by Lori Benton
I have written to Father concerning his Worries over who will step into Sir William’s shoes…or Moccasins, as the case may be. I doubt it shall be his son, Sir John, who—if what Father writes is true—seems little inclined for the Position, lacking even a scrap of his father’s Diplomacy or Empathy with the needs of the savages. Nor Joseph Brant, who Father seems to think grasps Sir William’s vision and might make a passable Superintendent of Indian Affairs if he was not, alas, an Indian. I suppose that leaves Colonel Guy Johnson, Sir William’s nephew, to maintain the Covenant Chain and, it is to be hoped, keep the savages neutral in the event of Hostilities…
Two Hawks lowered the letter and stared unseeing along the draw. It was no new thing to hear himself described a savage. Even Kirkland used the word in his letters, alongside such words as tawny brethren. But this was his own brother calling him so.
His brother thought like a white man. In all ways but one, he was a white man.
The thought made his belly roil. It was wrong that a son of the People didn’t know what he was, that his mind had been formed by living among whites. Resentment against the man Anna Catherine called Papa surged up as it hadn’t done in years. It coiled like poisonous vines around his tongue and set it in motion.
“William writes of who will take Warraghiyagey’s place and hold the ends of the Covenant Chain between our peoples. But it is not as simple as another man like Warraghiyagey—if one exists—keeping the nations from taking sides in this quarrel brewing between the English father and his children. Not all Haudenosaunee will hold to what the British tell us, even for the sake of Sir William’s memory. There are other men, like Kirkland, who say the king has treated his children as no father should and it is time for the children to stand on their own. He tells us his friends in the east prepare for war.”
Anna Catherine was no longer picking berries. She stood a few paces off, waist-deep in the shrubs, looking pale and pinched. “Papa and Mr. Doyle and Captain Lang talk about these things. And William. Now you too. Do you think war is coming?”
“Many of my people see its black birds circling.”
He regretted the harshness of those words, seeing her slender neck work as she swallowed. “And your people would fight in it?”
“If it comes to choosing sides,” he said, striving to conceal his emotion, “not all will go with the British. The Onyota’a:ka will probably listen to Kirkland, the Kanten kehá:ka will listen to Brant, and that makes me think there can be no consensus between all the nations over what to do if war comes. We will divide like the whites and turn on each other as enemies. As it was long ago, before the Great Binding Law was given and brought us peace.”
Anna Catherine’s eyes were round with the enormity of what he’d said. “Jonathan…could it truly come to that?”
Her use of his Christian name filled him with conflicting feelings—pleasure, longing, confusion. The warm air seemed to press on him, making it hard to breathe, as if a thunderstorm was gathering over their heads. But no cloud marred the summer sky. No black bird of war.
He didn’t want to talk about such things anymore. He folded his brother’s letter. “Put this away now.”
She waded through the bushes and took the letter, searching his face. “You haven’t finished.”
“Later.” He took the quiver and bow case from around his neck as she slipped the letter through the slit in her skirt. “Let us rest from words—and berries. Show me whether your shooting has improved as much as my reading.”
“I have my answer,” Two Hawks said, plainly striving not to laugh outright as they tramped through brush to find the arrow she’d shot wildly off among the trees.
“I haven’t practiced. I haven’t a bow and—there it is.” Anna pointed to the arrow’s feathered shaft bristling just short of a clump of rhododendron.
Two Hawks strode ahead, reaching it first. “I can make a bow for you. One better suited.”
She bit her lip as he straightened, arrow knocked in the bowstring, resting against his bare thigh. The sight of him was distracting; it was hard to keep thinking of words to say when she wanted simply to look at him. “I’d like that, but how would I explain to Papa and the Doyles where I came by it? I should have to hide it in a tree stump.” Unless he agreed to come to the house and…
She didn’t finish the thought. It puzzled her that after so many years he still refused to make Papa’s acquaintance. Knowing he would evade the question if she asked, she said, “I’d like to see you take care of a woman in her childbed.”
