Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  One of the littlest raised a hand and waved.

  “No more’n five miles.” Mister Gibbs planted a boot in Seona’s backside and gave a shove, knocking her to her knees. “Jones seen her creep into a thicket near his place, round first light.”

  Missus Gibbs strode forward and snatched the shawl off her shoulders. “This is mine.”

  Seona had no time to react. Pain rippled over her scalp as her hair, come unbraided in the night, was wrenched up hard in Mister Gibbs’s fist. She cried out from startlement as much as from the sting.

  “Ought to have covered this hair better. Jones knew you right off by your description gone round. Stupid girl.” Clutching at the man, neck twisted to ease the pain, she heard him tell his oldest child, “Bring me them shears of your mama’s. Now.”

  Put up your hair, girl-baby. . . .

  How many times your mama got to tell you?

  She struggled. “No! Please, I’ll braid it up!”

  The man knocked her in the head. The blow stunned her long enough for him to do the deed.

  Next she knew, her hair was lying in hanks in the pine straw and she was being hauled toward the nearest tree. Where the rope came from, she never saw. He put it tight around her hands and tied her standing, rough bark pressed into her face, the world spinning dizzily. He pulled down the shoulders of her short gown, ripping out the pins, driving a few into her skin.

  She hadn’t been strap-beaten since that time she and Miss Judith blacked their eyebrows, and never with the strength of a man’s arm. After the second blow she screamed. After twelve there was some commotion behind her. The blows stopped. Rough hands released her bonds and she slumped to the sandy ground. Pine needles poked into her shoulder, the side of her face. Her back was on fire.

  Mister Gibbs said, “Leave her, Betha. Let her lie and think on what she done.”

  How long she lay there shaking head to foot—thinking of nothing—she didn’t know. After a while the three oldest children ventured near, a row of dirty feet blue with cold in her swimming vision. She didn’t want them gaping at her. She should sit up. Cover herself.

  Instead she turned her head to peer up into the face of the oldest child, a boy. He poked her arm with a chilled bare toe.

  “You oughtn’t to have done it, Show-nee. Daddy whips bad girls.”

  His sister, second-born, gave him a shove. “Boys, too! He tanned yo’ backside just t’other day.”

  He shoved her back. “Shut up.”

  “She look like a boy now,” said the third-born, hunkering in front of Seona to jab her shorn head with a finger. This one wasn’t out of shifts yet. Seona only knew him for a boy from having wiped his backside often enough. “She shakin’. Look.”

  “Babies, move off.” The petticoat that had been Seona’s, hemline spotted with new scorch marks, swished into view. Little feet vanished. She winced when Missus Gibbs touched her back but didn’t cry out. She wouldn’t. Not again.

  “I’m sorry for it, but you brung it on yourself,” the woman said, voice low. “You best mind him from now on. Now get up. Come to the kitchen, let me clean these welts. Couple of ’em bleedin’.”

  Between the shaking and the fire lacing her back, Seona was a long time getting to her knees. The woman gripped her arm and half hauled her to her feet. Seona clutched the front of her gaping gown, took two steps toward the cabin that served for a cookhouse, then doubled over to vomit onto the pile of her shorn hair. This sickening was different than those before. It was deep and violent, seeming wrenched up from her soul. She heard the children squealing in disgust.

  Missus Gibbs hadn’t let go her arm. When she straightened, the woman peered at her, frowning. Her face pinched up tight.

  “Ain’t got time to tend you after all,” she said, as if something had changed her mind. “You missed supper. Go to your bed ’til I need your help putting these young’uns down for the night.”

  The woman left her at the cookhouse, clinging to the doorpost.

  “Wrap your head in something,” she tossed back over her shoulder. “It’s unsightly.”

  Fingers trembling, Seona reached up and felt the cropped hanks springing out thick from her head. Curling more tightly than they ever had long. Some great-granddaddy of yours likely made the Middle Passage—same as mine. But you got Indian in you, too . . .

  Whatever she was—Cherokee, African, or something else entire—how had she imagined for a moment that she could be the wife of a white man?

  “Ian,” she whispered, aching for him all the same. What would he think when he saw her now? If he ever saw her again.

