The Wood's Edge

by Lori Benton

  “Major? What is it?”

  Still breathing hard, he looked at the children. “Do you two run up to the house. Tell Mrs. Doyle I’ve come for Lydia.”

  They went unhappily, after Lydia hugged them and thanked them for showing her their new home. Feeling as tousled and stained as they—and caught barefoot—she faced the major. “Please, I see something’s amiss. Tell me.”

  “Lydia.” Reginald Aubrey took her by the shoulders. “Jacob came to the boatyard to tell me. I’m so very sorry.”

  His touch surprised all thought from her head. Then his words struck comprehension through her. Her mother. No. Numbness descended over her face, her lips. She couldn’t feel them as she said in a small, breathless voice, “She told me I should go…that she’d be all right. How? So quickly?”

  He offered no answers. Only a canoe to bear her home.

  Dazed and stricken, she clambered into it and stared, bewildered, when he held out her satchel, shoes, and hose, forgotten on the dock. She took them onto her lap, uncaring that a man—he of all men—had handled them. The canoe rocked as he settled behind her. He pushed off with a paddle, finding the river’s flow.

  Lydia looked steadfastly ahead, willing the river to carry them faster. “When?”

  “Two hours ago I make it. She wasn’t alone. Jacob and your father were with her.”

  “But I wasn’t!” Aching tears blurred the river, touching her lips with salt. Behind her the canoe’s paddle rested. The major’s hand fell again on her shoulder.

  “I know,” said Reginald Aubrey, who’d not only put two babies in the ground but had lost a father and hadn’t been there to comfort him in his passing. Or to be comforted. Lydia reached up to touch his hand but found no voice to say now what she hadn’t known to say then.

  “I do know,” he said and gave her shoulder a squeeze before he dipped the paddle again and sped them on.

  8

  Harvest Moon 1761

  Kanowalohale

  Gripping the hands supporting her, Good Voice bore down as pain ground through her hips and back and taut, swollen belly. With the corner of her mind not consumed with birthing the child, she asked the Master of Life to make it another son. A son to fill the void He-Is-Taken had left in the heart of his father, who was somewhere outside the birth hut getting drunk and starting to be loud about it.

  The clan women helping her cast disapproving looks toward the door hide. Good Voice knew it, though everything beyond the burning cradle of her hips felt remote, separated from her by a curtain of red.

  Between the pains, the curtain thinned. The door hide moved inward with a puff of chill breeze, and the small hand of Two Hawks, her son of four summers, who waited for this hard thing to be over.

  He should not be so near the birthing hut. Already his father was too full of trader’s rum to care for him.

  She heard Stone Thrower’s distant bellowing as one of the women, a Turtle Clan grandmother who sat in the women’s council, said to Bright Leaf, Good Voice’s aunt, “Someone should send that man farther away. He is no good for her now.”

  To which Bright Leaf muttered back, “Is that one ever good for her?”

  Good Voice felt her heart break for her husband, even as her body bled to birth his child. She took firmer grip of the women’s hands as the urge to push gathered in her thighs and back, sparing breath to say, “Do not send him away,” before she pushed, grunting through the cleaving pain. Suddenly the women were busy around her, Stone Thrower forgotten.

  Good Voice reached down. The baby’s head had crowned.

  Come, my son, and heal the pain of your father. Heal all our pain.

  Stone Thrower stopped shouting long before the morning her bleeding stopped and she emerged from the birth hut to walk to her lodge at the edge of the village on Oneida Creek, but Good Voice did not see him until later in the day, when he poked his head inside the lodge. Bloodshot eyes squinting in the dimness, he reached for something near the doorway. Their son. With a hand on the boy’s slender neck he pushed Two Hawks in ahead of him.

  Two Hawks scurried to his sleeping bench across the central fire and perched there like a wary owl, knees drawn to his chest. The marks of crying streaked his face. Good Voice wanted to gather him to her but waited, watching his father. So did Bright Leaf, who had a pot of hominy boiling over the fire. Good Voice sat up on her sleeping bench and gave her aunt an imploring look. Bright Leaf firmed her mouth and glared at Stone Thrower.

