Wild Indigo

by Judith Stanton

  And he had shared their bed.

  Perhaps there was hope to be had in that.

  Listening to the sigh of thread as Alice stitched the moccasin, Retha cast about for a positive sign that Jacob still wanted her as he had on their wedding day. Happy then, he had kissed her in front of the world. Again, before he left to find his cousin, he had kissed her with feeling. And when he had returned, he had accepted her nursing with gratitude, with…

  The image of his large, powerful body, lying on the bed, came to her.

  He had wanted her.

  If not waking, then at least in his sleep. She had seen him, under the sheet, swollen with what Alice had just described as the most powerful of all human desires.

  But Alice hadn’t said one thing about the size of a man.

  “It won’t fit!” Retha protested, covering her face with her hands, mortified by her own outburst, but also appalled by this startling new notion. Jacob would have to fit that part of him inside her, into a space inside herself she barely believed existed. Surely Alice had it wrong. No wonder cats cried out and dogs got stuck.

  “Man was made to fit woman,” Alice assured her.

  Unable to look up, Retha heard beads clink as Alice stirred in her leather pouch for another one.

  “You’re certain?” Retha said weakly after a while.

  “I would not lie about that.” Retha looked up to see Alice smiling warmly, a little bit amused. “Men and women do it all the time.”

  “And all those moans and groans I used to hear…”

  “Were sounds of pleasure.”

  Pleasure. Retha grabbed her cup and gulped her tea to hide the thought that swept her. She had felt pleasure. Those alarming new sensations felt good. She had only to think of him for them to wash through her again. Like water over rapids, rivers over falls. Exactly as Alice said.

  But it was so very hard to ask Alice about the rest.

  “I wonder…” Retha twisted the cup in her hand. “This pleasure…is it…”

  Alice patiently plied her needle to the soft deerskin.

  “Do you feel…this pleasure…with Gottlieb?”

  Abruptly Alice stood up.

  Retha watched closely as her friend lay her work on the mantel, her copper skin reddening. “You’re blushing.”

  Alice covered her face with outspread fingers. “I never blush.”

  But she did. And her blush was partial confirmation, and it gave Retha the nerve to ask about the deepest secret she had. “Do you ever feel it when you think about him?”

  Bending her head over her work, Alice nodded, but Retha detected a shy grin.

  “When I am with him and when I am not,” Alice finally admitted in a breathless voice. “He is a very gentle man.”

  For a moment Retha could say nothing. Envy swirled through her. Although diffident, Alice sounded happy, sure of herself. Satisfied.

  Suddenly she felt Alice’s strong arms around her. “Wanders Lost, I have met your man. You are a lucky one. I think he too will be very gentle.”

  Retha buried sharp doubt in her friend’s embrace, inhaling the strong yet comforting smell of bear grease that protected Alice’s skin. The last questions were the hardest. “But how do I start? What do I do?”

  “Trust him. Touch him. Reach for him. Let him know you will not shrink—”

  Alice broke off and moved toward the window, listening.

  “What is it?”

  “Visitors.”

  Retha heard nothing, but the tension in her friend’s stance sent an old, raw terror slithering down Retha’s spine. “Redcoats!” she whispered.

  “No. Worse.” Alice strained on tiptoe to look out the cabin’s one small window. “’Tis the militia. They hound us. They believe me to be a spy.”

  Heavy steps pounded the small front porch. Gottlieb, a massive porcupine of cut wheat stalks and clinging chafe, burst through the door. His chest heaved as he strode to his wife, gathered her protectively in his arms, and swept her from the window. Then he saw Retha.

  “Sister Retha! Gott im Himmel! How do you come to us?”

  “I came…I came…” Retha wrung her hands and looked from friend to friend. Alice’s face tightened with resistance. Gottlieb braced his body with a warrior’s determination.

  “’Tis too dangerous for you here,” he scolded in German. “The Sisters should not have let you come.”

  “They did not, Gottlieb. She is married. To your friend Jacob Blum.”

  “He should not have let you,” Gottlieb said sternly. “But you are married! This is good, Retha?”

  She swallowed quickly, hard. Did her own doubt and confusion show? “Yes, good.”

