The Frontiersman’s Daughter (9 page)
To be sure, Lael thought, these were the finest pair of stockings she’d ever made. She finished them and lay them over her lap, glancing up as Ma placed two mince pies to cool on the cabin windowsill. Five pewter plates shone on the small table at the heart of the cabin, the centerpiece a jar of brandied peaches.
Lael looked about the room, wanting to fix the scene in her mind for always. A tumult of waxy green mountain laurel cascaded over the mantle. A right terrible waste, Ma had said, but it did look festive with Simon’s bittersweet interspersed with it. The sight brought a blush to Lael’s face even now as she recalled every detail of their row on the river together just two nights past.
With Pa away, Ma asked Simon to take Christmas dinner with them. Lael was glad yet wondered if he’d miss the merriment of the large Hayes clan. Pa didn’t hold to such bedevilment as the Hayes clan was given to. His own Quaker boyhood nearly prevented him from celebrating Christmas altogether, for true Quakers dismissed the day as any other. But Ma insisted it be observed, if quietly, with Bible reading and singing hymns. Though it was just midday, fires were being lit on the common in advance of the fiddling. Earlier that day Rab Calloway had driven in a load of cider from his farm for the frolic, and old Amos, the fort fiddler, had sampled a barrel, eyes agleam.
Simon ate heartily of the turkey Ma Horn had roasted on a spit. There was corn pudding and potatoes, turnips and fried apples and a rectangle of johnnycake on a large wooden platter. Simon’s mother had sent a flask of blackberry wine, and each of them, save Ransom, sampled its tart sweetness. By meal’s end Lael felt a tad giddy, what with the overly warm cabin and Simon’s hand on hers beneath the table.
His beloved nearness nearly made her rue her refusal to run away with him, especially since he’d just whispered that a preacher was within fort walls. A Christmas wedding seemed a fine thing but for Pa’s warning words echoing in her ears. The thought of him returning home to find Simon as his son-in-law made her wince. Still, she wondered if he wouldn’t get used to it given time.
Night was falling fast. Ransom got up to feed the turkey carcass to the pack of dogs outside. Beyond the cracked door, a keening wind blew. Simon leaned over and murmured something in her ear. His warm words smelled of blackberry wine but were lost in the commotion outside.
Ma was the first to the door. Ma Horn followed, her smoking pipe abandoned at the hearth. Absently, Lael remembered she’d not yet given Simon the socks she’d made. Now he was pushing away from the table at the queer noise made by the fort’s dogs. Their mournful baying, at first distant, grew hellish.
Lael was the last one out of the cabin. A press of people were at the fort’s gates, now rapidly swinging shut. Sensing trouble, Lael sought out Ransom. But it was too late. He’d already seen the sickening sight.
Lael stood nearly witless on the frozen ground. Coming at her was a woman—nay, a girl—her dress dark with dirt and blood. Even her chestnut hair was matted, partly covering her face in filthy strands. She was supported on both sides by members of the militia who righted her when she stumbled.
“It’s a haint!” Ransom cried, darting behind Lael.
But this was no ghost. This, Lael realized with keen horror, was Piper Cane.
Ma Horn’s cabin was suddenly a beehive of activity. The more capable women, Ma included, came in to tend the stricken girl, whereas a party of men, led by Colonel Corey, rode out of the fort. The bonfires were lit after all, but this was no celebration. Militia lined the pickets, peering through the gun holes, but no fiddle music was heard.
Dazed, Lael stood outside without her cloak, unmindful of anything but the wretched sight of the girl she’d never liked. Simon found her and set his own coat about her shoulders.
“The Canes were burned out—all killed but Piper,” he told her. “Shawnee.”
Stunned, she could only look at him. All killed but Piper. Mathias and Mercy Cane. The brothers Coe and Hezekiah. Two small sisters. And a baby—hadn’t there been a baby?
“Poor Piper,” she murmured.
“Lucky Piper. Out chasin’ cows when death struck.”
Ma called to Lael from the cabin door. Reluctantly she left him and turned to do Ma’s bidding.
Inside, the women were bathing Piper, laboring to remove all physical traces of the hideous scene. The girl shivered as water and soft soap cascaded over her while she sat stiff as a corpse in an oaken tub. Her shaking didn’t end when she was clothed in Lael’s spare dress and moved to the fire, where Jane McFee combed out her hair. Dear Jane, who’d lost two husbands in the Indian wars, and whose old, usually steady hands now seemed to tremble.
Lael went to throw out the wash water, ashamed of her revulsion. No doubt the Shawnee had taken out their scalping knives before setting fire to the place. Was this what she’d come home and found? Lael blinked back hot tears. While there was no love lost between her and the Canes, seven people had perished. And one girl left destitute.
Colonel Corey and his party of scouts returned on the fifth day, having warned the nearby settlements. They’d tracked the winter raiders along the ancient Warrior’s Trace to the Falls of the Ohio and no farther.
In Ma Horn’s tiny cabin Piper Cane said not a word, just sat in the hickory rocker by the fire. A pall had been cast over any notion of courting. Lael was left to simply dream about her canoe ride with Simon and speak with him in snatches.
On New Year’s Day, Piper Cane left Ma Horn’s and saw the light of day. The dark-haired girl walked as slowly and unsteadily as an old woman across the common to the large blockhouse that was the Hayes’ home, Simon’s mother supporting her. For in the end it was the Hayes clan that took her in.
The snow came, transforming all that it touched, as if even nature wished to erase the bloody events at the Cane cabin. The massacre had cast a funereal pall over all, even as the snow in all its bright and silent beauty encased the pickets in ice and turned the river to silver.
