The Wood's Edge Page 17

  “Our people say it is wrong for dreams to go unrealized. Not good for the dreamer. Not lucky. But others have things to say about dreams.”

  “Others? You mean Fowler and Kirkland?”

  “And the book Kirkland has. That book has a lot to say about dreams.”

  “Does it?” Two Hawks had heard some of what was supposedly in that book—he hadn’t yet learned to read a word of it; perhaps he ought to—but he hadn’t heard anything about dreams.

  In the dappled forest light, Tames-His-Horse’s eyes were bright. “There is one in the book who had dreams sent by his god. He was a slave, but he had power. He could also tell others what their dreams meant. When those dreams came to pass as he said they would, the people made him a chief, and that way his own dreams came true. That one was called Joseph.”

  “Huh,” Two Hawks said. “Do you think my father’s dreams of killing the redcoat are sent by Kirkland’s god?”

  Tames-His-Horse thought about that, but not for long. “There is something else in that book, something about thoughts—and dreams are a kind of thoughts, yes? It says all thoughts must be held up to Heavenly Father’s words in the book to know if they are from Him or are only bad thoughts from our own spirits.”

  Two Hawks felt his lip pull back. “Are you one of them? a Christian?”

  “No,” Tames-His-Horse said. “I am thinking about such things. That is all.”

  “I don’t want to think about them.” Two Hawks heard the anger in his voice. “I want my father to be at peace and my brother returned to us.”

  Tames-His-Horse looked at him searchingly. “Little Brother, do you want your father to kill the redcoat?”

  He didn’t. For then he would have to see Anna Catherine cry. He would have to see her warm gaze turn cold. Turn to hate. What else would she feel if his father killed her father?

  “Ha,” Tames-His-Horse said. “Your arrow!” The Mohawk snatched it from a mossy bank and held it out, its shaft still piercing the yellow leaf.

  Two Hawks took it but didn’t answer the question.

  Good Voice found it easier to knock on Jerusha Kirkland’s cabin door the second time. She’d found the woman alone, and together they’d found their way through each other’s language to something that might one day be friendship. Jerusha didn’t ask how Good Voice came to be Oneida—the question she had asked Two Hawks—but before it was time to return to her work, Good Voice offered the story.

  “Thank you,” Jerusha said as Good Voice was leaving her lodge.

  “For what?”

  “For telling me your story. Will you tell me another thing?”

  Good Voice lingered on the doorstep, wary. “What thing?”

  “Are you happy with your life?”

  Good Voice knew what Jerusha was asking. Often it was hard for whites to believe someone of their kind adopted and raised one of the People might want to remain as they were, and though there were reasons she could say no to the question, none of them had to do with who she was—Good Voice of the Turtle Clan. “I am much happy as Onyota’a:ka.”

  This had satisfied Jerusha, Good Voice thought, as she passed through the pines near the lodge, but it had stirred up troubling thoughts in her own mind. She was content—aside from the trouble Stone Thrower caused, aside from the ache of her lost son. But what about that son, living across an ocean? Was he content with what he was becoming? Did he ever feel a lack, a longing? Did he sense there was a mother who—

  The bruising grip on her forearm yanked her nearly off her feet.

  She cried out, assaulted by the reek of spirits and musky unwashed male before her eyes could focus on the face of her husband, looking at her in disbelief.

  “What were you doing in the missionary’s lodge?”

  Not waiting for an answer, Stone Thrower hauled on her arm, pulling her out of sight of the cabin where her friend had already shut the door. Good Voice went without struggle. She didn’t want Jerusha Kirkland to see her husband drunk.

  She’d let him tow her back to her lodge, where their argument went back and forth and ended in her enduring his many excuses for why once again he’d little to show for the hides taken to the Carry. “But see—I have brought you a deer.” Stone Thrower’s words slurred as he pointed at the butchered carcass lying by the fire. “Already skinned, ready to cook. And I am hungry.”