Two Hawks spoke with a smug self-assurance. “That will never happen.”
“And why is that?”
“I am a man.” Oneida women, Two Hawks explained, retreated to a lodge at the edge of town to give birth, with only women to help, and remained there for days after the baby was born. “Until the bleeding stops.”
Mildly disconcerted that he knew about such bleeding, Anna wrinkled her nose. “I shouldn’t like to leave my home to give birth. I’d rather be in my own room, with my things around me. And Lydia. And Mrs. Doyle.”
Two Hawks’s eyes gleamed with humor and something deeper. “The women of my people see it as a time of rest from the fields and cook-fires…and from their husbands.”
Anna’s cheeks flamed as though the sun had burned them. What would Mrs. Doyle, or Lydia, think of her discussing such a delicate subject with a young man—a barely clothed one perfectly at ease in talking about it? She tried not to look at the bronzed planes of his chest, gleaming in the sun, but her face burned the more for wanting to look.
Perhaps he sensed her discomfort, for he raised the bow, the arrow still set in the string, only now she was mesmerized by the long muscles of his arms and the round muscles of his shoulders, the way his skin moved across them, supple and firm, as he drew back the bowstring twice as far as she’d ever managed. His hands were steady, his features fixed like an eagle sighting prey. The tension of the drawn bow seemed a part of him, seemed to pass from him to her, until she felt poised like the arrow, trembling on the verge of being cast far and fast by the strength of those sinewy hands.
Had he meant to kiss her before, in the pines? What would it have meant to him had she let him? That she was his woman? His wife? Would he have expected her to leave her life, go back with him to Kanowalohale and tend his cook-fire, share his bed, birth his babies at the edge of the village?
I would do it. If he wanted me, I would do that for him. My heart is that arrow, bound to fly where he aims it…
“There. Between those hickories. See the clump of sumac?”
His question snapped her free of the spell of his taut muscles, the drawn bow, the heat and power of him. Her heart wasn’t the arrow. She wasn’t his woman—or anyone else’s—and she was supremely glad he was too busy sighting for his shot to have looked at her while she was thinking such outrageous things. “Sumac? I barely see it. You can shoot that far?”
In answer to her breathless query, he released the arrow, which arced past the hickories and disappeared among the far-off sumac. He glanced down at her, mouth slanted in a grin of satisfaction. The sight sent an arrow of another sort arcing low through her belly, a shivering ache and a warming pleasure that collided and spun her thoughts, but because he looked so smug she blurted, “Race you to it!” and sprinted for the sumac, leaving the berry basket and her confusion behind.
She glanced back to see him sling his rifle into a carrying grip and come leaping like a deer after her, bow clenched in his other hand. She strained with all her might to reach the sumac first, barely aware of a thrashing in the brush ahead, beyond the hickory trees.
Two Hawks’s arm snaked hard around her ribs and jerked her off her feet. They stumbled sideways, scattering nuts and twigs and the bow that went skittering away through leaves. Two Hawks slammed against a hickory trunk, cradling her against his heaving chest, still clutching his rifle.
She struggled for breath, started to gasp out, “That was cheat—” but his
fingers came around her mouth, cutting off her words, as out of the sumac a dozen paces away burst a massive, black-furred bear, writhing and twisting on itself to reach the arrow bristling from its haunch.
Stepping away from the tree, Two Hawks thrust her behind him. He raised the rifle but didn’t fire. The arrow had barely wounded the bear, having lost its impetus before it struck. A swipe of a paw dislodged it. Then the bear swung its gaze toward them. With nothing between but a few yards of open ground, the force of its presence was immense and terrifying. Facing them on all fours, it grunted deep in its throat.
Time seemed to slow, catching Anna and Two Hawks and the bear in some suspended pocket where every thunderous heartbeat was a suffocating eternity, every breath an endless gasp. They were going to die—unless Two Hawks took his shot—and thus she gaped in horrified disbelief as he lowered the rifle, pointing its muzzle at the sky and, instead of shooting the bear, spoke to it.
