Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  Compared to their last exchange, her tone was warm. Neil felt a knot inside him uncoil. He put a hand atop the moccasin nearest him. She didn’t pull it away. “What was that, then?”

  “The name of the one my parents wrote their letters to. Tilda Fruehauf, Mama’s cousin in Albany.”

  Neil drew breath into his lungs, feeling a peace all the more comforting for the day’s turmoil. “We’d best be writing a letter, then, aye?”

  Birds were singing in the woods, but he didn’t think of their names in Latin. He thought of Willa, barefoot in the garden, tall and slender in her shift. He thought of that instant she’d turned to him with eyes that seemed to drink him in, a little startled, and he’d wanted to take her into his arms before the children woke and—

  “We will do that,” she said, and he caught his breath before he realized she spoke of the letter, not—

  “First,” she said, “eat the food I made for you.”

  Before he could rise, he felt her hand on the crown of his head, touching him lightly.

  “You didn’t tell me before that the guide who betrayed you was an Indian.”

  Her touch, her words, felt like a benediction.

  In that moment Neil MacGregor—physician, naturalist, possessed for years by a purpose unshaken by war or injury or loss of faculty—sensed something at the center of his being shift, like a compass needle turning to point in an unforeseen direction, toward a new purpose, a new path, at the end of which, he thought he could see her standing.

  He was reaching up to catch her lifting hand, lips parting to spill to her what he had but half-glimpsed, when the report of a gun shattered the moment, silencing the unnamed birds.

  NINETEEN

  The shot was too distant to deduce its origin. Neil thought it came from the west, toward Shiloh, a hunter maybe, and naught to do with them. Or with Joseph, the name that had obviously seared through Willa’s mind. She wouldn’t be dissuaded from making a trek to the islet. “To see if he is there, or a fresh kill, then I will know he is safe.”

  She took the travois.

  Neil put food on a plate and sat at the table with the children, said a blessing over it and them, kept praying, and forgot to eat.

  Willa returned after dark, dragging a butchered elk wrapped in its great hide. Neil met her in the yard and helped her bring the meat inside, to begin the task of cutting it for jerking.

  The children helped but soon tired. Willa hauled water for them to wash. Afterward they lay down, Cap at their feet with his nose pointed toward the tantalizing meat. Willa and Neil talked softly into the night while they saw to the bloody task, using both table and hearth, rewarding Cap for his restraint with the occasional scrap.

  “I searched the lakeshore,” she told him, intent upon the knife in her hand as she sliced the dark red meat and piled it on the hide, spread fur down across the table. “There were only Joseph’s tracks and his horse’s leaving the islet. Those I lost with the light. The shot must have been a hunter’s.”

  As I told ye, he thought, but held his tongue.

  It was as well he did so.

  Near midnight the task of preserving the meat was as complete as they could make it without daylight to build the fires for drying, when Cap sprang awake, trotted to the door and growled.

  “I dinna hear—,” Neil started to say, when the ruckle of a horse came, an instant before a thump reverberated through the boards under his feet. Cap erupted into ear-splitting alarm. The children started up with frightened cries. Neil grabbed the collie, muffling its noise.

  Musket at the ready, Willa raised the bar and opened the door.

  Joseph Tames-His-Horse, soaked in blood from the waist down, fell inward at their feet.

  The musket ball had taken him in the side, missing bone and vitals, best as Neil could tell, but hadn’t made an exit. He felt the bulge of it beneath the skin where Joseph’s lean waist curved around to his back. “Right, then. I’ll have to remove the ball before I can stop this bleeding. Willa, you’ll need to hold the candle near. Owl, can ye help hold him still while—”

  “No need.” Joseph’s words were strained, but Neil thought he caught amusement on the stern face of Willa’s clan brother. “Do what you must. I will not move.”

  Neil raised a brow at the big Indian, lying on his side near the children’s pallet, breechcloth and legging stiff with drying blood. “I’ll have heard that before, aye?”

