by Lori Benton
Two Hawks could smell the deer meat. His mouth watered. His belly writhed. Loudly. “I am hungry. You have a deer…?”
“I can hunt for myself again now. Though not like before.” Bear Tooth’s eyes grew hard. A shadow passed across his face. “Where is your father? Why is that one not hunting with you?”
Two Hawks’s empty belly twisted. He searched Bear Tooth’s face to know what he was thinking, then dropped his gaze to the man’s foot. There was still a noticeable twist to it. It looked like it must cause pain.
“He is gone. Not dead,” he added when Bear Tooth’s eyes flared wide with what must have been surprise. It couldn’t have been joy. “He went to live with the Senecas.”
“Did he?” Bear Tooth smiled. “Can you stand to your feet?”
Two Hawks’s bones felt weak as water. Why must he stand? Did Bear Tooth wish him to show courage before he would offer food? Another test to fail?
His voice broke as he said, “I do not know.”
Bear Tooth’s smile vanished. He stepped closer as if preparing to bend down at last and help him. But as he did so, the shadow that had flickered on his face loomed like a cloud settling over his features. A dark and ugly cloud. “Good,” he said, then raised his twisted foot and brought it down hard on Two Hawks’s ankle.
Pain blinded Two Hawks, but it was the shock of it as much as the hurting that made him cry out. His vision swam in darkness. He heard the leaves rustle but could only lie there waiting for his eyes to clear. When they did, he was alone with his bow and the panther.
Bear Tooth had taken his rifle.
Two Hawks had wept like a child into the dead leaves, wounded more deeply by betrayal than the physical pain of what Bear Tooth had done to him. Bear Tooth’s twisted foot might allow him to hunt, but it had lacked the strength to break Two Hawks’s bones. The other pain…that only grew and grew.
He sat up and brushed leaves from his hair and face. Gingerly he moved his ankle back and forth. He winced, then curled his toes inside his moccasin. Nothing broken, not down there. But something in him felt snapped in two.
He sat with his arms curled around his knees, while his ankle throbbed, remembering the darkness that had stared from Bear Tooth’s eyes. That man hated his father, and for that Two Hawks could not blame him. But why had he taken it out on Two Hawks, who’d never harmed him?
He raised his head and looked at the dead cat. Right there was meat. Not meat he would normally want to eat…but he decided not to die.
He built a small fire where he sat, cut strips of meat from the cat’s shoulder, stuck them on a stick, held them to the flames, and ate them barely cooked. It took little to fill him, so small was his stomach shrunken. After a time, when he felt strength flowing into his limbs, he skinned the panther. Only after he’d done all that did he stand and test his swollen ankle. He could bear some weight, but it would be a long path home. He took more meat and the rolled up fur, and left the carcass lying where it had fallen.
This was his father’s fault. All of it. Stone Thrower had pushed Bear Tooth into the trap and crippled him. Stone Thrower had hit his mother, making her put him out of the lodge. Then he left me alone to feed us both.
Or was it all the fault of Anna Catherine’s father? He had done the terrible thing that made his father do terrible things to his mother and Bear Tooth and…
A shadow flit across his path. Startled, he limped to a halt and stared round at the dripping forest. Passing clouds overhead hid the sun, shadowing the budding ridges and hollows. But that wasn’t where the shadow had come from. It was inside him.
He recognized the darkness. It was hatred. A cup his father had drunk from deeply, then passed on to Bear Tooth, who’d passed it on to him. He’d taken a swallow, and it was bitter in his belly.
Was he going to blame Bear Tooth and hate him, and hate his father, and Anna Catherine’s father? Was he going to become another man with a soul like a twisted root inside? He didn’t want to become that man, but he didn’t know how to stop it from happening.
His mother would know. She wasn’t like that in her heart, yet she suffered as much as anyone. Why wasn’t she passing on the hurt to everyone around her? He knew only one thing different about his mother. She believed the words of Kirkland, the words from his book.
“You need the strength of Jesus in you.” Those were the last words of Kirkland he’d heard for himself, spoken to his father. “To be the man you want to be, the man your family needs you to be.”
