Many Sparrows

by Lori Benton

  She went, leaving Clare and Crosses-the-Path and three little girls sitting in silence.

  Split-Moon wasn’t at his lodge, so Clare left the cakes wrapped in cornhusks beside his hearth. When she reached Jeremiah’s lodge, he was still lying where she’d last seen him, sound asleep. That surprised her. Was he feeling worse than he’d let on?

  She’d been eager to get to him, to unleash the questions rising on her tongue like floodwaters. With equal parts frustration and concern, she realized she must hold that flood at bay, but as she stood over him with Pippa still in the cradleboard on her back, the memory she’d been trying to capture since hearing the name Hannah in connection with his burst into clarity.

  She knew this man—or knew of him—had known of him long before their meeting by the wagon on a mountain trail in the midst of her labor with Pippa.

  Why had he never told her?

  The need to know vied with the impulse to let him sleep, but between getting Pippa out of the cradleboard and settling her to nurse, the baby erupted in howls of hunger.

  Jeremiah woke. Looking decidedly unwell but no longer fevered, he propped himself on an elbow. Clare put her back to him while Pippa nursed but could feel his gaze.

  “Have a nice visit with Crosses-the-Path?” he asked, voice raspy.

  “Yes. Until Rain Crow joined us. She said…”

  “Something about Jacob?” he prompted when she hesitated.

  “No. About you. And your wife.”

  Silence followed her reply. She turned to face Jeremiah, dragging up a corner of a blanket to cover herself.

  “I know who you are, Jem Ringbloom.”

  Jem Ringbloom. He could almost see the name hanging between them, shimmering like the ghost of the man it had belonged to. It swelled and filled the wegiwa until the air for breathing was squeezed right out. Who had told her? Rain Crow? But his sister didn’t know that name.

  Then he remembered where she’d said she lived the past few years. In the Shenandoah, near Staunton.

  He swallowed over a throat still raw. It was long past time to tell Clare his story, the whole of it, but he’d been waiting for her to want to know. He’d hoped interest, even care, would be what prompted the resurrection of that name and the life that went with it, after letting it lie like river-bottom silt for nigh on a decade.

  The silt was stirring now, muddying the waters above.

  “I haven’t been that man for a long time.”

  “But you are him—Jem Ringbloom,” she insisted. “You lived not five miles from Uncle Alphus’s mill on Lewis Creek. You and your wife. I remember now. She was taken by Indians when she was…”

  “About six months along with our first child,” he finished when she hesitated.

  Jeremiah sat up, rubbing hands over bristled cheeks. Back in Wheeling she’d mentioned an uncle called Alphus. A miller on Lewis Creek? His mind produced an image—a man around forty years then, weathered, hair salted gray. Not tall but tough as seasoned hickory. A former militia captain who’d fought with Braddock and Washington. He’d heard the man tell his stories.

  Memory tossed up a surname. “Alphus Litchfield, the miller, was your uncle?”

  “He’s my father’s younger brother,” Clare said. “But we aren’t talking about me now. What wouldn’t Rain Crow tell me?”

  He’d stalled long enough. “I doubt my sister knows the whole story of how I came to be Shawnee. She’d gone to live with the Moravians by then.”

  Clare watched his face, more intensely focused on him than he’d ever known her to be. “Will you tell me?”

  “I’d meant to.” He lay his head back and closed his eyes, finding it easier that way to untangle the memories. So many layers. So much easier to tell it as if he spoke of someone else.

  “Once upon a time a young farmer lived down the road a piece from a gristmill belonging to your uncle,” he said, and wondered why he wasn’t more amazed at this long-ago connection between them. “The farmer had a wife, a baby on the way. One day he traveled to that mill to have his corn ground, and when he got back home found his wife gone, his cabin wrecked, out in the yard…tracks of moccasins leading off. He grabbed rifle, horse, what food was to hand, and set out to follow, hearing along the way that a raiding party of Shawnees had been through. That daunted him, certain sure, but he learned all he could and pressed on westward, following the Indian paths toward the Ohio—”

  He paused as a fit of coughing overtook him. His lungs had a rattle, not bad but annoying. His throat felt like he’d swallowed sand.

