Wild Indigo

by Judith Stanton

  Still, the beast had not hurt her. Wolves, though rumored to be about, had never attacked this community or raided its stores. He let his eyes range over her determined, pretty face.

  “I need your help.”

  Her sweet plea cascaded over him. He rubbed his neck and reconsidered. It mattered to her enough to risk her reputation. “Very well, then. I will care for it.”

  “In the day?” she asked cautiously.

  “Day and night.” He gave her a stern look. “You’re not to go out. What does it need?”

  “Food, scraps, meat. But don’t try to touch her. Not until she’s eaten. She’s very shy.” Her gaze strayed toward his daughter. “Like someone else we know.” Retha whirled to go, then whipped back. Clasping his forearm with surprisingly strong fingers, she whispered, “You’ll go, you’ll really do it?”

  He shook his head even as he said yes, even as the imprint of her hand burned through his linen work shirt, through the coat he wore to the service. He swallowed hard.

  Her amber eyes were lively again. “The larder’s out of marrow bones, but she loves marrow bones.”

  And Retha was gone. Jacob felt as he had one day with a team of runaway horses, graceless and exhilarated. As effortlessly as she had touched his little girl, Retha had spun him off his ordered path. A man in his position had no business meeting a woman in the moonlight and then pledging to undertake wild missions for her by day and by night.

  It was madness on his part. On hers, simple need.

  No, trust. She had turned to him, he realized. She had selected him as the only man that she could trust.

  A band of hope squeezed his heart.

  She was wilder, bolder, and, strangely, kinder than he had imagined. For months the town’s wives and mothers and teachers had struggled to help his children, to no avail. Kneeling, she made friends with his daughter in a trice. Just as, no doubt, she befriended that beast of hers.

  Intrigued in spite of himself and feeling not a little reckless, he hoped some earnest prayers would turn his luck with the lot.

  Rushed, dusty, and late, Jacob came to the Elders’ weekly meeting straight from his work at Steiner’s Mill. He knew he and his fellow Elders had a full agenda, for with the war, worldly matters had spilled over into the group’s spiritual concerns. He also knew that Brother Marshall eschewed delay.

  “You have had a busy week, Brother Blum.” Marshall neither rose nor looked up from his notes. “Our meeting has commenced without you. We have confirmed the addition of three townsmen to the night watch in response to rumors of a raid. If you have no objection.”

  Brother Marshall would not countenance objection, but Jacob had one. He crossed the room, raising a cloud of dust as he swatted his breeches.

  “Three is excessive. Our community has barely seventy brothers. With both armies demanding our trade, our duties have stretched every man to his limit.”

  Marshall held his stern expression, and Brother Schopp mirrored it. Sisters Elisabeth Marshall and Rosina Krause looked on with mild concern.

  Taking a moment to formulate a more diplomatic answer, Jacob stroked the back of his chair, its beeswax finish soft as skin. Woman’s skin. He curled his fingers into a fist. He had to get to the business at hand.

  But a woman, he thought wryly, was the business at hand.

  “The four of you have voted on this, I take it.”

  “We have.” Marshall raised one drooped eyebrow, as if Jacob’s comment constituted a rebellion.

  “I support the Board’s decision,” Jacob said at last. “So long as every man consents to the burden he will incur.”

  “They do,” Marshall said brusquely, referring again to his notes. “Before you arrived, Brother Schopp reported on the raid on Bethabara. Colonel Williams’s regular army took a wagon, supplies, and one hundred twenty gallons of their good brandy.”

  Some in Salem were in spasms of fear that they too would be raided, Jacob knew, despite his negotiations in these last difficult months to forestall such a raid by either army.

  “They were in retreat. They could have done more harm than that,” Jacob said flatly, finally seating himself.

  His fellow Elders, men and women alike, seemed tense. They could not be so tense as he, waiting for this meeting to address the subject that mattered most to him.

  “I fear they will do worse, Brother Blum, and closer to home,” Sister Marshall said anxiously.

