The Legend of Tyoga Weathersby (41 page)

Placing his hand on her chest, he felt her heart beat. It was strong and her breathing was deep and regular. Grabbing another armful of covers and sheets, he ran down to the river again and repeated the process. All through the day he made the circuit from shelter to riverbank and back.

The sun was setting when his legs grew weak from lack of food and sleep. He collapsed onto the elkhide next to Trinity, placed his hand on her forehead, and dropped his chin to his chest in relief. Her fever was down and she had stopped shivering. He laid down beside her and fell asleep in a pile of soaking blankets—completely exhausted.

He was awakened by a gentle nudge to his side, and a whispered request, “Esgihusi.”

Propping himself up on his elbow, Tyoga rubbed his eyes and saw that it was dark outside. “T.J.,” he said. “You’re thirsty? That’s good.”

Trinity acknowleged with a slight shake of her head but did not open her eyes. Propping her head up with his hand, Tyoga held the water gourd to her lips. She drank slowly until it was nearly empty.

She struggled to open her eyes for just a moment and looked up at him.

Seeing a hint of surprise in her furrowed brow, Tyoga responded with a playful, “Don’t run off. It’s me! I just shaved off my beard. Had the straight razor out anyway, so I figured I’d put it to good use.”

Smiling, he brushed her hair out of her eyes. Trinity had never seen him cleanshaven. He had not shaved during his trek through the mountains and he had been with her for nearly a month now. After nine weeks of not shaving, he looked more animal than man. He understood how the dramatic change would have startled her. He rubbed his cleanshaven face with his open hand and shrugged his shoulders.

Standing up, Tyoga stretched his back and discovered that he was starving. Before he could get himself something to eat, he had to make a fresh bed of dry pelts and wool blankets for Trinity to lie on. He took the wet covers off her, and dried her body from head to toe. Placing her gently down on the soft dry bedding, he covered her with a clean sheet, and leaned over to place a soft kiss on her sweaty brow.

The kiss caught him completely by surprise.

Tyoga stoked the fire, heated some venison stew, took off his wet clothes and put on a store-bought cotton shirt and trousers, which were gifts they had brought back with them from their visit to Passaunkack. He had worn a pair of cotton trousers only once before. His papa had bought him the pants on one of their trips to Yorktown. They weren’t as durable as his doeskin britches, but he liked the way they felt against his skin.

Looking up at the stars, he thought of Sunlei, Tes Qua, and Prairie Day. He wondered if they were looking up at the moon at that exact same moment.

Are they thinking of me?

As two distant owls sang their haunting serenade, and nightbirds twittered overhead, Tyoga stretched and went inside to go to bed.

One side of the interior of the shelter was a muddy mess from where Tyoga had kept Trinity soaking in cool, wet blankets all day. The only dry part of the shelter floor was where he had placed her on a soft elkskin.

In the month that they had been together, Tyoga and Trinity had never shared a bed.

This never would have been the case had Trinity been pure Cherokee. Warming each other through the night with their shared body heat was an expectation rather than an act of intimacy. From the very first night, they would have slept together while keeping each other warm.

This was surely something Trinity would have done if she had been with a Cherokee brave. Somehow their “whiteness” dictated a contrary set of moral guidelines. That they wanted to snuggle through the cold nights was without question. It made sense to do so. That they did not, spoke to the power of societal dictate as the oppressor of natural inclination.

Tyoga removed his shirt and lay down next to Trinity Jane.

Chapter 49

Twin Oaks

T
rinity’s recovery was remarkably fast. She was young, and strong, and determined.

Tyoga had administered all of the prescribed treatments for snake bite. Thanks to the help he had given his mother when she cared for his younger brother, he had provided care well beyond what the untrained woodsman would have been able to do.

Tyoga steeped a tea of willow bark and yarrow to keep Trinity’s fever in check. He managed her pain by using ginger root and wild mint that acted as a powerful sedative. He made sure that she drank water, even when she claimed that she wasn’t thirsty. And, he was prepared to incise her leg from ankle to knee if the swelling had begun to rip her flesh apart.

