Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

by Sara Donati

  Because, Jennet reminded herself, there were wild beasts about, and for all its appearance of peace this village had seen a great deal of treachery over the years. Indian raids, schoolhouses burnt to the ground, murder. The Bonners did not share these stories with many, but Jennet was a cousin and would be more once Luke came back for her.

  The day after the matter was finally settled Gabriel and Annie had shown her the secrets of the mountain: the caves under the falls, the cavern on the north side of the mountain where the Tory gold had been hidden away for so long, the silver mine that had given up the last of that precious metal some ten years ago. Paradise could be a dangerous place for so many reasons. The miracle of it all was that the idea should excite her more than it frightened her. She liked to think of herself as brave, though she knew her mother would call her foolish; her father would have had stronger words still.

  “Your menfolk are as protective of you as any of mine are of me,” Jennet said now to Hannah, deeply satisfied that it should be so. As they had not yet started up the mountain proper the horses could still walk side by side and she turned to look at her cousin's profile.

  Hannah was often in a subdued and sometimes melancholy mood when she finished with a patient. Now she looked up at the sound of Jennet's voice with a start, as if she had forgotten where she was altogether. In the swaying light of the pierced tin lamp she carried, the bones of her face cast shadows that made her look more spirit than breathing flesh and blood.

  Jennet was afraid for her suddenly and did not know why, or if there was any comfort she might offer.

  Then Hannah said, “I didn't mean to practice medicine again. Ever again.”

  Jennet considered all the things she might say or questions she might ask, and she discarded them one by one. They went on in the soft warm night, through a world of sounds: night birds and creatures that hunted in the dark, the wind in the trees and leaves fluttering to earth. In time the horses began to climb, muscular sides clenching, sure of foot and eager to be home.

  A half hour passed and then another and then the sound of the falls at Lake in the Clouds came to them. Once in a while Jennet caught sight of Nathaniel just ahead of her on the path, but she had the unsettling notion that if she were to turn around she'd find that Hannah was gone, hiding herself until she had sorted through memories she had locked away but could not always govern.

  But she was there still, and she spoke when they were in view of the cabins. “Thank you, Jennet,” she said.

  “You've no cause to thank me,” Jennet said, relieved and shaken too, though she could not say just why. “I was happy to be what help I can.”

  “No. Thank you for not telling me how I should feel. Have I told you about the village the whites called Prophet's Town?”

  The question was so unexpected that Jennet drew up and turned to her cousin. “You know that you haven't,” she said. “But I'd like to hear about it. Did you live there?”

  Hannah made a sound in her throat. “From the day it was founded until the day it was burned to the ground,” she said. And then, before Jennet could think of what to ask: “It was a dream, and it did not last.”

  They stayed a few minutes in the common room talking with Elizabeth and eating. Usually Jennet loved this quiet time in the evening when the whole family sat together. Elizabeth would read aloud from a book or play or newspaper, and they talked about the strangest combinations of things, King Lear and the squash harvest, political intrigues in Washington and London and how much more wood the men needed to put up for the coming winter.

  Tonight Jennet was impatient with the talk and unable to concentrate on anything but the promise of hearing at least some of Hannah's story. She was afraid that the mood would have left her by the time Elizabeth put out the lamp and they all went to their beds.

  On the stairs Hannah stopped and looked over her shoulder at her father and stepmother. “The night air is cool,” she said. “Leave your window open.”

  It was such a strange request that no one could think of what to say, but as soon as Jennet closed the door of the chamber she shared with Hannah behind her, she understood.

  Hannah went to sit by the open window with her back to the room, and Jennet.

  “In the old days the village was called Ket-tip-pe-can-nunk,” she began in a clear voice that must travel on the night air. The tone was familiar to Jennet and strange too, filled with anger and sorrow in equal measures.

  “It was a beautiful place, on the river the whites call Wabash. Tecumseh and his brother chose it to build a new town where all the Indian tribes would come together.”

  “Tecumseh?” Jennet asked, the strange name sounding light on her tongue.

  “A Shawnee warrior,” Hannah said patiently. “A great warrior. His name means Panther-in-the-Sky.” When Jennet had no more questions, she went on. “Our son was four years old when my uncle Strong-Words and Strikes-the-Sky both swore allegiance to Tecumseh and we went to join him on the Wabash.”

  She was silent for so long that Jennet felt herself sliding toward sleep, only to be startled awake when Hannah took up her story again.

  “Tecumseh's brother had a vision of a place where all the People lived in the old way, free of influence of the white man, free of alcohol. It was hard work to convince other tribes but by the winter of eighteen ten there were more than five hundred warriors in training. Many of them brought their families. Sometimes I would hear five languages in five minutes walking from one place to another, and not understand any of them. The village was crowded and food was a problem. It was not always peaceful, but those were good years.”

  Hannah made a sound that might have been a laugh; it made the flesh rise all along Jennet's back. Jennet said, “As when the clans came together against the English. They can put aside old grudges and rivalries for only so long.”

  “Yes,” Hannah said. “It was like that.”

  “You were the only doctor?” Jennet ventured.

