The Wood's Edge Read online

  The sun that had shone upon his father’s shame had set, but the long summer twilight lingered. There was light for Two Hawks to follow his father through the town. Light, but little color. Color had leached from the world like the happiness that had leached from Two Hawks’s heart. He burned with the image of his mother’s battered face. That blow had been meant for him. He wished he’d taken it. With all his heart he wished it.

  Stone Thrower walked away through the town, past lodges where women scowled after him and children stopped playing to watch him pass. Old men shook their heads. Two Hawks wanted to scream at them to look away but did not. He followed, the scene in the field repeating in his mind. His mother crumpled on the ground among the squash vines. His father standing over her, breathing hard, bewilderment on his face, as if he couldn’t fathom how she came to be lying at his feet. Rage had filled Two Hawks, but before he could unlock his frozen limbs to attack his father, Stone Thrower had fallen to his knees.

  “Good Voice—open your eyes! Good Voice!” His mother only moaned and fluttered her eyelids.

  Stone Thrower had risen with her in his arms while the women came running to hover and scold and tell him not to move her. Ignoring them, he’d carried Good Voice to their lodge, leaving Two Hawks to trail behind with the rage banked within his heart.

  Near sunset Good Voice regained her senses—enough to stand on her feet and gather his father’s things and put them outside the door hide. Stone Thrower stood outside and watched her do it.

  Two Hawks had watched his father, seen the desolation on his face. It satisfied some of the rage inside him, but not enough. Not nearly enough. So he followed his father now. Straight to the lodge of the missionary.

  In the years since Samuel Kirkland came among them, he’d proved himself a man strong-minded, convinced his God was the only way to happiness in the Time After, that apart from Jesus there would be something called hell-and-damnation, which to hear Kirkland talk sounded like being pushed into a fire and held there screaming. Two Hawks had asked Clear Day how the missionary knew this, having never died.

  “It says it in the book,” Clear Day said. That seemed to be all the answer Kirkland needed to believe a thing. If it was in the book, it was true.

  Two Hawks was less sure.

  But Kirkland had proved he cared what happened to them in this life too. He cared that their crops failed, that game was gone from the forests and there was never enough to eat, that their kin on the southern border were murdered by settlers greedy for land. He did what he could about it, sharing all that was given him from his friends in the east, writing to those people to try to make the bad things better. He was a good man, in his sometimes prickly way. Many of the people loved him.

  Stone Thrower wasn’t one of those. That was why Two Hawks expected his father was going to the missionary now to do him harm. But the missionary wasn’t at his lodge. Two Hawks watched from the pines as his father pounded on the door, calling out to him.

  The light had not yet faded, though stars were in the sky, when his father headed off into the woods, down a path that led toward a little stream that ran into Oneida Creek. There on the path he met Kirkland coming up from the stream with a bucket.

  Stone Thrower didn’t pull the hatchet from his sash and raise it against the missionary, as Two Hawks had expected. He only raised his voice. He had just lost everything that mattered to him in this life, his father told the missionary. Now he wanted to know how to go back and start over. Was there a way to do that?

  Hunkered in the brush along the path, Two Hawks couldn’t see his father’s face, only Kirkland’s. The man stood with creek water dripping on his shoes and started doing that thing called preaching, only he did it in a voice like a man would use to talk to another man. He told his father about the consequences of sin, that the only way to walk a right path from that point was to repent of sin—to be sorry for it and resolve to stop doing it—ask for Heavenly Father’s forgiveness through the blood of Jesus-on-the-cross. Then go and do his best to sin no more. If sin happened anyway—as it would because no man except Jesus was perfect—then ask for Heavenly Father’s forgiveness again and be glad the blood of Jesus covered that new sin too.

  “That is what God’s mercy does. But it does not mean a man can go on sinning and never suffer consequences,” Kirkland cautioned. “Like what has happened to you and the woman who was your wife—yes, already I have heard what happened in the field today. I am sorry for it, but I am not surprised. I have watched you and seen how you have struggled in your own strength to be a good man. But the grief of the past has hardened your heart and crippled your soul. You need the strength of Jesus in you, the power of His Spirit, to be the man you want to be, the man your family needs you to be.”

