Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  Perhaps, even then, he had been in a dream’s grip and had not really seen her. Perhaps that look of trust had been for someone else. She greatly hoped so.

  She corked the bottle and dropped it into her carrying basket.

  The snow thaw had passed on the lower slopes, leaving only the marshy places impassable with mud. There on the ridge, the ground was moist but not saturated. Gripping the travois poles, she hoisted her burden and picked herself a path through the wide-spaced trees, while the dog followed.

  Though the going now was even slower, the land beneath her feet grew more familiar with each step. In her mind she rushed ahead, seeing it in memory—its fertile dips and rocky ridges, the broad noisy creek called Black Kettle, the lake with its tiny islet, the broad flats where Papa grew his corn and wheat. The clearing where the barn and cabin stood. So close now.

  Relief and dread warred in her belly.

  She found the little stream where she remembered it to be, and the footpath that followed its winding course south, then east, then south again. She saw no tracks of men, but the deer had kept it clear. Though the travois passed with little hindrance, the man’s weight dragged at her shoulders, causing a burn across the muscles of her back and arms. The basket’s tumpline, tight across her brow, strained the bones of her neck. She turned her mind from the pain, continuing as she had done through each day of her journey. One foot, then the other. A step, and another. As she went, she spoke aloud a name, one she had not heard for many years, and so she said it with care, her enunciation precise.

  “Wilhelm-ina O-ben-chain.”

  The collie trotted up beside her, ears perked, already accustomed to her voice. The woman who had been Burning Sky nodded to the dog, whose name she did not know.

  “Wilhelmina Obenchain,” she said, more assuredly this time. “But you may call me Willa.”

  TWO

  She came down off the last ridge and halted at the northern edge of the long clearing. At the other end, on a slight rise near the far tree line, the cabin still stood. That much could be said.

  A sweeping glance took in the rest of the homestead, or what remained of it. The charred bits of what had been the barn and crib and smokehouse. The pasture where the horse and cattle had grazed, choked with brush. The saplings advancing on the clearing her papa, Dieter Obenchain, had hacked from wilderness over twenty winters ago.

  For more than half those winters, far to the north, she had pictured her parents, and Oma, going about their lives in this place, believing she would never see them again but comforted by such thoughts all the same.

  Where was comfort to be found now? Where was Papa? Mama? With shaking arms she lowered the heavy travois to the weeds, then folded to her knees. Whatever army had done this burning, redcoat, bluecoat, or Longhouse warriors, they’d left no one to welcome her home.

  And no one to spurn your homecoming, a dark voice countered.

  She cringed from the voice, though it was no stranger. Had it not with every step of her journey insisted she was foolish to go back? She was better off alone, for to clear a path to her heart for another to tread was only to invite more grief. Had she not done so twice—loved two families, lived two lives? Both had been torn from her, ripping out great pieces of her soul in the taking. Why should she gather in that spilling wound again?

  She should have listened to that voice. It had been right in its dark warning. Now it was taunting her, saying, Why not sit in the weeds and wait to follow your precious lost ones?

  Why not, indeed?

  The dog, bossy creature, would not let her do so. It shoved its nose under her hand. It trotted toward the cabin, turned, and fixed her with expectant eyes. “Come, you,” it said, clear as speech.

  It had some sense, that dog. She might not care whether she lived or died, but the man she’d hauled out of the laurel thicket would no doubt wish her to choose living. For now at least.

  Willa Obenchain thrust down her grief and refused to think of past or future. The past could not be altered. The future would bring what it would. There was a now to deal with, and it needed all her strength to stand and meet it.

  “All right. Let’s get your man inside and see what can be done for him, hen’en?”

  The air inside the cabin swirled with stale memories, echoes of once-familiar voices trapped within, awaiting her coming to free them.

  “Do ye gather in the eggs, Daughter, then help your mama with the bread.”

  “Willa, it is well done. Turn and show me the back seams.”

  “She’d make a passable sempstress, could she pull her nose from those frivolous books for more than an hour.”

