by Lori Benton
“Do you bleed still?”
She looked up to find Rain Crow at her side. “Yes, but—”
“Then you must not leave.” Rain Crow turned to talk with several women nearby.
“What are you saying?”
Rain Crow ignored her until the conversation concluded.
“We talk of what to do. That one,” she said, nodding toward a young woman who, her time there ended, was gathering up her belongings. “She will bring what is needed.”
“Medicine?”
“You will see.”
Clare ground her teeth in frustration. Pippa awakened, and she picked her up, a hot, whimpering bundle. She knew she needed to pray but feared the Almighty wouldn’t wish to hear from her after holding Him at arm’s length for so long.
Desperation won out over shame. If You really do care about sparrows, then surely my baby means something to You. Please make her well. Clare shot glances at the women who watched her. And keep these women from doing anything that’s going to make Pippa worse.
Feeling trapped and at their mercy, she trembled with fatigue and dread for whatever they had planned.
She hadn’t long to wait.
Voices outside the door-hide heralded the arrival of several women, among them Crosses-the-Path, bearing a steaming tin cup.
“This fever tea.” With Rain Crow’s help, Crosses-the-Path communicated that Clare should get Pippa to swallow as much of the cup’s contents as she could. Even a few mouthfuls would help.
“Willow bark,” Rain Crow said, sniffing it. “With maple sugar, I think.”
Clare nodded, her own pounding head in need of such a tea, as other women came in and out of the lodge, carrying smooth river stones. They took them to the fire and lay them in the embers. Others brought woven mats, which they unrolled and spread against the bark walls above the sleeping benches, sealing any cracks. Still others had water in skins.
Crosses-the-Path had carried in a tight-woven basket. It held water too, but she didn’t put it near the fire as the rest of the women were doing. She poked a finger into the water and said, “Cold. You put on baby?”
She produced a wad of cloths and made motions of submerging them in the water.
Rain Crow joined them. “She fetched that from a spring. It will stay cold longer. Soak those pads and put them on your daughter to cool her fever. She will not like it, but do it. Then steam will help her here.” Rain Crow put a hand to her chest.
“Steam?”
“We are making this a sweat lodge for your baby. Everyone agrees it is best for the breathing to clear.”
Clare had heard of sweat lodges but had thought they were a thing men used—for ceremony. “Will that work?”
Rain Crow offered no reassurance. “We will see.”
Clare had given up trying to stem the tide of sweat making runnels down her face and neck, soaking her shirt until it clung like a second skin. The warmth of the lodge was stupefying. So far it didn’t seem to be helping Pippa; her fever had broken after applying the cooling compresses, but her little chest still rattled with labored breathing.
The women endured the discomfort with diplomatic fortitude. A few, stripped to their skirts, had stayed awake into the night to heat stones or pour water over them to create the steam. Once they’d gotten the steam going, Clare had slept from sheer exhaustion, while Rain Crow watched over Pippa, but between the heat and worry she’d soon awakened.
Two other women were awake, one still in her teens, the other older than Clare by a few years. That one was minding the steam but also rocking where she sat and murmuring to herself, a sound like the distant drone of bees.
“What is she saying?” A portion of the fire still burned for the heating of their food and the stones, but it had sunk to embers. The smoke-hole in the bark roof above was covered. Clare could just make out Rain Crow’s features as the woman turned to her.
“She prays for your daughter’s life.”
Clare blinked, sweat stinging her eyes, making the dim figures around her swim. “Prays to whom?”
“The Great Spirit—Moneto.” Rain Crow stared at her, eyes glinting with challenge, but just then it didn’t matter that Clare believed the woman prayed to a being that didn’t exist. She couldn’t stop the tears that welled.
The praying woman glanced up, as if she knew they spoke of her. Clare reached for her, grasping her hand all slick with sweat, and gave it a squeeze. “Niyaawe,” she said, thanking her.
Rain Crow was staring at her hard when she pulled back, the taut skin of her face glistening with sweat. “You are not offended?”
“That she cares enough about Pippa to pray for her?”
