Daughter of the Sword

by Jeanne Williams

  If so, Dane was besotted, indeed, and she, Deborah, had been dreaming, hoping—more than she’d realized until now. Feeling acutely sick, Deborah muttered that she’d better start setting dinner out, and she made for the cabin, hearing Thos, in puzzlement, say there was a sickle, and Dane, dismounting, say, “Good. After dinner, I’ll help.”

  You help? Deborah thought incredulously. He wouldn’t know how to hold a scythe, would blister those painter’s hands in minutes! She stopped at the well-house for buttermilk, butter, cottage cheese, and a few eggs to fry with left-over potatoes. Thos and Dane were unsaddling and rubbing down the horses, so Dane must intend to help with the harvest. A fine sight he’d be with his fine tailored broadcloth all covered with chaff and straw! Perhaps he could wear Thos’s other trousers. Dane was much broader through the shoulders, but not, she judged, through waist and thighs, an immodest but undeniably interesting thought.

  Entering the cabin, Deborah put down her burden, stirred up the fire, and put on potatoes mixed with eggs and chopped green onions before she went to the lean-to and conferred with Judith.

  “Mr. Hunter’s English and doesn’t want any part of our quarrels. He means to help with the harvest, so unless you’d rather stay hidden all afternoon, it might be as well for you to come out now.”

  “He a growed-up man you can trust?” demanded Judith, “Tongue won’t get carried away?”

  “He’s a grown-up man.” Deborah realized, with grudging, that she had to admit that. “And I think he always thinks before he speaks, which makes for dull conversation—or none at all! But I’m sure, Judith, that he won’t say anything about you.”

  Judith nodded, rising from the pallet. “Comin’ in, then. I want to help with the wheat. Ruther do anything than stay hid like a fox in its den!”

  Dane, of course, had brought a gift: hickory-smoked ham. Deborah introduced him to Judith, adding that it was highly important that he not mention her to anyone.

  He nodded and spoke pleasantly, as if he met runaways every day. Judith smiled. Tension went out of her, and she helped Deborah set out the meal, including generous slices of ham.

  “That’s a good man,” she told Deborah under her breath while Thos and Dane were discussing the gold rush that was bound to follow the return of some prospectors with considerable “dust.” “He’s not the kind would ever bed a woman who didn’t want him.” As Deborah gasped at this plain speaking, Judith laughed, a rich, throaty chuckling. “That don’ mean he has to do without! He your beau?”

  “No,” said Deborah shortly, dishing out the potatoes.

  She set them down with something of a bang. Dane shot her a questioning, amused look, then rose quickly to seat her while Thos did the same for Judith. Such courtesies had embarrassed Judith at first, but Leticia had pointed out that Judith was entitled to the treatment due a woman and should grow accustomed to accepting such gestures gracefully.

  It was taken for granted by now that Dane would never accept the visitor’s honor, saying grace, so Thos did, sounding especially sincere when he said they’d be most grateful and glad when the bountiful harvest was over, and the threshing and the flailing and winnowing.

  “Dane’s through with Fall Leaf’s portrait,” Thos said. “And Fall Leaf liked it so much that he wants one for himself.”

  “And of his favorite horse,” Dane added. “He declined to pay in gold nuggets like those he brought back from the South Platte, so we did some horse-trading. Do you think I was cheated, Miss Deborah? Two large oils for that cream-gold mare?”

  “I’ve never seen your work except for sketches,” Deborah said. “But if I had them, I’d trade two Rembrandts for that horse and still feel I had the best of the swap.”

  Dane looked appalled before he chuckled. “I’m overwhelmed at your valuation of art! But I suppose a horse is more useful in this country.”

  “Yes,” Deborah said rather shortly.

  Dane looked at her quizzically. “I’d hoped you’d go riding with me this afternoon, Miss Deborah, to let me see if the mare’s suitable for a lady, but it looks like today and tomorrow morning must go to harvesting. May I hope that tomorrow afternoon you’d favor me with your company?”

  Deborah stared at him, swept by conflict. To ride that fairy-tale animal one whole afternoon with Dane, to have that time with him, no matter what followed—

  Yes! She’d have that, at least. He didn’t need to know how it was for her, how much and what.

