Many Sparrows

by Lori Benton

  Liked it far too much.

  Was that liking preventing her from releasing control of this tangled situation in her heart?

  Things had been better this past moon, as the nights were growing cooler and the harvest coming in—better between his sister and Clare. The women were working together in the fields most days, and there had been no incidents of tension between them. Rain Crow was allowing Clare and Jacob to converse as they wished—under her watchful gaze.

  After parting from Falling Hawk, Jeremiah found Clare in the lodge settling Pippa to sleep. He entered quietly, and she greeted him with a smile, looking past him for Jacob, who more and more could be found trailing in his shadow, much as Wildcat did Wolf-Alone. But not today.

  Her disappointment was visible as she stood from the sleeping bench and crossed the lodge. “The council went long. What was decided?”

  “The other chiefs will go against Cornstalk. It remains now for the women to decide. They’re the last chance for peace. They’ll meet tomorrow morning at Nonhelema’s Town.”

  Clare raised her brows at that. “They could stop the men going to war?”

  “They could.”

  “And if they do?”

  “Cornstalk will send a message to Dunmore asking to meet in council.” Perhaps he’d be the one to take that message, let the white half of his world know he hadn’t fallen off a cliff or drowned in a river somewhere. Curious to know her thoughts, he asked, “What do you think will happen?”

  “I think there’ll be fighting.” When he looked at her sharply, questioning, Clare added, “I hear the women talking. I understand more than they think I do.” She pulled her lower lip between her teeth, studying him. “What will you do if the men go to fight?”

  There was a tightness in his chest. “It might be different was I away running messages. I could maybe avoid having to choose. But I’m here and…I’m Shawnee, Clare.”

  “But you’re still a Virginian, too, in the employ of the Crown.”

  “I am. Though by now they must’ve written me off for dead.”

  Her face went white at that, and he wished he’d phrased the sentiment otherwise. He hadn’t meant to unnerve her or throw a shadow over her heart, and yet…did that look of apprehension mean she cared whether he lived or died? Or had he simply reminded her of Philip?

  He’d managed thus far to avoid having this conversation, distracted as she’d been with Jacob. Truth to tell, he was as torn between his identity as a Shawnee and a Virginian as he’d been torn between Rain Crow’s heart and Clare’s.

  “What will you do?” she asked again.

  Jeremiah searched his heart, standing there before this woman he’d never expected to enter his life. He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to stay with her. Protect her. And everyone she loved.

  But what would he do?

  The women were having their council at Nonhelema’s Town, but neither Clare nor Crosses-the-Path had attended—Clare because she had no place there, and Crosses-the-Path because she was too unassuming to voice her opinion in such a setting, whatever that opinion might have been. She hadn’t chosen to share it with Clare, other than to shrug and say in Shawnee, “The women will decide what they decide, with me there or not.”

  Whether or not she intended to have an active say in matters, Rain Crow had crossed the creek to attend the council, for when Clare arrived at Falling Hawk’s door-hide, no smoke ascended from the roof-hole of the neighboring lodge.

  “Did she take Many Sparrows with her?” Clare asked before she and Crosses-the-Path and her eldest daughter got down to the business of slicing the squash and pumpkins harvested the previous day and laying them out to dry in the sun. On a blanket nearby, Crosses-the-Path’s youngest daughter sat with Pippa who, at nearly five months, wasn’t yet crawling but needed to be watched.

  “She no say me keep,” Crosses-the-Path said in English. “So maybe.”

  Disappointment stabbed. If Shawnee women could talk at such a venue as long as could their men, did Rain Crow expect a boy his age to sit still so many hours?

  His age. Four years old, but not for long. Clare wasn’t certain of the date but thought it still September. Jacob’s birthday was the twelfth of October.

  She’d ask Jeremiah if he knew the date when next she saw him. Might he help her with a gift? Perhaps make Jacob a bow of his own? He’d been using one Wildcat had outgrown.

