Wild Yearning

by Penelope Williamson

  “What message are you carrying now?” Ty asked, mainly to keep the conversation going.

  “Boston done sent a bang-boat up the Penobscot Bay couple weeks back. She leveled the mission at Castine with her cannon an’ managed t’ kill the old black robe, Sebastien Râle, in the process. Now them Abenakis over thataway are scalpin’ mad. They’ve taken up the hatchet, all official-like, after a big powwow of all the tribes, and they’re buildin’ themselves scalin’ ladders so’s even the forts won’t be safe.”

  Ty snarled with disgust at colonial policy. If anything was sure to rile up the Abenaki against the settlers, it was murdering their favorite French priest. “Do you know where they’re aiming to strike first?”

  “Well, ye know better’n most folk how them Abenakis’ve never been predictable. But if I was t’ guess, I’d say Merrymeeting, only ’cause there’s been some crazy Injun mouthin’ off lately at the powwows ’bout a vision he had or somethin’ and—Hey, what the hell?”

  Increase Spoon stared with astonishment at the empty rock where a second ago Dr. Tyler Savitch had appeared to be relaxing, lazily taking in a little sun. Increase looked around him —up the river where a smelt jumped, down the deer trail that led into the forest, both empty except for a squirrel who stared back at him, whiskers twitching. Finally, he looked down at the smoking pipe in his hand to be sure he hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.

  “Now what in blazes d’ ye think set him afire?” he asked of no one in particular.

  Shrugging, he resumed his way downriver. His squaw, Nesoowa, walked silently behind him.

  One half of his face he painted white, the other black so that he resembled a victim burning at the stake. It was fitting, for in the visions he saw his own death by fire. He welcomed his death with a singing heart. He would immolate himself so that his people might survive; it was a fitting way for a warrior to die.

  The spirits visited him all the time now. He no longer needed the Yengi spirit water to summon them. They showed him the same dream, over and over, so that he would not forget or betray his destiny.

  He understood the dream clearly, as clearly as if it were written in the pictographs of his people’s language. The rivers of Yengi who covered the earth were led by lusifee, the wildcat. But in the dream lusifee was slain by malsum, the wolf, and the Yengi tide receded, back into the ocean from which it had come. In the dream, the wolf killed the panther and the Dawn People regained their lost hunting grounds.

  The Dreamer’s eyes fluttered closed. He saw the face of lusifee—her tangled black hair, her pointed chin, those cat-like glowing, golden eyes.

  Still with his eyes closed, he took the red ochre and drew on his chest the image of the snarling wolf, totem of his tribe. Throwing back his head he gave the wolf’s howling cry. “I am the Dreamer!” he sang. “I am the Dreamer, leader of the wolf people. It is we who will kill the mighty lusifee. It is we who will drive back the Yengi tide!”

  The Dreamer was aware on the periphery of his entranced consciousness that most of the Abenaki tribes had once again taken up the hatchet against the Yengi. But the fate of the Dawn People would never be decided in that way. The spirits had spoken. It would be the Dreamer, and the Dreamer alone, who would bring lusifee back to the Norridgewocks where she would be burned as was her fate before Bedagi had interfered. She would be destroyed and the Yengi would leave the land of the Dawn People, forever.

  Why lusifee, the totem spirit of the Yengi, would choose to inhabit the body of a worthless woman, the Dreamer knew he would never fully understand. But then, the Yengi were an aberrant race; his father had once told him of some Yengi tribes which were ruled by female sachems. If they could choose women as their chiefs, then he supposed it was possible for a guardian spirit to inhabit the body of one of their females. That she was no ordinary woman, he had seen with his own eyes, for she had the courage, the ferocity of a warrior.

  She was lusifee and she must be destroyed.

  So the Dreamer prepared himself both for battle and for death. He smeared the bear grease over his body, he painted his chest and face, he sang his dream song to the heavens. He prepared himself to return to the place where he had captured lusifee the first time.

  The visions had promised she would be there and the visions never lied.

  The air was sweet with the odor of boiling sap. When Nat Parkes paused in his work of twitching rocks onto the stoneboat, he thought he could almost hear the sap dripping into the pails.