  The onslaught dizzied her as she lowered the travois and the man it supported—dragged in over the porch steps—before the hearth. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, the memories receded, flowing past her and away. She propped the carrying basket against the paneled wall and looked about, heart thudding like a water drum, with the strangeness of hardwood under her feet again.

  And it was hard. The main room of the cabin appeared reasonably sound. The roof had not leaked, nor the floor rotted. This was not too surprising. Her papa possessed a German sense of craftsmanship. What he’d made, he had made well.

  Even so, something felt at odds with the cabin’s obvious abandonment. The open door admitted light enough to show the main room swept clean. Hardly a cobweb draped the corners, except high up among the roof beams.

  The cabin’s state of cleanliness was not all that felt strange. There was order here, in contrast to the neglect outside. Kindling for a fire was laid in the hearth, wood stacked at the ready nearby. From the old iron cooking crane hung a battered kettle. She lifted the lid to find it scoured clean, half-filled with water. Most puzzling of all were the wildflowers tied with string, dried to brown now but clearly placed there by some caring hand, as one might put flowers on a grave.

  Unease tightened Willa’s chest.

  The cabin’s front room was stripped of furnishings, save for a trestle bench once belonging to their table. She began for the first time to wonder if her parents had survived the burning—and whatever violence attended it—taken away their belongings and gone east to Albany, or south to German Flats.

  Or had the place been raided and stripped clean?

  She’d heard accounts of the devastation the war between the Americans and the British had wrought upon New York’s frontier. Homes and crops burned. Settlers murdered, captured, driven off their land. For all she knew, Papa’s cabin now stood in the midst of an unpeopled wilderness—if not for the flowers, wood, and water.

  The man on the travois did not stir while she coaxed a fire to life and swung the kettle over the flames. She did not think he had left the cabin thus. His dog had come inside with her, but with a wariness that told her this was not a place it knew. It watched her, sniffed the man over, and went out again.

  She set the items she’d found among the laurels beside the hearth: canteen; satchel; a small glass that made things seen through it loom large; an odd container made of tin, round-sided and long, with a leather strap for carrying and a sliding pin for a clasp.

  The man moved his head, turning it toward the hearth. The firelight revealed a faintly reddened patch of skin, high above his left eyebrow. Most of his hair was tailed back, but shorter wisps curled on his brow. Thinking she might have overlooked a wound that needed tending, she brushed the stiffened hair aside.

  It was a wound, but one long since healed. The pinkish scar sliced a messy line along the man’s hairline, from his temple halfway across his brow.

  A knife blade had left that scar. A scalping blade.

  She drew back from the man, a little shaken, and went to fetch her herb pouch, from which she extracted a measure of willow bark. When steam rose off the water in the kettle, she dipped a gourd cup full, added the bark, and set it on the hearth to steep. Whatever hurts he might have besides the arm, the bark would ease their pain. When the laudanum wore off.

  Tu
rning, she nearly stumbled over the man’s satchel.

  Before she could think twice, she crouched and reached inside. The first thing she touched was flat, broad, and leather covered. She pulled it out. With a furtive glance at the man, she unwound the string from the horn toggle that secured its flap.

  She’d expected a journal, something written down that might give understanding of who the man was. What she found instead were drawings. In pencil, in ink, even in colored paint. Page after page of them, mostly of plants and flowers, now and then a bird or insect with the plant—all recognizable by their remarkable detail. They were carefully labeled, with notes on the borders. Or most of them were. No writing accompanied the last dozen likenesses.

  The stillness outside the cabin was broken by the dog’s sudden barking. Willa returned the sketchbook to the satchel, took up her musket, crossed to the door, and stood there blinking in surprise.

  Somewhere the dog had found a nanny goat, a half-starved, brindled creature, and was attempting to herd it across the cabin yard, creeping, crouching, circling around when the harried goat made a dash for the woods. Where it had come from was a mystery and made her wonder if it had belonged to her parents, or perhaps some other farm nearby, burned and abandoned like her own. She searched the sky above the wooded horizon, expecting to see smoke from another chimney.