What strength was going to help him be the man his people, his mother, his own heart, needed him to be?
As Two Hawks started forward again, weak from the long hunger and pain, he called out in his mind to Kirkland’s god. If You are there and can make me a man not like my father or Bear Tooth, but a man with a good heart, then that is what I want from You. A good heart. Maybe a new heart.
And a new rifle, he added but wasn’t sure that had been a wise thing to ask for and so he prayed to his mother as well. Talk to Jesus for me. I do not know what to say, but I am coming home. Pray for me.
Green Corn Moon
The Reverend Samuel Kirkland stood where the creek was deep, the cold water flowing past his hips. Good Voice stood before him, skirt pressed against her thighs, bare toes curling in the sandy creek bottom. Her tall son, just turned fifteen summers, stood to the side, ready to profess repentance of bad works called sin and his embracing of Jesus as Savior, Heavenly Father as God. The sky above shifted in a patchwork of white and blue. The leaves on the trees spreading up from the creek rustled in the breeze.
The faces of the people lining the bank shone, mostly with approval. Their garments were a riot of colors—stroud cloth, ruffled linen, deerskin, beads, quills. Their hair and ears and arms glinted with silver in the sunlight that darted through the clouds like firelight through a circle of dancing feet. Among them was Daniel Clear Day, beside him her son’s friend. Tames-His-Horse, the dreamer, would go under the water, too, before returning to his Mohawk people in the north. All wore their best and brightest, for there was always a celebration after a baptism, with food and dancing.
Kirkland frowned upon such indulgence, but this they chose to overlook in him.
Good Voice had celebrated in her soul since Two Hawks, returned from his hunting with a limp he refused to explain and a mind so preoccupied he’d barely spoken to her during the days it had taken the mysterious wound to heal, finally came to her and said he wished to go under the water and come up again with Jesus in his heart.
I have no greater joy, she thought, remembering words from the book, than to hear that my children walk in truth. And one day…May I know my firstborn also walks Your bright path. That was the prayer of Good Voice’s heart as Kirkland lowered her beneath the cold water and raised her up again, streaming wet and with a new name. Elizabeth.
Unless it was an old name, the name she had been called before she became Good Voice. It wasn’t something she thought about often, but on this day she wondered…had her white parents shared this faith? Would she see their faces in the Life After? Would they welcome her, their lost daughter, with arms flung open?
There was murmuring among the men, trills from the women, despite Kirkland’s admonition that this was a solemn occasion. He and they didn’t always see with the same eyes how they should worship their Creator. Kirkland was a white man, even if he was a brother in Jesus. White men often had strange and inflexible ideas about unimportant things. It was what was in the heart that mattered most.
As she stood aside so Two Hawks could take her place before the missionary, Good Voice believed the good feelings in her heart couldn’t possibly be stronger. But about that one thing at least, she was wrong.
Of those gathered in the water, it was she who first noticed the disturbance happening on the bank while Kirkland talked to her son about the meaning of baptism. Voices lifted in surprise as those nearest the water moved aside for a man carving a path through the gathering. The man didn’t sto
p when he reached the creek but came on, walking straight into the water. The man was Stone Thrower.
Good Voice felt the shock of it course through her as though the creek water had indeed washed deep into her flesh, her bones. Kirkland saw him too. Good Voice knew it though she never took her gaze off the man who had been her husband. The missionary’s words faltered. Now they were all just standing there in the flow, Good Voice, Two Hawks, and Kirkland, watching Stone Thrower wading out to them.
Almost a year had passed since Good Voice last saw him. Somewhere he’d shed his clothes and wore nothing now but a breechclout. His limbs were brown and sinewy, his chest full and broad. His belly was still firm and flat like a young man’s, though his face looked older, the lines around his eyes grown deeper. Those high-boned, handsome features of his were set in determined lines, all too familiar.
Good Voice felt the first twinge of unease. Had Stone Thrower come there thinking to prevent this baptism? It was too late for her—it wasn’t a thing that could be undone—but what of Two Hawks?
