Many Sparrows

by Lori Benton

  It suited Clare well enough. “Philippa Joan will be her name.”

  Mr. Ring’s gaze lifted, but he didn’t comment on her choice.

  “Don’t know whether I’ve mentioned what my business is along the Ohio at present. You recall what I told you about the Mingos? About Logan and his kin at Yellow Creek?”

  “You told me they were killed.” Why was he bringing up that savage’s name? She didn’t want to think about the manner of Philip’s dying. What he must have seen. Had his last thoughts been of her? Their children?

  She cut off that line of thinking fast as Mr. Ring said, “I was with Logan when he found their bodies. It was the cruelest, most barbarous sight I hope I ever see in this life.”

  Clare drew in a breath. “Worse than the sight of my husband lying dead?”

  Mr. Ring glanced up briefly, giving his answer in silence.

  “After we got his kin back across the river to their town, I left Logan in mourning and returned to Fort Pitt. From there I was sent out by McKee—he’s the deputy Indian agent—with a message for Cornstalk, the principal Shawnee chief, in response to the killings. I’m on my way with it now.”

  And she, with her plight, had slowed him down. That must be what he meant to imply. “Once I have Jacob safely in my custody, I will find a way to return to Staunton.”

  “Come from Staunton, do you?” He looked surprised. “I’d placed you farther east.”

  “I am from Richmond, if you must know, but we lived the past few years on my uncle’s farm in the Shenandoah.”

  The man was searching her face, his gaze sharpened, though she’d no notion what he was looking for. Thinking she preferred his silence, she reached for the baby.

  “Give her to me, please.”

  As he held the baby toward her, one hand splayed protectively beneath her head, Clare noticed the angry red scratch across its back, just below the knuckles. She took the baby and laid her down asleep, then turned back to him.

  “Your hand. Did I…?”

  He turned his hand over to view the scratch, as though he’d forgotten it was there. “Don’t bother yourself. I’ll tend it.”

  By the time he found the unguent he carried and smeared it over the wee scratch, Mrs. Inglesby was asleep. Jeremiah sat wakeful, watching her. A puzzle she was, with some pieces beginning to fall into place in his mind and others that, try as he might, he couldn’t make fit. He couldn’t know the nature of the Inglesbys’ marriage. Arranged, she’d called it. Yet when she might have broken off the engagement, she’d married the man without his fortune. Perhaps there’d been love in it once. Jeremiah was fair certain there’d been pain—older than the tragic events of the past few days.

  He glanced at his knapsack, where McKee’s missive was tucked away, an obligation he oughtn’t to ignore even if he wasn’t the only messenger sent. No telling whether the others had got through already, or at all, but someone had to reach the Shawnees. Ought he to abandon Clare Inglesby in Wheeling, regardless of what she did or didn’t find?

  He’d been where she was now. He knew the screaming need in her, had once let it master him, let it drown out reason, wisdom, even the Almighty’s leading.

  There were two paths before him, but he couldn’t walk both. Could he?

  Show me, he prayed. Better yet, show me wrong. Let the boy be in Wheeling.

  The faintest of breezes crossed the fire’s remains, stirring embers, briefly showing him a long blond braid, a curving hip, the stained folds of Clare Inglesby’s petticoat.

  He lay on his back with his rifle near, gazing at the slow march of clouds across a bright half-moon and remembering…fear, grief, regret, and the voice of a warrior telling him in all kindness the hard, cruel truth of what it meant to be a captive, embraced and adopted, white identity washed away in the cleansing waters of the river.

  He awoke some hours later, judging by the moon’s new position in the sky, disturbed by a sound out of place in his surroundings. Whimpering, but not that of an animal. His fingers tightened on the rifle before he remembered the baby.

  Pippa. He’d stopped himself saying it aloud, what sprang into his mind when the woman announced her daughter’s name. He’d been looking at the baby asleep along his arm, feeling a roil of grief and anger remembering Koonay and her and Gibson’s unborn child, yet finding in the face of the tiny mite he’d helped into the world a healing of sorts. A balm. There was a sweetness about this girl-child that touched him in a way nothing had in a long time. Then he’d heard the name pronounced upon her seemingly without thought to the child herself.