  “I have not found Continental leaders averse to reason,” Jacob reassured her, his gaze falling on the wooden lot bowl at her elbow. His stomach knotted.

  He wanted this drawing of the lot to be over and done.

  At the same time, he did not. All week he had seen Retha only during evening service. There he had not been able to penetrate her bright resolve. It kept her sitting, arrow-straight and primly regulated, amidst the Single Sisters, through the singing of chorales.

  All week too, the task of feeding her wolf filled him with ever greater misgivings. Was he keeping her from going astray or leading her into deeper disobedience? Soon, however, the beast would be well, making her disobedience as well as his contribution to it moot. He had tried to see her disregard for rules as a one-time, well-meant effort to rescue a poor suffering beast. He held to a hope that she would transfer her concern for one wild thing to his unruly children.

  Brother Marshall tapped his quill pen. Its feather fluttered like a nervous bird. “We await your reports on the Friedlanders, the watch house, and Steiner’s Mill.”

  Jacob fixed his gaze on his packet of reports and tried to think. His vision blurred. One reed in that lot bowl could change his life, his family’s life. Almost objectively, he noted that his heartbeat sped up at the thought.

  He wanted this bride with a desire he had not felt when the three previous lots were drawn.

  “Report, Brother Blum,” Marshall said.

  Jacob lifted his gaze from the lot bowl.

  Marshall smiled slightly. “We shall not forget your solemnities.”

  Blood heated Jacob’s face. He paged through his ledger to conceal his thoughts and prepare for the rest of the meeting. He had only to report decisions that his committee had already made.

  “The, um, watch house…” He found a sheet of calculations. “’Tis complete, but the balance is not yet paid to Gottlieb Vogler.”

  “How much is owing still?” Philip Schopp asked officiously. He always opposed dealing with Vogler, a disassociated Moravian but a respectable man.

  “Half the cost of Vogler’s logs. But the amount is not the question,” Jacob said firmly. “Rather, the manner of payment.”

  “He scorned currency?”

  Jacob prayed for patience. With the war, the new Continental government’s currency was unstable. “Vogler should not accept currency, nor should we expect him to. We should pay in hides, salt, or harvest stores—”

  Marshall and Schopp fell to a heated discussion of which would be less burdensome to the town and more fair to its vendor. Hides were everywhere in good supply, but salt was hard to come by, and harvest was some weeks away.

  Jacob halted their discussion. “He is willing to take payment after harvest.”

  “I presume you did not promise that,” Marshall said.

  “We discussed it.”

  “Why bring the matter before us?” Schopp asked.

  Jacob slowed his answer. “As head of the Supervisory Committee, negotiating price is my prerogative. But the Board of Elders approves the manner of payment. Hides or salt or after harvest. Which one we accept is up to us.”

  “Not if you have given him expectations,” Schopp said.

  “If the drought does not destroy our crops, I should think Brother Vogler and his bride would prefer the food,” Rosina Krause interrupted mildly.

  “He is no longer Brother Vogler,” Schopp argued.

  “To some of us he is,” she said.

  “’Tis settled then,” Jacob said. “Food, after harvest. As to the Continental Army�
��s drafting of the Friedlanders, I have urged them to apply to Bishop Graff for certificates of exemption.”

  “They should have paid the exemption tax,” Schopp said.

  Sister Krause harrumphed. “A threefold tax is a stiff penalty for farmers to pay during a war, Brother Schopp.”

  “Having failed to do so, they should fight,” he persisted.

  “Would you really have them fight, when it is an article of our faith not to bear arms for any government?” she asked.

  Jacob ended the familiar, fruitless argument with a decisive change of subject. “As to the mill-race, I have added two men to work on it.”

  “More deserters?” Schopp asked sharply.

  “We think so.” Jacob withheld his belief that they were British. If so, they sought concealment desperately and would work all the harder. The British might hold Charleston, and Cornwallis’s Redcoats might be poised at the North Carolina border, but in skirmishes throughout the state, Whigs were overwhelming superior forces of Tories.

  “Even with them, how much longer will repairs take?” Marshall asked.

