Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  “Give me some time,” Nathaniel said.

  You’ve had time, she wanted to say. But she watched him striding out into the depths and then swimming strongly, his legs and arms cutting the water like blades.

  She forced herself to look, not at him, but at the lake. At this setting, more beautiful and peaceful than anything she had ever experienced. She watched the slow glide of a turtle shell through a stand of bulrushes, hearing the gentle gurgle and hiss of the moving waters. Across the lake the heron was still stalking, joined now by an osprey which circled and then dove, and dove again. The woods were filled with birds, and the sounds of their calls. She squinted into the shadows and saw a pair of eyes reflecting back at her; a doe heavy with fawn, wondering whether it was safe to come to the lake to drink.

  Nathaniel swam for what seemed like a long time and then he came back to her, streaming water. The sun reflected off him in a million colors.

  “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly when he came to kneel in front of her. “It’s none of my business.”

  “It is,” he said. “It is your business.”

  “I wouldn’t let you tell me.”

  “I should have made you listen.”

  She lifted her chin; looked him straight in the eye. Elizabeth fought hard with the impulse to smooth things over, to make him feel better. “Yes,” she said finally, with a nod. “You should have. Although it would not have made any difference to me, in the end.”

  Rivulets of water ran down his body and over the rock, fading in the sun almost as they watched. Elizabeth saw the pulse in Nathaniel’s throat. His eyes were narrowed in the glare of the sun, his face impassive.

  “I haven’t talked to anybody about this since my mother. She said I should put it behind me for Hannah’s sake.”

  She started to ask another question, but he held up a palm to stop her. “Listen,” he said. “Listen and I’ll tell you. Although I doubt you’ll be glad of it.”

  He settled in front of her, straight-backed and cross-legged with his breechclout covering him, the long muscles in his thighs tensed. His hair hung damp over his heavily muscled shoulders. He was completely at ease in his near nakedness, and hers; Elizabeth blinked hard and looked away, concentrated on the mountains layered in shades of green and blue as far as she could see. When she had gathered her thoughts, she looked back at him. This was Nathaniel in front of her, her husband. With a story to tell her that she needed to hear, in spite of what it did to him, the pain it caused him. She fixed her eyes on his and held his gaze.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Nathaniel wondered what she thought she was going to hear. He was afraid to tell her the whole story; he also knew very well that she would not be satisfied with less than all of it. But she had expectations of him and he feared—he knew—that he was bound to disappoint her in some of them.

  “First you should know about me and Richard, before Sarah. How things got started. You know the story of how he came back to Paradise?”

  “From Curiosity,” Elizabeth confirmed.

  “One person who you can count on to tell it to you true,” he noted, satisfied with her source. “Well, you know then that Richard’s uncle came to claim him, took him off to Albany. But he was never gone for long, he was always coming back to Paradise for a week or a month at a time. He said it was to visit the Witherspoons, but there was more to it than that. It was my mother that interested him.”

  “Richard came to see your mother?” Elizabeth repeated. She was trying not to ask questions; she wanted to leave the storytelling to him. But it was hard for her, he could see that.

  “He couldn’t stay away from her,” Nathaniel said. “He loved her in the same way that he came to hate me, with everything that was in him. He used to come up to Lake in the Clouds to talk to her whenever he could manage, but mostly when I was out walking the trap lines or hunting with my father. He would sit and talk to her, or help her with whatever work she had her hand to. Candles or hoeing or wash, whatever. At this time he was less than fourteen, so you have to think of that, how strange that was. She would tell us when we came home that Richard had been to call, sometimes with Kitty. She said he was a poor soul.”

  Nathaniel paused, struck suddenly with loneliness for his mother. Talking about her had brought her face to him suddenly, and very clearly. Elizabeth touched his hand and he took it gratefully.

  “But to me he was barely civil. Less than. You could call it simple jealousy—I had my folks and he had nobody. I had Lake in the Clouds and he had no chance of ever getting close to it.” He glanced at her, saw the deep furrow of concentration between her eyes. “You haven’t seen the graves yet. It’s mostly our folks, but Todd’s mother is buried there, too. My father found her and brought her back to Lake in the Clouds to bury, what was left of her. I remember seeing Todd out there once in the middle of the night one summer by full moon.”