  Looking like the one who had been struck in the head, Stone Thrower left the missionary and went back to Good Voice’s lodge. Two Hawks followed again, ready to defend his mother if his father made more trouble. But his father only gathered his things and went away. That was the last Two Hawks saw of him that day. And many days after.

  Later he learned Stone Thrower had built himself a bark hut at the edge of the village. He stopped drinking rum, as far as Two Hawks could tell. When he had meat, he left it outside their lodge. For a time it seemed he was seeking that good path he’d walked in the years before they learned Two Hawks’s brother had again been taken away. That he would do the one thing needful to make Good Voice want him back as husband.

  Two Hawks learned what that thing was in late summer, before his mother’s face fully healed. The day Bright Leaf died. They were with her when it happened, Two Hawks and Good Voice, and some of their Turtle Clan kin, gathered to say good-bye, to see Bright Leaf on her journey.

  “You must forget that man,” Bright Leaf labored to say from her pallet by the fire. She reached a shaking hand to touch Two Hawks’s bony wrist. “He who gave you this good son…gives you nothing else but grief. Find…a better…husband.”

  Good Voice told her dying aunt she wanted no other husband. She didn’t want Stone Thrower either unless he did what Clear Day had done, what she herself had done.

  That was how Two Hawks learned his mother was a Jesus follower.

  Soon after, Bright Leaf died.

  His father didn’t embrace the missionary’s God. Sometime when the leaves began to color, he abandoned his bark hut and went to live with his friends among the Seneca, those he’d fought beside years ago when Pontiac had his war.

  “To clear his head of too much talk.” That was how Clear Day told them his father explained his going. “He took the white beads I have kept for his condolence,” the old man said, and for a moment Good Voice looked hopeful. But Clear Day shook his head. “To bury them out of sight where they will never again be found. That is what he told me.”

  Stone Thrower never meant to forgive or forget.

  Neither now did Two Hawks.

  19

  March 1772

  Mary Margaret Tiller entered the world with less fuss and bother than most firstborns, Lydia confided afterward. Anna, who couldn’t stop her hands shaking as she wrung soiled rags in a water bucket, asked, “How many births have you attended now?”

  It was the latest in a string of questions begun when a messenger had arrived at Lydia’s door with news of Mrs. Tiller’s confinement.

  Lydia paused in returning supplies to a wooden medical case to gaze at a wall sconce flickering in the passage near the bedroom where the drama had unfolded, her brows drawn in thought. “This will have been my twelfth. And by far the easiest.”

  “Easy?” Anna dropped her voice. “I was terrified for Mrs. Tiller.”

  And yet, now the labor was past, she wasn’t shaking with fear so much as wonder. And excitement. It had been the most thrilling experience of her life—excepting the day she met Two Hawks.

  “If you were afraid, you hid it well, though I’ve never seen your eyes so big as when the baby’s head crowned.” Lydia smiled as they worke
d, seeming as buoyed as Anna by the happy murmurs from the room beyond. “Be glad you weren’t with me at the first birth I attended.”

  “I am,” Anna replied. “Although…it turned out all right in the end.”

  She knew the story well, how on a summer evening two years past a pair of children burst into the apothecary where Lydia had been rolling pills—Jacob had been out with a homebound patient. The near hysterical children, who’d recognized the apothecary’s shingle above the door, had begged her to come help their dying mama.

  They’d led her to a rickety structure on the outskirts of town, long since sprawled beyond the stockade. Lydia had wondered if anyone knew the fatherless family was living in what amounted to an abandoned cow shed, but that hadn’t mattered at the time. The mother—in travail and exhausted from the fruitless effort—had seemed near death.

  Lydia sent the oldest child after the nearest midwife, hoping she’d be found to home. Meanwhile she determined the baby was trying to be born feet first. It was too far along in the process to think of turning the child—had Lydia known how. By God’s grace she’d delivered the baby alive and whole, kept the mother this side of heaven as well, in time for the midwife to arrive and help clean up, quiz Lydia as to the baby’s presentation and her actions, and welcome her into the exclusive company of midwives, should she wish to practice the trade.