While Trinity was recuperating, a great deal of time was spent helping her to remember the English language. She had been taken from her family when she was eight years old and already quite fluent in her native tongue. A schoolteacher, her mother had read to Trinity from an early age.

Trinity could read and write in English before that horrible day when she was the lone survivor of the Shawnee attack. As it turned out, the fact that she had only spoken and heard Algonquin for the past ten years diminished her recollection of the English language hardly at all. There were some difficulties with subject and verb agreement. Everyday items like the words for “fork” and “spoon” and “shoes” had to be relearned; but once they were, she never needed to ask again.

The summer of 1707 lasted well into the fall, and the tidewater stayed green and warm into the later weeks of October.

True to his word, Chief Blue Coat had assigned the task of marking Tyoga’s property lines to four young braves who were instructed to walk two-days in each direction of the compass, and mark the corner trees with the Twin Oaks brand. Over two hundred square miles of pristine Virginia countryside had been claimed in the name of Tyoga Weathersby. All of the land, timber, minerals, streams, and lakes belonged to the eighteen-year old man. All of the fish and fowl, hides and pelts were his to do with as he pleased.

In forty-eight hours, Chief Blue Coat had made Tyoga Weathersby a wealthy man.

The Mattaponi men helped Tyoga build a sturdy log cabin with a door of solid hickory, and two large window openings in the back and front of the home. The back wall faced the forest to the east and the path to Passaunkack. The front faced the Mattaponi River, the Appalachian Mountains, and the setting sun. The roof was made of the woven thatch the Mattaponi had learned to rely upon for a watertight lodge covering because milled planking and shingles would have to be purchased and transported from Calvert County. Glass windowpanes would have to be shipped from Yorktown.

The cabin had a great room and an area partitioned off as sleeping quarters.
A kitchen area for preparing and processing foodstuffs was along the north side of the cabin, and the majority of the south wall was taken up by an enormous stone fireplace.

The Mattaponi had seen chimneys before, but had never been involved in the construction of such a massive stone structure. The lean of the chimney to create the necessary updraft to keep smoke from filling the interior of the house had them a bit puzzled. However, they carried the stones, mixed the mud and straw mortar, and made the scaffolding necessary to construct a fireplace more grand than the one planned for the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg—the new name for Middle Plantation.

As warm and inviting as it seemed in the winter of 1708, the cabin, was only the beginning of what would become the magnificent estate along the Mattaponi known as Twin Oaks.

While the men were building the main house and out buildings, Trinity was hard at work learning the ways of the woodland tribes. She had grown up in the Nansmond Clan of the Powhatan, a tribe that lived among the estuaries of the Chesapeake. They grew corn, beans, and squash, and hunted the tidal basins for sturgeon, clams, mussels, shrimp, crabs, and shad. Their subsistence was based upon the harvesting of seafood rather than sowing and reaping vegetables and grains. While coaxing sustenance from the land was a talent not completely foreign to her, she had never had the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills of the inland Powhatan who were experts at planting, sowing, and preserving their crops.

Trinity Jane’s sister, Grows Strong, and her family and friends were frequent overnight visitors to Twin Oaks. Although it was far too late to plant any crops, the women of Passaunkack taught Trinity how to store seeds, preserve bulbs, and winter tubors for planting in the spring. They showed her planting and sowing techniques that would allow her to enjoy an abundant harvest the following growing season.

The fall was the time when the women of the village were most involved in the tanning of hides and the preparation of skins to make warm winter clothing for the cold months ahead. This was a skill at which Trinity had a great deal of experience. She showed the women of Mattaponi more efficient ways of fleshing a hide and new ways of making stretching frames that allowed for a final product that was uniform in thickness and shape.

The women exchanged clothes patterns and sewing techniques that produced warm and durable clothing the likes of which neither had been able to manufacture before.

As the weeks and months passed, the aloneness felt by Tyoga gradually faded away with the growing admiration for Trinity’s uncanny knack for teasing opportunity from adversity. The admiration born of shared hardship, misfortune conquered, and health restored blossomed into mutual trust that, over time, solidified into unshakable commitment. Desperation, perseverance, and triumph are the ores from which the strongest bonds are forged. They revealed their devotion to one another in the transparency of a smile, the gentleness of a glance, or the open flirtation of a sensuous sigh.

