A Flight of Arrows

by Lori Benton

  Joy and uncertainty vied on Anna’s face. Two Hawks gave a small nod of affirmation, though his features were unreadable. “If Aubrey will have me, that is what I want to do.”

  His expression might have been inscrutable, but his eyes were eloquent, gazing at Anna with such unshielded longing that it pricked Lydia’s eyes with tears. Without their saying a word, she knew they were about to place their hearts in her hands. “Let me guess. You wish me to put the question to him?”

  “We were going to ask you at supper,” Anna admitted. “Will you help us? With you on our side, there’s a chance Papa will agree.”

  Lydia took leave to doubt the efficacy of her influence, but since when had she been able to deny Anna anything so badly wanted?

  “Of course I’ll help you. Both of you,” she added, as her gaze slid down the length of Two Hawks’s frame, stopping short of those lean thighs scandalously bared by leggings and breechclout—the long woolen shirt he’d worn outside was draped across a kitchen bench. “But, Anna…might you have brought anything of William’s from the farm over the past months? A pair of breeches, perhaps?”

  With all the good intention in the world, their timing might have been better. Lydia halted at the doorway of Reginald’s workshop, mindful of Anna and Two Hawks—Jonathan, they’d agreed he would be called—waiting down the passage in the sitting room. Praying their hearts out, no doubt. Lydia stood in need of prayer.

  Reginald wasn’t alone in the spacious, wood-scented shop. His partner in business, white-haired, trim-muscled Ephraim Lang, had interrupted work on the long bateau set on the stocks to air a grievance concerning the finished vessels lining the bank of the iced-over Binne Kill.

  “The side’s hulled sure as if a six-pounder hit it square. A mallet was used, I’d say—and a deal of mean spirit. We’ll have to haul it back onto the stocks for repair.”

  Visible in profile, Reginald’s jaw was stiff, his brow tight. “Were you not here last night then?”

  “For a time,” Lang replied. “But I’ve my own bed and a wife in danger of forgetting the look of me, I’ve spent so many nights here of late.”

  Lydia’s stomach tensed beneath her stays. She’d never heard the two so near an argument. She waited, breathing in motes of wood dust hanging in the air. She caught the wearied stoop of Reginald’s shoulders as he said, “All right, Ephraim. I’ll be the one to sleep here from today. That’s what you’re after, is it?”

  Hope surged. Perhaps her timing wasn’t so unfortunate. Surely there would come no better opening than this.

  Lydia tapped the doorframe. “Reginald? Captain?”

  Both men started, turning toward her.

  “Lydia,” Reginald said. “What do you here?”

  Ignoring the less than cordial greeting, she stepped within and rounded the bateau, the hem of her petticoat sweeping a path through wood shavings. “I’m sorry to interrupt, and overhear, but as it happens, I may have another solution to the problem you appear to be facing…should you care to hear it.”

  “I’d like to hear it,” Ephraim Lang said.

  Lydia beamed, grateful. Reginald waved a hand for her to continue, then folded his arms as if already set to refuse her suggestion.

  “I hadn’t known you were suffering the depredations of vandalism, Reginald. It’s only that lately”—how lately, she refrained from elucidating—“with the increased demand for bateaux from the northern department, it occurred to me you could use another set of hands at work here. It sounds as though you could use another set of eyes as well. An apprentice, perhaps?”

  Captain Lang slapped his thigh in approval. “There now. The very thing I’ve been attempting to persuade him of since he returned from Skenesborough.”

  Reginald had the look of a man cornered. “ ’Tis the pair of you ganging up on me, is it?”

  Captain Lang grinned, showing strong, yellowed teeth through his white beard. “I like the way this woman thinks. Get yourself an apprentice. Give him this shop for a billet. Save our old bones the discomfort.”

  “Mind who it is you’re calling old.” Reginald held his defensive posture a moment longer, then the corner of his mouth twitched. “All right. I’ll look about town for a likely lad I can train—once I get a bit caught up. In a day or two—”

  “Today, Major,” said Lang. “Else there’ll never be any catching up.”