  She set about the work of a wife, put some of the venison over the fire to roast, before she saw to the hide and the rest of the meat. Her arm where he’d grabbed her throbbed. She could smell him more in the closeness of the lodge, wanted to tell him to go to the creek and clean himself, but didn’t.

  She tried to talk to Heavenly Father about him, tried to pray in the way Jerusha had demonstrated to her. Her mind was a turmoil.

  “Where is my son? Not gone to see that a’sluni girl, has he?”

  Good Voice’s stomach clenched. “He is away hunting with a friend. Three days now.”

  Stone Thrower made a scoffing noise. “What good will that do anyone? Those boys will scare off the game and make it harder for the men to find anything.”

  That boy has been doing the work of a man I could name, Good Voice thought, but the smarting of her arm warned her to silence. He’d bruised her so once before, too drunk to know his strength. She didn’t think he would do worse, but…Heavenly Father, I do not know how to be at peace with this man anymore. Can You do anything with him?

  Stone Thrower went out. Moments later he came back in. She heard his stomach gurgling. “Is that meat done?”

  He was eating some of it half-raw when the door hide shifted and Two Hawks came in with his bow and a brace of rabbits. Good Voice saw his face stiffen at sight of his father at the fire.

  Stone Thrower turned toward the door, venison grease shiny on his chin. “Rabbits again? Maybe one day you will get a deer, eh? Like the one I have brought home. A good deer.”

  Two Hawks laid the rabbits beside the door. He made for his sleeping bench to hang up his bow. “Maybe if I had a rifle I might be a better hunter.”

  “A boy has no need of a rifle.” Stone Thrower took another bite of venison and chewed, not looking at the son who was looking at him, angry and hurt, and longing.

  “I am not a boy,” he said, sounding half-strangled. “And you—” He stopped himself, catching Good Voice’s warning look. They spoke behind Stone Thrower’s back with their eyes, hers pleading. Let him be the one who knows it all. This will pass. But for a while it would be like trying to walk on clacking beach stones in silence.

  Good Voice offered her son some of the meat. As he reached for it, his gaze fell to her arm. Too quick to stop him, he turned over the white underside where the bruises were starting to darken.

  “I am going to the creek.” Stone Thrower got up and went out. He didn’t see Two Hawks’s eyes following him. When the hide fell shut, her son’s gaze met hers.

  “He did this?”

  She pulled away. “He did not mean to. I went to the missionary’s lodge, and he saw me. He was upset. Now…eat.”

  Two Hawks wouldn’t take the meat. Wouldn’t even look at it. “Has he ever hit you?”

  For the first time in his life, she couldn’t hold her child’s gaze. “Never.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  She looked at him, a skinny boy with the eyes of a man, resolute and angry, and in her mind one thought screamed. Do not get between us. You would be like a reed before a trampling horse.

  “I am telling you the truth.” She put all the conviction she could summon behind the words, more frightened by her son’s hard gaze turned toward the swaying door hide than she’d ever been of his father.

  18

  Green Corn Moon 1771

  “It happened in a place called Crickhowell, near where my brother lives. The young men of that place wanted to see who could shoot an arrow farthest from one of their grandfathers’ war bows. Many tried, but William’s arrow went the farthest. That is what he put in a lette
r to Anna Catherine.”

  Two Hawks, fresh from seeing the girl who called He-Is-Taken brother, had been talking since he stepped from the forest near the field where Good Voice picked beans from the vines coiling up around the cornstalks. She dropped a handful into the basket he now held for her. The corn, beans, and squash spread around them in the heat-shimmered air, giving privacy for this talk neither meant other ears to hear.

  It was Bright Leaf’s portion of the field she gleaned. Bright Leaf was unwell, too tired to pick what she planted in spring. It was a worry at the back of Good Voice’s mind as she stepped over squash vines to the next hillock. In the front of her mind were the feelings that always tangled inside her when Two Hawks had been to see that girl.

