Many Sparrows

by Lori Benton

  “Governor Dunmore has written to the officers of the frontier counties,” the man, still begrimed with the dust of travel, was saying between swallows from a flask someone thrust into his hands. “He’s calling up the militia for a campaign against the Shawnees and the Mingos. The governor will lead an army westward to put down this uprising. There are to be two divisions of said army, a Southern and a Northern. Colonel Andrew Lewis is ordered to muster militia from the southern counties—Botetourt, Fincastle, and Augusta—to assemble on the Greenbrier River.”

  Alphus Litchfield, captain in the Augusta County militia, took a moment to absorb the news, reaching the conclusion that duty now compelled him to retrace his trail south—right after he found that wagon, abandoned down the trail, and had himself a good look round. Then he would return to Staunton, settle his affairs for a longer absence, recruit the requisite company of men, and lead them to the muster on the Greenbrier.

  Not for Dunmore. Not primarily. First priority for Alphus Litchfield, however far west fate and Governor Dunmore’s campaign might take him, was to find his niece and her family and return them to Virginia.

  Else discover the means of their deaths and wreak his righteous vengeance.

  Clare thought she’d grasped the extent of the cultivated fields surrounding Cornstalk’s Town the day of her arrival but realized now she’d only seen a portion. The cornfields stretched what seemed for miles along the creek, their true extent revealed the morning she and Crosses-the-Path, her daughters, and Wildcat set off from Falling Hawk’s lodge and walked…and walked…along a path populated with women and children making for the fields. The sun was barely risen, but on that muggy morning the exertion had sweat springing up on Clare’s brow and down her back beneath Pippa’s cradleboard.

  Women were already in the fields, crouched and digging around the evenly spaced hillocks created by topsoil hoed into mounds. Out of each mound three or four cornstalks grew, most around knee-height that early in the season.

  Though an acre accommodated dozens of hillocks, it didn’t strike Clare as the best use of space, planting them thus. She’d have planted the corn in neat, tight rows—as she’d done on Uncle Alphus’s farm.

  They halted before a patch of the sprawling communal fields nestled between a threading stream and a row of massive tree stumps left to rot away.

  “You make?” Looking earnestly at Clare, Crosses-the-Path gestured to the patch while her daughters waited, each clutching a leather pouch, the smallest dancing foot to foot in impatience. Clare was pondering what was meant by the words “you make” when Wildcat tugged on her wrist to draw her aside.

  “Time plant beans and…squash? Pumpkin?” The boy waited until she nodded, though she’d no notion whether he’d found the words he sought. “This her field. She give you…patch. You make food for husband, baby.”

  Crosses-the-Path was giving her a portion of her field to tend, and its eventual yield. The woman was treating her like family—what she’d be had she truly married Jeremiah Ring—and not wholly out of duty. Crosses-the-Path looked genuinely hopeful her offer would be met with pleasure.

  Clare flicked her gaze to the sacks the girls clutched. Seeds for the beans and squash? That was why so much space was left between the hillocks—they were planting all three crops together.

  “She like you,” Wildcat added with one of his infectious grins.

  The boy had visited Clare several times for English lessons. When she learned about them, Crosses-the-Path had asked to be included. Wildcat pretended to be learning when all he really needed was the chance to practice. Though Crosses-the-Path was far behind the boy in her facility, she and Clare had developed a means of communication that included a few Shawnee words, a growing vocabulary of English, and much gesticulation.

  Clare smiled at Crosses-the-Path and nodded, despite her unease at accepting the gift. Surely she wouldn’t be living among the Shawnees when this corn was ripe for harvesting, but it would be good to have something to fill the time while she waited.

  Waiting was what her life had come down to, and she chafed over it, certain she would go mad not knowing how Jacob was faring in Nonhelema’s Town, however far beyond the creek it lay.

  That was a question she hadn’t dared ask, fearing if the distance was small she’d be overcome by the temptation to cross it, despite Mr. Ring’s warning that doing so would alarm Rain Crow and make it harder for him to get Jacob back.