  “Actually, about that likely lad…”

  Reginald peered at her, suspicion gathering in his gaze. “This conversation hasn’t been wholly theoretical, has it? You’d someone in mind before you came through the door.”

  “That a fact?” Captain Lang asked, interest in his gaze.

  Lydia’s face warmed. “Was I that transparent?”

  Reginald all but rolled his eyes in resignation. “Who is he? Where shall I find him? I see I’ll have no peace until I do.”

  Lydia smiled with a brightness she hoped wasn’t overdone. “You needn’t go looking. I’ve brought him with me.”

  Reginald’s face stilled. “Have you?”

  Knowing she’d seconds before he guessed for himself, Lydia turned toward the doorway and called, “Anna? Will the two of you come in now?”

  “Anna?” Reginald repeated. “What has she to do with this?”

  Lydia’s heart gave a skip as Two Hawks stepped from the shadowed passage into the window-lit shop. Anna had thought ahead, in hope, and brought to town weeks ago not only a pair of breeches William had abandoned in his flight but two shirts, as well as a hat—no longer stiffened into corners but still presentable. To this Lydia had added a neckcloth once belonging to Jacob and a pair of dark stockings she’d yet to turn into rags. Jacob’s coats would need altering to fit Two Hawks’s leaner frame, but a pair of buckled shoes had been of a suitable size. With his hair clubbed, the hat covering its shiny blackness…

  Reginald stared at William’s twin, his face registering shock, then an instant’s joy, replaced almost at once by recognition and disappointment as Anna moved to stand beside Two Hawks, the pair of them tense, visibly nervous, but radiating hope.

  “Papa, will you have Jonathan for your apprentice?”

  9

  Half-Day Moon

  Kanowalohale

  On her way back from the lodge of the Tuscarora women, Good Voice spied the girl, Strikes-The-Water, skulking at the forest’s snowy edge. Catching her gaze, the girl stepped back into the pines, knocking a bough-full of snow onto her head.

  Good Voice pressed back a laugh as Strikes-The-Water’s mutterings carried on the winter air. She called to the girl, drawing the attention of those working nearby. Strikes-The-Water emerged reluctantly from the trees. Across her shoulders rode the meat of a deer wrapped in its hide. Snow dusted her head.

  “Shekoli. You have had success with your bow.” Good Voice had heard much of this girl while visiting her mother, two aunts, and another elderly Deer Clan woman, having gone to their lodge bearing gifts of provisions from the Turtle Clan. One thing Good Voice had learned: though she’d told Two Hawks her name was Strikes-The-Water, the girl had been known for some years by another name. Girl-Who-Hunts.

  It wasn’t unheard of for a woman to hunt like a man, but this girl seemed not to want to draw attention to herself. For the hunting maybe, though Good Voice knew another reason.

  “If you are trying to avoid Reverend Kirkland, you need not bother. He has gone away east. Some warriors and sachems went with him.” One of them was Stone Thrower’s uncle, Clear Day. “Kirkland is taking them to see whether what Thayendanegea says is true, that the Americans have no guns big enough to win this fight against their king. Maybe they will meet the chief, Washington.”

  The girl looked unimpressed but relieved.

  “I am come from your mother’s lodge with gifts of welcome from my clan sisters,” Good Voice said. “But she will be happy to see that venison. You are a good daughter to her.”

  Strikes-The-Water looked embarrassed by the praise, yet Good Voice spoke only tr
uth. Those Tuscarora women had little meat in their lodge. No one had overmuch these days with the extra demands on the men. At least Two Hawks had done well for her, finding a soldier at the fort willing to trade cloth for furs. Some soldiers were trading from their own possessions. He’d found the wool she wanted, two blankets, and cloth for making warm leggings and shirts.

  Strikes-The-Water was frowning. “You are Two Hawks’s mother. Turtle Clan. Yet you serve my old mother as if she was your grandmother.”

  Good Voice thought it sad that those dark eyes with their lovely tilt should look out at the world with such mistrust. “Heavenly Father bids us love our neighbors and do for them what we would want done for us. Whatever their clan.”