His voice was calm, reasoning, yet Anna’s stunned mind could make no sense of his words. She caught the name for bear—ohkwa:lí. That was all. Her heart beat like the wings of a trapped bird. Her gaze fixed on the bear’s small eyes, every instinct screaming run.
She couldn’t move.
Two Hawks stopped talking. The bear’s black nostrils flared, smelling them. It gave another grunt, then heaved its bulk sideways, crashing back into the sumac scrub.
Anna’s knees banged together as the sumac shivered and stilled. The sound of the bear’s passage faded. She felt a squeeze on her fingers and looked down. She was gripping Two Hawks’s hand with all her might. She looked up to find him grinning as though what had just transpired left him filled with awe. Not the sheer terror gripping her in its maw.
She burst into tears.
Two Hawks must have set down his rifle and pulled her against him, or maybe she flung herself at him. She didn’t know, only that she was in his arms, muffling her sobs against his salty skin. After a time, the steady rhythm of the heart beneath her cheek calmed her. Two Hawks had a hand on her back, his other arm curved around her waist. It was stifling hot, but…oh, it was blissful comfort.
“It is gone.” He sounded as if he’d been saying those words for some time. She felt his lips press against the top of her head. Her cap had gone missing, her braid come unpinned, hanging heavy against her back. Her cheek was slick with sweat where it touched his chest. She was drenched from running, and from fear, but didn’t want to stop holding him. Didn’t want to face what had just happened.
“Wha—what did you say to make it go?”
She felt his chest move with laughter. “No one makes ohkwa:lí go or do what he does not want to do. You trick him or ask nicely. I told this one I was sorry my arrow hit him, that I was glad I had not hurt him badly, that I did not mean to hunt him today. I asked him to forgive me and go in peace and let us do the same.”
Anna marveled. How could he have had the presence of mind to stand before that angry, injured bear and say such things? “Weren’t you afraid?”
“Not for myself. But beneath the words I was saying to ohkwa:lí, I was praying to Heavenly Father. I did not want you to be hurt because I did a foolish thing in shooting an arrow farther than I could see to make you think much of me.”
Anna felt a shudder go through him. It brought on a fresh eruption of tears, and she cried against his chest. “I would have run smack into that bear if you hadn’t caught me. I was sure—sure I was about—to die!”
Two Hawks put her from him, far enough to look into her eyes. “Anna Catherine, do you not know Creator has us in His hand? Nothing can separate us from Him. Not even death.”
Anna shook her head. “I don’t think I know God the way you do.” It was a frightful thing to admit, as terrifying in its way as that bear coming out of the sumac. “How are you so certain about God—and death? About everything?”
There was a look in his eyes of pain, almost anguish. Then it was gone, replaced by tenderness. “I am not certain about even most things. But I know Heavenly Father is with me because I asked Him to be. I have the blood of Jesus covering me.”
“The red blanket of His goodness?” She surprised herself, recalling those words of Stone Thrower’s, spoken long ago.
Two Hawks smiled his broad, beautiful smile. “Yes, covering all my sin. And when Heavenly Father looks at me, what do you think He sees?”
“The goodness?”
“His own goodness, yes. The blood of His Son, who died in our place so we can live forever with Him, after we pass from this life—when that day comes.” But not today, his eyes reassured her.
She closed hers. “That’s what I want.”
He waited until she opened her eyes, and what she saw in his gaze left her feeling as though his arms were still around her. His arms and, strangely, Papa’s too. Was that what God’s arms felt like? Like the arms of a man who was friend and father and…maybe lover, all in one?
“Pray with me,” Two Hawks said. “We will settle this for you. You need not walk your path another day in fear. Not of bears, or war, or men like Warraghiyagey dying and leaving none to take their place.” His brows tightened. There was something going on inside him too, a wrestling his words to her had stirred. “Whatever may come, we do not have to fear.”
He knelt beneath the hickory, brushed away the nuts and twigs on the ground before him, and reached for her hand. “Will you pray?”
