Many Sparrows

by Lori Benton

  The light in his eyes let her know he understood. “Then I’ll find you waiting for me?”

  “You will,” she said. “No matter what.”

  They were no longer alone, and the business of preparing for another journey must needs begin. With every breath, Clare clung to her hard-won resolve. Not my will…

  There was one more farewell to make after getting her and Pippa’s belongings together—she couldn’t stay alone on the creek bank after Jeremiah and his brother left—and there came a moment when she and Wolf-Alone were together by the dying fire, she with Pippa in her arms asleep, and to her deep surprise the tall Indian touched her face and told her he would take care of Jeremiah.

  “I know.” His devotion to his adopted brothers was a thing she’d never questioned, though so much about the man begged for answers.

  “Better still,” he said. “God will help.”

  He hadn’t said your God. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you—whatever else you are?”

  “I am,” Wolf-Alone said and smiled faintly at her unveiled surprise.

  She gazed at the warrior, so strikingly handsome—except for those terrifying eyebrows—and she wondered again where he came from, why he’d chosen to live as Shawnee.

  “Who are you?” she asked, thinking it possibly her last chance ever to do so. “What was your name…before?”

  But Wolf-Alone shook his head. “I left that name behind long ago, and I won’t speak it again now,” he said and raised his head with a look in his eyes as if he could see past their dismantled camp on Scippo Creek, past the army’s larger camp nearby, straight through the darkness to something in the distance.

  He was staring in the direction of Cornstalk’s Town, and it brought the boy, Wildcat, to mind.

  “But I think,” he added, half to himself, “maybe soon I’ll have another name.”

  OCTOBER 28

  CAMP CHARLOTTE, SCIPPO CREEK

  Beneath her uncle’s canvas shelter, Clare woke to a dawn cold and misted, the gray of it glimpsed through a slender gap in the tent’s canvas opening. Pippa slept, warm in the blankets beside her, but even before Clare felt the bite of seeping air, her first coherent thought was of Jacob. Was he warm? Was he safe?

  Her second thought was of the man gone to find him. She closed her eyes, calling up her last moments with Jeremiah.

  When all was ready for their departure, Wolf-Alone and her uncle had drawn away, giving them a space of solitude, and she’d told Jeremiah something she’d been wanting to say.

  “The day the warriors returned to Cornstalk’s Town, after the battle, was the last time I spoke to Rain Crow, but I haven’t been able to put it from my mind.”

  “What did you say to my sister?”

  They’d stood close; the fire had died, the night was dark. The pack he would bear waited at the edge of camp. She’d wanted to touch him, hold him again, but Pippa filled her arms.

  “I told her God knows how we feel, she and I, about our sons. About losing them. Because He lost His Son. I asked her if she remembered that. It was right then the warriors returned but…I’m certain I heard her say that she remembered too.”

  He put his hands to her shoulders and drew her and Pippa to his chest. His lips were warm as they touched her brow.

  “Thank you,” he said, the warmth in his voice greater still. “I have prayed long for her to remember.”

  “I know.” She nestled her head against his chest. “But there’s something more I wanted to say. It wasn’t until I saw you again, here, that I really understood what that meant myself.”

  Not until she’d seen Jeremiah again, there in Camp Charlotte with Uncle Alphus, had she understood how deep her own mistrust of the Almighty went.

  “What I wanted to say to Rain Crow, but didn’t have the chance, is that there’s a verse in the Bible—I cannot tell you where to find it exactly. It says, If ‘he that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?’ It came back to me in that moment.”

  Jeremiah stepped back, though he didn’t take his hands from her.

  “You’d find it in Romans, the eighth chapter,” he told her, a smile in his voice though it was too dark to see it. “And yes. Yes, Clare. He will give us all the good things, and all that He does give is good. If it doesn’t seem so in this life, yet it will prove to be in heaven, where neither you nor I—or my sister—will turn to the Almighty in accusation and say, ‘I wish You’d given me whatever it was I begged You for, or didn’t give me that hard thing I didn’t want. I wish You’d ordered my life otherwise.’ ”

  She was beyond speech, in her throat a burn of longing and hope as she raised her face to his.

