by Lori Benton
“I see.”
The man was conscious; when Alphus spoke, he opened his one good eye and fixed on him a look of such beseeching need that Alphus knew why Geordie had been stirred to pity. Holding such feeling at bay, Alphus knelt beside the man, who spoke a word too softly rasped to hear.
“Say again?”
“He’s asking for water, sir,” Geordie said. “Asked me earlier.”
The man held Alphus’s gaze, fear and need in that dark eye.
“Geordie, fill a canteen and bring it here.”
“Yes sir,” the boy said, though reluctantly, and left them alone with the dead waiting to go in the ground.
“Thank you.”
Though the man’s voice was a thread, Alphus didn’t detect the accent of a native Shawnee. He didn’t think this man had lived his whole life among them. “Who are you?”
“I…” The man’s voice caught. He closed his eye.
Alphus felt the beginnings of alarm. If this man knew of Clare—a wild unlikely if—he didn’t want him dying before he spilled whatever he knew. Why hadn’t he brought his own canteen?
“While we wait for that water, I’m going to have a look at your battle wound.”
The man didn’t flinch or protest when Alphus began cutting away the binding around his lean torso. He’d guessed right, the linen stuck. He’d have to soak it off else risk reopening the wound to fresh bleeding.
Geordie came running up, clutching a dripping canteen. “Got it, sir. And I saw the surgeon. He’s been working all night and still at it, with more of our men yet to tend. He ain’t gonna get to this one.”
Alphus got the man’s head raised, and he swallowed down enough water to satisfy what must have been a raging thirst.
“All right now. I expect you can talk, and that’s what I want from you. Geordie here says you got a woman on your mind. A woman with an English name. Just you tell me that name now.”
The white Indian opened his eye and gazed at him, and there was to Alphus’s surprise something like recognition in the gaze.
“You know Clare?” he said, voice slightly less of a rasp. “Clare…Inglesby?”
Geordie’s eyes were wide. “How does he know your niece?”
“I do not know.” Though he was beginning to have an idea.
Alphus reached for the canteen the boy held and, holding it aloft, addressed the prisoner, whose gaze fastened with longing on the source of water. “Listen. I’ll give you this and even tend your wound, see if we can keep you alive—”
“So the army…can shoot me?” the man interjected, wryness in his tone.
So he was a traitor, or thought they’d view him as such.
Alphus considered the man lying before them, in no wise warming to him but needing him to live.
“That remains to be seen. Just you give answer to that boy’s question, then we’ll see what happens next. How is it you are acquainted with the name of my niece, Clare Inglesby? And—” Despite his resolve to reveal nothing of his desperation to this man until he got from him what he needed, he hadn’t kept the catch from his voice. “Does she still live?”
OCTOBER 14
CORNSTALK’S TOWN
News of the battle reached them two days before the warriors did, coming up the river trail with their wounded and their dead. Runners came ahead to spread the word and prepare the people of the Scioto towns. Few learned anything certain about the husband, son, or brother they’d sent off to fight, only that some weren’t coming back and more were coming back wounded. One of those dead was Cornstalk’s brother, Silverheels. Another was their war chief, Puckeshinwah.
As for the battle itself, as Clare understood it from Crosses-the-Path, the Shawnees had inflicted more casualties on the Virginians than they’d suffered, but it hadn’t been enough. More Virginians had come down the Kanawha to join the survivors of the battle while Dunmore’s Northern Army, still at full strength, had crossed the Ohio and was headed their way.
Many talked of leaving the Pickaway Plains, of finding a new place to live beyond the reach of grasping Long Knives. Here and there Clare noticed a lodge standing empty where some elder and his wife, maybe a grown daughter or two, had made it home. She wondered where they’d gone, who else might follow, what she and Pippa were to do if Jeremiah didn’t…
He would come back. He had to.
She stood outside Crosses-the-Path’s lodge, staring at Rain Crow’s, hoping she would emerge. The day was chilly. She’d left Pippa inside, watched by the girls, but she didn’t want to go back in. The lodge had begun to feel too small, the air thick with worry. Crosses-the-Path and her daughters were as anxious for Falling Hawk’s safe return as she was for Jeremiah’s.
