He swallowed the anger and frustration that he seldom gave in to and wondered if she would notice if he walked out and never came back. Would she eventually get up? Fix some food for the boys and herself?
If he thought his leaving would force her back to life, he would go this very minute. But what father could take that chance? He could not afford to be wrong. Susanna had locked herself deep into the dungeon of suffering she had built for herself. The boys did not deserve to lose both of them.
“I’m going out to look for them.”
He knew that she would eventually shuffle over to the table and sit waiting for him to return. Mealtimes were the few times of day she would get out of the rocking chair, and that was only because he had demanded she sit with the boys while they ate.
“We’re still a family,” he had insisted not long ago. The words had sounded hollow and false the day he threatened and cajoled her into sitting down with the boys for meals. He had never raised his voice to her before, nor had he again. After that, she went to the table for meals, but she rarely ate more than a few bites.
The boys had to be found while the pie cooled. Payson opened the door, squinting against the setting sun. Across the half-plowed field, an oxcart bumped and rumbled over the furrowed ground. Beside it, lanky as a beanpole, walked Bob Carver, his nearest neighbor. The man had been more than willing to befriend Payson when they first settled. He and his family had even brought some of the other Shawneetown folk to help the newcomers clear out the old cabin and shed, but after the baby was stillborn and Susanna began to curl up inside herself, the Carvers and the rest of them had stopped coming by.
The callers were still too far away for him to recognize the tall, broad-shouldered man in buckskins walking beside Carver or the woman seated on the oxcart. He did not really care who they were, for he would have welcomed the devil if he walked up to the door offering a momentary diversion.
“Bob Carver’s crossing the field with an oxcart, Susanna.” He looked over his shoulder. “Hear that, honey? Someone’s coming to call.”
Virginia came to mind, and with it the days when they had lived with her father, existing on the man’s charity. At the plantation, whenever callers were seen riding up the long drive, house slaves would begin fixing refreshments. Susanna and Olivia’s laughter would echo up the stairwell as they speculated on who might be calling.
Payson shook his head, refusing to let the past spoil the present.
He looked outside again, where a blazing sunset fired the sky above the treeline. He raised his hand in salute, although all he could make out against the bloodred sky were the dark silhouettes of the two men walking beside the oxcart, and the woman riding high on the swaying seat. Bob Carver waved back. Payson calculated just how far the turnip-and-squirrel pie might stretch as he stepped over the threshold and waited to welcome the visitors.
Noah heard Olivia’s quick intake of breath, saw her scoot to the edge of the seat and grip the wood until her knuckles whitened. She leaned forward, straining to get a better look at the man who had suddenly appeared in the open doorway of the small cabin up ahead of them. Her face went pale, her eyes unusually bright. She nearly flew over the front of the cart when the right wheel hit a particularly deep rut and the vehicle bounced a mile high. Noah reached up to steady her, drew her attention and earned himself a nervous smile.
“That’s my father.” Her voice was strained, unsteady.
Although he could not imagine any father turning away a daughter who had suffered so much, and none of it her fault, he knew she would be hesitant to tell her family about Lankanal and the whorehouse. He did not know Payson Bond, and therefore did not know what the man might do.
He was already in too deep. He was not about to walk away until he knew that she would fare well here.
The man in the doorway waved. His brown hair was shot through with blond highlights. As they drew closer, Noah could see that Payson Bond was not a very big man, slight of build, wiry. He wore sturdy, coarse wool trousers and a white cambric shirt. He still had a full head of hair, but his shoulders were already beginning to stoop.
“Please, stop the cart. Let me down, Mr. Carver,” Olivia begged.
Carver stopped the huge ox and stood by its head while Noah helped Olivia down. Concentrating on her father, she did not notice when Noah held her too close for a breath too long. She clung to his sleeve while she gathered courage to go the rest of the way alone. She was trembling.
“Do you want me to go with you?” He spoke softly, for her ears alone. Bob Carver was watching them closely, alternately shifting his view from them to the cabin and back again.
Olivia shook her head no. “I have to do this by myself,” she told him, searching his face with her gaze as if looking for strength. He could not give her that, only encouragement.
“He is your father, Olivia.”
She let go of his arm and took another step toward her future and all the doubt that plagued her.
Olivia tried to swallow around the lump in her throat. As she neared the house, she could see her father more clearly but as yet, he had not recognized her. He was thin, much thinner than she recalled. Hatless, his receding hairline etched pale coves on his forehead. His eyes were stark blue, and the planes and angles of his face stood out in sharp relief. Only thirty-eight years old, he looked much older.
For a while after her mother died there had been only the two of them. Versed in scholarly pursuits, he had taken work where he could get it, traveling Virginia, hiring on to tutor rich planters’ children.
Seeing him so slight and looking so vulnerable all alone in the doorway of the little cabin made her heart ache for him. Where were Susanna and the boys? Where was the family he had sacrificed her in order to save? She hoped to God he had not lost them, too. Not now.
All the resentment she had harbored during her long months of captivity shifted, not as far as forgiveness, but away from resentment. He still was and always would be her father.
