Embrace the Day (26 page)

Suddenly, Luke understood why Hance commanded his parents' loyalty as he did. Rakish charm and insouciance masked a true intensity of purpose that was hard to resist.

Fishing in his pocket, Luke extracted a small folded knife, its horn handle worn smooth by use. "Take it," Luke said. "I noticed your own was rusted."

Hance nodded. Now that they were parting, probably forever, there was no point in sustaining the prickle of mutual dislike. He gave Luke a mock salute, then turned to his parents.

Roarke embraced him wordlessly. They'd said all there was to say earlier, late at night over cups of fruit brandy.

"Take care of yourself," Roarke said.

"I mean to, Pa."

"Leave word at the Sheaf of Wheat in Lexington. We don't want to lose track of you."

Tears poured down Genevieve's face as she hugged Hance against her.

"I love you," she told him brokenly.

Hance swallowed against the ache in his throat. "Goodbye, Mama."

The sun burst from behind a cloud as he rode away. A single golden shaft streamed down over Hance as he stopped on the rise above the river road and turned to lift his arm in farewell. He looked glorious—young, strong, and golden, full of promises yet to be fulfilled. Genevieve refused to think of him as an outlaw, fleeing justice to lose himself beyond the Blue Ridge.

Luke and Israel ran down to the end of the drive, and Mimi scooped Sarah up and took her to the house, muttering and wiping at a stray tear.

Genevieve followed Roarke into the keeping room. The hooded clock's halfpenny moon was arcing into view within the dial, signaling the start of a new day. Absently, Roarke gave the clock a wind and then went to the window, leaning his knuckles hard on the sill.

Genevieve stood back, watching her husband closely. His jaw was set, his eyes trained unerringly westward. Lord, how many times had she seen that look lately? That intensity, that yearning.

Something Roarke had said to her, long ago when he'd returned from the frontier campaign, drifted into her mind. " 'Tis a beautiful country, Gennie. A paradise on earth. A man could walk a hundred miles and see nothing but nature's bounty. Why, if it weren't for this farm…"

And later, when he'd returned from his search for Rebecca: "I knew it was hopeless after the first six months. But I stayed, Gennie. I stayed because I love the feel of Kentucky soil in my hands and because, somehow, it made me seem closer to Becky."

Genevieve knew the restless yearning would never leave Roarke. At night sometimes he would hold her close and wonder aloud if he'd already satisfied life's demands here in Dancer's Meadow. Everything ran so smoothly on the farm. Too smoothly. Roarke, who had once been so busy and full of plans, had become an observer. He had only to watch his lands flourish and then reap the monetary rewards.

With a wistful smile, Genevieve realized that this existence simply wasn't enough for a man like Roarke Adair. He needed a challenge, something new to revive his spirits.

Her smile broadened suddenly to a grin. All she'd just thought of Roarke applied to her as well. And the children.

The family simply wasn't made to sit in idleness and watch their lives go by.

The Adairs were suited to a more challenging existence. In the early years their lives had been unpredictable, sometimes cruel, filled with upsets, surprises, and unexpected pleasures. They were a family who gained strength from adversity, who found joy in building things together.

Building things… There was nothing left to build here, at this farm. The work had all been done.

Genevieve drew in a shaky breath. "Roarke."

He looked at her, frowning at the odd note in her voice.

"Roarke, let's go to Kentucky. All of us."

The clock's ticking disturbed Roarke's thunderstruck silence. He stared at his wife and saw eagerness in her eyes, an excitement he hadn't noticed in a long time. The look enhanced her usual soft beauty with youthful fire, which made his blood grow warm.

"Gennie, what are you saying?"

"Only that it's time to move on, Roarke. All we do is grow soft and fret about Becky and wonder… We don't belong here anymore. It can never be Hance's home again. What have we to hold us here but the land?" She brightened at a sudden inspiration. "We could give it to the Greenleafs. Lord knows, they need the space for all those grandchildren."

He stood in front of her, looking almost boyish in his wonder. "Gennie… ?"

She leaned against his chest. "I'm not ready to grow old yet, Roarke. Neither are you. Let's go to Kentucky, claim the tract of land that was awarded you for serving in the war. Let's build something new together."

"Gennie love, could you really leave all this?" He encompassed the farm with a sweeping gesture.

"Willingly," she replied softly.

He opened his arms to her, and she walked into his embrace. Together they went to the window while the clock chimed quietly behind them. They were turned toward the solid, brooding wall of the Blue Ridge, but their eyes looked beyond.

The moonlight is the softest, in Kentucky,

Summer days come oftest, in Kentucky,

Friendship is the strongest,

Love's fires glow the longest,

Yet a wrong is always wrongest,

In Kentucky.

