Wild Indigo

by Judith Stanton

  If only he could free her from whatever haunted her, free both of them from the torment he had seen on their wedding night. But he would not free her from himself. He stepped up to the bed. A slight breeze stirred through the open window as first light flickered over her sensuous curves, playing along the long line to her waist, her generous hips, her shapely legs. But the gown and her position concealed her intimate charms.

  He longed to see more but thought better of making so much as a gesture. Last night, she dove under the cover’s protection.

  Retha made a high, anxious sound in her throat and twisted uneasily onto her back. Her high breasts pressed into the thin cambric of her gown. He took a slow admiring breath. Her nipples were taut, tempting. He let his gaze travel down. Beneath the fabric, at the juncture of her thighs, he could make out a sweet shadow of pleasure. Her legs were slightly ajar, as if some lover had entered her and left her so.

  He should be that lover.

  For long moments, he let longing fuel desire, a wrenching but delicious torment that overrode the weariness of his body, the lingering pain in his feet.

  Battling need, he left the bedroom, bare feet slapping the planked floor, and set his mind to other matters. He had to finish repairs on the mill. Armstrong was breathing down his neck. Using an ember from the kitchen hearth, he lit a tallow lamp, set it on a shelf above his drafting table, and took out a set of plans.

  For more than a week, the important work he undertook as planner for the town had gone untended. But then, if he had been less obsessed with improvements, repairs on the mill-race could have been finished days ago. The heavy drafting paper crackled as he unrolled it. Rubbing morning stiffness from the back of his neck, Jacob reviewed the dam’s design. While searching for Andreas, he had reworked it in his mind.

  His new plan would withstand any deluge short of the one that had sent Noah to the ark. Not only that, the mill could grind grain all the faster for Armstrong’s needy troops. In half the time it usually took him, Jacob marked his changes, rolled up the scroll, and tapped it impatiently against the slanted desk. So much for conquering desire with work.

  He thought of his reluctant bride in his bed. Her rejection struck at his pride. Her resistance forced him to smother his growing attraction. Her fear went against everything he knew the union of a man and a woman could be. He wanted her trust, her love, her passion.

  He wanted her to come to him.

  He snuffed the lamp and left the house. Down the street, Dr. Bonn, an early riser, might have a new remedy for Matthias.

  The children woke Retha, the two younger ones tumbling onto her bed like a litter of pups.

  “Where’s Papa?” Anna Johanna burrowed worriedly under the sheets.

  At work, Retha guessed, groping for consciousness. She didn’t know for certain where he was, so she did not say.

  A fuzz of early light haloed Matthias hugging a stray pillow beside her. “He didn’t have to go away again, did he?”

  “He’d better not.” Nicholas hung back at the foot of the bed.

  “He didn’t.” The resonance of their father’s voice made the children whirl to greet him.

  Retha scrambled up to see Jacob duck his head under the door. Caught sleeping late. Caught half-dressed. She thought of joining her stepdaughter under the sheets. “I’ll have breakfast for us in a minute,” she stammered.

  Jacob’s amused look acknowledged her confusion. Then he clamped a hand on each boy’s shoulder. “Time to dress for school,” he said indulgently, pushing them out of the room.

  “Wait for me.” Anna Johanna leapt from under her covers and grabbed for his breeches at his knee.

  “You too, pumpkin. You can’t say morning prayers in your shift.” His hands reached to lift her, then closed to fists as if unwilling to trust the change in her he had witnessed last night. “We’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.

  Retha felt left out but had no time to dwell on that. Dazed by her new family’s energy and demands, she hastily pinned her bodice and buttoned on her skirt before the thunk of children’s feet had reached the top of the stairs. There was always so much to do and so little time to do it.

  Last night she had had time aplenty. For hours she had lain in bed, anxiously awaiting Jacob, fearing he would join her and fearing he would not. Any minute he could have touched her. Or left her alone. But throughout her vigil, her body kept on betraying her, sheer shaking nerves alternating with warm, unexplained pulsings that brought on the nerves again.