  “Did your mother fear him?”

  Nathaniel had to laugh at that idea. “My mother didn’t fear anybody or anything, except illness. Richard Todd had her sympathy and her pity, but he didn’t scare her. Though sometimes it seems to me that he should have.

  “So things between me and Richard weren’t exactly friendly but there wasn’t any trouble, at least not then. When I was nineteen I left home to go to Barktown, and I was gone more than two years. I lost track of Richard until just before I came back, in the middle of the war. Did you ever ask Richard about his training?”

  “His medical training? No,” Elizabeth said. “He mentioned something about the physicians he studied with—”

  “Adams and Littlefield. Littlefield was Clinton’s personal physician on campaign.”

  “Sir Henry Clinton? The general?” Elizabeth looked confused.

  Nathaniel shook his head. “It’s a common enough name, I guess. There was a General James Clinton, too, but on the Continental side. Littlefield was his physician, and Richard was training under Littlefield, this was in ’79.”

  “Richard saw battle?”

  “Richard saw slaughter,” Nathaniel corrected her. “Sullivan came up from the south and Clinton moved west along the Mohawk and then down the Susquehanna to meet him. They weren’t after Tories, though. They were hoping to set an end to the whole Iroquois nation.”

  Elizabeth put out a hand to stop him. She cleared her throat gently. “I don’t understand. You fought under your father-in-law for the Continentals, did you not? And those Kahnyen’kehàka you fought with, are they not Iroquois?”

  “I forget sometimes what you can’t know about,” he conceded. “You realize the Hode’noshaunee is a league of six nations? Well, within the league there wasn’t always agreement on who to back in the war, not even within the tribes. Some fought with the Tories and some fought against them. By ’79 all Washington wanted was every Iroquois out of the northwest, and fast. So Sullivan and Clinton marched that summer. Burned more than forty towns before they finished, and burned the crops in the fields and the orchards and anything that would take to a torch. Those who didn’t die fled north to Canada, or if they didn’t they starved in the winter after.”

  Nathaniel was talking fast, as if he could spit this information out like a mouthful of bitter medicine. He saw her hands trembling, and the way she clutched them together in her lap. It was not comfort he needed right now, but her attention; she seemed to realize that, and he was grateful.

  “Clinton burned Barktown,” she concluded.

  “It was burned, but not by Clinton hisself. There was a big militia party from Johnstown, and they decided to get a jump on things. Thought they’d show up to report for duty with some good marks to their credit.”

  “Where were you?” she asked, her voice hoarse and low.

  “Sky-Wound-Round sent me to Albany, to talk to Schuyler about what could be done to make peace between the Iroquois and the army.” Although his face was blank, his eyes flashed with a bright anger. “Sky-Wound-Round was still hopeful in those days that the Kahnyen�
��kehàka could have a home here.”

  “But he does have a home here, I met him at Barktown.”

  “He lives in exile in his own homelands,” Nathaniel corrected her. He watched her think this through, and then accept it, reluctantly.

  “You didn’t know what was happening with the campaign while you were talking to Schuyler?”

  “No, and he didn’t tell me.” Nathaniel stopped. He thought hard about what he could say to her. If he should leave her with the impressions of Schuyler that she had taken away from Saratoga on her wedding day, or if he should tell her the whole truth. Not for the first time that day, Nathaniel thought of Hannah, of what it would be like for her as a young woman, half Kahnyen’kehàka. Hannah would need Elizabeth’s help, which Elizabeth would not be able to give unless she understood the realities of what it meant to be living in a white man’s country when your skin was more than white.

  “Schuyler let me talk to him as if there were some room for peace. And the whole time we talked about which of the chiefs could be brought over and which tribes might be able to survive on this side of the border, Clinton was getting his men on the road with the taste for red flesh in their mouths. Now, Schuyler claims he told Clinton to leave Barktown alone, given the fact that Sky-Wound-Round had fought for him at Saratoga.”

