by Sara Donati
A shout of reluctant approval followed a left hook that took Billy in the chest, but left him rocking. Like a stunted oak in a high wind, he groaned but he would not quite topple.
“Nathaniel Bonner!” cried Anna Hauptmann. “Are you fighting with the man, or dancing? Will you knock some sense into his bloody head once and for all?” She was the only woman in the crowd, standing there in a dressing gown and bouncing up and down on her bare feet like a girl of twelve. Not a pleasing sight.
“Aw, Anna. I got a dollar on Billy there, give him a chance.”
She grunted, and flung her long plaits back over her shoulders. “You want to throw your good money away, Ambrose, you go right ahead. But I guess when your Marianne gets done with you, you won’t look much better than Billy there.”
Nathaniel reached out with a left cross and Billy’s lip split open with a pop. The crowd bellowed in response. From his one open eye, Billy threw them a baleful glare. His nose had been slightly reoriented on his broad, lopsided face, and he stood there heaving and foaming like an overworked horse in the sun.
“Christ on a pony, Kirby, fall down and stop embarrassing your sainted mother!” shouted Anna, disgusted. “Would you see to business, Nathaniel?”
Bonner just circled, as if he had nothing better to do than watch Billy Kirby bleed into the dust. If he was getting any pleasure out of it, it couldn’t be seen on his face.
A blow to Billy’s shoulder sent him staggering backward.
“Come on, Kirby,” called one of the Camerons in a long whine. “You can do better than that.”
“Me Grannie Meg could do better than that, and her dead these ten years!” Archie Cunningham shouted.
Axel let out a great bray of laughter, and the rest of the crowd joined him, tentatively at first and then with abandon. In response, Kirby roused himself, leading with his right in a long, sloppy roundhouse that gave Bonner more than enough time to step out of the way. Stumbling like a baby, Billy barely caught himself before plowing into the horse trough.
Bonner wasn’t even breathing hard. He had taken only one real punch, and a graze on his cheekbone glistened raw in the torchlight.
“Ja, you look ready to call it quits, Kirby. Had enough?” Axel called.
Billy shook his head, slinging ropes of blood and spit. He started toward Bonner growling, only to be dealt a vicious uppercut to the gut. Kirby crossed his arms over himself and collapsed forward onto his knees, his head hanging down to the ground. Blood and vomit dripped into the dirt.
“That’s it, then!” Axel held up one arm.
Liam Kirby, his face a study in misery and shame, crouched down next to his brother, who now sat on the ground. With a push and a roar, Billy sent the boy sprawling into the dirt. Then he hauled himself to his feet and stood glaring at Bonner, swaying crookedly. Bonner stared back, one brow cocked like the leg of the bigger dog.
Claude Dubonnet came and whispered something into Kirby’s ear. Billy finally nodded, and followed him off in the direction of his cabin.
Men were heading back into the tavern, more sober now than they wanted to be, and not looking forward to paying off hasty bets. The pockets of Anna’s morning coat were sagging with her profit.
“I see you slinking away, Isaac Cameron,” she called out. “Never mind. If I don’t get my coin from you I’ll just drop by your place in the morning, see if it’s any easier to part with it when your head’s fit to burst.”
Isaac came trudging back into the torchlight, fishing deep in his money pouch and muttering loudly. “You trained that daughter of yours poorly, Axel. What’s she doing out here in the middle of the night, sticking her nose in men’s business?”
“Collectin’ your money, looks like.” Axel laughed. “Don’t go blaming her for the liquor in your belly.” He grinned at Julian as he handed over his musket.
“Ain’t that so, Middleton?”
Wiping the barrel with his handkerchief, Julian merely smiled.
Bonner still stood where the fight had stopped, his face set and impassive as ever. He was flexing his right hand, opening and closing the fist like the mouth of a trap, slowly rolling his shoulders and testing his elbows. No damage to speak of, beyond a split knuckle or two. Anna was talking to him, gesturing broadly. One or two of the men stopped to congratulate him.