Rain Crow cut the thick, humid air with a motion of her hand. “That is not what I mean. Do you not pray to Jesus and the Almighty, as Panther-Sees-Him still does?”
Jeremiah prayed. She knew that. Their lodge was small and it was impossible to hide such things. But her own faith, or lack thereof, wasn’t a subject Clare wanted to discuss with this woman.
“I pray to the Almighty,” she said, for it was strictly true even if her prayers for Jacob’s return had gone unanswered, all her prayers for her life with Philip come to naught. “I prayed for my daughter.”
Even she heard the doubt in her voice.
“You do not believe the Almighty will heal her?” Rain Crow asked.
“I hope so.”
“Hope.” The word sounded desolate on Rain Crow’s lips. Her baby had died of sickness a little over a year ago, along with her husband. What sort of sickness had it been? Something like what Pippa had now?
“It was the spotting sickness,” Rain Crow said, as though Clare had asked the question. “That is what killed my husband and son. It took away many, leaving those it did not kill covered in horrible scars.”
But not Rain Crow. Her skin was smooth, unblemished by illness.
“I’m sorry,” Clare said, knowing not what else to say.
Rain Crow’s face hardened. “Why?”
“Because I know such pain. My husband was killed in the mountains before my son was taken. The Mingo, Logan, killed him.”
“Whites killed his family. They killed mine.”
Clare flinched at her vehemence. “Didn’t you just say it was smallpox—spotting sickness?”
“White man’s sickness. More deadly to my people than soldiers and guns. Why should I pray to a God who favors one people over another? Who makes one strong and another weak? He is the God of all peoples, the Moravians say. So my mother believes despite everything we have lost. A God of forgiveness and peace! Why then do His people not follow His ways? Why do my people melt like morning dew before such a bad-behaving people as yours?”
The woman who had gone back to her praying fell silent. She got up and went to her sleeping place, leaving them alone by the steaming stones with Pippa.
Clare’s face heated, as if she’d been unfairly slapped. This woman who held her son captive was talking about the bad behavior of her people?
Yet it was true what she said. Indians hadn’t fared well in the face of ever-encroaching settlement. They were pushed westward, or they tried to become like the whites, whether from sincere desire or out of desperation to survive. Had not she and Philip been on their way to claim a piece of what had been their hunting grounds south of the Ohio River? She opened her mouth but was at a loss to answer such piercing questions. Or the pain behind them. She lifted her hands in helplessness.
“I don’t know why your people have lost so much. I don’t know why you have lost so much. I don’t know why Philip was killed and Jacob taken from me. I don’t know why Jeremiah found me or why you of all people…” She shook her head. “I don’t know why the Almighty let it happen. I don’t know what He means by any of it.”
She’d stood on this precipice of doubt before, staring down at the raw pit. But when had that pit so widened?
Maybe the better question was when had the first crack in her faith occurred? Surely long
before Philip’s final foolish notion of leaving Virginia for the wilds of Kentucky. She’d grown increasingly disillusioned over the course of her marriage—not just with Philip but with the Almighty and His care of them. She’d had a strong faith in God until she married Philip. Or so she’d thought. Had it only been untested?
“We don’t always see the path clear,” she blurted, and wondered where those words had sprung from, until she recalled Jeremiah speaking them as he lay sick. “Sometimes we get hemmed in by…by a thicket of thorns, and there’s nowhere to go…but the way will be shown.”
Rain Crow didn’t scoff at the borrowed, comfortless words, as Clare had expected. She opened her mouth, then shut it and looked away.
Clare thought their conversation at an end, but after a moment Rain Crow said in a tone less hostile, “When my husband lay covered in sores, he said a thing to me this talk of paths makes me remember. He said it comes down to whether or not we believe God is what He says He is, a Father with a good path for His children to walk, no matter what that looks like to us on this side of death, whether it be a hard steep path full of stones or a long dry trudge or a gentle path through rich grasses by streams of water to drink. Or all of that at different times. There is nothing that can separate us from His love.”
