Many Sparrows

by Lori Benton

  Pippa, disturbed by their voices, whimpered and came awake. Clare turned from him and picked up the baby, put her to a shoulder, and patted her. She wiped at her tears and looked at him again, eyes unguarded, and he was almost certain he saw in them what he longed to see.

  A need that had nothing to do with Jacob.

  He didn’t want to leave her with so much between them frayed, but he meant to spend the night preparing for battle with his brothers, set apart from their families, each seeking strength and guidance in his own way.

  “I’m going to fight to my last drop of blood to keep harm from you, from this place,” he told her. “Dunmore’s soldiers will have to get through me—and eight hundred other warriors—to reach you.”

  His words seemed to bring her no comfort. There was so much more he wanted to say that he feared she wasn’t ready to hear. But what if he never had another chance to say it?

  “Clare, never think I regret a moment of what’s passed since I came upon you at that wagon, about to birth that sweet baby girl you’re holding. I’d lay down more than a few months of my life for you. I’d lay it all down. All my years. This body too, if you need it.”

  He raised his hand to Pippa’s head, not daring to touch her mother as he longed to do. She caught his gaze, a stirring in her eyes, then she stepped back from him.

  “Jeremiah,” she said, her voice a bare thread. “Please come back.”

  “You know I cannot promise it.”

  “I know.” Gratitude flashed across her eyes, though for what he didn’t know.

  He went to pack the things he’d need for the coming campaign. They were few and gathered quickly, but in the process his hand encountered something in his knapsack he’d all but forgotten he placed there. He withdrew it, stood, and held it out to Clare.

  She stared at the object in his hand, the timepiece that had been Philip Inglesby’s, handed down from his grandfather. Still crushed. Still unopened.

  She took it. “Didn’t I throw this away, back in the clearing where Pippa was born?”

  “I fetched it out of the weeds while you slept. Thought you might change your mind and want it back.”

  He watched her face as she looked from him to the timepiece, all that was left to her of her former life, save her children. Pain and sorrow sharpened her gaze, but there was more there. Acceptance, resignation, maybe even peace.

  “Thank you. Maybe one day it can be Jacob’s, if ever I have the chance to see it mended.”

  He stood at the door-hide a moment, setting the sight of her and Pippa to memory. She watched him back with equal intensity.

  “God keep you, Clare,” he said at last and went out to find his brothers.

  “And you,” she’d forced through a throat too tight for speech, though she didn’t think he’d heard her. The air of the lodge seemed to buzz with his passionate words. So did her head. And heart. Why hadn’t he touched her? He’d plainly wanted to. She wished he had, even if it wouldn’t have changed a thing.

  Would she ever see him again? He hadn’t promised, and for his honesty she was thankful, and yet…for the first time in her life she wished a man had lied to her, had told her what she wanted to hear, had promised her a future, a hope, all the things he’d just said he wanted. With her.

  All my years…

  Instead he’d handed her Philip’s timepiece and walked out of the lodge to go fight a battle that stood between them and all their years.

  Almost she went running to the door-hide. Almost she gave in to the need to call him back. But where would it lead? What would a few more moments solve? He had to go, though she knew he would never willingly abandon her. Her only regret was that he’d likely left thinking she believed that’s what he was doing.

  She looked at the timepiece, thought of the man who had cherished it, and realized she no longer mourned him or the life they’d had. There was sorrow for its tragic ending, for all the failures that had led to that ending—hers as well as Philip’s—but the grief didn’t pierce as it had. Nor did the regret. And she knew why.

  Jeremiah.

  But she couldn’t open her heart to him yet, couldn’t let such passions distract her when she needed to be as single-minded as he.

  It was going to take all she had, mind and heart, not to let Jacob slip through her grasp again as her world turned upside down.

  OCTOBER 9, 1774

  POINT PLEASANT, VIRGINIA COLONY

  At noon on the first Sunday spent at the encampment at the mouth of the Kanawha River, the men of Colonel Andrew Lewis’s command gathered for their customary religious service, led by the Southern Army’s chaplain.