  There was a prodigious amount of squash and pumpkins to cut and dry, including the seeds, removed with the pulpy innards. Their talk was sporadic as they worked, leaving Clare with space for thinking. Jeremiah hadn’t given her an answer about what he meant to do if the rest of the Shawnee men left to fight. Including his brothers. What would happen to her and Pippa and Jacob if he did go off to fight?

  She glanced aside at the young woman working diligently beside her, outwardly unruffled by what her Shawnee sisters across the creek were that moment discussing.

  “Where would you go?” Clare asked, raising the back of a pulp-covered hand to brush away a tickling strand of hair come loose from her braid. “You and the children, if Dunmore’s army comes here?”

  Crosses-the-Path looked up from the pumpkin slices she’d been arranging on a rack of thin wood strips. “Come threaten this town?”

  “What if they do here as they did at Wakatomica?” She looked round at the lodges nearby, quieter with many of the women and children gone to the council. She couldn’t imagine it in ashes. Didn’t want to imagine such a thing.

  “Women, children hide—or go.” Crosses-the-Path waved toward the creek and the lands to the west. “Maybe come back, build again. Maybe not.”

  Clare had deduced as much from observing the refugees from Wakatomica, most of whom had left their temporary lodging in the Scioto towns for a new site where Wakatomica had been rebuilt, somewhere to the west.

  “But what about this?” Clare asked, spreading shiny hands over the vegetables before them. “And the corn we’ve harvested? You couldn’t carry it all away even with the warning of a week.”

  The people had horses that could carry some in packs, but likely they would be used to carry people, the weak, old, and sick. Some, like Nonhelema and her brothers, had herds of cattle, cumbersome to drive away ahead of an attacking army. Then there were all these lodges and everything they contained.

  Crosses-the-Path nodded. “Much lost when soldiers come. Hunger follow. But we run. We live.”

  Clare didn’t voice her underlying fear that she would be pushed along with them if the people were forced to run, she and Pippa and Jacob borne like flotsam on a tide deeper into the wilderness. Unless Rain Crow finally gave Jacob back to her and Jeremiah led them away from such turmoil.

  She was running out of time.

  When she took up Pippa on her hip and left Falling Hawk’s lodge for the day, she paused to stand gazing at Rain Crow’s lodge. She detected no sign or sound of Jacob within.

  The need to set eyes on him, to know he was well, turned her feet toward the creek instead of Jeremiah’s lodge.

  Though he’d left early to hunt with Falling Hawk and others eager to get meat for their families before the need to fight was upon them, Jeremiah had promised to return by nightfall. No doubt he would be hungry. Likely Rain Crow had taken Jacob with her and any searching for her son would be time wasted. Still she had a few moments to check the creek where the children liked to play. If Jacob wasn’t there, she would return to the lodge.

  But Jacob was at the creek, crouched on the ground with Wildcat and several other boys, poking at a pair of toads one of them had captured.

  “Jacob!” she called, just as she caught sight of Wolf-Alone coming toward the boys from the opposite direction.

  At her call the boys broke apart, one of them taking up the toads, as Wildcat greeted Wolf-Alone and Jacob sprang up and ran to her.

  She knelt with Pippa clasped to her side and gave her son a one-armed hug, reveling as always in the little boy smell of him, sweat and dir
t and sun and grass, the feel of his small body alive with vigor.

  “What have you been doing all day, and who have you been doing it with?”

  “You smell like pumpkins.” Jacob stepped back and looked her over. “I was with Split-Moon and Wildcat and those other boys. Listen, Mama—we found toads! Come see!”

  He’d taken her by the hand to lead her back to the boys, then saw those with the toads had scampered off. Still he led her toward Wildcat and Wolf-Alone.

  “Why were you with Split-Moon, not Crosses-the-Path?” she asked, feeling the deprivation, knowing she might have spent this day with Jacob had she but known where he was.

  “I don’t know,” Jacob said.

  Before she could inquire the same of Wildcat, Wolf-Alone addressed her in Shawnee. “Panther-Sees-Him wishes to speak with you.”

  She looked up at the tall Indian, struck as she sometimes was by his imposing face with those fiercely slanted brows that, in her opinion, kept him from being quite devastatingly handsome. Except on the rare occasions he smiled. “He does?”

