by Linda Byler
Would she ever be able to return to her childhood home? Would she ever have a home of her own? Two of the young Conestoga men had asked for a marriage ceremony, but so far, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to accept this strange way of life.
In her own mind and heart, she wanted a husband, her own man, to love and to cherish, but she’d come to accept the fact that this wasn’t possible for her among the Amish in Berks County. Here with the Conestoga, it was possible, but her whole being shrank from it. The communal living, the sleeping arrangement, the sharing of life with so many was not the way she imagined her future. And yet, what other choice did she have?
The snow drifted down through the tree branches as the wind moved them back and forth. Little gray birds flitted from one snowy branch to another, their busy little chirps lifting her spirits. She watched a brown rabbit strip the bark from a green sapling that was almost covered with deep, powdery snow. The rabbit eagerly chewed the tree’s soft inner lining.
She was hungry, her stomach hollow and empty, but the corn and beans were rationed now. Naw-A-Te had spoken the evening before, saying the worst storms were still to come.
Sighing, she stopped, breathed deeply, then turned to go back the way she had come. She walked slowly now, her legs pushing the snow away with a soft sh-sh-sh, the cold finally penetrating her feet. She did not exactly want to return to the smoky interior of the longhouse, but she had nowhere else to go.
Lifting the deerskin flap, she went inside, her eyes adjusting to the gray half-light, the pungent smoke of the cooking fires. She sat cross-legged, watching Clover string beads on a sinew, then took up the dried reeds herself and began to weave a basket the way Clover had taught her.
The little ones were coughing. In a corner, Running Bear worked on his arrows, precisely carving another sharp head. He looked up, his piercing black eyes in his ruddy face boring into hers. Quickly she looked away and began weaving faster, the reeds moving through her fingers smoothly.
She felt him beside her before she actually saw him. He nodded to her to follow him outside.
Hester shook her head. He frowned and refused to move. He picked up the basket she was working on and moved it aside. She watched as his hand came down to take hers. He pulled gently. She looked up at him, his dark, dark eyes beckoning to her. How long could she keep saying no?
From the opposite wall, Clover looked up and giggled, holding her hand to her wide mouth. Soon enough, Hester would be prepared to become Running Bear’s wife. Soon she would begin the wedding dress.
When the Chinook woke Hester one mild night, she felt a joy in her heart again, a sensation she could barely recall, a forgotten illusion. Had she ever been happy?
She would have to leave or marry Running Bear. The decision was hers, but she knew it had already been made. It would not be long now. After the scourge of smallpox, there were only seventeen remaining. The children slipped away, one after another, except for four of them.
Death among the Indians was understood the way other hazards and unfortunate happenings of nature were accepted. There was a sadness, but a soft, gentle receiving of what the Creator had done, an uncomplaining yielding of something they had once possessed.
Hester had cried for Beaver, but alone, in the privacy of her bunk. She was in awe of the loving acceptance she witnessed, so completely in tune with the Creator. Death was a passing, a turning of the wheel.
So many things among these people were good, but so many things were wrong. In the spring, when the thaw came, she would slip away. She would survive. She had done it before.
The snow melted into the earth, turning the banks of the Conestoga into a quagmire. The interior of the longhouse was dense with the lingering smoke of cooking fires.
Running Bear killed an elk, a huge antlered animal that had miraculously survived the deep snows. The people ate ravenously, tearing at the stringy meat like dogs and gnashing their teeth as grease dripped from their chins and fingers, staining their shirt fronts. They leaped and danced. Running Bear fell into a stupor, his head lolling like a broken doll.
Hester was seized with horror when the chanting began. Would this mean she would be given to him, the brave hunter? Her breath came in quick gasps. She looked around wildly. Darkness had fallen, which meant she could slip away unseen. A great cry rose from the feasting when Naw-A-Te stood, holding up both arms and calling for silence.
Hester did not wait. Slowly, as if she wanted to step outside for only a short time, she moved toward the door while every eye was stayed on Naw-A-Te and his upcoming announcement. Silently, like the smoke that disappeared through the hole in the roof, she slipped through the deerskin. Her heart racing, she stayed just out of sight, straining to hear what the eldest among them would say.