James Hilary Mulligan

Licking River Valley, 1805

Whispering Rain brought
her hand over Small Thunder's mouth to still his whimpering. It had been hours since the white hunters had attacked, but she was still gripped by the fear that some of them lurked at the river-bank below, poking through the burned-out remains of the small encampment. She gathered the little boy closer and brushed her hand over his brow, murmuring words of comfort that she could not give.

There was no comfort for either of them. Whispering Rain squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth against the impulse to keen forth her grief with a high-pitched wail, as her people had done since ancient times. It was imperative that she hold her emotions in tight rein.

Even more pervasive than grief was the anger Whispering Rain felt. The supreme irony was that the hunters had descended upon them just when the small family had been heading peaceably into their midst, to the town called Lexington.

They were going there at the insistence of Whispering Rain's mother, a white woman, Amy Parker had lost her youngest child to the smallpox, had watched the boy slip away in an ooze of pus and fever. Terrified for the rest of her family, she'd begged her husband to take them to Lexington. A trader had told them of a new shield against the scourge. An inoculation, the trader had called it. Something added to the blood to make it immune to the dreadful disease.

Whispering Rain shook her head. There was no shield a Shawnee could erect against this other scourge, this frenzied hatred of whites against Indians.

She wondered if the hunters had been aware that they'd killed one of their own. A woman whose skin was as white as theirs, who'd kept her Christian name. Amy, who had prayed and sung hymns and called her daughter Mariah Parker, doggedly teaching the girl to speak the tongue of the white man.

Whispering Rain despised her knowledge of English now, just as she despised her appearance. Her eyes, a legacy of her mother, were the same scintillating blue of the sky, although her hair, mercifully, was as black as a raven's feather and grew straight and thick. Unfortunately, her other features bespoke her mixed heritage. Rather than the proud nose and fleshy lips of the Kispokotha Shawnee, Mariah's features were so delicate that she considered them weak. If she hadn't been a war chief's daughter, she would have been viciously ridiculed by the tribe.

The war chief's daughter. Once so proud, always striving to overcome the taint of her white ancestry by running faster, weaving more finely, singing more sweetly than all the others. But what was she now? Her efforts to carve out her own identity mattered not at all here in this wilderness, where all her family but a small frightened boy had died.

Coonahaw, her father, lay somewhere below in the charred rubble of the camp, his body chilled by the blast of winter cold that swept over the steaming salt licks.

Whispering Rain would have been among those massacred—by the gods, she almost wished she were—if it hadn't been for Small Thunder, the stocky boy of three winters who had climbed up to the caves on the bluff, then screamed when he couldn't get back down.

His mother, Mariah's half sister, had snorted and de-clared that he should be made to climb down on his own. But Whispering Rain had been fearful. Small Thunder was teetering precariously at the top of the bluff a hundred spans above and in his panicked state might have fallen to his death.

Whispering Rain had gone to fetch him, not knowing what her indulgence would spare her. No sooner had she reached him than a crash could be heard below. Whispering Rain had thrown herself to the rough edge of the bluff, covering Small Thunder with her body.

From that vantage point, frozen with horror, she'd watched her family die. All of them. Faces smashed by tomahawks, bellies laid open by long knives, bodies shattered by the white man's fire-spitting
metequa
.

The massacre had lasted only minutes. Whispering Rain wondered how it could have happened. The settlers in Chillicothe had assured them that no hostilities were nurtured in the area.

With a leaden heart, Whispering Rain came to her feet. Arrows of pain shot up her left leg, and she glanced down at it, frowning. She hadn't realized she'd injured herself. A sharp jut of rock had torn into the flesh above her moccasin, laying it open. Blood oozed from the wound. She used her belt to wrap it, wincing with pain.

Dusk was settling over the licks, creating a throbbing atmosphere of purple twilight. Whispering Rain glanced down at the boy. He had begun to shiver, and there was a bluish ring about his lips. He wouldn't last this winter night on the exposed bluff.

"Gimewane." His teeth chattered as he spoke her name.

She put her shawl around him and brought the ends of it about her shoulders, fashioning a sling. She was clumsy and off-balance, being so slight of stature, but her limbs were strong and wiry from years of running and hefting great bundles on the tribe's frequent migrations.

Whispering Rain paused to listen to the winter stillness of the woods as her eyes surveyed the steaming licks below her. Her relief came in a little frozen breath; there was no sign of the attackers. Fitting her hands and feet into gaps in the sandy rock, she began a slow, arduous climb downward. It was full dark of night by the time she dropped to the packed-earth surface of the river bank. The impact caused her wound to begin bleeding again. Whispering Rain ignored it and turned slowly, dreading the sight that was about to greet her.

Wisps of smoke trickled skyward, emanating from the pitiful remains of the scattered makeshift dwellings. The camp looked like a battlefield, littered by the dark, still shapes of her parents, her half sister, Melassa, and Melassa's husband, Scotach. Sickness bounded to her throat, and she fought it down with an effort.

