Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  “I couldna read a word, either time.”

  Understanding lit her face. Then her brows puckered as she considered him. “That is a great loss for you, a great difficulty.”

  She acknowledged the fact with gravity, not pity, for which he was thankful.

  “But you mean to go on with it—your work—or you would not be here. How have you managed?”

  He would get no better opening than this. “I’ve kept the notes in my head for the drawings I’ve done, saying them over to myself before I sleep. But I’ll lose the knowledge if I canna get it set in writing soon, which brings me to a thing I’ve wanted to ask ye.” He drew a breath and plunged ahead. “Would you be agreeable to helping me with the writing, while my arm’s on the mend?”

  Instead of answering, she asked the one question he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to answer. “When your arm is healed, what will you do then? You will need a horse, yes? And … other things?”

  “Aye.”

  Resignation must have shown in his face. Her brow creased. “This troubles you?”

  He sighed. “I havena wanted to say it, but I think losing my field kit is the feather that broke the horse’s back, as they say. I dinna think I can go on without it.”

  Now her face was grave, her eyes full of concern. “Why can you not go on?”

  “You’ve seen the inside of Keegan’s store. I’d have to journey back to Schenectady, maybe even Albany, to replace what I lost—paints, brushes, the plant press, all the rest. Even if I did, I wasna given provision to outfit myself twice over.” He set his teeth, then forced himself to say it aloud. “No. I’m done.”

  “After you have been through so much? That does not seem right.”

  Any less right than Willa’s enduring twelve years of captivity, only to return to find her family’s land about to be snatched out from under her? She looked away from him, at the fire, as if thinking hard about something—his request? His predicament? Her own?

  “It matters to you,” she said at last. “To set down the words for the drawings you have already finished, even if you do not mean to go on?”

  “Aye. At least I’ll have proof that I tried, when I explain my failure to the Society.” His face flamed as he spoke, and he looked away, hoping she wouldn’t notice the guilt thoughts of his mentors in Philadelphia stirred.

  The American Philosophical Society had for the most part ceased to meet during the war years, the very years Neil had waited for the tumult—that inside his head as well as on the frontier—to cease. The one at least had done so, and at winter’s end he’d received a letter from Benjamin Rush, in which the good doctor declared the Society’s intention of resuming their interrupted gatherings. He’d encouraged Neil to strike out for the Great Northern Wilderness, if he still intended to do so, that they would expect word from him later in the season.

  Had he been completely forthcoming about his condition, he was certain Rush’s encouragement would have turned to dissuasion.

  Neil forced himself to meet Willa’s gaze, half believing she’d be so minded herself.

  “I will help you,” she said. “Some each day. But it must wait until the sun sleeps.”

  He smiled at her phrasing, as gratitude dispelled his embarrassment. Perhaps it would mean little in the end, whether or not the drawings he’d finished were annotated, but her willingness buoyed his spirits. “Thank you,” he said.

  There had been no thunder for some time. He rose and went to the door, opening it again to the night. The rain still pattered but no longer beat the ground. Feeling a nudge at his knee, he looked down. Cap had padded after him. “Ye dinna want to go out there.”

  The collie whined.

  “I’ll not be letting ye back in, do you get yourself all-over mud. You’ll stay on the porch till you’ve dried.”

  Amber eyes fixed on him, unblinking.

  “On your own head be it, lad.” He let the dog out, calling after it, “Dinna pester the hens!”

  When he glanced at the hearth, Willa was bent over her sewing, trying unsuccessfully to hide a smile. “Did I say something funny?”

  “It is how you are with that dog that is funny. Talking to it as if it were a child.”

  Her smile dimmed suddenly, but he answered in the same light vein, “I suspect he sees it the other way ’round.”

  The cold was seeping in, raising gooseflesh up his shins, but he stayed at the door.

  “Where was the village ye lived in? With the Mohawks, I mean. Was it one of those burned by—what was that general’s name? Sullivan?”

  Willa kept her gaze on her sewing. “My village was far to the north, not part of the Longhouse people. In that I was fortunate. No Town Destroyers like Sullivan or Clinton burned our crops or our houses. A sickness destroyed it. Smallpox.”