  He directed Owl to sit on Joseph’s opposite side, ready to take him by the shoulders if need be. He had his medical case open beside him, a pile of linen scraps, a bowl of water, a clean knife, a threaded needle ready.

  “Willa?” He looked to the hearth where she’d been mixing a dressing of comfrey and burdock. She brought that now in a gourd bowl. The beeswax candle she’d lit shed better light than the tallow stubs they usually burned. She knelt beside him, impatiently whipping aside her petticoat. With one hand she held the candle close, with the other made ready to press a linen wad below the spot Neil indicated.

  With Maggie behind him on the pallet, Owl watching him across Joseph’s shoulder, Neil felt again for the embedded ball, wiped the area with a dampened cloth, and made his cut. It was done so quickly even Willa gasped. The ball popped from the lips of Joseph’s flesh and landed in Neil’s palm in a bright red smear.

  Blood welled from the small incision. Willa pressed the linen to it. “Good?” she asked.

  “Aye. Just so.” Neil took the candle and set it on the floor between them. He checked the ball carefully, determining it was whole.

  As promised, Joseph hadn’t so much as winced. Nor did he as Neil closed the incision with two neat stitches, leaving it partially open to drain. He took the grease Willa held out to rub onto the skin around it and the cleaned entry wound, before she applied the dressed poultices. Together they wrapped Joseph’s midsection in linen to hold them in place.

  Not until he helped the Indian sit up with his back against the wall did it occur to Neil how few words he and Willa had exchanged as they worked. “Ye did well,” he told her now. “We’ll watch for infection for a few days, while he lies about underfoot and you feed him full of elk.”

  “And make a new set of leggings,” Willa added wryly.

  Joseph grunted in amusement, then noticed the children staring, one to either side of him. “It will be well. You may sleep and not fear for me.”

  “Aye,” Neil said mildly as he checked the bindings to be sure all the shifting about hadn’t disturbed them. “You play the stoic brave like ye were born to it.”

  Joseph leveled him a look. “It is a thing that can be taught, if you wish to learn.”

  Willa rolled her eyes, in no mood for humor—or the tension it veiled. She wiped the musket ball clean, then stood and pinned her clan brother with a forbidding stare. “Who did this to you?”

  Joseph glanced at the listening children. Willa made a huffing noise and retreated to the table, where she began cleaning up the mess left from the butchering. She set a kettle full of the meat to stew and wrapped the rest in the hide to deal with come morning. Which wasn’t far off.

  Silence stretched in the cabin’s front room. Maggie curled onto her side and, despite the night’s excitement, lost the battle with sleep. Neil gathered up his medical box and set it on a block chair, then put the blood-soaked linen scraps into what remained of the water in the bowl, to be scrubbed out later.

  He was exhausted but too keyed up to sleep. Willa seemed in the same predicament. She scrubbed the table and fetched fresh water from the spring. Cap, put from the cabin during the surgery, came in with her. The collie gave Joseph a thorough sniffing over, then settled in a compact ball next to Owl, who sat wide awake, staring at them each in turn, his gaze settling lastly on Neil.

  “How did you know to do that?”

  At the table, Neil passed a hand over his face and blinked. “Do what, lad?”

  Owl nodded at Joseph. “How did you know where to find the ball under his skin and
get at it like you did?”

  “I kent what to do because I went to university to learn such things, in a place called Edinburgh. I assisted a physician called Dr. Graham, there and in Philadelphia. After Cherry Valley, in Schenectady, I served as a doctor when needed.”

  So he had done—as well as a man could who had recovered in body, if not thoroughly in mind.

  He’d hoped the answer was sufficient to satisfy the boy’s curiosity, but Owl looked no more ready to sleep than moments ago. “Were you called Dr. MacGregor?”

  “Aye, lad. I was so. Though lately I’ve spent more time with plants than patients.”