  “The only promise I can leave you with,” he said, his voice gone husky with the pain and the glory of such words, “is that we will never say such things to the Almighty. Instead we’ll call His judgments right and true. Every single one.”

  “Jeremiah.” She wanted to tell him to be careful, to be mindful of his safety as he went into the unknown for her, for Jacob, for his sister.

  “I will,” he said, answering her unspoken plea. Then he leaned down and kissed her mouth for the first time, and before he’d finished she was breathless and tingling down to her toes, longing for it not to be the last kiss but the first of many.

  Then he bent lower and kissed the top of Pippa’s head. “Take care of my girl.”

  His girl. She didn’t refute the claim. She had joy in it.

  “When you find Rain Crow, will you tell her what you just told me, about God’s judgments?”

  “I’ll tell her,” he said. “And more besides.”

  And then she’d let him go, to stand with her uncle and watch the two warriors vanish into the night, Wolf-Alone carrying the lion’s share of their belongings until Jeremiah regained his strength.

  And the stillness, the trusting, finally and truly began.

  It wasn’t late into the morning before a messenger arrived, sent from Major Crawford, who’d led his men north after the Mingos at Seekunk the morning after Jeremiah’s departure. The news wasn’t what Governor Dunmore—or Clare—had hoped for. While Crawford had attempted to surround the village in the night, in preparation for a dawn attack, one of his men was prematurely discovered by the Indians and many managed to escape.

  “We killed us a few, took some prisoners, rescued a couple Virginians they was holding,” the messenger related in Alphus Litchfield’s hearing, which he’d related to Clare. But her uncle was quick to say neither of those captives had been a child. No word was to be had of Jacob or of Jeremiah, but with the raid on Seekunk, Lord Dunmore’s war against the Ohio Indians had come to an end.

  That day the governor began preparations for the return to Virginia. Though Clare had hoped to wait at Camp Charlotte for Jeremiah and Jacob to return, that choice was taken from her as well.

  “We have to go with them,” Uncle Alphus told her. “We cannot stay here on our own, and as for you returning to the Shawnees, I’m sorry, Clare, but I simply cannot let you and Pippa do that. Your father would scalp me, and he’d have every cause to do so.”

  “I’m not asking for either,” she said, holding Pippa wrapped in her shawl and gazing north, as if Jeremiah might come striding out of the trees, Jacob in his arms, if she but kept a vigil.

  She started when a deer stepped into view, blood surging in eagerness even as her brain told her there was no cause. Then she turned away and let her uncle lead her back to the army’s camp, where they began their preparations for leaving.

  Not my will, Lord. Yours be done.

  She heard the following morning that the Shawnees who remained at Camp Charlotte intended to ride with the governor on his return journey as far as Fort Gower, erected at the mouth of the Hocking. On the last day of October, mounted on a borrowed horse, Clare rode with the militia and that Shawnee delegation, which included Cornstalk and Nonhelema, along forest paths decked in fading gold, d
own the Hocking River until they reached the Ohio and the new fort Dunmore had left in his wake.

  The air smelled of the river, the coming cold, the tang of fresh-cut timber. All around her—at least among the men of Dunmore’s army—the talk was not of the west or Indians but of what was happening in the east, in Boston and Philadelphia. Even she with her great distraction of mind and heart could discern the discontent among men like James Harrod, John Sevier, and others over the issue of British authority and its bounds, and the Crown-appointed men like Lord Dunmore who had led the campaign.

  Unlike the men around her, eager to return to their homes and take up their rifles, or their pens, in yet another brewing conflict, Clare Inglesby was leaving her heart behind in the wilderness, with her son.

  And with Jeremiah Ring.