Still, they had not touched.

One evening in late October, they were sitting around the campfire, watching the blazing orange ball of the sun slowly sink into the mountains to the west. Their bellies were full of turkey breast and trout fillets. The remnants of blanched watercress partially filled one of the two clay bowls. The other held a helping of creamed corn.

They were both very tired. Their muscles ached with the throb of accomplishment and progress. They were content and relaxed.

As the sun continued to set and darkness descended into the glade, Tyoga turned his attention to Trinity Jane, who was seated in front and to the side of him.

The transition from day to night strips the world of color and replaces the dazzle of reds and greens and blues with a pastel grayness that compensates for the loss with a clarity of its own accord.

In the dying light of day, the scar on Trinity’s face transitioned from what might have been seen by others as a blemish, into a milestone of passage that was pleasing to his eyes.
The mark accentuated rather than detracted from her beauty. Even at her young age, she radiated a wisdom and contentment of soul that are the rewards of living a life more accomplished at giving than coveting.

In the grayness of twilight, Trinity Jane virtually glowed.

When she turned and caught him staring at her, she smiled rather coyly and moved back so that she was next to his side. She put her hand on his thigh and rested her head against his shoulder.

“Are you thinking about her, Ty?” she asked.

“No.”

“It is okay if you are. I understand,” Trinity said.

“It is better if I don’t,” he replied. “If I imagine where she might be, what might be happening to her, and that I should be with her to protect her—it just becomes too much to bear.”

“You made the right decision, Tyoga,” she said. “You did what was best for everyone, you must know that.”

“I did what was best for everyone when I left the mountains. I know that.” He paused, and then added, “I don’t think that I have done right by you, T.J.”

She gently pushed away from him, and sat up on her knees so that they were eye-to-eye. “Ty, I am here by my own choice,” she said. “You are not sorry that I am here, are you, Ty? It would kill me to know that you do not want me here with you. I have helped you, haven’t I? I haven’t been any trouble.”

Rocking to his knees, he took Trinity’s shoulders between his two strong hands and lifted her so that she was kneeling upright and they were once again face to face. “T.J.” He waited for her to focus on his eyes. “I could not have made it without you by my side. Do you hear me?”

She knodded.

“Don’t ever ask me again if I want you with me. Never again.”

Overcome with the sincerity in his voice and the look in his eyes, Trinity released herself to him. She held his head in her hands and tenderly kissed him with her dewy lips. Before Tyoga even had the chance to respond, she said, “Wait here. I have a surprise for you.” She kissed him again, jumped up, skipped up the stone steps, and disappeared into the cabin.

Outside, Tyoga watched the moon rise and the stars begin to shine.

The promise had been strong within him over the past several weeks. It had spoken to him, not in the usual way that alerted him to threat or peril, but in a whisper that allowed him to see the ordinary and mundane in new and different ways. The pattern of stones on the shore of the Mattaponi murmured truths about the journey that lay ahead. The dew on the cattails dribbled hints of birth and transition. The flocks of crows roosting in the pines to the east felt like an arrival unforseen.

He was shaken from his thoughts of the promise by Trinity’s doeskin dress landing in his lap. From behind him, he heard her sultry voice say, “Ty.”

He turned around.

Haloed by the light of the fire inside, Trinity Jane stood in the front door of the cabin.

Tyoga stood up and just stared. He had no words.

The sheer pastel linen dress flowed over her slender waist and taut abdomen nearly to the floor. The deep plunging neckline, filled with a gauzy lace bodice, revealed the cleavage between her ample breasts. She wore no shoes.

She had brushed her hair out from the usual side ponytail. The thick auburn waves cascaded past her shoulders to between her shoulder blades. She did not have bangs like the Cherokee or Powhatan women, but had allowed her hair to grow out at an equal length. Her forehead and brows where hidden behind an auburn veil of lustrous hair that was teasing, provocative, and alluring.