Firebrand's Woman

by Vanessa Royall

  “Let’s have some order here,” Phil Foley complained. “You’ll all get your chance to speak.”

  Harris was just about to give the high sign to Ben and Jed and Jeevis. He wished ol’ Fes Farson owned land so he’d be eligible to attend this meeting. Instead he was runnin’ things back at the plantation.

  Jason was laying the incriminating evidence of forgery out on the desk. Delia, seated in the back row with many of the other wives, and keeping little Andrew quiet, was telling herself, It’s going to work, it’s going to work, it’s going to work…

  The people were poised, hopefully, fearfully, for a long-delayed blow against Harris—

  When the attack began.

  Chapter III

  After all these years of vigilance, the people of Harrisville had let down their guard. Taut for the confrontation with Harris, fatigued by the turmoil of the flood and its demoralizing aftermath, they had succumbed to the oldest assurance there is: We’ve been through it all; what more can happen now?

  More can always happen. And it did, but in a way no one expected, and thus they did not even recognize at first that an attack was under way.

  There was a small sound against the outside of the wooden schoolhouse. Only a few people heard it, and their attention was on the proceedings. Their minds barely registered the sound, and did not begin to interpret what it meant.

  Then came a faint crackling sound, like the rustle of fallen leaves in dry grass. Delia’s senses responded to its soft, lulling encroachment; her memory flared to it. Autumn in the mountains outside her tribal village, and—

  Autumn? But it was raw, cold, shabby spring. Still, she could smell the fire smoke of pine.

  Then, like the rising mutter of angry voices swelling in argument, the sound increased until it became a dull rumble that the people could no longer ignore, then a sharp thunderclap that turned into a burgeoning roar. The smell of pine smoke was suddenly everywhere, and people were screaming. The schoolhouse was on fire.

  A few men raced outside, Felix Wohl one of them.

  He flung open the door, reaching for the revolver at his belt, and for an instant stood outlined against the scudding gray clouds. For an instant. Then he was smashed back into the school, driven as if by supernatural power. Hysterical screams mingled with the roar of the spreading fire. A war arrow, three feet long, protruded from Wohl’s forehead, eagle feathers still quivering from the released tension of the bow. Outside, cries of agony, quickly ended, rose from Abner Barkley and Will Tenant, who had rushed without thinking to their doom.

  But doom was all about. A fire-arrow had ignited the pine shingles of the school, and the flames had spread. Now, waiting on horseback all around the building were Indians, resting easily, bows taut and arrows threaded. Death to the jackals! The time had come to pass!

  Jason crept to a window. “Surrounded, I think,” he shouted, cursing himself for not bringing a rifle. Indeed, the prospect of this formal, democratic meeting had moved many of the men to leave their heavy weapons out on the wagons, or in gunsheaths fastened to saddles on their horses.

  Rupert Harris, to his credit, kept his head. He had not come all the way from a dirt-poor sharecropper’s shack without a hard supply of guts, and there was still all that coal in the blue ranges of Tennessee. “Women and children under the desks!” he bellowed.

  “But the fire!”

  “Under the desks!” Jason ordered, too, united for a moment, by simple logic, with the red-bearded brawler. They needed time, and if cinders began to fall from the ceiling, as seemed imminent, the desks might lend some shelter.

  “The men will have to pile out of windows and doors, all together,” Jason yelled. “Try to take cover and return fire. Women, stay covered until after we’re out, then you go, too, and head for the horses and wagons.”

  Delia remembered the position in which their buggy had been left, by the tree near the east side of the school. The village was toward the east, but half a mile away. It seemed impossible ever to reach it. How many Indians were out there? Was Torch one of them?