  Maybe it was down to the years he’d spent with the Shawnees, who didn’t choose their offsprings’ names without some study of the child or the circumstances of its birth. He hadn’t meant to force the issue of a name, only talk about it with the woman. Then it was done and he’d been left staring at the scrunched little face thinking, Pippa. It had settled easy on the infant laid across his arm.

  Jeremiah smiled, half his mind attuned to the forest around them, sifting sounds and smells and deeper senses. The smile faded as the whimpering escalated and he realized it wasn’t the baby making the noise. It was her mother, crying in her sleep.

  “Jacob!”

  Jeremiah’s heart wrenched, as if an unseen hand had grasped it and jerked it down one of the two paths facing him, making the choice for him. He’d agreed to guide Clare Inglesby as far as Wheeling but knew now their paths wouldn’t diverge there.

  I don’t know why You seem bent on my trying to do for her what I couldn’t do for myself, but all right. How am I to do it?

  It was a question flung to heaven. The reply came back to him, a still, small voice.

  With God all things are possible.

  He chuckled softly at that. It was what she had said. And it was true enough. The Almighty could, and would, do whatever it pleased Him to do. In His way and time. But Jeremiah knew better than to promise everything was going to turn out the way Clare Inglesby so fiercely hoped it would. Sometimes the ways of the Almighty were beyond a man’s understanding, even looking back, after he’d weathered the first crushing grief of a loss he’d thought sure to kill him.

  He thought about something else that warrior in his memory had told him. “Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Creator seeing, and you, a man, are worth more than many sparrows. That is what the words of the One the whites call Jesus say. But His word does not say that sparrows will never fall.”

  Jeremiah had to agree. They were never promised that.

  Uncle Alphus’s fields have been neglected. So many stones, big and small, buried in the clay-rich soil. “Like raisins in a cake,” she says, making Philip sigh dramatically and her little boy laugh and repeat her words, “Raisins inna cake!” More often now he has his own words to impart. “Mama, let me tell you something!”

  They’ve been a month on Uncle Alphus’s farm, carving out a life Clare never imagined for herself, a life devoid of the comforts she’s known since birth. It’s a life of constant work, sunup to sundown, blisters on hands, cracks in shoes, backs that ache at night and yet…watching her husband and son carrying rocks out of the field they hope to make yield life-giving food, it strikes her that she’s never been so happy.

  Uncle Alphus hadn’t made a farmer, and she never expected Philip would, but on this day closing in with its aches and weariness and a supper still to fix and her filthy little boy to wash, she dares to hope her husband has finally found a life to which he can settle, that he can be content with its simplicity, its honest toil, as she finds she can be. She dares to hope and embrace the joy.

  Fingernails caked with reddish earth, she pauses to watch her little family. Philip has hefted a stone from the ground. His face twists into a comical mask of strain—Jacob is at his side, watching every move—as he staggers toward the line of piled stones that might, with more skillful stacking, become a fence. Jacob spies a much smaller stone and, covered in Virginia clay to his eyebrows, pries it loose and totters
with it toward the pile, a miniature of Philip…

  It is a different time. Later. She carries another child beneath her heart, another son, she thinks, but her joy has vanished like the mist it was built upon because Philip stands before her with that gleam in his eye telling her about a man, James Harrod, and a place, Kentucky, and a weight heavier than the baby she carries is forming in her chest. Tears roll down her cheeks though she knows she was too stunned to cry when this actually happened and that she is only dreaming about it now.

  But the weight…

  They are piling the stones on top of her. Philip and Jacob. Stone after stone. Burying her. “No, please. You will crush the child. Jacob, your little brother!”

  A last stone covers her face, and Philip and Jacob are gone and only the stones remain. And the child? Not a son. A daughter…but where is she among all these stones…?

  Clare came awake with a groan, hands scrabbling over moss and earth, groping for her baby, hair and face wet with tears wept in her sleep. It had been a terrible dream. But the weight still lay heavy on her chest. Something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong. The weight…

  Philip was gone. Jacob was gone. She was alone.

