by Lori Benton
Falling Hawk was sprawled asleep nearby, so they kept their voices low, his daughters muffling giggles as Clare made a show of being repulsed by what Crosses-the-Path was stirring into the kettle hung over the fire.
In truth her disgust wasn’t merely to amuse the girls; she suspected their mother knew it though she didn’t seem to mind. Crosses-the-Path enjoyed introducing Clare to her native foods and instructing her in their preparation, as well as the language barrier between them allowed. That barrier continued to shrink due to Crosses-the-Path’s diligence in learning English, though Clare doubted words in any language could render appealing what was going into that kettle.
“Yellow jackets?” she’d said in disbelief upon identifying the little roasted brown things Crosses-the-Path’s oldest daughter had prepared while her mother was sequestered in the women’s lodge.
Her little sister snatched one from the heaping bowl before their mother could get them into the pot of seasoned broth, popping it into her mouth. Grinning while she chewed, the girl picked up another of the insects and held it out to Clare, who gazed with dismay at the repulsive offering nestled in the little palm.
Reminding herself she was making friendly with this family for Jacob’s sake, Clare took the roasted yellow jacket, spoke the Shawnee word for thank you—Niyaawe—and put it in her mouth.
It crunched like a piece of chicken skin fried to a crisp. It had a little of that flavor too, with a slight nutty component. None of which overcame her repugnance, but she forced it down with a moue of distaste she tried to make look comical, as if she didn’t really mean it.
The girls tittered. Crosses-the-Path hushed them, but it was too late. Across the lodge their father groaned and sat up on his sleeping bench.
Not only was Falling Hawk haggard from the night of dancing, he was still sporting the evidence of having been the one to procure the ground-dwelling yellow jackets. Yesterday morning he’d come home triumphant with the night-dormant hive, reeking of the smoke he’d used to procure it and spotted with welted stings. He’d put the hive on a heated stone at the fire’s edge and parched it. The girls had removed the dead insects and fried them in grease.
Returned that morning from the women’s lodge, Crosses-the-Path had dressed his welts with wet tobacco leaves, even though he’d danced half the night away with the stings untended. Now he sat blinking at them, face, neck, arms, and chest spotted brown as well as red. Seeing them staring, he grinned. Clumps of dried tobacco fell from his face.
Finding this sight hilarious, his daughters laughed loud enough to startle Pippa awake.
Clare welcomed the distraction; Falling Hawk’s presence was a keen reminder of what happened the previous evening, the other reason she’d managed little sleep.
Wolf-Alone and Jeremiah had gone to the dance, the latter assuring her he wouldn’t stay long. Having the lodge to herself, she’d decided to bathe, including her hair. Despite the drumming already begun, she’d gotten Pippa to sleep. Leaving the baby hedged with rolled furs and blankets, she’d hurried out to fetch water, taking the largest kettle she thought she could manage to haul back full from the creek. The sun had vanished over the horizon. Ribbons of orange fading to purple streaked the sky above the town. Shadows stretched among the lodges.
She knew this was a time of celebration for these people; still the deep rhythmic thrumming of the drums and the shaking of gourd rattles, the stomping of feet and the shrill voices of the singers, combined to unnerve her. She didn’t linger at the creek. She’d reached the darkened edge of town with her heavy kettle when Falling Hawk stepped abruptly across her path.
“I hab here my sister wish talk wid oo,” he said, face distorted by swelling, including his upper lip, which had impeded his speech.
She’d caught one word: sister.
Arms weak, Clare bent to set the kettle on the path outside the deserted lodge where Falling Hawk had stopped her. By the time she straightened, he’d stepped back. In his place stood Rain Crow.
Even in the twilight Clare could see the woman was as striking as she remembered, but there was too much bone in her face, too little flesh. Rain Crow was painfully thin, all but swallowed in a beribboned blouse belted over a deerskin skirt that looked as soft as butter. Twin spots of red, some sort of dye, colored her cheekbones. Clare didn’t know what the spots signified but felt the heat in her own cheeks burning up to match them.
Rain Crow broke the drum-filled silence. “I must say to you a thing before the dancing.”
