Ethan stepped aside as the farm wagon, pulled by two sturdy oxen, lumbered past on the narrow road. He tipped his hat to Ginny Grey. Though he took note of the derisive smile on Rufus’s face, he paid it little mind. He barely heard the words, contemptuous and liquor-slurred, rattling the icy silence, “Well, if it ain’t the Coward of Clarkson’s Mill!”
He ignored the taunt, even though it would have given him great pleasure to wipe away that smile with his fists. The man was a drunken bully, and a fool to boot. But why take him on here in the road in front of his wife and son? Besides, something more pressing held Ethan’s attention.
Zara. Zara Grey.
Her arms folded tightly across her chest, her gaze cast down, she sat in the straw of the wagon bed.
Perhaps she felt his stare, for she glanced up at him as if startled, and then averted her eyes with the same sense of urgency. And once more, just before the wagon rounded the bend in the road, she peered up almost reluctantly from under her eyebrows, engaging his gaze with a long and searching look. He smiled and removed his hat while she continued to regard him with her wary doe’s eyes until the wagon had disappeared into the slate-coloured evening.
* * *
Zara drew the woolen shawl tight against a sudden blast of winter wind, and pressed herself close to the slats in the corner of the wagon bed. The bumping, jolting pace of the ride home seemed far more uncomfortable than the ride into the village. The soft earth had grown hard, heaving up rocks and swells. Ice had formed a brittle crust over the standing water in the hollows and wagon ruts studding the road. Despite her uncle’s good cheer, a tension hung on the air, as frigid as the gust that took her breath away.
Hoping to catch another glimpse of the man on the road, Zara glanced up again in the direction of the settlement. He was long gone from view, but the effect of his dark eyes upon her had not faded. He had called to her with his silent voice and with his eyes and his heart. Unlike the rude and gawking stares of those who regarded her with secret scorn and barely suppressed fear—as if she had walked naked among them—the man’s eyes had been filled with sadness and a longing as deep and as real as her own.
She pulled the rainbow ribbon from her hair and pressed its cool smoothness to her cheek.
Beside her in the straw-strewn wagon bed, his thin legs drawn up to his chest, head bobbing to the rhythm of the ride, Jabez stared at the darkening sky, a blade of straw between his teeth. Earlier in the day he had indicated points of interest along the route. It had been nothing but idle talk to fill up the time and ease the discomfort inspired by their forced closeness. Even though he had made no attempt to hide his uneasiness, his natural sincerity had touched her.
But now his silence echoed her own anxiety. She sensed the disquiet in his faraway eyes and his reticence.
Zara turned her eyes skyward. Tahahiawakon! He-Who-Holds-up-the-sky! It is I, whom you once knew as Jiiwi, daughter of the Great Hill People, keepers of the western door of the Ongweh-oh-weh-ney. Send me a sign so that I may know your wishes.
* * *
Late into the night, Zara could not sleep. Long after her aunt and uncle had doused the lights and banked the fire, long after the night sounds had begun to fill the silence, her awareness centreded on Jabez’s restlessness. She heard him breathing in his bed at the far end of the loft, stirring in restive fits under his blankets. More than once he sat up with a start. She saw him dimly in the glow of embers filtering up through the open trap door. Once, he crept from his bed and, shivering from cold, crouched over the opening and contemplated the room below. Save for the sounds of his father’s snoring and the occasional sputter and pop of the coals, all remained still.
Dawn had not yet broken when he slipped quietly down the ladder and across the floor to the door. She heard him lift the latch, but he did not go out.
She must have dozed for an instant, for in the next moment, Jabez was sitting on the edge of her cot. She bolted up, pulling the blanket to her neck, alarm hammering in her breast. He quickly slipped a hand over her mouth.
“Don’t be afraid!” he whispered into her hair. “I want to help you. Do you understand me?”
She nodded slowly, uncertain. He released her.