  “Either you’re blessed with the luck of angels,” the midwife told her frankly, “or you’ve found your calling.”

  Lydia had known which it was. While the birth was unnerving, attending it had fulfilled that incessant, lifelong hunger to heal, to make whole. The next several births she’d attended as a midwife’s apprentice had sealed the decision. Not until the fifth had she seen a baby die. Though hopelessly premature, Lydia had grieved the tiny girl.

  But not as deeply as she grieved now.

  It was barely a fortnight since Jacob van Bergen, carried off by an acute wasting sickness that had taken him in a matter of months, had left Lydia widowed at twenty-six.

  And childless, Anna couldn’t help thinking while they bid farewell to tiny Mary Margaret and stepped into the afternoon, hoods thrown back to welcome the weak sunlight. That Lydia’s brief marriage had produced no children while she’d helped so many into the world pierced Anna’s heart even as the March air stung her cheeks.

  Melting snow lay in dingy piles in front of shops and homes. The Tillers’ house was two streets over from Lydia’s. Between them lay the apothecary. As the shingle bearing her late husband’s name came into view, Lydia cast the shop a glance of longing but passed it without speaking.

  What would happen to the shop, now there was no apothecary? Though Lydia hadn’t spoken of it, she was surely thinking of it. Anna often heard her up and about in the night, though such nocturnal stirring wasn’t always for worry or grief. Anna was surprised to learn how often women called on Lydia for remedies for ailing children and husbands, or advice on issues too delicate to mention to a physician. All of which Lydia now dispensed from her kitchen, trading simples and receipts for the occasional small coin, foodstuffs, or words of condolence.

  Papa had been the one to suggest Anna stay with Lydia for a few weeks after Jacob’s burial. Though she’d found herself intrigued by all Lydia knew of herbs and tinctures and decoctions, and was eager to set her hands to any practical task to be of help, Anna longed to be of consolation as well. But what did she know of grief? She still had a father—the only one she could remember. And if William’s absence was a perpetual ache, she had the comfort of his letters. And she had Two Hawks.

  In the entryway of the house, they shed cloaks and pattens, then trooped to the kitchen to tidy away supplies. Lydia immediately restocked her midwifery case and then pronounced, “I could do with some tea,” and set about stoking the fire and putting the kettle over it.

  Anna cut slices from a loaf and set the bread on a plate. They took their meals in the kitchen since most of their time was spent near the hearth.

  “I remember this kitchen from when we lived here,” Anna said, coming back from a pantry shelf with a jar of apple butter. “My very first memory is a puddle of sunlight and William sitting in it with those soldiers of his. He let me hold one.”

  Lydia looked up from arranging cups and tea leaves. “That was the day Reginald returned from the war. You would’ve been…three years old?”

  “I mostly remember the soldiers.” And William’s mother taking the one out of her hand, but she didn’t mention that. “Will you see Mrs. Tiller and her baby again?”

  She hoped so, and that Lydia might let her go along.

  The fire cracked. Sparks sifted over the hearth bricks. Lydia grabbed a twig broom and swept them back, then straightened with a faraway look in her eyes. “I’ll stop by tomorrow, as often after that as seems needful. Sometimes…”

  “Sometimes?” Anna prompted.

  Lydia blinked, giving her a rueful smile. “I must be tired. My thoughts have scattered.”

  More likely other thoughts were demanding her attention. “You sit down. Let me finish.”

  The kettle was aboil. Anna took a cloth to grasp it and poured steaming water for the tea. Lydia spread apple butter on a slice of bread, raised it to her mouth, then put it down without taking a bite and looked across the table at Anna. “I mean to sell the shop.”

  Anna set down the kettle on a tail of the cloth. “Oh, Lydia. Must you?”

