“I thought he would be even more motivated than most to see our objective through.” The captain’s eyelids drooped as he made a scuffing noise with his teeth.
Half turned to the field as he kept himself apart, Fontaine’s knuckles were white on the flask as he nursed his drink. Catherine didn’t condone it, but at least she understood where it came from. Her own father searched for solace deep in his cups, as well, and always found remorse at the bottom.
“It is not malice or mal intent you observe, but grief,” Moreau went on. “Still, now is the time, more than ever before, for him to fall back on his discipline and training. If I must send him back across the river this morning, I will.”
After a brief but volatile conversation Catherine couldn’t help but overhear, that was exactly what Moreau did. She was not without sympathy for Fontaine, but having him gone eased her spirit so she could better concentrate on the work.
Once the women learned the rudiments of cutting grain, they fell into a rhythm. Across the field, those who could spare the breath sang old songs to which the coureurs des bois and voyageurs paddled.
À la claire fontaine m’en allant promener
J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle que je m’y suis baignée
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.
The voices filtered through the wheat like a far-off dream: I’ve loved you for so long that I’ll never forget you. It was a melancholy ballad of love and loss. Catherine did not join in, though she knew each word of that and every other folk song. Gabriel had been a coureur des bois himself and had filled her childhood with his songs.
As a young man, Gabriel had been training to be a barrister in Montreal and had recently married a Frenchwoman named Isabelle when the feeling of suffocation grew too much for him. His wife of less than two years waited at home while he broke away from all expectations and responsibility. He paddled along rivers and creeks with corded arms that grew sun-bronzed and strong as timber, trapping without the sanction the French government had given to the voyageurs officially tasked with the fur trade.
When Gabriel returned from one of his months-long absences, he’d found Isabelle laboring to bring their first baby, a girl, into the world. She named the baby Marie-Catherine. Isabelle’s dying wish to Gabriel was that he promise to raise the girl properly—in silks and lace, with finishing school and balls. He promised, but the baby died soon after her mother.
Of course, Catherine had no idea of any of this as a child. Only when she found an old sketchbook of Gabriel’s filled with images not of Strong Wind, but of a young bride with upswept curls, did she pull the truth from him bit by bit when rum had loosened his tongue. Only then did she see the twisted root of her name. Her father had named her for the pureblood French daughter once lost to him. In the Mohawk culture, such a practice was normal. The replacement for the lost family member was often named for the deceased loved one. In essence, the replacement became the original.
Once Catherine understood this, she knew why Gabriel had worked so hard to train and punish the “savage” out of her. But before her parents’ divorce, all she knew of her father was that he brought music and laughter with him every time he returned from a trapping or hunting trip, and that she felt her family was complete when he was near. She’d been his favorite child, or so she fancied. Bright Star always favored their mother, and Joseph, born while Gabriel was away, never did bond with his father.
Catherine swung the scythe across the grain to the rhythm of the folk songs. Chaff hung in the air and dusted her throat, but she smiled at the memories of an age gone by. The days when she had been Stands-Apart were honey-thick with joy and light. She had been loved by both parents and loved them in return with abandon, though Gabriel was so often gone.
She stretched her lower back for a moment before drinking water from her canteen. The morning spread thin and long, and progress seemed slow compared to the work yet to be done. Blisters bubbled on her palms. Thankful worked parallel to her, some distance away. Behind them, old men forced gnarled hands and stooped backs into service as they bound stalks into sheaves and hoisted them into carts.
Catherine’s thoughts circled back to her father. After his trapping accident, Gabriel no longer played his fiddle and had not been able to train his remaining hand to sketch. Early attempts resulted in frustrated rages drowned in rum or brandy. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—paddle his own canoe or hunt for the family again. But she loved him still, the papa who singled her out among the children, her name, Marie-Catherine, like a song on his lips.
But he never danced with her after his accident. And he only sang when he was drunk.