  “My brother has decided on what he means to do. Read law at Oxford.” Two Hawks spoke the phrase in careful English. It sent a shiver up Good Voice’s spine, despite the day’s heavy warmth. Was that how He-Is-Taken sounded when he spoke?

  She cast a look at her son. “Oxford?”

  “It is a place of learning they have in England.”

  Good Voice snapped off another handful of beans and motioned her son to bring the basket near. “Is he not in a place called Wales?”

  “Yes, but England is close by. Like Onondaga land is to us.” Two Hawks grinned, baring straight white teeth. “Anna Catherine asked to shoot an arrow with my bow. She said if William and I could do it, she ought to be able.” He laughed, as if the memory amused him.

  “Bring the basket closer,” Good Voice said. “Did she shoot an arrow?”

  “All of them.” Two Hawks picked his way through the vines to her side, the planes of his face gleaming in the sun’s warmth.

  He was growing very handsome, her son.

  “The bow was hard for her to draw. She said how strong I must be to pull it back as far as I do,” he added, with a look of pleasure his mother didn’t miss. “I laughed when she tried. I could not help it! My laughing made her more determined, and before we stopped she hit the target I made. Though if it had been a deer, it would have been its tail. Ha!”

  Speaking of deer made her wonder if her son had pulled himself away from this girl long enough to kill a deer and bring her the meat and hide. Good Voice observed the flush under his skin—a flush not put there by the summer heat.

  Once she’d asked him whether seeing that girl was a hard thing to do. Two Hawks had held her gaze for a moment; she’d seen in his eyes the same tangle of feeling that lived in her. He had simply made a different choice about it. “Do you never wish to go and talk to her yourself?” he’d asked. “You would not need to tell her who you are—that much my father is right to forbid—only that you are my mother.”

  “It is a thing I might do, if I thought it would not bring a pain so great that…” But she hadn’t been able even to speak of it. And that was only one reason—the pain talking to that girl about her son would bring her. There were others.

  It was one thing for Two Hawks to disobey his father. One day he would leave them, be his own person, a warrior who decided for himself. It could be said that she might do likewise, risk angering Stone Thrower—to a point where he did her harm—by going to see the girl. She had the right to do that. And perhaps he wouldn’t harm her. Perhaps it would only be the thing that ended their marriage.

  But she didn’t want to see even that happen, not if she could help it. She’d decided it was best this way, to let Two Hawks use the need for hunting to cover his coming and going to see that girl. She still got to hear, in much detail, everything she told him. Though lately he was talking more and more about the girl herself.

  “Is she pretty, this girl?”

  She spoke as though inquiring whether it might soon rain. Despite her seeming indifference, Two Hawks hesitated. Then, as if he couldn’t hold his peace he said, “She has this hair, long and thick. Like dark honey from a bee tree. Honey with the sun shining through it.”

  Good Voice blinked, taken aback. She’d thought white women kept their hair covered. Even white girls. “You have seen her hair all down?”

  “The first time I saw her, when we were small. But sometimes her braid hangs down. It is thick as my arm.”

  Good Voice cut another look at her son. Two Hawks had just marked fourteen summers, and his bones were growing fast again. He was taller now than she, though not as tall as his father. Not many moons from now he would be.

  When had Two Hawks stopped being her little boy and become the young man standing there telling her about people she didn’t know, about that other son she’d carried nine moons in her belly, fourteen years in her heart? That was how it was with children. In the mind they stayed small, their heads down around your knees, your hips. Then one day you turned around to find they’d stretched toward the sky like cornstalks.

  He-Is-Taken would be as tall now. Then she thought, My son in a white man’s school, learning white man’s law!

  “William says in his letters he misses Anna Catherine,” Two Hawks said, picking up on her change of mood as he was wont to do. “He says…”

  Good Voice paused in her picking. Hard as it was to be separated from her firstborn, to depend on others who had no right to it for these scraps of him, she was greedy for those scraps. “What does he say?”

  Two Hawks looked away. “He misses Aubrey. He calls him Father.”

