CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

BY RIDING HARD through open country as long as they could see their way with the help of the full moon—Margaret estimated they rode until nearly midnight—they reached the brow of a hill overlooking the Greenbrier Settlement. Because of the full moon, the settlement was still astir. Margaret spied her mother’s cabin, which stood near the entrance to the town, and a group of people lit by the flames of a cookfire.

As she and McCormick rode closer, Margaret studied each face in the group around the fire, but the only one she recognized at first was her younger sister. Eliza was now a toothpick-thin young woman, barefooted, as they all were, her worn cotton shift drooping from one shoulder. She was engaged in tearing bits of meat off a large leg bone to offer to two smaller children whom Margaret did not recognize. Looking up, Eliza stared at her.

Their mother was nowhere to be seen.

How chill and strange it was, Margaret thought, to be able to name only one member of her family. Four years had changed them completely. She knew she also had changed greatly, her upper arms thickened by the legions of logs she had split and carried, her shoulders broadened after years of carrying spring water, her fair complexion damaged and darkened.

She watched other people gathering on their cabin doorsteps, scanning the strangers with alarm. Arriving at this late hour boded no good. Were they in flight from another burned stockade or raided cabin? A man grabbed a cowbell and began to ring it vigorously and more people tumbled out of their doors, some wearing nightshirts and caps.

As they rode into the settlement, Margaret recognized the big tulip poplar, long spared the ax because of the children’s pleading. One branch, a few feet from the ground and twenty feet long, had always provided a sort of swing. Margaret remembered her brothers ranged along the branch, stoutly kicking the dirt to set it swinging. They were sitting and swinging now, released from bed by the excitement.

She began to recognize them in spite of the large and small changes their time apart had wrought. The oldest four were all taller but thin as rakes.

Quickly, she named them.

The eldest boy was now a young man with a whisp of blond beard on his chin, far too old to swing on the poplar branch: Ethan.

The brother next in line was still mostly a child, his face scarred from what must have been a bout with smallpox. He had the long, bruised legs of a forest runner, and Margaret remembered he had always been a wild thing closer to a deer than to a boy: Charlie.

Next was a grinning fourteen-year-old with a mop of red hair, the only one of the brood with that coloring: James, never called Jimmy, by their mother’s decree.

The fourth in age was a tall creature who had outgrown his clothes, his pants not reaching his ankles, his wrists hanging below his sleeves, his great bare feet broad as shovels: Winston, who had been her favorite lap child.

Looking back, Margaret saw Eliza beside the fire, still tearing off bits of meat for the two youngest boys. These little ones were chewing rapidly, standing shoulder to shoulder as though aspiring to be joined in the flesh. They were scarcely a year apart and were perhaps three and two years old. They showed the depredations of the hard winter just passed in a shadowy fairness that warned, Margaret thought, that they would not be long for this world.

The smallest of the two was staring at her. Riding close to him, Margaret leaned down and asked his name.

“Abraham,” he told her, speaking thickly, and she saw that he had a cleft palette that split his upper lip and turned the edges upward. She remembered hearing that babies born late in a woman’s life tended to enter the world with injuries that hardly equipped them to survive.

She leaned down again to ask the other small boy his name. He looked up at her brightly and said, “Peter. On this rock I will build my church.”

Margaret was for the first time truly astonished. “Who told you that?” she asked.

“My paw. He’s the preacher.”

“So now you have a church?”

He turned to point to a little structure at the edge of the settlement with a wide door and a tiny steeple, topped with a white cross.

Margaret said to McCormick, “There was no church here when I was taken.”

McCormick nodded grimly. “The Methodists send their missionaries far and wide, making great difficulties for those of us inclined to sip a little rum. These days I spend no time in this settlement.”

Now, alerted by the commotion and the cowbell, the family’s cabin door opened and the mother of them all stepped out, carrying a sleeping infant on her arm.

She stared at Margaret, who felt her old affection for her mother welling up in tears. How worn her mother looked, how much older than when Margaret had left.

Riding up to her, McCormick told her, “The young Shawnee chief accepted your two hundred dollars, although the squaws did not wish to let your daughter go.”

Still she was silent and staring. The rest of the family was also silent and staring.

“Go to your grandma,” Margaret told John as McCormick dropped him from his saddle. He stood uncertainly, looking up at his mother. “Go!” she ordered and he trotted away to the woman standing in the cabin doorway.

Occupied with this strange homecoming, Margaret did not notice McCormick turning his horse. “Good luck to you!” he shouted at the edge of the settlement, but when she started to answer, he had already ridden into the trees.

She dismounted and tied her horse to the iron-topped hitching post that stood outside the tavern next door. The hitching post she remembered, but the tavern surprised her; it had been old Tomasita Luckett’s cabin, but now it displayed a sign welcoming all comers above the familiar image of an earth-colored whiskey jug.

She went to her mother’s cabin. There was no more excuse for delay. As she approached, she saw that John was standing looking up at his grandmother with the fearlessness he had learned among the Shawnee. Nancy was staring at him without expression.

Then she crouched to examine him, and Margaret saw that she was wearing the old blue-checked homespun gown she remembered, much the worse for wear.

As Margaret watched, Nancy tipped up the little boy’s chin with her forefinger. John did not flinch, although he raised his hand to remove her finger.

Nancy stood up. “I see nothing of John Paulee in him,” she told Margaret.

Margaret said hurriedly, “Surely you see his father’s eyes, bright blue, with black lashes and eyebrows—put in with a sooty finger, you used to say.”