  “I would see my wife,” he said, defensive in the face of her silent rebuke. The feathers in his scalp-lock were crumpled. Grease spotted his wrinkled shirt. But he didn’t slur his words.

  Even on the day of the child’s birth, Good Voice had known his drunken shouting had been to do with his fear for her—and the memory of the terrible thing that happened at her last childbed, which he hadn’t been there to prevent. More and more often these days he tried to wash away those memories, and the guilt he carried, with trader’s rum. It didn’t seem to be working for him.

  “They tell me it was a son.” Grief made his voice ragged. The same grief that skewered her like arrows through the heart and womb.

  “It was.”

  Emotion flickered in Stone Thrower’s reddened eyes, but the lodge shadows obscured it. “He cried. I heard him.”

  He’d uttered one plaintive mewl, that tiny boy, then before the cord that bound them could be severed he’d gone back to where he’d been before, as though the world—or the mother—he was born to was too great a disappointment to bear.

  It was wrong to think so. Good Voice knew this. That one’s death was not a rejection of her. But she’d put such hope in the child. Hope that he would bring wholeness to his father, to their family. She never once thought she would lose another son, not while she was looking right at him, holding his warm, slippery flesh.

  She waited for her husband to say something more.

  Stone Thrower folded his lean-muscled legs to crouch beside her, his handsome face twisted with grief, haggard with drinking. He put his hand against her cheek. “You are well?”

  His rum breath made her belly churn, but the tender gesture brought tears rushing. She was well enough, in the way he meant, but she couldn’t say the words.

  Stone Thrower bent his brow to hers. “This was not your fault.”

  But the other was. He didn’t say it—had never said it and maybe never thought it, she couldn’t know—but as he drew back, other dark thoughts slid across his eyes, pushing out the tenderness. He was thinking of He-Is-Taken. He was curling around that pain that gnawed him with viper’s fangs and flooded his soul with venom. He was adding to it now this new loss.

  Stone Thrower’s gaze fell on Two Hawks, crouched on his sleeping bench, watching. The boy asked, nervous but hopeful, “Will we shoot arrows today, now my mother is home?”

  Her son had his first bow—a slender curve of hickory that Stone Thrower had made in the weeks before the birthing, and a quiver for his little arrows she had made from a gray fox’s pelt, the pieces laid across her belly while she sewed them. How they’d laughed together, she and her son, when the baby kicked and the little pelt moved on her belly like it still had life…

  The bow was Two Hawks’s prized possession. He was determined to master it and make his father proud.

  Stone Thrower was in no frame of mind for it now. He grunted a sound no one could mistake for anything but No, then rose and stalked out of the lodge, smacking the door hide aside as he went. The disappointment on Two Hawks’s face left her spirit folded up in grief.

  She had seen Stone Thrower like this before, when the memories grew sharp, when he couldn’t go on with things as though one of their sons wasn’t missing from their fire, their hearts. What would follow was as predictable as night after day. Stone Thrower would leave them, go off to search for He-Is-Taken, for Redcoat Aw-bree who stole him. If he managed to get beyond the village before he found another jug of rum. Either way, he was lost to her for many sleeps.


  “At least he stayed to see it through. That is something.” Bright Leaf, whose sad duty it had been to bury the dead child in the forest, pushed a lock of graying hair from her lined face as she checked the boiling hominy.

  Bright Leaf was tired, her patience thin. She had been working to glean Good Voice’s part of the fields too, while Good Voice had been confined to the birthing hut. Tomorrow she would rise and be of help. There was no babe to suckle, no new life to tend like the spark from struck flint. But there were crops to bring in and store, hides to be worked, corn to be ground. Life would go on around its circle. She would heal. And next time she would do better.

  She had sent the wrong plea to the Master of Life. Better to have asked for a living child, son or daughter, than demanding one over the other. She would not let Stone Thrower know she’d prayed such a prayer. She couldn’t bear him to know it. He might think she deserved what she got. Even though he loved her, he might have that thought, and she might see it in his eyes before he could hide it.

  “Now we will see him no more, until he crawls back stinking of vomit to tell you he is sorry and will change his ways.” Bright Leaf’s disdain filled the cabin like the stench of rotting meat. “That is what an old woman thinks—if anyone should ask.”