There was the distant sound of drumming. Had they already begun their celebration? No. Naw-A-Te was speaking. Distracted by the sounds in the distance, she could not hear his words.
She slipped to the ground and pressed her ear to the wet earth. The unmistakable sound of hoofbeats shook the ground. The full realization of the oncoming riders hit her like a sledgehammer. With a small cry, she raised her head, then sprang to her feet with another. Running at full speed, she immediately disappeared into the evening light as a posse of men from the town of Lancaster bore down on the lone Indian village.
They waved torches in orange flashes of destruction. Hoarse, hate-filled cries carried through the wet woodland by the creek.
Hester ran, zigzagging among the trees, finally hitting one with her bent knee. Pain exploded through her head as she fell to the ground. She heard the cries of the men, and then the hopeless wails of the Indian women. The torches had already lit the longhouse, an eerie orange glow placing each tree in silhouette.
Hester clung to a tree, her knee a throbbing appendage now. She must run. She must. The baying of a hound dog behind her sent her into a mindless dash. She felt no pain from her knee as she crashed through underbrush, weaving in and out of trees. The toe of her moccasin caught on a grapevine, and she was flung to the ground. Her head snapped back with the impact. She bit down on her tongue, tasting blood.
The hound gave its eerie, high-pitched howl, sending chills of fear up her arms. Through the dark, behind her, she heard more than one dog coming. She’d never get away.
The night was filled with orange light as the longhouse went up in a roaring inferno, and the cries of the Indians mixed with those of the men who took them captive.
Hester looked back once, then turned sharply to the left. She slid down the muddy bank of the Conestoga Creek, lifting the branches above her head before succumbing to the mind-numbing cold of the snow-fed waters. She could not stay in water this cold. She would freeze. But she dared not get out, either. The dogs would lead the posse to her.
After a while her legs became numb, completely without feeling. When wave after wave of drowsiness overtook her, she knew she would freeze, so she had to take her chances with the dogs. The instant she dragged herself out of the frigid water, she knew she’d made a mistake. The baying began immediately, rising to a high pitch she could only describe as horrible. She ran on legs she did not know were there. Her only goal was to widen the distance between her and the dogs.
On they came. To the right now. She veered left. She became aware of thundering hooves and waving red torches bearing down on her. Still, she continued running.
The torches illuminated a pile of blackened brush. Bending low, she dived straight for the tangle of branches and weeds, then lay flat on the ground, panting, as the dogs and riders closed in. She kicked with all her strength, as the skinny, spotted dogs pushed their snouts through any available opening.
The horses slid to a stop. She smelled sweat and leather, heard the horses’ nostrils quivering as their breaths came rapidly. Men dismounted. They flailed the bushes with their rifles, calling out to one another, their voices high with excitement. “Got ’em! Got ’em!” one man kept yelling in a strained, whining tone.
Hester stayed where she was, alternately kicking the dogs’ noses and slapping at their jaws. She put up such a fierce fight that it took two men to drag her from her hiding place. One dropped his torch, which sizzled out in the cold, wet earth when she bit down on a hairy hand as hard as she could, sinking her teeth into the fleshy thumb.
Its owner howled a high-pitched screech of pain and anger. Hester felt an explosion of pain in her head as the man brought down the butt of his rifle, and mercifully, darkness took the world away.
Billy Ferree was nosing around the livery stable on Water Street in the town of Lancaster, much too late at night for a schoolboy to be out and about. He found out most of what was going on when the men came out of Carpenter Tavern and tried to hitch their horses to their buggies, which sometimes they did successfully and sometimes they didn’t. When they had had too much brown ale, Billy offered his services. He had already squirreled away a plentiful stash of coins in the wooden box beneath his bed.
Tonight, though, he’d hid. That bunch of Indian killers coming through the door was enough to make him pop off and jump into the grain bin. He saw them dump a sack behind the bin where the straw was kept. Billy figured like as not, it was a dead Indian, which gave him the woolies.