  There was no sign of neighbors.

  After propping the musket by the door, she stepped off the porch and bent to wrench up a tuft of new spring grass. “Dog! Bring it this way. Hahnio!”

  It was the goat that responded. Breaking off its escape with a protesting bla-a-at, it trotted straight to her outstretched hand.

  Rolling its odd-pupiled eyes at the lurking collie, the goat followed Willa—or her handful of grass—around the porch to the addition her father had built when Opa died and Oma came up the creek from German Flats to live with them. This was the only part of the cabin that had fallen into disrepair. Half the roof was open to the sky, and the front timbers had rotted with rain and snow. The far corner timbers still stood solid, and the door to the main cabin was shut firm.

  With some arranging of the fallen logs, Willa made a pen and with the help of the dog persuaded the goat inside it. She snatched up handfuls of grass for the creature, wondering after all that effort if it was not better to leave it loose and chance its staying. How would she feed it otherwise? She could not spare her seed corn. She needed every precious kernel. Perhaps she could build a proper pen …

  If she decided to stay. Or to stay alive.

  She was hearing voices again—women’s voices. The singing and chatter that flew above brown hands busy planting; tending kettles, fires, babies; scraping hides; weaving mats; piecing moccasins and dying quills. So many hands to make the work fly. The memories pierced like arrows through her chest, her throat, her burning eyes.

  Desperately, she reached back to dimmer memories—Mama and Oma making soap, dipping candles, sewing quilts, husking corn—but even their time-blunted points could wound.

  The dog nudged her palm, and with a shake of her head, she came back to the present, where no hands offered help. Did she have it in her to go on? Was there any point in it now?

  The dog whined. Willa sighed.

  “I have not forgotten your man.” She’d taken him into her care and under her roof—if she could call it that. She was obligated to see that decision through. What first, then? There was that arm she suspected was broken. If it needed to be set, best to do it before the laudanum wore off.

  But when she came into the cabin, she found she was too late. The man had freed himself from the travois and was sitting up on it, looking about, blinking those eyes as blue as bits of sky fallen to earth. Dark brows soared at the sight of her, before he offered a tentative smile.

  “ ’Tis not the first time I’ve waked to find myself cast upon the mercy of strangers,” he said, the words rolling over her, thick as corn porridge. “Though come to that—”

  Whatever more he meant to say was cut short when the dog, hearing his voice, pushed past her, bolted joyfully across the cabin, and hurled itself at the man.

  THREE

  Neil MacGregor got an arm half-raised before the filthy mass of fur vaguely resembling his dog barreled into him. Shielding his injured parts from the wriggling onslaught left his face open to a slobbery barrage. “Easy, sir—down, I say!”

  He’d meant to say a deal more, but the collie swung its rump, tail whirling like a pinwheel, and swiped the wagging appendage against his swollen wrist. Pain forked like lightning up his arm, searing the words to his tongue.

  “Dog. Come away.”

  The command came from the Indian who’d entered the cabin. From his glimpse of her stroud cloth and deerskin garments, Neil hadn’t expected her to speak a word of English. More startling was his dog’s response. The collie backed away and sat, pressed against the rock hearth, two paces from where Neil had awakened, lashed to what appeared to be a travois.

  Removing his teeth from his lower lip, he peered at the woman in the doorway, squinting to bear the daylight streaming past her. Not an Indian, he realized. The thick braid of hair fallen over her shoulder was a light brown, glinting nearly auburn in the glare of sunlight. Her face, while tight-skinned and high-boned, had a golden cast, not the bronze of the Indians he’d encountered.

  “D’ye mind terribly shutting the door?” he asked her, shooting a warning look at the dog lest it think itself released. The collie glanced at the woman and lay down. Neil was likewise tempted, but warring with a pounding, woozy head was the need to make sense of his circumstances—a far cry from the last he recalled—and to ascertain the extent of his injuries. Nothing too alarming, save for his right arm. Fractured, judging from the splintering pain when he moved it, and the bruised swelling of the wrist.