  “He is remembering last time, when I was in the fort,” Good Voice said in dull defense of her husband. And he is dreaming again. She didn’t say that. It would only make her aunt more ill-at-ease. But Good Voice knew. Even when the dreams didn’t make her husband thrash beside her in his sleep, or bolt upright with a war cry on his lips, there were signs. The restlessness, the drinking, the hard light in his eyes. “There is nothing to be done, and it makes him angry.”

  “When is that one not angry?” Bright Leaf countered, bending over the pot. “When he has rum he is loud and angry. When he has no rum he is silent and angry.”

  It wasn’t quite true, the bitter words her aunt pronounced. At times Good Voice glimpsed the man she loved, the kind, strong, good man she’d been eager to call husband, those years before the French and English went to war, back when the Haudenosaunee, the Longhouse People, stood strong between them, making those great a’sluni nations vie for their favor, their furs, their friendship, their warriors’ strong arms in battle. That man was still there, buried beneath the hate and grief. Few agreed with her. Some of the kutiyanéshu—the clan mothers—Bright Leaf chief among them, thought it time she put Stone Thrower’s belongings outside their lodge and tell him to go back to his mother’s Bear Clan people.

  Good Voice couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had no brothers to teach and train her son, as was their custom. With her own father and mother dead, Two Hawks and his father had only each other.

  “I will go downriver to Fort Johnson!” Stone Thrower shouted outside the lodge, startling them. “This time I will go. If anyone can help me it is Warraghiyagey. He will tell the English king to find that redcoat, make him give back my son!”

  Stone Thrower was talking to someone, not shouting to himself as he sometimes did when the dream-need was on him and no one would listen. Good Voice waited to hear who it was, gazing around the lodge at hanging strings of beans and onions, and the first dried rounds of squash, at woven storage baskets pushed under benches along the walls, at stacks of deer hides to be traded, others needing work, at the fire in the earthen floor sending up smoke to curl beneath the roof hole.

  “You might do that,” said a voice unruffled by her husband’s temper. “But will the great William Johnson give you his ear? Are you too drunk to make your words to him sensible?”

  Good Voice breathed out a sigh. It was Clear Day, her husband’s uncle—his mother’s brother—the one man who could still sway Stone Thrower with his counsel, who could curb his thirst—for liquor and vengeance—long enough to be sure he hunted for them in the months when autumn’s crops were depleted, or went to the fish camp to catch their share when that time came. Only Clear Day could shame Stone Thrower into remembering he still had a son who needed to learn what it was to be ukwehu-wé, an Indian person, a man of the People.

  Bright Leaf called Two Hawks to the fire and gave him hominy in a gourd bowl. The boy ate it with his fingers, watching the door hide.

  Good Voice watched her son. Two Hawks was a lively boy, good-natured, athletic, fond of games like snow snakes and Tewaarathon, the little-brother-of-war game played with webbed sticks and deer-hide ball. Anything that called for physical skill—most of all shooting those arrows. Yet he could make himself still and quiet too. He was a good son, rarely naughty like other boys.

  She waited until he finished eating, then beckoned him to her bench. He was no longer a baby, but sometimes he would still crawl into the blankets and snuggle close. She hoped he wanted it now.

  Two Hawks put down the bowl and came to her, mouth smeared with hominy, and cuddled beside her with a care for her sore flesh wise beyond his years. Tears still dampened his hair. Two Hawks had wanted this brother.

  “Did he look like me?” the boy asked.

  Bright Leaf looked up from the pot she still tended, brow creased as though she thought of shooing Two Hawks from the lodge to let her rest. Good Voice shook her head at her aunt. She needed this closeness as much as her son needed it. She breathed in the smell of him, his hair, his skin, and in answer to his question said, “He was not as brown as you.”

  The infant had looked as Good Voice expected her babies would look. Dark of hair, skin a shade between hers and his father’s, though still flushed pink from birth. She clenched her teeth, remembering him—separate from the oneness they had been until that moment, distinct among every other person who had lived. She’d known an instant of pure wonder and joy…

  “But there was something of you in his face.” Good Voice gazed down at Two Hawks, who Bright Leaf said was starting to look like her despite his coloring. What Bright Leaf saw was in the shape of his head and the set of his eyes. How his wide mouth angled up at the corners even when he wasn’t smiling.

