Daughter of the Sword (15 page)

Maybe a man like that was necessary in times like these, or like Robespierre in the French Revolution, or Oliver Cromwell, but she shrank from such men in a revulsion multiplied by their self-righteousness. She prayed with all her might that Thos would keep free of the hypnotic power Brown exercised over his sons and those who followed him.

When the women went out to the field, Dane was swinging the sickle in a smooth, controlled way that made Deborah positive he'd done it before, grasping a handful of grain, shearing it off, and leaving it in a little pile. This was more laborious and slower than the cradle, but Dane had a bit of a start and managed to hold most of it as she collected the heaps and bounded them.

She was afraid that he'd blister his hands on the sickle and soon ran back to the house to locate Josiah's winter gauntlets.

Dane looked at her quizzically as she called to him and proffered the gloves. “You must think me tender, indeed.” He smiled, but he did put them on. “My best friend, much to my father's dismay, was the gamekeeper's son. We often helped in the harvest, in fields far from where my father might spy us. Rob and I knew the river and woods better than any poacher. While I was off at school, I never met among the gentry's sons anyone I liked as well as Rob.”

“Is he still at your home?” Deborah tried to conjure up an image of what Dane's country was like, but she only saw thatched cottages and gray turreted castles.

“No.” Dane's face closed. “He came into the army with me. He died at Balaclava.”

Turning abruptly, he swung the sickle, as if cutting at some old enemy. The waving wheat blurred in front of Deborah. It was a moment before she could see well enough to bundle up the grain.

vii

Chores next morning, breakfast, family worship, with Judith taking part by now as if she'd been born to it. Dane rode up as the older Whitlaws were leaving, and the others were in the field while morning cool lessened the itch of chaff on their skin.

Meadlowlarks sang from the surrounding grass and prairie chickens whirred when the harvesters came near enough to alarm them. Mockingbirds, crows, and red-winged blackbirds greedily devoured grain fallen from the reaping. They were welcome to that but were shooed away from the shocks.

After the wheat was thoroughly cured and dry, it would be thrashed and then the horses and Venus would be turned in to feed on the nutritious stubble. Now they were barred by the prickly Osage orange hedge grown high enough to be protective in the three years since the Whitlaws had planted the sproutings given them by Johnny.

“I don't like fences,” he growled, “but you've got to have 'em if you're going to grow crops.” He'd spat prodigiously. “One damned thing follows the other. Plains Indians move around, gather berries, nuts, roots, and such like wild foods. They eat a lot of those without getting tied down to a patch of land and a crop they have to stay with.”

“But Mr. Chaudoin,” Mother had protested, “white people don't roam around like that. By farming and raising domestic animals, many people can be fed off comparatively little land.”

“And that's good?” scoffed Johnny. “The whites multiplied till they filled up Europe and started spillin' over here. Now they've crowded up the land east of the Mississippi, they're gobblin' up the plains, pourin' into California and Utah and Oregon. Where they'll go then only Wakan Tanka knows, but if they keep on litterin' worse'n jack-rabbits, they'll have to farm the ocean or find a way to plow the stars!”

At fifteen, Deborah hadn't learned to suppress impertinent questions. Frowning, she'd asked, “But Mr. Chaudoin, if you like Indians ways so much, why didn't you stay with the Sioux?”

“Deborah!” rebuked Mother, but Johnny grinned crookedly, tweaking one of Deborah's plaits.

“Didn't belong after Sweet Grass died. Truth to tell, I never belonged all that much. The Lakotah believe they're Wakan Tanka's only true children, and their word for stranger also means enemy. My father-in-law never stopped calling me ‘dog face' and ‘flop-ears' behind my back, and my brothers-in-law were glad their sister had no children from a ‘crooked foot.'”

Thos, also uninhibited, asked with wide eyes, “But didn't you call them gut-eaters?”

“Thos!” thundered Josiah.

Bursting into a roar of laughter, Johnny hugged Thos and patted him on the shoulder with the force of a playful bear.
“Cesli Tatanka!
They
were
gut-eaters, and so was I! Nothin' better than ‘boudins' wrapped around a stick and roasted crisp! Next time I get a buffalo, you'll have to try 'em!”

