Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  He hadn’t been quick enough to hide what it was. Willa straightened from the hearth, petticoat swishing around her ankles.

  “Owl, where did you get a book?”

  Maggie’s singing ceased. “He’s Matthew now,” she reminded her. When Neil MacGregor rode from the cabin yard, he’d taken the girl’s shyness with him. She’d since been bold to speak her mind, reminding Willa more of Goes-Singing every day.

  “Matthew, then. You have a book. Let me see it.”

  To his credit, the boy didn’t deny the book. He drew it from hiding and brought it to her. It was Neil’s Bible.

  “He didn’t steal it,” his sister said firmly. The boy’s mouth twisted, then firmed.

  “Mr. MacGregor gave it to me.”

  She took it into hands that trembled. “When?”

  “The day he left. You were in your garden.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were angry with him.”

  Willa shook her head. “Why did he give you his Bible?”

  “He cannot read it. He wanted me to read it.”

  Willa’s grip on the Bible tightened. She wanted to climb to the loft, light a candle, pour through its pages, which looked to be marked with dozens of stray bits of paper. “Do you wish to read it?”

  “Yes,” Matthew said.

  She searched his face, seeing only earnestness. “Do you know how to read?”

  The boy lowered his gaze. “Yes.”

  Behind his back, his sister wagged her head. Matthew turned and caught her at it, scowled, then flushed. “I can read … some.”

  “You needn’t hide it from me to do so,” Willa said. Then on impulse added, “If you wish it, I will help you to read it.”

  The boy nodded, and she set the Bible on the table. The sight made her feel as if some bit of Neil MacGregor had come whispering back into her home.

  She did not look too closely at the comfort she drew from that.

  A scratching sounded at the door. Matthew let in the collie. In the seconds of the door’s opening, Willa caught the flash of lightning away beyond the ridge to the north. She sent up a prayer for the wandering naturalist, that he was somewhere safe and dry.

  The boy shut the door. The dog went to the pallet where Maggie sat, curling near her to sleep.

  His Bible and his dog. Willa didn’t know whether to smile or put a fist to the spot of pain that had bloomed beneath her ribs. She caught herself doing both as the girl set the doll aside and began grooming the dog with careful fingers, picking foxtails from its coat.

  Willa settled cross-legged at the hearth and set about replenishing her shot pouch. She chose a piece from the pile of deformed bullets, broken buttons, and bits of lead, and placed it in the ladle. As she held the ladle to the fire, the boy crouched near to watch.

  She was conscious of the tension that had existed between her and the children since Neil’s leaving. It was never anything overt. She had no complaint to make of them. They did everything she bid them—including spending hours each day patrolling the cornfield to keep away deer and raccoon. Yet she had a sense of them withholding something from her. Had it been the Bible? The tension hadn’t broken with its discovery.

  Not a secret, then. More like a sense of waiting hanging over them. There could be only one thing they were waiting for—an answer to the question put to her the day of Neil MacGregor’s leaving.

  How could she give an answer? She couldn’t bear the terror of yes. She just couldn’t. But she could not bring herself to disappoint them with no. She would wait. Joseph would return. When he was there, ready to put them on the back of his horse, then she would say no.

  Across the room the collie rolled onto its back, four paws in the air, showing its teeth in a foolish grin that drew giggles from Maggie. Closer to hand, Matthew stared at the lead in the ladle she held to the fire’s heart, until it melted all at once into a shimmering puddle. He watched as she poured the liquid into the mold, holding her face away from the sharp metallic fumes.

  “Who taught you to do that? Was it your white father?”

  She remembered Dieter Obenchain kneeling before that very hearth, turning out musket balls while she sat on a bench at the table—a different table than the one there now—her legs too short to reach the floor. Papa had poured the bright stream of lead into the mold, then turned to her …

  His smile flashed upon her mind with such searing clarity she was forced to blink back tears. She waved a hand before her face, pretending the fumes stung her eyes.