  From time to time he had stopped and gone over to give Delia and the girls a hand hauling the filled buckets on the sledge over to the boiling kettle. He kept the fire fed with wood, too. He did these chores for Delia, to make the sugaring easier for her. He had things he needed to make up for with Delia. A lot of things.

  He didn’t clear away all the stones from the field; some he left in scattered heaps. He had read in his almanac that stones made good manure, as they supposedly leached into the soil and the ground around them was said to sprout three times the crops of ordinary dirt. Earlier Delia had asked him about the heaps of stones and when he explained—a bit sheepishly, for the theory sounded like an old wive’s tale even if it had come out of the almanac—she had actually smiled. He realized it pleased him to make her smile.

  He looked for her now and saw that she was among the maples, tapping in more spiles. The girls were tending to the fire. With everyone’s attention focused elsewhere, Nat slipped away from the stoneboat and followed a familiar path up the hill behind where the barn used to be, before the savages had burned it.

  The marker remained untouched, although weathered by a winter exposed to the elements. Last year at this time she had been dead but three weeks. The stone had been freshly carved, the letters white scars in the smooth, gray granite, the dirt covering the grave mulchy brown and raw. Now the letters were black and the granite was pitted and scarred with tiny cracks. The ground had sunk at bit around the stone and sprouts of weeds were coming up through the patchy snow.

  Removing his hat, he knelt beside the marker, tracing the letters of her name with his fingers.

  Mary…

  You know the course of my thoughts these last weeks, while I’ve waited for Delia to come home. For I could feel you there, listening to me. It’s not that I love you any less…

  He shut his eyes for a moment, then sat back on his haunches. He dangled his hat between his outstretched knees, his wrists resting on his thighs. Mary, I’m going to have the house rebuilt next week and Obadiah Kemble is making us a new bed. And, Mary, I intend … I intend for Delia and me to share that bed as man and wife. If this hurts you, then I’m truly sorry, for you know in ten years I never once set out to deliberately hurt you. And I certainly never thought of taking another woman to bed, or even looked at one in that way. But I’ve considered it and I’ve decided maybe where you are now you don’t much care about such things as the pleasures of the flesh anymore. I hope that’s true because … because there’s more to marriage than two people sharing the same house, Mary, and I’m wedded to Delia now.

  He swallowed, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. Slowly he stood up. But it won’t change how I feel about you. And I hope … I hope it won’t change how you feel about me.

  A terrible doubt blossomed in Nat’s mind, a doubt whether the Mary he knew and loved felt anything at all anymore. But the thought was too terrible to contemplate and he hammered it down ruthlessly. If he believed for just one moment that nothing of Mary existed beyond the bones in this grave he—

  A piercing scream split the air and Nat flung his head up in terror. For a moment he was sure the sound had come from the grave at his feet.

  Then the scream came again and a cry of “Delia!” in Meg’s voice, and he spun around, stumbling and tripping in his haste to get back down the hill.

  Delia struggled in the arms of an Abenaki savage. As he tried to drag her back with him, deeper into the forest, her feet left furrows in the soggy snow. It was the girls who sc
reamed. Delia fought her abductor in awful silence, clawing at the arm that had a stranglehold around her neck.

  For one shameful, paralyzing moment Nat’s feet slowed as fear squeezed his chest. Like a fool he had left his musket back on the stoneboat, too far away from him to retrieve it and shoot the savage before he disappeared into the woods with Delia. Nat looked frantically around him, wondering if more Indians lurked within the forest, ready to spring out at him.

  Yet he was running again, toward the naked, painted man who wrestled with Delia … with no thought now but to save her.

  * * *

  Lusifee fought with the spirit of the wildcat that inhabited her soul and the Dreamer was shocked by the weakness of his response. His arms felt weighted to the earth with stones. His legs trembled with the effort it took to drag the Yengi woman with him. His breath labored in his chest, like mournful, dying gusts of wind, and he shook his head to rid it of the blurry film that covered his eyes.

  The Dreamer saw the tall, yellow-haired man lumbering awkwardly across the fields and he felt at the thong around his waist for his scalping knife. Lusifee almost broke free of him then and he saved his grip on her only by tangling his fingers in her hair. He threw back his head to utter his war cry, but he thought he might have laughed instead.

