The Frontiersman’s Daughter (14 page)

23

That night she dreamt she was on the river again. Only this time Susanna was with her, both of them dangling cane-cut feet in the cold water. She was paddling, but the oars were as willful as twin mules, going every which way but the way she wanted. The canoe was like a leaf caught in the current, the wind shoving them toward the opposite shore—the Shawnee shore.

Susanna screamed, but Lael was speechless. There, crouching low behind a tangle of mountain laurel, was Captain Jack, just as she’d known he would be. All at once she was drenched with river water. He was dragging her and gesturing to the scalping knife at his waist. Behind her, Susanna screamed and screamed and would not stop.

She came awake at once, throwing back the thin blanket that seemed to hold a weight of water. The only sound was the drip of the rain outside the rock shelter. For a few lonesome moments she sat, heart a-gallop, not drenched in river water but her own salty sweat. She shut her eyes tight as if to block the dream.

What had Ma Horn once told her?
Stay standing . . . won’t nothing ever befall you that the Lord don’t allow.
If this was true, she reckoned the Lord had allowed Pa to die. Yet couldn’t He have reached a hand down from heaven and helped her father at the last? Couldn’t He have soothed the swollen river long enough to let him pass?

She broke camp and continued on her way. She knew she must still be mourning for the blooming dogwood and wild plum in her path only cut her with their beauty. Still, nothing looked familiar. Sometimes it seemed she was just circling, crisscrossing her own tracks, completely befuddled.

Lost
, the still woods seemed to whisper.
Lael Click . . . lost.

Had Pa ever been lost? Nay, not lost, she remembered him saying, but he confessed he’d once been bewildered for three days. Right then and there she got off her horse and knelt down in the cool, damp clover. She could ill afford to be befuddled three days, so she bowed her head and prayed to be set on the right path.

Soon after, she came to a wide trace, rutted and worn away by the trek of buffalo. The trace gleamed hard and white in the spring sun. Something within her, some remembrance long buried, broke free.

She was almost to the river.

The Louisa. The Shawnee Chenoa. The Kentucke.

The name mattered little. She was coming home.

She’d long dreamed of returning in spring when the dogwoods and wild plums were white as fine linen against the greening woods. In the meadows the rye grass and clover tickled the bottoms of her feet for she’d long since abandoned her boots. They hung from the saddle by their laces, forgotten.

The sun had come out as if in welcome, raising her spirits. She took a deep breath as she caught sight of the Kentucke River, winsome and curvaceous, a timeless blue. Beyond its spring-swollen banks on the opposite shore were the huge oaks and elms she’d known from childhood that now hid the Click cabin from view.

She’d come this way to avoid the settlement. She wanted to look again upon the place from which Pa had made his timely escape from a party of Cherokee when first coming into Kentucke all those years before, leaping off his horse and jumping off the rocky bluff into the waiting arms of the maple below. There it stood, solid and newly green and far taller than she remembered.

Unafraid, she urged the mare forward into the river. As if sensing her ease, the horse swam effortlessly into the cold current to the bank beyond. She could see her old homeplace now, chimney and all, and the sight made her oblivious to her dripping dress and saddlebags.

From a distance the cabin looked unchanged, hugging the tangled hillside, the grassy yard dotted with stumps and framed all around by the dark woods. But never in her remembering had the cabin sat so lonely and desolate, inhabited by pigeons, the chinking crumbling, the porch sagging beneath the weight of time and roses.

Nearly noon now, she climbed the hill and tethered the mare to a rail fence fashioned by Pa’s own hands. The sun-warmed wood was soothing against her fingers, and along its length twined blackberry vine. Slipping off her heavy dress, she draped it over the fence to dry and retrieved another from the saddlebag.

How small the cabin looked! Her eyes ran over its hand-hewn details as she approached. The substantial chimney of river rock and mud. The tiny loft window. The old worn door stone. The sagging porch now bereft of Ma’s rocking chair. She would need a rocker. Pa always said mountain ash couldn’t be beat for furniture. A porch without a rocker looked naked and unsightly. And the rose canes—pretty though they were—would have to be cut back lest they grow right through the cabin door.

She kicked at a pile of dry leaves on the porch with a bare toe and watched them crumble to dust. Her whole being longed to straighten up and polish and set things right. This was home . . .
her home!
She felt like crying with her gladness.

At the door she paused, suddenly chilled, as the sun passed behind a cloud. Who had last passed through this door? Pa? Her mother? The day she’d left the settlement still hung heavy in her heart. She’d been but a girl then, heartsore and homesick. Now she was a woman, much the same.

