Between Two Shores

by Jocelyn Green

  “Sister.” Bright Star used the name she hadn’t called Catherine since they were girls. “My sister, you’ve returned to me. To us. Thank God you’ve come home at last.”

  “But too late,” Catherine choked out, crying onto Bright Star’s shoulder. Too late, too late. The words pounded against her skull as grief crashed over her afresh. “I’m sorry Joseph was killed. I’m sorry you were there to witness it. None of you would have been here if it wasn’t for me.”

  Bright Star’s hand stroked the back of Catherine’s head. “Stop this talk. You have lost a brother, too.”

  They stood there long enough for Catherine’s tears to cease and for her sister’s to begin. Bright Star cried at last.

  When at length they released each other, Catherine bent with the pain in her rib.

  “You’re hurt?” Bright Star steadied her by the elbow, and Thankful took her other hand.

  Catherine grimaced, wishing she could dismiss such a trivial thing. A moment passed before she could draw breath to explain. “I was injured the day after the battle and couldn’t travel until now, otherwise I would have come weeks ago.” Her hair had come loose from its pins and whipped about her neck.

  Bright Star hooked a shoulder-length strand behind Catherine’s ear but said nothing of its shorter length. “Injured how?”

  “I met Pierre Moreau in the hospital. He attacked me with a surgeon’s knife, and when I lunged away from him, I cracked my rib on a windowsill. He is gone now,” she added. “Sailed back to France with the rest of the Quebec garrison.”

  Anger pinched Bright Star’s face. “I never trusted him. And Gaspard Fontaine?”

  “Proved a friend.” A small smile flickered over Catherine’s lips.

  “I’m so sorry Captain Moreau hurt you,” Thankful said. She bowed her head, and her hair fell like a curtain over half her face. “Was he upset because your mission was successful?”

  “Yes, he was. It was.” But she didn’t want to speak of Quebec. “I arrived yesterday evening and went through the village looking for you. How did I miss you?”

  Bright Star sat on the ground, gesturing for the others to do the same. “Yesterday afternoon we finished laying the last stones on Joseph’s grave. In the evening, we were foraging in the woods, since the raiders took all the corn they didn’t burn. Then we slept in an empty storehouse. You must have come when we were out.”

  Catherine gazed toward the river. “Shall we bury the others, as well?”

  “We met a few Abenaki who also escaped. They are on their way back and will bury their own people according to their own customs.”

  Inhaling slowly, Catherine nodded, then let out a breath. Questions burned on her tongue, but she held them back, wary of pushing too hard. She allowed the quiet to possess a few moments, waiting to see if either Bright Star or Thankful would speak.

  They did not.

  “Will you tell me what happened, or will it hurt too much?” Catherine tilted her head toward the village, encompassing the whole of ruined Odanak in the gesture.

  Thankful gathered her sunflowers, then placed all but one on Joseph’s grave. This she clutched in her lap. She pinned a dull gaze to the tree trunk, to the letters that spelled WE LIVE. “They came before dawn, those Rangers. It was the day after a wedding celebration that lasted far into the night, so most of the people here were deep in their dreams when it began.” She pleated a petal with her fingers, a chore without purpose unless to distract herself from her own tale. “They came like banshees, Catherine. With tomahawks and bayonets and bullets, screaming about Fort William Henry and revenge.”

  Catherine had heard of Fort William Henry. Vastly outnumbered, the British had surrendered after a French siege to the fort. The French general Montcalm had lost control of his native allies, who murdered and scalped sick and wounded provincials by the score, if not by the hundreds.

  Thankful’s soft voice continued. “The Rangers were mad with bloodlust, ripping doors off hinges, killing families in their beds. It was dark, but we heard the screams of women and children. I hear them now.” She pinched the petal in half and creased it, then folded it back on itself. “I don’t know if I will ever stop hearing children being killed.” Another fold, crease, pinch, crease, until the pace grew frantic.

