Lori Benton (32 page)

“No—yes. We want …” Owl’s tight-knit brows unraveled in confusion, but Pine Bird thrust out her small quivering chin.

“We want to stay with you,” she said.

Willa saw the revelation in Owl’s eyes, unknown to him until his sister spoke for them. “Will you keep us, Miss Willa?”

She rocked back on her heels, mouth open, but no words to speak. Even for Neil, it seemed too much. As though he couldn’t bear to hear her refuse them as well, he took up his hat and mounted his horse.

“Cap!” he called to the collie, lolling on the porch through this distressing farewell as if nothing of consequence were unfolding.

The dog sat up but didn’t obey.

“Capercaillie! Let’s go.”

The collie sidled close to Owl, pressing against the boy’s knee, ears flattened. Neil’s mouth slanted in a grimace he might have meant for a smile. He raised his eyes to the boy. “Ye’ll keep him for me, then?”

“I will.” Tears coursed down Owl’s face now too. Pine Bird was looking back and forth between them, as if expecting someone to say this wasn’t happening. Willa pressed her lips tight together.

Neil MacGregor looked at her from the saddle. “God keep ye, Willa. And thank you, for everything.” He chirruped softly, and the horse took its first steps away from her.

The morning air was sticky, smelling of coming heat. The birds seemed to sense it; their trills held a sense of urgency, but they couldn’t drown the steady
clop
of the roan’s departing hooves. Over Willa and the children, silence had fallen, as hobbling as fetters. Neil had reached the fringe of trees between the yard and the cornfield before Owl’s shout broke its bonds.

“Mr. MacGregor, wait!”

Neil reined in the horse, twisting in the saddle to look back as the boy leaped off the porch and ran into the yard to stand, bare legged beneath his shirt, black hair straggling on his shoulders.

“Don’t you want to know my name when you pray for me?”

“Lad,” Neil said, “I’ve always wanted that. Tell me your name.”

Willa was near enough to see the gladness and grief breaking on Neil MacGregor’s face, but she couldn’t see the boy’s, to know if he smiled or wept as he shouted, “It’s Matthew. My name is Matthew Kershaw!”

Outside the cabin, crickets were singing. Inside, supper was cleared away, plates and kettle scrubbed—as were the children, settled on their pallet in the corner but not sleeping. Or even sleepy, Willa observed as she gathered the trappings for bullet making: scrap lead, mold, and ladle.

Her shot pouch was nearly empty. She’d let Owl, or rather Matthew—the children insisted on their Christian names now—use her musket to practice his marksmanship. Though he recovered some of the spent balls, digging them from the stump into which he’d shot them, most were misshapen and useless. She added them to the pile of scrap lead on the hearth.

Maggie sang softly to a cornhusk doll, a gift from Anni’s Samantha. Even with Maggie’s small voice filling the room, Willa felt the absence of Neil MacGregor. Twelve evenings they had spent without him, not that she was keeping a count. She didn’t want to admit how much she missed his easy conversation with the children or his sketches spread out on the table, missed him standing at her shoulder giving dictation while she labored to write legibly with his quill. She kept busy, clinging to the part of herself that was relieved Neil was gone, dismayed when that part shrank a little each day. More dismayed at how frequently her thoughts flitted back to those moments by the spring, the night before he left. It overcame her in unguarded moments, the memory of his mouth on hers, his lovely words … the horrible things she had said to drive him away.

It was harder than she’d expected, his absence. But the struggle would pass. If she would just cease thinking of the man, it would pass.

Annoyed with herself, she set the mold and ladle on the hearth, then glanced at the children’s pallet, beside which a tallow stub burned in a
wooden dish. The boy made a sudden movement when she looked his way, shoving something under a quilt.

He hadn’t been quick enough to hide what it was. Willa straightened from the hearth, petticoat swishing around her ankles.

“Owl, where did you get a book?”

Maggie’s singing ceased. “He’s Matthew now,” she reminded her. When Neil MacGregor rode from the cabin yard, he’d taken the girl’s shyness with him. She’d since been bold to speak her mind, reminding Willa more of Goes-Singing every day.

“Matthew, then. You have a book. Let me see it.”

To his credit, the boy didn’t deny the book. He drew it from hiding and brought it to her. It was Neil’s Bible.

“He didn’t steal it,” his sister said firmly. The boy’s mouth twisted, then firmed.

“Mr. MacGregor gave it to me.”

She took it into hands that trembled. “When?”

“The day he left. You were in your garden.”

“Why?”

“Because you were angry with him.”

Willa shook her head. “
Why
did he give you his Bible?”

“He cannot read it. He wanted me to read it.”

Willa’s grip on the Bible tightened. She wanted to climb to the loft, light a candle, pour through its pages, which looked to be marked with dozens of stray bits of paper. “Do you wish to read it?”

“Yes,” Matthew said.

She searched his face, seeing only earnestness. “Do you know how to read?”

The boy lowered his gaze. “Yes.”

Behind his back, his sister wagged her head. Matthew turned and caught her at it, scowled, then flushed. “I can read … some.”

“You needn’t hide it from me to do so,” Willa said. Then on impulse added, “If you wish it, I will help you to read it.”

The boy nodded, and she set the Bible on the table. The sight made her feel as if some bit of Neil MacGregor had come whispering back into her home.

She did not look too closely at the comfort she drew from that.

A scratching sounded at the door. Matthew let in the collie. In the seconds of the door’s opening, Willa caught the flash of lightning away beyond the ridge to the north. She sent up a prayer for the wandering naturalist, that he was somewhere safe and dry.

