Fire Along the Sky (2 page)

Prologue: Hannah

August 1812

In the gauzy high heat of late summer, a solitary woman walked a trail through the endless forests.

All around her the woods were alive with noise. A thrush sang overhead in the canopy of birch and maple, white pine and black ash, his long sweet melody caught up and cast out again by a mockingbird. Preacher birds scolded; a single crow called out to her. She raised her head and saw Hidden Wolf for the first time in ten years: the mountain where she had been born.

The sunlight brought tears to her eyes. She dropped her head and saw a footprint that she recognized as her father's. He must have been this way earlier in the day. For many years she had seen his face only indistinctly in her dreams, but she knew his footprint. Others were with him: her uncle, younger boys, and a man, tall and strong by his mark. Strangers to her, her blood relatives.

If she raised her voice to call they might hear her and come. This idea was a strange one—she had not used her voice in so long she wondered if it would even obey her—and it was frightening. She had wished for her father so often and so hard, and still she was not ready to look up and see him standing in front of her.

Sweat trickled between her breasts and soaked the small doeskin bag she wore on a piece of rawhide around her neck. Her overdress stuck to her, rank and worn thin as paper, a second skin she should have shed long ago. She walked faster, the swarming blackfly urging her on. At the point where the mountain's shoulder shoved itself up from the forest floor she turned onto a new trail, one that would take her to home by the way of the north face of the mountain. The climb was steep and winding and dangerous but it could take two hours off a journey that had lasted far too long.

The walking woman was thirstier with every step, but she forced herself onward through air grown so heavy and hot that it rested like another weight on the shoulders.

The sound of singing came and went, drifting on a teasing breeze, interrupted now and then with talk, too faint to make out clearly. A young girl, maybe six or seven years old by her sound, and playing alone on a part of the mountain where the woman herself was not allowed to play as a child.

The walking woman climbed for an hour. When she rounded an outcropping of rock the voice was suddenly clear. The child was talking to herself in lively imitation, the tone high and wavering and round with plummy sounds.

My dear Lady Isabel, may I pour you tea. How very kind, with sugar please.

The girl shifted from English to Mohawk, her tone scolding, as harsh as a jay's.

No sugar! No sugar! O'seronni poison, as bad as rum!

The girl was such a good mimic of her mother that the walking woman had to press a hand to her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. She paused to wonder at this oddity, that she was capable of laughter, and then the woman turned in the girl's direction.

She was a little below the trail, wading in one of the streams that ran down the mountain like wet hair down a woman's back. The water pooled between boulders before spilling down twenty steep and rocky feet.

The little girl had taken off her moccasins to set them neatly aside; blue-black braids were swinging at her waist as she hopped out of the water and in again in some game of her own design. For a moment the woman believed that it was a trick, that the mountain had conjured her own girl-self up out of stone and soil: a vision to answer the question she had asked herself with every step of this journey. An image to remind her that she was right to come. She belonged on this mountain where she was born, with her own people. With the living.

This thought was still in her mind when a fox stumbled out of the woods and slid down the incline toward the stream. Small and sleek, the red pelt dull with dust, and the worst of it: a grinning mouth that dripped white foam and crimson. It took an unsteady step toward the girl and snapped at the air, once and again, a sound like a dull blade against stone.

The girl stood perfectly still, one foot raised out of the water like a heron. So young for this particular lesson, but it had come to find her nonetheless; her silence was far too fragile to protect her.

Another lurching step and another, and a familiar smell came to the woman on a gust of wind. Madness in the blood.

Her bow came into her hands as if she had called it, the curved wooden shaft cool and smooth and familiar. She notched the arrow and felt the tickle of the hawk feather against her wrist

The boy's quick fingers tying the knot, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth in concentration

and took aim. In that last moment of its life the fox raised its head to look directly at her. A look she knew very well.

“I bring you the death you seek,” the woman said, and she let the arrow fly.

The little girl was her youngest cousin, born two full summers after the woman left home. She disliked her Mohawk girl-name and asked to be called Annie instead.

“My mother always calls me Kenenstasi,” she added solemnly, watching out of the corner of her eye to see how well this fabled cousin would understand, or if she would have to be reminded of the way the world was divided into red and white.

“I will call you Annie,” the woman promised.