Whispering Rain swore softly to Matchemenetoo, the Devil Spirit, when she recognized her father's body. His head was a mass of gore, black in the deepening night. The hunters had claimed his scalp. Many white men sported Indian pelts. Still cursing, she crossed to her mother's body. Amy Parker, it seemed, had died as peacefully as she had lived. A single ribbon of darkening blood circled her throat like a necklace. Her hands were folded on her breast; her face was smooth, its lines softened by the release of her spirit.

Whispering Rain set Small Thunder down beside the caved-in remains of a hut some yards away from the bodies, where the partial walls offered a bit of shelter from the driving blast of wind.

Activity kept her emotions at bay. She had little trouble making a fire. Sifting through a smoldering pile of ashes, she scooped a few live coals into a shard of clay pottery and laid them in front of the shelter. She coaxed a blaze from bits of charred cloth and dried bark chips and then wrapped Small Thunder snugly in a torn blanket.

"Stay here," she told him, her breath coming in visible puffs. "I'll get you something to eat."

But when she returned with a small quantity of jerked venison that had survived the pillaging, she found that Small Thunder had fallen asleep. Tears were drying on his face, streaking through the dusting of dirt on his cheeks. Whispering Rain's breath caught in her throat. Small Thunder understood. He was too little to comprehend everything, but he obviously knew all was lost.

Tscha-yah-ki
. Everything.

Whispering Rain put a hand to her cheek. It came away dry. She couldn't remember ever shedding a tear and now, when at last there was cause to indulge her grief, she found she couldn't cry. Years of battling imagined weaknesses had driven the tears from her.

Sighing, she returned to the main part of the encampment, forcing her mind to empty itself of all thought as she prepared to mourn her dead. If she allowed herself to think too much, she'd never be able to cope with the ravaged faces, the slack limbs, the staring eyes.

She worked until the winter cold was replaced by the sweat of exertion, bringing the bodies to a flat where the springs warmed the earth to a sticky mud. Lacking tools, she couldn't provide proper narrow graves and had decided into let the earth take them slowly, swallowing their remains.

Using her shawl she cleansed their faces, beloved faces that had once laughed around the council fires. She paused to loosen her hair of its braids, wishing she had paint of yellow and vermilion to draw whorls of mourning upon her face. She covered the bodies with burned and bloodied shreds of fabric and laid a single smooth stone at the feet of each one. The tobacco she sprinkled over them was not the sacred
nilu famu
, but it would have to suffice as the final sacrament.

Then Whispering Rain stepped back and watched the firelight flicker off the makeshift bier. She stared as deep, silent, heartfelt grief gripped her in stillness, until the wind chilled the sweat on her body.

At last she began the breathy, undulating notes of the death chant. Her voice rose to the barren night sky, quavering with melancholy, embodying all the tenderness, sorrow, and despair that she felt.

When her song was done, she trudged to the river's edge to scrub her body with sand until her limbs stung and her flesh glowed pink in the firelight. There should be no anger in mourning, yet Whispering Rain couldn't help herself.

Rage intruded upon the hollow grief in her heart. Surprisingly, she realized that some of her fury belonged to her parents. They had to ride down among the white man, ignoring the elders' decision that the course of wisdom lay west, into the sun. You should have heeded the elders, she raged in silence. Didn't you know what would happen?

Whispering Rain set her jaw. Of course they knew. The reprisals, the furious vengeance. The struggle went on until fighting meant only death. The hallowed hunting ground, which the ancients had decreed could belong to no tribe, had been measured and surveyed and parceled out by land-hungry settlers who named it Kentucky and called themselves Americans.

They'd never stop coming.

Whispering Rain retreated to the shelter where she'd left the boy. When she tried to settle down, a hard object dug into her back. Frowning, she groped among the blankets and debris until she extracted a rifle. Somehow the weapon, along with all its firing implements, had escaped plunder. Whispering Rain gathered the things close with the cold certainty that she would be needing the
metequa
—the white man's weapon.

What didn't occur to her, as she lay back and stared up at the cold, white points of light in the dawning sky, was how soon she would use the rifle to spit vengeance on one of her family's murderers.

A twig snapped. She would never have remarked on it had it not been for the utter, unmoving stillness of the dawn. She sat up, listening intently now. There was a crunch of frozen mud being trodden upon—by a foot heavier than that of a deer or wildcat.

Whispering Rain took up the rifle, biting her lip as she tried to remember the steps in loading it. Her father, proud of her quickness of mind, had shown her. Twice. She prayed it had been enough.

Her fingers trembled as she inserted a small swab of flax into the barrel and tamped it down with the ramrod. Find-ing no measuring device, she placed an unknown quantity of powder into the muzzle. The footsteps grew louder, and Small Thunder whimpered and shifted in his sleep.