Many Sparrows

by Lori Benton

  She had never seen him take part in a game like this before. It surprised her that he was often in the thick of things, his lean frame remarkably agile as he ran and dodged and kicked the ball to Falling Hawk or another member of his team.

  Watching him, Clare thought back to something he’d said to her at the feast. At some point he’d noticed she’d barely touched the mounds of roasted corn before them.

  “Clare,” he’d said softly while those around them chattered and ate. “Are you all right?”

  She had thought she’d been doing a passable imitation of it.

  The Indians around her were consuming prodigious amounts of food. These people knew times of hunger, she’d come to understand, though even when food was plentiful they tended to eat in moderation, each family sharing what they didn’t need rather than hoarding it. But this excess…she could never hope to match it, having no appetite at all.

  She hadn’t lifted her head from Pippa. The baby wasn’t fussing, but keeping her head down meant she wouldn’t have to see Rain Crow and Jacob across from her. She’d thought she was ready to endure anything for another glimpse of Jacob—and she’d had so much more than a glimpse—but seeing him fed and mothered by another woman was agony.

  “I’m fine,” she’d said, not fooling him for an instant.

  “Trust the Almighty, Clare. He’ll work this out for good in the end.”

  She’d looked at him in time to see the expression in his eyes, seeming at odds with his words. A look of pain. Blinking back tears of despair, she’d murmured, “Was I deemed unfit to raise him?”

  Jeremiah had reached for Pippa in order to lean in closer. “I didn’t hear you.”

  She’d let him take the baby, watched him plant chubby feet on his lap, supporting Pippa between his strong hands. “Does God not want me to be his mother?”

  She’d glanced up in time to see Rain Crow pop a bite of cooked squash into Jacob’s mouth, see him make a face, then reluctantly chew and swallow. Jacob hated squash.

  “Trust Him, Clare. A moment at a time.”

  “I cannot.”

  Jeremiah had leaned sideways until their shoulders touched. “Looks to me like you are.”

  There’d been a tug on her sleeve—Crosses-the-Path’s youngest daughter, grinning shyly. With Clare’s lap free of Pippa, the girl had claimed it for herself, climbing up to nestle against the empty sling. Clare’s arms had come around the girl, who was nearly Jacob’s size.

  Separated from her by only a pile of corn ears and drifts of shed husks, Jacob had noticed. He’d glared at the girl. Rain Crow tried to distract him with more food, but Jacob was stuffed full and couldn’t be enticed.

  Clare hadn’t known if she should put the child away from her. Crosses-the-Path had gone to talk with other women and wasn’t there to intervene.

  Rain Crow had decided the issue. She’d taken Jacob by the hand, rose, and led him to a group of boys his age playing a game with throwing sticks. The boys welcomed him, and he was soon engaged in their game.

  He seemed so at ease among these Indians.

  Clare had summoned the memory of their exchange before the feast. He’d wanted to see his sister. He’d asked after his father. “Love you, Mama.” She’d clutched Jacob’s words tight to her heart. He wasn’t lost to her. Not in mind or in heart. Not yet.

  The crowd at the edge of the playing field erupted in a roar, recalling her attention. Wildcat drove in a stick to mark a score, but Clare couldn’t remember which group of pegs belonged to which team.

  “Which side is winning?” she asked Crosses-the-Path, gesturing at the sticks. One side had three. The other two.

  Crosses-the-Path frowned. “Side?”

  Was there a Shawnee word for team? “With armbands or without?”

  Falling Hawk’s wife stared blankly, then looked beyond Clare, who turned, startled, to find none other than Rain Crow beside her.

  “It is Panther-Sees-Him’s team that made the score. They are winning. You were watching. You could not tell?”

  Thunder rumbled, distant still, on the heels of Rain Crow’s words. Clare was thunderstruck to find the woman standing there talking to her, as if she’d been any other woman asking the question. She forced herself not to look for Jacob.

  “Is there a prize for the winning team?”

  “The losing team gathers firewood for winners.” Rain Crow’s attention shifted back to the game. Without taking her gaze from the players on the field, she said, “My husband played this game when young, before he listened to the Moravians. Before he left his Delaware people.”