Lael longed for Pa’s return, her angst tinged with boredom and disbelief at what had befallen the settlement. With the Canes killed, the schoolhouse closed and all manner of people crowded into the fort, some families living two to a cabin, lest their fate be the same.
With so many people present, Ma Horn was never idle. Though her abode was even smaller than her cabin atop Pigeon Ridge, she crammed each corner and crevice with healing herbs. As winter set in, the grippe seemed to visit every family, and even Lael herself took to bed with a fever, burning up and shivering by turns beneath a Star of Bethlehem quilt. Ma Horn poured all manner of tea and tincture down her, and on the fourth day she arose, ready to resume her chores.
As she stood over a log trough full of rainwater under the cabin’s eave, stirring in wood ashes to make washing suds, there came a commotion at the front gate.
Two men hobbled past the sentry and stood just within the fort’s walls. Within minutes a crowd began to gather and frightful weeping could be heard. Lael hung back even as Ma pressed forward. Though hardly recognizable after more than six years away, two more men taken captive with her father at the salt licks had finally come home.
Strange, Lael thought, how the Click clan could never seem to get shed of the past and all its secrets. Standing at the back of the crowd, she saw nothing familiar about the half-starved, barely clothed men before her, their bare feet scalded from walking the many miles from the British stronghold of Detroit.
Because the men’s families had long since given them up for dead and returned east, they were now without kin or cabin. It was Ma Horn who took them in, burning their louse-ridden clothes and cutting their long hair before doing so. Once they’d shaved and bathed, Ma brought a tray of stew, bread, and cider to their door. But the men demanded whiskey and a meeting with Pa and the fort’s leaders, most of whom were away scouting and hunting.
Ma Horn plied the men’s frazzled forms with moonshine and tinctures and kept them to their beds, allowing them but one or two visitors at a time. Weak and sickly though they were, Hugh McClary and John Watson were a huge curiosity, drawing every last man to the tiny cabin to rehash the events of the last six years.
“Let them talk. ’Tis a tonic in itself,” the old woman said.
But Lael sensed trouble. Within days of their return, as Ezekial’s name grew more muddied, there was renewed talk of renaming the fort. Hugh McClary spoke out most strongly in favor of the notion.
Ma snorted when she heard the news. “I suppose he’s callin’ it Fort McClary already,” she retorted bitterly before returning to her spinning.
Now, years after the fact, Pa’s name was again being tied to treason. Long forgotten was his court-martial and subsequent exoneration. Yet McClary refused to let the past rest. No one truly knew what happened at the salt licks all those years before, he argued. Who was to say even now that the absent Click wasn’t out working with the Indians and British to bring about their doom?
Lael could hear him loud and clear in the evenings as they shared an end wall with Ma Horn’s cabin. When others came to visit the two recuperating captives, raised voices could be heard through the log wall. Though Ma said nothing, Lael could not stand the idle chatter. Yet where could she go except to stand out in the snow?
The fort seemed to churn and foment in Pa’s absence. Though McClary and Watson made plans to return to their families in Pennsylvania, they were far from well and could not travel. As long as McClary remained, his ill will permeated and poisoned the fort. Lael had long watched her father outwit the smartest men and smooth all manner of ruffled feathers. Their present predicament begged for a cool head and restraining hand.
Oh Pa, come home, wherever you are.
Lael knocked then pushed open the door of Ma Horn’s, careful not to upset the heavy tray she carried. With Ma abed with the grippe, it fell to Lael to fix supper for the invalid men and serve it, and tonight Ma Horn was nowhere to be seen.
From the shadows Hugh McClary stared at her, his emaciated face more skeleton than whiskers. John Watson nodded her way in friendly fashion, then looked away as if embarrassed to be seen in his bed clothes.
“Ain’t you Zeke Click’s daughter?” McClary said. “You look some like him.”
“Leave her be,” Watson warned from his bed.
The smell of sickness and herbs hung about the room. Lael remembered someone saying McClary had lung fever and the French pox. Ma had blushed scarlet at this, though Lael didn’t know what it meant. Maybe the sickness made him mean. Carefully, she approached the table and set down the tray. The aroma of hot hominy and pork gravy made her mouth water.
“I ain’t eatin’ nothin’ from the hand o’ no traitor,” McClary continued, thrashing on his pallet.
“She ain’t no traitor, you idiot! Her pa saved your hide at the salt licks,” Watson said, struggling to sit up.
“That Injun lover! He saved hisself, turnin’ Shawnee while we sat rottin’ in some British prison six years. I’m surprised he come back here after fallin’ in with Chief Blackfish. All that talk about bein’ adopted turns my stomach.”
“The talk’s true,” Watson said, breaking into a sweat from the sheer exertion of sitting up.
“I’ll tell you what’s true . . .”
Lael began backing up toward the door.
Where was Ma Horn?
“The truth is there’s more than one blue-eyed Injun brat beyond the Falls of the Ohio where Zeke Click’s concerned.”
Lael turned and fled the cabin, leaving the door wide open in her wake. The cold night air assaulted her senses as she ran through crusty snow, stopping just inside the stockade where she hid in a dark corner. Sliding down against the frozen pickets, she buried her face in her apron, but no tears came. Truly, she was beyond tears. Her small world, made up primarily of her pa and unsettled as it was, seemed to unravel fast as twine.
She knew what McClary meant. Just lately she’d begun to wonder herself. While Ma dallied with Uncle Neddy, did Pa not do the same in the Indian villages? Had Chief Blackfish not only adopted him as a son but presented him with an Indian bride? Two years was a long time to be away. Had he fathered other children besides her? “Blue-eyed brats,” McClary had called them. If so, how did he know, imprisoned as he’d been in Detroit?
’Twould not be a bad life, Daughter.
Suddenly Pa’s words took on new meaning. Perhaps he’d found the Indian life very good indeed.