Clare clung to the words, those of a man who had known his path through this life was ending at a hard place, yet who obviously hadn’t felt himself abandoned by the God he’d left his people to serve. The pain in her chest was raw.
Silence hung, broken only by the snores of women sleeping badly and the rattle of a sick baby’s breathing.
“Do you believe that?” she finally asked.
Rain Crow looked at her, sweat running down her face like tears. “Do you?”
“I want to.” Clare looked the other woman in the eyes and finished silently, But you have my son.
Gray edged the door-hide before Pippa’s breath caught and she made a choking sound. Clare had dozed sitting up. Jarred awake, she reached for her daughter. Before she had Pippa to her shoulder the baby coughed. A wad of mucus shot from her mouth to land on the packed-earth floor. Pippa’s wail was interrupted by a further string of coughing.
Rain Crow started awake, saw what was happening, and retrieved the pads they’d used to cool Pippa’s fever and began wiping up the mess.
“Wesah,” she said, even as she winced at the wracking cough that kept thwarting Pippa’s cries.
Around the lodge other women stirred, murmuring to each other, blinking like sleepy owls at the baby propped on Clare’s lap.
Clare patted the convulsing little back, soothing her, bracing her. Gradually the women began to set about making food or bathing. No one heated the stones again. Hopefully they wouldn’t be needed.
Pippa settled down to nurse after a time, though she continued to cough, and finally fell into a more peaceful sleep, the rattle in her chest less pronounced.
Arms shaking, ears buzzing with fatigue, Clare lay the baby down.
“She will be well,” Rain Crow said, coming to set a corn cake baked in ashes next to Clare. “Though if that rattle doesn’t go away by tonight…more steam, I think.”
Clare felt a hot, tight pain in her throat and knew it wasn’t from sickness. “Thank you.”
Rain Crow pretended she hadn’t heard.
Another day passed. One of the women left the lodge. Three more arrived. Crosses-the-Path came to the door and was told of Pippa’s improvement. She went to tell Jeremiah, who was, “Much worry you, baby.”
Clare and Rain Crow sat near Pippa, talking little, listening to the chatter in the lodge.
Night fell. Pippa’s chest sounded little better. They heated the stones and made more steam. The women around them resignedly stripped to their skin, most of them, and lay down to sleep as best they could.
Into the long silence Rain Crow asked, “The father of Many Sparrows who is dead. Will you tell me of him?”
Clare stared at the woman, debating asking why Rain Crow wanted to know—she having stated that talking of the dead was not a thing Shawnees habitually did—but swallowed back the question.
“His name was Philip Inglesby. We married when we were very young. I was nineteen.” She fumbled her way through, not knowing what about Philip or the troubled patchwork of a life they’d stitched together would be of interest to a Shawnee woman who didn’t know that world, whose only exposure to whites was the Moravian missionaries, traders, and men like Jeremiah.
Rain Crow listened in silence, taking Pippa on her lap at one point and patting her, wiping up after each coughing spell.
When Clare stopped, having come to the point where Philip refused to wait in Redstone for a boat to be built to take them down the Monongahela to Pittsburgh, Rain Crow was silent so long Clare decided that was the end of the conversation.
“My husband was born Delaware,” she said at last, “but the name he had among them I will not speak. He was known to the missionaries as Josiah.”
Not letting on she knew this already, Clare watched Rain Crow as she spoke. The woman kept her gaze fixed on the top of Pippa’s head, where blond hair lay plastered to her tender scalp. She bent her face as if to kiss Pippa’s crown, then stiffened and drew her head erect, meeting Clare’s gaze.
“We had a son born to us a year after we married. The day he was born I looked into his eyes and saw the man he would be. The good things he would do. Three moons later, when he was the age your daughter is now, all that was taken away.”
Rain Crow pressed her chin to the top of Pippa’s head, holding the baby in cradling arms. She didn’t seem to want or need Clare to say anything. Especially not I’m sorry.
Clare wasn’t sorry. Or if she was, it was drowned by her rage. She wanted to scream at the woman. If you understand such pain, why are you trying to take all of that away from me?
She knew she mustn’t say such words. Must not—must not. But she had to say something or burst.