  Strikes-The-Water’s sculpted face reflected wariness but also a hint of gratitude. “You are alone now. This is so?”

  Good Voice swallowed back a shard of sorrow. “My son and husband are away, to different places.”

  Stone Thrower had been at Fort Stanwix for six sleeps. Two Hawks was gone to Anna Catherine and Aubrey. It was a hard thing, seeing her son in love with that girl. She liked Anna Catherine. Had she been born Haudenosaunee, Good Voice couldn’t have been happier with her son’s choice. As it was she’d let him go, clinging to the possibility—she couldn’t call what would bring him heartache a hope—that Aubrey would refuse him. But had that happened, Two Hawks would have already returned. He’d been gone twice as long as his father. She’d asked Clear Day, on his way through Schenectady with Kirkland, to find Two Hawks or get word of him. Clear Day knew to go to the Aubrey farm or the home of Lydia van Bergen, who would know where to find Two Hawks in the white’s town.

  “I see now what you have told me is true,” Clear Day had said before his going, when she had placed in his rope-veined hands the tiny image of her firstborn, given by the man who stole him. “He is like his brother, yet not.”

  The old man had been unable to tear his gaze from the small face, just as she and Stone Thrower had been unable to do that night they sat in Aubrey’s house and stared and stared, trying to fill up nineteen summers of longing, half afraid of the thing they held, as if it might somehow hold William’s spirit.

  Finally her husband’s uncle had raised his netted gaze. “My nephew has not spoken much about your time spent in that house.”

  “You returned to Kanowalohale before Aubrey left to build those boats,” Good Voice said. “He stayed away long. When he returned, Stone Thrower was ready to walk home. It was not the parting I hoped for. I am not certain what I hoped.”

  Their going had left a hollow place in her heart, a certainty that something had been left unfinished. Unspoken. Undone.

  Clear Day grunted, as if he guessed as much. “I have thought many times about you and my nephew sleeping under that man’s roof. That could not have been an easy thing. What did you say to him about those long years without your son?”

  Good Voice admitted they’d shared little. “I do not know everything Stone Thrower said to Aubrey when I was not there to hear, but I do not think it was much more than I said. Why do you ask?”

  Clear Day dropped his gaze to the face of her firstborn. “It is in my mind to wonder whether Aubrey understands how great a grief he brought to you by what he did.”

  She remembered Aubrey’s head bowed as she told him of his dead infant, left beside her in that fort called William Henry. She remembered his tears as she spoke of burying that child at the fort the French had called Carillon. Had they been tears for his own son, dead and abandoned, or for her son, stolen and lost? Had they been tears for himself?

  “The white beads my nephew gave to that one may have opened his ears to hear your words—he let you into his home and gave you this,” he said, lifting his palm on which her son’s face rested. “It is something. But that wampum did not clear his throat to speak to you.”

  “True,” Good Voice said. “My husband does not know what is in that man’s heart. It is why he made him promise not to go after William without him.”

  “Ah. I had wondered about that.” Clear Day had said no more about Aubrey, or William, though Good Voice had seen much thinking in his gaze as he gave back the image of her son.

  Soon after that conversation, Stone Thrower took her son’s image with him to the fort to show the scouts there or anyone who had been among the redcoats wintering in Quebec. With all her men gone away to different places, Good Voice had gone about living, often wondering what the rest of her years would hold. She’d begun to see herself—forty summers, best she knew—as a woman getting old. Getting old without children at her fire. There would never be another child at her fire, with no daughter to give her grandchildren to carry on her clan line. That line would end with her.

  “Both are away?” Strikes-The-Water asked, recalling Good Voice from her sad thoughts. “Then maybe you need some of this deer?”

  Good Voice decided she liked this girl, no matter if she prickled when one tried to come close. Like nettles that were good to eat but could sting you in the picking.

  “I would take it gladly,” she said, adding, “There is something more I would give your mother. Come to my lodge. You may take it to her with this meat you’ve brought her.”