Catherine wrestled those thoughts down. As difficult as Gabriel was to live with, he was her father, and she would not abandon him. She would never be the refined, sophisticated, purely French daughter he wanted. But as she stood between two empires, could she be a bridge in her family, too?
“Is that your father?” Captain Moreau asked as he handed Catherine out of the canoe and onto the dock that evening. Thankful came right behind her.
Catherine shielded her eyes from the sun as she angled toward the sound of slurring song. “It is.” She sighed.
Moreau tied the canoe to the piling, then joined the women on the dock. Though he had not put blade to wheat, he had raked up the fallen stalks with the older men and exuded the musky odor of labor and late summer sun. With his handkerchief, he rubbed the chaff from the grooves on his brow and straightened his tricorne hat. “I should meet him and explain my orders.”
As they closed the distance between dock and house, the air soured with the smell of rum. Catherine’s face flushed in shame. “Another time, Captain,” she suggested. “When you are rested and have eaten, perhaps.”
Chest swelling with an unreleased sigh, Moreau agreed and took his leave.
Gabriel pushed himself out of his chair and leaned awkwardly against a porch column. No longer singing, he just stared at them. Grey hair, once thick and brown, hung to his shoulders in unkempt strands. He hadn’t even pinned his empty shirt sleeve, so it waved in the breeze, a white flag of surrender to the hardships that had befallen him. The pinched expression on his face, however, was anything but submissive. Catherine knew that look. It held a fight.
“Do you think he’s as angry as he looks?” Thankful whispered.
“I’m certain of it.” Gabriel was unused to being alone all day with no one to tend his needs. From what he’d shared of his privileged childhood, his whims had too often been catered to, breeding a selfishness that discarded responsibility in favor of freedom. But then, Catherine had spoiled him, too, she supposed, and she had no doubt he felt affronted by her absence, orders notwithstanding. “He won’t be reasoned with in this state. Go on, I’ll see to him myself.”
Thankful bowed her head and began a wide circle to the back of the house while Catherine approached the porch.
“I’m hungry.” Gabriel insisted he couldn’t prepare his own food but had no trouble opening a bottle with one hand. A jug dangled from his thumb now, and she judged its weight by its sway. A just-begun jug of rum meant he was still depressed and seeking comfort. A half-drunk jug meant he had mellowed. If he stopped drinking at this point, he could still be talked to, would still listen. But an empty jug loosed him from all inhibition and sometimes from time itself as his mind meandered the paths of his pain.
He stumbled down the steps toward Catherine, dropping the jug to grasp her outstretched hand before he fell. Not one drop of rum spilled into the grass.
“Will you eat if I feed you now?” she asked, her own stomach cramped. She held him steady for a moment before releasing him.
“I saw you with that man down there.” The alcohol on his words was overpowering. “You chose to take care of him instead of me today?”
Catherine looked into his red-veined eyes. “That was Captain Pierre Moreau of the Régiment Royal-Roussillon. He’s a professional soldier, one of the troupes de ter
re that arrived from France. Remember, I told you about him in my note. Did you read it?”
Gabriel cocked his head. “Liar. You can’t read or write. What else are you hiding from me?” He yanked her hat from her head with such force that he dislodged the pins, and her hair came tumbling down.
Catherine’s heart drummed. All else fell silent to her ears as she focused only on the labored breathing of her father. She should not have been standing so close to him. She should have remembered what he could do in this state, what he had already done in years past.
“Go to bed. You need to rest.” She took a step back from him. “I’ll bring you something to eat in a bit.”
Gabriel’s hand shot out and latched on to her forearm, fingers digging into her flesh. The strength in his one hand and arm was preternatural. “I don’t like coming home and finding you not where you should be. A woman should wait for her husband, not move into another man’s lodge. Have I been gone so long, Strong Wind, that I mean nothing to you?”
He was crushing the veins beneath her skin. Her fingers tingled, then began to lose feeling. With her free hand, she pried his fingers loose until she could twist from his grasp.