He might have been on his knees asking her to marry him, if that was a thing Oneidas did. Then it dashed across her mind that what he was asking would link them forever, in a different way.
Breathless with the intimacy of it, Anna put her hand in his and knelt.
24
Harvest Moon 1775
Lying wakeful on his sleeping bench, Two Hawks listened to the rain outside, pounding the earth, drumming on the roof of his mother’s lodge, muffling the murmurs across the dying fire. These he paid little mind to until he caught the name his parents still used when referring to his brother. He-Is-Taken.
It was no surprise William was heavy on their minds. Just three days ago, Two Hawks had returned from seeing Anna Catherine again, and told them what he learned from her, that it would not be many more seasons before William was done with Oxford. Then he would return to them.
“What will we do then?” his mother asked his father in the dark of the lodge. It was a question everyone was asking these days—not because of Two Hawks’s brother; because blood had been spilled at a place called Bunker Hill, and the birds of war wheeled over the land for all who had eyes to see.
Back in spring, Samuel Kirkland had been removed as their missionary by Colonel Guy Johnson, who resented Kirkland’s loyalty to the new Congress of the colonials and threatened him should he return to Kanowalohale. Though Colonel Johnson had since fled to Canada, the Congress Kirkland supported kept him traveling far and wide to councils and gatherings. Now, when they most needed guidance, when staying neutral in this conflict between the colonials and their king was becoming hard to do, when some prominent Oneidas, like the war chief at Oriska Town, Honyery Doxtader, had made their choice and joined up with the farmer-soldiers of a militia chief called Nicholas Herkimer, putting their names on his papers, promising to scout for the Americans. Now, when it seemed their prayers about William might soon be answered.
Two Hawks eased himself over on his bench and stared at the cook-fire embers, thinking about those Oneidas who’d agreed to be scouts, feeling his own blood stir in answer to that call. But it wasn’t himself acting as scout he saw by the embers’ glow. It was Anna Catherine, filling his head and heart.
Looking back, Two Hawks knew he’d loved her long before he understood what could exist between a man and woman—like it was between his parents, a bond so strong it had weathered grief and separation, disappointment, blame, hurt. A thing tempered now like pounded iron. Perhaps he’d loved her since that first time he saw her bounding toward him across the clearing, hair streaming behind her, fleeing the pain of
losing William. He’d known for certain he loved her since the day more than a year past when he shot the bear and she wept in his arms.
“Bear’s Heart.” He’d spoken the name over her as they rose from praying, seeing those green-brown eyes of hers luminous with tears and joy and question. “When an Oneida goes under the water,” he’d explained, “he gets a new name. A Christian name. You should have a new name.”
“But I haven’t been baptized,” she’d said. “Not yet.”
“You were baptized in courage today. You have a bear’s heart now.” She’d smiled at him, and he’d thought his heart would burst with joy.
His heart still rejoiced that Heavenly Father let him be the one to put her hand in His, and since that day the sun hadn’t moved a finger’s length across the sky without his thinking of her, longing for her with as much anguish as joy.
He was feeling that anguish now, for across the whispering embers his father wasn’t talking of love but vengeance, how he still struggled with the need of it. How the dream of killing Reginald Aubrey still ruled his heart in the night.
Two Hawks recalled, all too painfully, the last time it had done so. His father’s inarticulate shouting, his mother’s calming voice, his own frantic heart slowing as he stared into the lodge’s shadows, realizing it was the dream again. His parents’ voices:
“What about the white beads? If you would only—”
“No.”
“If you buried them when you left us—dig them up now.”
Two Hawks had waited, breath held, only to hear his father’s choked reply, “I cannot!” and the sound of him struggling out of the furs, stumbling out of the lodge into the night.
That big warrior who once frightened and embittered Two Hawks with his drunkenness and anger, but filled his chest now with pride for how he’d let Creator remake him, had wept over his struggle with those old dark impulses and the dream that would not release him. He was a warrior fighting an unseen battle.
