Between Two Shores

by Jocelyn Green

  Her lips mashed into a thin line. “You’ve had five years to say it. I’d say the time for talk is past.”

  “Catie.” He touched her elbow, brow etched with confusion, though she could not imagine why her reaction surprised him.

  “Stop.” She pulled away.

  “Catherine Stands-Apart.” The way he said her name made it sound like a sentence.

  “Yes, I do.” She took another step back from him.

  A few days’ beard could not hide the flush in his cheeks. “Catherine. I do not expect your forgiveness or even your understanding. But I need you now.”

  I needed you a long time ago. Desperately. But to confess it aloud would bring nothing but humiliation. It had not been a good trade, their romance. Samuel Crane had gotten what he wanted. She hadn’t.

  “I need you,” he said again, urgency sharpening his tone. “Put aside your own feelings and remember there is a war on. I need your help.”

  “Most here would call you the enemy,” she reminded him.

  “Not you, though,” Samuel said. “Never you. You don’t pick sides like that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, now I’m asking you to. Pleading. If you can’t choose Britain or France, choose me, or the memory of me you hold most dear. There’s something I must do. You’re the only one who can help me.”

  His words ran over her like water over a rock. “I do not have ears for your talk,” she said in the tongue of her mother’s people, then remembered he could not understand it. With the ease of turning a page, she flipped back to his language. “I will not listen to your speeches. Do not speak to me. Go, and I’ll forget you were here. I’ve done it before.”

  She watched the arrow hit its mark as the light snuffed from his eyes.

  Good, she thought, for he’d wounded her, too, so much that she had grown tough with it. The suffering he’d caused her had been a test of endurance, like walking over hot coals as a child without giving voice to her pain. She had proved her courage then and grown fleet and fearless to run barefoot, even over rocks and sticks. Now it wasn’t just her feet that were protected by old scars.

  She spun from Samuel to walk away on soles that still served her well.

  “Catherine . . .” he called after her.

  Her long hair billowed freely in her wake. “Leave,” she said over her shoulder, not slowing her pace.

  He caught up to her, carrying the scent of damp stone and pine on his shirt. “I intend to. But I can’t go alone.”

  Chapter Five

  October 1749

  Ten Years Ago

  A stab of anticipation poked hot down Catherine’s throat. The autumn wind whipping her skirts carried a sharp tang of crushed mint as she hastened to Samuel’s workshop behind the house.

  His hand stilled on the shaving stand he’d been sanding. “Well, Catie, you look fair to bursting with news. Good trade at the post?” His breeches rode high on his stockinged calves, as he seemed to grow an inch each month since he’d reached his sixteenth year.

  The fire crackled. She pressed her hand against her pocket and felt the letter beneath the fabric. “This time, the news is for you.”

  The easy grin on his face faltered. He pointed to a block chair by the hearth, where she took a seat. Subtle light twinkled over the workshop walls, glinting off metal tools hanging on their pegs, polished to a shine. Chisels and gouges, gimlets, augers, hammers. Saws for every purpose: crosscut, rip, dovetail, miter, fret and coping, veneer.

  Sitting on a barrel opposite her, Samuel wiped a cloth between his hands. Then he waited. She had grown to expect this of him. During the last year, she had learned the steadiness of his manner and drew a certain calm from it. Though a quiet defiance toward Gabriel was rising along with his height, Samuel never pushed Catherine.

  “Sam.” She clasped her hands on her aproned lap.

  A smile twitched his lips as he brushed sawdust from his faded blue vest. “Still here.”

  A nervous chuckle escaped her. “I’ve been working more with the porters who trade for us in Albany. I didn’t want to say anything to you in case it came to nothing, but I sent word through them to our merchant contacts there, inquiring after your brother.”

  The color drained from his face. “Joel.” His voice cracked on the name.

  “Yes.” Skipping the unimportant details of who had tracked him down and how, she pulled the letter from her pocket and thrust it toward him. “He lives, Sam. He sent you this.” It had been weeks in transit, but what were mere weeks when the brothers had not seen each other in three years?