  Looking around at the faces of the men assembled to hear the exhortation, Alphus Litchfield detected little pleasure in their expressions, though it hadn’t to do with anything the man behind the makeshift log pulpit was saying.

  Alphus reckoned it a good thing they’d dubbed their camp Point Pleasant before they’d found the message from Governor Dunmore.

  Not that the place wasn’t deserving of the name, situated on a triangle of land on the north bank of the Kanawha where it flowed into the Ohio. The rivers formed two sides of the triangle, while a high ridge, at the base of which flowed a creek aptly named Crooked, created the third and longest side. The densely forested hills were ablaze in autumn tints, the ground beneath a carpet of leaves so thick that to walk those wooded aisles made a man feel encased in a tunnel of gold.

  The rivers were low, the Ohio at that point nigh as calm as a lake, reflecting the sky and the fiery ridgeline opposite clear as a looking glass. Across this scene, flurries of wind-driven leaves whirled like amber sparks.

  Upon arrival, many of the men briefly forgot the purpose of their being there, transported by the enchantment of the place—a spell broken when a scout discovered the letter from Dunmore concealed in a hollow tree. Assembled in his marquee, Colonel Lewis informed his officers of the letter’s content; orders to move the Southern Army upriver to the Hocking still stood, to everyone’s dismay.

  A messenger was sent with a letter entreating Dunmore once again to adhere to the original plan and come downriver to Point Pleasant.

  Meanwhile the army went about the business of mending clothes and equipment, fortifying the encampment, securing supplies, caring for livestock.

  Days passed, thinning the patience of officers and men alike. Finally that morning more messengers sent from Dunmore arrived—with yet another change in orders.

  The Shawnees had rejected the governor’s invitation to a peace council on the Hocking. Dunmore now purposed to take his troops directly across the Ohio and begin the march toward the Scioto towns. Lewis’s army was to meet the governor at a ridge somewhere southeast of the Pickaway Plains.

  Reactions among the officers to this vague rendezvous in the middle of hostile Indian territory had ranged from consternation to blazing outrage. They couldn’t abandon their present encampment before the Fincastle Regiment and the rest of the army arrived from Camp Union. Leaving Point Pleasant and pushing deep into Shawnee lands with their smaller numbers would be inviting attack, with their enemy having the advantage of knowing the terrain. Did Dunmore mean to sacrifice his Southern Army, deliberately leaving them open to attack?

  And what were they to make of these continued rumors, also brought by Dunmore’s messengers, of militiamen in Massachusetts battling British soldiers?

  Alphus Litchfield wasn’t the only one frustrated at not knowing who or what to believe, cut off from the colony and about to face a fierce and implacable enemy.

  At least that latter concern didn’t seem to overly distress the men, Alphus thought as he looked around the little clearing where the meeting was taking place. They felt themselves in good position, there in the forks of the river. As long as they could remain on the Virginia side until Dunmore saw fit to join them, they didn’t fear attack.

  “Let ’em cross the river and try us,” he’d overheard Ezra Baldwin boasting around the fire. “We’
ll send ’em back with their tails tucked.”

  Sitting on a log as the preacher preached, with the murmur of the rivers in his ears, dazzled by the leaves burning like flames along the ridgeline, Alphus tried to clear his mind of everything but this place, this campaign. Perhaps after this assemblage broke up he’d take Lieutenant Woodbane and a few others and scout that twisty little creek and the high ridge beyond it. He wanted to know the lay of this land. Felt the need in his bones to learn it intimately.

  He’d a sense that men were coming, but not necessarily Dunmore’s.

  CORNSTALK’S TOWN, OCTOBER 9, EVENING

  Cornstalk and Nonhelema, along with their brothers and the war chiefs, had led the warriors east toward the Ohio, with Jeremiah, Falling Hawk, and Wolf-Alone in their ranks. Unable to bear the solitude, Clare had gone to Rain Crow’s lodge, hoping to see Jacob, but once again Rain Crow refused to let her in—or Jacob out.

  “She fear,” Crosses-the-Path explained when Clare found admittance into her lodge. “She fear soldiers come, you take Many Sparrows, run to army.”