  The memory vanished and another took its place. A fire in the center of a longhouse, sending up its smoke to the high bark roof. A pair of tattooed old warriors come to visit the even older man who was the father of her adoptive mother. The three sitting wrinkled and brown and smelling of bear grease, turning out round musket balls that clacked in the ashes like marbles, while she watched from a platform a few feet away. It was this memory she spoke of.

  Maggie abandoned the dog and came to sit beside her brother, eyes trained on her. Their faces were sheened like copper in the firelight.

  “They did not know how closely I watched them.” Willa turned out the first musket ball into the ashes, to be filed smooth when cool. She took up a broken button and an unrecognizable twist of lead and dropped them into the ladle. “Or else they didn’t mind. Not even when I moved to the fire and sat with them. That is one time I saw this done.”

  She didn’t sense the tension so much when she spoke, so she kept talking. She told them of the day Joseph Tames-His-Horse got the small scar above his eyebrow, trying to teach three small boys to shoot their bows.

  “All went well till I decided I wished to learn, though I was a girl. The boys were unhappy when I shot better than they on my first try. One leaped up with his bow and loosed an arrow to prove himself my match.” Willa poured more molten lead into the bullet mold. “It was a good shot, except Joseph had not moved away from checking the arrow I had shot. He turned his face as the arrow nipped past him, nearly taking out his eye.”

  Maggie gasped. Matthew watched her face, holding back his own reaction until Willa showed him a smile. Then he smiled too.

  “Joseph is still leaving meat for you, but when will we see him again?” The boy looked half-hopeful, but half-wary too. He had admired Joseph, but now there was this question between them. Did the child sense she had made up her mind to give them their answer when Joseph returned?

  “Before the autumn he will come back.” She didn’t have the heart to add “for you.”

  The children shared a look, turned quiet for a time, until Matthew asked, “What was your name to them?”

  At first the question itself surprised her. Then it struck Willa how the boy had phrased it. The Mohawks were them.

  “Burning Sky.”

  “For your hair?” Maggie reached for Willa’s braid. She’d been told its color changed with the light. In the fire’s glow it was more auburn than brown.

  ’Tis the color of winter oak leaves, your hair.

  Willa paused in reaching for the mold to turn out another ball. Do not think of him. She took a deep breath and could smell the girl’s hair beside her, sweet and damp from washing, and another yearning nearly as sharp filled her. The yearning for the warm weight of a child in her arms.

  “I suppose so,” she said, her throat too tight for telling that story.

  Matthew held a toy soldier broken at the knees, the last piece of lead she had to melt. He handed it to her, reluctant. “Were you happy being Mohawk?”

  Willa set the soldier in the ladle and held it to the flames, watching for the moment when it would dissolve and be a soldier no more. “I learned to be.”

  “Why did you leave them?”

  She jerked the soldier back from the fire, uncertain why she hesitated to turn him into a musket ball. She stared at him, afraid she was too late, but the soldier held his broken shape. “I left because my husband was dead. My mother was dead. My children were dead. Joseph was gone
away, and I did not know whether he—”

  Hearing such dreadful words on her lips, afraid she would lose control of the tears that burned her eyes, her nose, Willa set the ladle on the hearth. “If you want that soldier,” she told the boy, “you may have him. But let him cool first.”

  She looked at the children, expecting more questions, wondering how she could answer without dissolving into a puddle of grief in front of them. But they looked back at her with eyes too old for their faces and said no more.

  When the children slept, she sat at the table, a candle lighting the boards, and reached for the Bible. She held it in her hands, feeling the weight and wear of it, the tiny cracks in the leather of the spine and edges. She opened the cover to the first page. Inscribed in faded ink were names. James, Angus, Dougal … all MacGregors and the wives they’d married, down to Liam MacGregor and Morag Murray MacGregor … and the last name, Neil William Murray MacGregor. He’d given the boy his family Bible, as a man would pass it to a son.

  She set it on its worn spine and let it open where it would. It chose a place near the middle. The book of Isaiah. Halfway down the page, a passage was underscored: “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.”