  Samuel took the envelope and paused before breaking the seal, pulling out the letter. It was not a moment for an audience.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” she said, starting to stand.

  “No.” His hand reached out and grasped hers. “I want you here.” He did not release her as he read. The gentle pressure warmed a place in her spirit that hadn’t been touched before.

  The wait seemed endless before he spoke again, and yet she did not mind the quiet that cradled the rise and fall of Sam’s breath. Surely the news was good, for the merchant had said it was written by Joel Crane’s own hand. With a pang, she grasped the pull it had on her only friend.

  When at last Sam looked up at her, firelight flared in his eyes. “All this time,” he whispered. “He’s been alive and well, all this time. Walks with a limp from some injury, but he’s well. Joel escaped and hid during the raid, and he’s been trying to find me ever since. He petitioned the governor to secure my ransom, in vain, but now . . . He says the town needs a carpenter. That he is in need of me.” He laughed, the rare sound a gift to Catherine. “Joel’s alive!” He leapt up and hugged her tight. “You found him.” There was more life in his body now than she’d ever seen.

  “You must go to him.” It was an instinct that required no thought. “And I don’t mean years from now.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Conviction poured strength into her bones. “This is not your home. You have a family, a community, an entire culture, and it isn’t here. I know what it is to be apart from that, to feel the soul wither, to begin to wonder who you are.”

  “Your years at that school in Montreal.”

  She nodded. “It was horrible beyond description.”

  Samuel’s situation was not exactly the same. He was isolated and lonesome, mistreated by Gabriel, but not entirely stripped of who he was. The Jesuit priest at Kahnawake had come to convert him to Catholicism, but Sam had refused, and Gabriel had not forced the point, no longer being religious himself. Instead, Samuel practiced French by reading Catherine’s Bible, and then they spoke English while discussing it. They spoke of courage, forgiveness, loving one’s neighbor, putting another’s interests ahead of one’s own. This was what filled her mind now. It was in Samuel’s best interest to be free.

  She and Samuel had forged a friendship, but it was not the blood tie he had with Joel. And she was his captor’s daughter.

  “This place is not your home,” she said again. He had been wrongfully taken in an act of war, but now there was peace between the nations. A peace that Gabriel conveniently ignored. “Before the winter, you ought to be home.”

  She had already formed a plan.

  Moccasins planted wide beneath her skirts, Catherine brought down the ax with a crack, parting the log on the chopping stump. Despite an afternoon of splitting wood, the ache in her shoulders could not rival that in her soul. She hadn’t realized until Samuel was gone just how deeply she’d come to care for him.

  She dropped the ax head to the leaf-littered ground, hand upon its handle. In the nearby thicket, the tops of pine trees leaned, and bare maple branches swayed beneath a full-bellied sky. It had not been a week since she’d sent Samuel off with a canoe and enough dried meat to get him to Albany. He would need to hire help at the portages between rivers, for he’d not be able to carry his canoe alone, but certainly he’d find Mohawks enough to employ.


  Please, God, please help him escape.

  Unwilling to trust anyone else, she had sent him without an escort. As she had traveled to Albany with the porters herself, she drew maps and wrote detailed instructions from memory. But were her recollections complete?

  “Come with me,” Samuel had said at their parting, but she knew her place was here. She’d been touched by his sentiment, but now she wondered if it might have been inspired by fear. Nearly two hundred miles separated Montreal from Albany, which included both rivers and portage between them. Much could happen, especially this late in the season, and Samuel Crane was a young British carpenter, not a seasoned backwoodsman. As soon as Gabriel had learned his captive had run away, he’d sent word with a passing trapper about Samuel, along with a promise of a reward for his capture. Soon every voyageur south of Montreal would be looking for a British boy traveling alone.

  A rustling at the wood’s edge drew her attention to a black-haired boy with a small bow and quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Leaving her woodpile, she went to him. Joseph had grown bolder since Samuel left. She’d sensed him watching her before this, but only recently had he shown himself.