  No. The baby. Where…?

  “She’s right here, Missus,” a voice said, sending shock through every nerve before she remembered him, too.

  “She woke a bit ago, but I thought to let you sleep. She’s been quiet.”

  Mr. Ring sat by the fire that blazed again, holding her daughter wrapped in the blue blanket, and Clare Inglesby, remembering everything, longed to forget again.

  Dawn had come stealing over the mountains, down the ridge near which they’d camped. By the light of the fire he’d watched the graying bring the woman into focus. She’d wept in her sleep again and awakened the baby. He’d scooped her up and held her until Mrs. Inglesby sat up, groping as if for something lost. He gave the baby to her and wanted to give her more.

  Words came to him. “Wait on the Lord. Be of good courage. He will strengthen your heart.”

  She stared at him, desolation in eyes that bared a soul she’d tried to keep hidden, but there on the edge of her dreams, with the barriers thinned, she couldn’t.

  “How?”

  “For now, Missus? Let it be one moment, one breath, at a time. Just keep crying out to Him. He brought us together, led me right to you in your need. Don’t you think He’ll finish what He’s started?”

  Whatever that was.

  She looked at him for several of those breaths, then pushed herself resolutely to her feet, took her baby a little distance away, and put her back to him.

  Wait on the Lord. Be of good courage.

  He thought about telling her who had said those words to him when that desolation had filled his heart but knew it would uproot whatever seed of good they might sow, hearing it was Logan.

  Whatever Clare expected to find on the banks of the Ohio the day she followed Philip out of Redstone, it wasn’t what greeted her as she descended the final ridge to the sight of the settlement huddled on a stretch of stump-pocked river-bottom land. The reality of Wheeling was nothing short of a reflection of her own inner landscape—a hive upturned, swarming with frantic activity.

  Catching the scents of cooking on the warm air, she spied cabins scattered near a two-story timber blockhouse—built, Mr. Ring informed her, by the Zane brothers, Silas and Ebenezer. Not far from the blockhouse, a stockade was going up, men dragging timbers, shaping them with axes, hoisting them upright. Everywhere women milled about, wrangling children and animals, striding hither and yon. Many families had pitched camps along a creek winding down from the ridge. Fires from camp and cabin spiraled smoke into a cloudless sky. Beyond it all the Ohio River swept past, broad and bluish, with an island in the center of the wide sweep. Canoes, rafts, and flatboats crowded the bank.

  Pausing on a bluff overlooking the scene, Mr. Ring nodded toward the rising stockade as another timber was dropped into place, the gap at its base filled with earth, tamped by booted feet.

  “Connolly’s doing.” Catching her questioning gaze, he expounded, “Major Connolly, commander at Fort Pitt. He’s ordered a fellow, Major William Crawford, to bring four hundred men to Wheeling to fortify the place. Don’t look as if Crawford’s arrived yet, but word must’ve gone ahead to get the work underway.”

  Mr. Ring had yet to say how long he planned to remain in Wheeling, but he’d made it plain he meant to cross the Ohio to the Indians, and she’d made it plain that was fine by her. To judge by the number of rivercraft coming and going, there would be someone with room enough for two small children and a woman, even one who presented a less than respectable sight.

  She was come down out of the mountains footsore and bug-bitten, sunburned and blistered. The soles of her shoes were worn near through, threatening to part at the seams. Her petticoat and short gown begged repair and a good washing. But her insides no longer felt raw. Her baby was reasonably clean and had made the mountain crossing in more comfort than her mother.

  The second morning on the trail, she’d awakened to find her guide sitting by the fire. On the ground beside him was a narrow contraption built of sticks whittled flat and woven into a backboard, with something like a leather sack attached to its front, stitched up the center, open at the neck. Leather loops of varying length attached to the woven back hung limp across the sack. A broad flat piece like a hat brim jutted from the top.

  Its purpose had wholly escaped her.