In the dingy dark, she made out the outline of a bundle on his lap. He slid it toward her, but she didn’t take it. “Your old clothes,” he explained quietly. “Pa thinks I burned them. And Mama’s old cloak. She don’t wear it no more. And here are your moccasins. I’ve undone the latch for you.”
Zara inclined her head and cast him a dubious look.
“You can go,” he said, an urgent note creeping into his voice. “No one will know. They won’t miss you until morning.”
He paused and stared, as if waiting for her to reply.
“You do understand, don’t you? You don’t want to be here. I know you don’t want to marry me any more than I do you.”
Jabez fidgeted with the edge of the cloak and pressed the bundle into her lap. “I don’t care about the inheritance. I want you to know that. It’s wrong what Pa’s done to you, what he’s planning to do. It’s Henry Van Gelder’s money he wants. It’d serve you no good where he’s figurin’ to send you. So, you’d be best off to go now.” He stopped talking and stared at her and waited. “Oh, Hell…maybe you don’t understand me!”
His words had come too fast. She could not grasp their full meaning. But she understood his purpose.
She reached out tentatively and brushed his smooth cheek with her fingertips. He winced from her touch, and she withdrew her hand.
He spoke again with heightened agitation. “I’m sorry, Zara. I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But maybe you should just go back to where you come from. I don’t mean that to be cruel. But you…you’re not like us. You’re one of them.”
Hot tears flooded her eyes as she looked down at the bundle in her lap. She fingered the rough woolen cloak.
Jabez stood suddenly. He slipped the cloak from under her hands and arranged her quilled deerskin longblouse and leggings, and her skirt of broadcloth on the cot. “There isn’t much time. You’d best get dressed now.” And he disappeared into the shadows across the room.
Zara ran her hands over the soft deerskin garments. She had made them from the skin of a deer that Nichus…
Blinking back her tears, she glanced up at Jabez pacing in the dark. She pulled on the comfortable clothes over her shift, and fastened the leggings above her knees.
“Agasyawnih,” she said in a whisper, informing him that was finished.
With a startled gasp, Jabez turned suddenly in the dusky light. Seeing that she was dressed, he motioned to her to follow, and started toward the ladder.
She watched him until he was no more than a blur through the veil of tears. Go! she exhorted herself. Jabez was right. You do not belong here.
But she could not go back to The People. She was dead to them.
The witch Jiiwi is no more!
“Pssst!” Jabez motioned to her from the top of the ladder.
Often since coming to her uncle’s house, she had dreamed of running away. To find her grandfather. But fear had prevented her. She was unfamiliar with the land, unsure of her ability to communicate in a language that no longer came naturally to her. But now that the opportunity lay within reach, it was a chance worth taking. The Creator had sent her a sign.
East to Albany. East, where the sun rises, toward life. A good sign. She would find the creek flowing south into the Mohawk River and follow the river eastward. And then? Once in Albany, how would she find her grandfather? How would she know him? Too many seasons had passed, too many to remember.
“It’s getting late!” Jabez jostled her shoulder. “They’ll be waking soon!”
Gripped by a quivering uncertainty, she rose from the bed. Already a gauzy light had begun to dilute the darkness.
Downstairs, she followed Jabez silently past his parents’ bed, past the rough-hewn kitchen table, to the door. While she slipped into her moccasins, he wrapped something in a cloth.
“Some bread and cold meat,” he explained, thrusting the parcel into her hands. He hustled her out the door as the first light of dawn glowed red over the eastern hills.
* * *
In spite of the bone-chilling blasts of wind, Zara pressed on, her feet burning with the cold. The threadbare cloak offered little protection against the gusts and squalls of icy rain that had turned to snow just past daybreak.
It had taken longer than she expected to locate the creek flowing south into the Mohawk River. Keeping to the wooded areas, she tracked along the old hunting trail that wound a path paralleling the creek. But vast expanses of meadow and farm fields precluded the protection she had hoped for, as the wind picked up and the snow fell harder.