  There beside the hearth was the ratty quilt she’d been given to sleep on—so old she dared not wash it for fear of its falling to pieces. A fire was burning low. Seona got another stick of wood onto it, then fell onto her pallet, wishing it were her grave.

  Hers, but not her baby’s.

  31

  The fire sputtered its smoke through the dripping pines that enclosed the cleft in the ridge, deep in the hills above Mountain Laurel. Ian had chosen the spot for its seclusion. Though chill and wet, the only knocking came from the occasional woodpecker, the only voices those of crows and ravens, the nightly hoot of owls. But solitude had brought Ian no nearer the decision he needed to make. He felt run aground, the weight of grief, regret, and longing beneath his ribs dragging at him like an anchor.

  The scent of roasting rabbit, snared that morning, failed to quicken his appetite as he sat cross-legged before a brush shelter, letting his thoughts skitter like leaves down a well-worn trail.

  If he left Mountain Laurel, where was he to go? What was he to do once he got there? He’d money left from the sale of the desks, the new batch in the making. He could finish them and with the proceeds start over somewhere as a cabinetmaker; a hardscrabble life to begin with, but he could bear that. He was less certain he could go on crafting furniture and bear the constant reminder of—

  He took a mental step back from Seona, as from the cracking of thin ice.

  Taking the rabbit from the flames, he arranged the meat on damp leaves to cool, then ran a hand through his hair. His fingers caught in a tangle of sap, yanking painfully.

  Perhaps he was unsuited for civilized life. There was the frontier and furs to be taken still—maybe Callum would have him back.

  A raindrop struck the top of his head, tracing a cold line down his scalp. Clouds trundled by like wool-heavy sheep grazing the treetops.

  “‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” he murmured, then fell mute. Those words had no place on the lips of such a wayward lamb.

  Other words came to mind, spoken by John Reynold that sultry summer day Ian returned the shoat, the day he discovered the birch hollow, the raven, and Seona . . .

  Memory cracked the ice again. He scurried back.

  What was it John had said? Something to do with vision, a thing his neighbor possessed in spades. Ian raised bent knees, sharp-boned beneath loose buckskin breeches, tattered now with spots scorched through, and pressed his brow against them. Then he had it.

  Without vision the people perish. Uncertain if that was Scripture—knowing John, it likely was—he lifted his head and stared down the sloping forest aisles, past pines and laurel thickets, dark and evergreen, past leaves plastered in rain-matted mounds, brown among tumbled gray stone. “Give me vision, then, or I perish.”

  His stomach growled. For the first time in days he felt the stirrings of hunger. He tilted back his head, mouth quirked at this blunt answer to his prayer.

  Eat, the glowering heavens might as well have rumbled.

  The rabbit was cool to the touch. With his knife he carved away the roasted flesh, while his mind moved on to the third of his options: stay in Carolina, accept his uncle’s offer—one with an onus of expectation he didn’t think he could bear. Yet here he sat wrestling with it as though his soul were tethered to the place. Did he think Seona might return? Or was it that it still bore her presence and those who grieved her absence?
>
  Stop it. She’s gone. Let her go.

  Ian thrust a stick into the settling fire, then reached to massage his healing arm. At least he wasn’t cold. Aside from two wool hunting shirts, he’d the buckskin coat. Someone had attempted to work out the bloodstains and repair the tears, but the quillwork was shredded beyond restoring. He touched the rows of stitches high on breast and sleeve, a mirror of the scars he bore beneath. He’d left his finer clothes behind, as well as the homespun he wore for shop and field.

  Three sets of garments. Three lives from which to choose. Tradesman, planter, frontiersman. There was something in each that appealed, but something that repelled as well.

  The rain pelted down with resolve. He crawled inside the shelter and pulled a woven mat across the opening. He’d a letter still to write, one he’d been composing in his mind, off and on.

  Dear Da—he might pen—I have squandered another chance at settling to a useful life. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me as an apprentice in your shop. . . .

  He’d write no such drivel, but he must write something. And soon.

  In the dark of the shelter Ian laid his head to sleep, perishing beneath the weight of fruitless thought. Where there is no vision . . .