  “If we get in the harvest, sir, and if my parents consent, I’d be delighted to try the mare for you—though you must understand most of my riding’s been a matter of hanging onto Thos while Nebuchadnezzar plods along.”

  “You’re exactly right for what I need to ascertain,” he assured her. “And your parents have already agreed to trust you to me.”

  When? Startled, Deborah glanced up at him and encountered a strange light deep in his eyes, like the blue nimbus bordering candle flame. It pierced into her like a white-hot blade. Fighting a slow inner trembling, she tore her eyes away while she still had some shreds of composure left.

  What was the matter with her? How could she respond in this frightening, mind-dizzying way to a man who’d kept his cold, careful distance and was courting a sensuous, experienced woman who must know how to match and please him as no girl possibly could—at least not one brought up and trained by Leticia Whitlaw!

  Eagerly turning the subject to the gold at Pike’s Peak, Thos said that Father was printing a book by one of the returned prospectors, and that a number of other guides were being published by various printers. Merchants were ordering in wagonloads and cargoes of supplies to outfit the swarms of gold-seekers who were already leaving, hoping to get a head start on the flood of easterners certain to come west with the spring weather.

  “They’ve already platted a town named Denver right at the foot of the mountains,” Thos said.

  “And that’s still in Kansas Territory?” marveled Dane.

  “Sure,” said Thos airily. “This is a big country.” His russet eyes sparkled. “I’d sure like to try my luck. Just imagine, finding gold!”

  “Why don’t you?” asked Dane with an indulgent grin. “Rolf would probably go with you; he’s on fire to do anything, so long as it’s not boring and ordinary.

  Boyish enthusiasm changed abruptly into a man’s set purpose. “John Brown’s back in Kansas.”

  “So I’d heard.” Dane shrugged. “I don’t know why he and Montgomery and the rest of those men in southeast Kansas don’t just let the inevitable happen.”

  Thos scowled at this criticism of the men he longed to follow. “What do you mean?”

  “Days are past when Missourians could cross by the hundreds and vote. The pro-slave Lecompton constitution’s bound to be voted down this summer. The Free Staters have won. It’ll simply need time to make it all legal.”

  “You say that when it’s less than a month ago that those men were murdered on the Marais des Cygnes!” cried Thos. “How can you remember that and wonder at their friends wanting vengeance?”

  “As one who got more war than he wanted, I confess to bafflement over why each side seems intent on having the last massacre.”

  Much on his dignity, Thos said, “Maybe you don’t understand, sir, being a foreigner, but Brown won’t rest while there’s a slave in the country. And I think he’s right!”

  “I believe he even advocates kidnapping them out of slave states,” remarked Dane.

  “He does. And I’m going to help him.”

  “Thos!” Deborah turned on her twin, made savage by fear. “Don’t go with that horrible old man!”

  “Why, ’Borah!” Thos stared at her, eyes growing larger and larger. “I don’t like what happened at Pottawatomie, either, but this is the same as war! Brown—well, you know Father says he’s a torch to burn down the whole house of slavery.”

  “He may be that.” There was a bitter taste in Deborah’s mouth. “He may be God’s sword. But he’s terrible.�
� She caught her twin’s gaze and held it. “I mean this, Thos.” She spoke slowly, measuring her words. “I’d rather see you dead than dragging unarmed men out to slaughter. I’d rather see you dead.”

  White to the lips, Thos seemed dazed. With a dull shake of his head, he pushed back the bench and reached for his hat.

  “I’ll get out the sickle for you,” he said to Dane.

  Judith grabbed Deborah’s arm and gave her a hard shake. “What you mean, sayin’ such a crazy thing? That’s your brother—your twin! Almost you! You go after him right now, an’ say you don’ mean it!”

  “But I do!” Deborah sprang up and began clearing the table, fighting tears that stung her eyelids.

  “That’s a funny thing to say when you’ve got a Bowie under your mattress!” Judith scorned.

  “Fighting’s one thing,” Deborah flashed, scrubbing at the tears that would fall. Had she bungled, only managed to set. Thos more stubbornly in his wish? “If there’s a war, I’d go if I could, and I’m sure Thos will. It’s this cold-blooded slaughtering I can’t bear!”

