“Get that in the raid?” inquired Rupert Harris.
Jason hesitated, but only for a moment. “I did not wish to make much of it,” he said, “but, yes, Delia and I were captured and taken to the Chickasaw village.”
Awed, fearful exclamations followed this announcement; and in spite of her anxiety Delia could not help but notice that the cries of these white people, when they spoke of Indians, were exactly like the sounds made by her own tribe when the depredations of the white men were anticipated or reported.
“They cut me some. But they did not bind her, and so at nighttime, she came, released me, and we fled.”
Delia felt the approval of the people, though Harris seemed less willing to lend his immediate approbation. But he did not dwell on her then. Instead he asked a series of quick questions to determine the state of the Chickasaw and their leadership. Upon learning of Firebrand’s ascendancy, he cursed bitterly.
“I’ve been meaning to go north for some time, to give news of our plight to General Jackson, and I think now the time has’ surely come to do it.”
Mutters of agreement spread through the group.
But there were other things to do before they could consider the particulars. More logs remained to be turned into planking. In spite of continued protestations, Jason went to help the men. As for Delia, several women came forward with offers to give her dwelling. One of them—a fair-haired, pale-eyed girl with a very bright, persistent smile—pushed forward and said, “Oh, but you know Phil and I are going to add onto our house and make it an inn…”
This news seemed to take the other women by surprise.
“…and I’m sure you wouldn’t deny us our first guests.”
The women looked at one another in a way that was both strange and familiar to Delia, glanced with measuring eyes at the fair-haired girl, and seemed to agree: Well, let her do it then, if it will make her happy.
So they returned to brick making, while the young woman led Delia back up the river bank to the village, talking nonstop.
“I’m so glad you’re safely here. This is a fine place to live. A little rough yet, but with great promise. Just like Rupert says, wait until we get more land cleared, and get slaves. Slaves can make the difference. Oh, I’m sorry—” she laughed, very brightly—“I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m Gale Foley. Mrs. Phil Foley. He’s down there working with the men.”
She lowered her voice slightly, but not much. “We’re actually a little above a lot of the people here. In social station, I mean. But we try to manage. I’ll explain everything to you later. So you’re Delia. What a pretty name. From Georgia, did Mr. Randolph say?” It was all Delia could do to get in a quick nod. “Georgia is a fine place to be from. We’re from Boston, though. Phil and me. I’m sort of the social leader here, you could say. Everyone defers to me because I’ve had more—well, I have to say it, I just do, it’s the truth—more education and breeding. Phil’s not really a common farmer, either, he’s an advocate…”
Delia did not know what an advocate was, but the manner in which Gale pronounced the word made it seem portentous indeed, so she managed to inject a respectful nod, all the while wondering about this strange white girl.
“…but he wasn’t able to—oh, I’ll save that for later, it’s depressing. Now here’s our place,” she babbled on, showing Delia one of the buildings of wood, which looked just like all of the other wooden buildings, “and as you can see it’s the biggest and best situated in town, that’s why I had the idea and convinced Phil to let us have an inn. A lot of people will be stopping by, I’m sure, on the way to the West, and…”
She opened the door, and motioned Delia inside.
“We’re sure to make loads and loads of money. Are you hungry? Would you like some tea?”
Delia had never heard of tea, but she was hungry, and perhaps tea was good to eat. She had just expressed her gratitude for the offer when she stopped in mid-step, her eyes riveted to the corner of the room she had just entered.
There, crouched like an animal, eyes half-crazed with fear, and a chain around his neck, was Bright Badger. The chain was attached to a rope that was tied to a bolt in the wall. Bright Badger wore only a breechcloth; his back was covered with welts and cuts. His eyes widened as he recognized her. But he said nothing.
Gale’s tone, which had been friendly, changed abruptly in mid-sentence. “You!” she barked at Bright Badger. “Heat water for teal This instant!”