  “Look!” He lifted a clutch of dead rabbits, a grin nearly splitting his face in two. “I hunted these myself. For you.” He thrust them toward her, and she accepted with many thanks.

  “Awiyo,” she said. It is good. “These will make a fine stew, just what we need for this cold night. And I have something for you.” Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew a handful of the British glass trade beads she kept on her person ever since she’d first seen Joseph watching her. “Some are for you, and some for our sister.” Catherine was fifteen summers now, so he must be nine. Which meant Bright Star was eighteen.

  Joseph picked out a cobalt-blue bead and held it up, one eye closed. “I will tell her this is the color of your eyes. She will want to make a doll for her daughter and use these beads for the eyes.”

  Catherine’s pulse trotted at the thought. If Samuel could travel so far alone to be with his brother, could she not spend time with her siblings and niece, too? It had been so long, but blood ties were stronger than lost time.

  A door creaked on its hinge and slammed closed again. Gabriel stood on the porch, watching them without a word, his expression censure enough. He’d been especially cross since Sam had disappeared.

  Thunder poured into her brother’s face. “Those rabbits are for you. Not for him.” He spilled the beads into a small leather pouch tied to his waist and backed into the trees.

  “Wait!” Catherine dashed after him, his offering in her fist. When he saw the quilled moccasins beneath the hem of her dress, he relaxed enough to listen. “Never mind him. Come back to me, please? And next time, see if our sister will come, too. Tell her I will help her make the doll myself.”

  “Hen’en!” he agreed, and disappeared between trunks and boughs and a veil of falling rain.

  The drops spilled down Catherine’s upturned face, and her thoughts went cold as they veered toward Sam. If she could only be sure he would reach home.

  November 1749

  The fire struggled to keep up with the cold.

  From the parlor, the case clock struck the midnight hour while Catherine stayed awake to throw pine knots into the kitchen’s hearth. It was the warmest room in the house, so she and Gabriel had made their sleeping pallets here, her father insisting she take the one nearest the fire. Muscles stiff, she reached over and pulled the bearskin robe higher beneath his chin. A fur hat covered his head to the bridge of his reddened nose.

  Catherine’s thoughts wandered to her siblings in Kahnawake, wondering how they fared in longhouses that could not be warmer than this. Her brother had returned several days ago, but without Bright Star, who apparently could not spare the time. Catherine knew she must be busy, for she had never seen an idle Mohawk mother. Still, the disappointment stung. In the back room of the trading post, while Joseph looked on, Catherine had fashioned a doll from corn husks she had saved for that purpose. When he spotted Gabriel approaching, Joseph had snatched the doll with a promise to deliver it to their niece and scampered back into the woods.

  Tucking her own furs around her, Catherine hugged her knees to her chest and watched the fire, wondering if her gift had made her niece—or Bright Star—happy. She wanted her sister to forgive her for leaving the People, yet she could not bring herself to apologize for her choice. Fatigue weighted her limbs as she considered that perhaps Bright Star had outgrown her.

  Outside, moonlight doubled itself on the snow, casting a pearl-grey pall into the air. Frost etched white ferns onto the windows. But beyond them, an orange glow bobbed up and down. Wrestling back her exhaustion, Catherine rose and squinted at it. A touch of her fingertips to the cold pane, and the glass siphoned warmth from her skin, clearing the frost from her view.

  Then she heard a man’s voice, unfamiliar, shouting in French from the creek behind the house. In the dead of night, he came bearing a lantern. Remarkably, he did not sound drunk. Without a backward glance at Gabriel, Catherine broke from the kitchen, shoving the door closed.

  “Are you hurt?” she called out, forcing her leaden legs to carry her.

  “This one is.”

  The reply lit her pace. By the time she reached them, two Frenchmen had beached a canoe on the bank and hoisted a young man onto the ground.

  It was Samuel. He wasn’t moving.

  She raced to kneel beside him. His skin was mottled with cold, the hollows of his eyes sunken and bruised. One arm was folded tightly across his chest. His leg was in a makeshift splint, the bandages crusted and crimson.