The little girl managed a smile. For the rest of the walk home she was quiet except for a shuddering breath now and then, her mind still filled with the idea of death. Or maybe, the woman reasoned to herself, maybe the girl was quiet because all the questions she would ask had already been answered.

She asked, “Have they had word of me at Lake in the Clouds?”

The little girl let out a sound of surprise, someplace between a croak and a hiccup. She nodded. “A letter came a week ago. We've been waiting for you.”

The walking woman did not ask who wrote the letter; she was only thankful that she would not have to tell her own story. More than anything else she feared having to look her father in the eye and confess her failures.

At the crest of the mountain where the sound of the falls was so loud that she must shout to be heard, Annie turned to the walking woman and cupped her hands around her mouth. Her face was shiny with heat and eagerness to be home.

“The fast trail or the slow?”

“You go ahead,” the woman told her. “Tell them I'm coming.”

She watched until the girl disappeared into the trees and then she sat down abruptly and wrapped her arms around herself to stop the trembling. Overhead an eagle coasted on a hot and rising wind. When it was clear that the eagle had no advice to give her, the walking woman got up and started on the last leg of her journey.

Standing in the forests above the glen tucked into the side of the mountain, she took in the changes all at once. At the far end, just before the cliffs fell away into the valley, where the sun shone hot and long enough for corn and squash and beans, the field lay fallow under a coat of coarse straw that shifted in the wind. That was a surprise in itself, but there was more.

The older cabin, the one built long ago by her grandfather, was as it had always been. The second, newer cabin was gone (
a fire,
she reminded herself;
they wrote to you about the fire
). In its place something else had been built, not a cabin in the Indian style or a house such as the whites who lived in villages built, but a combination of both. The walls were made of square-hewn logs, and like the older cabin it was long and el-shaped with chimneys at two ends, but this house had a second story. Shutters bracketed each of the glass windows, and above the front door someone had painted the symbol of the Wolf clan of the Kahnyen'kehàka.

On the porch of this strange cabin-house that she must now call her home, the woman's family was gathered, and they were looking at her, all of them, waiting for some sign that she was real; that she was the daughter they had been waiting for.

Her father stood straight and strong though the hair that fell over his shoulders was mostly gray; beside him was her stepmother, small and rounder with age, pale with worry. Her hair—still dark—curled around her face in the heat. Next to her, the walking woman's aunt Many-Doves stood, the living image of her own mother, long gone to dust. With her stood the walking woman's uncle Runs-from-Bears and a man who must be Blue-Jay, his oldest son. Blue-Jay had been a boy when she went away, but now he stood taller even than his own father, the tallest man in a hundred miles. There was no sign of the other children of Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears, not even of Kenenstasi-called-Annie, most certainly because she had been sent down to the village to spread the word.

The walking woman's own brothers and sister stood at the bottom of the steps. The twins, still children when she went away, were now eighteen years old, old enough to be gone, raising families of their own. Lily was small of stature but with a fierce and burning energy about her, at odds with her watchfulness. Daniel was so much like the grandfather they all had in common that the walking woman believed at first that time had taken to spinning backward.

Each of the twins had a hand on the shoulders of the boy.

The walking woman had never seen the boy before, and still she recognized the shape of his head and the set of his eyes, the way he held himself. Her father's son, her half brother, called Gabriel. From the few letters that found her in the west, always months out of date and rough with handling, she knew some of his story.

She was not surprised when he let out a high yipping cry, a trill from the back of his throat, and leapt forward so that the dogs twitching in their rabbit-dreams rose up in a fury of startled barks. They ran at his heels and with that the others began moving too. As if the boy had opened an invisible gate.

By the time she let her pack slide to the ground he was there, flinging his arms around her like a tether, a hangman's rope, a lifeline.

Her hands fluttered and then settled, one on his shoulder and the other on the curve of his skull, on dark, curly hair hot with the sun. She touched him as gently as spun sugar; as if the heat of her wanting might cause him to disappear. He was talking to her but the words swarmed around her head like blackfly, an irritation of no real importance. Beneath her hands she felt the strumming of his blood, the startling life force of this boy born within days of her own son.

“Finally,” he was saying. “Finally you're here.”