But she would not suffer herself to stop. Not to rest, for to do so she would run the risk of being overtaken. She forced herself on, driving herself beyond endurance until her will and her body became one. And in that state, oblivious to discomfort, aware only of the thoughts impelling her on, she entertained dream visions.
Throughout the years they had come to her. The ondinnonk, the dreams that needed to be acted upon, the desires of her soul. All too often, they had come as murky visions. At other times, they overwhelmed her with startling clarity. But she never knew how to interpret them.
Often she dreamed of an old man whose hair was white as snow. His face was gentle, his eyes filled with smiles. Sometimes the visiting image was of a woman with hair like her own and eyes the colour of a bottomless lake, whose touch could chase away her fears, and whose voice could bring an end to night.
Sometimes she saw herself, a small child in a large room with shimmering glass reflecting the firelight, and the old man’s arms were strong about her. His face was damp as he held her close and kissed her. And she clung to his neck and she wept.
Please, don’t make me go away!
The wind picked up, generating a mournful whistling through the trees and over the scrub-covered ground. The sound jarred her from the visions that had served to block out her thoughts. And with the return of awareness, so too came the cold and fatigue that threatened to overwhelm her. Hunger gnawed at her insides.
Well past midday the snow stopped falling. The air had turned colder, but the sky remained the colour of slate. She did not know how long or how far she had traveled when the path opened onto a grassy plain sheltered by tall pines and sugar maples.
Drawn by a force she could not resist, she trod slowly over the frozen earth. On a day long ago, in the Moon of the Harvest, the air had held the deep, mellow fragrance of newly gathered wheat. Somehow, she could smell it, even now. Vague and yet familiar, the scent sparked a succession of disjointed images to flood her mind. When she looked up, an empty vista greeted her where she knew a house once had stood. Nothing remained of the house, save a heap of stony rubble amid scrub and tangled weeds. Once, sweet-smelling herbs had grown in a well-tended garden just beyond the door. She could almost see it in her mind’s eye.
She found herself in a plot of earth studded with five stone markers. Words had been carved into the stones; she saw their impression through the thin layer of wet snow. Although she could not decipher the writing, she reached out with a faltering hand and brushed away the snow from one of the stones.
While voices from the past filled her head, Zara sat on a rotted tree stump and regarded the stones. An odd comfort lulled her as she breathed the scents and allowed those long-gone sensations to stir inside her.
Once this place had been her home.
Closing her eyes, she could almost feel a hand on her face, the warm hand of a woman with pale-coloured hair, whose touch could chase away all fear.
A cold gust of wind moaned through the naked branches of the surrounding trees and rippled the cloak around her. She raised her head. A sound, too distant to discern yet too close to ignore, shattered her serenity, and an inexplicable fear closed around her heart. A moment passed before she realized that the approaching sounds were more human than spirit. Men’s voices. The muted thud of horses in the snow. Rufus Grey!
Zara! Run!
On that cold day—long since gone—in the Moon of the Harvest, she had run. Blindly, seeing nothing for the smoke and her tears. Spurred on by the rattle of musket fire and screams more terrible than any she had known, she had stumbled toward the stand of pines on the rise above the creek, toward a child’s perception of safety.
Mama! Her own voice. The voice of the child she had been.
But she would not run now. Perhaps she never should have run. Slipping from the stump to her knees, she pressed her cheek to the cold headstone, and shut her eyes and her ears to the sounds drawing closer.
“Mama…”
* * *
“Thank the Lord we found you!”
A false note tinged Rufus’s grateful acknowledgement. Zara sensed the insincerity in his forced kindness, in the way he wrapped his burly arms around her and pretended to be happy. His display was solely for the benefit of the other men, all of whom expressed relief that she was safe. Seated in front of her uncle on the bare back of the plow horse, with his arms enclosing her as he plied the reins, she felt the tension in his body. As they rode back together toward the settlement, she took a grain of comfort in the other men’s presence. So long as they remained, Rufus controlled his rage.