  The girl hesitated but nodded and fell into step with Good Voice, who passed through lodges to the bend in the creek where the Turtle Clan dwelled, certain she’d have thought of something to give the girl before they arrived.

  Strikes-The-Water collided with someone as she was leaving Good Voice’s lodge, toting her venison and one of the blankets Two Hawks had traded for at the fort. Good Voice rose from tidying the things she’d moved to get at the blanket, recognizing Stone Thrower’s startled apology as the girl ducked past him and hurried away.

  “Shekoli, Husband.” Good Voice crossed to where he stood with the door open, looking after the girl. He turned, snowshoes in hand, taking in the sight of her with a smile that made her heart glad. “Come in and be warm. I have food.”

  Stone Thrower made a sound of pleasure. “You always do. For that I am thankful.”

  While Good Voice warmed the corn soup she’d fixed earlier for herself, Stone Thrower crossed to the place he kept his belongings. He removed his blanket and haversack, then sat on their sleeping bench.

  “That girl,” he said with a nod at the door. “She is the one our son guided here?”

  “She is that one.” Good Voice told him about meeting Strikes-The-Water and exchanging a blanket for the venison, which needed to go into a kettle to boil. “I noticed a thing about that girl,” she said, adding water to the thickened soup as it warmed, then setting about cutting the venison and adding it to another kettle simmering over the fire. “How she looked at our son, before he left.”

  It had happened the day Two Hawks and the girl had arrived together, before the Tuscarora women were taken away by a Deer Clan matron who would see them settled. A brief glance, but telling. She caught Stone Thrower’s gaze, making sure he understood what sort of look she meant.

  “Did she look at him like that? I did not notice. But it is you women who see such things before men do.”

  Good Voice smiled, her attention on the knife in her hands.

  “She is pretty, that girl,” he added.

  “That is a thing a man notices.” Good Voice’s thoughts from earlier flooded back, and she couldn’t keep a light heart, no matter how glad she was at Stone Thrower’s return. “So is Anna Catherine…a pretty girl.”

  Stone Thrower grunted agreement. “I think our son has eyes for only that one.”

  Good Voice ladled soup into a bowl. “I have been thinking about that. About our son marrying a white woman.” She brought the bowl to Stone Thrower where he sat. “We would lose him.”

  Lose another son.

  Stone Thrower took the bowl but held her gaze. The pain in her heart was matched in his eyes. She went to the fire to stir the simmering meat. When she looked up, her husband was looking around at their snug home, at the log walls hung wit
h their possessions. The benches below. The place where Two Hawks slept, empty now.

  “Whenever our son marries,” he said, “he will leave us. Even if she is Haudenosaunee, he will go to her people. As I came to yours.”

  “True. But their children would have a clan.”

  Stone Thrower took a mouthful of soup and swallowed. He didn’t take another. Good Voice knew he carried the same struggle over letting Two Hawks follow his heart, even if it led away from them. Away from the People. “I should not have said these things with you just come through the door,” she told him.

  Stone Thrower set aside the bowl. Despite his sober look, her heart leapt. “What is it? You bring news?”

  “It is to do with William. Before I left the fort, a party of scouts was leaving for the east, to go up the Hudson to Quebec to speak with the Caughnawagas. I asked them to listen for news of Johnson’s regiment and to look for a young man with the face of Two Hawks.”

  “You showed them the little painting?”

  “I did.”

  “May I…?” But he was already taking out the likeness from the pouch he wore on a cord around his neck. Good Voice looked with longing on the face of her firstborn. “Do you think—” She swallowed and began again. “Do you think they will find him?”

  She searched her husband’s face for hope.

  “It is much ground they will cover, and our son is one among many. Still I had to ask it.”

  Tears threatened, but Good Voice blinked them back. “I have long feared our firstborn will never be Oneida, never think of himself as an Indian person. But I never expected Two Hawks…”

  “To cleave to a white woman in his heart?” Stone Thrower asked.

  Good Voice nodded. “I did not take it seriously enough when he was young and spoke to me all the time of Anna Catherine. I am sorry for letting him go so many times to her, when you did not know about it.”