Watching a fight was thirsty work. Julian wondered if his brother-in-law might be persuaded to buy him a drink, in celebration of the triumph of good over evil. Then he remembered that Hawkeye was sitting over in the trading post behind a locked door, and he thought of a better plan. Just earlier in the day he had seen a stray bottle of schnapps on the counter over there.
Axel had come up to talk to Nathaniel; Julian took that opportunity to slip away.
Drenched with sweat, her heart beating hard in her throat, Elizabeth closed the rear door of the trading post behind her and took a moment to lean against the wall in order to catch her breath. She shut her eyes, willing the shaking in her hands and legs to cease. It was a mean trick she had played on poor Jed; he would be hard-pressed to explain himself tomorrow morning. He had offered to play her a tune, even as he fell onto the cot and instantly to sleep, never noticing the sound of the door locking behind him. Elizabeth hoped he would forgive her, in time. If it bought Hawkeye the chance to be with his father before it was too late, she would take on Jed McGarrity’s anger, and gladly.
The noise of the fight had stopped, and the tavern was filling up again. Nathaniel would be looking for her down by the schoolhouse; she needed to be on her way.
She opened her eyes, and her brother was standing in front of her.
“Mrs. Bonner,” he said, sweeping his arm in front of himself in an expansive gesture that had nothing to do with the leering grin on his face. “Whatever in the world are you doing here? Or is that a question you cannot answer?”
“I am waiting for my husband,” Elizabeth said. Behind her back, she still held the key to Anna’s pantry. She gripped it harder. “And what is your business here?”
He shook his head. “Not nearly as interesting as yours, I’ll wager. Been in to pay your father-in-law a midnight visit, have you? Find him well?”
Elizabeth fixed him with her sternest gaze. “I hope you are not so very short of cash that you’re resorting to petty thievery again.”
“I see that marriage hasn’t mellowed you!” He laughed softly. “If you are so concerned for my financial well-being, my wealthy sister, why then perhaps you would be so good—”
“Nothing changes, Julian, does it? You are still trying to get others to pay your way for you.”
“And you will still try to change me. These games of yours are very tiresome, Lizzie. Why don’t you just come back home, and put an end to this silliness?”
Her anxiety abruptly replaced by anger, Elizabeth felt the knot in her stomach tighten and break. She stepped toward her brother, and he stepped back in surprise.
“This is not a game, Julian. This is my life. I have a husband, I have a home. I am never coming back.”
His temper was buried deep, but she still knew how to put a hook in it and drag it to the surface. She watched him battle to maintain his smirk, and fail. “You will,” he whispered, with a new edge to his tone. “I will see to it. You cannot run off with a third of the property and think you’ll get away with it.”
Shaking now with exhaustion and irritation, Elizabeth pulled herself up to her full height. “I have only what was rightfully mine. And listen to me now, carefully: I will keep what is mine.”
On Julian’s face a flickering of anger. His mouth, narrowed down to a spiteful line. “You don’t believe that Nathaniel Bonner really wants you, do you?” His eyes traveled slowly over her face, and his lip curled in disgust. “Now that he’s got your father’s land, what makes you think you can keep him, you with your books and your lectures. You can’t breed him any children—did Richard ever tell you that, that your husband’s sterile? Didn’t bother to mention that, did he? Bu
t then I doubt the thought has even occurred to him—why would it, after all, when there’s a woman like Many-Doves in the next bed.”
The bile that rose in her throat would choke her, if she let it. It tasted of the things she saw in him now: the consuming selfishness, the bitter loneliness that had turned this man into a creature that she did not recognize, and wanted no part of.
She said: “It is very strange that you should mention Many-Doves, Julian. Just earlier today she was talking to me about you.”
If she had slapped him, he could not have looked more stunned. It gave her pause enough only to catch her breath.
“Many-Doves said, ‘A man with no center will try to fill the void that rules him.’ She calls you He-Seeks-in-the-Dark.”
He let out a rush of air that was half gasp, half awkward laugh. “Mohawk nonsense,” he said hoarsely, his eyes flickering away from her. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you have no soul. You know that to be true, which is your second curse. And the harder one to live with.”