She thought about seeking out Wildcat, knowing the boy awaited Wolf-Alone with equal concern. It would be something to do to pass the time crawling by so agonizingly slow.
She’d made up her mind to go to Split-Moon’s lodge and look for the boy when the hide flap over Rain Crow’s lodge shifted and the woman looked out. She saw Clare and for a moment merely stared, as though making up her mind about something.
Jacob’s voice rose inside the lodge, asking something in Shawnee. Rain Crow said something sharp in the same tongue over her shoulder.
He didn’t speak again.
Clare felt a burst of anger that the woman should speak to Jacob so, but when Rain Crow let the door-hide fall and came striding toward Clare, alarm replaced indignation.
Rain Crow halted in front of her, face set, dark eyes smoldering with feeling.
“I would know a thing from you,” she said in English. “Before my brothers return.”
Clare’s heart was already racing. “What?”
“If the Almighty is a good God, as the Moravians say—as my mother and Panther-Sees-Him believe—why does He let happen all the bad things? Why so much sickness? So much death? Why do warriors spill their blood in battle and still that army comes? You tell me this.”
Clare realized her mouth was hanging open, no doubt making her look as dumbstruck as this woman had rendered her. What could she say to such things? She had no words. None with any conviction behind them.
Someone else had, however.
“The Almighty is good, and He’s working all things together for your good. Either you believe that or you don’t.”
She opened her mouth to parrot Jeremiah’s last words to her, but they formed like soap bubbles on her tongue, bitter and empty. What spilled out instead was, “I don’t know! Is that what you want to hear from me? Fine then, I admit it. I still don’t know why my son was taken, or yours died, or both our husbands are gone. Is any of it fair? None of it feels fair.”
Unmoved by her honesty, Rain Crow raised her chin, defiant.
“Why then follow such a God?” she demanded but didn’t wait for an answer this time. Turning on her moccasined heel, she strode back toward her lodge.
Clare knew she’d again fallen short, again failed. Said the wrong thing. Done the wrong thing. Did it really matter now what she said?
Rain Crow had nearly reached her lodge when Clare knew she must say something more. The compulsion to do so was like a hand prying open her jaw, loosening her tongue.
“Why? Because He knows how we feel.” The words tore out of her like bits of her own flesh ripped away, trailing blood. “Abigail—He knows!”
Speaking her Christian name had the effect she’d hoped it might. Rain Crow whirled to face Clare.
“What do you mean? Who knows what?”
“The Almighty. He knows how it feels to lose a son. Don’t you remember? His own Son was lost to Him, hanging on that cross. Don’t you remember when the sun went dark? Don’t you remember what that meant? He took the punishment for it, all of it, all the evil that men do, all the pain of this fallen world. He was broken so that we can be whole. He held nothing back.”
Rain Crow’s face was for once completely unguarded. The defiant mask had fallen to reveal a look of pain and need and fear so r
aw that Clare was stunned.
It was her own heart staring back at her.
But something else was happening now, something in Clare’s soul was shifting, opening, filling. And it hadn’t to do with Rain Crow. Not directly. Her voice when she’d started to speak of the Almighty had been weak, pleading. By the time she’d finished, something had rushed in to fill the emptiness carved out in her heart, carved again and again during the years of her failing marriage to Philip and in the months since his death.
Where there had been emptiness, now there was hope. Not the thin, desperate thing she’d called hope these months past, not the fretful worrying wishes and wants that had dominated her every thought and deed. An absolute certainty. A knowing. As solid as the earth beneath her feet.
It was all going to be right in the end. She did not know how. She did not need to know how. She only needed to know who was going to make it so.
Like a flood, assurance swelled and the fullness of it empowered her so that the last words out of her mouth had been spoken with a conviction she’d thought she would never again feel.
He held nothing back.