She knew the moment he recognized her, for his whole demeanor changed. He straightened, gave a cry she could not hear, then started running across the field, arms open wide as if he wanted to embrace not only her, but the woods and trees and the fiery sunset sky.
Tears were streaming down the hollows of his cheeks by the time he reached her. They fell into each other’s arms, rocking side to side without a word, for there were no words. There was nothing that anyone had ever said before that would express all they needed to say.
He held her close, his shoulders heaving with silent, soul-wrenching sobs, and when he finally pulled back he did not let go. Payson ran his hands over her face, tracing it like a blind man, his fingers shaking so hard she had to close her eyes.
“Are you all right?” The words were strained, furtive, demanding only because he needed to know. “Are you all right?”
No, Daddy. I will never be the same.
I will never be that young or carefree or innocent again.
I am nineteen now and I am old inside.
My soul is tarnished and I am afraid to love.
Olivia hugged him close, patting his back as she would have one of the little boys. All the things she might have said, all the things she had thought of saying to him in the middle of those long and terribly desperate nights in New Orleans, all of those things she could not say now. Not with his tears of joy still wet upon his cheeks.
“Yes, Daddy,” Olivia lied. “I’m all right.”
“Oh, Livvie, we thought you were dead.”
I was, Daddy.
“I’m here now, Daddy.”
“Oh, God, Olivia. Why are you dressed that way? Where have you been? I’ve been so worried.” He tried to read her face the way he read his books.
Olivia whispered, “Please, don’t ask me that now, Daddy. I’ll tell you someday.”
He went very still. Finally he said, “I’m just so happy to have you home.”
“Where are the boys? Where is Susanna?”
“Dearest Lord in heaven!”
Payson’s strangled cry had slowly sifted through the haze, intruding into Susanna’s carefully woven web of isolation and retreat. Something in his voice had sent a chill down her spine, one as cold and sharp as a knife, so much so that she winced. She looked up from where her hands lay idle in her lap. The door was open and a shaft of burnt-umber light streamed into the room, forcing her to squint against the unaccustomed brightness.
There was no sign of Payson, only the fading sound of his cry lingering on the still, close air inside the cabin.
Susanna pushed herself up out of the rocker. Every bone creaked, every muscle screamed. She was stiff and sore from sitting—how long had it been? She could not fathom time anymore, nor did she care to try. Her gait was no more than a slow, uneven shuffle as she hobbled toward the open door, drawn not by the light, but by the cry torn from her husband’s throat.
She flung her arm over her eyes to shield them from the intense light before she stood in the open door and took the brunt of the sun’s last rays. As she finally dared look out across the field, what was left of the sun ducked below the horizon and Susanna could see clearly. She dropped her arm away from her eyes, using her hand to brace herself in the doorway.
While she was in the safe haven of her rocking chair, time had moved on and left her behind. Where trees had once surrounded the field, Payson had cleared more land. Row upon uneven row of tilled soil fanned out around the cabin, but then abruptly halted. A plow missing a handle stood off to the side of the tilled soil, in silent explanation of why the furrowed rows stopped.
She watched Payson run across the field with his arms open wide, staggering, righting himself, running again straight toward the slight, fragile figure of a young woman in an Indian gown of doeskin standing a few yards in front of an oxcart and two men.
A cry was building inside Susanna, too, one that she was powerless to stop, and yet when it bubbled up into her throat and her mouth opened to let it out, not a sound issued forth. The searing pain of that suffocated scream brought her to her knees.
She knelt in the dirt outside the cabin while the past slammed into the present, and watched Payson race across his land, reach for the ebony-haired girl and pull her into his arms. She watched them rock back and forth in each other’s embrace. Then he ran his hands over her face, making certain it was truly his girl come back to him again, back from whatever horrors might have befallen her, back from the grave.
The scream inside Susanna finally found its way out and the word that the sound wrapped itself around was “Olivia!”
Noah sat in the evening glow of twilight resting on a stump outside the cabin, engaged in a silent staring contest with two little boys. They had come tearing around the corner of the log house jabbering and shoving at one another until they saw him sitting there and stopped dead in their tracks. Their eyes popped and they froze to the spot.
Finally, the taller boy glanced at the closed cabin door. He screwed up enough courage to speak.
“You an injun or something?”
Noah nodded. “Partly.”
“What happened to your eye?” The little one took a step toward Noah, but his older brother put his hand on the boy’s shirt and yanked him back.
“Accident,” Noah said.
He hadn’t been around many children, just the ones who happened to be on board flatboats he was hired to pilot downriver. Hunter Boone had a passel of nieces and nephews down in Sandy Shoals and Noah had taken meals with them sometimes. One Christmas he had even carved some wooden animals for them to play with, but on the whole, children were a different breed of animal he knew nothing about.
The older one looked as if he had thought things through. He straightened his shoulders and puffed out his narrow chest. He scrutinized Noah carefully. He seemed particularly attracted to the skinning knife.
“You gonna scalp our ma and pa with that?”
Noah took his time wiping his hand over his mouth to hide a smile. “No.”