Nathaniel appeared suddenly out of the darkness; she felt his presence like the shadow of the mountain itself. He put a hand on her arm, and she touched him with a finger, asking for his silence for one more moment.
Julian blinked at her, as if he could not quite focus his eyes. Then he turned his back to both of them, and disappeared into the night.
They walked home in silence, but they were not alone on the path to Lake in the Clouds. Three young River Indians overtook them in the strawberry field, alive with waves of fireflies under the horned moon. Another, larger group of Kahnyen’kehàka came out of the forest a mile farther on. Many-Doves had started the word moving in Barktown, and from all over the territory men would come to be near when Chingachgook walked the path. Nathaniel’s pace quickened, and Elizabeth pushed herself to keep up.
The cabin was crowded with strangers. Onandaga from upriver. More Kahnyen’kehàka, standing quietly. A couple of white trappers were cleaning their guns by the hearth. Her father sat talking to John Glove and Galileo. She felt his gaze on her as they passed.
Hawkeye was crouched next to the cot where his father slipped further into his death dream. The only things alive about him were his eyes, fixed on Chingachgook’s face, and his voice, hoarse and vaguely crackling. He was singing under his breath in Mahican; Elizabeth did not understand the words, and she did not need an interpreter.
She picked up Chingachgook’s hand off the blanket, fever hot. Cradled in her own two hands, it was like a piece of driftwood, deceptively light for all its strong, polished form. She had the sense of his bones, leached hollow and pale, as if they had lain for all of his many years in the direct light of the sun. The same sun that had given his people their own particular rainbow: copper and bronze, amber and sienna.
There was a subtle shifting in the deeply fissured face. His eyes opened, a flicker of awareness, and then closed again. The snake that coiled over his cheekbones shimmered in the lamplight and disappeared into the sparse white hair at his temple.
The door opened and there was the distinctive rattle of bone and silver. Elizabeth had last seen Bitter-Words this morning at Barktown, and now here he was, standing over the cot to look at Chingachgook with his eyes as black and expressive as the night. Hawkeye rose to talk to the faith keeper, and Elizabeth took the opportunity to slip away and look for Hannah.
Outside, a huge fire was burning, and around it, more people, mostly men. Maybe a hundred of them, talking among themselves while they made camp. They were roasting deer; she counted three, and a small bear, the bones of which had been tossed to the dogs. These men would hunt to feed themselves, as they must. Billy Kirby could hardly drag all of them off to gaol.
But he could, he would, come looking for Hawkeye, and soon. And he would find half the Hode’noshaunee nation here, as they had feared would one day be the case. She put the thought away from her—what they had done tonight, and what it would mean tomorrow—because now she was tired, she was tired to the bone and she would think of her child first. Nathaniel came out on the porch behind her.
“Go sleep,” he said, his arms coming up from behind to encircle her, his chin resting on the crown of her head. “I’ll come fetch you when it’s time. You did good, Boots. Thank you.”
She nodded, leaning back against him.
“Your father—”
“Tomorrow,” he said, his mouth at her ear. “Sleep first.”
Elizabeth left him to this family of his that was still a mystery to her, a connection woven not of blood and muscle but common purpose. On her own porch, facing away from the gathering, she found children sleeping wrapped in blankets. She stood for a moment listening to their breathing, and watching the flicker of fireflies. A Kahnyen’kehàka woman she did not recognize sat in one of the rocking chairs, nursing an infant.
Inside, Curiosity was stirring the cook pot. Elizabeth took soup and corn bread from her. She could not remember when she had last eaten, but she still felt strangely full, a fist in her belly and her throat closed tight. She took the soup out onto the porch and then the women collected the sleeping children and took them up to the loft, and Curiosity went back to the other cabin.
Elizabeth found Many-Doves and Hannah asleep in her bed. Hannah was fully dressed, her unplaited hair scattered across the pillow. She lay down with them to wait.
From the open window, there was the sound of singing and a water drum and a slow, shuffling step toward the dawn.
LIII
“Mr. Middleton, Billy Kirby here and Claude Dubonnet with him.”