  Clare was frowning. “Jeremiah, I know you aren’t well. If you’d like, I could wait.”

  He could tell she didn’t want to do that. Nor did he. He cleared his throat. “I’d as soon get this out.”

  “Once Pippa settles I’ll make tea.”

  “For which I’d thank you kindly. I’ll keep talking, all right? I just got to pace myself.”

  “Take your time,” she said, clearly impatient to have the tale in full.

  He smiled a little at that. “That young farmer made it across the Alleghenies and the Ohio River and all the way up the Scioto to this place. By then, of course, he’d been taken prisoner himself. He’d been caught the second day out by some of the warriors who’d taken his wife—a few had remained behind to watch their back trail for pursuit. They’d surrounded him and his horse, and he’d surrendered, hadn’t fought them, for he’d come to realize it was the only way he was going to find his wife—or survive, if they showed him such mercy. Desperate as he was, he was no frontiersman. He could never make it so deep into Indian country, find his wife, rescue her, lead her back to safety, without coming to harm. He’d have to share in her captivity, pray they didn’t kill him, and hope for the chance to get near her.”

  While he spoke, Clare rose and lay the baby down. Almost instantly Pippa was asleep. Clare shifted her focus to the fire.

  Watching her, in the back of Jeremiah’s mind a good feeling was welling up, a contentment that strengthened him to go on telling how that young farmer was taken to Cornstalk’s Town, but not in company with his wife, who arrived some days ahead of him. How, once he’d glimpsed his wife there, he’d managed to communicate his desire to live among the Shawnees at Cornstalk’s Town. How he was made to run the gauntlet and earned a modicum of respect for surviving it. How soon after, with his wounds still healing and his fate still undecided, a warrior called Falling Hawk took him along on a hunting foray.

  Returning to camp one evening, Falling Hawk had caught a panther creeping up on the farmer, sitting by the fire and unaware of being stalked. Falling Hawk had scared the panther off and, being one who enjoyed a good joke, been highly amused by it all. That was how the farmer got his name, given a few days later when Falling Hawk adopted him as a brother—so he could go on laughing at him, apparently.

  “During this time the farmer’s heart was being wrenched in two; he’d been forced to stand by, helpless to stop it, when his pregnant wife was adopted by a Shawnee couple who wanted another daughter.”

  “Split-Moon and Red-Quill-Woman,” Clare said, now tending a boiling kettle of corn soup over the flames. “That much I know. But I’d wondered how you got that name.”

  Jeremiah managed a half-smile. “Not for anything noteworthy save my inattention. I like to think that wouldn’t happen now.”

  “Hmm,” she murmured, leaving him wondering did she mean something by it. When he couldn’t catch her eye he picked up his tale again.

  “The farmer never let on that Hannah was his wife, her child his. They’d yet to speak to one another, though he knew she’d seen him there in the town. He was much talked of, the hapless white man who wanted to be Shawnee. He’d had no firm plan in mind, aside from watching for a chance to get near Hannah. Time wasn’t on their side. The baby was but a month away from being born, and the longer he waited, the less likely Hannah would be able to travel. But as chance would have it, they were provided the opportunity of escape a week after his
adoption.”

  “How?” Clare interjected.

  “She was beginning to be trusted, allowed to do simple tasks alone, such as draw water at the creek. The farmer was trusted like a brother and could go where he wished by then. He took advantage of that, of the kindness and trust of his new brother, stashing a hatchet, a blanket, other items of use, in a hollow log a mile upstream along the creek. Of course when the moment came, one morning before dawn, they had to leave with next to nothing, save a desperation greater than their wisdom. Still they made it a fair ways before…”

  Jeremiah paused, watching Clare move from the kettle to the cup of tea now steeping on a stone at the fire’s edge. “Before?”

  “The baby came two days out from Cornstalk’s Town,” he said. “Though the farmer did what he could, his wife and newborn son…they both died.”

  Clare had stilled, letting the soup bubble, the tea steam, the fire crackle on. She stared at him, absorbing the stark words.