  Catherine’s eyes closed for a moment to hold back tears. “Oh, Thankful.” Words failed her. She could no more string them together in her mind than push them across her tongue.

  Thankful plucked a petal from the flower’s center and ripped it to tiny pieces. “Many times over the last several years, I have wished the Abenaki people could experience the same terror I did, the same terror they inflicted upon hundreds of New England families. And then . . .” Her voice trailed away, and she tore more petals until they splattered her apron with sunshine. Tears slid down her cheeks and met beneath her chin. “That wish came true—but not until after I had lived with them, eaten their food, slept beneath their roofs. Fawn behaved like a grandmother toward us, or at least how I suppose a grandmother might be. I didn’t understand her most of the time, but I understood she was trying to help us.”

  The urge to protect her surged in Catherine. “Say no more, Thankful, if you’d rather not. I’m sorry I—”

  “Catherine, stop. No more apologies, please.” Tone gentle, Bright Star met her gaze not with censure, but compassion. “This isn’t about you and what you could have or should have done. We will sit here at the foot of our brother’s grave while we can. We will say our piece, each one of us, even if it makes us uncomfortable.”

  Warmth flushed across Catherine’s cheeks at the idea that she might have silenced Thankful for her own sake, to ease the weight of her guilt. Biting her tongue, she pulled her cape closer and waited.

  Brushing the petals from her lap, Thankful wound a strand of her hair in a ringlet around her finger. “Being at Odanak was the right hard thing for me to do, just as you said it would be. I won’t say that I befriended all the Abenaki, but I ceased to view them as monsters. I saw them as people, with flaws just like anybody else. But I never grew used to living beneath the flags of so many scalps. Then the Rangers harvested their own. . . .”

  “You saw this?” Catherine whispered.

  “Heard it.” A pinecone dropped from a tree several yards distant, and Thankful startled. Composure crumbling, she looked away.

  Catherine held herself back from rushing to fill the silence. Instead they sat in grief together, the whistling wind the only sound.

  “I will say no more,” Thankful said at last. Clasping her hands barely disguised their shaking. “I cannot.”

  “You were brave,” Bright Star told her. “You still are. What is that psalm I heard you whispering?”

  Thankful’s eyebrow lifted. “‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’ But the night, you see, can last a very long time.”

  “This I know.” Bright Star stood and helped Thankful up, then Catherine. “I am practiced at burying the ones I love, and yet each death carves new runnels in my heart. I don’t pretend to know what it is to live inside your skin, Thankful. But I do know that however far off the sun is, morning is on the way.” Like a hen gathering her chicks, Bright Star put her arms around their shoulders. “And I know that sisters help us see the light a little faster.”

  They said good-bye to Joseph and turned their steps away. The fact that Thankful’s hands hadn’t stopped shaking wasn’t lost on Catherine, but no one spoke of it. Worry settled like a yoke on Catherine’s shoulders.

  As they walked, she touched her sister’s elbow. “I have questions,” Catherine murmured, “about our brother.” She still hadn’t heard exactly how Joseph met his end or how Bright Star and Thankful had escaped.

  A sad smile curved Bright Star’s lips. “I know you do. He fought infection in his shattered leg for weeks before gangrene set in. Had he lived, he would have lost his leg to amputation in order to save his life.”

  Thankful slowed her pace, droppi
ng several steps behind them. It was obvious this was a story she didn’t want to hear.

  “Then the raid happened,” Catherine prompted.

  “As soon as we heard the screams on the other side of town, he was adamant that he would stay and fight and not slow down our escape. But this is where I will be your big sister and carry the rest of the story for you, locked safe inside me. Remember Joseph as he lived, not the manner of his death.”

  “But—”

  “It is my turn to be adamant. He died. We are alive. So let us live.” Green ribbons danced in the wind at the ends of her braids.

  Catherine’s eyelids turned hot and sticky at the conviction in her voice.