  “Yes. Now.” To Clare’s surprise Wolf-Alone took her by the arm and steered her away from the boys, speaking to Wildcat again in Shawnee, telling him to look after Jacob.

  It seemed whatever Jeremiah wished to say to her was urgent.

  “All right,” she said, gripping Pippa to her side. “Jacob? I’ll see you soon.”

  She looked back and caught a last sight of her son as he called, “ ’Bye, Mama!”

  Pulling from Wolf-Alone’s grasp, she hurried to match his pace back to the village.

  “Your Shawnee is improving,” he said as they walked, speaking low and in English so none but she would hear.

  “Niyaawe,” she said, surprised by the compliment. “You’re just back from scouting?”

  “I am. I haven’t been to our lodge.”

  “Then how do…?” She halted, shifting Pippa to her shoulder. Wolf-Alone halted as well. “Has Jeremiah returned from hunting?”

  “Hunting?”

  “He left this morning.” She frowned, enlightened and annoyed. “Jeremiah doesn’t wish to speak to me. You do.”

  Wolf-Alone nearly grinned. “My brother always wishes to speak to you. I think you know this.”

  To her mortification, Clare blushed. “What is it you wish to say?”

  Wolf-Alone’s face sobered. He glanced around, saw no one was near enough to overhear them, then leaned toward her slightly. “It’s about Wildcat. If anything happens to me, if I don’t return from the battle…”

  Alarmed, Clare cut in, “Battle? The women haven’t come from their council, have they?”

  Wolf-Alone shook his head. “But that army’s coming on, well supplied, many men. They don’t come westward for a frolic in the wood.”

  Clare looked back toward the creek, but Wildcat and Jacob had gone off to play elsewhere. The need to find her son, to have him within reach, was nearly irresistible. “What were you going to ask about Wildcat?”

  “I want you to look after him, take him as your own, if I don’t survive.”

  She jerked her head around sharply, meeting his amber gaze. “What of Split-Moon? Surely he won’t fight?”

  “Whatever happens to Split-Moon, I want you and Panther-Sees-Him to take Wildcat with you when you leave the Shawnees.”

  The man was full of surprises today. “Why do you say we’re leaving? Has Jeremiah said something to you?”

  Wolf-Alone raised a hand. “He hasn’t spoken of it to me. But you will leave. Both of you. This isn’t the place for you, and I think…I think the place for him is wherever you are. And I don’t want Wildcat to remain here without me.”

  Clare’s thoughts were in a spin. Jeremiah’s place was with her? And he didn’t want Wildcat to live with the Shawnees?

  What was it about that boy this warrior was holding so closely to his chest?

  “Wildcat has no memory of any other life,” she said, “and he has a father here. Why shouldn’t he stay?”

  “It will break that old man’s heart, but…” Wolf-Alone again hesitated, looking on the verge of telling her something more. Then he grasped her hand and held it firm. “Clare, please. Promise me you’ll take him with you, back to Virginia.”

  Whatever else he’d meant to do, Wolf-Alone had thoroughly rattled her. She’d never seen such emotion in the man before. Nor had she ever heard him sound less like an Indian. Even his cadence of speech had changed.

  “I cannot take that boy from his father. I won’t.”

  “Split-Moon isn’t…”

  “Isn’t his father?” she prompted when he hesitated. “Is that what you were going to say?”

  “No. Never mind it, Clare. Just, please, think about what I asked.” Wolf-Alone gazed down at her, his scrutiny hard, then he nodded once, let go her hand, and strode away.

  She could have made no other response to the astonishing request than she had, she thought. Right or wrong to begin with, Wildcat was Shawnee now. Taking him away from Split-Moon would be no better than kidnapping—unless she had some means to learn who his white parents were. If Wolf-Alone knew, he’d have said so, wouldn’t he?

  The warrior hadn’t told her everything. She was certain of it. But she also knew that pressing him would serve no purpose. Either he would choose to tell her or he wouldn’t.

  What she ought to have asked about was what he’d seen down on the Kanawha, how near he’d come to the approaching army, whether he might even have glimpsed her uncle.

