“Kètatamihtit mahtakenk nëwitèch.”
Though the words were mumbled, they were spoken fervently.
If they want to have war I will go. Because I do not think about my life.
She rolled over as if agitated, nearly brushing his arm. Such telling words. War. Life. The Lenape sentences, strung together like beads on a leather string, told a piece of Keturah Braam’s life story.
He’d not spoken a word to her since they’d first met at the blockhouse. Needs be he would try to converse with her in Lenape. She might have completely forgotten the white talk. Just how many years had she been away? He tensed as she mumbled again, this time indistinctly. If he had his druthers, she’d be gone by first light, fleeing west into the forest, before she reunited with her white kin.
Betimes the return was as terrifying as the capture.
6
Clean tow apron. Piggin in hand. The creak of the cabin door opened onto a dewy, sunlit clearing. Tessa stepped outside in the sleepy haze of first awakening, ears tuned to unbroken birdsong, spirit tuned to the day’s prospects. The cow awaited milking. The butter churning. After that she’d help Ross at the ferry.
Ma was near, humming softly as she watered the vegetable garden. Together they’d sown the flax yesterday. Lemuel was chopping wood while Zadock and Cyrus took to the fields. No sign of Jasper. With the recent Indian unrest, they all but held their breath till they saw him again.
A week had passed since they’d forted up. Tessa rued returning to the river and the unsettling memories there, but at noon she took her rifle and a dinner pail to Ross. With the last killing frost far behind them, ’twould soon be strawberry season. Long daylight. Riotous growth. On the heels of that came another unwelcome, stubborn thought.
’Twas in June Keturah had been taken. Three Indians had encircled her. Or were there four?
Keep quiet, Keturah.
Tessa had only mouthed the words that day, panic choking her. Though she’d screamed at first, Keturah then turned to stone. One painted brave reached out a hand, lifting a strand of her corn-silk hair. Pure Dutch she was, terror in her delft-blue eyes.
Tessa was struck by a peculiar thought. If the Indians were bestirred by beauty, might it save her lovely friend?
Ruth had run like a jackrabbit. But Tessa, torn between fleeing or making a stand, hunkered down behind a screen of mountain laurel. Keturah was bound, her wrists knotted with rawhide, and shoved to a start. She’d not walk far before she’d trip in those petticoats. One was singed from the hearth’s fire. Tessa had teased her about it that very morn.
In moments, Keturah stepped into a thick stand of chestnut and vanished. ’Twas the last memory Tessa had of her beloved friend.
Ever since, regret had been her bosom companion. What if she’d tried to save her? Would she not have been taken too? What could one have done with only a basketful of berries?
Sidestepping a mudhole, Tessa tried to banish all dark thoughts. Impossible. A sudden snap of a twig just behind caused her to swirl around so fast her skirts caught on a bramble bush. A timid doe took a step through the leafy undergrowth, a bespeckled fawn not far behind. Jerking her skirts free, Tessa pressed on, gaze swinging wide. The rifle grew cumbersome, the dinner pail a nuisance.
Ahead of her the trail forked. The path to the ferry was well trammeled while the other was scraggly and overgrown, leading to the Braams’ abandoned homestead. No one had walked that way for years to her knowledge save some animal or passing Indian. Haunted, some said, all much as it had been the day the Braams had left. Mayhap haunted was the reason no one else had claimed it. In a time of land grabbing, ’twas a wonderment it was left alone.
She veered left toward the river, startled to find a wistful longing pulling her right. Long ago she’d felt that same beguiling pull, a young girl on her way to visit friends. How bright the Braam cabin. How welcoming. Was it because they’d had only daughters?
Mistress Braam oft made sugar bread, sûkerbôle, its welcoming aroma reaching to the edges of the clearing, warm as an embrace. Mister Braam was always in the fields. Deprived of sons, he did the heavy work. In her mind’s eye he stood tall as his corn, his silhouette against the horizon scarecrowish, he was so lean. Come harvest time, Tessa’s brothers were sent for. With Keturah, the eldest daughter, nearby, getting the Swans to lend a hand had not been hard.
At last Tessa emerged on the riverbank. Squinting, she adjusted to the water’s glare, glad to the heart to see Ross returning from a ferrying.
“I was starting to fret,” he called out when he spied her.
Across the Buckhannon was a large family, the two youngest secured in hampers straddling a packhorse. One was wailing. The older boys herded the few sheep and cows from behind. A chicken squawked in their midst. The clan looked vulnerable. Weary. Her heart squeezed as they struggled up the rocky bank. On the opposite shore, Ross made a smooth landing, leaping from the ferry’s rough edge.
“Current’s sluggish today.” He poked around in the pail. “Better partake right quick. Look over yonder.”
Over yonder meant east. Tessa’s eyes widened at the sight of a large party in the distance, two buckskinned men leading. Rarely did such a pack of armed men come to harm. Mayhap the struggling family could travel with these backwoodsmen, who usually swam their horses across if unencumbered by pelts and trapping gear. Not all relied on the ferry.
“Virginians, likely,” Ross said, biting into his cornbread. “Surveyors. Land stealers.”
She regarded them with a mix of disdain and fascination. The parceling of western land meant peace, Pa had once said, yet she’d not known a speck of peace in all her hard-won years. Soon these bold men sprawled along the riverbank like they already owned it, burdened with their chains and markers and axes, looking her up and down as if set on surveying her too. Paying them no mind, she took hold of a setting pole, having shut her rifle in the ferry house.
Ross set his fixings aside. One particular nervy horse needed to be blindfolded, the party ferried in batches. Such a mess of men and baggage! Reeking of spirits and unwashed parts, they were, and she aimed to stay downwind of them if she could, listening as Ross warned of the latest spate of trouble and the coming of the war hero.
“Wait till Tygart gets here,” one man said, no hint of jesting about him. “A good many redmen stay clear of him. And not only because he fights like the devil.”
Her ears nearly burned to hear the rest. Other than Boone and Washington, both revered up and down the frontier, few men were worth mentioning. The rest of their blustering was lost to her as the man nearest her began to cough and spit tobacco into the muddy water. Such coarseness left her craving the cabin and Ma’s hymn singing.
By and by, all were ferried to the far shore. They paid in coin. It made a merry jingle when Ross dropped it into a leather pouch. Stepping around a mound of horse leavings, Tessa eyed the trail to the ferry that would soon be a rutted wagon road by midsummer.
“Take your leave,” Ross urged, likely remembering Cyrus’s caution to keep her home. First he fetched her rifle. His own was near at hand.
She hesitated, never liking him to be alone, before kissing his sun-browned cheek. It bore a faint, red-tinted stubble. Though the smallest Swan both in stature and by birth, he was fast becoming a man. And he had little need of her with the current so peaceable and the day nearly done.