  But how would the situation be resolved if she stayed on one side of the creek and Rain Crow stayed on the other? What, exactly, was Mr. Ring waiting for?

  The man had other matters worrying him now; despite Cornstalk’s disapproval, some forty young Shawnee warriors had crossed the Ohio to raid along the river, striking at isolated cabins raised in what they considered their hunting grounds.

  As grave and immediate were such matters, not even that could preoccupy Clare enough to stem the grief of missing her son, the constant worry that he was well on his way to becoming another Wildcat, the spinning of plan after plan to get him back—plans that, if she voiced them, Mr. Ring found reason to dismiss as unsuitable.

  Round face brightening at Clare’s acceptance, Crosses-the-Path gestured to her daughters, who scampered into the field to begin the days’ work. Wildcat and their mother followed. Clare came last, hearing a smacking of lips from Pippa and the small, urgent grunts that were precursory to a full-throated wail of hunger.

  She settled near the hillock where Crosses-the-Path had begun digging, removed Pippa from the cradleboard, and put her to a breast.

  She caught the other woman casting glances her way. Clare hadn’t bothered to cover herself; many of the women in the fields wore nothing but a skirt, their brown backs already glistening in the morning sun. With some surprise Clare realized she’d grown used to the sight of so much bare skin, to the point she no longer felt awkward about nursing her baby openly. At least in front of the women.

  Crosses-the-Path’s covert gaze had nothing to do with such matters; the look of baby-hunger was the same anywhere—a Richmond parlor, a Shenandoah farm, or a Shawnee village. Unless they’d lost a baby since, it was four years since her last child was born. Perhaps she longed to give Falling Hawk a son, though Clare had the sense that daughters were valued as much as sons among these people.

  Deeming it too intimate a subject to inquire about on their short acquaintance, Clare remarked, “I’ve never seen crops planted like this, together in one field.”

  Crosses-the-Path paused, dirt clinging to her hands and her small digging tool, then nodded. “Wesah. All together.”

  “Good for each type of plant?” When the woman nodded, Clare asked, “How is it good?”

  This took longer to answer, but eventually Crosses-the-Path explained her people’s planting method.

  With the cornstalks grown sturdy enough, the beans, planted around their bases, would use the growing stalks as a climbing pole. Squash and pumpkins would be planted around the edges of the mound. When they matured, their broad leaves would shade the ground, inhibiting weed growth, thus reducing the work the fields would require in coming weeks.

  “I do declare,” Clare said, impressed by the wisdom behind the method. “I wonder why everyone doesn’t plant that way.”

  Pippa was finished feeding. Clare returned her to the cradleboard in hopes she would sleep. “Would you mind keeping an eye on her while I work?” she asked Wildcat, who’d lingered nearby, listening to their conversation.

  Crosses-the-Path’s youngest daughter, paying attention to this exchange with an intensity that revealed her effort to comprehend it, looked instantly relieved when the boy went to sit in the shade of one of the big stumps, against which Pippa’s cradleboard was propped. The little girl held her bag of seeds close, as if she feared its loss.

  Thinking no more of it, Clare moved to the part of the field intended for her. She could hear Crosses-the-Path repeating a few new English words gleaned from their conversation.

&nbs
p; The woman learned quickly. More quickly than Clare was managing to pick up her language. Or her ways.

  She’d made a few inroads with the women of Cornstalk’s village, beyond Crosses-the-Path. It could hardly be helped with a fortnight come and gone since she first saw the trader, Cheramy, at the creek. She’d returned each morning and evening since, hoping to encounter him again. When she hadn’t, she’d allowed herself to be engaged by whichever Shawnee woman made an effort to speak to her. Talking with the women gave her cause to linger and wait for Cheramy. Thus far in vain.

  The warm morning was turning into a hot day. Sweat coursed down Clare’s temple. She swiped it away before it stung her eye, looking up to find Pippa wakeful, Wildcat tickling the baby’s nose with a blue jay’s feather, dutifully engaged in his task of minding the infant.

  She returned her attention to the work at hand.