  Alarm burst through her. The edges of her vision closed in on Samuel. No, no! No! Every frantic heartbeat rebelled against what she saw.

  One of the men spoke. They were trappers and traders—she could see that now—broken blood vessels webbing across their cheeks. “Word along the traplines is that a British boy ransomed by your father was foolhardy enough to run away. Figured this was him, even before we questioned him.”

  She nodded, blame and guilt snatching her breath. “Can you help—help me get him to the house?” she gasped. “How bad is it?”

  “He’s had better days.” The brawnier of the two traders heaved Samuel over his shoulder like a sack of flour, Sam’s right leg angling awkwardly in its splint. “My brother Rémy and I were downstream of a rapid when a smashed-up canoe came floating behind us on the current. We searched about for the unfortunate owner and found him in bad shape, washed up on some rocks.”

  Rémy sniffed, rubbing his nose, then pushed his muffler below his chin. “Femur broken, shoulder dislocated, a blow to his head on the rocks. When he finally came to, he told Nicolas and me that he’d nodded off in the canoe, and when he woke, found himself too close to white water he’d rather not brave, though that stretch isn’t as challenging as the Lachine Rapids. He tried to stop being pulled in, but the paddle had wedged between some rocks, and the force of it dislocated his shoulder. Dropped the paddle, lost his balance, capsized.”

  Catherine reeled. She could see it unfold in her mind as clearly as if she’d been there. In his eagerness to get home, Samuel had pushed himself too hard, forfeiting the sleep he needed. But oh, the cost.

  Nicolas grunted as he shifted Samuel’s weight on his shoulder. “Couldn’t swim with his shoulder injured, naturally. The rapids sent him right over a fall, and the landing on the rocks below broke his leg. If we hadn’t found him as soon as we did, his story would have a different ending.”

  “Very different,” Rémy echoed. “We made camp and dried him out right away. I poured some brandy into him to brace him some, and Nicolas popped his shoulder back in place and set his leg. It was a clean break, so it may heal all right. But it’ll be up to you now to restore him.”

  He followed Catherine into the kitchen, laying Samuel on her pallet as directed. Stripping fur layers off her body, she laid them across Sam instead. She covered his ears with her hands to war
m them.

  Gabriel roused as the traders filled him in. Catherine heard her father exclaim, then lapse into a tone of camaraderie with Rémy and Nicolas. If they exchanged stories or terms for the payment Gabriel had promised for Sam’s return, she didn’t hear them. Condemnation resounded inside her skull like the clapper of a bell.

  She had done this. If Sam lost limb or life, it would be her fault.

  And if Sam were going to heal, to live wholly once more, that would be solely up to her, as well.

  Chapter Six

  August 1759

  The bell tinkled over the door as Catherine entered the trading post, Thankful close behind her. When Catherine had found Samuel repairing the chinks in their house yesterday evening, Gabriel was already asleep, and she knew better than to wake him for a confrontation. He had still been abed this morning when she rose and left for the harvest, but now he stood behind the counter in the late afternoon sun, trading with Joseph Many Feathers. Once their transaction was complete, she would ask the questions that had been burning all day.

  Joseph’s head gleamed bronze where it had been plucked clean of hair save for the jet-black scalp lock adorned with feathers. He wore the usual mix of European and native clothing common among a people living at the heart of international trade. Linen leggings, leather breechclout, ready-made French trade shirt embellished with bloodred woodpecker scalps.

  Another Mohawk warrior named Grey Wolf stood looking at the muskets. Turkey feathers sprouted from his scalp lock, and his torso was bare above leggings trimmed with dyed porcupine quills. His frame was spare, and his cheeks were pitted from the spotting sickness that had rampaged again through Kahnawake four years ago, taking his wife with it.

  Timothy Laughing Creek, his son of eleven summers, made faces at his reflection in a copper kettle. “Catherine!” Naked except for his breechclout, the boy shoved the kettle back onto a shelf and bounded over to greet her, undisturbed by his own mild smallpox scarring. “I caught a fish today in the river. Very big, very good. You should have seen it.”