  “Oh no. There were healers who came to us from many tribes, but never enough, just as we never had enough medicines or even corn husks for bandages. I was busy all day with the sick, and Strikes-the-Sky was busy with the young warriors or with Tecumseh, in the middle of discussions and negotiations.

  “But we were content. I was doing what I wanted to do, working among my own people and learning everything I could about medicine from any healer who came to the village. I vaccinated hundreds against the smallpox.

  “We stayed because my uncle and my husband had real hope in Tecumseh.”

  Hannah's voice had taken on a new rhythm, as if by telling this story she found herself talking to the people she was describing, lost to her now. She recited bits from Tecumseh's speeches and again Jennet could not help but think of Scotland, where men had fought for hundreds of years to loosen the hold of the English, all for naught. Something had always gone wrong, and most usually the flaw was to be found in men of lesser understanding or courage.

  Hannah would tell that part of the story too; Jennet could feel her nearing it and she was weary, suddenly, of such stories. She would have turned away from this one if it weren't for the fact that it was Hannah telling it.

  “In the fall of eighteen eleven Tecumseh and some of the warriors left to visit villages and I stayed behind with my son. There were many new people in the village who needed to be vaccinated, that was the excuse I gave. It was the first time Strikes-the-Sky and I were ever really apart since we were married.”

  She was pointing with her chin out the window. “Right here, at Lake in the Clouds. There, on that spot.”

  For a long time there was silence and Jennet thought of her own wedding, something she rarely did. The images came to her as dull as tarnished copper: Ewan's blameless face, twitching with anxiousness; her mother pale in her mourning clothes, summoning a trembling smile whenever Jennet caught her eye. The clansmen like a wall all around her, impenetrable. Even her brother had been subdued.

  Hannah's voice dropped t
o an almost-whisper. “I kept my son with me, and the men rode off at dawn in the rain. That was the last time I saw my husband.”

  In her surprise Jennet found it hard to keep her silence. “I thought he died in battle, the one your father told me about—”

  “The whites call it the Battle of Tippecanoe. But no, Strikes-the-Sky wasn't there. I wish he had been. If Tecumseh hadn't been away and taken the best minds with him, things might have turned out differently when the whites decided to attack the village.”

  “What went wrong?” Jennet asked.

  “Tecumseh's brother.” Her voice had soured. A shivering moved Hannah's shoulders, like a woman taken suddenly in a fever.

  “He was no warrior, but he believed himself to be equal to the decisions that had to be made, and no one had the courage to challenge him. When it was all over close to four hundred warriors were dead, my uncle and his eldest sons and so many others, young men and old. I knew them, every one.”

  Jennet couldn't really imagine what Hannah was telling her, and she didn't really want to. But her cousin went on, as if she could simply not stop the flow of the story.

  “Harrison's men burned the village to the ground and all our hopes with it. We ran,” Hannah said. “We ran for our lives and we dragged the wounded and the children behind us. And that is as much of the story as I can tell you, for now at least.”

  She got up from the chair and shut the window firmly. Then she went to her bed, where she laid herself down fully dressed and crossed an arm over her face.

  Jennet wanted to know so many things: where Strikes-the-Sky had died, and how, if not at the battle of Tippecanoe; what exactly had gone wrong, and what had become of the man people called the Prophet. And the most important question, the one that might never be answered at all: what had happened to Hannah's son, the boy whose name she never said aloud? Had he died in the battle, or its aftermath?

  Instead she said, “Cousin, what happened tonight to make you need to tell that story?”

  It seemed at first as if Hannah would not answer. Then she said, “When they brought my uncle Strong-Words' body home, he was missing both of his arms. They had been chopped off at the shoulder, very deliberately. The next day we all went to the battlefield: his wife and daughter, my son and me. To find his arms so we could bury him properly. But we failed. Some white man carried my uncle's arms away with him.”

  In the dark Jennet found she could hardly swallow, so rough and swollen was her throat.

  “Sometimes,” Hannah said, and her voice crackled like spring ice. “Sometimes in my dreams I see my uncle swimming in the lake in the clouds, armless and sleek, like an otter. That was his boy-name, you know. Otter. In my dream he puts his head up out of the water and even sleeping I can smell the battle on him. There is such terrible sadness and disappointment in his face. I carry it like a stone around my neck.”

  Hannah turned her face to the wall. Just when Jennet thought that she had gone to sleep, Hannah sat up and began to rock in the bed, her arms around her knees.

  “I was happy,” she said. “I want you to know how happy I was. I want you to know about Strikes-the-Sky, what kind of husband he is, what kind of father he was to our son. He is a good man.”

  “I know that already,” Jennet said, shocked above all things that Hannah spoke of her husband as if he might still be alive.

  Satisfied, Hannah lay down again. “If I can find the words to make him real again,” she said. “Then I will tell you his stories.”

  It was not her uncle that came to Hannah in her dreams that night, nor her husband or even her son, though the boy was most likely to show himself when she was unsettled by memories. Instead a white man came to find her. She had never learned his name, though he died under her scalpel while she fought to save his life.