But she sensed the anger seething inside him.
“Now, tell us, lassie,” one of the men said, “what made ye run off like that?”
“Weddin’ agitation, I s’pect,” another answered. “Some women get it bad.”
“Some men too!”
The men laughed, Rufus loudest of all. But his laughter chilled the very blood in her veins.
One-by-one, as they approached the settlement, the others took their leave and rode home. And with their dwindling numbers, Rufus grew more and more sullenly silent. By nightfall, she was alone with him.
Rufus whispered tightly in her ear, “I’m going to make you sorry for what you done.” He wound her loosened hair around his fist. She readied herself for a jolt of pain, but he merely tightened his grip and slowly pulled back her head. “You’re gunna pay with your Injun hide.”
A dim light suffused the night as they neared the house, a lone candle in the window guiding them through the darkness. Rufus called out for Jabez, who came out on the run. Ginny followed close behind, holding a horn lamp aloft. She paused in the doorway, a hand to her chest.
Rufus dismounted, pulling Zara down after him. “See to the horse,” he called abruptly to his son. Without a word, Jabez led the animal to the barn.
“Oh, Zara!” Ginny strode toward her. In the pale lamplight, her aunt’s face bore signs of strain broken by a smile. “Thank the Lord you’re safe! What a fright you gave us.” She moved to take Zara under her arm. “Come inside. You must be cold and—”
“She’s coming with me!” Rufus turned and shoved Zara before him. She fell hard into the snow.
Ginny bent to help Zara up, but Rufus blocked her. “Oh, no Rufus, please…!”
“Stay away, Ginny!”
His wife took a step back, her eyes wide, a hand to her gaping mouth.
“Gi’me that lamp!”
Lying in the snow, Zara felt him step over her. She jammed her eyes shut.
“Get up!”
She would not obey. She would not so much as look at him.
His foot grazed her side, not forcefully, but enough to make her flinch. “I said, ‘Get up!’”
“Rufus, don’t!” Ginny cried, “I’m begging you, please. Leave her be!”
“Go inside, Ginny! Now!”
“I cannot allow—”
But her aunt’s words were cut short. Rufus struck her, a resounding slap across her face. Zara winced at the sound. Then came an explosion of breath, a moan, and the hasty retreat of her aunt’s steps crunching over the snow. Zara pulled herself up on hands and knees.
But before she could summon the will to move, Rufus hauled her up under the shoulders, and half dragging, half pushing, propelled her toward the tool shed. “Next time you’ll think twice before you make a fool of me!”
He slammed the door open. The murky light of his lamp caused the cramped space to jump at her from the darkness. Shapes and shadows loomed up like ghosts, and she clutched at the doorjamb with both hands.
“Go on! Git inside!” He pushed her in and closed the door behind him. The mouldy, dusty smell made her eyes sting.
Rufus hung the lamp and his coat on pegs by the door. From the darkened corner, he took a long, slender birch rod. As he turned slowly, he flexed it in his hands, his face distorted by shadows.
“I’ll teach you to run away from me.” Drawing a small knife from his belt, he stepped toward her.
She glanced about quickly for an avenue of escape. But there were no windows, and the only door was to his back. She pressed her back hard against the far wall, her fingers splayed against the rough wood.
He reached out and tore the cloak from her shoulders. The force of his action spun her around, and he descended on her like an avalanche. With one hand gripping the back of her longblouse, his forearm pressed tight against her back, his weight crushing her against the wall, he methodically began to slit the garment open to her waist.
“You’ve the devil in you,” he whispered through his teeth. “But I reckon to do something about it.”
She tried to struggle, but she could not move, could barely breathe. The splintery boards scraped her cheek.
“Willful you are, and stubborn to a fault. But I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll not soon forget!”
Suddenly, he released her. Cold air poured in a rush over her back. She gasped for breath. Then birch rod whistled through the air and tore through the shift and into her skin.