  Destroyed. He didn’t think she used the word carelessly. Who had she lost to the pox? Her husband? Those who’d adopted her? He wanted to ask, but she’d turned closer to the fire, putting her shoulder to him. Protecting a wound she didn’t want him probing, he sensed. He suspected he had only the vaguest idea as yet of what Willa Obenchain—or Burning Sky—had endured the past twelve years. But it was that day’s events that came rushing in to fill his mind now.

  By the Colonel’s decree, Willa wouldn’t be run off her land. Not by Richard or any other meddlesome neighbor. Not yet. But the eyes of one county magistrate couldn’t be everywhere at once. Her Indian brother wasn’t to be counted on for protection, save at the utmost extreme. In fact, his presence could make matters worse for Willa, if it was discovered.

  Then there’s me, he thought. While he couldn’t for the moment chop wood or build a table or dig the ground, might he afford Willa the kind of protection that would discourage attack, rather than invite it? Or was he only looking for another excuse to delay his ignominious return to Philadelphia?

  He had a week, he reminded himself, maybe two, to figure that out.

  Gripping the spade in hands hardened to the work, Willa drew the earth into small scattered hillocks—earth too wet from last night’s rain to work easily, earth smelling of the rawness of open graves.

  She tried to drive back that last thought, but it was no good. The talking in the night had done it. Being with a man under her roof, hearing his voice, stitching a shirt for him, the fire warming their faces … It had felt too much like the life she’d known with Kingfisher and their children, and now she could not stop thinking of her daughters.

  Goes-Singing, slender and quick, running between the mounds at last year’s planting, bringing fish to replenish the earth. Sweet Rain, still fat and wobbly on her legs, tiny fist clenched around three kernels of seed corn, determined to help.

  At the creek that morning, she’d caught a few small fish but had not wanted to take the time to throw the net again and again. A fish went into every hillock to nourish the plants as they grew. She could not catch enough and prepare the ground too. She would have to cut the fish into pieces, a stingy portion for each cornstalk. She worried the earth would feel neglected, that the crop would suffer. Thus she worked the ground in sorrow, and it wasn’t good.

  Planting was meant to be a time of joy, a singing time for the women and children of the clans. She had no children to catch the fish or bang the gourds to keep the birds from stealing the seeds and kernels after sowing. And in summer, when the bean pods came and the corn ripened and the squash vines blossomed, there would be no children to help guard the crop from the deer, raccoon, and rabbit that would steal it.

  Letting the spade fall, she dropped to her knees and plunged her hands into the earth, grabbing up wet fistfuls of it to smear down the front of her tunic, the deerskin skirt covering her thighs. She did not care. She wanted to be covered. Buried.

  Take my heart and hide it in this ground, for the pain of it in me is too great to bear.

  Her throat was too tight for the scream building inside her to come out. Only a groan slipped past.

  “Willa?”

&nbs
p; She had not heard Neil MacGregor come across the field. He was simply there, kneeling to put his good hand on her shoulder. A sob escaped her throat at the touch, and his arm came around her.

  Though she was as stiff and bent as a crone, filthy with dirt, she let him hold her as a brother might. As Joseph would have done. His hair was loose on his shoulders. It brushed her cheek, wet from bathing, cold.

  “What d’ye need, Willa? Tell me.”

  My children. She swallowed back that answer and said, “Fish.”

  She felt a tremor go through him, as though her words made him laugh, but when he spoke, there was no mirth in his voice, only kindness.

  “Then I’ll get ye some.” He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. Then he left her.

  But somehow, he left her changed. She still had no children, no sisters to help her, but she’d remembered there was one thing more she could do. She could pray as she planted.

  On her feet, covered in earth, she took up the spade and went back to making hillocks and beseeched the same God she’d always prayed to, even if sometimes it had been in silence, while others around her prayed in different ways—asking blessing for the ground, the seeds that would go into it, the crop that would spring from it. Asking for favor, asking for deliverance. Asking for a miracle.