  Vision. He could try a vision quest, after the manner of the Chippewa. Such ceremonials were solitary affairs, but he’d once stumbled upon a glade where a boy and his father were preparing for one. He minded cedar boughs laid upon the ground, ringing a brush shelter. Four sticks tied with bits of colorful cloth, their purpose unknown. The boy’s startled eyes staring at him from a blackened face.

  On a fragile thread of hope he drifted toward sleep, wrapped in his old camp blanket, with its comforting smells of horse and smoke.

  He dreamt of Seona. Peril threatened but he couldn’t reach her.

  She is a lithe shape slipping through shadow and mist, through brush and bramble that lets her pass but claws his flesh as he pursues, until not just shoulder and chest but thighs and belly are striped in red. She isn’t alone. Thomas runs beside her. This enrages him, driving him on despite the lashing. A swamp spreads before them. Thomas slips and falls into it. He struggles and sinks deeper. Seona implores him to help, but he doesn’t help. His heart is a stone that swells and bursts from him, a rock that’s taller than he is. Seona stands atop it, disappointment in her eyes. He tries to reach her, but the rock that had been his heart grows as he climbs it. Small and high above him, Seona shakes her head in sorrow and turns away . . .

  He started awake, breath coming in pants. Clutching his belly like a man gutshot, he curled inward around his grief. His breathing quieted.

  The noise of panting didn’t.

  The sound came from beyond the shelter. Rhythmic, steady. Not human. He reached for the rifle but stilled with his hand on the cold barrel, nostrils flaring at the pungent, incongruous whiff of wet dog.

  The dogs—Charlie Spencer’s, he presumed—were gone before he emerged from the shelter next morning and found their tracks in the mud. He saw no sign of Spencer, at least not in the moist earth surrounding his shelter. But Spencer might have been more careful than that. Hoping the man hadn’t been trailing his dogs close, Ian went about his preparations for the vision quest.

  The nearest to cedar he found by his camp was juniper, but he made a ring of it for his quest. He blacked his face with soot, sat on the cold ground in the ring’s center, and settled in to wait.

  On the second day of his vigil he began to suspect himself of folly, his quest of futility. By the third day he’d lost all doubt on both scores. Desperate, he persisted.

  Early on the fourth day he saw the raven, eyeing him from the crest of a nearby stone. He couldn’t be certain it was Munin. If so, would the bird speak without Seona by?

  He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. Weak from hunger, he’d been dreaming of her again on the edge of sleep. This time she’d come seeking him, saying it was a mistake. She hadn’t meant to leave him. With hands and lips she touched his scars, weeping for each one.

  Ian shifted, sore from sitting. “If ye’ve come to reproach me, ye needn’t bother,” he told the raven, voice graveled with disuse. “She made her choice.”

  “Ye’ve taken to conversing wi’ the birds, Mister Ian?”

  Ian’s scalp crawled with shock, but when he spoke, he sounded calm. “Only the one.”

  Behind him a stick snapped. The raven took wing.

  Ian turned.

  Malcolm stood below him on the slope, braced on one side by Ally, on the other by John Reynold.

  They sat on boughs gathered from the juniper circle, Ally with a bundle clutched to his chest. While the fire blazed, Ian devoured the last of the sweet rolls his neighbor had brought, shamelessly licking his fingers.

  “John, your wife is an angel of mercy. I feel almost human.” He rubbed a hand over his stubbled face, palm coming away smeared with soot. “Though I cannot be much to look at.”

  “You aren’t,” John agreed with a cheerfulness that almost rang true.

  In the firelight Ally’s teeth gleamed as he grinned. “You don’t want to be white no more, Mister Ian?”

  Malcolm shot a hushing look at his grandson.

  John cleared his throat. “Cecily hoped you’d be ready to extend your appreciation in person.”

  Though Charlie Spencer had left no sign of his presence, he had, in fact, found Ian’s shelter—so they’d told him—and gone down the ridge to tell John of his discovery. John had gone to Uncle Hugh, who’d blessed this deputation.