  Pausing, Bright Star angled and held out a hand to bring Thankful into the fold. “I have a thing to say to both of you. I have been alive for many years without living. I absorbed the deaths of those in my family very deeply. Pieces of myself were buried in each grave, and I believe this is normal to an extent. But I allowed grief to whittle me further and further, until I was more shell than soul. It is right to mourn what has been taken from us. What is not right is that I didn’t let myself grow in new ways until Catherine began bringing me on the river with her. I had been alive but refusing to live, and that was wrong.”

  Tears lined Catherine’s lashes. She’d observed this in Bright Star, and yet she’d done the same thing in the years after Samuel disappeared. They had been two sisters at odds, so quick to judge the other and failing to see their own twin flaws.

  Bright Star veered away from the Saint-François River, leading Catherine and Thankful to a smaller creek similar to the one that flowed behind their trading post. This one coursed down a gentle slope, cascading over slabs of rock plastered with fallen leaves. Mist surrounded a waist-high waterfall.

  “I have a story for you.” Bright Star’s smile flared so wide and free, it was as if Catherine was seeing her true sister for the first time in years. “It is the story of us, and we are writing it even now.”

  Thankful pushed her hair behind her shoulder, tilting her head to listen.

  “It is the custom of the People, when a family member dies, to replace the lost loved one with another,” Bright Star began. “We ransom and adopt a captive, and that former captive is given a new name and becomes part of the family forever, regardless of the past. It is the pleasure of the adopting family to do this thing, not because of anything the captive has done, but because we are eager to love completely and are confident that love will heal the wounds of the past. Thankful, my sister ransomed you, not in place of anyone she had lost, but simply because she wanted you for who you are. Your name remains what it has always been.”

  “Unless—” Thankful hesitated, then began again. “Unless you were the lost sister, and I the replacement for you.”

  Catherine frowned. “No. You both know how I feel about this practice of replacing people. It cannot be done. No one can stand in for another.”

  Bright Star held up a hand. “And I agree with you. Allow me to finish, and I think you will agree with me, too.” She slipped off her moccasins and waded into the water. “All of us have been ransomed by the Great Good God. Jesus died, and we became God’s children. He died, and so we live. The black robes have a practice where a new Christian is taken into the water, baptized, and afterward, the person is clean in Christ. The People have a similar tradition with the captives they adopt into the tribe. They scrub them clean, washing away the white blood, so that afterward they are new and completely part of the family.”

  A bow of color glistened in the waterfall’s spray. On the bank behind Bright Star, birch trees stood tall and straight, their trunks white as snow geese, their leaves like countless candle flames. “Both customs wash away the old and begin something new,” she continued. “A new start. A new family. This is what I want for us. Today I allow myself the sorrows for loved ones lost, but wash away the bitterness that has held me back from living my own life.” She held her cupped hands in the falling water and laved it over her face.

  Catherine watched in awe, pulse thrumming. This was the sister she longed to know. A woman with wisdom and grace and humility, who had been refined by life’s trials, not eaten away by them. It was as if Bright Star had been buried beneath an ocean of too many hard years, and she was finally coming to the surface.

  Unprompted, Thankful hoisted the hem of her skirts and stepped into the creek.

  Smiling, Bright Star held her hands beneath the falls again and wiped the soot and tears from the young woman’s face. “Thankful. Today I do not scour away your heritage or your name. But if I can wash away your fears, this I do. I clear away all doubt that you belong here with Catherine and with myself. Today I call you my sister, though you remain Thankful Winslet through and through. You are loved and cherished for who you are. You are enough. You are part of a family once more.”

  Releasing her skirts, Thankful held her hands to the falling stream, then washed her own face and neck. With creek water streaming down her face, she hugged Bright Star and said, “Thank you. Today I am your sister, and Catherine’s.”

