by Lori Benton
During the swelter of early July, Anna found her thoughts straying to that council, wondering if Two Hawks or Stone Thrower was in attendance. Wondering would Sir William find the force of will and eloquence to keep the Six Nations peaceful and settle the fearful ripples flowing eastward from the Ohio, threatening to engulf them.
On the muggy afternoon she and Lydia arrived at the Binne Kill, tired but elated after a morning spent ushering Schenectady’s newest resident into his mother’s welcoming arms, Captain Lang and his crew were just returned from German Flatts. They came with bundled deerskins. And news.
“…Seneca chiefs and most of the rest of ’em flat-out told Johnson the Stanwix Treaty back in ’68 was rubbish. The boundaries set betwixt their hunting ground and settlement land were never honored, and if the friends of the English—meaning themselves—were treated with such contempt, how should they believe anything Johnson promised them on the king’s behalf?”
Sam Reagan was relating the news of the council at Johnson Hall to Papa, who’d come out onto the quay, shirtsleeves dusted in wood shavings, to greet his returning crewmen. Captain Lang watched the cargo being unloaded, but his glance, when he spared it, glittered with amusement at Sam’s blatant sense of drama.
Anna was about to announce their presence when Lydia put a hand to her arm. “Let’s hear this out.”
Other men—boatmen, traders, town merchants—drew near in twos and threes to hear as well.
“What it came down to,” Sam told his swelling audience, “was Johnson telling the chiefs to keep their little brothers the Shawnees and Mingos under control, and the chiefs telling Johnson to keep his settlers under control, and neither admitting both demands were beyond anyone’s control.”
Two years of river work had filled Sam out in the shoulders and bleached his tailed hair to flaxen. Face sheened with sweat in the high sun, he looked past the ring of male listeners and caught her gaze. Beneath her wide straw bonnet, a dew sprang up across her brow. Though she’d long since realized nothing of a serious nature lay behind Sam’s occasional flirtations, there was a glint at the back of those lively hazel eyes she didn’t quite trust.
“Finally, this very morn,” he said, all presage and portent, “for you know there’s always feasting and smoking and then more feasting at these Indian councils before they get down to business—this very morn Johnson stood up to speak again and collapsed under that arbor—had to be supported inside the house to rest.”
“Collapsed?” The shock on Papa’s sweating face mirrored that of every man within earshot.
“How fairs Johnson now?” someone inquired. “Does the council proceed?”
“It hardly could,” Sam Reagan replied, nimbly recapturing attention as he turned to address the questioner. “Not with Sir William gone on to glory.”
“Náhte’ asilu…lots of berries?” Anna asked, raising the basket she carried on her arm, half-full of the blueberries ripening over the slopes. How would you say lots of berries?
She and Two Hawks had reached the chestnut beneath which she’d last spoken to his father, over a year ago. The shade was welcome for the coolness it afforded. Sweltering July had given way to sweltering August. Two Hawks had discarded his shirt back at the clearing and wore only breechclout, moccasins, and the weapons he was never without, while she perspired beneath shift, stays, stockings, cap, gown, and petticoat. It hardly seemed fair.
“Yotahyú:ni,” Two Hawks replied, making a grab for the berry basket, which she whisked out of reach. He’d learned to speak English well, but until recently she’d learned very little of his language. She was rectifying that now.
“Náhte’ asilu…” Her gaze fell on the weapons slung at his back. “Bow?”
“A’ʌ:ná.”
“Náhte’ asilu…arrow?”
“Kayu:kwíle’.”
“Knife?”
“Ashale’.” Two Hawks grabbed for the basket again. Again she snatched it from his grasp.
“Náhte’ asilu…greedy boy?”
Two Hawks took exception to that. “I am not a boy. I am as many summers as you,” he added, inordinately pleased that for the next two months they would both be seventeen.
“Only till October. Then I’ll be your elder again and you’ll have to mind what I say.”
“But for now I need not?” Two Hawks grinned down at her, dark eyes teasing in the forest gloom.