She turned to leave, but before she could take two steps, her head was yanked from behind as Gabriel pulled her hair. Balance lost, she fell backward and tried to spin around to catch herself. She collided with the porch railing, pain searing her temple, and then crumpled on her side on the stone steps.
“Clumsy woman.” He shook his head, and she wondered if he was thinking of Isabelle, whose long lines in his sketches had been the very essence of grace.
Catherine touched the wound and found it already swelling. Her ribs throbbed, but she doubted it was anything more than a bruise. She’d made a mistake in trying to talk with him.
Gabriel sat on the step beside her, pressing his hand between his knees. “I couldn’t have you walk away from me, see? Don’t leave me. You can’t leave me, do you understand?”
She pushed away from him, her gut filling with the weight of a pile of rocks. She was ashamed of him, and just as ashamed to be bleeding on the ground at his feet. How often had Strong Wind suffered this humiliation? A few times, after the accident? Several? Strong Wind would say Catherine had chosen the wrong side when she left Kahnawake for Gabriel.
It was a thought Catherine banished with practiced speed. They would reconcile once he was sober.
“I’m not leaving you,” she told her father. “Trust me. There’s nowhere I belong but here.” The truth of it was bitter on her tongue.
His silver-stubbled chin trembled. He made to stroke her hair, but she flinched at his hand, and he blanched.
Stiffly, she retrieved her hat, then rose and helped him do the same. “To bed with you now.” She kicked the empty jug aside and led him into the house. He hadn’t meant to hurt her.
A floorboard creaked beneath her moccasins, the sound so familiar that she scarcely heard it. Matching her pace to Gabriel’s shuffling steps, she led him past the front parlor and up the stairs to the second floor. She followed her father into his chamber and watched his stooped form settle into the bed.
After pulling the edge of the sheet up over Gabriel’s chest, Catherine unfurled the mosquito netting from the frame surrounding the bed until it dropped to the floor on all sides.
“Don’t go. Have you no pity?” Gabriel pleaded. Wisps of hair fanned onto the pillowcase. “It was no accident, Strong Wind. He pushed me. Your brother pushed me to the ground, knowing that trap was right where I’d fall. He always hated me, never accepted me into the Wolf Clan.”
Catherine had the accusations memorized by now. According to Gabriel, her uncle could not accept that a white man had married his sister, and deliberately set out to hurt him. How much truth lived in that story, she didn’t know.
“You can’t blame me for no longer being able to hunt and trap,” he went on. “If it weren’t for your brother— But I’ll speak no more of it if you’ll stay.”
Shaking her skirts to create a breeze, Catherine felt as though she were overhearing his last conversation with Strong Wind. She hated when he spoke to her this way. Those words were not meant for her ears but clearly haunted him still.
He stared through the netting at her.
She licked her dry lips. “It’s me, Papa. Your daughter.”
His face pinched. Then, “Yes. So it is. Sit next to me then, Marie-Catherine. I need you. I always have.”
“I know, Papa. I’m here.” She stayed until his jaw grew slack.
Chapter Four
The kitchen was empty when Catherine entered. In the waning light of day, the whitewashed stone walls took on a honeyed hue. A heat-laden breeze pushed through the window near the ceiling, rustling through dried herbs that had all but lost their scents. The hearth was cold, the pot on the crane still empty, the crock of flour nearly as barren.
She tossed her hat onto the broad oak table between drying hazelnuts waiting to be shelled and what was left of the golden bread she’d made out of corn earlier in the week. Gabriel hated the bread, calling corn no fair substitute for wheat, but in times like this, even he could not refuse to eat it.
Gingerly, she washed her scraped and blistered hands before lowering herself onto the bench. The bread crumbled as she pinched a piece from the half-eaten loaf. It was grainy on her tongue as she pressed it to the roof of her mouth. Savoring the flavor kept her from eating too fast.