She pushed against the heavy door, and it groaned in resistance. The room was dark and musty, and she went to the windows and threw open the shutters. Cobwebs caught in her hair, but the light was a welcome sight, dispelling every shadow. She made a face at the mess, as the chinking between the logs had begun to crumble and now littered the floor. The cabin had sat empty for a long time—after she’d gone to Virginia, her family had moved farther west to the Falls of the Ohio, where Pa built another cabin and surveyed land.

But truly, little had changed within. The long trestle table and benches were in the middle of the room, whitened with dust. The rope bedstead occupied one corner but was bare of a tick. On the mantle rested two wooden bowls and some gourds. Ma had taken little, she realized. But then, she’d had no need of such homely things, living in town and married to a man of means.

Next she inspected the barn and was surprised to find the old plow there along with a broom and some old tools. Taking the bucket, she drew water from the spring, thinking how fine the cabin looked with door and shutters wide open in welcome. It was dusk when she finished scrubbing the worn floor with sand and water and an old petticoat.

Chilled, she longed for the comfort of a fire. Taking the flint from a saddlebag, she coaxed a flame at the hearth, feeding it twigs and dry moss before adding old wood from the barn. The fire crackled and smoked gratifyingly, and she leaned back on her heels, cast back to another time when Ma had done the same each morning. The iron spider sat in back of the fire, blackened from years of use. Ma always said her chimney drew the best in the country.

But there would be no supper since she’d run out of provisions. By the light of a candle she took out a scrap of paper and quill and ink and began thinking of all that she needed. Salt. Cornmeal. Potatoes. Coffee. Sugar. Hunger made a long list, she mused. She had some money left and needed to go to Fort Click soon or starve.

But . . . what if Fort Click was not Fort Click at all but had been renamed? Five years away was not a coon’s age, surely, but long enough to have wrought change in the settlement. Could it be true that numerous cabins now surrounded the stockade? What if Ma Horn had passed on?

She blew out the candle abruptly and retreated to her makeshift bed of old hay and quilts before the flickering fire. For a time she tossed about uncomfortably, finding the hard floor even less hospitable than the spring ground. She’d grown soft, she thought ruefully. Hadn’t Pa preferred the forest floor in and out of season to a corn-husk or feather tick? She could hear his voice now as clearly as if he called from the corner.

Settle yourself, Daughter. There’s worse things than a hard bed.

She listened to the faraway scuttle of a mouse in the loft and fell into an exhausted slumber.

24

Early the next morning she took the path to Pigeon Ridge. The familiar trail was overgrown, which Lael took as a troubling sign. But at every turn was a lovely gift—a clump of dewy violets, some tender shoots of salat, a fine mist that hung like a bridal veil from the treetops.

She knew at first sight that the cabin had been empty for some time. Tears of disappointment stung her eyes as she opened the door and stepped inside. There was no rocker by the fire or honeysuckle baskets overflowing with herbs and roots. Empty and cold as a tomb, not a stitch of furniture remained.

Ma Horn had not passed on, surely. Someone would have sent word from the settlement to Briar Hill. Theodora Humboldt Horn had no Kentucke kin but Neddy, yet someone would have taken her in if she were ill or infirm.

Lael could not rest until she knew where Ma Horn was. With Ma Horn gone, Susanna and Will were her closest neighbors. She had no choice but to take the mare, for the Bliss cabin at Cozy Creek was miles away. She missed so much by riding, failing to see all the little details spring had wrought. The morning was the warmest yet, and a faint wind stirred the newly leafed trees all around her, creating lacy patterns of light on the forest floor.

Halfway there, she stopped to drink at a spring and stared at her reflection in the whispering water. Suppose Susanna didn’t recognize her—or was sore over her lack of a farewell long ago? As she rode, she prepared herself for their reunion. Maybe Will had moved them west to Missouri or some other distant place. With her heart beating so furiously it seemed a bird had been loosed in her ribcage, she took a deep breath.

As she drew near Will’s old place, three children played beneath a pine, unaware of her approach. There was a curious absence of barking dogs. She remembered that Will had a penchant for dogs—not just any dogs, but tried and true bluetick hounds from Virginia.

She tied the mare to a fence and stood watching the children. She could see Susanna and Will in their small faces. The youngest, a girl, toddled about on fat legs and pulled at a cat’s tail. The older two, both boys with dirty faces, were making stick drawings in the dirt.

Not wanting to startle them, she whistled softly. The girl looked up and, seeing her, bawled, “Ma-Maw!”