“That depends.”
“On what?” He snatched a berry from the basket and popped it into his mouth, too quick this time to prevent.
“On whether you wish to see me again after today.” He made another try for a berry, but she moved too quickly, heading for the thicket spreading up the slope beyond the chestnut. “You’re supposed to put them in the basket, not take them out.”
“I thought Creator made them to go into the mouths of His children.”
“They will, eventually. Mrs. Doyle wants these for pies.”
Two Hawks followed her into the berry thicket, picking as diligently as she, though he ate as many berries as he added to her basket. Greedy boy.
When Anna glanced at him again, Two Hawks said, “I will always mind what you say. That is what a wise man does. He listens to his sisters, his mother, his aunts.”
Thinking he still teased, she narrowed her eyes. “Truly?”
“Only a fool fails to heed the women of his clan. It is the women who choose which men will lead, after all.”
Intrigued, she asked, “What clan are you?”
“A’no:wál. Turtle Clan. There is also Wolf and Bear. When I marry, it will be a woman from one of those clans or maybe…” He glanced at her, then looked at his hands, busy among leafy stems. “Just not someone who is Turtle Clan. The women of that clan, my mother’s clan, are counted as sisters.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. All.”
She wasn’t Turtle Clan. Had he meant to include her in the category of women he could marry? Flushed at the very notion—hastily dismissing it—Anna crouched to reach the berries on a low shrub, thinking about his words concerning Oneida women, how they were the ones to choose their leaders. To her knowing, there was no English colony in which women had a say in who became their governors, or part of this new thing happening now, Congress.
She stood, taking up the basket to move to another thicket where sunlight fell in patches and insects danced like motes in the slanting beams. “It’s not so among us. The part about men listening to women. Not generally.”
Two Hawks came up the slope behind her. “I know.”
“You do?” He stood in sunlight, brows drawn against the glare. Sweat made a sheen across his brow. It was impossible not to admire him, standing there bare-chested. “Do you know many white women…besides me?”
“The wife of Kirkland lived among us for a time. That is mostly how I know, from watching her—them. I did not watch her.” His color deepened. “I saw how they were when I happened to see them.”
Anna stifled a giggle at the discomfort he’d caused himself, not wanting her to think he’d spied on Mrs. Kirkland. “I didn’t know Reverend Kirkland had a wife.” She hesitated, uncertain how he would interpret her next question. “You said she used to live among you. Did she not like living in Kanowalohale?”
Two Hawks, back to picking berries, explained that Mrs. Kirkland had returned to the place Kirkland came from, back east, because of the unrest with the Ohio tribes and Sir William Johnson’s death. “My mother was sad to see her go.”
“Good Voice,” Anna said. She pictured his mother, pretty and brown-skinned, with the same melting dark eyes of her son, who’d turned his attention to the bushes, the look on his face guarded. Or was it preoccupied? Though she’d grown almost as comfortable with him as she’d once been with William, there was much about Two Hawks she didn’t fathom. Not like William, whose every thought had been as graspable as her own, and freely shared—still shared in his letters. She had a new letter in her pocket, a troubling one she mea
nt to share with Two Hawks when the berry picking was done.
Thinking about William, the nearest to a brother she’d ever had, made her break the insect-humming quiet. “Am I like a sister to you then, that you intend to mind what I say?”
The stillness behind her made her turn. Two Hawks was looking at her with an arresting intensity. “Is that what you want to be? My sister?”
She opened her mouth to reply, then clamped it shut as a snatch of another conversation wafted to them on the breeze, muffled by distance. Footsteps were coming through the wood. Alarm sang through her.
Two Hawks flung out his hand. Then she was following him up the slope and into the nearest pine thicket. There was a declivity at its center where the hillside dipped behind a stone outcrop. They hunkered behind the stone, hemmed by poking branches. The tang of resin filled Anna’s nose. She strained to listen, heart banging as footsteps came crackling through the berry shrubs. Voices resolved into words, though the stone that hid them prevented her seeing who they belonged to.