  Turning her back to feed the baby, she’d reached up to massage her aching neck as soon as she’d a hand free. The cloth she’d used for a sling the previous day had proved insufficient support. Much of the time she’d had to lend a hand to it—tricky when she needed both to manage the trail’s rougher spots, places so steep or stony they were climbing more than walking.

  Behind her Mr. Ring had said, “I noticed, Missus, you carrying the baby in a sling is causing a strain. Thought you might get on better with a cradleboard, like Indian women use to tote their babes. I can show you how it wears.”

  Clare had looked again at what he’d made, interest sparking until she thought, Carry my baby like an Indian? But if it would help her walk faster, farther each day…

  She’d allowed him to strap her daughter into the thing, finding it suited perfectly, between sack and leather cords and woven bits to shield her from the sun, keeping her snug and immobile, even her tiny head. He’d put the baby on his own back and walked around the camp to let her see her daughter was secure.

  The baby whimpered now in the carrier on Clare’s back. She’d have to see to her daughter’s needs before she could begin her search for Jacob.

  They moved on down the trail, Clare’s feet aching, her heart thudding with hope, and soon came in sight of the camps along the creek. Mr. Ring pointed out a place where the water tumbled over mossy rocks and made a pool. Several women were tending to their washing there. Some paused to take curious note of them.

  “How if I leave you here?”

  The time for parting had come.

  “Thank you for getting me this far,” Clare said, “and for helping me when I was alone.” Such inadequate words for what the man had done. Clare swallowed, choked by the unexpected depth of her gratitude. “I’m sure I’ll be fine from here.”

  Jeremiah Ring stared at her, brow creased deep. “I don’t mean to leave you for good, Missus. I’m just going off to find Ebenezer Zane for a talk. I’ll come back for you once I make arrangements. Tend to your things meantime, then rest a bit.”

  It was her turn to stare. “I’ve told you there’s no need for you to arrange anything concerning me.”

  The baby wasn’t growing any happier on her back as Mr. Ring, clinging stubbornly to the notion that Jacob had been captured by Indians, said, “I mean to take a canoe to Yellow Creek, see if Logan’s people have Jacob in their keeping and might be willing to return him peaceable-like.”

  “If you truly mean to help me, don’t go rushing off, but talk
to your Mr. Zane and anyone else here you will about Jacob. Two of us will cover the ground more quickly.”

  She could tell he was exerting effort not to argue outright with her plan. “You meaning to talk to every soul in this settlement?”

  His incredulity only hardened her will. “You are free to leave me any time, Mr. Ring, as I’ve repeatedly said. I have two strong hands and can work to feed myself until I find my son, and truly I must see to this child on my back right now.” With the baby setting to wail, she glanced over at the women doing their washing. “I’ll stay here for the present.”

  It was as good a place as any to begin her search.

  He found Ebenezer Zane outside the blockhouse lighting a clay pipe in a rare moment of idleness. The two exchanged news, Zane keeping a watchful eye on folk passing near the blockhouse where stores were kept. Jeremiah told of finding Philip Inglesby dead and scalped and his widow in distress of childbirth, having discovered her son missing from the wagon where she’d left him.

  “A killing that close to Redstone?” Zane lowered his pipe to cast a grim look at the wooded slopes hemming Wheeling up against the river. “Ye’re thinking ’twas Logan or his warriors done it, then took the boy?”

  “No telling for sure till I see the man. But I expect so.”

  Zane confirmed he’d had no word of a boy found in a wagon and brought in to Wheeling. “Not likely settling folk would’ve taken him in the middle of the night without a look round. Or without the boy calling for his ma.”

  “Tracks told another tale, but the mother won’t believe it. She’s bound and determined she’ll find him here.”

  Zane chewed the pipe stem and shook his head. “Her boy’s across the river by now.”

  Jeremiah gazed in that direction. It was a place he knew—its people and perils—well enough to know it was no place for Clare Inglesby, even though the woman did have fortitude. She hadn’t complained these past days, though the mountain crossing had been hard on her. She’d gone quiet once he’d agreed to take her along to Wheeling. Done what he asked of her. Tended to that dark-eyed baby girl.