  A hardness, formed by years of tension, lost its grip within Catherine. Autumn’s splendor unfurled on the hills beyond them. Wind sighed, the creek riffled, and the sun rose higher to shine upon three women set apart from the world of war, if only for the moment. They were sisters, this was sanctuary, and she reveled in what God had done.

  The water chilled Catherine’s feet as she joined them. It grounded her to the moment, stones and sand beneath her soles.

  Cupping more water in her hands, Bright Star looked deeply, honestly, into Catherine’s eyes. “Today I wash away the years and hard feelings that have separated us. I rinse away any judgments I have uttered. I want to be your sister fully and without holding back. You were named Catherine Stands-Apart, but today I rename you Catherine Goes-Between, for you go between places and peoples, and serve them both. This is not your weakness, but a strength. The Great Good God went between for us.” With water running down her arms and dripping from her elbows, she washed Catherine’s face. “Do you accept this name?”

  “I do.” Taking Bright Star’s hand and Thankful’s, Catherine closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. She was not just clean, but restored.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  When at last they reached Gabriel’s home, Bright Star wasn’t ready to carry on to Kahnawake quite yet and chose to accompany Catherine and Thankful to the house.

  As she walked up the slope to the front porch, Catherine felt a familiar squeeze around her chest, a constriction she couldn’t blame on her bindings. After being away from her father for more than a month, the idea of shaping her days to please him felt like trying to fit into a gown she’d outgrown.

  Walking beside her, Thankful seemed as fleeting and thin as a shadow. Her hands still had not stopped their trembling except when busy at a task. Pulling her cloak tighter about her, she whispered, “I feel as though I’ve been ransomed all over again. The memories of my childhood terror were unlocked by that Odanak raid. I wonder if they will haunt me as they did when I was seven.”

  “You are not a child this time,” Bright Star told her. “You’re not alone.”

  But wariness hung in the air.

  The front door opened before Catherine’s hand touched the latch.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.” Gabriel’s greeting held no warmth. His hair was unkempt, face unshaven. His empty sleeve was unpinned and dangled by his sagging trousers. If he was surprised to see both of his daughters, his expression did not reveal it. His glare was for Catherine alone.

  She had not remembered how small he was, nor how small he made her feel. “Papa.” In all the time she’d had to imagine this moment, she could never picture how it would go. She clasped her hands. They were chapped and raw as a fishwife’s. “We’re cold.”

  Smoke rose and divided, curling up from the pipe in his hand. So he’d found a way to light it without her. “You left me.”r />
  But he stood aside, and all three women filed in. It was the first time Bright Star had ever entered the house, yet her gaze didn’t wander from Gabriel.

  Fire crackled from the parlor hearth, and they went to it. Thankful warmed her hands, back turned to the man who had never understood her purpose in his household. Bright Star stood shoulder to shoulder with Catherine.

  “I came back,” she told her father. “I have gone on trips before, and I have always come home to you. I see you managed fine without us.”

  Flames hissed and popped behind the grate. At last, he regarded Bright Star. He pursed his lips around the pipe stem, then puffed into the space between them. “Does she speak?”

  Indignation licked through Catherine. Here was his firstborn child, in the same room as him for the first time in more than fifteen years, and this was how he addressed her.

  “When she wants to.” Bright Star crossed her arms and stared down her nose at Gabriel, matching his glint with her own.

  Gabriel grunted. He did not ask where they had been, or how they fared, or if they might care to eat or sit down.

  “There has been a battle,” Catherine told him, though she supposed he’d already learned about it.

  “Oui, Quebec is lost, and no doubt in the spring, the British will come for Montreal.” He waved the pipe through the air, putting talk of war behind them without asking what she knew. “When you disappeared, I figured you’d taken Samuel Crane to safety. That didn’t trouble me much, to be honest, for I didn’t want him dead any more than you did. I’ll never get the money back I spent for his ransom, though.”

  Catherine listened as if from far away. Two empires raged in war, men were dying, women being widowed, and Gabriel Duval’s chief concern was the protection of his own interests.