  “What else can I do? I cannot be an apothecary—not with a shingle.” Lydia glanced at the shelves, cupboards, and chests crowding the kitchen, overflowing with the shop’s former medicinal stock. Fragrant herbs hung from ceiling beams. Jars and crocks and corked glass bottles adorned every sill and surface. “I’ll treat any of Jacob’s patients who’ll let me, along with the midwifing, but I’ll do the work from here. I can manage if I sell the shop and the lot on which it stands.” Lydia’s eyes gleamed. “But it will be like losing Papa again.”

  “And Mr. van Bergen,” Anna said before thinking.

  Lydia’s eyes softened. “And Jacob.” Her mouth trembled briefly, then steadied, as if by an effort of will. She looked at Anna, and her gaze cleared. “You owned that what you experienced today unnerved you. ’Tis perfectly natural it would.”

  “It was overwhelming,” Anna admitted. “But not in a bad way. I don’t know if I can find words to adequately explain it.”

  “You may never find them,” Lydia said, as if she knew. “But then again, you might. I’m wondering, Anna…how adverse would you be to experiencing it again?”

  “I—experiencing it again? You’d want that? My helping you?”

  “I would,” Lydia said. “Very much. If you want it.”

  Anna didn’t know why she was so surprised. It felt as though part of her had been anticipating the question since they left the Tillers’ home. And yet…it felt a little like that birth had felt. Thrilling and terrifying. Anna felt herself poised, as though come abruptly to a chasm in her path, a divide she hadn’t expected. Looking across, she measured the distance. A prodigious leap, but on the other side stood Lydia, holding out a hand. How often had she run into Lydia’s arms and found safety there. Solace. Love.

  She met Lydia’s gaze, a host of feelings welling. Curiosity. Fear. But growing stronger all the while…eagerness.

  “I wouldn’t be at all adverse to that.”

  For the first time since Jacob’s burial, a heaviness seemed to lift from Lydia. The smile she gave Anna was like the sun peeking through grim clouds. “It’s what I hoped you’d say, my girl. Finish your tea, then we’ll go down to the Binne Kill and talk to your father about it.”

  The river ice had thawed, sending the floes that jammed the current downstream to the falls above the Hudson. Despite the lingering snow on its banks, the smell of the river was strong along the quay where several bateaux were being loaded for the season’s first trip upriver. With a bursting energy at odds with his white hair, Captain Lang paced the quay near Papa’s boatyard,
cargo list in hand, checking poles and rigging, overseeing the crewmen stowing crates and barrels into the flat-bottomed, shallow-draft bateaux.

  One crewman was a young man, no more than eighteen, a stranger to Anna. Pink-cheeked from exertion and the brisk air, he’d a longish face, blond hair tailed back, and a smile he flashed at Anna over a hefted crate as she and Lydia passed on their way to Papa’s warehouse.

  Warmth bloomed in Anna’s cheeks as Lydia, with a narrowed glance at the young man, hustled her inside.

  The front portion of the warehouse contained the rooms where Papa conducted business, while the larger, rear portion was given to storage and the workshop with its broad doors opening onto the waterfront, where he built his boats. While any skilled carpenter could cobble together a serviceable bateau, Papa was a true craftsman. His bateaux were prized for their clean lines and durability.

  As they entered, he was talking to a tradesman Anna recognized from their church meeting. She and Lydia waited for the man to conclude his business. After he left, lifting his hat in passing, Lydia said, “Have we come at an inopportune time, Reginald?”

  “Not at all.” Papa came to greet them, his gaze on Lydia soft with sympathy. “They were lined up deep this morning, the merchants. I’m sending only two boats, in case the river is still blocked. But canoes have come down, and from what I hear ’tis clear to Herkimer’s Carry.” Dismissing matters of business, he asked, “To what do I owe this pleasure, ladies?”

  “I—” Grinning sidelong at Anna, Lydia amended, “We have come with a proposal to present to you.”

  After the heaviness of Jacob’s passing, it was good to see Lydia’s smile. Papa’s face lit at the sight. “A proposal, is it? Come you back to the sitting room then, where a fire’s on the grate, and tell me of it.”