He’d heard they were gonna get rid of Indiantown, the last of the Conestoga Indians’ villages. Too many of the townspeople did not want them red men skulking about. Harmless, they were, in Billy’s opinion, but then an eleven-year-old boy with a thatch of carroty hair couldn’t go up against town council.
He waited. Some of the oats in the bin had gotten between his shirttail and his trousers, itching him terrible. He figured he’d better not scratch till that gang was gone.
Slowly, he raised his head above the top of the bin. His gray felt hat drooped and hung in all the wrong directions, the holes in the crown sprouting red hair. Beneath the floppy brim, his blue eyes rolled to either side of the stable before he slowly pulled himself up. He scratched heartily, then sucked in his stomach and shook both knees back and forth to rid himself of the stray oats.
He thought he’d better check on that sack of Indian. Looking back over his shoulder, he tiptoed softly to the spot he reckoned they’d dumped it. He didn’t want to be too loud in the presence of the dead. He reached up and took off his hat, letting his red hair fall loose. It went every which way, as long as it was and uncombed.
Cautiously, with thumb and forefinger, he drew back the sacking. Oops. Feet. Wrong end. Softly, he tiptoed to the opposite end and pulled aside the sacking. He bent down to peer very closely in the weak, flickering light from the oil lantern swinging from the beams.
He whistled, a soft whoosh of astonishment. Boy, oh boy. This was no ordinary one. Had to be a girl. She was still as death, so he guessed she was gone.
He kept looking though. Just looking and looking, and thinking what a waste of life. A girl this pretty. A huge dark blue bruise. They’d walloped her good.
When a soft moaning sound reached his ears, he jumped so hard his teeth whacked against one another. He bent his ear to the girl’s chest and heard the steady thud-thud of the faint heartbeat. Well, this was one for Ma, no doubt. If he could get her out of here, leastways.
CHAPTER 6
THE SOFT MOANING SOUND WAS FOLLOWED BY another. The head turned a wee bit to right. Straw was getting stuck in her hair, so he brushed it off with his dirty little fingers. He’d run home and get the wagon if she woke up. In the middle of the night, no one would know, and if they did catch sight of him, they’d think he was hauling feed for the horse.
She turned her head, getting more straw in the heavy wet tresses. Billy brushed it away, tenderly. He talked to her then. He told her she should try to wake up if she could ‘cause his ma could watch out for her real good. Her name was Emma, Emma Ferree. She was a widow. Enos Ferree died from the lung fever. Now Emma took in any weak or poor or starving person, but she’d never taken a dead one yet, so far as he knew, so she better wake up.
When her eyelids fluttered, he stayed right where he was and kept on talking. When she looked out from between those black eyelashes and groaned, he lowered his face and asked her to repeat that sentence, please, that he hadn’t rightly heard just what she meant.
He kept on, patiently trying to bring her to consciousness, but in the end, he decided to run the whole way home for the seck veggley (sack wagon). When he got back, he stopped at the tavern door and pounded on it with his fists until the black cleaning man came to the door, his eyes rolling up white into his head, he was so scared. “Come and see this awful-lookin’ girl that got dumped in the alley,” he begged him.
He obliged Billy, but could only assure him that no, she weren’t dead, at least not yet. He said, “Laws, Laws, Laws a mercy,” over and over so many times that Billy didn’t know why he was calling on the law now. It wouldn’t help much, seein’ as she probably wouldn’t be living till morning.
Billy trundled off down the deserted street with his burden covered in sacking, his step jaunty. But he was a frightened boy whose heart was knocking against his rib cage like a pigeon that wanted out.
Billy lived in a group of houses called Lancaster Townstead, located about a mile from the Conestoga Creek. James Hamilton, a socially prominent lawyer, laid out the plans for the town. Local folks thought Hamilton was foolish, planning the town so far away from the Conestoga Creek with no other good waterway. It was hilly and hampered, too, by the large Dark Hazel Swamp. Mostly German people lived there, and in time they overcame the less than friendly environment, creating businesses, and putting up row after row of wooden houses along the streets.