  She held her son close to her. After the initial shock of watching his elders yell and run about, the boy seemed studiously interested in everything that was happening. The men broke window glass with the barrels of their pistols, feinting and ducking, trying to take aim at charging Indians without themselves being hit. The schoolroom was a horror of screaming. The smoke thickened. War whoops sounded outside, again and again, like cries from hell. There was no order, no reason, in the turmoil. There was no logic save that of preserving one’s life. Was this how it had been at Talking Rock? Delia wondered, within the space of an instant, as she crouched beneath a desk and held little Andrew in her arms. Then an arrow shot through one of the ruined windowpanes and crashed into the picture of George Washington on the opposite wall. More arrows followed. Delia saw how the feathers rippled, how the arrows shook and quivered. She did not think of death. There was no time to think of death.

  Beneath a desk with Andrew, she heard a wild howl like that of legend-devils, a howl such as she had not heard since her days in the tribe. The cry split the air, and it was a moment before she realized that this was the howl of white men. Yelling for blood, they crashed out of windows, out the door, and made their counterattack, firing their handguns, trying to reach their rifles. Delia heard the shots, and then the whick-whick-whick of bowstrings released.

  Jeevis Johnson, Harris’s friend, did not make it outside. Struck by an arrow as he crouched on a window-sill, ready to leap’ outside, he smashed backward instead, onto the desk under which Delia huddled, then rolled off and thudded to the floor. His pistol fell beside him; but Delia could not hear the clunk of metal on wood because of the fire’s rolling roar. The heat was already fierce. Outside there were shots—a few of them rifle shots—and more yelling. She grabbed the gun, stood up, and saw that many of the other women were ready to flee, too. None of them spoke, but they went to the open doorway and made their break.

  Running with Andrew twisting and bouncing beneath her arm, and the pistol in her free hand, Delia could not apprise herself of the whole battle. Only impressions stood out, enlarged or diminished by the vagaries of her beating brain. Men behind wagons, loading and firing. Men writhing on the ground, wounded and bloody. Fire leaping and wailing on the roof of the school, creeping down the walls like tongues of red and yellow ivory. The whick and swish of countless arrows, and the despairing howls of the men and women whom death had found this day. She knew the war cry that signaled a charge, and her time was very short. She reached the buggy, threw her son beneath the seat, and grabbed the horse’s reins. She thought fleetingly to look for Jason, but she knew there was no time. In the distance tides of smoke rolled from the roofs of the village. This was no raid. This was a massive attack. Firebrand! she thought, but she had no time. The horse bolted. Its glistening flank flashed beside her. The buggy wheel leaped forward and Andrew screamed. She grabbed a piece of harness and pulled herself up on the back of the maddened beast, pressed herself into its racing back, terrified for her son, who jounced in the narrow space beneath the seat of the jolting buggy.

  But, as it happened, she presented a poorer target stretched out on the horse than she would have while seated upright in the buggy. Arrows flew past her, and then no more. Behind her, other horses were running; women, men, and the Indians charged toward the fireball of the school. One brave gave chase for a short while, howled something unintelligible, then gave up and returned to easier killing.

  The village was burning. Andrew was screaming in utmost terror.

  Delia got the horse under control and turned it to the woods by the river.

  Chapter IV

  Delia ran the horse until it could run no more, until even lashing the beast with the leather reins had no effect. But she had reached the site upon which Riverbend farm had stood, and she stopped on the promontory where the barn had been. The animal stood with its legs spread, head down, sides heaving. Delia leaped from
its back and pulled Andrew from his place beneath the carriage seat. He was sobbing, close to hysteria, and seemed barely able to recognize her.

  “It’s over, there now, it’s all right,” she crooned, knowing that none of the soothing words bore truth. But she held him and crooned to him, and he seemed to grow quieter; and he looked around as if this location were vaguely familiar, as if his house ought to be just over there, where the uprooted windbreak trees lay strewn across the earth like a rubble of broken sticks. The house itself had been swept away, leaving a yawning, water-filled excavation where the cellar had been.

  There was nothing left; and now, over the remaining trees, clouds of smoke rose billowing from the besieged village.

  “My people!” she cried, lifting her face to the bleak gray sky. “What have you done? This shall be the end of you!”

  Now the white men would ride into the mountains, thirsting for blood, bent upon a revenge so malicious, so thorough, that not one living Chickasaw would be unscarred by it, and not more than a few Chickasaw would be left alive. What had possessed Torch to do this thing now, after years of peace?