  “Yes, Brother Blum, how long? You know the Continental troops grow restless for their grain,” Elisabeth Marshall added.

  Jacob had no simple answer for the Elders, none of whom participated in the heavy and dangerous communal work. “Twill take time. The damage from spring flooding was complete. The stream must be dammed and diverted, the waterway allowed to dry, all old timbers removed, new ones seated—”

  “But when do you see the end?” Marshall prodded.

  Jacob stifled his frustration. He saw an end to work at the mill, but not to this interminable meeting. He forced himself to sound patient, practical, knowledgeable, all of which he was, most days. “Another month, at best.”

  Rosina Krause broke the stranglehold of pressing subjects by reaching across the table for the lot bowl. As head of the Single Sisters, the drawing of the marriage lot was her affair.

  “’Tis time, Brother Marshall,” she said, pushing the bowl to the center of the table to make her point. “We have tormented Brother Blum long enough this afternoon.”

  The women shared knowing glances. Abruptly the tone of the meeting changed. Marshall put away his notes, and Schopp’s pinched face softened. Tensions eased. A faint, hot breeze made its way through an open window, ruffling a sheet of Jacob’s neglected ledger. He closed the book and self-consciously straightened the damp stock that choked his neck.

  He had waited all afternoon for this moment. All week, in fact. Sweat poured off his body, but not from the heat. When the lot had been cast for Christina, he had been too brash to understand its power and far too young to imagine either the permanence or the poignancy of union.

  Now he did. If the lot said yes, his fate, his family’s fate was sealed. A pleasant fate, he thought, if satisfying his desire were his only object. But misgivings reared up, more potent than desire. Could Retha, the foundling, friend of Indians, rescuer of lame wolves, be the right woman to mother his children?

  Brother Marshall bowed his head. “Guide us, Savior, in the matter of Brother Blum’s proposal to Sister Retha. May all here present bear witness this time-honored expression of Thy will and cheerfully carry out Thy commands.”

  Elisabeth Marshall retrieved the small, deep bowl and placed it in front of her husband. He closed his eyes. With a light click of wood on wood, she rearranged the reeds, turned the bowl, and guided his hand to its blunt rim.

  Brother Marshall’s lips moved in silent prayer as his fingers found the ends of the three reeds. For the fourth time, he selected a reed for Jacob, pulled it apart, and gave the slip of paper to his wife. Holding it up to the light, she squinted worriedly. Then a grin spread across her face.

  “Ja, Brother Blum, yes,” she said, barely containing her feminine excitement. “Sister Krause may propose to Sister Mary Margaretha on your behalf. The lot says yes.”

  Lowering his head, Jacob thought of a flash of white shift, a flare of gilded hair, a bold dance of slender feet. A surge of triumph flooded him. A triumph of desire.

  But what had he done to his family?

  More to the point, what would Sister Retha do to them?

  “You think about it, Sister Retha. And you think long and hard about those children,” Rosina Krause said later that day in her immaculate office, moments after giving Retha the astounding news.

  The lot granted Jacob Blum permission to ask for her hand in marriage.

  Retha’s head spun. Marry Brother Blum! Be a mother to his children! A week had passed since Jacob Blum took on the care of her wolf. His proposal, properly made for him by the senior Single Sister, left Retha speechless.

  “And you make up your mind as quickly as you can. Don’t you change back and forth as Sister Grimm did last winter,” Rosina scolded.

  “I’ll try,” Retha said feebly.

  “Those children cannot be expected to wait on girlish indecision.” Rosina’s words followed Retha as the enormity of Jacob Blum’s proposal drove her blindly from the little office.

  She was a girl no more.

  Throughout the night and the next day, Retha did think long and hard about the children and their father, even into the afternoon while she stood folding the Tavern’s fresh linens into a willow basket.

  Jacob Blum had gone and gotten permission to marry her.

  Dizzy at the thought, she pressed a hand against her forehead. She hadn’t decided to agree to it. There was so very much to consider. Accepting him meant accepting them.