  Even had they been unmarked, the words would have leaped off the page like an arrow aimed at her soul. A bruised reed. She had thought of this tender promise, clung to it in fact, when she found Neil MacGregor lying in the laurels below the boundary stone. It had compelled her to look past her own pain and see him. Broken. Wounded. Like herself.

  Swallowing past a thick pain in her throat, she let her fingertip wander across the words. Turning the thin pages at random for a while, careful they didn’t crinkle and disturb the children, she paused when she came to one of the papers tucked between. It wasn’t folded or sealed, but was filled edge to edge with the neat slanted script she recognized from Neil’s older drawings. His own writing. She turned the paper so she could read it.

  Before she took in more than the first few words, she spread her hand across it, struck by the notion that she was intruding upon something not meant for her eyes. He’d given the Bible and all it contained to the boy. Not to her.

  But might he have supposed she’d learn of the gift, be curious enough to open it for herself? Might he have hoped she would do so? This would have been her Bible, with her name beside his on that front page, if she’d given him what he asked of her.

  Whatever you’ve been, whatever else ye will be, I want you to be my wife.

  The words had struck terror in her soul when he spoke them, yet they insisted on replaying through her mind, rife with bittersweet regret. Why could she not have been strong until his leaving? Kept him at arm’s length as she had meant to do. What did he think of her now? That she’d wanted to bed him there in the ferns, but not marry him? That she’d have let it get that far? She would not have. She hoped she would not have.

  Did he despise her now?

  She lifted her hand from the paper. The lines swam, then cleared before her eyes. Unaddressed, unsigned, the words began as a simple declaration.

  I embark upon my Journey into the Hinterland of this troubled Colony to pursue the Vision for which I am entrusted. Though I go into the Unknown with no little Trepidation, I pray I shall not fail those who send me forth, my Fellows of the Philosophical Society. I do not consider myself a Man cut from Cloth suited for great Hardship or Endurance, yet I set out in Faith, believing that what I lack in my flesh the Almighty Lord shall by His Good Grace supply daily, whatever may come. Be Thou my Vision. Be Thou to me always my True North. May Providence once again use the foolish things of this World to confound the Wise, the Weak to confound the Mighty, all the better that He receive the Glory when I am safe delivered, my Journey finished, my Labor complete. In the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

  Willa set the paper back into the pages of the Bible and shut the book, tasting the salt of tears on her lips. She stroked her fingertips across the cover, certain she’d never known a man with greater faith. Neil MacGregor saw things as they could be, not as they were. It was how he’d insisted on seeing her. And the children. Everyone except himself. He saw himself all wrong. He was neither foolish nor weak. She might have thought so once. She knew better now.

  ’Twas no coincidence, your finding me as ye did, no coincidence these children came to us. ’Tis the Almighty’s doing.

  She put her hands over her face, as if to hide from his impassioned words at the spring. Through her fingers, she looked at the children, dark forms sprawled in the abandon of sleep. Trusting her. Like they would a mother.

  “No,” she whispered. “No.”

  Neil MacGregor was gone. Soon the children would go. Joseph would return and take them west to find their mother’s kin or someone of the Wolf Clan willing to take them in. And with them would go the last terrible temptation to offer up her heart for breaking again.

  Leaving the Bible for the boy to find come morning, she climbed the loft ladder, trying not to think of the empty room below where Neil MacGregor no longer slept.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A fortnight and a day after riding from Willa’s cabin yard, Neil MacGregor had begun drawing uneasy parallels between himself and the prophet Jonah, who’d gone down to Joppa in search of a ship to take him in the opposite direction of Nineveh, where the Almighty had instructed him to go.

  It began with a tempest of a mountain storm breaking over his head and nearly drowning him. In short order he’d found himself swallowed whole—by a cave little drier than a fish’s belly. The air reeked of damp but was at least breathable. He had that over Jonah.