  With shaking hands Clare set Pippa on a buffalo hide for Crosses-the-Path’s girls to entertain, then knelt by the fire and looked imploringly at their mother.

  “I’m not going to do that.” Even as the words left her lips, Clare knew their dishonesty. If the opportunity presented itself to do exactly that, she might take it. But the chances of that happening seemed almost nonexistent.

  Crosses-the-Path looked miserable and torn. Clare was sick to her soul of her plight doing that to everyone who held any sympathy for her.

  Jeremiah. There was so much she should have said to him, this man who’d put his life on hold for her, borne himself with dignity through an impossible situation. Why had she let him go into battle without telling him what that meant to her, what he meant to her?

  “You’re saying the right words, but only you can know whether you truly trust Him.” Those words had plowed deep, turning up the soil of her heart, unearthing doubts and fears.

  How could she lay down the need to regain her son? Her son. How did a mother do such a thing? The very notion filled her with a panic so visceral she could barely breathe.

  There was but one directive of Jeremiah’s she could obey.

  “Stay with Crosses-the-Path.”

  She saw Crosses-the-Path chewing at her lip, anxiety mirrored in her round face. She was worried for Falling Hawk, for all the warriors gone to face the Virginians. Clare felt a kinship with her as never before.

  “May Pippa and I stay with you?” she asked. “Until the men are back? I don’t want to be alone in that lodge.”

  Of course they were welcomed. Crosses-the-Path rarely said no to anything Clare asked of her. But Clare caught the glint of question in her gaze. Was she really asking to stay so she might have a better chance at seeing Jacob? Of taking Jacob?

  Questions that thankfully went unasked.

  ALONG THE OHIO RIVER, OCTOBER 9, NIGHTFALL

  The warriors had come down to the trail that ran along the Ohio, but Jeremiah knew they wouldn’t cross opposite the point where the Kanawha joined its waters to its flow. Concealed by the wooded ridgeline, they followed that trail three miles upriver, where a few of the warriors and youths who had accompanied them would remain with the horses and excess belongings the warriors left behind; they would take nothing but weapons and waterskins with them over to the other side.

  They crossed the river by raft, under cover of darkness, coming ashore in small groups at the mouth of a creek where once a Shawnee town had stood, long ago abandoned.

  They knew from their scouts that the Virginians couldn’t be surrounded, but they could be trapped, there on that point of land between rivers, if the Shawnees could make themselves a long advancing line, come upon them in the twilight before dawn to attack the camp and block escape to the east.

  Many, they hoped, would have no time to raise a weapon or even emerge from their tents.

  Once across the river, they camped at the old town creek. Dressed for war, stripped to breechclout and moccasins, they’d been divided into units of sixty warriors. Jeremiah, Falling Hawk, and Wolf-Alone would fight under Cornstalk’s leadership. Others would fight with Nonhelema, Blue Jacket, Puckeshinwah, Black Snake, and the rest of the war chiefs.

  Wolf-Alone approved his chief’s strategy. “He is thinking like a white general thinks.”

  “Do you know how white generals think, brother?” Falling Hawk asked. Clouds had covered stars and moon so that his face was unreadable, but there was teasing in his voice.

  “It may be I know something of it,” Wolf-Alone said.

  Jeremiah felt more than saw Falling Hawk turn to look at him, seated on the ground in a bed of leaves. They were well used to their brother and his mysteries, but tonight Jeremiah wanted to push beyond that wall Wolf-Alone kept raised.

  “So here we are, and tomorrow maybe one of us, or all, will stand before Creator,” he said. “Do you not think it time to tell us who you were before you rose out of that creek like a fish sprouting legs?”

  “You did not come into being that day,” Falling Hawk said, perhaps catching what stirred in Jeremiah’s heart, that sense that this could be their last chance to speak of such things.

  Wolf-Alone was silent for a while. They waited.

  “Brothers,” he said at last. “It is not that I do not wish you to know who I was before. But truly that man is no more. It would be like speaking of the dead to mention his name. Will you be content that you have a brother, Wolf-Alone, who will fight beside you as the sun is rising, who will do all he can to keep you whole and bring you back to your women and children?”