Memory pressed at the edges of her mind. Strong Wind shelling dried corn into an elm bark cask, her long hair making music as elaborately beaded strands clinked together. Joseph Many Feathers, a baby asleep in the cradleboard on his mother’s back. The board was intricately carved and padded with down and furs. “You mustn’t worry your little brother will replace you,” Strong Wind had said, smiling at her. They could hear children chasing each other between the longhouses, laughing. “Your little brother will grow up and move into the longhouse of his wife, in a separate clan from ours. But my two daughters are both a part of me, neither one better nor more important than the other. Like two hands of one body.” She’d lifted hers then, wiggling her fingers. “I need you both. And you need each other.” The girl who had been Stands-Apart had nodded, soothed by the reassurance that she belonged.
Catherine stepped on the heels of her moccasins to remove them, peeling the recollection from her mind as she finished eating her portion of bread. Pushing back from the table, she pulled a pewter cup from the sideboard and drew water from the urn in the corner to slake her thirst. Since the last of the bread would go to Gabriel when he woke, she reached low into the barrel against the wall and measured out dried beans to soak overnight for tomorrow’s supper.
Movement outside the window caught her eye. Moments later, she heard a persistent scraping against the outer wall. Leaving hat and moccasins behind, Catherine climbed the stone steps leading out of the house to investigate.
Blackbirds wheeled overhead as the evening air sat heavy on her skin. The setting sun lit the clouds from beneath, painting their bellies pink and gold. Rounding the corner of the house, Catherine stepped around a tree stump and beneath the canopy of a willow. There, she stopped.
His back to her, a man was filling gaps in the house’s stone wall with fresh mortar. It was a task that needed doing, to be sure, especially before winter arrived on bitter winds. But who—?
Her heart slammed into her rib cage. She knew that six-foot frame. She knew the lines of those shoulders, the tilt of his head in concentration.
“Samuel?” she whispered.
Turning, he met her gaze.
Catherine did not remember lowering herself to sit on the tree stump, but there she was. Samuel Crane knelt before her, bucket of mortar and trowel abandoned. He was not as she remembered, but he was undeniably the man who had left her and never come back. She knew every contour of his face—the angle of his square jaw, the planes of his cheekbones, the straight line of his nose. His hair, tailed at the neck, was t
he very color of the wheat she’d cut that day. She remembered the feel of it in her fingers. Soft as corn silk.
“What’s this?” he asked, accusation in his tone.
Catherine looked down and saw only her fists balled in her lap.
“Right there.” He brushed a fingertip against the inside of her forearm where purple bloomed against her skin. He searched her face, settling on the lump at her temple. “And there. Your father did this to you?”
Catherine pulled her hair over her shoulder, a dark veil to conceal the evidence. Anger surged through her with a force that almost scared her. “How dare you pretend to care about a bruise on my arm when it’s obvious how little you care for me at all?”
“Who did this to you? It was Gabriel, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t want to hear the sympathy in his voice, that particular brand that was edged with steel. She laced her arms at her waist and looked away. “I have nothing to say to you.”
She stood, grateful her skirts hid the shake of her legs and that her hair covered the aching side of her head. Still, she felt exposed, as if he could see straight through to the secret places where she hid the truest parts of herself.
Samuel rose. As he brushed leaf matter from his threadbare breeches, she took in her own disrepair. Her apron was yellowed from scything wheat, and the cotton dress it covered was rumpled and damp beneath the arms. With no hat to cover it, her hair streamed as free as if she were still a child at Kahnawake. No Englishwoman would allow a man to see her hair down like this. No full-blooded Frenchwoman, either. Strands lifted on a breeze, dark brown ribbons separating from the plaits that had woven them together. She caught him watching with fascination, or perhaps just recollection.
His presence threatened to unravel her, too. He shouldn’t be here, not now, not after so many years. Not during a war, for pity’s sake, when French soldiers could see them together and have grounds to arrest them for treason.
Samuel stepped into the gap between them. “I have so much to say to you.”
Between Two Shores Page 5