  Josiah, who had died among the Moravians and the Indians who lived with them. Along with their baby. Did Rain Crow know she knew this?

  “It’s hard,” Clare said. “Hard to trust when a husband is taken. And a child. Even if…”

  She didn’t know what she was trying to say. This was the woman who had custody of the child in question. Her child.

  She saw acknowledgment of this in Rain Crow’s guarded eyes.

  On the field another score was made, to judge by the cheers and groans of onlookers. Clare saw a tangle of men and women getting up off the ground, some being congratulated. Jeremiah was again in the midst of them. Falling Hawk slapped him on the back as he got to his feet.

  “It is over.” Rain Crow said. “Your man has won it for his team. Wolf-Alone will gather wood for you this night.”

  Wildcat sprang up and hurried onto the field to meet Wolf-Alone coming in. The boy seemed about to make a gesture of consolation, but the big warrior laughed and squeezed his shoulder, making light of his team’s loss.

  “Clare!” Jeremiah was still on the field, warriors around him, but he was looking at her, his smile a blaze of triumph, his usually sober face animated, gleaming in the light of a westering sun moments away from dipping behind the rising storm clouds.

  The look of him captured her gaze, and she felt herself returning his smile, for a moment forgetting who stood beside her. Then she glanced sidelong.

  In the seconds her attention had been caught by Jeremiah, Rain Crow had melted away into the crowd dispersing back into the town.

  A drizzling rain settled in for the remaining days of the Green Corn Dance. On the final soggy day as the moisture at last drifted eastward, Rain Crow moved her lodge to Cornstalk’s Town.

  “She didn’t tell me she meant to do so,” Jeremiah said hoarsely from his pallet of furs. Suffering a summer ague since the previous day, he was resting at Clare’s urging, though she suspected he’d be up and about as soon as she left the lodge.

  She turned to Wolf-Alone, tending the fire, and asked in her halting Shawnee, “Sister tell you?”

  Wolf-Alone shook his head, said something brief to Jeremiah in which Clare recognized the names of Wildcat and Falling Hawk.

  “Apparently,” Jeremiah said at her questioning look, “Wildcat’s the one in the know this time.”

  Wildcat had come to them the previous evening babbling that Rain Crow and Jacob had left Nonhelema’s Town, crossed the creek with all their things on the back of a borrowed horse, and were setting up a lodge near Falling Hawk’s.

  Clare hadn’t rushed straight out to see for herself, having already made plans to visit Crosses-the-Path the following day; still she’d slept little for relief and eagerness. And curiosity. She and Rain Crow had barely spoken after their conversation on the sidelines of the game. The next day Rain Crow had gone back across Scippo Creek, taking Jacob with her.

  “I’ve my suspicions as to why,” Jeremiah said, the words followed by a coughing bout.

  Clare frowned as she settled Pippa in her cradleboard and propped it against the lodge wall to lace it up, as Wolf-Alone rose from the fire and made ready to leave as well. He was going hunting with Wildcat, who was making sure Split-Moon had all he needed for the days the boy and Wolf-Alone would be away.

  “It’s to do with you,” Jeremiah said once the coughing passed. “How you conducted yourself during the Gr
een Corn Dance. You did well, Clare. You put everyone at ease.”

  Jeremiah didn’t say “I told you so.” He didn’t look as though he was even thinking it. Clare appreciated that.

  Finished with the cradleboard, she flashed a look of appeal at Wolf-Alone, who came and helped her don the contraption.

  “Like you’re doing today,” Jeremiah added, nodding at the small, tightly woven basket she’d picked up. It held dried currants. “Being friendly with Crosses-the-Path. Falling Hawk says she enjoys your company.”

  Clare was surprised how much it pleased her to hear it. “I like spending time with her too. And her girls.”

  Though she’d eaten little during the feasting, she’d sampled something she’d liked, cornmeal cakes sweetened with dried fruit and maple sugar. They were the nearest thing to a proper tea cake she’d had in months. Crosses-the-Path had offered to show her how to make them, and she was looking forward to it…until she remembered. This friendship was a facade, with one end in mind—creating sympathy for herself and her desire to regain Jacob in the minds of the people holding him captive.