Susanna came running. Across the yard the children scrambled, hiding in her skirts and pointing toward Lael.

No light of recognition lit Susanna’s face. For a moment Lael felt foolish—and speechless. Had she changed so much? As in days past she was bonnetless and barefoot. Her hair hung down her back in a long braid with little wisps about her face and she wore a simple linen dress with little trim.

Suddenly, Susanna threw up her arms. “Lael! Lael Click! Is that you?”

Lael smiled and held out her hands. “Here I am.”

Susanna started across the yard, stumbling over her children in her gladness. The women embraced long and hard, then pulled apart in laughter.

“Why, I never!” Susanna exclaimed, looking her over. “You’re supposed to be at some fancy school, fillin’ your head with facts and figures—or so the settlement gossip goes.”

“I’ve come home, to stay.”

“To stay? Where?”

“Pa deeded me the land—all four hundred acres,” Lael told her proudly. “I aim to live there.”

“Alone?”

“Nay, not alone. There’s my mare—and I’ll have some chickens and a milk cow as soon as I’m able.”

“Oh, Lael, it is you! Only you could talk so! But what about your ma and pa—and Ransom?”

Lael sobered then. “Pa’s gone, Susanna. Last December, on the way to map the Missouri River country . . .” She nearly stumbled over the words as she said them, recalling anew the day she’d received Ma’s letter.

Susanna, slack-jawed with shock, looked at the ground. Her children hung on her apron but were silent. “We never heard it here. We been cooped up in the cove all winter; not once have we been to the fort since fall.”

“Better you hear it from me than some settlement ninny,” Lael said. “Pa drowned crossing the Missouri on a cold, rainy day. The river was swollen from the winter thaw . . . the current was too strong. The Spanish government had granted him land in Missouri, and he was going to claim it.”

Susanna looked bewildered. “You sure? That sets queer with me.”

Lael could do nothing but nod, the threat of tears too near.

Wet-eyed herself, Susanna pressed on. “And your ma?”

“Ma’s remarried and lives in Bardstown. Ransom’s with her.” For a fleeting moment Lael felt guilty she’d not stopped and seen them. But her heart was yet too sore, her resentment too fresh about Ma’s remarrying. She’d simply wanted to come home as fast as she could with no detours along the way, though she did miss her brother.

“Ransom. He was just a little feller when you set out. I misdoubt I’d know him on sight.”

They fell silent for a moment, then Susanna hooked her arm through Lael’s, calling to her oldest boy, “Henry, go water and hay that mare. Then we’ll all go in the house for some pie and coffee.”

They said little once inside. Susanna bustled about the cabin, fetching dishes and cups from a corner cupboard—not the daily wooden ones, but the chipped blue china her mother had brought over the gap from North Carolina. She set the kettle over the fire while the children vied for the biggest piece of pie and the closest seat to Lael.

“My oldest is Henry,” Susanna called over her shoulder as she made coffee. “Then there’s Ben. And my baby—well, she had such fair hair and green eyes I couldn’t call her nothin’ but Lael.”

“Lay-elle,” the little girl echoed shyly.

Lael smiled and reached out to touch a wisp of the fine baby hair. “I’m honored, Susanna. Did Will put up too much of a fuss?”

Susanna smiled and poured the coffee. “He wanted to call her Matilda Jane after his mother, but I stood my ground. I said she’d never know the difference, her being grave-bound and all. He called her Matilda for a week then gave up.” She sat down and sampled a piece of pie, then looked at Lael long and hard. “You don’t have the look of a lady, all huffy and high-minded. I was a-feared you would be. Now your voice, it’s some different.”

“Oh?”

“I have a notion you could talk a blue streak and I wouldn’t know a word you’d be saying. But that dress of yours is as homely as mine.”

Lael looked down and smoothed a crease. “It’s a simple one. I was afraid you wouldn’t know me if I wore anything else.”

Susanna looked dashed. “I hope you have some fancy dresses. It would tickle me to see somethin’ other than homespun.”

Lael smiled, thinking how she had once felt the same, in awe of satins and velvets and pretty painted silks. “Henry, fetch my pack, if you please.”

From the pack Lael pulled out a small straw hat encircled with silk pansies and a pair of kid gloves. Susanna drew in her breath, and six childish eyes rounded in delight. “I’ve no pretty dresses with me today. Just these—for you.” Lael set the hat atop Susanna’s head, and little Lael clapped in delight. “A sight better than an old poke bonnet!”