“Why do you call him Many Sparrows?”
Rain Crow’s gaze sharpened as her head lifted. “That is his name.”
“I mean why did you choose it? Do you know the verse in Scripture that speaks of sparrows falling?”
Rain Crow shook her head. “That is not the reason for the name.”
“What then?”
“You must know,” Rain Crow said impatiently, as if coming so near to acknowledging Clare’s maternal connection to Jacob was a source of disquiet. “He chatters like many birds all together. Like a flock of sparrows in a field.”
Clare put a hand to her mouth, but couldn’t hold back the startled burst of laughter that escaped. In a voice pitched high to mimic Jacob’s she exclaimed, “Mama—Mama, let me tell you something!”
Other women broke off conversations to look their way. Clare was only dimly aware of them. Her vision was full of Rain Crow, of the mirth filling her eyes and curving her mouth in a smile she tried hard to suppress, but couldn’t.
“Yes,” she said. “Like that.”
And Rain Crow laughed with her.
Pippa was nearly over her cough and long over the fever the morning Clare left the women’s lodge, abandoning Rain Crow to another day of confinement—two, if Clare was lucky. She went straight to the lodge of Crosses-the-Path, arriving as the woman was feeding her daughters and Jacob, who she was watching for Rain Crow. Seeing Clare at the doorway, he abandoned his food. She pressed him close, all sun-browned and sun-bleached. “Jacob.”
“I’m called Many Sparrows now,” he reminded her.
Clare’s smile faltered. “You’re still Jacob—to me and to your sister. Remember your sister?”
“Pippa!” He craned his neck to see the baby in the cradleboard.
Clare didn’t bend down. Crosses-the-Path stood by the fire, watching them uneasily. Clare’s heart thudded as she said, “I’ll be taking Many Sparrows with me now. He’ll stay with me and Panther-Sees-Him until Rain Crow…until she is able to care for him again.”
&n
bsp; She was both thrilled and angered to be saying the words. She hadn’t dared to ask for such a thing, though the thought had crossed her mind and she’d been sorely tempted. Then, moments before she left the women’s lodge, Rain Crow had stopped her and said, “Many Sparrows is staying in Falling Hawk’s lodge, but you may take him to yours—until I am done here.”
She’d added that last sharply, looking hard at Clare, who understood this was some sort of test. Could she be trusted to give this son of contention back when Rain Crow demanded it?
“Rain Crow not say me this—yes or no,” Crosses-the-Path said with patent reluctance. “She say you yes?”
Clare kept her hand buried in Jacob’s long curls, wanting with all her heart to scoop him into her arms and run like the dickens—far past Jeremiah’s lodge.
“Moments ago. You can go to the lodge and ask her for yourself.”
Crosses-the-Path spoke briefly to her eldest daughter, who rose from the fire and slipped out of the lodge. The girl was back in moments, nodding her head vigorously at her mother’s question.
Crosses-the-Path shrugged and smiled, waving her off, and Clare headed to Jeremiah’s lodge with both her children in her care for the first time since Pippa’s birth.
If only for a day. Maybe two.
If she could have stopped time that day, she’d have done so. Jacob’s incessant questions made her feel more like herself than she had since they’d left Uncle Alphus’s farm. While she cooked or mended clothing, or Jacob played with his baby sister or explored the unfamiliar lodge, he talked and talked and Clare listened. So did Jeremiah who, reassured that Rain Crow had given her consent to the arrangement, entered into their conversations and their play, carrying on with Jacob when she needed to tend to Pippa—who’s appetite had returned and then some—showing the boy his rifle and hunting pouch, Wolf-Alone’s bow and arrows.
Where Wolf-Alone was Clare didn’t know but hoped he would stay there. She liked it, the four of them together.
That night Clare didn’t fall asleep as soon as Pippa was settled, as was her custom. Not even when she lay Jacob down, talked out and exhausted at last. She was afraid to close her eyes, afraid to miss a moment with her son. In the past few months he seemed to have grown inches in height. It filled her with pride even as it broke her heart.