  Again footsteps thundered on the porch. Her heart flapped in her throat like a trapped bird’s wings.

  One man’s peremptory steps, three men’s, four. A lot of men, a band, a troop. She couldn’t count. She couldn’t breathe.

  Gottlieb extended her a ham-sized hand. “Stehen zie hier, Retha, bitte. Mit uns.”

  Retha went to stand with them, a thin, uncontrollable shaking suffusing her limbs and her belly. In town the sight of soldiers never bothered her, but she barely had time to register that thought.

  “And let me speak with him,” he went on. “Moravian Sisters don’t know English. He will think you a spy for sure.”

  Retha bridled. Jacob said that, too. She hadn’t wanted to believe it was true. She couldn’t hazard that it was not.

  A tall, skinny man pushed his way inside. Road dirt streaked his rough militia linens. He circled the three of them as if they were prey, his thin lips curling over stained teeth.

  At Retha, he halted. Her furtive glance caught him ogling her, and she purposely stared past his gaze, only to see his bony fingers slide through his unwashed, carroty hair.

  CHAPTER 10

  The man called Sim Scaife paced the clay floor. Four sweaty Liberty Men lounged behind him, their heat and their easy, edgy menace swamping the cool room. Retha fingered the blue ribbon on her Haube for reassurance but felt none. Gottlieb’s hand came to rest protectively on her shoulder. His stolid presence comforted her only slightly as an eerie sense stole over her.

  She struggled briefly to remember another hot day, another tight room. She had been in this exact predicament once before. A man behind her, a woman beside her, the thin stench of danger. Unwashed men, spent powder.

  “Reckon we caught your wife at it this time, squaw lover,” Scaife drawled.

  Retha’s images vanished, and she saw only the redheaded man.

  “Cherokee Alice consorting with a white woman. Two skirts.” He spat. “Nothin’s worse’n a female spy.”

  Gottlieb’s hand tensed on Retha’s shoulder, but still he didn’t speak. His silence riffled her nerves. How much of Scaife’s crude, backcountry English could he understand? He should have let her talk. It wouldn’t prove she was a spy. Besides, she could clear this up with a quick explanation. She had simply taken a walk, looking for dyes. As everyone knew she had always done.

  With the muzzle of his musket, Scaife flipped one of Alice’s black braids over her shoulder. “Naught’s prettier. And naught’s sneakier, neither.”

  “Nicht spy, Captain Scaife,” Gottlieb said at last, his profound bass straining against his meager English. “Sie ist nicht spy. Not when you come here last month, last week. And not today.”

  “Ah, but this one—” Scaife made an insolent quarter-turn to Retha and snaked out a hand, untying the ribbon on her Haube and dragging the cap off her head.

  Freed, Retha’s hair slumped around her shoulders. A small, wiry militia man laughed restlessly. Hot blood rose to her face.

  “Blue ribbon, too…” Scaife examined the cap and its ribbons before tossing it to his men like plundered spoils. “One of them Moravians got him a wandering Frau.”

  “Maybe Vogler here just likes his quim in different colors,” a fuzzy-cheeked militia man taunted, taking his cue from Scaife.

  “Naw, it’s all pink
inside, Calloway. Mebbe you ain’t had none yet,” the wiry man said.

  The young man reddened and went for his comrade’s linens, but Scaife separated them with a growl. “It’s my arrest, Calloway.”

  The men slouched back. Retha looked down to hide confused embarrassment. She didn’t understand the words but caught the implication. Gottlieb didn’t seem to.

  “Das ist Mary Margaretha Blum,” he said carefully. “1st Frau of Bruder Jacob Blum.”

  “Brooder Bloom’s woman?” Scaife raised an insinuating eyebrow as he mocked Gottlieb’s heavy accent. “We know Brooder Bloom. You and Blum taking turns now?”

  Gottlieb did not take the bait but drew Alice and Retha nearer. Tension crackled across the room.

  Scaife turned to Retha, touching her loosened hair with bony fingers. “You spying or running away little house Frau? I’ll find you out.” Suddenly he snatched back his hand. “Yellow eyes! Where’d you get them yellow eyes?”

  Chin high, Retha refused to answer a question meaningless to her anyway.

  “What’s he saying, Retha?” Gottlieb muttered in German.