  But no. That was just as pointless. Wolf-Alone wouldn’t know Alphus Litchfield if her uncle stepped from the woods to hail him.

  The day after the women’s council ended with a declaration of battle, Clare went to the fields to harvest more pumpkins with Pippa in her cradleboard strapped to her back. Crosses-the-Path and her daughters went with her, as did Jacob. Suffering a headache that made the sunlight unbearable, Rain Crow had remained in her lodge to work on preserving produce already brought in from the fields.

  The threat of coming violence sought to press upon Clare’s spirit and fill her thoughts with anxiety, but just now—this blissful now with Jacob scouting the sprawling vines and hillocks for ripe pumpkins—she could almost believe he was hers again, that at day’s end he would return with her to Jeremiah’s lodge, eat food she prepared, then sleep under her watchful eye.

  Crouched in the morning chill with a buckhorn knife in one hand, a pumpkin’s spiraling stem in the other, she raised her face to the autumn sun, bright through closed lids, and was rocked by a contentment so deep she thought maybe she could live this life—be Shawnee—if that was what it took to have both her children near like this. Had the Almighty not answered her pleas for Jacob’s return because, for whatever unimaginable reason, He wanted her to be Shawnee?

  Wolf-Alone didn’t think so. “This isn’t the place for you.”

  Jacob’s voice broke into her thoughts.

  “Found one, Mama! Wesah. Come see!” he came running, hair shining like flax, chattering in a hodgepodge of English and Shawnee.

  “Did you, clever boy? Let me cut this one first. But no, first I’m going to hug you!”

  She dropped the knife and scooped her son into her arms. With Pippa squealing in her cradleboard at the sudden movement, she stood and swooped him high into the autumn sky, the both of them laughing.

  But her boy wasn’t tiny anymore. He was sturdy and solid. She couldn’t hold him aloft as once she’d done on a farm far to the east.

  Back on his feet, he raced off to stand guard over the pumpkin he’d found lest Crosses-the-Path’s daughters claim it.

  Clare knelt to sever the one at her feet, thinking more soberly now but as intensely: could she truly be content thus? Raising Pippa among the Shawnees, living with them? With Jeremiah…

  Married to Jeremiah? She wasn’t blind to his feelings for her, though she could tell he tried to hide them.

  It was a question she set aside for the present, afraid to delve into h
er heart and discover there some unexpected desire. It would only cloud her thinking. She must do what was best for her children first and keep her own needs, her wants, out of it.

  Jeremiah might try to hide his feelings for her, however deep they went, but to his feelings for Pippa he’d given free rein. The man was besotted with her daughter. That time she’d come upon him holding her, the two of them asleep, hadn’t been the last such moment she’d witnessed. Now that he’d been allowed to see Jacob, to act toward him as an uncle in the Shawnee way of reckoning, it was clear he was fond of her son as well. He’d good things to say of Jacob, and it warmed her heart to hear them, yet it pained her to see her son adapting to Shawnee life.

  This wasn’t the life she’d choose given the freedom—and possession of her children—to do so. But if Jeremiah could be a part of Jacob’s life, and through Jeremiah she to some degree, then her son would never forget entirely who he was, who she was. He would never forget who Jacob Inglesby had been.

  Could she somehow live with that?

  Clare carried the severed pumpkin to the others they’d collected at the field’s edge, then turned back toward her son. Glancing beyond him, to parts of the field where other women worked and little ones ran among the harvested cornstalks, she was stabbed with longing for homes built of timber and stone, for mills and churches and shops and carriages. For the sound of English spoken in the streets. For her parents. Her uncle. The society and the family she’d left behind. A world her children might never know.

  Contentment evaporated. Anxiety filled her heart, even as she smiled at her son and bent to cut the pumpkin at his feet, sending him off to look for the next.

  Lord, how long?

  When nothing but silence greeted the prayer, her mind sought refuge in that abyss of desperation, churning with schemes and plans. Was there something she’d yet to think of, something to do or say that would turn Rain Crow’s stubborn heart?