  The woman did as he’d asked, bringing a blessed dimness to the cabin. She made no reply, however, nor any other indication she’d understood him. Perhaps she’d shut the door of her volition, not at his request. She had spoken English, hadn’t she? The fading imprint of blinding pain told him he’d had another of the cursed headaches. They could scramble his brains for hours after waking.

  Unnerved by the woman’s silence, he looked at his dog. “Ye reek to high heaven, lad—and you’re a sorry sight, forby.”

  The collie thumped the floor with its tail, pleased to be addressed.

  “He is as I found him,” the woman said. “Or as he found me.”

  That had been English, though the sound of it was odd, spoken with a faint accent Neil couldn’t place, and a careful, almost halting manner, as though she was thinking hard about the words she chose to speak.

  “Aye, well, he’s inclined to attach himself to passersby. He found me near Schenectady—down on the Mohawk River. What his given name is I canna say, but I call him Capercaillie. That’s a kind of bird,” he explained at her blank stare. “In Scotland. Cap does for short.”

  He checked his blethering and dropped his gaze. The woman’s feet were encased in stitched moccasins, beaded or quilled—he couldn’t tell from that distance—in a flower design, their edges dark with moisture and mud. Above them, leggings of faded scarlet, similarly decorated, disappeared beneath a wrapped skirt of tanned hide, its edges fringed. Over this she wore a long tunic of stroud cloth like the leggings, only blue, and much worn. From her neck hung a necklace of shells and a bone-handled knife sheathed in beaded leather. It was the most rustic costume he’d yet seen on the frontier—on a white woman.

  “He found you, did ye say?”

  “Near the laurels. With you.”

  Images skittered at the edges of his memory. A laurel thicket … and a hawk in flight. A red-tailed hawk. It had circled up and over a curious stone on a ridge. A thin stone that rose to a point like a scalpel’s blade. Wanting a closer look, he’d led the horse around to it by an easier ascent, made a sketch, then slipped the book into his satchel and unlaced a saddlebag. A canteen had fallen. He’d grabbed
for it …

  Next he kent, he was lying in the laurels with Cap’s frantic barking driving spikes into his skull, his vision occluded, and his wrist screaming in pain. At some point he’d roused and found the laudanum in his coat pocket, the glass thankfully unbroken. Black draft for the black spells. He hated the stuff. Hated worse his need of it.

  So the woman had found him there, still in the laurels. “Ye dinna mean to say you brought me here, on your own?”

  The woman’s deep-set eyes narrowed, but she nodded.

  “How? Oh, aye, the travois,” he said, answering his own question. How had she gotten his horse to pull the contraption? Too distracted for the moment by a fresh stab of pain to ask, he ran light fingers over his swollen wrist, hissing in a breath.

  The woman’s moccasins drew near, and he saw that it was beads, not quills, that adorned them. Very pretty they were, though, where mud did not obscure the designs.

  Her braid swung down in the firelight, the russet of autumn in its brown coils, as she reached for a gourd cup set by the hearth. She had capable-looking hands, long and shapely, but work roughened.

  “Drink. It will help some. Your arm is broken?”

  “Aye. I’m all but sure.” He looked up as he accepted the gourd, and nearly spilled its contents into his lap. It was the first close look he’d had at her features. While his initial reaction was one of concern—the wide cheekbones, the deep hollows of her eyes, the line of her jaw, were sharply jutting in what was clearly a half-starved face—what caused the heat to rise to the roots of his hair was the thrill of recognition that shot through him.

  He’d taken her for an angel when he opened his eyes to her the first time, thinking himself about to step through heaven’s door.

  Well, so. He wasn’t dead. And she was no angel. Only striking in the remote and daunting way he’d imagined angels to be, with her straight back and long limbs and thick hair drawn back from those fiercely sculpted bones. And those eyes. He thought them green. Maybe hazel. With the firelight behind her, he couldn’t tell for certain.