Zara whirled around with the shock of surprise and received the second blow across her chest. Gritting her teeth against the scream of pain and outrage, she tried to dodge the third blow, but the switch bit hard into her shoulder. She spun wildly away, fending off the rain of punishment with her arms, and collided against the upturned wheelbarrow. With all her might, she heaved it at Rufus. He dodged it, staggering in the effort. She darted for the door. But Rufus was upon her in an instant, and he hurled her, face down, to the floor.
“You won’t escape me so easily! Not when you’re still in need of teaching.” And he whipped her again and again.
Choking on her own suppressed cries of pain and her tears, she dragged herself on hands and knees across the earthen floor. Her hair hung in her eyes, blinding her. Fire spread across her back, along with the warm, sticky ooze of blood.
“I want to hear you beg!” Rufus breathed heavily, as he continued his assault. “I want you to beg me to stop.”
She would die first.
“Call on Our Lord to help you. Call on God Almighty, because you’ll be needin’ His help before I’m done with you.”
“Tahahiawakon!” she whispered through her teeth. He-Who-Holds-up-the-Sky, fill me with the courage of a warrior. But she could no longer will herself to move.
With that, the beating stopped.
“What’s this? Calling for your lover? This Ta-hahia-wakon? Your Injun lover? Squaw bitch! Whore!” And he threw himself on her, a knee on either side of her, so that she lay between his legs. “You like them red-skinned bucks, don’t you? They mount you like animals in the woods. You like that, don’t you?”
He leaned forward and gripped her face. She moaned; she could not help herself. Panting like a dog, he bent closer still, and forced her to look at him.
“How would you like it now?” With his free hand, he unfastened his breeches. “Animal-style…”
He released her face and fumbled with her skirt, raising it above her hips. She closed her eyes, and clenched her jaw as he fondled her buttocks and the backs of her thighs. She wept, great convulsive heaves and sobs, as he thrust his coarse hands up between her legs and forced them apart.
She clawed at the hard earthen floor, and braced her hands. And then she screamed, the sound rising from the depths of her fear and pain and humiliation. A renewed energy surged through her. Pushing up with all her might, she arched. And toppled him from her back.
Free of his weight, she pitched herself forward. Oblivious to her pain, she thrashed out with her hands, and encountered a jumbled pile of ropes and metal on a shelf just above her head. The metal was hard, curved and pointed at the end. And sharp. She had it in her grasp, even as he hauled her by her ankles back across the floor. She struggled with all her remaining strength, struggled to right herself, to turn and strike.
With a cry that ripped from her very core, she struck, slashing him with the sickle full across his chest.
Zara scrambled to her feet and looked down at him in horror. He was on his knees, his hands to the wound, head bowed as the dark stain widened on his shirt. Blood seeped through his trembling fingers.
Rufus laboured for breath. He struggled to rise, hate flaming in his eyes. “Damn you!” he growled. “Damn you to Hell! I’ll kill you for this!”
She glanced at the sickle still poised in her hand and fought back the urge to slash his face, to finish him. Slowly, she lowered it to her side and let it drop to the floor. Then she plunged past him toward the door, scooping up her cloak as she ran.
* * *
As he closed the barn doors, Jabez heard the sounds of struggle coming from the tool shed. A prickle of guilt tightened his stomach. He had never wished such punishment on Zara. All he wanted was for her to be gone. Far away. It didn’t matter where. Now there would be no stopping Rufus and his scheme.
“Oh, Becky…” He rested his forehead against the rough wood of the door.
A savage scream shattered the night, startling him from his thoughts. Wincing, he glanced up and listened. All was quite now. Ungodly quiet.
Jabez waited, tense and expectant, for another sound. But as the silence deepened, along with his resignation, he set the latch in its cradle.
As he turned to head back to the house, he caught a glimpse of Zara racing toward the thickest part of the night. He stopped and watched until she had disappeared into the darkness.