  Dane had risen. She didn’t know how it happened, but he was holding her. “Your brother won’t kill like that,” he soothed, stroking her hair as she wept against his shoulder. “I’ve been a soldier, Deborah. I know the ice-cold natural assassins. Thos isn’t one. But cry. Get all the fear and worry out.”

  His voice was gentle. He comforted her with it and his hands till the wrenching sobs eased. What a baby he must think her! Or a hysterical woman, which was worse. Freeing herself, Deborah choked out an apology and hurried to help Judith with the dishes.

  Dane watched her, hesitating a moment. Then he took off his coat and tie, rolled up the sleeves of his snowy linen shirt, and went out. Apparently he was serious about helping.

  Judith ignored Deborah as they did the dishes, though several times Deborah caught hazel eyes regarding her with puzzlement that verged on hostility, and several times Judith gave a vexed shake of her lioness’s head. It was clear there was much she wanted to say about John Brown, which was natural since he’d helped her, but Deborah didn’t want to hear his tactics defended.

  Maybe a man like that was necessary in times like these, or like Robespierre in the French Revolution, or Oliver Cromwell, but she shrank from such men in a revulsion multiplied by their self-righteousness. She prayed with all her might that Thos would keep free of the hypnotic power Brown exercised over his sons and those who followed him.

  When the women went out to the field, Dane was swinging the sickle in a smooth, controlled way that made Deborah positive he’d done it before, grasping a handful of grain, shearing it off, and leaving it in a little pile. This was more laborious and slower than the cradle, but Dane had a bit of a start and managed to hold most of it as she collected the heaps and bounded them.

  She was afraid that he’d blister his hands on the sickle and soon ran back to the house to locate Josiah’s winter gauntlets.

  Dane looked at her quizzically as she called to him and proffered the gloves. “You must think me tender, indeed.” He smiled, but he did put them on. “My best friend, much to my father’s dismay, was the gamekeeper’s son. We often helped in the harvest, in fields far from where my father might spy us. Rob and I knew the river and woods better than any poacher. While I was off at school, I never met among the gentry’s sons anyone I liked as well as Rob.”

  “Is he still at your home?” Deborah tried to conjure up an image of what Dane’s country was like, but she only saw thatched cottages and gray turreted castles.

  “No.” Dane’s face closed. “He came into the army with me. He died at Balaclava.”

  Turning abruptly, he swung the sickle, as if cutting at some old enemy. The waving wheat blurred in front of Deborah. It was a moment before she could see well enough to bundle up the grain.

  vii

  Chores next morning, breakfast, family worship, with Judith taking part by now as if she’d been born to it. Dane rode up as the older Whitlaws were leaving, and the others were in the field while morning cool lessened the itch of chaff on their skin.

  Meadlowlarks sang from the surrounding grass and prairie chickens whirred when the harvesters came near enough to alarm them. Mockingbirds, crows, and red-winged blackbirds greedily devoured grain fallen from the reaping. They were welcome to that but were shooed away from the shocks.

  After the wheat was thoroughly cured and dry, it would be thrashed and then the horses and Venus would be turned in to feed on the nutritious stubble. Now they were barred by the prickly Osage orange hedge grown high enough to be protective in the three years since the Whitlaws had planted the sproutings given them by Johnny.

  “I don’t like fences,” he growled, “but you’ve got to have ’em if you’re going to grow crops.” He’d spat prodigiously. “One damned thing follows the other. Plains Indians move around, gather berries, nuts, roots, and such like wild foods. They eat a lot of those without getting tied down to a patch of land and a crop they have to stay with.”

  “But Mr. Chaudoin,” Mother had protested, “white people don’t roam around like that. By farming and raising domestic animals, many people can be fed off comparatively little land.”

  “And that’s good?” scoffed Johnny. “The whites multiplied till they filled up Europe and started spillin’ over here. Now they’ve crowded up the land east of the Mississippi, they’re gobblin’ up the plains, pourin’ into California and Utah and Oregon. Where they’ll go then only Wakan Tanka knows, but if they keep on litterin’ worse’n jack-rabbits, they’ll have to farm the ocean or find a way to plow the stars!”