  The man with the yellow hair came on. He had no part in the vision; he was a gnat, easily squashed. The Dreamer drew back his hand and flung the knife at the man’s chest, but his arm felt strangely weak and his aim was wobbly and low. He would have missed altogether, but the man’s left foot seemed to collapse beneath him in that instant, so that he lurched sideways, flailing his arms to regain his balance and throwing himself directly into the path of the knife.

  The knife buried itself in the man’s stomach.

  Still, the man came on, several more stumbling steps before he slipped and collapsed on the trailing edge of a bank of melting snow. “Nat!” Lusifee screamed, tearing free from the Dreamer’s grasp. She flung herself toward the fallen man. “Nat!”

  It wasn’t a noise that made the Dreamer’s head snap up then, but a premonition as strong as any vision. He saw a spirit in the guise of a man emerge from the trees to the right of him. He saw the spirit’s long arm come up to point at his chest. He saw a flash of flame…

  He never heard the shot that killed him. But if he had he would have likened it to the sound of thunder.

  Ty took the precious few seconds necessary to reprime his rifle and ensure the Dreamer was dead before he pulled Delia off Nat. He gave her a little shove toward the sap kettle, where Meg and Tildy were huddled together, sobbing hysterically.

  “Get the girls and get to the blockhouse now, Delia! Tell Colonel Bishop an Abenaki war party is headed for Merrymeeting.”

  Delia looked down at hands that were covered with blood. She turned hollowed, shocked eyes onto Ty’s face. “Ty … Nat is…”

  He shook her slightly. “Delia! You’ve got to warn Merrymeeting and get those girls safely inside the stockade.” He shook her again, harder. “Do you understand?”

  She nodded, her teeth sinking into her lower lip.

  “Good.” Seizing her jaw, he landed a hard, swift kiss on her mouth, then whirled her around, sending her forward. “Now run, Delia-girl. Run like God Almighty!”

  She ran. He watched her until she reached the girls, picking Tildy up into her arms and taking Meg by the hand, until all three of them had started down the cart tracks toward the village.

  He knelt beside Nat. Gray eyes, dark with pain, fastened onto his. “Doc? My stomach hurts.”

  “You’ve got a knife in your belly, Nat,” Ty said. He wished he had some mandrake root to ease the man’s pain. “I’m going to have to pull it out of you.”

  Nat jerked a nod on a sobbing breath. “Delia …?”

  “She’s all right. So are your girls … Bear down, Nat. This is going to hurt like hell.”

  The knife was buried deep and it came out hard, and Ty was afraid he’d killed the man. But Nat’s breaths still came, in stertorous gasps, in between his screams. Ty staunched the welling blood with his wadded-up shirt, listening all the while for the sound of the fort’s warning bell, which would mean that Delia and the girls had arrived safely, although he knew that even at a fast run it would take them at least a half hour to get there.

  Ty thought he would have to build a travois to carry Nat to Merrymeeting until he noticed the stoneboat in a nearby field. He led the ox team over to Nat and as gently as he could lifted the man onto the sled. The movement had started Nat screaming again, but once on the stoneboat the screams faded, and Ty hoped for Nat’s sake that he had fainted.

  Nat sighed and his head lolled. “Mary …”

  “Hang on, Nat. You’re going to make it if you just hang on.”

  Nat’s hand flopped as he tried to lift it and his glazed eyes cleared a moment, fastening onto Ty’s face. “Tell Delia … sorry. Was going to make it up to her … Never got the chance …”

  Ty squeezed the man’s shoulder. “You tell her yourself. When we get to Merrymeeting.”

  Nat’s eyes closed and he drifted on a tide of agony. The pain was a living thing in his gut. He could picture it, eating at him the way tongues of flame ate at a pitch-covered log. It sizzled, crackled, burned. It was too much to bear and he hoped he would die soon.