The boy jumped up, knowing he had been commanded to do something, but he was not quite certain what it was. Delia remembered that Bright Badger, in spite of his name, had never been among the more intelligent children in the tribe, and this strange white woman barking at him must have verged on the incomprehensible. At any rate, he was not quick about heating the water.
“You ignorant savage!” cried Gale. “How many times have I explained the words to you?”
With that, she took up a length of rope and began striking Bright Badger over the back and shoulders, while he yelped and howled and tried to escape her fury.
“Stop!” Delia cried.
Surprised, Gale did so. “What?”
Quickly, in her own tongue, Delia explained to Bright Badger what it was he had been instructed to do, although she herself still did not know what tea was.
The boy did, however, and quickly made for the stove, half crouching, like an animal, and fed kindling into the place of the fire.
Gale put the rope down. “You know the savage tongue?”
“Yes,” said Delia. “There were many friendly Indians in my part of Georgia.”
“I see, I see,” said Gale, contemplatively, and Delia thought the secret of her identity was lost now for sure. But it turned out that the white girl was thinking of something altogether different.
“You can help me!” she exclaimed With delight.
“Help you? Of course, but—”
“You can help me train this Indian boy to be a slave. You know how to talk to him.”
This suggestion revolted Delia to the final degree.
“It’s our Christian duty!” Gale was saying. “We must teach these pagan savages how to work!”
Duty was a word that Delia knew from her own life, and it was a good word. Christian she did not know. What could it be? Did it have something to do with slaves? She could think of nothing to say that would not further compromise herself, and so said not a word. In a moment she was motioned toward a strange-looking upright arrangement of wood balanced on four sticklike legs. Several of the same devices surrounded a flat piece of wood balanced on four thicker upright wooden supports. Delia had never seen anything like it.
“Sit down, sit down,” Gale was saying.
Sit down? Delia wondered. On the flat wooden thing, or…?
She hesitated, watching, and saw Gale pull away from the flat piece one of the four-legged upright pieces and sit down on it. Ah, so that was how one did it! She did likewise, and found it very odd, but not uncomfortable. It was not as pleasant a position as sitting cross-legged, but less tiring than squatting.
Bright Badger brought two tiny, hollow containers made of a glassy substance, a bowl with white powder in it, and the smallest pitcher Delia had ever seen, which contained something that looked reassuringly like milk. Gale smiled at her when Bright Badger put the pitcher on the table.
But what was to happen now? Was Delia supposed to drink from the pitcher? She smiled back at the white girl, and waited, wishing to all heaven that Jason were here with her. Bright Badger was not meeting her eyes, or even looking her way, and that unsettled Delia, too. It suddenly occurred to her that she herself might be made a slave, and chained to the wall. No, she would kill herself first!
Then the boy brought over a pitcherlike pot of some kind, from which Gale poured a dark liquid into the tiny containers. “Help yourself to sugar, please?” she said then, waiting.
Sugar? It must be the white powder. But what did one do with it? There was a miniature spoo
n in the white powder, true; but did one eat it, or what?
“No, thank you,” she said.
“Oh, please. It’s for special.”
“You first,” Delia said, buying time. “For being so kind to me.”
Gale accepted the idea of being kind, and the principle that such a quality ought to be rewarded with favor. She spooned some of the white powder into the tea. Then she added milk. Delia followed suit, and sipped gingerly, as the white girl did. Tea was very good! She sipped some more.
“Rupert gave him to me,” Gale was saying, with a nod toward Bright Badger, who had scuttled back to his corner. “Caught him out in the woods, the little beggar. No one else would take him, but I said to Phil, ‘Let’s.’ It’ll be a great advantage to have the first slave in Harrisville. Later, when we get darkies, we’ll be even better off. It counts, it always counts, to be in the vanguard. That’s how you get respect. I learned things like that growing up back east.”