He is my child. He will do this thing if he wishes it. No man can say otherwise.
Stone Thrower’s gaze met hers as she thought these things. As it did, his face softened with a tenderness more startling than his dramatic appearance. His eyes had a reaching power that made her breath catch, the way it had the first time he ever looked at her. But Stone Thrower didn’t speak. Not to her. He turned his face to the missionary who still had his hand on Two Hawks’s shoulder.
If Kirkland was unsettled by this intrusion into one of his most sacred rituals, he hid it.
“From whence do you come?” he asked Stone Thrower, his voice raised to carry above the creek’s chatter, to the people crowding close to the bank to watch this turn of events.
“I come from Ganundasaga,” Stone Thrower said, “and the lodge of your Seneca friend, who sought me out there. He was hungry for word of you.”
Kirkland’s face relaxed. He’d once lived in Ganundasaga, before he came to the Oneida. Few of the Senecas, that nation who guarded the western door of the Great Longhouse, had embraced his God. But those who did had loved him well. “How fares my Seneca brother and his family?”
“He has not forgotten you.” Stone Thrower paused, drawing in a breath that expanded his chest. “Nor has he forgotten the God you preached among them. I bring greetings from your brothers and sisters among the Senecas…who are now my brothers and sisters.”
The gazes of his son, the missionary, and everyone standing on the creek bank were fixed on Stone Thrower in astonishment. He raised his voice with the strength of a warrior, of a man unashamed of his words. “I am here to say I am ready to be forgiven my sins, and with the help of Jesus to be the husband and father I have failed to be. I know Creator will have me, for He will turn away no one who comes with a true heart. I have been told this many times, by you, by my uncle, by others from here to Ganundasaga. Now I believe it. My heart is true.”
At last he set his gaze on Good Voice, who was clutching the hand of her son, trying to take in what she’d heard. Stone Thrower’s face softened as it had moments ago. He spoke softly too, only for her ears. “Heavenly Father will not turn me away, but will you? Or can you find it in your heart to have me back? Not the man you knew, but one I am becoming?”
She let go of Two Hawks’s hand, for the world had narrowed. It no longer included the people on the bank, the missionary, or even her son. She searched the brown eyes fixed on her and saw in them what she had never seen, not even in that first sweet year before Fort William Henry. Death unto life. That was what she saw in the eyes of her husband.
She hadn’t bidden the word into her mind—husband—but it was there in her thoughts. And it was true.
“I will have you back,” she said. The world widened again. She was startled to see Kirkland, still standing with his hand on her son’s shoulder. The heart inside her chest had been leaping like a spring-happy fawn. Now uncertainty bloomed, but the joy in Stone Thrower’s face rivaled the sun that broke from the clouds and dazzled their eyes with its dance upon the creek.
“Will you put me under the water, here with my family?” he asked the missionary.
Good Voice clasped her lip between her teeth, tasting the water still trickling from her hair. It wasn’t Kirkland’s way to permit baptism upon a man’s or woman’s first word of desiring it. His way would be to watch Stone Thrower for a time, talk with him often, see if the way he lived proved what he said had happened in his heart. Only when he was satisfied would he consent to baptism. It was one of those things he was stubborn about, and she could see on his face these thoughts were going through his head.
Kirkland looked at Two Hawks, whose eyes pleaded, full of hope. Then he looked at Good Voice. He seemed to be asking her was she certain about this man who had caused them such trouble and grief.
Through a warm rush of tears, Good Voice nodded.
“Very well.” Kirkland squeezed her son’s shoulder and moved him gently aside. “You will have your turn right after. In this case I think it fitting your father should be first.”
21
April 1773
Anna went often to the woods bordering the farm the year she became Lydia’s apprentice. Helping stock Lydia’s pharmacopoeia was proving one of her favorite aspects of her training, but while she gleaned, she also hoped to see a familiar, lithe figure coming through the trees toward her or standing still in shadow, waiting for her to spy him.
Summer waned. Leaves blazed and swirled away like sparks, baring limbs to receive the season’s first snow. But Two Hawks never came.