“Well, I heard a thcream,” the shorter one said, eyeing him suspiciously.
“What’s a thcream?” Noah frowned. He thought he knew most of the English words there were to know, but thcream was a new one.
“Freddie talks funny,” the older boy informed him. “He said, he heard a scream.”
“That was your ma,” Noah obliged.
“Did you hurt her or thomthing?” The little one, Freddie, was on the verge of tears, which made Noah extremely nervous.
“No. I guess she was excited.”
“Why?”
Noah sighed. “Listen, somebody else ought to be along to tell you why. Sit down. Don’t ask me anything else.”
“You talk funny.” It was the little one again.
“You do, too.” Noah nodded. There.
“It’s getting dark. We’re supposed to be eatin’ supper.” The older boy began to pick at a scab on his elbow.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” Noah warned.
“It’s all right. I bleed all the time.”
“What’s your name?” The stump was biting into Noah’s butt. He shifted around.
“Little Pay. It’s really Payson Bond Junior, but nobody ever calls me that because of my pa’s name is Payson, too, so they call me Little Pay.” He tipped his head toward his brother. “This here minnow is Freddie.”
Freddie saluted Noah, then wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “Pa thaid we were having thquirrel pie for thupper. You can eat my turnipth,” he offered.
“Eat them yourself,” Noah said. Both boys looked as if they had not had a good meal in years. Their pants were too short, showing their bony little ankles and dirty feet.
Just then the door opened and Olivia stepped out into the waning light. Little Pay called her name and ran directly over to her. Freddie hung back until she went down on her knees to hug his brother, then he crept forward and stepped into the same hug.
“You came back, Livvie.” Little Pay clung to her neck and kissed her cheek. “I thought you were never coming home again after those men took you away. Did you sail down the river to a pirate ship?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Noah watched her fight back tears as she hugged the dirty little ruffians, her half-brothers.
Little Pay’s tone was accusatory. “Where were you, Livvie? Why did you stay away so long? Why didn’t you find us before now?”
“Where did you get that injun dreth, Livvie? Did you join the red thkinned thavageth?” Freddie yelled.
Noah stood up to put a stop to the questions that were obviously disturbing Olivia. He walked over to the trio and stood over them.
“Now, let go of her. I need to talk to her.” Noah had no idea his words would produce such immediate action. Both of the boys jumped toward their sister and flanked her.
Olivia got to her feet and dusted off the front of the doeskin gown.
“Thank you,” she whispered with a smile that made his heart stumble.
“Your father’s wife, is she all right?”
Olivia looked down at the boys. “Why don’t you two get along and wash up for supper.” They left somewhat reluctantly, but after she promised she would join them in a minute or two, they went inside. She waited until the door closed behind them before she started to walk away from the cabin. Noah fell into step behind her.
“Oh, Noah, I can’t believe the straits my father is in. Susanna lost the child she was carrying shortly after they settled in here and she hasn’t been the same since. Daddy said she sits all day, mourning a little girl baby that died at birth.”
Noah scanned die edge of the woods mat bordered the field. Darkness had deepened there. Long black shadows cloaked the tall hickory and maple trees. Lost in thought, Olivia had headed off in that direction. He took her arm and turned her back toward
the cabin without her even noticing the change in direction. She walked on, talking out her feelings, more to herself than him.
“The cabin is a mess. I don’t think they have had a decent meal in days, maybe weeks. My father never was good at hunting and now that he has the land almost cleared, he has no time to try, if he wants to get the corn in. Susanna does nothing, so he has been forced to take care of the boys, the cooking, the fields. Their clothes and bedding are filthy. He said they had a Scottish girl that worked for room and board, but she ran off and they haven’t seen her since.”
Noah tried to fathom a man who could not hunt. It was a man’s duty, one that ensured survival, one every man should know, but whites were different. Some of them hunted while some refined other skills.
“What did your father do before he came here?”
“He was a teacher.”
“But not of hunting.”
She laughed and shook her head. “No. Not of hunting. He taught poetry and literature. Other men hired him to teach their children how to read books, to write, to study.”
Noah knew of books, but he could not read.
“A man can’t eat books, nor can he feed them to his children.”
She stopped pacing and looked over at him. The light was almost gone. “But a man can learn about hunting by reading a book.”
He thought of the lethal traps his father had taught him to use, the look of the dead animals caught in them. The blood and the skinning, the curing of hides, the butchering of the meat. His mother had taught him to make and use a bow and arrows. His father had given him his long rifle. No book could ever prepare a man for the bloody tasks he had learned from his parents, just as no words could prepare a man for the way a woman’s warm breath felt on his skin, or the way it felt to slide inside a woman’s body.
He stopped walking. “Reading about something is not the same as doing it, is it?”
She shook her head. “No. You’re right. It isn’t.”
Olivia made no move to go back inside the cabin, although it was dark now and the only light they had to see by was the glow from the lamp inside. The little boys’ voices filtered out through the window. They were asking their father about Olivia, where would she sleep, if she was home to stay.
Blue Moon Page 11