  “Jeremiah…I’m sorry.” Comprehension filled her gaze. “That day at the wagon, when you found me…?”

  “I was plumb terrified. I knew the worst that could happen.”

  “But you faced it. One or both of us might well have died if you hadn’t.”

  “There was no choice, Clare. I couldn’t have left you. The Almighty lent me the courage I needed. And I’m thankful.”

  “You are?” she asked, as if he couldn’t possibly mean it.

  He held her gaze. “Of course I am.”

  She was the first to look away. “What happened then?”

  “Falling Hawk and a few other warriors came after us. Found me sitting by the bodies, still stained with blood. He took us back, and I didn’t resist. Hannah and the baby were buried in their custom.”

  He was no longer speaking as if of another, but Clare didn’t seem to notice the change. She’d risen and brought him the tea, which he took, warm in his hands, and sipped.

  It hurt going down, but the honey was sweet.

  “I don’t recall this next part well. I mind telling Falling Hawk the truth, that Hannah had been my wife, her child mine. I’d come among them to take her back. No other reason. He was furious, hurt, but he let Split-Moon decide my fate since Hannah was his daughter. I think they’d come to love her, those two, for the short time they had her.”

  He told this part as quickly as he could. How Split-Moon hadn’t believed Jeremiah’s taking his daughter away was the cause of her death. It would have happened no matter where she was at the time. He told Falling Hawk what he wanted done with Jeremiah. “Send him away. If he comes back, he is Panther-Sees-Him, a Shawnee, and a brother. If not, he is a Long Knife and an enemy of no matter and no name. Then if we see him again we will kill him.”

  “They let me decide,” Jeremiah said, still feeling an echo of the amazement he’d felt then, not quite dulled by shock and grief. “I left and wandered eastward, hardly caring where I aimed. I was ready to wander till death found me and I could go be with Hannah, our son. That might’ve been how the story of Jem Ringbloom ended had Logan not stumbled across me. Literally, I mean. But this part you maybe don’t want to hear?”

  Clare’s gaze had sharpened at mention of her husband’s murderer; a crease formed between her brows, but she said, “You once told me Logan was your friend. I want to know why.”

  So he told her.

  Weakened from hunger, exposure—it was late November with winter closing in—he’d laid himself down on a thread of a path, somewhere east of the Muskingum River, deciding that was far enough. He was done. Buckskins covered in frost, he’d appeared to Logan and his hunters like a rock lying across the trail. Logan, in the van, stepped on him as one would a rock.

  “He felt the give of flesh beneath his foot and went down in a tangle with the warrior coming behind him. Both fell atop me.”

  He smiled faintly, again not really remembering that part. Logan had told him of it later, once he had Jeremiah carried to his hunting camp, warmed and fed and forced to go on living.

  Logan had saved his life, but more than that. He’d taken Jeremiah back to his lodge, given him a place to heal, a space of time to think, many nights of talking and listening and smoking around the fire, when certainly the man had more pressing matters to attend to with winter coming and kin to provide for. But he’d never once made Jeremiah feel there was anything more important than listening to his rambling on about his losses, his pain, his path.

  In the end Jeremiah had known he didn’t want to go back to his old life in Virginia. Not without Hannah and their child.

  “But I had another place, another people, if my heart was big enough to embrace them, accept them. Forgive them. Logan helped me see that; he’d already suffered losses at the hands of whites and yet he remained committed to friendship between our peoples.”

  Ironic, given the turn things had taken back in spring. And tragic. But back then Jeremiah had taken Logan’s example to heart. He’d chosen forgiveness and, in returning, accepted it from Falling Hawk.

  For a while, the first year especially, he’d made that choice to forgive many times. Eventually he’d learned to appreciate the Shawnees’ way of life, to see their strengths as a people. Their devotion to family. Their generosity. Their fierce loyalty. Their ability to live off the land without overburdening it. Their love for and deep connection to that land.

  Not long after, he began to meet the traders who crossed the frontier, from Pittsburgh and points east. They told him how he could be useful to the Indian agents at Fort Pitt. If he wanted to be.