  She felt doomed to this incessant cycle of sensation, without knowing what caused it or when it might end. She wanted to end it today, if only she knew how, if only someone would tell her what was wrong. If only she had someone to turn to.

  Preoccupied, she went to the kitchen and set the table with tinware plates, cups, and utensils.

  Alice! She could go to Alice. Her married Chero-kee friend would know what was happening to her, would tell the truth and not scorn her or giggle. In one morning, Retha could trek to the Voglers’ cabin and back. Soldiers would be on the roads, but they didn’t frequent the woods, and no one knew Indian trails or deer paths as well as she. Still, she didn’t have the pass that the Continental Army required of travelers of late, and she would be going behind her husband’s back. All in all, she would be taking a terrible chance.

  But, she told herself, gathering her resolve, she was going for his sake, for the sake of their marriage.

  She put out milk, bread, and cold green-apple pie. One quick trip was well worth the risk. Eva could keep Anna Johanna for a few short hours. Retha needed dyestuffs anyway and would be sure to find some. She would be back by noon when the boys came home for hominy.

  Four hungry, dressed Blums noisily descended the stairs. Their racket made a comforting domestic clatter, Retha realized, relaxing for a moment. She was starting like having a family. She almost liked being a mother.

  But Jacob caught her eye and cocked his head toward the table, amused and questioning. She followed his gaze, staring blankly for a moment at everything she had set out, feeling stupid. Wasn’t it enough? After all, there were only five people….

  And four plates! In mock distress, she hit her forehead with the heel of her hand.

  He laughed. “Is someone not welcome here?”

  “Someone is not awake.” With a hot blush, she retrieved a fifth plate from the cupboard and set it out with a flourish. “Everyone’s welcome.”

  After prayers and breakfast, they shuttled the boys off to school. Jacob picked up a large scroll of parchment from his desk in the parlor, headed for the door, but turned to Retha, speaking so low that Anna Johanna could not hear. “Ah. I talked with Dr. Bonn. He suspects consumption.”

  “But Matthias has no cough.”

  “So I reminded him. He offers to examine the boy, but he has made up his mind. Consumption.” Jacob’s eyes glinted. “I will not have my son frightened into thinking he has a deadly disease.”

  She agreed. “Because he doesn’t. There’s no cough. He’s thin, but he is not sickly.”

  “He merely will not eat. ’Tis not the same at all.”

  “Perhaps some concoction to stimulate the appetite.”

  “I asked the good doctor for one. Matthias, the man said in all his pomposity, is too young to lose his appetite. ‘We must seek the underlying disorder.’” Jacob imitated Dr. Bonn’s droning voice, but Retha heard a note of disgust in his tone. “That means we must find the cure ourselves.”

  Jacob’s we heartened Retha. “We will. We’ll find it.”

  “I know. Somehow. But naught I’ve tried has worked so far…” He paused at the door, looking defeated.

  Unsure of what wives did when dejected husbands left for work, Retha stepped nearer, reaching out to soothe him.

  Apparently not this.

  He wielded his scroll like a weapon. “I have to go,” he said briskly.

  Alice sat under a giant oak that arched over her small cabin, a waist-length fall of
jet-black hair obscuring her face and the work in her lap.

  Having walked for an hour through morning dews, Retha untied the skirts she had knotted up to keep dry. Her shoes, Haube, and neckerchief dangled in her hands. She decided not to put them back on. Even in the deep forest, it had been sweltering. Her Cherokee friend would understand her effort to be free of white women’s hot, confining clothes.

  “Alice,” she called softly.

  Alice didn’t respond. Retha walked closer. Her friend’s attention was given over to beading a very large moccasin, at odds with her simple gingham shift.

  Retha called again.

  Alice jumped up, spilling beads onto the hide spread over the weedy ground.

  “I am come,” Retha said in German, the traditional Cherokee greeting of a guest sure of being accepted.