  Mary…

  He felt so close to her now. For the first time since she had died he thought he could actually hear her voice. And the image of her, which had been fading of late, was suddenly in sharp focus before his eyes, as if she leaned right over him, her face mere inches from his. He was sure he felt her lips brush his forehead. I’m coming, he told her. Soon, soon…

  For a brief moment the agony faded and lucidity returned and in that moment he felt guilty for wanting to die. He would be leaving his children, a wife. But the guilt was small compared to the fierce yearning to have the unbearable pain stop … and the joy, the incredible joy and anticipation at the knowledge that soon, soon he would see his Mary. They would be together again. This time forever.

  Bells. In the far distance he heard bells. How odd, he thought, that there would be bells in heaven. The blue sky overhead began to blaze with white light and the ringing grew louder. The white light was cold, very cold. But he didn’t mind because the cold was numbing the fiery pain in his belly. Soon, he thought, soon, soon…

  “Mary…”

  Ty heard Nat’s roughened whisper and glanced down, words of reassurance on his lips. Words that died when he saw the open, lifeless eyes.

  The stockade’s warning bell carried far on the clear spring air. Settlers from the other nearby farms streamed out into the road on foot, horseback, and carts. They carried with them the things that they would need for a long siege. The oxen were not known for being fleet of foot, but the road was muddy and deeply carved with ruts and the sled moved easily over it. Soon the Merrymeeting green came into view, then the mast house, the Bishops’ manor house, the meetinghouse and parsonage, and finally the stockade.

  The palisade gates were open for the streams of refugees, but men prowled the sentry walks, rifles pointing into the surrounding wilderness forest. Inside the walls the stockade resembled an anthill that had been knocked over, with people scurrying in all directions, seemingly to no purpose.

  The blockhouse door banged open as Ty drove through the gates and Delia stumbled out. She paused on the threshold, her gaze flying first to Nat’s lifeless body on the sled and then to Ty’s face. He could hear screams coming from inside the blockhouse—Meg crying, “Let me go!” over and over.

  He met Delia halfway. He longed to take her into his arms, but he was afraid she would misinterpret his motivation. Instead, he tried to give her comfort with his eyes. “He died on the way here, Delia. I tried, but there never really was a chance.”

  She reached up and stroked his cheek. “Thank you, Ty,” she said softly. And then she went to Nat.

  She sat on the sled beside him and pic
ked up his hand, bringing it to her lips, and she cried. Ty turned his back on them, but not out of jealousy. Out of understanding.

  The sun went down and it grew cold. In the windows of the sheds beneath the walls, lacy white ferns of ice grew in the corners of the windowpanes. The moon came up, round and white, like a hard-packed ball of snow. It bathed the surrounding forest in a bright, silvery light.

  A scout had returned just before sunset. He had seen the Abenaki war party—over two hundred strong. They were stopping to raid a few isolated farms and trappers’ cabins along the way, but there was no doubt Merrymeeting was their main objective.

  Tyler Savitch, Colonel Bishop, and Sam Randolf were grouped around the cannon. The weapon’s long, black nose pointed menacingly east, the direction from which the Penobscot Abenaki were expected to come.

  His face looking ruddy as a scrubbed beet in the torchlight, Colonel Bishop glared at the cannon as he heaved a dubious sigh. “Are you sure this thing’ll fire, Sam?”

  “Hell, no.” Sam kicked so hard at one of the spoked iron wheels, he almost knocked his hat off. “For all I know, the damn thing could be no more use than a lace-trimmed nightie. But, aye, I think she’ll fire.”

  The colonel stared over the pointed palisade walls, into the dark, empty night. He pulled his thick lips with his fingers. “We’ve only shot enough for two rounds. Depending on their numbers, we might not be able to kill enough of them by firing only twice.”

  “We don’t need to kill all that many of them,” Ty said. He wrapped his hands around a couple of the logs, and the tendons in his wrists stood out, belying the relaxed tone of his voice. “The threat of the cannon should be enough.” He tried to explain the Abenaki method of fighting a war. “They don’t believe in dying gloriously on the battlefield. To them the object is to kill as many of the enemy as they can while surviving themselves to fight another day. They don’t see running off as a reflection of their courage, so if killing us looks to be too costly, they’ll simply fade back into the wilderness and strike somewhere else.”