  TWELVE

  The British had burned Richard’s homestead, south of the Colonel’s adjoining fields—so Anni told Willa when she and Neil stopped briefly at the mill on their way to return the Colonel’s mule. In the months since Shiloh’s surviving inhabitants left the forts on the Mohawk River and returned to pick up the pieces of their lives, Richard had not rebuilt his cabin. He’d slept and taken meals in the Colonel’s six-room stone house—a structure impervious to flame—while he worked his land for all the profit he could wrest from it.

  Willa prayed he was away tending that work the second morning after the storm.

  They’d seen Richard and the assessor the previous day. Still covered in the mud of her grieving, Willa had seen them coming in time to slip from the field to the cabin yard, where she shot Neil MacGregor a pleading glance and, at his nod, hurried into the wood near the spring. To her shame, she’d been grateful he was stranded at her cabin, willing to spare her an encounter with Richard she was in no frame of mind, or heart, to endure. She was thankful to have him with her now, even if Richard was nowhere in sight and it was Goodenough’s boy, Lem, who led them to the stable, where the Colonel’s groom took the mule into custody.

  Lem raced off to the cellar kitchen to tell his mama they’d arrived. Willa made to follow but halted at the stable door when she realized Neil was not behind her. She turned to see him standing by the mule, looking as if he meant to engage Aram Crane in conversation.

  “Do you mean to come with me to the house?” she called.

  He glanced at her, then back at Crane—who’d ducked into a tack room with the packsaddle, out of sight—then shrugged. “Aye.”

  “Is he still afraid of you?” Willa asked as they fell into step toward the stone house. It was hard to hide the smile tugging at her mouth. It did not escape Neil’s notice.

  “Think it funny, do ye?” he asked, pretending mild insult. “Aye,” he muttered, with a glance behind him at the stable. “I suppose it is rather funny.”

  But the word she knew he was thinking, the word she was thinking, was strange.

  Willa had let the tea in the cup go cold. Goodenough made a soft tsk as she warmed it with a fresh pouring, but her eyes lingered kindly as she served the Colonel, Neil, and Wendell Stoltz. On the table between the dishes lay the assessor’s papers, including a map showing the boundaries of her land. Stoltz had explained his mapping, based on the original deed, and had inquired—from courtesy, Willa suspected—whether the borders he’d drawn and described in his notes coincided with her memory of them.

  All that certain Farm or Tract of Land situate in upper Shiloh and County of Montgomery, formerly Tryon, being Bounded as follows Viz. Beginning at the South West corner of said Farm thence running Easterly by Woodland along the north bank of Black Kettle Creek to a Lake …

  She assured him that they were correct, and swallowed a sip of strong black tea. Another time she would have savored the half-forgotten taste, but today in the Colonel’s paneled parlor, her throat felt lined with ashes, the tea bitter on her tongue. The assessor’s notes had also contained these words: “Comprising about Ninety Acres more or less Forfeited to the People of this State by the Conviction of Dieter Obenchain.”

  “I’ll leave you with a detailing of my assessment.” Stoltz pushed a sheet of foolscap across the table. “An estimate. The final price will be fixed before the auction and will no doubt increase with the bidding.”

  Beside her, Neil MacGregor shifted in his chair. “When is it to be, the auction?”

  “Also yet to be fixed, but Miss Obenchain may look to the autumn.”

  Stoltz rolled the map as Willa read the value set on her land, the ransom she must pay to redeem what she considered hers, a sum slightly nearer two hundred pounds than three hundred. It might as well have been ten thousand, for all she could imagine ever paying it.

  “If present company holds me pardoned, there’s a final property along Black Kettle to assess.” Stoltz hesitated, gazing at her apologetically. “Miss Obenchain, there are times when my duties as assessor bring me no joy. And should you disprove what is commonly held against your father, that he never declared himself for the Patriot cause because he was, in fact, a Loyalist, then rest assured I shall do what I can to bring that proof before the commissioners of confiscation, to forestall these proceedings. But it must be unmitigated proof.”