“This patch looks picked over.”
“We’re near the Aubrey farm. Anna Doyle will have been over this slope.”
She recognized the voices—their neighbors to the south. A girl near her own age and a younger brother. Had she been alone, Anna would have welcomed them to pick with her.
That was when she realized her blunder. Two Hawks, huddled close at her back, must have felt her tensing. His whisper brushed her ear. “What is it?”
She swiveled her head to look at him. With his face inches from hers, she mouthed, the basket. He squeezed her arm. The heat of his hand seared through her sleeve. What would her neighbors think if they came across the basket abandoned on the slope?
“Come on, Sissy. It’s too hot for this. Let’s go to the river.”
Anna waited for their footsteps to diminish, breathing out relief that her basket had gone unspotted.
Something prickly dropped onto the back of her neck. Hoping it was pine straw and not a spider, she raised her shoulders to dislodge it, but still it prickled.
Two Hawks brushed whatever it was away. The touch, so gentle it almost felt like a feathery kiss, raised gooseflesh down her arms.
Sweat sprang up fresh at every point their bodies touched.
The voices of her neighbors faded. Two Hawks’s hand was on her shoulder, heavy and hot. “They are gone,” he said in that soft baritone that still could catch her by surprise. It was deeper than ever just now, husky even, and so near her ear it made her shiver again, despite the heat.
Turning to face him, she lost her balance on the slope. His arm snaked around her and held her fast. Then it tightened, pulling her in to him. Grabbing for the rock behind which they’d hid, she used it to scramble to her feet.
She made as much racket as a moose getting out of the pines, snapping dead twigs, snagging her cap, having to retrieve it from the needled limbs. She was struggling to fit it back over her braided hair, tucking up sweaty strands as she reached the basket, before she heard Two Hawks coming more quietly behind her.
“I know another place to pick. Away from the river.” She led the way up and over the slope, her heart skipping too hurriedly for the climb to account for.
“Anna Catherine?”
She pressed on, gathering her scattered composure. “It’s not far.”
It had been dim beneath those pines. Surely she hadn’t seen in his eyes what she thought she’d seen, when he caught and held her. He hadn’t been about to kiss her?
She didn’t know. One thing she did know; she wasn’t—and never wanted to be—his sister.
23
Two Hawks followed her up through the berry bushes, gaze roving the forest lest others catch them unawares—this place wasn’t as thinly settled as it had been—but his eyes were ever drawn back to Anna Catherine’s slender neck, to that smooth spot where the hair coiled in wisps below her cap, that place he’d briefly touched, brushing away the pine needles. Before she fled the thicket.
“I’ve a letter from William.” She’d come to a draw between low hills, choked with berry shrubs. She set the basket on a stone, fished the letter from her pocket, and all but thrust it at him. Two Hawks took the letter, careful to prevent his fingers brushing hers, not liking that what he’d nearly done under the pines had upset her. Had she not felt it too, with their bodies touching, that stab of wanting?
“Why don’t you sit here and read?” She took her basket off the stone. “I shan’t be long.”
Almost he decided to go, to start for Kanowalohale without reading his brother’s words. But he didn’t want to leave her in the woods so far from her people. Or with this unsettledness between them.
He unfolded the creased pages, watching Anna Catherine, slender and graceful as a doe among the bushes, wishing he could give her words she would take into her heart and cherish as she did his brother’s. What would she think of William if she knew the truth? What would she think of him?