  An Ottawa chief called Sabaqua had taken the soldier as a prisoner early in the fighting. Though wounded himself, Sabaqua and another warrior called Shabbona had brought the prisoner in on horseback just past dawn. Sabaqua claimed the soldier for his own; he would bring him to his wife to take the place of the son who had fallen in the battle.

  But Hannah took one look and knew that Sabaqua could not have this white soldier for a son. He was a young man in his prime, strong and straight, but there was a wound in his side that pierced his liver and one leg was crushed; there was nothing any healer could do for him.

  And still she tried. She packed the wound in his side and dug deep into the flesh of his leg to stop the bleeding, and while she worked the man alternated between screaming and talking. It was so long since she had spoken English it was possible, at first, simply not to understand him. But then the words had begun to order themselves in her mind and she could not ignore them anymore.

  He told her about his home in the Indiana territory and his sister and his father, talking to her as if she were an old friend, someone he had grown up with, and not an Indian woman covered with great gouts of his blood. There was an urgency in him as he entrusted her with his memories as they faded out of his mind and heart.

  And all the while he talked there were more wounded coming in: men of her own tribe, her own family, her husband's. Men she knew well, whose children she had helped into the world, whose sons had played with her son. Warriors who had a chance of surviving their wounds and perhaps living to fight another day. If she would only turn away from this dying man with skin darkened by the sun to a shade that would be always and forever nothing less than white.

  Many of the men she had failed to save came to her in the dark of night; some to talk to her about matters of no importance, others to say nothing at all. In this dream the white man without a name smiled at her, reached out a bloody hand and touched her cheek with one finger. His wounds had shifted from his leg and side to his chest, where a single bullet had carved out a hole over his heart.

  The white man opened his mouth and spoke to her not in his own voice, but with her husband's.

  Take care of the boy, Strikes-the-Sky said through the dead white man. Save the boy. My brothers will raise him to be a warrior.

  I failed, she told him. I tried to save him but I failed. He's in the shadow lands. He is yours to look after, now.

  Look after the boy, Strikes-the-Sky said again. You must save the boy.

  Chapter 8

  Montreal

  In an attic room on the top floor of her brother's home, Lily Bonner worked in the last light of December afternoon. Her breath hovered damp and white around her head, and her skin was flushed with cold. The woolen cloak she wore to start with lay forgotten in the sawdust and wood shavings.

  She carved, her movements sure and quick, quicker with the waning light. With all her concentration fixed on the block of cherry wood on the worktable, Lily coaxed the lines of a flowering tree into revealing themselves.

  Now and then Lily paused in her work to study the branch propped up as a model on the deep windowsill. On the low table beneath the window there was a neat row of woodcarver's tools: chisels and knives and blades, gifts from her brother, who made such things appear before she could even think to ask. Each tool was wrapped in a rag, tucked and folded in precise angles, damp with oil.

  She had started work with the rising of the sun, moving from one task to another: three hours with one teacher, two hours with another, the rest of the time at an easel or drawing table or in the attic with the wood. After dinner she had taken her daily walk through the city.

  Every day she understood a little more of the French spoken all around her by farmers and tinsmiths, shop clerks and milkmaids. Often Lily thought of her mother's classroom and wished that she had been less impatient with the things she had been given to learn, French among them.

  Today she had found the courage to try her luck when she bought a penny bun from an older woman with kind eyes, her red cheeks roughened by pox scars. To her surprise Lily found that she could answer when the old woman asked after Luke and Iona, something that pleased her very much, even if it was strang
e to be reminded that even in this great city everyone must know her face and name and her family history. Long before she came to stay here people had been telling stories about her father and grandfather—breathless ones, sometimes funny, always exciting, and so far as Lily could tell, they were all true, at least in spirit.

  As a little girl she had listened to the stories and wished for her own adventures. Then Gabriel Oak began to teach her how to draw and those wishes had been replaced by very different ones. For so long she had wanted just what she had been given: teachers and tools and time to work. Freedom from the endless, mindless jobs: spinning, grinding corn, wiping dishes. No children to plague her with questions and stories and excursions into the forests. At home much of November would be taken up with spinning tow for wicks and candle dipping, Lily's least favorite of all the endless household work. No doubt they were dipping candles in Montreal too, but it had nothing to do with her, not here. This is what she wanted, Lily told herself. Everything she asked for.

  It was almost four; time to change and go down to the dinner table, where food and drink appeared magically, carried up the stairs from the basement kitchen. There would be company, as there always was; her brother was known throughout Canada for his conversation and the generous table he set. There were stories about him too, though they were not told in his hearing. Lily heard snatches wherever she went, and gathered those bits and pieces to take back to Luke. When they sat together on Sundays she would bring them out and quiz him: Is it true that? and, How did you come to? and, Where was it you came across?

  But at the dinner table she kept her questions to herself in front of company. His friends or business acquaintances were many and always welcome, and some of them had got into the habit of bringing wives and daughters and most especially marriageable sons along to meet Lily. All of Montreal was curious about her, this girl raised in the wilderness who came to study art. Nathaniel Bonner's daughter, with paint stains on her fingers.