Back east must be a great place, thought Delia, from the way the white girl had said it, and a very important place. She wondered if it was as big as Harrisville, and if it was so great, why Gale had left it.
“Why doesn’t he look at me?” Delia asked. “The boy?”
Gale was astounded. “Surely you know? A slave must never look into the eyes of his master—and never, absolutely never, must he look upon a woman! Oh, this boy has had some hard lessons, as you can see by his bruises, but he’ll come around, don’t you worry.”
Right then Delia decided to plan something, anything, that would free the poor child of his torment.
“You have very striking features, do you know that?” Gale was asking, peering this way and that, examining Delia as if she were some exotic, newfound object of delight.
“Thank you.”
“Are you interested in this”—she winked—“Mr. Randolph, who’s supposed to be taking care of you?”
“He’s…very kind. A friend of my father’s,” she remembered to add.
“If I were you, I might do a little taking care of him,” said Gale with another wink. “Of course, Phil is a perfect husband,” she saw fit to point out. “He does everything I want. That’s because I—” she put her teacup down and leaned forward conspiratorially—“come from higher circles than him.”
“Higher circles?” Delia asked, and fought an urge to look up at the top of this weird, square room.
“Yes,” Gale went on, babbling again. “I could tell you things… It’s not easy for me, being way out here in the wilderness, even if it is a fine place, what with Mr. Harris and all. He’s the real man around here…Phil, of course…” Suddenly her bright look fell away, and something like a mean little glint came into her eyes.
Delia was startled. For that fleeting instant this Gale Foley woman reminded her of none other than Little Swallow: the same mixture of ambition and pride, insecurity and vengefulness.
But then the dark look was gone, as if it had never been there at all. The bright, optimistic face was back. “It was a good thing, really,” she chattered, “that Phil couldn’t get an advocate job in the East. Now we can get in on the ground floor here on the frontier. Back east, I would have just been one of many cultivated ladies, but here I’m…”
She made a gesture with her hand. Modesty would not permit her to describe the actual regard in which she was held.
“I’ll tell you about the women,” she said. “If we’re going to be friends, there are things you should know. All of them are very nice, but none of them are too well educated. They all look up to me. Notice how they deferred immediately when I suggested you stay here? That’s what I mean. They tell me all their problems. I’m very close to each of them. Just last week, for instance, I taught Mrs. Loftus how to improve her quilt making.”
“Quilt mak—” Delia started to ask. “Yes.” Oh, when would Jason get here?
Mercifully, she had not long to wait. The sounds of people coming up from their work by the river were heard, and Gale jumped to her feet with something like alarm. “Oh, my! Here it is almost supper time, and…” She picked up her rope and advanced on Bright Badger. “Up, up—and be quick about it now. I’m untying you, but only to go to the smokehouse—smokehouse, understand? Fetch back a ham, and be quick about it!”
Delia saw the boy struggle to understand the strange words, and he seemed to, for as soon as the woman untied him, he raced from the house.
Then Jason came in, followed by a pleasant, nondescript white man.
“Phil!” Gale cried. “I’m so tired from making those bricks, and the slave has been so difficult!”
With an emotion very close to joy, Delia saw the look of astonishment and disgust that appeared on Jason’s face when he heard the word slave. He said nothing, however.
After a moment of explanatory conversation—Phil seemed surprised that his wife’s inn had been so soon established—Delia and Jason were led upstairs, the stairway itself hardly more than a rickety ladder that led to what had been a simple loft. Now, however, a thin wall divided the loft to form the rooms of the “inn.”
“Now this is room one,” Gale explained, “and this is room two. You may have your choice. Perhaps you’d like to rest while supper is prepared?”
Both Jason and Delia eagerly agreed.
“This time of year, cooking is done on the common range outside in the village. I must go over there now, if I can find that worthless boy, and cook up some ham. I’ll call when I get back. Phil, would you help me?”
So the new guests at the inn were left alone.
Jason’s glance was solicitous. “How are you finding life among the jackals?” he smiled.