  The smell of blood—human and game—seemed of a sudden thick in the air. Neil rose and returned his medicine case to his room. While there, he fetched his Bible from its place in his bags. Willa had taken a seat at the table when he returned. Exhaustion shadowed her eyes, but when she saw the book in his hand, her gaze lighted. “Is that a Bible?”

  “Aye. I havena read from it in some while, ken. Would ye care to? Read for us?”

  Willa’s glance went to Joseph. Hearing a small intake of breath, Neil turned to see him settling himself more comfortably against the paneled wall. Joseph caught him watching, and came near to smiling. “Even a warrior feels pain.”

  “There’s laudanum, if ye wish it.”

  “No.” Joseph canted his head, eying him. “Why do you not read your Bible?”

  “He cannot,” Owl answered for him. “An Indian—an Oneida—pretended to be his friend, then hit him over the head and tried to scalp him. It hurt him in his brain, and now he cannot read or write.”

  A twitch of brows was the only indication of Joseph’s surprise, though Neil felt himself under a keener appraisal.

  “I am half Oneida,” the Indian said. “Small recompense it is for another’s wrong, but I will read to you now, if you wish it.”

  Not to save himself could Neil tell if the man meant to mock him or not, but he handed the Bible over.

  Owl watched the exchange, staring now at Joseph. “Are you a praying Indian?”

  Joseph leaned his head back and narrowed his eyes to slits. The firelight barely reached him where he sat against the far wall, but the flickering light of the candle still burning beside him on the puncheon floor showed his face drawn with pain.

  “When I was not many years older than you are now,” he told the boy, “my father sent me to his Oneida people, to a town called Kanowalohale. A white man called Samuel Kirkland had come there to teach the People some of his English ways. My father wished me to know some of this learning and to know my Oneida kin in the south. That is why I was sent.”

  He shared a glance across the room with Willa, one that softened the angles of his face. “But Kirkland also taught about his God—the Great Good God from this Book—and His Son who lived a short while as a man, called Jesus. Some of His words I had heard from the French black robes in the north, but some of it was new to me. The part about repentance—a changed heart—that was new. I listened for a long time before I began to know in my heart that Kirkland’s words were true.”

  Joseph laid the Bible on his lap, drew the candle closer, and began to turn the pages, stopping near the middle—Psalms, Neil guessed. As the thin pages rustled and the fire sparked, his curiosity mounted. He made no suggestion, wanting to know what text an Indian would choose to read of his own free will.

  Owl lay down beside his sleeping sister, eyes shining in the candlelight, half-lidded now.

  Joseph found the passage he sought and began in a measured cadence, his voice barely touched by the pain that must be searing his torn flesh. “ ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, he is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler—’ ”

  Joseph broke off, hissing in a breath. Neil waited, but when Joseph didn’t continue, he picked up the passage from memory.

  “ ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.’ ”

  He stopped when Joseph again opened his eyes.

  “ ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side,” the Indian took up, “and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.’ ”

  In the silence following, Joseph stared long at Willa, his love for her unguarded on his face. Neil felt at once grateful … and more deeply stabbed with jealousy than he had any right to be.

  He reminded himself of the obligations that should—that must—take him far from that cabin on Black Kettle Creek. At least for a time. Which seemed only to make the feeling worse. What he longed for was to be alone with Willa, to tell her of that possibility he’d glimpsed earlier, to confirm whether she had seen it too.

  Joseph’s dark eyes flicked to him, as if he could sense the tug of war going on inside Neil’s soul. Neil looked away, at Willa, but her eyes were guarded, reflecting only firelight.

  She rose from the table to spread a blanket over the sleeping children.

  TWENTY

  The fires in the yard were sending up good smoke. Willa had built them of green hickory laid over embers from the hearth, above which elk strips lay on trellises constructed of peeled poles. Soon the sun, just topping the trees, would lend its aid to the drying.