“Half the men hereabouts have those Irish eyes,” Nancy said, shifting the infant to the other arm, “and the little savages too, I’ve heard tell, because of their barbarous ways with our women captives.”

“I saw no signs of such behavior!”

“Enough,” Nancy said. “Come inside.” She beckoned to the other children, who were watching open-mouthed. “In, all of you.”

As they herded inside, Margaret’s brother Ethan touched her shoulder. “She used to cry for you every night.”

Margaret nodded. She would need to give her mother time. But it was bitter to meet with this reception. “Has Mother married again while I was away?” she asked him.

“Three years ago come Michaelmas. He’s the preacher here now, Mr. Rutherford Thompson, sent to us from the mission. Gone most of the time to see to his other parishes but here once a month on God’s day to preach his sermon.”

“Then these two—?” Margaret asked, pointing to the two little boys who had followed their mother to the stove.

“His. That last one, too. Born three months ago and baptized Christian-like. Mr. Thompson says we must all go through it, but I claim I’m too old to duck my head for a splash of water, holy or not.”

“Perhaps when Mr. Thompson arrived, Mother stopped crying for me,” Margaret said dryly. Her brother did not answer.

Now Nancy ordered him to fetch a bucket of water from the spring, which ended their talk.

Her mother still had not greeted her, although Margaret felt the weight of her eyes. Now she beckoned her into the cabin, then set her to chopping winter-dug potatoes, hard as brown stones, to add to the deer meat stew that was steaming in an iron pot over the fire. The potatoes were hardly cooked before the children came, each with a spoon, to dip and try the supper, then snatched tin plates and lined up as Nancy doled out portions. As each child passed, Margaret noticed, Nancy examined it, parting hair to check for lice, pinching a dirty cheek. Likely it was the first time she’d seen them since sunup.

Nancy had still to greet Margaret. She handed her a tin plate grudgingly as though there was not enough for another mouth, and indeed she’d had to scrape the bottom of the iron pot.

Dinner was soon eaten. When the plates had been taken to the spring and washed, each child responsible for his own, Nancy shooed them all up to the loft. Eliza had gone out.

John had chosen to sit during supper with red-haired James, and they had scuffled and laughed together. Now he went up to the loft with the others. The romping and yelling continued for a time until Nancy shouted for silence.

“Devils,” she said amiably, settling herself in the one chair with arms. “But better than girls with their ways.” She took up a nearly finished sock and began to knit.

“Does Eliza have troublesome ways?” Margaret asked with an innocence she almost felt.

“Not to your measure. You remember how you used to do, out at all hours, up to no good. A fine thing it was John Paulee married you when he did or I’d have had a bastard on my hands.”

Margaret was silent. There was too much time and space between them and no quick way to bridge it.

Nancy laid down the sock and gestured to Margaret to hold out her hands so the new skein of yarn, dun-colored like the rest, could be stretched between them. She began to wind off the yarn rapidly. “Now ye’ve brought me a wood’s colt,” she grumbled.

Again Margaret said nothing. After a moment, she asked, “How are you, Mother?”

“Worn down with work, dawn to dusk,” Nancy replied promptly. She placed her hand over the small swell in her apron. “And another this summer.”

“Your new husband—?”

“Gone three weeks out of four, riding his circuit. A good man, a servant of the Lord,” she added, a phrase Margaret had never heard on her mother’s lips. “Comes home randy as a billy goat, telling me my duty.” She glanced at the baby in the worn cradle by the fire. “That one there come close to killing me.”

Margaret did not choose to go in that direction. “Where is Eliza?” she asked.

“Running wild, same as you. She’ll be back here late without a doubt.”

Again Margaret chose not to go further. “I remember her a little girl,” she said.

“Four years is a long time, Margaret.”

John came creeping down the loft ladder, looking for his mother, but Nancy shooed him up again. “If he’s to stay here with us awhile, he must learn our ways,” she said. “Acts like a little savage, so bold.”

“He is John Paulee’s son.”

“How can that be, Daughter? You lit out of here with a suckling babe and even I never conceived while I was nursing.”

“Nevertheless—” Margaret felt her face growing hot.

“Well, you’ll be going back to the savages soon, and the boy, too,” Nancy said, taking the skein of yarn and beginning to wind it into a ball. “Never heard of a redeemed captive that wanted to stay with her kind.”

Margaret looked at her mother, bent over her yarn. The broad planes of her cheeks and forehead gleamed in the firelight, carved with wrinkles. This was not the same woman who had run after her on leaving day, shouting, “Teach, Daughter! Teach!”

Four years, endless toil, three more children. Margaret shuddered. There seemed little hope of a bridge between them.

She went to look at the infant in her cradle by the fire. The little girl seemed to be sleeping deeply, but her cheeks were flushed with fever. “When will you give her suck?” she asked her mother.

Nancy did not look up from her yarn. “She is poorly. The tit does not interest her.”

“Perhaps a sugar titty, then?”

Nancy shook her head. “She’ll cry when she’s hungry. A waste of time else.”

Margaret laid her palm on the infant’s hot cheek. “She is running fever. Is there no one to help?”

“Old man Peters claimed to know the herbs better than me. Dead and laid to rest these six months and my man forbids me the practice, says it’s not the way of Christians. Spring is always the time for fevers. She’ll pull out of it by morning, Lord willing.”

As Margaret stood watching, the tiny body was shaken by a violent spasm. She moaned and curled. Margaret remembered the old chief on his deathbed, showing her a point in the sky. But this infant had no sky to call her own.