  She turned then, still cradling the boy, and saw the marks of the wagon tracks that traced her flight, clear sign to any brave that someone had escaped the slaughter. She feared for herself, because they might kill her quite readily: the outcast maiden, taken to wife by a jackal. But for little Andrew she felt true horror: He was undeniably white and would be scalped without a moment’s hesitation. Considering the matter, she unhitched the horse from the buggy.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said, both to her son and to the startled horse, which seemed to anticipate that yet another wild trek was imminent. Then, bracing herself, she pushed the buggy with all her strength. Its wheels turned once, twice, and then the power of gravity took hold, the buggy began to roll down the slope, gathered momentum, and crashed into the fast-moving river, where it bobbed a time or two, then floated downstream, spinning slowly, easily, as in a dream.

  “Now, now, just a little farther,” she said to the poor horse, steadying it, stroking its sweaty, foaming neck. Then, placing the boy on the horse’s back, she slowly pulled herself up, too. The beast quivered, almost staggered, and seemed to sink toward the ground; but from some wellspring of endurance, it did not fall, and Delia tapped its flanks gently with her heels. Guiding the horse, she rode down to the river, careful that the hoofprints were left between the marks of the buggy tracks. Once in the water, she eased the faltering beast along the river bank, leaving neither sign nor track that she had passed this way.

  Riding, crooning to the horse and the boy, Delia experienced a momentary but piercing sadness. No sign that I have passed this way…Exiled by her own people, and now driven by them from the place that had adopted her, she could not divine the future. There seemed neither fortune nor pattern in the course of her life, only scant periods of chance happiness, followed by wracking, brutal devastation, the crueler for its inexplicability. It seemed almost as if fate were a living thing, with malevolence in its heart, cunning in its brain, and Gyva as its victim.

  Gyva! She had thought of herself by her Chickasaw name! That had not happened for a long time.

  Andrew was rocking against her, and presently he fell asleep to the horse’s slow gait. Delia rode, thinking what she would do. Ahead, the river swept around the bend for which the farm had been named. A thin finger of land stretched out into the water, littered now with jetsam and debris left by the receding high water, and sullied trunks of stripped trees bore lines ten feet above Delia’s head, marking the place where the river had crested.

  The horse stopped, and Delia felt a shudder pass through it, into herself. Gripping Andrew tightly, she leaped sideways from the animal’s back and felt the cold, rushing water up to her knees, here in the shallows. Then a sheet of liquid ice drenched her as the horse dropped dead in the water, its big body raising a tremendous splash, and Andrew woke, startled and wailing. No time for pity. Do not leave tracks, she thought; and, her feet growing number by the minute, the boy shivering, she eased toward the shore, searching for rocky ground. If she could get to the woods, find shelter, try to build a fire…

  “Mama!” Andrew wailed. “Cold. Me cold.” He shook convulsively in her arms. Both of them were dripping wet, and the March wind slipped through the river valley, laying icy fingers down to their skin. She made her way onto a rocky ledge, climbed, and soon the river was below, a vast strip of power, deception, and death, moving around the great sweep of the bend. Once Torch had dreamed a river bend where promise and wonder lay buried in warm sand. But the dream had been illusion, and the promise a mockery. And now Riverbend farm was gone, too. Did Ababinili create men to play with them, to deceive them, to laugh at their very dreams? There was no secret of life, nor would there ever be, and the golden stick was but the thread of a hope, a hope more heartbreaking for its shimmering evanescence.

  “Cold!” Andrew cried through chattering teeth. “Papa! Pa-”

  Delia stumbled. A curved chunk of wood, half buried in the silt left by the flood, caught her foot and sent her sprawling. Andrew fell and lay stunned beside her, blood oozing from his fine, pale forehead.

  “Oh, darling!”

  She picked him up, held him, pressed her hand to his head, trying to stop the flow of blood.