  “You didn’t believe General Schuyler?” Elizabeth asked evenly. If she was shocked by this idea of considerate and elegant Philip Schuyler as complicit in a plot to wipe out the Iroquois, she did not show it.

  “There’s no question that the campaign plans came from Schuyler,” Nathaniel said quietly. “None at all. For him, most Indians are savages and worthy of extermination, and he would own that to my face if I asked him. You’re thinking of Runs-from-Bears. I’m not saying that Schuyler can’t see the human being in some individuals. He can be loyal where it’s called for. He did what he could to spare Barktown, but you have to remember, Elizabeth, that for him a bad Indian is one who doesn’t see an advantage in being white.” He gave her a minute to digest this, watching her face. He could see questions forming there, doubt and hesitancy and reluctant agreement.

  “So how is it that Barktown was burned?” she asked.

  “The Johnstown militia decided to do that on their own authority.”

  “I see,” Elizabeth said, matching his tone.

  “No you don’t, but you will soon.” He cleared his throat.

  “So I went home and I found the village still smoking. The men—Sarah’s father and her two brothers, both less than twenty, her uncle, other men and boys who were my friends—all of them dead. Took by surprise in the night. The women had fled or were doing what women always do, trying to keep alive and pull things back together. Sky-Wound-Round himself they took hostage, thinking they’d show up at Clinton’s doorstep with more than just Indian hides to show for their trouble.”

  “Falling-Day?” Elizabeth asked numbly. “Sarah?”

  “They took them along with Sky-Wound-Round, and Otter and Many-Doves, too. Otter was five at the time, Many-Doves was just seven.”

  Nathaniel had been staring at his own hands, lying flat on his knees; now he looked up at her, and he let her see his face the way he knew it must look. She was frightened; perhaps of him, perhaps of what he was telling her. It was hard to say. Nathaniel was suddenly tired, and he wanted to lie here in the sun and sleep with her next to him, listening to her breathe. Just sleep, with the sounds of the lake murmuring at them. But there was more to tell, and he could not turn away from this story, not once it was begun. With as little detail as possible, he told her about how he had tracked the militia, catching up to them on the next morning and then keeping well out of sight. To them he would have been just another Mohawk, and he knew better than to show himself.

  The group of mismatched and poorly trained civilians, most of them with little battle experience, could hardly be called militia. Nathaniel recognized one or two of them from the distance. In that first day of following them the biggest surprise had been the acknowledgment that these civilians, poorly outfitted and provisioned, and led by nobody in particular, had been able to take Barktown with enough stealth and skill to cut down some of the strongest and most fearless of the Kahnyen’kehàka warriors. Two things consumed him and focused all his energies: catching up with his family and solving this mystery.

  Both had happened on that evening when he caught sight of them from a bluff over their campsite.

  Elizabeth was leaning toward Nathaniel, concentrated completely on this story. She hadn’t interrupted him or asked any questions for quite a long time, but he could see her growing impatience. “What? What is it?” he asked.

  “They were well treated?”

  “They didn’t abuse the women, if that’s what you mean,” Nathaniel said. He could see that this had been on her mind, for she settled back a bit, and some tension left her.

  “They weren’t bleeding or wounded, at least that I could see from that distance. But they were well guarded, better than I thought they would be, an older man and a bunch of women and children. It didn’t fit together, none of it. The massacre, or the taking of the hostages, or the sorry excuse for a militia. But then I finally got sight of the man in charge, and things fell into place.”

  “Was it someone you knew?”

  “Never saw him before. A slight man, didn’t look much like a soldier at all, wearing spectacles. Looked more like a schoolteacher.”

  She made a sound of impatience.

  “It was Joshua Littlefield,” Nathaniel said. “On his way to join Clinton at Canajoharie.”

  “The surgeon?” Elizabeth asked, and then something flooded her face, understanding and a blank horror. “Richard.” She leaned forward and took his hands. “Richard was there. Richard told them about the village, how to get to it, how to surprise them. Was it Richard?”