  Before they’d washed up destitute at Uncle Alphus’s door, Clare had had no experience in matters of the soil. Since her father was a physician as well as a businessman, they’d lived in the heart of Richmond; garden plots were the extent of the Litchfield family’s planting, and they’d slaves to tend the work and its yield once it reached the kitchen-house. Yet Clare had taken to life and work on the farm with more readiness than Philip, who’d grown to manhood on a proper plantation. Philip had been at home with ledgers and figures, a proclivity Uncle Alphus had pointed out when her husband fixed on Kentucky as the answer to their financial difficulties.

  Her thoughts drifted to Uncle Alphus as she moved around the hillocks, digging holes for seeds Crosses-the-Path’s daughters planted and tamped down.

  From her earliest memories, Alphus Litchfield had been besotted with her, his only niece. To her he’d seemed the epitome of the romantic adventurer. He’d settled in the Shenandoah when it was still the frontier, fought in the old French War, been a long-hunter, spending whole winters ranging the wilderness for furs, seeing and doing all manner of things a little girl accustomed to the parlors of Richmond society could hardly imagine—save during visits when he told her tales of his frontier life with a skill to keep her rapt with suspense.

  Was he at work even now in his corn-dusted mill, with its grinding stones and splashing waterwheel, imagining her somewhere deep in Kentucky busy about the hard work of making a home? Or had he heard of the unrest on the frontier and worried for their very lives?

  She was certain her reality was worse than anything he’d imagined.

  Uncle Alphus couldn’t help her now. She’d thought Jeremiah Ring would be the man to do so, but now there was Jean-Paul Cheramy. Or she hoped so. So much time had passed since that encounter at the creek that she’d begun to wonder if she’d conjured the man from thin air and desperation.

  She looked up from her digging to spot Wildcat, only to find that Crosses-the-Path’s youngest daughter had taken over minding Pippa after all. Wildcat stood at the field’s edge with a band of boys stopped along the path. Each carried a bow and quiver of arrows.

  Perhaps planting and minding babies wasn’t a thing males typically did.

  Clare blinked aside memory of Jeremiah Ring asleep with Pippa on his chest just as—sure enough—Wildcat cast a half-guilty look at her. She waved him away, and he hurried off with the boys, one of whom carried a small hoop fashioned of grapevines. Off to have some sort of competition, like as not.

  Everything was a competition with males, it seemed. Philip had been of that mind-set, trying to regain what he’d lost, including his place in Richmond society, instead of settling for a simpler life on a farm in the Shenandoah.

  At least they’d have both been alive to live it.

  It struck her that of all the men she’d known, Jeremiah Ring seemed to have the least bent in him toward competition. He wasn’t quite Shawnee in his ways. These people loved games, games of chance with bone dice, or games requiring what seemed half the village to play on a field set aside for the purpose, and would drop everything on the instant to play them, yet she’d never seen Mr. Ring take part. Nor was he like any white man she’d known. He’d no desire, seemingly, to own his own land, to farm, to learn a trade, even to marry and raise a family. His work for the Indian agents at Fort Pitt seemed a casual thing, done when he chose to do it.

  He seemed adrift between those worlds, red and white, bearing his messages from one to the other, a threaded needle stitching them together. But what of dreams and desires? Had he none?

  The sun had traveled up the sky and begun its descent before they left the fields, making for the creek to wash. Though covered in the dirt and sweat of labor, Clare felt a satisfaction in the work. Not as much had she believed she was providing for herself and her children.

  Thought of Jacob, never more than barely held at bay, flooded back full force.

  At the creek the women waded in to wash, most stripped naked, but Clare remained on the bank, half her attention on washing, half on the brush across the bank.

  Once again she saw no sign of Mr. Cheramy.

  Crosses-the-Path stayed with her while her daughters waded in, washing in the shallows by dipping water to sluice their arms and faces. No longer quiet or shy with Clare, the woman had kept up a chatter in Shawnee all the way back from the fields, with enough English sprinkled in that Clare now and then took her meaning. Now she seemed to be talking about her daughters.

  “Children watch. Bean. Squash. Keep away bird. Deer.”