“Little brother.” The English words tasted sour and coppery on her tongue, flecks of dried blood to be spat out. “How good it is to see you.”

Prologue: Elizabeth

Luke Scott Bonner, Esq.
Forbes & Sons
rue Bonsecours
Montreal

Dear Luke,

Your sister Hannah is come home to Lake in the Clouds. She is alone, as your letter warned us she must be. While she is in good health, she has not spoken to us of the things that weigh heaviest on her heart and mind, except to confirm the worst: her son is dead.

The story of what happened to Strikes-the-Sky is less clear and very troubling. In the spring of last year he left their village on the Wabash on a scouting mission. Traveling with him was Manny Freeman. Neither of them was ever seen again, nor has there been any reliable report of them or their fate. Hannah does not speak of Strikes-the-Sky as alive or dead, or in any way at all. Her silence robs us of our own words.

Of your grandfather Hawkeye there is a little more news. Your sister saw him last in Indiana territory three years ago. He set off on foot in a southwesterly direction, taking nothing with him but his weapons and as many provisions as he could carry.

Your father sends his very warmest good wishes and this word: if your trade connections in the west have any news of your grandfather, we would be most thankful for any information they might provide.

Gabriel asks when you will come to visit. We have explained to him many times that it is neither easy nor safe to cross the border in times of war but this is something our youngest does not care to hear. Daniel would like to see you as well. I know that he hopes you will convince us, his most unreasonable parents, that he and Blue-Jay had best go join the fighting. They speak of little else, to our considerable disquiet.

Please give our best regards to your grandmother Iona. We think of you every day with love and gratitude for the kind services you have provided us in our worry for your sister. As Hannah continues to improve from her long journey—I dare not write of her
healing
—we hope to send you more and better news of her.

Your loving stepmother
Elizabeth Middleton Bonner

Chapter 1

Early September 1812
Paradise, New-York State

Hot sun and abundant rain: Lily Bonner said a word of thanks for a good summer and the harvest it had given them, and in the same breath she wished her hoe to the devil and herself away.

But there was no chance of escape. Even Lily's mother, whose usual and acknowledged place was at her writing desk or in a classroom, had come to help; everyone must, this close to harvest.
The women must,
Lily corrected herself: the men were in the cool of the forests.

She glanced up and caught sight of her mother, all furious concentration as she moved along her row. She swung her hoe with the same easy rhythm as Many-Doves. They were an army of two marching through the tasseled rows, corn brushing shoulders and cheeks as if to thank the women for their care.

For all their lives the Mohawk women had spent the best part of every summer day in the fields tending the three sisters: corn, beans, squash. But Lily's mother had been raised in a great English manor house with servants, and she had not held a hoe in her hands—white skin, ink-stained fingers—until she was thirty. Elizabeth Middleton had come to New-York as a spinster, a teacher, a crusader; in just six months' time she had become someone very different.

Lily understood a simple truth: the day came for every woman when she must choose one kind of life or another or let someone else make the choice for her. For some the crucial moment came suddenly, without warning and when least expected; others saw it approaching, pushing up out of the ground like a weed.

It was an image that would not leave her mind, and so she had finally spoken about it to her mother, holding the idea out in open palms like the egg of an unfamiliar and exotic bird.

And how it had pleased her mother, this simple gift. She sat contemplating her folded hands for a moment, Quaker-gray eyes fixed on the horizon and a tilt to her head that meant her mind was far away, reliving some moment, recalling a phrase read last week or ten years ago. When she spoke, finally, it was not with the quotation Lily expected.

She said, “There are so many choices available to you, such riches for the taking. The very best advice I can give you is very simple. You have heard me say it in different ways, but I'll put it as simply as I can. When it comes time to choose, try to favor the rational over the subjective.”

At that Lily had laughed out loud, in surprise and disappointment. Who else had a mother who would say such a thing, and in such a studiously odd way? Other people were satisfied with quoting the Bible and old wives' wisdoms, but Lily had a mother who preferred Kant to the Proverbs. Who made decisions with her head when she could, and was convinced that in doing so, her other needs would be satisfied.

Certainly she could point to even the most unconventional choices she had made in her life and argue that they were rational, and more than that: that she was happy with the choices she had made. As most of the other women Lily knew were happy with the lives they had.