  Nathaniel nodded. “I hadn’t caught sight of him till then, or maybe I did and I didn’t recognize him. I’d been living in Falling-Day’s longhouse for two years at that point. But there was Richard with Littlefield, and he was doing a lot of talking. It was Littlefield who was leading the militia to Clinton’s camp, but it was Richard who was making the decisions.”

  “He took them hostage,” Elizabeth said.

  “I assume it was his idea,” Nathaniel agreed. “Although I didn’t figure that out straightaway. Not until it was too late.”

  A wariness came over her face.

  “I thought if I could get to Richard, I could explain to him about Sarah, that she was my wife, that those people were my family. That Sky-Wound-Round was under Schuyler’s protection. I wasn’t thinking straight,” he said, still now after so many years feeling the shame of this, that he had made such an elemental mistake in assessing his enemy.

  “He wouldn’t listen?”

  “He had me arrested as a spy,” Nathaniel said simply. “And he would have seen me shot then and there if it hadn’t been for Sarah.”

  Elizabeth felt slightly nauseated and wished very much that Nathaniel would stop this story. She dropped the hand that she had been holding and wished for a handkerchief to wipe her face. Here was a Sarah she hadn’t anticipated. A young woman who had stood up to the men who held her captive. Capable of convincing them that they would have Schuyler’s wrath to deal with if they shot one of his best and most valued negotiators and translators. Nathaniel could only tell her about this in a disjointed way, he explained, because he himself had not heard what Sarah had to say.

  “Somebody came up behind me and put a musket butt to my head, and that’s all I remember till the next morning. I don’t know exactly what she said, but she scairt Littlefield enough about Schuyler to put a stop to an execution.”

  “What did Richard say to you?” Elizabeth asked. “How did he explain himself?”

  “Explain himself? Richard Todd? He didn’t have a thing to say. Stayed just behind us for the rest of the march, watching to make sure we didn’t try to run, and hoping that we’d be s
o stupid. To this day I wonder if he really thought he could talk Clinton into shooting me. He may have thought that; he was only eighteen at the time but he had a way with men. I’m sure it was him who got the militia riled up enough to attack Barktown, told them how to do it. Who else would know how to do that, but a man raised by the Kahnyen’kehàka? And he made it look like it all came from Littlefield, that was the real genius of it. Whether or not he thought he could see me shot at Canajoharie, he surely enjoyed watching us march.”

  Nathaniel had a picture of himself as he must have looked: Blinded by his own blood, with his hands bound behind him, and wheeling, his head a flare of pain. It was the sight of Otter walking in front of him that had kept him focused and able to put one foot in front of the next. Otter with his back straight and his five-year-old eyes sparking hate, so determined not to shame his grandfather or his mother. Otter who had insisted on calling Richard “Irtakohsaks,” Cat-Eater, to his face, and who had been whipped for it. He thought of the Otter Elizabeth knew, and the one she didn’t, and then he told her this story. Her head snapped up in surprise when he had finished.

  “It was Otter, wasn’t it, who shot at the horses that day, when we bolted?”

  Nathaniel nodded.

  “This is more complicated than I anticipated,” Elizabeth murmured. “I am presuming that Clinton believed what you had to say?”

  “Aye, once we got that far there was no question of hostages or executions. Littlefield went to report to Clinton straightaway, and you could hear the man bellow across the camp. He came thundering out of his tent and found us where they had dumped us, and he spent an hour apologizing to Sky-Wound-Round and trying to set things right. Gave us provisions and horses and sent us on our way. Promised to punish the men who were responsible—something that never happened, to the best of my knowledge. And he had the gall to send his greetings to my folks. But he couldn’t send us home to Barktown,” Nathaniel finished. “Because there wasn’t a home to go back to anymore.”

  “What of Richard?”

  “Did Clinton punish him, do you mean? No. He hadn’t done anything but put ideas in Littlefield’s head, and Littlefield was the one who caught the trouble. When we left Canajoharie the last I saw was Richard standing there, scratching his chin, watching us ride away. But then at least I knew the truth about him.”