  Though she wanted to, Willa could not dislike the man. “I will find that proof.” Her assertion hung in the air, feeble words with nothing behind them but determination.

  Goodenough followed the assessor out, leaving Willa and Neil alone with the Colonel.

  The parlor had changed in the years since Willa last stepped foot inside it. Small reminder remained of Anni’s mother, Sarah Waring. The room smelled of tobacco now. The furnishings were sparser, the tables unadorned. An oak-wood fire burned in the hearth, and a clock ticked on the wide-molded mantel. She remembered the clock. It and the fire were the only sounds in the room, until the Colonel spoke.

  “You’ve begun planting, Richard tells me.”

  “I am still breaking ground, but I will plant soon.”

  The Colonel reached for a pipe, which he’d smoked earlier but had let go out. He tapped the bowl gently against the table, scattering dottle over the polished surface. “I’d ask you to consider leaving the land at rest for the present and coming here to live.”

  Willa opened her mouth, but the Colonel raised his pipe against a hasty response. “Dieter Obenchain, whatever his politics, was a good neighbor, an honest man. In his place—as a father, if you will—I offer you shelter, while you consider what you may wish to do …”

  Willa stiffened in her chair. “You would see me admit defeat without trying to prove my parents’ innocence?”

  Elias Waring sighed, as if with a great weariness. “Innocence is a word I’ve learned to ascribe in strictest moderation, Wilhelmina. After the war we’ve come through, we are none of us innocent.”

  Neil MacGregor cleared his throat. “Respectfully, sir, are ye saying her parents deserved what happened to them?”

  Willa caught the guarded look that crossed the Colonel’s face.

  “Anni has said she does not know what happened to them,” she said. “Perhaps it is that you know?”

  Abandoning the pipe, Anni’s father rose from the table and crossed to the hearth, his limp more pronounced without the aid of his walking stick. He took up a poker and pushed at the logs in the grate, raising a spurt of flame.

  “Has Anni told you about Oriskany, where we lost Sam and Nick?” he asked, instead of answering her question. “It was in that battle,” he went on when Willa nodded, “that I took a ball through the thi
gh. The wound was slow healing. I was here abed from August until November of that year, 1777. Sarah and Edward died the spring after Oriskany. Afterward, and until the war ended, I spent little time in Shiloh.”

  The Colonel leaned against the mantel, watching the flames, firelight showing plain the deep-etched lines of his face. “Richard and I rode with the militia up and down West Canada Creek and between the forts on the Mohawk, that last summer your parents were seen. There were countless raids on settlements from here down into Pennsylvania. Impossible to know who was responsible for them all.”

  “Was there reason to think Indians were involved?” Neil asked. “In her parents’ case.”

  The Colonel’s gaze lifted. “If an arrow found embedded in the cabin door counts as such. But as our worthy assessor would say, that cannot be counted as unmitigated proof of who was behind that raid. Some of the Iroquois fought on our side.”

  It was the Oneida who had sided with the Long Knives against the British and the rest of the Longhouse nations, in large part due to their beloved missionary, Samuel Kirkland—the man she had to thank for Joseph’s faith. And her own.

  Yet Willa felt herself deflate in disappointment. How could she ever learn what had happened to her parents, what they might have thought or said or did, when the world she’d left them in so long ago had been scattered to the winds, just like the Great Council Fire of the Longhouse people? If anyone knew the truth of what happened to the Obenchains, surely they would have come forward about it by now.

  “I know about the Oneida.” At her words, the air seemed to crackle like the fire in the hearth. The Colonel studied her, curious, questioning. “What is it you wish to ask me, Colonel?”

  Elias Waring’s eyes were sober. “I would be lying if I say the question hasn’t preyed on my mind—and been the subject of many a prayer. If I may ask, were you treated kindly during your captivity?”

  Captivity. How long since she had thought of her life with the Kanien’kehá:ka in such a way?

  “Except for the journey north after I was taken,” she said, aware of Neil MacGregor beside her, listening, “when I was pressed to travel swiftly, I was treated well enough. It was longer before I learned to appreciate it, but from the beginning, I was valued, though white.”