Her voice was as supple as her flowing hair, her English as flawless as her skin. Clare at once feared this was going to be about Mr. Cheramy and her attempt to steal Jacob back from her.
“Say what to me?” she asked, every nerve taut.
“Say to you that I forgive.”
Rain Crow hadn’t stuttered or hesitated. Her words were clear. Still Clare could hardly take them in. “Forgive? Who?”
“You.” Rain Crow gave a nod, sharp and quick. “For your bad behavior when you tried to take my son from me. Both times.”
Clare felt the wind go out of her, as sickening as a punch in the gut. With effort she kept from bending double. No matter that it was clear Rain Crow knew about the trader. She had said her son.
How dare this woman say such a thing?
Rain Crow flashed her a searching look and, apparently having said all she meant to say, hurried into the shadows where Falling Hawk awaited her, before Clare could recover enough to say anything at all.
Falling Hawk gave her a long look before turning to follow his sister toward the beating of drums.
Jeremiah found her in the lodge soon after, unwashed and weeping beside the kettle, which she’d had the presence of mind to carry back. Without speaking he knelt and wrapped his arms around her, as Crosses-the-Path had done that day at the creek. She was too overcome with misery to care. It felt good to have a man’s shoulder to cry against, to feel strong arms around her, never mind he wasn’t truly her husband. Never mind there was nothing he could do to heal her heart.
“Rain Crow is here,” she said against his shirt.
“Aye. I saw her dancing.”
She pulled back to look at him. “And Jacob? Did you see him?”
“I didn’t.” He took her by the shoulders and gazed into her face—a face likely as swollen as Falling Hawk’s. But Jeremiah’s eyes in the firelight were tender, not appraising. “What did she say to you?”
“That she forgave me.” Clare choked the words out. “For how I acted when I saw Jacob, the day we arrived—and what I tried to do with Mr. Cheramy. ‘Bad behavior’ she called it.”
“Ah,” Jeremiah said, as if this made all the sense in the world.
She pulled away, making him drop his hands, and wiped beneath her nose with the back of her own. “Why would she say such a thing? You seem to know.”
He rose to sit on the edge of her sleeping bench, careful not to disturb Pippa in her nest of blankets. “It’s the Green Corn Dance. For Shawnees to take part in it, they must come with a right heart. A clean heart free of resentment, of grudges. My sister was trying to make her heart right.”
“Make her heart right?” Despair was a pit, and she teetered on its edge. She went to the water she’d left unheated, scooped a handful, and splashed her face. “Didn’t you tell me Rain Crow lived with the Moravians? What is she doing taking part in a heathen celebration?”
For that matter, what was Jeremiah doing taking part?
He stood, reached for her hand, and guided her to the table to sit. He did likewise. “This is my sister’s first Green Corn Dance since returning from the town Reverend Zeisberger started a couple years back, the first one west of the Ohio.”
“A couple years? Didn’t you tell me she lived half her life with them?”
“She did. Her mother chose to follow Christ when Rain Crow was a girl. They left the Scioto to live in Pennsylvania at another Moravian town until Zeisberger went west to start the new ones. Rain Crow and her mothe
r went with him to Gnadenhutten. By then Rain Crow—she was called Abigail then—had married a Delaware Christian, Josiah.”
Jeremiah paused, glanced at Pippa, then said, “I visited them there once, just after their son was born. My sister was happy, fervent in her love for the Almighty. Then sickness came and she lost both son and husband and now is but a shell of the sister I first met. What Falling Hawk did, bringing her a son—”
“My son,” Clare cut in.
“In bringing her Jacob,” he went on relentlessly. “It wasn’t done out of malice. He did it out of love for our sister. To see her healed.”
Bitterness burned in Clare’s throat. “And I suppose she was—until I arrived and spoiled it all?”
“No,” Jeremiah said flatly. “Not in the way she needs to be.” He didn’t expound on that but studied her soberly. “I’m telling you these things to help you understand why we need to be patient, to allow the Almighty to work. My sister is His. He will speak to her, in His way and time.”
“But she came to the dance,” Clare persisted. “If He should speak, what’s to say she will listen?”