But she had. She’d withheld her trust. She’d withheld her heart. For so many years now she had curled up her soul in fear. But that wasn’t how she wanted to live. How she wanted to be. She did believe God was good. That He cared about the sparrows. Each one. That He saw her and Jacob and Pippa. And Jeremiah. And Wolf-Alone and Falling Hawk. And Crosses-the-Path and her daughters and Wildcat and Rain Crow, whose heart was broken by grief. He’d proven it, and she believed it. And yet…Lord, help my unbelief!
Rain Crow continued to stare, though something in the woman’s resistant posture seemed to soften; she took a step toward Clare and started to speak but got out only two words before a cry went up from the direction of the creek that flowed between Cornstalk’s and Nonhelema’s towns.
Other women emerged from lodges, looking in that direction. Crosses-the-Path came out of her lodge and asked something urgently in Shawnee, to which Rain Crow replied.
“What is it?” Clare asked, though she’d already guessed.
“Warriors come from south.” Crosses-the-Path took her by the arm. “We go over creek.”
Clare didn’t resist as Crosses-the-Path pulled her inside the lodge, where Pippa would need to be strapped into her cradleboard for the journey. She glanced back to see that Rain Crow had vanished inside her lodge.
Clare’s heart lurched, but she settled it with a deep breath, quieting her racing mind. She’d heard those two words Rain Crow spoke before the cry from the creek arose.
“I remember,” she’d said.
The first of the warriors, the chiefs and those on horses, had reached the council house at Nonhelema’s Town when Clare and Crosses-the-Path arrived. Clare doubted she would ever forget the sight of Cornstalk’s face or that of his sister, so grim and set with bitter grief. She didn’t look to see where they went or try to understand anything they said to the distraught crowd gathering around them. Like most of the Shawnee women, she was watching the warriors still coming in, those on their feet and those helping them, then the litters and the travois and…There was Wolf-Alone, supporting Falling Hawk who was on his feet but sagging, one shoulder stained with blood.
Crosses-the-Path cried out in dismay. The women ran to meet them, Clare searching but not seeing Jeremiah. When she finally captured Wolf-Alone’s attention, the look he gave her answered her question before she could ask it.
“Where is he?” He made no reply, for she’d spoken in English. Near to screaming with anxiety, she repeated the question in fumbling Shawnee.
Wolf-Alone replied, something about Jeremiah not making it back across the river. Something about his being shot. She must have looked as she felt, near to swooning, for the warrior reached out to grip her arm.
She managed to find the one Shawnee word she needed. “Dead?”
“I do not know.”
“What do you mean?” Again she’d spoken in English.
Wolf-Alone gave his brother over to the care of his wife, who couldn’t support his weight for long alone, then hastily bent near her ear and in hurried English said, “We’re going to listen to Cornstalk speak. Go to my lodge. Wait for me there. I will tell you all when I come.”
Then he was striding away toward Nonhelema’s council house, and she couldn’t follow because Crosses-the-Path was calling for her help. Clare got a shoulder under Falling Hawk’s arm, and together they began the slow, painful process of getting the wounded warrior home. She didn’t think he was mortally wounded, but he was nearly unconscious by the time they reached the creek.
When Falling Hawk was safely on his sleeping bench in his lodge, Crosses-the-Path’s daughters came rushing in to see their father and help their mother tend him. Still Clare lingered, though her worry for Jeremiah was nearly driving her to distraction.
And where was Rain Crow? Where was Jacob?
“You go,” Crosses-the-Path told her, breaking off from tending Falling Hawk’s shoulder wound. “He not too much hurt.”
“Thank you,” Clare said, hardly knowing why she was thanking the woman, and slipped out to find Rain Crow and Jacob, needing to be near her son, needing to see him if not Jeremiah.
Jeremiah shot. And captured? Wolf-Alone hadn’t said he was dead. Please not dead.
She called at Rain Crow’s lodge but got no answer.
Clare grasped the door-hide. She was prepared to be shouted at, ordered out, verbally abused, physically assaulted, anything but what she found when she moved aside the hide.
The lodge was empty.