  There was no more to it than that, she reminded herself.

  At the door-hide she looked back at Jeremiah lying in his bed furs. She’d fixed him a bowl of broth and a tea of herbs Crosses-the-Path said would be good for his cough and slight fever. Both sat beside him on a rush mat, untouched.

  “You’ll be all right on your own?”

  Catching a half-concealed grin from Wolf-Alone, Clare blushed. She’d sounded like a wife certain her husband hadn’t the sense to take care of himself in her absence.

  “I’ll be fine,” Jeremiah assured her with a grin. “Likely I’ll sleep—once you both clear out and give me a little peace and quiet.”

  With his back to Jeremiah, Wolf-Alone rolled his eyes and went about his packing.

  Marginally reassured, Clare went out into the town.

  Split-Moon and Wildcat were coming along the path from the creek, each carrying armfuls of firewood. Split-Moon stumbled and dropped a portion of his burden. Clare, spotting them, hurried to their aid.

  “Let me get those for you.” She gathered the sticks, but didn’t give them back to the old man. To Wildcat she said, “I’ll carry these back to your lodge for you. I think Wolf-Alone is nearly ready to go.”

  The color in Wildcat’s sun-browned face deepened as he responded—not with the fluency of which she knew him capable. “It good, Clare-wife. Wesah.”

  Returning Split-Moon’s curious gaze—the man had little English, as far as she knew—she trailed them through the village to their lodge. Split-Moon set down his load outside the trade blanket that hung across the doorway and motioned her to give him what she’d carried.

  She handed him the smaller bundle. He nodded his thanks.

  She supposed she’d have left them then had not Wolf-Alone appeared from around a nearby lodge, stopped at sight of her, then raised a hand in greeting to Split-Moon and called to Wildcat.

  Face lighting with eagerness, the boy darted into the lodge. He was back out seconds later with bow and quiver, a hide bag and rolled blanket slung across his chest. He spoke a farewell to his father and raced off to follow Wolf-Alone on their hunting foray.

  Clare caught the old man’s expression as he looked after his adopted son. Sadness curved the lines of his face. And loneliness? Wildcat was the only family he had since the loss of his daughter and the death of his wife.

  Did the old man still think of Tall Doe? Still wonder at her fate?

  Would she ever stop thinking of Jacob?

  Sorrow for the man wrenched her heart. For the first time she was glad he had Wildcat to console him.

  “I wish we could speak of these things, Grandfather,” she said, using the term of respect Shawnees showed to older men. “I wish we had the words. Perhaps you would have some wisdom for me.”

  Split-Moon gazed at her, frowning, and Clare sighed at the language barrier. Then, brightening with a notion, she smiled at the old man staring at her with puzzled eyes.

  “But I’m going to come back and see you later, and I’ll have something for your supper, if all goes well.”

  It went very well. The cakes turned out so scrumptious that it wasn’t easy to set a few aside, wrapped in cornhusks, to take to Split-Moon as she’d promised. Accompanied by a tea Crosses-the-Path steeped with her favorite herbs, mint foremost among them, the coos and gurgles and occasional laughs of a contentedly fed Pippa, and the giggles of two little girls vying to amuse the baby, it felt like a continuation of the Green Corn celebration.

  Perhaps drawn by their laughter or the smell of baking, Rain Crow pushed aside the door-hide of her brother’s lodge as they were diving into second helpings.

  Crosses-the-Path waved her in with a glance at Clare, who looked immediately for Jacob. Her heart gave a leap when she saw him, but Rain Crow grasped his shoulder and spoke to him.

  Clare didn’t need to know the Shawnee words to recognize a mother telling her child to stay outside and play. With a look at Clare, in which she read confusion, then resignation, Jacob obeyed.

  Disappointment. Envy. Rage. Clare’s heart burned with such feelings and more, but she was smiling when Rain Crow let the hide fall shut behind her and sat with them by the dying fire to share in cakes and tea. At first she spoke little, but she seemed interested in Pippa, peering often at the baby nestled between the girls’ knees, resting on her tummy but pushed up on her arms to look around. Biting back reluctance, Clare asked, “Would you like to hold her?”