  “I’m not sure.” She was worse than not sure. She was mystified. Her eyes were strange, so Eva always teased her, as pale a brown as if they had faded.

  “Didn’t he say something about yellow—”

  “No plotting, squaw lover,” Scaife rasped, even as he stepped away and spoke in an undertone to one of his men.

  Retha strained to hear. The words garrison and crowded floated up to her. Did he mean to arrest them all and haul them off to prison? The thought of being locked up chilled her. Then she detected a phrase about taking her to Salem.

  “What else, Retha?”

  “He means to escort me back to Salem, I think.”

  “I can’t let him take you—”

  Scaife returned, glowering. “None of that babble, Vogler. You just tell Cherokee Alice to dish us up some of that stew over there.”

  Gottlieb lifted his hands in question.

  “Food, you ham-handed German dunderhead.” Scaife pointed at the steaming kettle. “Feed my men.”

  Omitting the insults, Gottlieb told Alice what to do. She began setting out bowls.

  “You too, Frau Blum. Serve up.” Scaife pointed her toward the table.

  Retha hefted the kettle to the table so Alice could ladle out the stew. Any task was preferable to standing still. War-thin and hungry, Scaife’s men crowded around, tearing off pieces of com bread, soaking them in broth, spooning up stew with chunks of meat.

  Scaife spit out his first bite. “What the hell’s this slop, Vogler?”

  Gottlieb raised his shoulders. “What’s wrong with the stew?” he asked Retha in German.

  “He doesn’t like it,” she translated promptly, almost amused by Scaife’s sputtering indignation. “Maybe he never had turtle stew.”

  “Don’t talk.” Alice concealed her warning to Retha by looking straight at her husband. “You give yourself away. You show you know English, and they will think you are spy.” Silently she walked over to the hearth, picked up a turtle shell, and held it out to Scaife.

  “Turtle soup? Pig swill!” he barked, swatting the shell aside. It cracked onto the floor, rocking like a spun top. “You men finish up and meet me outside.”

  Grabbing Retha’s elbow, Scaife jerked her toward the door. She almost stumbled.

  Gottlieb prevented her fall, catching her with large, gentle hands and wresting her away from Scaife. “She stays here. She is our friend.”

  “We’re taking her to her husband,” Scaife purred derisively. He removed Gottlieb’s hands from Retha’s waist like a dandy plucking lint off his waistcoat.

  Gottlieb swelled with indignation. “I myself take her to Jacob Blum.”

  Scaife’s free hand whipped his pistol from his belt. At the table, one soldier plunked down his bowl, reclaimed his musket from the wall, and snapped its bayonet in place.

  “You can make this easy, Vogler,” Scaife said. “Or you can make it hard.”

  Gottlieb’s hands lifted, fisted.

  Scaife eyed the fists and raised a brow. “Another threat from you and we’ll take her, too.” His head twisted toward Alice. “To the garrison where she belongs.”

  Retha watched defeat and anger play across Gottlieb’s face. “I’ll be all right,” she assured him with a confidence she did not feel. But she was mortified that she had so endangered her friends and would do anything to set that right. “Let me go. He’ll take me to Jacob.” Slowly Gottlieb lowered his fists.

  “Don’t you men tarry,” Scaife barked, and pushed Retha through the doorway. Outside, he flopped her onto his ribby nag like a bundle of deerskins, squashing her breasts under his bony arms as he lifted her. She swallowed hard against the bruising insult.

  As she struggled to right herself against the saddle’s crude wooden framing, her skirt flew up.

  “Nice gams,” Scaife mocked, eyeing her bare legs.

  She understood the tone if not the word. With an angry flourish, she shook her skirt down to her laced shoes and straightened in the saddle. Bared legs, bare throat, bare head. Her Haube would be left behind, her neckerchief was inside. She refused to ask for them. No brave-hearted Cherokee woman would stoop to supplication, and her heart had learned courage from them. Defiant, she lifted her chin above her naked throat and unprotected chest.

  “That’s right, Frau Bloom.” Scaife’s leer lingered on all the female parts of her that Alice had just spoken of so earthily. Lips, breasts, and the juncture of her thighs. Her offerings to her husband. “Get yourself set. You ride with me.”