His absence left Anna cloaked in disappointment as bleak as the winter that ushered in 1773. Were it not for the companionable hours spent in Lydia’s kitchen drying herbs, preparing tinctures and pills, the visits made to those who needed them—and William’s letters—her spirits might have sunk pitiably low.
The winter passed in a patchwork of lonely days at the farm, busy days in town. Snow melted, and the river ice vanished. Trees along the creek sent out a mist of green, and tender plants shot forth again, begging for harvest.
“ ’Tis wash day,” Mrs. Doyle reminded her as, breakfast over, Anna took a shawl from a peg, intending to check several favorite spots for harvesting across the creek. “My poor back cannot take that chore alone anymore.”
“It’s too chilly to begin now. Why don’t you put your feet up by the fire—spend a while with that new novel of Papa’s I’ve seen you eyeing.”
Mrs. Doyle wasn’t quick enough to hide her brightening at the reminder of Papa’s copy of The Vicar of Wakefield, though she tried to douse it with a stern look.
“Stuff and nonsense—novels.”
Grinning at the unconvincing censure, Anna reached for her gathering basket. Mrs. Doyle eyed it dangling from her arm.
“I am after gettin’ through that laundry today, so don’t dawdle.” She set a plate on a rack in the hutch as Anna opened the door. “And be watchful. Rowan’s seen a fair number of Indians on the river of late.”
Though doubtless meant as a mild caution, Anna felt hope stir. She managed not to sound too eager as she said, “Perhaps Sir William is back from his travels.”
William Johnson had sailed for England last July, hoping to impress upon His Majesty, King George, the importance of the Six Nations to the Crown’s future interest in the colony—a colony crowding hard against its Indian neighbors despite edicts to prevent settler encroachment. Or so Anna gathered from snatches of conversation overheard in town. Nor was it possible these days to keep from overhearing the bitter grumblings over Parliament’s high-handed treatment of the colonies since the war with France ended. Or the arguments for self-government springing up like weeds wherever she turned.
“Back from England is he? And the Indians flockin’ to Johnson Hall to hear what the king had to say, no doubt.” Mrs. Doyle set the last plate in its place. “Well, never mind Sir William. Just you have a care and don’t stray far.”<
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Anna hurried down the rutted track that crossed the fields toward the forest, noting the columns of chimney smoke that marked the distant farms of neighbors, cleared over the past few years. Papa’s land was no longer as isolated as when Mrs. Aubrey cowered within the house and she and William had run wild about the place.
The thought stirred the old pang of longing for William, only now it was mingled with longing for Two Hawks. It had been a year and a six-month—no, a bit longer than that—since she’d seen her Oneida friend. If something terrible were to happen away in Wales—God forbid—she’d hear about it eventually. If something happened to Two Hawks, she’d be left to wonder forever.
Rowan Doyle was in the field near the creek, sowing corn from a bag slung at his waist. Past sixty now, his tall frame was stooped, his hair white across his scalp. He tamped down a handful of kernels with a sturdy boot. When he saw her across the open field, Anna waved. Mr. Doyle returned the salute but seemed to watch her more intently than was needful. He couldn’t know her thoughts or who she hoped to find beyond the beech grove.
Still, cheeks prickling in the chilly air, she kept her feet from hurrying the last few yards to the old footlog—in case Mr. Doyle watched.
“What will you do with those?”
The voice that spoke behind her had deepened since last she’d heard it, but still she knew it, and the knowing sent a shiver up her arms. Anna pushed up off the ground at the clearing’s edge where she’d knelt to gather fiddleheads, an irrepressible smile pulling at her mouth. The smile froze as she took in Two Hawks, standing in dappled shade, dressed in a long hunting shirt above leggings gartered with red wool. He’d a blanket roll tied across his back, a rifle slung at his shoulder, his bow in hand.
This wasn’t the Two Hawks of her memory. Still lean and long-limbed, he’d a man’s wide shoulders now, a man’s strong jaw and nose. Yet the boy she remembered lingered in the brown eyes drinking her in, the wide mouth curled at the corners in a smile as frozen as hers felt.