Susanna laughed. “And these gloves are soft as butter. They’ll do fine to cover up these knotty hands of mine.” She removed the hat and set it in her lap. “There’s big changes in the settlement, Lael. Last spring the men built a church just beyond the fort’s west wall. There’s no preacher yet so it’s sat empty over the winter, but sometimes a circuit rider comes round. You should hear the singin’ on Sundays. Like a choir of angels.”

Listening, Lael forgot her pie and coffee, a tangle of bittersweet feelings in her breast.

“There’s been lots of changes, mostly good. But the old timers are passing on,” Susanna went on.

Lael swallowed and the words formed an ache in her throat as she asked, “And Ma Horn? Is she . . . well?”

“Ma Horn moved to the fort two years back, being blind in one eye and all. She can’t get around like she used to, and there’s been a sight of sickness in the settlement. She ain’t been up here since she birthed Henry.”

“But that was years ago!” Lael exclaimed.

“I birthed the last two myself, with Will’s help,” Susanna said with a touch of pride. “But I do miss Ma Horn. No one else knows where the best ginseng grows and all them healin’ herbs.”

Susanna poured more coffee and Lael looked around, sensing her friend’s contentment. “This is all so good . . . the pie . . . you . . . the children. Are you happy, Susanna?”

Susanna shooed the children back outside but left the door open. When she sat back down her eyes were alight. “I done right by marryin’ Will, Lael. He’s a good man.”

“Where is he?”

“Took to the woods with his dogs this morning. Say you’ll stay for supper, Lael, and spend the night. Say you’ll stay till we get our visit out.”

Lael smiled. “Then I don’t expect I’ll ever leave.”

When Will returned after noon, he carried a wild turkey, his pack of tired dogs close behind. His eyes twinkled when he spotted Lael. “So the good Lord has brought you back to us.”

Lael smiled. “I don’t know if it’s the Lord’s doing or my own.”

“Either way, we’re mighty glad to have you,” he replied, handing her his catch. “Now let’s see how a fine Virginia lady handles an old bird. Or are you still your father’s daughter?”

The rest of the day was spent in many of the domestic duties Lael had nearly forgotten. Scalding and plucking the bird. Digging for potatoes stored in straw in the springhouse. Grinding corn into meal for bread. Setting the table and filling the salt gourd.

The interior of the cabin held all the touches of a man’s hand that warmed a woman’s heart. A sturdy pine cupboard with a leaf pattern whittled in the doors. A cradle big enough to hold two babies. A spinning wheel under one shuttered window.

After the supper dishes had been cleared away, and Will and the children were in bed, Lael found herself alone with Susanna before the fire. Outside, the katydids chorused in the calm of the warm night, and far beyond the shuttered windows a wolf howled. Lael felt a little thrill that she could hardly recall the civilized sounds of Virginia—bells tolling, carriages clip-clopping, the incessant hum of voices day and night. Her mind seemed clear and spacious and settled for the first time in years.

“There’s been no Injun trouble for some time now,” Susanna said in a hushed voice. “The worst of it came before you left, when the Canes were killed and burnt out. Since then there’s been some horse stealin’ and random killin’ but no attacks on the fort.”

She got up and moved about the room, checking the latches on the shutters and the heavy bar across the door before taking her seat with a sigh. Watching her, Lael sensed there was more than Indian trouble on her mind, and she braced herself to hear whatever Susanna held back.

All day long they had skirted the subject of Simon, at times coming dangerously close when Susanna spoke of her kin or the goings-on in the settlement. All day the suspense had been building around the omission of his name until here at day’s end they could hide from it no longer.

Susanna gave a push to the rocker that was across from Lael’s own. “I never thought to see you again, Lael. None of us did. The day your pa pulled out, Ma Horn said we’d not see hide nor hair of you again, and everyone believed it. But it’s queer, ain’t it, how you come to be here right now, like you knowed . . .” She broke off and looked into the fire, fingers twining and untwining in her lap. “It’s queer how you come back, just in time.”

Lael sat utterly still. An uncomfortable silence fell between them like a chasm neither was willing to cross. Lael studied her old friend, her thoughts wild with speculation, her heart like a stone in her chest. Susanna would not look at her. Lael’s voice was soft. “Say it, Susanna.”

Susanna looked up, her eyes reflecting resignation. “Simon is to wed Piper Cane on Sunday next.”

Lael let the words flower fully in her mind with all their unwanted implications. “Sunday next,” she echoed.

“Aye, at noon, alongside the river by the fort.”

Lael swallowed, her mouth dry. After all this time the sting of betrayal still hurt. Years before she and Piper and Simon had been linked in a strange and twisted love knot—and were still. She said dully, “I should have expected it long before now.”