  “I don’t know what I’m ready to do,” Ian said. “My uncle wants me to stay, though God knows why after—”

  “Best do as he wants, Mister Ian,” Ally blurted, smile vanished. “I ain’t wanting Mister Pryce as mastah—I rather it be you.”

  Ian frowned at the anxious outpouring. “My uncle isn’t about to sell ye to Chesterfield, Ally. And I’d rather ye called no man master.”

  “Got to be somebody.” Around the bundle he clutched, Ally wrung his big hands.

  “We ken ye dinna want the yoke Master Hugh means to place on ye,” Malcolm said. “But as to what makes Ally speak so of Gideon Pryce . . . Who d’ye think Miss Rosalyn is like to wed, if no’ ye? And if ye go, leaving your uncle wi’out an heir, into whose hands does Mountain Laurel pass?”

  Pryce’s—or whomever Rosalyn married. Had the old slave come to entreat him as the lesser of two evils? Ian wouldn’t ask whether Malcolm knew of his uncle’s debt and to whom was owed the greater portion. Without a male heir to assume those debts, part of Mountain Laurel would fall into Gideon Pryce’s hands upon his uncle’s death, marriage or no. And what, aside from livestock, was easier to turn into cash than slaves?

  He’d asked himself, Could he live with what he would become if he stayed? Now he wondered, Could he live with himself if he left?

  He hunched his shoulders, feeling the yoke begin to settle. It was anything but light. “D’ye know what ye’re asking of me?”

  “Probably better than ye do, Mister Ian,” Malcolm said.

  He raised his head when John stood. Ally put down the bundle and lumbered to his feet. “Ye’re going so soon?”

  “Not quite yet. Malcolm has a thing yet to say to you. We’ll be waiting, just out of hearing.” John grasped Ian’s shoulder in farewell. “You’re not alone in this, Ian, whatever you decide.”

  A wind moved down the ridge, stirring the trees to creak, rattling the few clinging leaves as the crackle of their footsteps diminished. What light filtered through the trees was dim. The fire cast a ruddy sheen on Malcolm’s seamed face as he stared into it.

  “Seona told ye about that old raven?” the old man asked.

  “She did,” Ian said. “It’s to do with Seona, what ye have to say to me?”

  The old man had to be cold and paining. He gave sign of neither. “’Tis to do with Seona, why ye’re up on this ridge freezing your bum to the ground?”

  Ice of a different sort bro
ke under Ian. The waters rushed up to engulf him. “It is.”

  It was all to do with Seona. Why should he deny it?

  Malcolm’s breath flowed out in a sigh and he let Ian see his grief at Seona’s loss. But there was something deeper in his careworn face, something vital, like strong bone beneath ravaged skin.

  “How d’ye do it, Malcolm? How have ye made your peace with . . . ?” He groped for words to finish the question. Enslavement? A wasted life? The sheer burden of living?

  “Peace, or the kind I’m thinkin’ ye mean,” Malcolm said, “comes only one way. Or it doesna come. Through the lordship of the Almighty.”

  Ian ground his teeth. “Tell me something, Malcolm. Can ye read?”

  “No, Mister Ian. I canna.”

  “Then how d’ye know about the Almighty?”

  Malcolm’s face beamed with pleasure, as if it was a question he’d long waited to be asked. “When I was a young man still, Naomi just a bitty lass, there came a traveling preacher riding circuit through the backcountry. Auld Master Duncan let him preach to us—in English. But I was stubborn. I held out surrendering my will, thinking I was already under one master’s thumb and didna need another. But it wasna more chains the preacher meant to heap on me. ’Twas freedom from chains he preached.”

  “And so ye gave your heart to God.” Ian waved away the rest of the predictable tale. “Nothing changed, did it? Ye still toil for a master.” For a Cameron.

  “Ye’re wrong, Mister Ian. Everything changed because I changed.”

  Go with God. Judith’s words to him, days ago. He’d dismissed them as simply a thing pious people said. Was there a reality behind them?

  How was it done, then, this going-with-God business? How did one divine where the Almighty was headed when the aims of men and women, even his own heart, were a mystery at best? At worst, a deceit? Easier to guess where a star might fall.