  Sometimes when she looked at Two Hawks, Good Voice tried to picture him with lighter skin. She recalled thinking, even in that place underground like an animal’s den, that her firstborn would have eyes like hers, eyes Stone Thrower once told her were like the Harvest Moon sky. Did her firstborn still look white, as he had at his birth? Did the redcoat treat him kindly, or had he made of him a slave?

  Where was he?

  Good Voice drifted on the edge of sleep, while outside the lodge voices rose and fell. Sometimes Stone Thrower railed. Or complained. Or pleaded. Once, in a snarl of rage, he shouted, “I will find the redcoat and do as I have dreamed—but not before he sees I have taken back my son from him!”

  It was silence that finally roused her, to find Two Hawks napping on his bench, Bright Leaf still puttering about the lodge.

  A knock sounded on the door frame.

  “Clear Day would speak with you,” Bright Leaf said, having gone to see who wished to enter. “I told him you are tired.”

  Outside was quiet. Stone Thrower had gone. “He may come in.”

  Clear Day of the Bear Clan, her husband’s uncle, wasn’t an old man, but neither was he young. He still wore his graying hair in a scalp-lock, and his body was that of a warrior, though one past his prime. Grunting, he folded himself to sit on a mat beside her. The spotting sickness had long ago pitted his cheeks, and his features were blunter and broader than Stone Thrower’s, who took after his father’s Wolf Clan men in looks.

  Two Hawks sat up, pleased his father’s uncle had come to call. “Will you come and watch me shoot my arrows, Uncle?”

  “I would be happy to do that later,” Clear Day told him. “You must be getting good with that bow your father made.”

  Two Hawks nodded with unabashed pride.

  “He is ready to be a hunter, that one,” Good Voice said, beaming at her son.

  After food was offered and tasted, Clear Day grew sober. “I must speak with you about your husband.”


  Clear Day glanced at Bright Leaf, who took his meaning and called Two Hawks to her. “I will have him in the fields with me.”

  Two Hawks’s face fell—the fields were a woman’s place—but he brightened as he asked, “Can I take my bow?”

  Bright Leaf chuckled. “Yes, yes. Bring it. Only do not be shooting arrows at my pumpkins!”

  When they went out, Good Voice gazed at her hands in her lap, waiting for Clear Day to speak.

  “Maybe you heard what my nephew had to say to me?”

  “All of Kanowalohale heard, I think.”

  “He dreams again?”

  Good Voice nodded.

  “I thought they had stopped.”

  They had stopped, those terrible night dreams, once her belly began to grow, as if the life inside her had absorbed the darkness of its father’s spirit. Could that be what made the child unable to live in the light?

  The thought was too painful to hold under scrutiny.

  Stone Thrower hadn’t recounted those dreams for her in a long time, but she didn’t need him to. During that first year after He-Is-Taken was lost, Stone Thrower had told her how, in his dreams, he hunted for Redcoat Aw-bree, through forest and shadow. The details of the hunt were rarely ever the same, but its ending never varied. Stone Thrower stood over the redcoat, ready to kill him.

  “And our son?” she once asked him, back when she believed they must see the dream fulfilled. “Do you get him back?”

  But Stone Thrower hadn’t wanted to answer that.

  Night dreams weren’t meant to be ignored. They were the expression of a person’s true heart and deepest desires. If they could be fulfilled, they should be, else a person might not prosper in his ways. At first Stone Thrower had found warriors willing to go out with him, men of his mother’s Bear Clan, though he had no way to find the redcoat he longed to kill, no notion where to look for their lost son.

  After a time the other warriors grew weary of his obsession with his dream, until now he couldn’t find a single one to go with him on his fruitless searches eastward. They hunted with him, fished with him, let him play Tewaarathon, but they had drawn back from him in their hearts about the dreams. So Stone Thrower had begun looking elsewhere to see them fulfilled, their son restored.