Thos and Father had, pronouncing them excellent, but the Whitlaw women had left the small intestines for smoked fat from the back bone and rich steaks from the hump.

And the Osage orange, set out in furrows and watered painstakingly from the well till they had a good start, now protected the wheat, planted last fall for the first time.

Corn had been the first crop, quick-growing, easy to plant and harvest. That field was fenced with rails from trees cut along the Kaw. The Whitlaws were still enjoying roasting ears, but before the blades started yellowing, it'd be time to strip them from the ears and dry them for fodder, leaving the stalks supporting the naked ears to wait till autumn for harvesting.

In spite of the heat, stooping and tying that made her back and shoulders ache, Deborah got great satisfaction out of the harvest, as she had earlier from planting. Whatever Johnny said about crops, she felt it was a miracle for hard, dead-seeming grain to spend a season under earth and come up, radiantly green, to grow into food by the grace of sun and rain.

It was Demeter restoring the fields when her daughter came back to her from death, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Tammuz, those who died and lived again. Josiah Whitlaw was a student and lover of mythology. Along with fairy tales, fables, and Bible stories, the twins had grown up with the Trojan War and Ulysses's wanderings, gleanings from Herodotus, Plutarch, Pausanias, and Strabo, and the Norse legends upon which Mr. Richard Wagner was building a great operatic cycle after his earlier success with
Lohengrin
and
Tannhäuser.

Leticia had always been somewhat troubled by Josiah's filling her children's minds with what she called “heathenish false gods and idols,” to which Josiah countered that since false gods were forever being mentioned in the Bible, he thought people should know something about them.

Though Father faithfully attended services and was a good friend of Reverend Cordley, an English-born graduate of Andover Theological Seminary and the University of Michigan, who had come to pastor the Plymouth Congregational Church in Lawrence last year, Deborah secretly believed he had no religion at all, or a very broad one, depending on how one looked at it. He liked the Sioux name for God, Wakan Tanka, or Great Holy, and had said more than once, even to Reverend Cordley, that if Unitarians weren't so contentious and proud of their brains, he'd have joined them.

Adding another bundle to a shock, Deborah smiled. How her thoughts had ranged, from Babylonia to Greece! But it wasn't surprising that the harvest took one back: to Ruth, gleaning in an alien field and finding a husband; even to Cain, who killed his brother because God had preferred Abel's flesh offering to Cain's fruit and grain. There was something ancient and enduring, a binding of generations, in gathering a harvest.

Father said machinery was sure to be invented for planting, cutting, binding, and threshing, but so far methods hadn't changed drastically since some man or woman first poked holes in the earth with a sharp stick and covered the seed with his or her heel.

Machines would make it easier and faster, of course, just as the one for sewing invented by Mr. Howe and developed by Mr. Singer had made a tremendous difference in making clothes. Deborah was certainly glad the family had one, and she wished mightily that someone would invent a washing machine. She truly hated the whole hot, monotonous, tiring chore, which had to be done week after week. In winter, it wasn't quite so bad, though then one's hands got numb and chapped.

But harvest was once a year, an earth magic that promised food through the cold months, and handling the grain, smelling it, seeing the growing number of shocks dot the field—all these made the work a sort of ritual, a ceremony. She'd never dare say that to Thos, of course, who felt about any kind of farmwork the way she felt about laundry—even if he weren't so stiffly angry at her for what she'd said yesterday. That memory made her eyes sting and she pushed it away. Thos
had
to understand. He'd get over his hurt.

She wouldn't tell him, either, what an odd contentment filled her when she watched Dane's broad shoulders swing the sickle, or how she tried to pick up the wheat where she fancied his hand had gripped it. And she was going riding with him—all afternoon!—on the honey-cream mare that had spent the night at the Whitlaws', so that last night, after the chores were done, Deborah had been able to walk up to the beautiful creature and feed her part of one of the green apples Father had garnered that day as pay for advertising.

It had been some help for the ache at her twin's continuing coldness to caress the soft, sensitive muzzle that nudged her palm for more goodies, to murmur praises to the alertly tilted ears.

“I can hardly wait to ride you, Beauty,” Deborah whispered.
And be with Dane … though what good would that do?