Julian squinted up at Curiosity’s oldest daughter. “I don’t want to see anyone, Daisy.”
“Yes, sir, so you said. But I don’t think they’ll go away on my word.”
Daisy blinked at him, her mouth folded in a tight line. Another woman who couldn’t tell the difference between a drunken man and one who was working on achieving that state, but had not yet succeeded. Julian reached for his coffee cup, and eyed the brandy bottle on the sideboard.
“Then get your mother to deal with them.” He took another swallow and then stabbed halfheartedly at a sausage. “I’m not in the mood for their games this morning.”
She stood there still, her face impassive. “My folks are up at Lake in the Clouds,” she said patiently. “Chingachgook died at dawn, so I don’t expect they’ll be down anytime soon.”
At the door, Billy Kirby said: “The whole Indian nation is up there, too, to bury the old bastard.”
“Billy,” said Julian with a sigh. “By God, man, can’t you leave me alone? My head hurts as bad as your face looks. Go home and sleep, why don’t you, and let them bury their dead.”
Dubonnet, face like a pickled egg, cleared his throat. “You were eager enough to send us up there not so very long ago.”
“Yes, well. I didn’t anticipate you’d make a complete muddle of it when I made the suggestion. My error, I suppose.”
“We didn’t shoot anybody,” Kirby said.
Julian lifted up his hands in a gesture of dismissal. “I have no intention of climbing that mountain to watch Nathaniel Bonner thrash you again, Kirby. Even if he does have a more appreciative audience this time—”
“Hawkeye was broke out of the gaol last night. I got an idea that it was your sister who done it.”
Julian pulled up short, and then let out a hoarse laugh. “She was always too clever by half. I should have known.” He took a harder look at the two men before him. The worse for wear, but dressed and armed as if they were going to war. “Tell me you are going up there to arrest Hawkeye in front of every Mohawk in New-York State.”
Billy’s jaw worked like a saw. “And your sister, too. Soon as I got enough men together, I’m going up there to do just that.”
“By God, you are either the bravest or the stupidest pair I’ve ever seen. There’s not enough men on the continent to pull that off,” Julian said. “How long do you think you’ll keep the support o
f the men in the village if you try to arrest my sister? And you’ve got no proof that it was her, do you?”
Billy jerked the battered tricorn from his head and began to knead it compulsively. “Not exactly. There’s Jed McGarrity, but he ain’t too talkative this morning.”
Julian snorted. “The judge will need more than your suspicions before he’ll put a woman in gaol.”
Billy’s head jerked up, his eyes flaring. “Well, what about you, then? Your word would do the job.”
With a quick motion, Julian emptied his coffee cup, and then put it down softly on the table. “Don’t count on it.”
“Does that mean you ain’t coming with us?”
Julian ran a hand through his hair. “I most certainly am not. I don’t know why I should worry about the two of you, you are more trouble than you are worth. But let me point out that not only is discretion the better part of valor, it is also a more promising strategy in this little war of yours.”
Billy scowled at him. “Talk plain, Middleton.”
With a groan, Julian heaved himself out of his chair. “All right, yes. How is this: if you can put a harness on your impatience now and sit on your hurt pride, you will have at least a prayer of getting what you want.”
Dubonnet looked thoughtful. “And if we don’t?”
Julian shrugged. “If you go up there now, Bonner will gut you and leave you for the crows. Sheriff or not.”
In a great tidal wave of grief that took the summer day and heaved it into a new shape, Nathaniel struggled from task to task until his grandfather was in the ground. Working with his father and Runs-from-Bears, they dug the grave. The faith keeper’s songs and prayers provided a rhythm to work by.
It was just over a year since they had buried his mother. Behind him, Nathaniel could sense the shape of her grave. He imagined her as he always did, with her arms held out in welcome. The others were waiting for Chingachgook, too. Those who had gone before: his first son, who had died in battle, the wife who had borne him. Sarah, with the child in her arms. They would welcome Chingachgook, who would walk tall and strong among them. He had gone to this homecoming gladly.