  The day in early November the Shawnees departed Fort Gower, Clare stood in the sting of a chilling breeze and watched them go. Cornstalk, Nonhelema, the chiefs Blue Jacket and Black Hoof, many others, all with feathers twirling in the wind, black hair lifting, astride horses painted and bedecked for parade, to all outward appearances without grief or regret. But Clare knew the heartache, even despair, those regally composed faces concealed. They had lost sons and brothers and husbands. They had lost their lands south of the Ohio River. They would lose all those captives, many now family, that they would be forced to give back to the whites. With one exception, perhaps, and she wondered again what Wolf-Alone would do about the boy, Wildcat.

  It was nearly as hard for her to stand and let the Shawnees ride away, out of her life, as it had been to watch Jeremiah vanish into the darkness without her, days ago. Beyond all expectation, she felt her heart break at the sight.

  Perhaps Governor Dunmore was envisioning his newly inked peace leading to rich settlements for Virginia extending down the Ohio and branching south along Kentucky’s many rivers. But how long until even Kentucky wasn’t enough? Until restless, hungry eyes looked northward?

  This will never end. Always men want more.

  Before the last of the Shawnees’ horses vanished around the bend in the wooded path, the warrior astride it looked back briefly. Around him all was burnished brown and drifting mist, the flames of autumn sunk to embers.

  He wasn’t a warrior Clare knew by name, but his face was familiar and it remained emblazoned upon her memory for many days after, along with that of Falling Hawk, Crosses-the-Path and her daughters, Split-Moon and Wildcat, others she’d come to know. She wondered if she would ever see them again, all those fallen sparrows the Almighty was watching.

  She hoped so. Until then she would wish them peace in which to heal their wings, that they might take flight again.

  MARCH 1775

  SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA

  Snow fell in the night, blanketing the valley and the ridges rising to west and east, making their slopes seem higher and more remote, each wooded fold cast in sharp relief beneath a leaden sky promising more snow before day’s end.

  In late March such heavy snowfall was less welcome than it had been in late November when Clare and Pippa Inglesby and Alphus Litchfield returned to the mill on Lewis Creek, having made the journey from Fort Pitt down the Monongahela, then by horseback south along the wagon road Clare, Philip, and Jacob had traveled in spring. But to Clare, who lifted her face to the sullen heavens from the warmth of her uncle’s horse-drawn sled, the breeze of their passing cold against her cheeks, it seemed fitting winter should linger, the earth continue sleeping, spring be deferred.

  She’d spent the winter tending her uncle’s house and hearth, lavishing upon the man the domestic attention he’d rarely known in his life of bachelorhood. It made her happy to see him dandle Pippa on his knee like a grandfather—though like a grandfather he was swift to hand the baby back if she cried or needed tending.

  So she’d lived, worked, slept, and each morning awoke thinking: Should evening come and they have not, Thy will be done. Then she would arise and pray for her boy, for the man who sought him, for the woman who clung to what wasn’t hers to claim.

  Didn’t she herself know the terrible wrench of releasing?

  Afterward she went about the doings of the day, and it seemed to her the life going on around her—in her uncle’s home, at his mill, in Staunton, in the colony beyond where revolutionary-minded men such as Patrick Henry spoke of liberty or death—was like the rim of a wagon wheel turning, its many spokes running inward to where she stood, the axis of the wheel that spun, alone with the Almighty in a stillness both temporal and eternal.

  At Christmastide her parents had come from Richmond to entreat her to return east. She’d known it wasn’t time to choose a path. She was at a crossroads, listening for direction. Until she had it, she wouldn’t take a step. She’d remained in the place where Jeremiah Ring had been the young farmer, Jem Ringbloom, with a wife called Hannah, and had known happiness; where once she had been content, none of them knowing how fragile was such happiness, yet to learn there was a joy deeper than circumstance, a joy that sprang from the seeds of trust, believing God was who and what He said He was. Good. Sovereign. Father.

  Through it all she’d watched her baby girl grow. At nearly ten months, Pippa was as tow-headed and brown-eyed as her brother, grown chunky on the verge of taking her first unaided steps.