  “You are. It is well,” Alice said, welcome in her words and in the smile that flashed across her still pretty, pockmarked face. But her hands moved nervously to recover the scattered beads.

  Retha dropped to her knees to help. “I didn’t mean to alarm you.”

  Alice’s gaze skimmed the large clearing. Retha could see nothing but crops, planted on land that Indians had burned for hunting years before. In the distance, Gottlieb rhythmically swung a great scythe, single-handedly harvesting wheat in a parched field.

  “We have so many…intruders,” Alice finally explained, searching her hard-earned German for the right word.

  “I didn’t see a soul all the way here.”

  Alice scooped the last of the beads into a small pouch and surveyed Retha’s state of undress. “Militia,” Alice explained. “You should not come here. Redcoats march from the south, Gottlieb says. And many others.”

  “They aren’t here yet.”

  Smiling cautiously, Alice gestured to her to sit on the hide blanket. “Why do you come?”

  “To see you, of course.” Retha sat down, folding her neckerchief and beribboned Haube on her lap.

  “You travel with pass?”

  Retha shook her head, her loose hair sticking to her bared shoulders. “No pass. I didn’t come by the roads.”

  “Woods are not safe.”

  “I avoided clearings, too, until yours.”

  Alice scowled ever so slightly, the reproof a severe reprimand from her. “The Sisters would not like. They take good care of you.”

  “They try.”

  Retha saw the moment Alice’s eyes widened at the sight of the new blue ribbon on her Haube. A blush of self-consciousness warmed her face.

  “Your ribbon. It is blue.” Alice touched it and grinned. “Married?”

  Retha nodded.

  Alice’s limited German seemed to fail her, and she burst into her loud native tongue. “But when? And who? When I saw you at the market, you said naught of marriage!”

  Retha eked out her story in rusty Cherokee, hoping the earthy tongue would make her intimate questions less embarrassing. “I knew naught. But even then, I believe Brother Blum had conspired with the Elders to cast the lot for me. Imagine that. Imagine a man like Brother Blum asking for me.”

  “But he’s the one—isn’t he Gottlieb’s friend, the one with all the children?”

  “Only three.” Retha giggled, then bit her lip. She had to be serious. She needed to know about men and women, and even more—if she could bring herself to ask—about these strange new feelings. Suddenly feeling terribly naïve, Retha retreated to safer ground. “In truth, I’ve scarcely thought of children.”

  “Tell me about them,” Alice entreated. She and Gottlieb still had none. “Is it difficult to be a mother?”

  “Yes. And no.” Sometimes switching to German to explain a nuance, Retha unburdened herself of all she had come to feel in her first week with Jacob’s family—confusion, commitment, and pride. Alice ahhed over Anna’s dirty dress, commiserated over tales of Nicholas’s intransigence, wondered aloud why Matthias was so thin.

  “You should feed him good Indian food,” she said.

  “Perhaps I will.”

  “But you never spoke to me of marriage.”

  Retha ran the blue ribbons through her fingers, thinking what to say. “I wondered why no one ever asked,” she confessed. “To them, I was an orphan and an outsider. So I never spoke of it. I thought perhaps my past repelled them.”

  “It could not have. They never would have kept you. Besides, you are not born Cherokee.” Alice patted her hand, then took up her work. “Well, well. A bride of a week. And so, my friend, is he a gentle man?”

  A gentle man. Retha sat back on her heels. What a peculiar notion. Jacob was a large man. A strong man. A busy man. And a good father. What was Alice asking? “I think he is a good man. He loves his children. He works so hard for everyone.”

  Alice smiled slyly. “That’s not what I meant.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Has he satisfied you? Is he a gentle man?”

  Retha withdrew her hand. “Oh, you mean his temper. I think he has quite a temper. But he keeps it under control.”

  The smile slipped off Alice’s face. “He’s hurt you.”

  “Oh, no,” Retha said, truly puzzled. “I don’t believe Jacob would do that.”