“I know her faith has faltered,” Jeremiah said, “though I did think she might have stayed back from the dance tonight, stayed across the creek with most of those who came from the Muskingum towns.”
He paused again, as if to allow Clare to reach her own understanding of why those he mentioned would have chosen not to take part in a celebration that required clearing one’s heart of bad feeling toward others. She didn’t have to reach far.
It was but ten days since Wakatomica and other towns on the Muskingum River had been attacked by Virginia militia. The soldiers—the Shawnees called them Long Knives—had skirmished with the warriors while the women and children fled. Finding the towns deserted, the Virginians burned them and the surrounding cornfields, then hurried back south to the Ohio. The Indians hadn’t returned to their ruined homes. Some had taken refuge in the Scioto towns until Wakatomica could be rebuilt, likely someplace farther west.
Soon after, a prominent chieftain of the Senecas, Guyasuta, and the Delaware chief, White Eyes, came to Cornstalk’s Town to urge the people not to take up the war hatchet against the Virginians, despite this invasion and loss. Many gathered in the council house to hear their words, but all knew it was too late for speaking them. Cornstalk had his scouts out. The Shawnees knew Governor Dunmore was mustering a larger army than the few hundred that had come up the Muskingum. What exactly he meant to do with this army, and when, remained to be seen; though Cornstalk and Nonhelema hoped to avoid a full-scale war, the present peace felt as fragile as a flower tossed on the edge of a blaze.
Clare suspected Jeremiah wanted to make the long trek to Fort Pitt, to speak with the Indian agents. Since he hadn’t mentioned leaving the Scioto, she hadn’t brought it up, afraid of what his answer would be.
Across the table she met his gaze. “Did everyone from the Muskingum towns stay away from the dance?”
Jeremiah shook his head. “I saw a few there.”
Did that mean those few had found a way to forgive the Virginians for destroying their homes, their food for the coming winter, everything but what they’d managed to carry away when they fled? Some had lost husbands, sons, or brothers, for there had been casualties in the skirmishing.
The sound of drumming had faded to the edges of Clare’s awareness while Jeremiah spoke of his sister. It swelled again now, an incessant thudding that grated on her nerves. It commanded her heartbeat fall into rhythm, as though it were the collective will of these people who’d taken her son, her life. She couldn’t tell herself the drums had nothing to do with her, for she was there, among them, held fast by her own heart’s tether. How long before the beating of celebration turned into the beating of war? Would it sound any different to her ears when it did?
Exhausted, she’d risen from the table. “I’m going to sleep.”
But she hadn’t. She’d lain awake into the night listening to the drums, rehearsing that encounter with Rain Crow, until Pippa woke and cried to be fed.
Later, as she trailed Crosses-the-Path’s family and their kettle of noxious soup onto the council house yard, Pippa riding in a sling across her front, Clare scanned the crowd gathering at the communal baskets of roasted corn for one small, fair-haired figure.
This time Jacob spotted her first.
“Mama…Mama!”
She heard his urgent cry a second before his little body slammed into her side. Only Pippa in her sling kept Clare from hoisting him into her arms.
“Jacob!” She put her hands to her son’s head as he tilted his face up to her, sun-browned and smiling. His hair, longer than she’d ever let it grow, was a shock of white-blond in contrast.
She was aware of searing this moment into her memory, certain it would be fleeting. And it was. Rain Crow’s voice called out the Shawnee words Clare recognized now as Many Sparrows. She pretended she couldn’t hear, but Jacob’s smile faltered.
“Mama, why I’m not with you? Why don’t my other mama let me see you?”
Other mama. The words were a knife in her heart.
“Many Sparrows!”
Clare wrenched her head up and saw not only Rain Crow advancing on her but Jeremiah and Wolf-Alone. Crosses-the-Path looked apprehensively over her soup kettle. And there came Falling Hawk as well, hurrying toward them. Before anyone could reach her, Clare removed her hands from Jacob and took a step back. Her mouth trembled as she fought for control.
“I hope to see more of you soon, Jacob.”
Jacob’s gaze dropped to Pippa in her sling. “Is that my brother?”