These Pennsylvania Dutchmen from Germany claimed that they didn’t understand the fee the township required for them to live there. So they left their rents unpaid, their stoic, unchangeable ways driving the property owners to distraction. They said they’d paid enough rent the day they occupied their lots and refused to pay more. They were required to build a substantial house within a year, made of wood, with a good chimney, among other requirements.
Hamilton reasoned that if he kept out unskilled lower classes, the town would prosper with merchants, builders, and other professionals. Lancaster Townstead became a thriving community in the mid 1700s, with well-laid-out streets lined with lots and houses built to accommodate the mostly German population.
Emma Ferree’s ancestors may have been French, but she’d say she was as “Dutch as they come” and proud of it. She was an extremely short, portly woman, her small feet propelling her stocky legs through the rooms of her house in a floating motion, her wide, gathered skirts brushing her scoured oak floors, her dark hair tucked beneath the white haus frau (housewife) cap she always wore. Her eyes were mostly hidden beneath puffs of flesh resembling good bread dough, but her bright, glinty gaze missed nothing, her eyes darting back and forth, often filling with quick tears of sympathy.
Beneath her homespun housedress, behind the row of fashionable buttons, her heart beat quick and sure, burdened only with the unfortunate circumstances of her people, which meant every person she encountered. She took in the sick, the beggarly, the cold, and the hungry. She handed coins to the poor and ladled out her thick bean soup to anyone who was in the need of sustenance.
That was the main objective in her life, now that Enos was gone, may he rest in peace, she always said. For Enos had been a good man, following the plow and working the land until his knees wouldn’t take it anymore. Emma persuaded him to purchase a lot in the town of Lancaster, and he set up a successful peddling business, buying cheese and butter from the country folk, then distributing them to the townspeople.
Oh, she missed Enos terrible, so she did, but she stayed busy and kept her grief at bay. Billy was not hers, he was aw gnomma. She never could bring herself to part with the three-year-old waif with the flaming red hair. A young Scottish girl, her husband killed on the front line of the never ceasing French and Indian War, with three little ones, two of them younger than Bill
y, and no way to support herself, had lived with Emma until she ran off with a British huckster, taking the two youngest and leaving Billy.
That was all right with Billy, who stuck to Emma like a small burr from the day she’d wrapped her soft, warm arms around him and kissed the top of his dirty red hair. He had been much like a bad case of lice to his tall, skinny mother, driving her to madness with his antics, his red hair, and his temper. All he knew from his mother was constant scolding, followed by stinging slaps across his face or shoulders or backside. He attached himself to Emma, and that was that. He never missed his mum, called Emma “Ma,” and went right ahead with his life as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever occurred.
From the tavern, Billy pulled the wagon through the wide tracks made by horses’ hooves and carriage wheels. The night was damp and cold, the light gray from the few sputtering gas lamps on iron posts. The snow hampered his progress, but he persevered, both hands curled around the iron handle of the wagon, his sack-covered burden lying perfectly still, a bag of feed by all appearances.
He was slogging his way up Water Street, then he’d turn left on Orange Street and right on Mulberry to the second house on the left. He leaned forward, his gray, felt hat pulled down to the tops of his eyes and over his large ears, his red hair bouncing with each tug.
The streets were quiet at this hour. The houses lined the streets like strict Quakers, tall and dark and silent, not even one welcoming orange glow from a black, rectangular window. That was all right with Billy. Coming home past midnight with a sack of feed might raise a few questions, as if he’d stolen it from the livery. The only thing that kept Billy on the straight and narrow (which was wider for him than for some) was the thought of being clamped in those formidable stocks on the square in front of the County Courthouse, where thieves and pickpockets, liars and frauds were stuck for days, while jesting onlookers made fun of them or threw tomatoes or eggs at them. Billy was afraid if that happened to him, and he couldn’t get out to avenge himself, he’d explode from his fiery temper. So he better watch out, he reasoned.