  She shot him a flaming look.

  He barked a laugh. “Thought so, little liar. You understood pert’ near every word.”

  Just outside Salem at Steiner’s Mill, Jacob slammed a sledgehammer into one of the new pilings for the frame dam. Usually he took comfort in doing his full share of communal labor, and the spillway’s renovations were, after all, of his design. But today he had spent the two hours since noon trying to ignore the way the sun crawled across the sky, poking in and out of dark, gathering clouds.

  His wife had not returned for the midday meal. Sister Ernst had puffed the furlong down the road to deliver the message to him here. Retha was gathering dyestuffs in the forbidden woods and had convinced her friend that she took no risks. Unconvinced, he listened to the Sister’s arguments, thanked her, and sent her back to care for Anna Johanna. The boys would spend the afternoon in school. So he wasn’t worried about his children. But he was starting to worry about his maddeningly independent wife.

  What if something had gone wrong? For weeks, as the war moved up from South Carolina, soldiers had swarmed the roads and woods. Of late, he would admit, there had been a lull. Still, he could have, should have, gone after his wife. If she were harmed, he had no one to blame but himself. For now, he was treading a fine line between encouraging his young bride to stand by his side, newly married and all grown up, and gently guiding her in her new role, so as to help yet not interfere. If he fell on the wrong side of that line, in either direction, he would further jeopardize their fragile relationship.

  She had made a decision, and he wanted to stand behind her. As the town dyer, she had scoured the countryside for plants. She knew the woods.

  But it was late and getting later, and distant thunder threatened a storm. Any minute now he would give in to his growing conviction of her danger, fling his sledgehammer into the muck, and tear out after her.

  He struck another resounding, satisfying blow, and another.

  And heard hoofbeats. The mopey slap of water against his pilings did not mute the rhythmic threat of horses tearing up the main road that ran to the mill.

  Jacob looked up, in no humor for soldiers, red or blue, fleeing or charging, needing grain or change of—

  Clothing. From this distance, he could make out a person in a dress astride a horse. A woman, leading a band of men.

  Amber hair furled out b
ehind her, and skirts buffeted her horse’s sides. Flanking her, a small band of Liberty Men galloped in tight formation. Above her head, a tricorn swayed and bobbled. Jacob squinted. A man rode behind her, his arms around her body.

  Retha was a prisoner. They had found her, captured her, and done to her—God only knew what.

  Jacob’s hands tightened on the shaft of the sledgehammer as he fought a mad desire to maul the man who clasped her to him.

  They galloped up, five ragged, bearded Liberty Men and his windblown wife. Their heaving horses skidded to a halt in front of the drained millpond, at the wet bare feet of Jacob and his men.

  In the part of his brain that had gone on full alert, Jacob noted the hired deserters had vanished behind him while Brothers Hine and Rausch held back. Beside him, Brother Steiner was already sloshing through the muck to tend to other business.

  These soldiers were not Steiner’s business.

  With a sudden wave of anger, Jacob charged past him to claim his wife. A wiry soldier spurred his horse up against Jacob, cutting him off from her, but the small horse’s arched neck didn’t block his view. Anxious, he scanned her face and her alarmingly bared throat for signs of injury. And gave a quick sigh of relief. No harm done, on the surface at least.

  But she sat in the saddle like a wild thing cornered, too smart to bolt before her way was clear. Sunlight streamed through storm clouds, lighting her untamed amber hair. A sight for her husband and no one else. A memory of his first glimpse of her glorious hair flashed upon him. Here it was unbound for all the world to see: both those reckless, grinning soldiers and his Moravian compatriots, the upright Brothers Hine and Rausch and Steiner. Men who would leer and men who would look away.

  A possessive rage, the likes of which he had never known, spiked his gut. He sidestepped the soldier’s mount to claim his wife, her eyes flashing and her chin held high above her bare chest. Where her neckerchief should have been.

  Who had removed it? Jacob swore the black oath under his breath.

  From behind her, Retha’s captor vaulted off the horse, revealing his face for the first time. Sim Scaife turned to Jacob and tipped his rumpled tricorn, showing a carrot-red tangle of hair. “Brought your wife home, Brooder Bloom.”