  She looked down where she had fallen and saw the rim of a barrel, half buried in the sand, FLOUR, it said, in water-ravaged letters. Could it be the barrel from her pantry where she’d hidden the…

  She pried off the lid and looked inside. The barrel had been solidly built, allowing only slight moisture inside in spite of the flood. The flour was caked into clumps, doughy but not hard packed, and when Delia stuck her hand deep into it, her fingers closed around the leather pouch, safe and dry. She shook off the white film of flour and pressed the pouch to her breast, pressed Andrew to her breast; and, although she was a Chickasaw, who flinched or wavered never, who bore with defiance and equanimity the gaze of conquerors and the vanquishments of fate, Delia and Dey-Lor-Gyva cried tears of mingled bitterness and love.

  Years later, those few who had been told by her of this tearful grief at the river’s bend, those few who knew of it, would say that it was at that moment, that moment undeniably, that the separate rivers of her heritage, the distinct impulses of her mixed blood, did join together forever. Thereafter, she was what she had been, true, as all of us are what we were born. But, oh—after that moment she was not the same, she was more than she had been…

  The flow of blood was ceasing, but Andrew was in a dangerous state when Delia spied the canoes. They came from upriver, where the village was, and the high hoots and cries of their passengers left no doubt that victory in battle had been accomplished. The current sped the canoes toward the bend, and Delia crouched down behind fallen logs. If she were to move now, or try to flee into the trees, she would be seen for certain, and she was grateful that the shouts and cries of the warriors blotted out Andrew’s faint moans. Very soon the crafts were within easy sighting, and Delia saw the Chickasaw designs on the bark, saw the Chickasaw war markings in bright paint upon the faces of the braves. But…

  The river ran west! And the Chickasaw lived to the south, beyond Twin Mountains!

  Then she heard distinctly the calls of the triumphant braves, and knew their words and the sounds of their tongue.

  Choctaw!

  The brave lay in the dust, and she felt the cold knife in her hand. “You must do it,” Torch was telling her…

  “AIIIIIEEEEEE YIPYIPYIP AHHHHHHHYAAAAAAARRRRRRR!” howled the impostors, their canoes skimming now around the peninsula, sweeping them away to the west, fleeing the scene of their twin victories: one in battle, one in duplicity.

  And Delia alone knew what had transpired. The Chickasaw were innocent, but the Chickasaw would be blamed.

  Chapter V

  The distance between Riverbend farm and Harrisville was slightly more than seven miles, an easy morning’s
ride in a buggy or on horseback. But the trip took much longer on foot, and if one had also to bear a burden of heartbreak, did time matter at all?

  When the last of the disguised Choctaw war canoes had swung around the bend—a river bend that once again had played its promise false, had shielded illusion—Delia turned back toward the source of smoke and fire. She tried not to think of Jason’s probable fate, and Andrew’s desperate plight was soon preoccupation enough.

  “Ma…Ma,” he managed to say, coughing and choking and shuddering. The hard ride in the buggy, the permeating cold, the fall upon stone: too much for the little body to bear.

  To stop here in the woods or out in the fields was pointless. Rain had begun, and she had no flint. The whole earth was wet and deadly. Only Harrisville had fire, this day. If Delia had possessed an oil-soaked arrow, such as the Choctaw had used to fire the pine shingles on the schoolhouse roof, all might have been well…

  The little boy began to choke. His tiny, perfect body shook uncontrollably in her arms. She held him and she did not think about it, and she walked as fast as she could and she did not think.

  Soon his breathing came in gagged and ragged gasps, and he grew still in her arms, only to shiver and convulse again. The walking warmed her, but for him, for her tiny son, all there was was the warmth of her body.

  It was not enough.

  Light rain was falling when she stumbled back into Harrisville, choking on the ugly smell of half-smothered smoke and the smouldering embers of wet wood. To her surprise, several buildings were still standing—the livery, the general store, the sawmill down by the river. Through the haze of rain and drifting smoke that clung close to the damp earth she saw the moving bodies of men working, carrying things. And when she walked closer, Delia realized they were carrying exactly what she was carrying: the earthly remains of those who had been beloved in life.