  Crosses-the-Path went still at her words. So did Rain Crow, who looked at her in open surprise.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Crosses-the-Path’s oldest daughter picked up the baby with practiced ease and brought her to Rain Crow, who held her against a shoulder until Pippa squirmed to see the rest of them. Rain Crow turned her and planted her little bottom on her lap.

  It was all Clare could do not to snatch her baby from those hands that had pushed her son out the lodge door. She schooled her face as Rain Crow met her gaze.

  “I saw you before, with Little-Cat-That-Scratches and his father, carrying the wood for them.”

  It took a moment for Clare to recall that other way of saying Wildcat’s name.

  There had been a question implicit in the words. Did Rain Crow think she was drawn to the boy because he was another adopted white? That was true enough. But today it had been Split-Moon’s daughter on her mind. She hadn’t been able to ask the old man about her, but she still had questions—some of them about Mr. Cheramy, questions she’d never brought up to Jeremiah again. Could Rain Crow know more about him, more than Jeremiah had shared?

  “It’s sad what happened to Split-Moon’s daughter, Tall Doe, making it so he and his wife felt the need to…take another to be their child.”

  Crosses-the-Path hadn’t grasped her words that time. Rain Crow noticed this and spoke to her in Shawnee. The women exchanged a look that left Clare puzzled.

  “Is it really true, what they say Mr. Cheramy did to those young women he married? And to Tall Doe? Did he really sell them as slaves in Montreal?”

  Again Rain Crow translated her words. The silence that followed grew ever more awkward, as if both women debated how to respond, or whether to respond at all.

  Clare knew she’d taken a risk in mentioning the trader, but Rain Crow didn’t appear angry or suspicious. Only cautious. Still she feared she had blundered, though in what way exactly she couldn’t be certain.

  What was wrong with her? Every time she gained a little ground with Rain Crow, earned a modicum of acceptance, she did or said something to lose it again.

  “That much bad time,” Crosses-the-Path said at last. “After other daughter die.”

  Though her tone had been polite, her expression had communicated censure, as though Clare had erred in mentioning not Mr. Cheramy but Tall Doe. But now her curiosity was too greatly aroused to keep silent.

  “Other daughter? Spl
it-Moon and his wife had two daughters? Jeremiah told me they had only the one; that’s why they wanted Wildcat.”

  She’d spoken in English again, but Crosses-the-Path seemed to understand the gist of what she was asking. “Panther-Sees-Him not say you his woman?”

  “I don’t understand.” Clare looked to Rain Crow, whose eyes flashed over Pippa’s head at Crosses-the-Path with something close to reprimand, then with resignation she met Clare’s questioning gaze.

  “Of all these dead ones my people do not speak. But I will tell you some of it because you do not know our ways and maybe…maybe it is good you know of it.

  “Before Little-Cat-That-Scratches came to be their son,” she went on, “Split-Moon and Red-Quill-Woman adopted the one who was wife of Panther-Sees-Him. This was when Tall Doe was maybe nine summers, still a girl, and not a strong one. Little and slight like her mother, Red-Quill-Woman. They wanted an older girl, stronger, to help cook, help work. Hannah came with the promise of a baby to come. That was welcome too.”

  Clare gaped at the woman holding her daughter, trying to make sense of what she’d said.

  “Jeremiah had a wife? A Shawnee wife? But no, you said…”

  Hannah. Hannah…Ring?

  Somewhere beneath the shock of it all, bells were ringing in her memory. And the half-forgotten name of Bloom.

  Crosses-the-Path looked blankly at her, but Rain Crow was staring, understanding dawning on her face.

  “He did not tell you about her? It is painful for him. And for Falling Hawk because Panther-Sees-Him betrayed him and his Shawnee people. For Hannah.”

  Rain Crow’s words only added layers to Clare’s confusion. “Jeremiah betrayed Falling Hawk?”

  Rain Crow held Pippa out to her. Clare took her daughter but didn’t take her eyes off the other woman, who stood and brushed down her skirt.

  “Maybe you should know this. But it is not for us to tell you, that is what I think now. Ask Panther-Sees-Him to know. I am going.”