  “In everything give thanks,” Neil muttered, hunkered back from the cave’s entrance at the close of this, his third day in the bowels of the earth. “For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you,” he added, finishing the verse from Thessalonians—and wished immediately he hadn’t. The will of God was a topic of thought he’d lately avoided pondering. Since leaving Willa and the children, in fact.

  He never hoped to experience again such a heart-scouring as he’d endured that day. After that raw leave-taking in her cabin yard, he’d gone into Shiloh where, while purchasing provisions and checking a final time for a letter for Willa—there was none—he’d been forced to run a gauntlet of acquaintances, none happy to see him go. Jack Keegan, the MacNabs, the Kepplers.

  It was near midday before he put the settlement behind him, taking a trail headed northward. Even then, he’d gone but a short way before Francis Waring stepped from the woods.

  Neil had reined in Seamus to bid the lad farewell and request that he look in on Willa and the children from time to time—a thing Francis would likely have done regardless, but the asking assuaged Neil’s guilt over leaving.

  Like a scrap of linen over a disembowelment.

  He gazed now at the cave’s stony confines, half of which his horse occupied. The floor was sandy toward the back. There he’d spread his saddle, bags, and their contents, in the hope of their keeping dry, most particularly the drawings bearing Willa’s rough but earnest penmanship. Wrapped in oilskin, they’d suffered no lasting damage from the rain. He thought of her bent over the table, ink-stained fingers clenched around a quill, mouth set in concentration as she took his dictation. And hastily pushed away the memory.

  “Chamaedaphne calyculata.” It was daily ritual again, reciting his mental field notes. “The shrub grows in open bog waters, forming dense colonies … doesna tolerate shade … leaves leathery, oblong, arranged alternately on stem … small remnant of bell-shaped blossoms, no fruit present in July.”

  How much knowledge could his brain hold before vital bits began slipping away and he ended with a set of pretty drawings bereft of annotation? In his university days, he’d met a fellow in a public house in Edinburgh who claimed to have the entire canon of Scripture put to memory. For hours, Neil had tested the assertion, flipping through his Bible for the most
obscure verses he could find. The fellow never once misquoted a passage.

  He’d given that Bible to the lad, a scene he couldn’t recall without a hollowness opening under his ribs. He missed the children. He missed his Bible too—its presence had long been a comfort even if he couldn’t read it—but he was glad to know Owl had it in his possession and, Neil hoped, would cherish it as he grew to manhood.

  Not Owl, he reminded himself.

  “Matthew Kershaw,” he murmured, still blessed by the parting gift. Leaning his head against damp stone, he prayed. Guard and keep them. Be a father to the fatherless. A husband to the widow …

  His thoughts had circled back to Willa. Neither in mind nor in heart had he truly left her. But he must. He would. Tomorrow.

  Tomorrow he would stop thinking of her incessantly.

  Beyond the cave the rain had slackened at long last. Because the clouds lay low and the land sloping from the cave was thickly wooded, it was hard to judge the time of day. He reckoned it getting on to dusk. Too late for traveling. Besides, there was likely no drier place to camp for a hundred miles around than where he was, stuck in the belly of the earth.

  He plucked at the sleeve of his shirt, which clung like a second skin, and wrinkled his nose. He stank. His horse stank. The cave stank. The whole world stank.

  Finished with his litany of field notes, he fed and watered Seamus, then glanced toward the cave entrance and automatically called, “Cap,” then laid himself down in the cave’s chill, missing his stinking dog.

  Sometime later, sleep elusive and thoughts of Willa grown unbearable, he rose and sat on a damp lip of rock outside the cave. It was full dark now. The croaking of contented frogs had replaced the patter of rain.

  He’d had little sense of the topography beyond the slope he’d been crossing when the storm broke. Now he could see a fair distance to the north and west, where a ragged line of peaks rose in silhouette against ever-broadening patches of stars. The air had cooled on the heels of the storm and held an autumnal freshness now, though it was yet high summer. He drew it in and breathed out prayer. For Willa. For the children. For Anni and her unborn baby. He even prayed for Joseph, knowing the Indian shared his pain, his longing, and had carried it longer.