The field, now, was almost cut. Thos and Dane finished at opposite ends and stood grinning at each other a moment before Dane looked at Deborah.

His smile faded. As if caught irresistibly, his gaze dwelled on her unbuttoned throat, the worn calico clinging moistly to her breasts.

A man and woman had shared harvest, working in rhythm, honoring the strength of each other. Now they shared something else. Dane's eyes came back to her face.

“Why don't you ladies wash up and start dinner?” he asked. “Thos and I can finish binding.”

Deborah shook chaff and straw from her, and with Judith she started to the house. Had she imagined the way his gaze had lingered? Had it been, wretched thought, an uncontrollable male reaction that had nothing to do, really, with her? What she hadn't imagined was the way she'd felt. As she and Judith washed at the bench by the door, her flesh seemed to be burning—not from the sun, but from his eyes.

They were nearly through the meal when horses nickered and hooves sounded down the lane. Motioning the others to sit still, Dane crossed to the door, stiffened, and gave a small shrug.

“Well, Rolf, I thought you were hunting today.”

Judith rose and hurried to the bedroom. From there she could make a quick escape to the lean-to. Deborah took her plate and fork and hid them in the dishpan.

“And I thought you were painting.” Rolf's mocking voice approached the house. “Now what can be the magnet that draws us from our usual pursuits and passions?”

“I had a mind to help with the harvest.” Dane, reluctantly, it seemed, let his brother enter.

“Oh, yes, you've always acted like a throwback to some yeoman in our family.” Rolf's eyes rested on Deborah. “Even to my uneducated view, the wheat seemed all cut and shocked. No boiling kettles and washtubs fill the yard. Am I so lucky, Miss Deborah, as to find you at leisure?”

“Let me set you a place,” she offered. “You must be hungry.”

“So I am.” He took the side of the bench just vacated by Judith. “Thanks for your charming concern for my outer man. But you haven't answered my question.”

“Miss Deborah's riding with me,” said Dane. His level gaze met and held his brother's. “She's consented to try the mare Fall Leaf traded me.”

Rolf paused, fork halfway to his mouth. “So that's what happened to that fantastic beast! The fair Melissa simpered to me that the blue blanket exactly matched her eyes.”

“Mrs. Eden has an unnerving way of leaping to conclusions and forcing—or trying to force—others to jump, too.” Dane's tone was dry.

“How tactfully you put it.” Rolf grinned. “Discourage her gently, will you? If she decides she can't have you, she may start in on me.”

Did he mean—were they saying—? Deborah's heart gave a strange little skip. Dane didn't
sound
in love with Melissa Eden. But perhaps they'd just had one of those lovers' quarrels, which, when made up, whetted and doubled desires. She poured buttermilk for Rolf, then drew back as he straightened in a way that brought his head against her shoulder.

“I can accompany you, brother,” he said to Dane. “You might be glad of my pistols if you encounter roving desperadoes, be they Free State or pro-slave.”

“Thanks, but I'm able to look after Miss Deborah.”

Again, Deborah's heart tripped and began to pound. If Dane's whole concern was in testing the mare for a lady's mount, he woundn't care if Rolf came along, would he? But probably he thought Rolf's harum-scarum riding style would make the mare, or Deborah, fidgety.

Rolf's mouth hardened. He stared at Dane for a long moment, eyes seeming almost black. Deborah didn't know how tense she was till he chuckled and she relaxed.

“It seems I must hope for another day. But it's not too soon to invite you all to a celebration July 4.”

“July 4?” echoed Thos and grinned. “What kind of celebration? A shooting match?”

“No jollities like that,” Rolf promised. “But I'm told it's a great holiday. Rather than skulk about the fringes like the defeated enemy, I decided to be quick off the mark and host some festivities myself.”

With a slow, admiring whistle, Thos said, “That must be what you British call ‘cheek.' What a dandy notion! It'll be the talk of the Territory.”

Rolf said modestly, “Well, I doubt if it'll crowd out politics or the gold rush, but I'll do my best. I've engaged the Free State Hotel and they'll prepare the food, though I've promised to bring in the game. Want to help, Thos? Four or five of us are going out on the prairie a few days early to try to bring back a wagonload of buffalo meat.”