Her heart was breaking as she smiled. “This is your baby sister. Her name is Philippa Joan, but we’re calling her Pippa.”
Jeremiah’s face had flashed through her mind when she spoke, but that wasn’t right. That wasn’t we. There was no we. A searing of grief for Philip caught her off guard.
“Pippa?” Jacob’s face lit with interest. “Can I see her?”
It was all she could do not to kneel in the dirt and let him see his sister. But this wasn’t the time or place. “She’s sleeping now and—”
“Mama, let me ask you something,” Jacob cut in. “Where’s Papa?”
Her son gazed up at her, waiting for her answer. A stone lodged in her throat. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him. Not now. “It’s all right, Jacob. It’s all right for you to be with Rain Crow for a while. I love you. I miss you.”
Those last words nearly choked her.
“Many Sparrows, come to me!” Rain Crow had spoken the command in English this time; it couldn’t be misunderstood.
“Love you, Mama,” Jacob said and turned away.
Clare’s heart swelled and soared and broke as her son scuffed across the trampled ground to Rain Crow, who waited for him. Though many voices hummed and laughter was going up, silence surrounded Jeremiah’s troubled kin, tense and uncertain. Feeling their scrutiny, Clare stood straight under the weight, and when she was certain she would neither weep nor beg, turned to Jeremiah and smiled.
Her son knew who he was. He knew who she was to him. “Love you, Mama.”
Of their little group, Falling Hawk moved first, striding after Rain Crow, calling to her. Rain Crow stopped to listen, clasping Jacob by the hand.
Clare shifted Pippa higher as the baby stirred awake. “What is he saying?”
Jeremiah was studying her. “He’s asking our sister to sit with us at the feast.”
While Falling Hawk spoke, Rain Crow looked at Clare, as if to discern whether this request had initiated with her, a ploy to be near Jacob.
Infused with a hope she tried not to show, Clare turned to Crosses-the-Path, offering to help carry the kettle, and from the corner of her eye caught Rain Crow’s change of posture, her nod of acquiescence.
The feasting had abated. In the west, across the Scioto, thunderclouds piled, but thus far the sun still shown down on this first day of celebration.
> Clare held Pippa as the day’s sticky heat cooled and the first rumble of that distant storm trembled the air. They stood at the edge of a field where men and women were playing a rough-and-tumble game that centered around possession of a ball the size of a large melon, made of deerskin stuffed with grass, weighted with a stone at its center.
The players were divided into teams. At the moment, one team was attempting to put the ball through posts at the far end of the field—as best Clare could see craning around other watchers crowding the sidelines, chattering and shouting at the players—while the other team tried to prevent them. There was a great deal of shoving, jostling, and falling, so it was difficult to be sure, but she’d noted how the teams were set apart because members of one wore red cloth bands tied around their upper arms, while the other team wore none. Score was kept on the sidelines with small sticks driven into the ground; since Wildcat had assumed that job and was in too much earnest about it to be distracted, it was left to Crosses-the-Path to explain the game.
“Oh!” Clare said as a woman on the field made a spectacular leaping catch of the ball, which had been kicked high in the air by a man on the opposing team. “She caught the ball with her hands, but the men are only kicking it.”
Crosses-the-Path raised her hands, palms out. “Woman hand touch ball—good. Man—bad.” She shook her head for emphasis. “Only man foot touch. What word you say?” She made a motion with her foot, barely missing Wildcat hunkered on the grass before them, oblivious to everything but the game unfolding.
“Kick,” Clare said, and missed whatever happened to cause a collective groan to rise from half the onlookers.
Jeremiah, on the field with both his brothers, was on the ground but laughing, being hauled to his feet by Wolf-Alone, who played for the opposing team since his muscular arm was tied with a red band. Jeremiah wore no band. He also wore no shirt, leggings, or moccasins. Nothing but a breechclout, just like the warriors and even the women taking part in the game. No one seemed the least concerned about that, so she was trying not to be either, but whenever a group of them went down in a tangle of limbs, she felt a searing heat in her cheeks. Especially when it was Jeremiah.