  Jeremiah swallowed, finding a lump had formed at the base of his throat. Falling Hawk too might have found such an obstruction, for he didn’t speak at once. Jeremiah saw his hand lift, catching the glimmer of moonlight through the clouds. It came to rest on their brother’s broad shoulder.

  “It is more than enough. Let us sleep now.”

  Around them others were lying down in the leaves and grasses of that place Shawnees once lived. Were any of them thinking of those lives lived there? Were they thinking of the towns back along the Scioto and how easily they could be swept away, leaving no more than a memory on the land?

  What were the Virginians thinking as they took to their bedrolls just a few miles to the south? Jeremiah was sick at thought of killing them—and trying not to think of Clare’s uncle among them—but just as Cornstalk was doing what he must, because it was the will of the people, he too would do what he must to keep safe those who held his heart in their hands—his brothers, his sister, Crosses-the-Path and her children, Wildcat, Pippa and Jacob. Clare.

  Just don’t let me come face to face with Alphus Litchfield. Any man but that one.

  Sometime before dawn tinged the sky above the ridges and mountains to the east, Wolf-Alone shook him awake as others around them were stirring.

  One by one, eight hundred warriors fell into file and began their advance to the place where they would spread their line between the rivers. Heading down one of the low ridges that ran along the Ohio, which flowed now on their right, they crept through the predawn wood toward the base of a much higher ridge, where a mist was rising, spreading from the twisted creek bottom.

  OCTOBER 10, 1774

  POINT PLEASANT, VIRGINIA COLONY

  Alphus Litchfield came awake in his bedroll and stifled a groan as old aches gave themselves new voice. Hips, back, knees, and more protested, having marched a hundred and forty miles over rugged terrain. It was yet an hour, best he could tell, before he needed to be sitting up, so he lay still, eyes shut, inviting sleep’s return, but he couldn’t shut his ears to the call of a predawn bird or the snores of his men.

  Another company would be rising now, heading to relieve those on sentry during the night past, doubtless by now staring into the murky dark of the wood, bleary-eyed, fighting to stay wakeful.

  Was it Captain Russell’s Fi
ncastle men on sentry duty this morning? No, ought to be McClanahan’s. Tonight it would fall to Alphus’s company again, if they were still encamped there.

  No help for it. His mind was up and running, busy with the doings of the day about to break. Would they spend it waiting for Dunmore to change his mind again or cross the Ohio and make for his vague wilderness rendezvous?

  Last he’d heard, Colonel Lewis hadn’t decided.

  Instead of speculating, he traced in memory the two short sides of the triangle that was their camp, where tents stretched along the rivers, including his own company’s on the Kanawha side, along with the rest of Augusta County Regiment, some of the Botetort companies and others—among them William Russell’s company of men who’d come up from the Overmountain country near the Tennessee River.

  Alphus had heard those men talking the evening before as they sat around the fires, about how they’d formed themselves an independent colony, though they were careful not to name it so. The Watauga Association, they called it. It was needful, they said, with the North Carolina seat of government so far off to the east, no decent roads to connect them to the rest of the colony, cut off for weeks at a time when snow fell with no one but themselves to depend on for aid in the face of Indian threat. Why not govern themselves while they were at it?

  He’d listened and wondered whether it was Crown approved or something of a little rebellion going on across those high Carolina mountains. Those men—Russell, Shelby, Sevier, and others—had had a lot to say about what was purported to be happening back east, particularly in Massachusetts.

  “Might be independence is coming for the rest of the colonies,” Isaac Shelby had remarked.

  “Especially with Crown-appointed governors who cannot even settle on a rendezvous,” one called Valentine Sevier quipped, to the wry chuckles and dark assenting looks of his listeners, none of whom were pleased in the slightest with the turn Governor Dunmore’s campaign had taken.

  Alphus didn’t express his agreement openly, but listening to the Overmountain men, he had, for the first time in years, felt the old wanderlust stirring—that urge to turn his back on the settled east, climb a ridge, and look away westward. To sell what he could, load up a horse with goods enough to get by on, and just set out.