  He made the journey back east his second summer living as a Shawnee, told his story in brief, and before he left Pittsburgh had offered his services as an interpreter, guide, and message bearer when needed.

  He’d given his name as Jeremiah Ring.

  “And that’s how our paths came to cross,” he said, ending his story at last. “Yet I’ve never believed any of it was happenstance. I knew the Almighty was guiding things. It’s just…we don’t always see the path clear, much less any other path that crosses it or runs alongside it for a time. We don’t get the eagle’s view. Sometimes we look around and it’s like being hemmed by a thicket of thorns. But it’s there.”

  He longed to lay back and rest now but waited. Clare had set a bowl of corn soup down by him and taken her own to the low table, but hadn’t touched it yet.

  “What is there?” she asked.

  “The way forward. It’ll be shown us.”

  Talking had wearied him, but telling her of Hannah hadn’t hurt as deeply as he’d expected it to. He felt ready to lay down the past, leave it there, and move on. If Clare and Pippa—Jacob too, God willing—would be there for him to carry instead.

  Though he was long in coming to this place of healing, of looking ahead in the way of the heart, it would be foolish to expect Clare to have arrived with him. She was still in the midst of her turmoil as he’d been so long ago. Yet for the first time since Hannah’s death, he yearned to be a covering for a woman. To protect her. Provide for her. Let her into his heart as far as she wanted to come.

  Philip Inglesby had broken her trust. Circumstances had tested her faith nigh to its breaking point. Would she ever find it in her to trust a man again? Or for that matter, the Almighty?

  Clare knew it was inevitable if she remained among the Shawnees long enough, but she hadn’t expected it so soon; two days after sharing tea and cakes with Crosses-the-Path, it became necessary for her to spend time in the women’s lodge, sequestered with those waiting out the days of their monthly courses. She’d no choice in the matter. No woman was allowed to be near men or come in contact with their possessions during this time. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t Shawnee. The women would force her to comply with their custom, Jeremiah had warned her, else the warriors would be incensed.

  Though she didn’t know any of the women present when she arrived, and none spoke English, having brought Pippa into the lodge with her seemed all the bridge needed
to span the language chasm. From the youngest to the oldest, each wanted to coo over Pippa. Those few who had nursing babies found it amusing to place the naked little ones side by side to compare their looks.

  Clare indulged their curiosity, until toward evening when Pippa became fretful.

  Shifting the baby from shoulder to shoulder, Clare paced the crowded lodge, trying not to infringe upon another woman’s space. Pippa’s crying kept many wakeful, for which Clare apologized repeatedly, having learned those Shawnee words early on. The women lifted weary heads in the firelight or grumbled and turned over in their furs, no longer charmed by the fussy white infant.

  Clare thought of Jacob through the wakeful hours, but now her mind was nearly as filled with thoughts of Jeremiah. Her heart was heavy for all he’d endured, the grief and guilt he’d lived with—though he hadn’t expressed the latter, she sensed he carried that weight.

  The night passed with little sleep for anyone. In the morning the door-hide was moved aside as several of the women left and a new one entered—Rain Crow.

  By then Clare was fraught with exhaustion and rising apprehension, and Pippa was flushed with fever.

  “She’s got whatever Jeremiah had.” Though still plagued by that rattling cough, Jeremiah had been up and about when Clare left for the women’s lodge.

  “Panther-Sees-Him is well,” Rain Crow informed her, having spread her bedding on a nearby sleeping bench. “Your baby will come through too. She is white.”

  The words seemed unsympathetic, until Clare recalled having heard that Indians died more easily than whites of some sicknesses. Rain Crow likely meant it as a simple statement of fact. But Pippa was so tiny. As the day passed, Clare hovered over her baby, ignoring the women who chatted or sewed or tended the communal kettle of corn soup. Pippa wouldn’t nurse for more than a moment before breaking off to cry pitiably. By the end of that second day, her fever hadn’t broken and there was a rattle in her chest when she breathed.

  “We must do something,” Clare said to no one in particular. “I should leave.”