  At fifteen, Deborah hadn’t learned to suppress impertinent questions. Frowning, she’d asked, “But Mr. Chaudoin, if you like Indians ways so much, why didn’t you stay with the Sioux?”

  “Deborah!” rebuked Mother, but Johnny grinned crookedly, tweaking one of Deborah’s plaits.

  “Didn’t belong after Sweet Grass died. Truth to tell, I never belonged all that much. The Lakotah believe they’re Wakan Tanka’s only true children, and their word for stranger also means enemy. My father-in-law never stopped calling me ‘dog face’ and ‘flop-ears’ behind my back, and my brothers-in-law were glad their sister had no children from a ‘crooked foot.’”

  Thos, also uninhibited, asked with wide eyes, “But didn’t you call them gut-eaters?”

  “Thos!” thundered Josiah.

  Bursting into a roar of laughter, Johnny hugged Thos and patted him on the shoulder with the force of a playful bear. “Cesli Tatanka! They were gut-eaters, and so was I! Nothin’ better than ‘boudins’ wrapped around a stick and roasted crisp! Next time I get a buffalo, you’ll have to try ’em!”

  Thos and Father had, pronouncing them excellent, but the Whitlaw women had left the small intestines for smoked fat from the back bone and rich steaks from the hump.

  And the Osage orange, set out in furrows and watered painstakingly from the well till they had a good start, now protected the wheat, planted last fall for the first time.

  Corn had been the first crop, quick-growing, easy to plant and harvest. That field was fenced with rails from trees cut along the Kaw. The Whitlaws were still enjoying roasting ears, but before the blades started yellowing, it’d be time to strip them from the ears and dry them for fodder, leaving the stalks supporting the naked ears to wait till autumn for harvesting.

  In spite of the heat, stooping and tying that made her back and shoulders ache, Deborah got great satisfaction out of the harvest, as she had earlier from planting. Whatever Johnny said about crops, she felt it was a miracle for hard, dead-seeming grain to spend a season under earth and come up, radiantly green, to grow into food by the grace of sun and rain.

  It was Demeter restoring the fields when her daughter came back to her from death, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Tammuz, those who died and lived again. Josiah Whitlaw was a student and lover of mythology. Along with fairy tales, fables, and Bible stories, the twins had grown up with the Trojan War a
nd Ulysses’s wanderings, gleanings from Herodotus, Plutarch, Pausanias, and Strabo, and the Norse legends upon which Mr. Richard Wagner was building a great operatic cycle after his earlier success with Lohengrin and Tannhäuser.

  Leticia had always been somewhat troubled by Josiah’s filling her children’s minds with what she called “heathenish false gods and idols,” to which Josiah countered that since false gods were forever being mentioned in the Bible, he thought people should know something about them.

  Though Father faithfully attended services and was a good friend of Reverend Cordley, an English-born graduate of Andover Theological Seminary and the University of Michigan, who had come to pastor the Plymouth Congregational Church in Lawrence last year, Deborah secretly believed he had no religion at all, or a very broad one, depending on how one looked at it. He liked the Sioux name for God, Wakan Tanka, or Great Holy, and had said more than once, even to Reverend Cordley, that if Unitarians weren’t so contentious and proud of their brains, he’d have joined them.

  Adding another bundle to a shock, Deborah smiled. How her thoughts had ranged, from Babylonia to Greece! But it wasn’t surprising that the harvest took one back: to Ruth, gleaning in an alien field and finding a husband; even to Cain, who killed his brother because God had preferred Abel’s flesh offering to Cain’s fruit and grain. There was something ancient and enduring, a binding of generations, in gathering a harvest.

  Father said machinery was sure to be invented for planting, cutting, binding, and threshing, but so far methods hadn’t changed drastically since some man or woman first poked holes in the earth with a sharp stick and covered the seed with his or her heel.

  Machines would make it easier and faster, of course, just as the one for sewing invented by Mr. Howe and developed by Mr. Singer had made a tremendous difference in making clothes. Deborah was certainly glad the family had one, and she wished mightily that someone would invent a washing machine. She truly hated the whole hot, monotonous, tiring chore, which had to be done week after week. In winter, it wasn’t quite so bad, though then one’s hands got numb and chapped.