t you want her to come here?”
Willa hugged her daughter, then brushed the tousled hair from her son’s face. “Oma is my grandmother,” she said, and smiled through the last of her tears. “Your great-grandmother. And I want very much for her to come here, to see my beautiful family.”
“We have a great-grandmother?” Maggie asked, clearly fascinated by the notion.
“She’s coming here to live with us?” Matthew asked, excitement mounting in his voice. “With books?”
Neil and Willa both laughed, catching gazes across the children’s heads. “Yes,” Willa told them. “She’s bringing books. She’s coming home.”
Home. It was the land beneath them, yes, but so much more than that. Home was in the eyes of Neil MacGregor, looking at her with love. Home was in the faces of these children she would cherish, for as long as the Almighty lent them to her—and forever in her heart. In them the two rivers of her soul had met and now flowed on together, clear and sure.
In them she was home.
Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments
In the course of researching the historical backdrop of this novel, I read dozens of books written about the eighteenth century, but there’s only so much factual detail a writer can insert into a novel before she stops her story in its tracks to give a history lesson. For readers interested in learning more about the time period and events that influenced the story and shaped the characters found in the pages of Burning Sky, I offer the following notes.
The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) proved extremely devastating to the New York frontier, in part because of its northern border shared with Canada, to which many Loyalists and pro-British Iroquois retreated, and from which they staged regular raids. These were part of the overall British campaign against the colonies, but on a smaller scale they consisted of personally motivated reprisals against Patriots for their attacks on Iroquois towns and Loyalist settlers. These reprisal raids, such as the attack upon Cherry Valley that Neil MacGregor found himself caught in, continued until the war’s generally accepted ending—and beyond. General Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Patriot troops after his defeat at the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781, yet pro-British war parties were still roaming the Mohawk Valley during the summer of 1782, destroying property and taking prisoners. The New York frontier Willa Obenchain returned to in the spring of 1784 was a landscape of blackened homesteads and razed settlements, few of which had been reclaimed.
The Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse), also called the Six Nations of the Iroquois, are a league of independent nations that, centuries before the Revolutionary War, were united under a set of laws called the Great Law of Peace. These nations are, from east to west as they were situated across the Mohawk Valley and western New York: Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The Tuscaroras joined the League in the early eighteenth century and dwelled primarily on Oneida land.
Toward the end of the 1600s, long before the war between the Colonies and the Crown, some members of the Six Nations immigrated north to Canada due to the influence of French Jesuit missionaries. While they continued to consider themselves close kin to the Mohawks and other nations of the Haudenosaunee, they remained apart. (It is among these Mohawks that Willa Obenchain lived for twelve years, and from there that she returned to her home in New York.) In 1710, four Mohawk men from the Haudenosaunee in the Mohawk Valley traveled to England to meet Queen Anne. While there, they asked for Anglican missionaries to come among them, in part as a safeguard against the French Jesuits leading more of the people away to Canada, thus weakening their nation. Queen Anne sent the missionaries, and soon Anglican Christianity took hold among the Mohawks, and to varying degrees the western Longhouse nations.
In the 1740s the spiritual revival called the Great Awakening led to New Light, or personal-conversion-oriented missionaries, coming among the Iroquois. Prominent among these missionaries was Samuel Kirkland, who by the late 1760s had settled among the Oneidas at one of their primary towns, Kanowalohale. There
he dedicated himself to preaching the gospel, education, and the procuring of material needs for a people grown dependent on European goods as their lands became overhunted by their own involvement in the fur trade, and by encroaching white settlers. It was a clash between Kirkland’s conversion-oriented Christian beliefs and those of the Church of England, longer established among the Six Nations, that caused fissures to form among the Iroquois. It took a war to reveal the extent of these cracks in the fabric of the centuries-old League. While most of the Iroquois nations chose to fight for the British, most of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, in part because of their loyalty to Kirkland, chose to fight for the Patriots. For the Iroquois, as much as for European colonists, the Revolutionary War was no less than a civil war.
As early as 1772, free white citizens of the Mohawk Valley had been pressed to sign an oath of allegiance to King George, but in the years to follow, loyalty to the king crumbled under the weight of taxation and other restrictive acts of Parliament, an ocean away. By 1775, the lines between Patriot and Loyalist were already being drawn in New York so swiftly that some colonials were slow to realize the peril of not choosing sides. Neighbor pressured neighbor to sign oaths of allegiance to the new Continental Congress, and to declare their partisanship publicly. To refuse, even to dither, was tantamount to admitting oneself a British sympathizer. Homes, land, businesses, and lives were lost to fence-sitting, as Loyalists’ property was seized and held, and many Loyalists jailed, abused, or driven from the colony. While the Treaty of Paris, signed by the United States and Britain in September of 1783, gave Loyalists the right to reclaim and dispose of their property within a year’s time, resentment against these former neighbors was so strong in New York that the state ignored this provision and continued to confiscate and sell Loyalist property until 1788.
Negotiations for the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (the second council that Neil, Joseph, and Willa anticipate happening soon after the end of Burning Sky), held between American Congressional Commissioners and representatives of the Six Nations, took place during October 1784. The Six Nations came to this treaty still divided in their loyalties and worried about their future. The distressing terms of peace between the United States and Great Britain were made known—terms in which the Iroquois were excluded and the lands they claimed as sovereign nations relinquished by the British to the Americans. Because the war had left thousands of pro-British Iroquois huddled in makeshift, disease-ridden camps outside Fort Niagara in the west, their attendance at Fort Stanwix for this vital treaty was thin. Negotiations stretched for days, at the close of which, despite Iroquois efforts to stress their status as free and independent nations, the Six Nations were compelled to relinquish any claim to lands in the Ohio country and a huge tract of territory comprising the northwestern sector of the present state of Pennsylvania. News of the land cession was met with widespread resentment and bitterness. Led by Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), many of the Six Nations refugees settled in southern Ontario along the Grand River, assisted by the Canadian government. Though the nations were scattered across the US/Canada border, the Haudenosaunee would eventually reestablish the Iroquois League according to the old pattern, and see their nations-within-anation status acknowledged by the federal government.