  Good Voice felt the breath rush out of her, as if a weight had hit her in the back. Maybe that was one thing she needn’t have known. She turned her attention to the beans.

  “Why do you think it happened this way?” Two Hawks asked. “That just when we found him he was taken away again.”

  Good Voice dropped the beans she held into the basket and met her son’s searching gaze. For many moons she’d wrestled in prayer with that very question. Why. She wanted to speak comforting words to her son about trusting God’s path for them. Trusting His goodness. But how was she to begin when she’d never told anyone about her choice to follow the Jesus path? Not even Jerusha Kirkland. Before she could find words, Two Hawks spoke again.

  “Clear Day says if we let Jesus give us new hearts, He will work all things out for good. Even bad things.”

  Good Voice’s mouth dropped open in surprise. It was as if her son had read her mind. “You have spoken to Clear Day about such things?”

  Two Hawks shrugged. “He is like you.”

  “What do you mean, like me?”

  “He does not mind talking about William, so…sometimes we do.” Two Hawks averted his gaze. “It is good to have a man to talk to. He knows I see Anna Catherine. He thinks it good that I do so, that I make a friend of her.”

  “That is what my Jesus-praying uncle thinks?” said a voice from the edge of the cornfield.

  Good Voice’s belly made a sickening drop as Stone Thrower strode toward them, staggering a little, heedless of the squash vines he trampled. The smell of rum and sour sweat hit Good Voice like a wall.

  Stone Thrower settled his glare on Two Hawks. “You have gone back to see that girl when I said we were finished with it. Do not lie and say you have not done so.”

  Good Voice stepped forward, touching Two Hawks’s rigid arm. “It is my fault. I let him go and said nothing—”

  Stone Thrower raised his hand. “Let this son of mine talk for himself.”

  Still clutching the gathering basket, face as rigid as his limbs, Two Hawks said, “I was not going to lie. I have been to see her.”

  Stone Thrower’s eyes narrowed. “Has your brother returned?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you go?”

  Color crept into Two Hawks’s face. “I want to know about William. Anna Catherine reads his letters to me.”

  “William.” Stone Thrower spat the name. “Is it only for news of your brother you go? Or do you wish to see that girl?”

  Other women in the field, those within hearing, had stopped working to look their way.

  “Husband,” Good Voice began.

  S
tone Thrower silenced her with a look. “You will have your chance to explain why you kept this from me. Let him speak now.”

  Two Hawks gripped the gathering basket. “Anna Catherine is my friend.”

  “She is nothing to you!” Stone Thrower shouted in an explosion of stinking breath. “Or am I to lose another son to these thieving whites? Look at you,” his lip curled in derision, “picking beans like a woman!”

  He struck the basket from Two Hawks’s grasp. Beans rained over the ground as the basket tumbled into the vines. Murmurs of disapproval rose among the women looking on, but none came nearer. This was a family quarrel. They would not interfere unless things got out of hand.

  “You will go no more to that girl,” Stone Thrower said. “I heard it from her mouth that it would be years before He-Is-Taken returns. You have no business with her now.”

  Two Hawks held his peace, but Good Voice saw the defiance in his face. So did his father. “Tell me you will obey me in this!”

  Two Hawks said nothing. Stone Thrower lunged forward and shoved their son. Caught off guard, Two Hawks staggered back but didn’t fall.

  “Answer me!”

  Shock froze Good Voice where she stood. As often as her husband had been angry-drunk, he had never laid a hand on their son. She ground her teeth as something fierce came writhing up from the center of her, pushing back the shock.

  Two Hawks stood straight. “It is not your place anymore to tell me stay or go. I am a man now.”

  “You are a foolish boy!” Stone Thrower made to lunge past Good Voice, fist pulled back to strike. That fierceness writhing inside her burst forth in a scream as she stepped between them.

  There were two blows. One from Stone Thrower’s fist in her face, the other from the ground when her head hit it. Then all was spinning, corn and sky, sky and corn, moccasined feet and faces…all spinning into darkness.