  Willa lifted her face to its warmth, a burnished glow against her eyelids. Her hair and clothing smelled of smoke. Her mouth tasted of it. Longing for a wash in the spring runnel, even more for her loft pallet, she bent to check the nearest strip, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. Still too supple.

  She looked toward the field where the corn now stood waist high in some spots, sheltering young squash plants and bean vines. The children’s dark heads bobbed among the green stalks as they called to each other or whooped at the crows taking wing before them like drifts of blackened ash. The girl’s leg was healing well.

  The man responsible for that healing emerged from the smoke with reddened eyes and a mouth that smiled at her, showing his good teeth.

  “Go and rest, Willa. You hardly slept at all last night.”

  He looked tempted to drop to the ground between the fires and take his own counsel. They were a sight, all but staggering with exhaustion, their faces, necks, and hands smeared with rendered grease—as were the children in the field—to ward off biting flies. Neil had balked at the smelly stuff, but when he saw how well it worked as a repellent, he’d given in and let the girl anoint his face and neck, making her giggle at the faces he had pulled.

  “I ken how jerked meat looks when done,” he said now. “I’ll watch it—and the weans,” he added, as a happy shriek came from the field beyond the scrim of trees.

  Weans. Maybe it was exhaustion, but his word for the children struck her as funny. She was astonished to hear a giggle escape her own lips. It died when Neil stepped closer. Even with them red from sleeplessness and smoke, the pull of his eyes was strong.

  She stepped back. “I will go in.”

  Her blood thrummed, warming her face as she shut herself within the cabin. She waited while her eyes adjusted to the dimness. Joseph was sitting against the wall, legs outstretched, Neil’s Bible open on his lap.

  Willa swayed, near to reeling with the need for sleep, but this was the first moment alone they’d had. Who could say in such a crowded cabin when one would come again? She crossed the room to stand before him. “It is time to tell me where you were and what you were doing to end up with a bullet in your side—though I think I know.”

  Joseph leaned his head back to look up at her, rounding his eyes in mock surprise. “Sit first. If you topple onto me, it will do my wound no good, big as y
ou are.”

  He reached up a muscular arm and grasped her greasy hand. Though she wanted to give him a smarting remark, she sank down beside him and leaned her head against his bare shoulder, too lead weighted to pull her hand from his. He smelled of buckskin and blood, though it was hardly detectable beneath her own stink.

  “Now you can tell me what I was doing.”

  She ignored his teasing tone. “You went near Shiloh and got yourself spotted.”

  “Why would I do that foolish thing?”

  Joseph passed his thumb across the back of her hand. She closed her eyes, turning her palm over in his. He pressed the pad of his thumb deep into tired muscles, making her want to groan.

  “Because you think your deserter is in Shiloh. Or nearby.” The cabin floor made her backside hurt. She shifted, finding no comfort. “Is he?”

  Joseph’s thumb stilled. “I have seen him, coming and going from the place where he lives and works.”

  That could be many a man. “Is he the one who shot you?”

  “That was another, but they live in the same place. A big man—bigger than me, maybe. Pale hair.”

  A spurt of alarm roused her. She sat up straight but was too surprised to speak Richard’s name before Joseph added, “It is for that man the deserter is working. Tending horses.”

  “Aram Crane,” Willa said, not bothering to clarify that it was for Richard’s father he worked, for she saw recognition of the name in Joseph’s face.

  “How do you know this?”

  “Neil told me—only he does not know that he did so. He does not know you are hunting a man.”

  “Then how is it he told you?”

  “I am getting to that part,” she said, cross and sounding it because she was so tired and worried. About so many things. “It was that place I keep hearing so much about: Cherry Valley. Neil was there when it was attacked, right before he was hurt by that Oneida. Crane said that he was there too, but he said things about the British attacking that made Neil think he might have been on their side of it, though he seems to be pretending otherwise.”

  “And so you guessed he was the man I sought.” Joseph had begun kneading her hand again. She blinked and settled back against him, unable to resist relaxing despite the importance of what they were speaking about.