  “Of course, it hurts the first time, and the blood—”

  “It didn’t hurt, and there was no blood,” Retha assured her, hastening to one of the worrying points she had come to address. “But with three young children already, I hope and pray we’ll not soon have another—”

  “No pain?” Alice set aside her work and studied Retha with piercing black eyes. “You would have felt some pain.”

  “No. None.”

  “You would have seen blood on the sheets.”

  Blood on the sheets? Retha shivered. She could only shake her head. There had been no blood.

  “Something is amiss, my friend.” Alice’s voice softened. “Are you sleeping with your husband?”

  “Of course I am. Except when he was away. When his cousin was drafted and he had to go and bring him back. The four days he was gone, I slept alone. Which is what I’m used to, but not a whole room to myself…”

  She was rambling.

  Alice stopped her. “I mean, lying with him. You know. As husband and wife. As woman and man.”

  Retha’s hand shook. “I don’t know.”

  “Did no one explain to you beforehand?”

  No, she thought to herself, that’s why I came to you. But Retha sat mute, shaking her head stupidly.

  Gently Alice wrapped her arm around Retha’s shoulder. “Wanders Lost, has your husband loved you?”

  Tears sprang to Retha’s eyes. This was awful. When she tried to speak, the words scratched her throat. “I don’t think he loves me.”

  Alice looked uncomfortable. “I am serious. Has he mated with you?”

  “I told you. On our wedding night.”

  “Ah.” Alice paused. “Tell me what happened.”

  Retha steadied herself with a deep breath. She had come for this. “He kissed me and held me and took me to the bedroom and left me alone to undress.”

  “And then…”

  Fierce heat flooded Retha. Instinctively she began to rock. “I don’t remember.”

  Her friend’s brow furrowed with doubt.

  “I mean, ’twas over so quick…”

  Alice made a clicking sound of disapproval.

  “It must have happened fast.”

  “My friend, it doesn’t happen fast.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think your husband has not yet loved you.”

  Retha didn’t think she could feel hotter. Embarrassment, consternation, bewilderment washed through her. She was so sure something had happened.

  Why else would Jacob have been angry?

  Alice stood, extended her hand, and helped Retha up. “I have some sassafras tea. Let’s go inside and talk.” She rolled her needlework up in the hide and led Retha into the cabin.

  Inside, the night air lingered, the day’s heat held at bay by thick
log walls. Retha wiggled her toes against the cabin floor’s hard clay and let its coolness seep into her body through the soles of her feet. She needed to ground herself on the simple earth, and chill the hot confusion that raced through her veins.

  “This tea is not quite what you need but it is all I have,” Alice said, seating Retha away from the small room’s huge hearth where a stew simmered in a covered kettle over embers. Then Alice took out the moccasin she was beading, and sat, too. “If you had come of age with us, your mother…”

  “Singing Stones of the Wolf Clan…”

  “Would have told you. But I will speak for her.”

  Alice proceeded with a simple yet earthy description of the marriage act that left no doubt in Retha’s mind: Her husband had not yet joined with her. He hadn’t entered her, it hadn’t hurt, she hadn’t bled, and nothing, nothing had made her body feel like water rushing over rapids and then plunging over falls. Except perhaps…

  Self-consciousness skittered along her veins. She had already had those feelings—for Jacob but not with him.

  She was a wife and not a wife.

  Alice had detected her failing to fulfill a woman’s duty to her husband like a hawk sights prey. Not that Alice would use that knowledge to harm or hurt her in any way. But Retha dared not look at her friend. She tried to conceal the turmoil of her thoughts by sipping her tea. What did it all mean?

  And why was Jacob angry? Because he did not love her or did not want her? Or because she somehow truly repelled him? And if it were the last reason, did she repel him because of her past or in some other way? If so, how could she ever change what had already gone so wrong? She had ruined her chance for happiness with her husband without even knowing she had done wrong.

  She set down her cup to steady it. But what had she done? Nothing. She had gone to bed and gone to sleep.