  “Yes…wesah,” Clare murmured, nodding though she barely took in what the woman was saying, for just when she’d consigned another day’s passing to hope deferred, she’d glimpsed the man watching from the brush across the creek.

  He was looking directly, intensely, at her. With the barest tip of his head downstream, Jean-Paul Cheramy backed into shadow.

  No one else seemed to have noticed him.

  Clare waited until Crosses-the-Path became preoccupied with her daughters, splashing each other now rather than bathing, then took up Pippa’s cradleboard and slipped away downstream, past the concealing clump of wild rose.

  The creek’s level had fallen over the past days, there having been little rain. Clare crossed to Cheramy, needing only to remove her moccasins. Now she stood before the man, who explained his long absence by saying he’d been across the Scioto River in Kispoko Town, trading there. “But now I am come back to look for you, Madame, to tell you I have seen your son. He is the one called Many Sparrows?”

  “Yes,” she said, a little breathless. Seen close up, Jean-Paul Cheramy reminded her more strikingly of Philip, only his eyes were a piercing blue instead of brown. “His name is Jacob. Jacob Inglesby.”

  “Not your own name—Ring? Ah, but he will have another father, not Jeremiah Ring, who I take it is the father of your new bébé?”

  The trader went on before Clare could respond.

  “But tell me, Madame, how come you to be in Cornstalk’s Town and yet your son is in Nonhelema’s Town, being called Many Sparrows, the son of Rain Crow?”

  Hoping to form some sort of bond with this man, Clare spilled the story of her plight—Philip’s death and Jacob’s capture, Jeremiah Ring’s arrival and Pippa’s birth, their trek over the mountains to Wheeling, then following Jacob’s trail at last to Cornstalk’s Town to find him already adopted.

  “Mr. Ring wishes me to give it time, even to befriend Rain Crow. But no amount of showing myself friendly is going to make her give up Jacob if she wants to keep him. And how am I to do any such thing when I’m on one side of this creek and she on the other?”

  Mr. Cheramy, who had listened to her unfolding tale without interruption, wasted no time on exclamations or sympathy. “And yet, Madame, here you stand on this side of the creek.”

  Clare looked at her bare feet, wet in the pine needles. Feet at which the trader also looked.

  “But what good will it do?” she asked, warmth blooming in her cheeks. “I cannot go marching into Nonhelema’s Town uninvited. Rain Crow would drive me right back out.”

 
“Even though your husband is her brother?”

  She’d caught the emphasis he’d placed on the word, that subtle note of doubt. Ought she to trust him with the truth? Maybe it would help persuade him of her need.

  Desperation and hope made her reckless. “Actually…he isn’t my husband, Mr. Cheramy. We aren’t married.”

  Silence wrapped around them, heavy and uncertain, as Clare searched the blue eyes regarding her.

  “This I had already surmised. At least that he could not possibly be the father of this second child. Not if you met when you say. Yet you pretend to a marriage. Why?”

  Because he didn’t sound shocked, or condemning, merely curious, she said, “Mr. Ring says it’s for my protection and my acceptance. And for all I know he’s right, so I would ask you to keep the truth between us.”

  The admonition seemed to surprise—perhaps offend—the trader. “You will see, Madame. I am a very good keeper of secrets. Also I am a man who understands your lack of patience with Indians. As for this Mr. Ring, who has promised to help you, it is his own Shawnee family from which he must get your son away? That much you have said is true?”

  “It is. He promised his help before he knew Falling Hawk, his brother, took Jacob to give him to their sister.”

  Mr. Cheramy shook his head, tailed blond hair sweeping his shoulders. “Then maybe this is not a thing within his power to do for you, however much he wished to.” The trader held her gaze, eyes warming. “For I think, Madame, were I in his place with you, I would want to render you this service if I could.”

  Blushing again, Clare averted her gaze but couldn’t deny the force of his words, the hope they kindled.

  “And as it happens,” he went on, “I know where your son may be found.”

  She looked up sharply. “In Nonhelema’s Town.”

  “No, Madame. I know where he is en ce moment and will take you to him if you can come with me now. Shall the bébé keep quiet a while, do you think?”