The boy shut the door. The dog went to the pallet where Maggie sat, curling near her to sleep.

His Bible and his dog. Willa didn’t know whether to smile or put a fist to the spot of pain that had bloomed beneath her ribs. She caught herself doing both as the girl set the doll aside and began grooming the dog with careful fingers, picking foxtails from its coat.

Willa settled cross-legged at the hearth and set about replenishing her shot pouch. She chose a piece from the pile of deformed bullets, broken buttons, and bits of lead, and placed it in the ladle. As she held the ladle to the fire, the boy crouched near to watch.

She was conscious of the tension that had existed between her and the children since Neil’s leaving. It was never anything overt. She had no complaint to make of them. They did everything she bid them—including spending hours each day patrolling the cornfield to keep away deer and raccoon. Yet she had a sense of them withholding something from her. Had it been the Bible? The tension hadn’t broken with its discovery.

Not a secret, then. More like a sense of waiting hanging over them. There could be only one thing they were waiting for—an answer to the question put to her the day of Neil MacGregor’s leaving.

How could she give an answer? She couldn’t bear the terror of
yes
. She
just couldn’t. But she could not bring herself to disappoint them with
no
. She would wait. Joseph would return. When he was there, ready to put them on the back of his horse, then she would say no.

Across the room the collie rolled onto its back, four paws in the air, showing its teeth in a foolish grin that drew giggles from Maggie. Closer to hand, Matthew stared at the lead in the ladle she held to the fire’s heart, until it melted all at once into a shimmering puddle. He watched as she poured the liquid into the mold, holding her face away from the sharp metallic fumes.

“Who taught you to do that? Was it your white father?”

She remembered Dieter Obenchain kneeling before that very hearth, turning out musket balls while she sat on a bench at the table—a different table than the one there now—her legs too short to reach the floor. Papa had poured the bright stream of lead into the mold, then turned to her …

His smile flashed upon her mind with such searing clarity she was forced to blink back tears. She waved a hand before her face, pretending the fumes stung her eyes.

The memory vanished and another took its place. A fire in the center of a longhouse, sending up its smoke to the high bark roof. A pair of tattooed old warriors come to visit the even older man who was the father of her adoptive mother. The three sitting wrinkled and brown and smelling of bear grease, turning out round musket balls that clacked in the ashes like marbles, while she watched from a platform a few feet away. It was this memory she spoke of.

Maggie abandoned the dog and came to sit beside her brother, eyes trained on her. Their faces were sheened like copper in the firelight.

“They did not know how closely I watched them.” Willa turned out the first musket ball into the ashes, to be filed smooth when cool. She took up a broken button and an unrecognizable twist of lead and dropped them into the ladle. “Or else they didn’t mind. Not even when I moved to the fire and sat with them. That is one time I saw this done.”

She didn’t sense the tension so much when she spoke, so she kept talking. She told them of the day Joseph Tames-His-Horse got the small scar above his eyebrow, trying to teach three small boys to shoot their bows.

“All went well till I decided I wished to learn, though I was a girl. The boys were unhappy when I shot better than they on my first try. One leaped up with his bow and loosed an arrow to prove himself my match.” Willa poured more molten lead into the bullet mold. “It was a good shot, except Joseph had not moved away from checking the arrow I had shot. He turned his face as the arrow nipped past him, nearly taking out his eye.”

Maggie gasped. Matthew watched her face, holding back his own reaction until Willa showed him a smile. Then he smiled too.

“Joseph is still leaving meat for you, but when will we see him again?” The boy looked half-hopeful, but half-wary too. He had admired Joseph, but now there was this question between them. Did the child sense she had made up her mind to give them their answer when Joseph returned?

“Before the autumn he will come back.” She didn’t have the heart to add “for you.”

The children shared a look, turned quiet for a time, until Matthew asked, “What was your name to them?”

At first the question itself surprised her. Then it struck Willa how the boy had phrased it. The Mohawks were
them
.

“Burning Sky.”

“For your hair?” Maggie reached for Willa’s braid. She’d been told its color changed with the light. In the fire’s glow it was more auburn than brown.

’Tis the color of winter oak leaves, your hair
.

Willa paused in reaching for the mold to turn out another ball.
Do not think of him
. She took a deep breath and could smell the girl’s hair beside her, sweet and damp from washing, and another yearning nearly as sharp filled her. The yearning for the warm weight of a child in her arms.

“I suppose so,” she said, her throat too tight for telling that story.

Matthew held a toy soldier broken at the knees, the last piece of lead she had to melt. He handed it to her, reluctant. “Were you happy being Mohawk?”

Willa set the soldier in the ladle and held it to the flames, watching for the moment when it would dissolve and be a soldier no more. “I learned to be.”

“Why did you leave them?”

She jerked the soldier back from the fire, uncertain why she hesitated to turn him into a musket ball. She stared at him, afraid she was too late, but the soldier held his broken shape. “I left because my husband was dead. My mother was dead. My children were dead. Joseph was gone away, and I did not know whether he—”

Hearing such dreadful words on her lips, afraid she would lose control of the tears that burned her eyes, her nose, Willa set the ladle on the hearth. “If you want that soldier,” she told the boy, “you may have him. But let him cool first.”

She looked at the children, expecting more questions, wondering how she could answer without dissolving into a puddle of grief in front of them. But they looked back at her with eyes too old for their faces and said no more.