He scanned the letter’s first line, smiling faintly at Anna Catherine’s recent determination to learn his language as he had hers, a thing that pleased him. Then he read,
Dear Anna,
I am matriculated! Where to begin? With my Tutor, I suppose. He is called Mr. Haviland. I think we shall get on tolerably for he is not so very old and seems to take a fatherly sort of interest in the Freshmen in his charge. Next of importance is my Room. I should say Rooms, for I have obtained two of them, a bedchamber, admittedly cramped, and a sitting room where I shall study and, once I’ve collected a few, entertain Friends. The furnishings are sparse, but my Allowance (from the Estate, though it is Mr. Haviland who doles it out) shall stretch to adding what is lacking if I am prudent. Best of all my Little Kingdom is neither stuffed up under a garret nor buried in a cellar but is on the second floor—with a view of St. Peter’s Church, no less. A respectable Accommodation for a commoner, I am told. Yes, I am considered a commoner here. Does that sound strange to you, with your American Sensibilities? Yet do not take “commoner” to mean the lowest sort of Undergraduate. Those would be the servitors, who must work to afford tuition and the cost of College living, as well as seeing to their Studies. Above me are the Gentlemen-commoners, with the sons of the Nobility above them. A carousing, idle bunch in the main those latter, and as I do intend to learn a thing or two while mewed in Oxford, I’m just as glad to not be admitted to their Company, or their Senior Common Room.
Two Hawks looked up. Anna Catherine had moved deeper into the thicket. He rose and followed her, wading into the bushes. “He writes of this college where he studies. Have you seen such a place? Maybe in the east, in one of those big cities?”
“Philadelphia, you mean? Or New York?” She was hunkered down, picking berries low to the ground. “I’ve never been anywhere but our farm and Schenectady, and once to Albany.” She waved away a swarm of gnats, adding, “Except as a baby.”
Fort William Henry. How strange to think they had both been there as infants. His mother had not mingled with the white women at that fort after he and his brother came into the world, except for those that helped in the birthing. Had Anna Catherine’s mother been one of those? Had their mothers touched? Looked at each other?
Her voice, a sound long since rooted in his heart, came from the thicket. “Read to me while I pick.”
He shot her a wry look. “Could you not tell me all he says without looking?”
“Probably. But I’d like to hear how you’re coming along with the reading.”
Though he wished she’d denied it, she sounded more herself. He found where he had stopped reading before.
“Simply having these two small rooms to myself is heady stuff. Independence! No Mother or Mr. Davies or Cook or anyone telling me how to come and go—except the bells for morning Chapel and dinner of an afternoon, which reminds me to mention that we must all turn out at dinner with our hair most grievously coiffured, powdered, AND curled, else shorn and wigged out, or suffer the consternation of our Heads
of House. Barbers are provided for this Necessity, though a Neighbor across the stair is passing good at arranging hair. You would laugh to see me, though I confess I am not sure how long I may bear with the Practice before I dispense with powder and tail my hair in its Primitive State and shock the entire Hall.”
Two Hawks raised his head to ask what his brother meant about hair and heads in houses, but Anna Catherine spoke first. “Your reading is much improved.”
Pride didn’t let him admit that half his brother’s words were beyond his understanding. “I spent the winter again studying. I am reading a book one of Kirkland’s assistants loaned me. The Vicar of Wakefield.”
Anna Catherine looked at him, eyes bright with surprise. “Papa has a copy. When you’re finished, you must tell me what you think of it. I’ve yet to read it.”
Two Hawks stared at the letter, not seeing the words for his gladness. She expected there to be another meeting between them. He hadn’t disgusted her with his embrace.
He wished he dared to try it again.
But what was he thinking? The issue of a stolen brother between them aside, they lived in different worlds, ones that—if what they were hearing in Kanowalohale was true—might soon collide in open conflict again, with two sides of white men killing each other for the Haudenosaunee to choose between, with no Warraghiyagey to keep the Covenant Chain bright and unbroken.
And what of the chain of friendship between him and Anna Catherine? He could speak her words, and she understood some of his, but did they truly understand each other? How could they, when they never met in either of their worlds but in this place between? There was so much about him she didn’t know. So much he’d kept from her.
With an ache in his chest, Two Hawks went back to reading the letter. And there was his brother, from across the water in England, writing of one of the things he’d been thinking about. As if William stood there in the berry patch speaking to him face to face.