  Jacob Blum, Rosina Krause, and the whole community, when it came right down to it, would expect her to marry him now that the lot had said yes. Would expect her to put her work behind her, even her life as a Single Sister, such as it was, even her wolf. Would expect her to join his household and care for his children.

  What did she know of children? Especially boys.

  Worse, what did she know of men?

  She wished her thoughts would fold as neatly into place as these sheets and pillowslips. In her heart of hearts she knew that her wolf was the least important thing, yet at first it was the hardest to let go. The wolf had come to her, wild and free and needy, reminding her of everything she once loved of her woodland life with the Cherokee. In saving its life, she had won back a piece of that past. She would be trading its wildness for the mysterious misery of Jacob Blum’s strange daughter, a misery so like her own after her own mother’s death that she wasn’t sure she could face it.

  The prospect of any child needing her to be her mother daunted her. Let alone one who had fits. She had heard Anna Johanna screaming once in the streets of town, had seen her clinging to that dress. Retha sympathized. She herself had suffered terribly, having lost both parents at once. But how would she manage the child? It was one thing to talk to her for a few moments, quite another to have the care of her for life.

  What if the little girl hated her?

  And what of those half-grown sons?

  She couldn’t even talk to Brother Blum about the marriage. Yesterday he had left town, committing his children to the care of Samuel and Eva Ernst. He hadn’t said a word to her, either about his proposal or about tending her wolf.

  Retha slapped the last pillowslips in place just as the haunting sound of Samuel Ernst’s conch announced the afternoon’s market on the Square. Well, she thought, tucking her load inside the basket’s rim, the market won’t be crowded, the weather being what it was. Outside, the afternoon was muggy, the sky dark with scudding clouds, like her thoughts. Sometimes in this dry, hot summer, clouds like that brought rain, but not often lately.

  What had Brother Blum been thinking, to ask for her hand in marriage?

  She swung the heavy basket to her shoulder and headed up the street.

  He must be desperate. She tried to ignore gossip, truly she did, having too often been its subject. Even so, everyone knew he had had trouble with the lot. Twice, some said three times, his proposals had been denied. Surely that was why
Sister Rosina urged her to decide.

  Retha regretted asking him to feed her wolf. Now that she was actually doing the laundry, it was clear she could have managed feeding it herself. Since she asked Brother Blum to do it, he had spoken to her only once. She stopped in midstride.

  Only once. The day after the Elders’ meeting. The day after the lot had been cast.

  She balanced her load and put her thoughts together. He had known then. Even while he had been talking to her about her wolf, he planned his proposal. And said not one word of his intentions. Never mind that Rosina Krause was supposed to tell her first. Such secrecy made her mad enough to turn him down. She had the right to do so.

  And she owed him nothing. Not much, she amended.

  That day, they had met accidentally in the Square.

  “I have yet to see your wolf,” he had said, his voice rough, almost grumpy.

  “You have fed her though, thank you very much.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I see her.”

  “That wasn’t our agreement.” Although he scowled in the bright afternoon sun, his lake-blue eyes were drilling hers.

  She tried to placate him. “’Tis naught. I stop by the creek before I come back with the laundry.”

  “We agreed that’s too risky for you,” he said sternly.

  We didn’t, and it isn’t, she thought. Alone outdoors, she was smarter than she had ever been. More slippery, more careful.

  Brother Blum grunted, gathered up his children, and left. As if he hadn’t known the first thing about his pending proposal. As if he had no feelings for her at all.

  Loaded with laundry now, she slipped around to the Tavern’s back door, angry just thinking about his silence, his indifference. She would tend the wolf herself.

  Brisk and genial, Jeremiah Meyer lifted her basket over the bottom half of the door.

  “You wait,” he said, retrieving a mound of linens from a corner of the room and piling dirty bedclothes high on her basket. “Here are more. The British lieutenant and his detachment rode out before noon.”

  At the sight and smell of a blood-soiled sheet, she sniffed fresh air and made a face. “’Tis a foul task I do for you, Brother Meyer,” she teased, hoping her manner would mask the queasiness that flooded her.