She’d never been inside Rain Crow’s lodge, never seen her possessions or Jacob’s, the places where they ate and slept, but to her eyes it looked stripped. Hastily so, as if a woman and boy had taken only what they could gather quickly, what they could carry away on their backs.
Not wanting to believe what her eyes were telling her, she moved to the fire ring in the center of the lodge. Though the flames had died, it radiated shimmering warmth.
She turned in a circle, searching shadows, then hurried out to find Crosses-the-Path at her fire, Falling Hawk tended and resting on his sleeping bench.
By force of will she kept from blurting out her news and asked, “Will he be all right?”
She kept her voice low, though it shook. Crosses-the-Path heard her distress and frowned as she said, “In time. But what wrong? You hear of Panther-Sees-Him?”
She looked braced for the worst of news, but Clare shook her head.
“No. I’m still waiting for Wolf-Alone to come from the council house, but…Rain Crow is gone. So is Jacob. I went inside. Her things are gone. Did she go back to Nonhelema’s Town?”
“And we not see?” Crosses-the-Path asked.
She waved her oldest daughter over and asked her a question in Shawnee, in which Clare caught Nonhelema’s name.
The girl, who had stayed behind in Cornstalk’s Town when Clare and her mother crossed the creek, now shook her head as she replied. When Crosses-the-Path looked at Clare, it was like that meeting of eyes she’d had with Wolf-Alone before he told her of Jeremiah.
“Rain Crow hear of battle. She say if Long Knives attack, it bad for her. If Shawnees talk peace, it bad for her. They take from her Many Sparrows.” She heaved a sigh, deep and troubled. “She go with others, far from here.”
The last of Clare’s denial shredded. “She took Jacob away?”
Crosses-the-Path lifted her hands in helplessness. “She not want him go with you or army.”
Clare stood with all of them watching her. Her breath came short. Her heart felt crushed, beating like a thing long trapped having worn itself out.
“You said far from here. Where have they gone?”
Crosses-the-Path shook her head. “She not say.”
Who would know where she’d gone? Who could she ask? Wolf-Alone? But he wouldn’t know. He was just returned from the battle.
The weight of Pippa on
her back was like a stone. Even if she found someone who could tell her where Rain Crow and Jacob had gone, she couldn’t go after them. Not without Jeremiah.
Turning from the staring eyes of his brother’s family, she went out to wait for Wolf-Alone.
He wasn’t long in coming to the lodge.
She’d laid Pippa on the sleeping bench, kindled the fire, and started a kettle of corn soup heating, when the door-hide pushed inward and Wolf-Alone entered.
All the things she needed to ask, to tell, crowded hard and fast on her tongue, but in the end she said none of them, for he crossed the lodge and stopped before her and took her shoulders between his hands.
“Clare, forgive me. I promised I’d go back for him, and I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
The big warrior dropped his head, anguish on his face. She reached up and touched that face, seeing that it bore bruises and a cut across the brow. She looked him over, but he seemed to have come through the battle unscathed save for these minor wounds. No easy feat from what she’d seen of the survivors in Nonhelema’s Town.
“Wolf-Alone, I know you would have gone back for him if that’s what you promised to do—you would have done it if you could. I’d believe nothing less of you. Look at me.”
The man raised amber eyes to hers. “Clare,” he began, then swallowed, hesitating.
“Sit down,” she told him. “Soup is heating. Tell me what happened. Tell me—” She tried to say Jeremiah’s name but couldn’t. “Is he alive?”
“He was when I left him.” Clearly exhausted, Wolf-Alone lowered himself heavily onto a block chair at the low table. He glanced aside at Pippa, waving tiny arms and making gurgling noises. “I washed on my way across the creek. May I hold her?”
To Clare’s knowledge, Wolf-Alone hadn’t held her daughter since the day they met, outside the council house in Wakatomica—unless one counted his lifting the baby and cradleboard off her back the day they arrived in Cornstalk’s Town.
“All right.” She gave Pippa into his keeping before she went to tend the soup.
Pippa seemed fascinated by the man’s eyebrows, her little fingers tracing those twin bold sweeps from her perch in his arms.