  For Pippa, the sight—and feel and taste—of snow was as enthralling as it had been the first time she took note of it, though just now she was well-covered by the blankets in the sled, pressed close to Clare’s side, sheltered from the cold. Nestled in an old buffalo lap robe from Uncle Alphus’s adventurous long-hunter days, Clare watched the mountains and woods slip past, felt her daughter’s small head butt against her side, and tried to recall exactly when her uncle began talking of hitching his team to the wagon and driving out to the farm, their present destination.

  Had it been yesterday? Or the evening before?

  That was it. He’d broached the subject over dinner of roasted chicken and dried apple pie. She’d fed Pippa small bites of the food, half-listening to him talk of riding out to check on things as he did periodically, seeing as the farm stood vacant. It had only been a week since he’d last done so; she’d been surprised he would again. More surprised still that he’d insisted she and Pippa accompany him.

  There’d been something about the way he looked at her when he said it. Something in his gaze. Expectancy?

  Whatever it was, he’d suppressed it too quickly for her to be certain. She suspected he’d some surprise for her there—perhaps he’d made something for Pippa. She decided to play along.

  “All right, Uncle. We’ll go with you.” And in saying those words, she’d wondered, was she ready to take up residence there, alone with Pippa? Was that what the Lord had next for her?

  She didn’t know, but she would go with the idea in mind and see if He might tell her so when she stood again on that ground.

  In the end it was the sled they hitched, not the wagon, and over the miles Clare had grown lulled by the hiss of runners, the muffled fall of the teams’ hooves, the occasional thump of snow sliding from a tree bough, the passing of the last wooded mile before the farm came into view.

  It had always struck her as abrupt, that falling away of trees as the track emerged from the wood—even in winter for the pines were densely spaced. The farmhouse would appear ahead, two-storied and whitewashed, the barn and outbuildings set amidst rolling pasture and fallow field.

  Before the wood opened, she glanced at her uncle. He’d fallen silent over the last stretch.

  “It’s only been a week since you’ve been out here,” she said, breath clouding briefly before vanishing in the wind of their passage. “Planning to give up your mill and turn farmer again?”

  Uncle Alphus seemed to be trying to hide a smile. “Never crossed my mind, my girl. I’ve wondered whether you might.”

  She wasn’t ready to admit her mind was circling the notion.

  “Are you eager to have me and Pippa out from underfoot? Perh
aps coming down with a case of the wanderlust after all these years?” When Uncle Alphus looked at her half-guiltily, half-startled, she laughed. “You’ve mentioned that Watauga Association at least a dozen times since Christmas, Uncle. I’ve expected you to come home from the mill one of these days to say you’ve sold it and the farm and are heading west again.”

  He’d told her in some detail about the settlements beyond the mountains to the south. Apparently he’d met men from that region during Lord Dunmore’s campaign. It sounded as though another colony was going to be formed, or had been.

  It wasn’t likely to be a British colony, the way things were going. Spanish, perhaps. Or maybe American?

  “I reckon old age isn’t a cure for itching feet, after all,” Uncle Alphus said as he guided the horses around a fallen limb.

  “You aren’t old!” Clare protested. “But I did wonder if perhaps you wanted me and Pippa to come along with you.”

  “That would be for you to decide, Clare, if the time should come. But I don’t want you following after me out of some sort of duty or obligation. You’re young and need to live your life, not mine.”

  Clare gazed ahead down the snowy track bending away through the pinewood, blinking away tears the cold air stung from her eyes. They’d lingered at Fort Gower until the fifth of November, the officers who’d served under Lord Dunmore discussing the conflict with the Crown and, agreeing upon their sentiments, writing up a statement that was published in the Virginia Gazette, to the effect that if there was war with Great Britain, then the Americans would have an army. Having fought together as colonial militia on the frontier, they’d learned they needn’t go in awe of men in red coats.

  Live your life.

  Where would that life be lived? What would be the shape of it?

  Exceeding, abundantly, above all that she could ask or imagine.

  The fragment of promise from the Scripture slid through her mind as the sled emerged from the wood, the view of the farmstead opening up in that sudden way it had. She knew at once that something about the scene was wrong.