“I do not understand this woman, Gale, and there are many things I do not understand. And Jason…” She lowered her voice urgently, glanced down into the small house to make certain they were alone. “She has a young boy here, an Indian boy, whom she has made into a slave. It is terrible.”
“I know. It’s one of the reasons I left Virginia. I cannot abide such enforced subservience, but like it or not, our law states that—”
“But the boy is from my village! I saw Harris abduct him, right before my eyes!”
She saw him considering the problems, balancing her instincts and his own with their mutual need to survive, and his hope to make a life of farming in this land.
“How do you like the woman?” he asked, as if Delia might have found in Mrs. Foley some redemptive grace.
“She is strange. She frightens me. Like another whom I have known among my people, she makes great show of the teeth, but in her heart there is bile, and maybe terror, for a thing I know not.”
“All right,” he nodded. “I shall speak to her at our evening meal, and listen to her. If our staying here would be unpleasant because of her, we’ll leave.”
“But where will we stay?”
“I did not come here to put my comfort in the hands of others. I will act, and find a place. But if we are to leave this ‘inn,’ it should be immediate, lest we stir animosity in a woman with a small mind and facile tongue.”
Delia agreed, and seeing Jason push aside a hanging curtain leading to his share of the loft, she did the same. Inside was a long, rectangular object on four wooden legs. It looked very much like the table downstairs, except that it was lower, and covered with a soft cloth. Wondering what it was, she lay down on the floor and dropped quickly into a nap, thinking about Bright Badger, running through the forest, picking berries.
Chapter VI
“Mr. Harris has decided to travel north to the Hermitage and speak with Andy Jackson,” Phil Foley told them at supper, his mouth full of fried ham and squash.
Jason nodded, eating.
Delia was trying, painstakingly, to cut her piece of ham with a knife, as she had seen the others do. In her own village meat was eaten in chunks, with the fingers. Never did one have a great big hot slab of it on a plate, where it must be cut, and organized, and forever moved about. Fortunately Jason kept the Foleys occ
upied in conversation, giving her a chance to get accustomed to this strange new way of eating. Jason had spoken of the Randolphs, his family in Virginia, news of which Gale greeted with little yelps of delight. Her own family, in Boston, knew the Adamses very well and had entrée to the best of society, and consequently she and Jason were practically related—“in social class, anyway,” Gale put it.
Jason smiled pleasantly and said nothing.
“And like yourself,” Gale went on, “Phil and I sought greater challenge here in the West, where you can forge your own life…”
Her voice trailed off, and Phil ate, studying his ham and beans. It was clear even to Delia, who had but limited knowledge of her hostess, that Phil had disappointed Gale grievously by not having achieved some high position in the East.
In due course Jason courteously inquired as to Phil Foley’s interests, and was delighted to learn that, like himself, Phil had “read the law,” which was the expression used to indicate that a man intended to practice as an attorney.
“But that was back east,” Phil explained. “A lawyer will be needed out here someday, but for the time being I make a living by managing the grist mill. And I’ve also begun to clear some acres south of town. I want to farm as well.”
“Progress would come faster, wouldn’t it,” Jason asked, “if people lived on their separate plots, instead of coming back here to town every night? Isn’t considerable time wasted traveling to and from the various plots?”
“Yes,” Phil agreed, “but like Mr. Harris said, no one has been bold enough to set up a house and live away from the village. To do so would be a certain target for an Indian raiding party.”
Jason acknowledged this wisdom soberly, and said no more. In the corner, crouched against the wall, Bright Badger whined in hunger, his eyes still downcast. Phil rose to give him some meat. Gale touched his hand. “Not until we’re through,” she hissed. “He must learn to wait.”
Phil’s instincts were good, even if he lacked courage in the face of his wife’s strong whims. “He’s just a boy,” Phil managed. “I wish you hadn’t taken him from Harris.”
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