Her cousin Kateri had chosen a husband from the Turtle clan at Good Pasture and gone with him to live among the Mohawk on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence. It was too early yet to know how well she had chosen, or how badly. Other women misstepped and struggled mightily forever after; there were a few like that in Paradise, burning bright with the anger they must swallow day by day.

And then there was Hannah, her own sister, who had chosen to leave home and chosen well, in spite of the fact that the wars in the west had taken it all away from her. Now she was neither angry nor content but merely alive, as placid and blank as the clouds overhead and just as distant.

The war was coming closer all the time, and while they had not heard a single shot fired and none of the men had gone to join the fighting—
not yet,
Lily corrected herself—there were casualties. Lily counted herself among them.

Without the war she would have left two months ago for New-York City. The plan had taken a full year to finalize: she would live with her uncle and aunt Spencer in their fine house on Whitehall Street and study art with the teachers they had found for her. In time, when she had advanced far enough, she would travel with them to Europe where she could study the work of the great artists.

But all of that had come to a sudden end, because men must fight and to do that they started wars. Her own brother was infected with that need, her twin brother. The strangeness of it never faded.

Many-Doves was telling a story. Lily's mother laughed in response, a gentle hiccupping laughter that meant she was embarrassed. All these years living among the plain-speaking Kahnyen'kehàka women, but her mother still blushed and laughed like a proper young English lady when the talk turned to men and women and the things they were to each other.

This is the life my mother chose
. Lily repeated this sentence to herself often, and every time she was overcome with admiration and resentment in equal measure.

When Many-Doves decided the time was right they put down the hoes to eat in the shade of the birch trees. Lily filled empty gourds with water from the stream and they unwrapped a parcel of cornbread and boiled eggs and peppery radishes plucked this morning from the kitchen garden, still trailing clots of damp earth. Lily listened for a while as they talked about the coming harvest and the day's work.

When it was clear that today was not the day they would decide among themselves what was to be done to heal Hannah, Lily went off to wade in the lake, digging her toes into the mud and pulling her skirts up through her belt so that the duck grass tickled her bare calves. She wet her handkerchief and wiped her face and the back of her neck free of dust and grit, thankful for the cool and the breeze and the very colors of the sky. Lily felt her mother watching her, her love and pride and worry radiating as hot and true as the sun itself.

The sound of drumming hooves brought her out of her daydream. The others heard it too, all of them turning in the direction of the village, their heads tilted at just the same angle, listening hard.

“Riders!” Her brother Gabriel exploded out of a clump of grass almost under Lily's nose, all pinwheeling arms and legs and spraying water. Annie, Many-Doves' daughter, was just behind him and they galloped toward the women, both of them sleekly wet and naked. Gabriel's skin was burned almost as dark as Annie's, so that his gray eyes worked silver.

“Five riders!” Annie shouted as if she must make herself heard on the top of the mountain.

“We hear.” Many-Doves raised a hand to screen out the sun as she looked in the direction of the village.

“Your uncle Todd's letter said he hoped to be home today,” Lily's mother said, wiping her neck with a kerchief. “But who does he have with him?” Her expression was a combination of worry and anticipation and excitement too.

“Whoever it is, they must be lost,” Lily said, wishing herself wrong even as she said the words. “No stranger ever comes to Paradise on purpose.”

The cornfield was on a little rise that gave them a good view of the village on the other side of the lake: the building that had once been the church but now was just a meetinghouse, as no minister seemed to want to stay in Paradise; the well; the dusty road that widened in front of the trading post and then narrowed again to disappear almost immediately into the woods; a few cabins; the smithy; here and there a curl of smoke from a chimney they could not see.

Every year Paradise was a little smaller, like an old woman hunching down into her bones. When a family gave up and moved on the cabin stayed empty and the garden around it lay fallow, simply because Uncle Todd could not be bothered to look for new tenants. At this moment the only sign of life was a cat asleep on the wall of the well, her fur gleaming in the sun. But folks would come soon enough: so many riders at once was almost as good as a fire for waking them up.

The sound of hooves on the road grew louder and louder still, and then the riders showed themselves. Five of them, as Annie had foretold. Uncle Todd and cousin Ethan among them—Lily made out that much and nothing about the others; she did not have her father's keen eyesight. Gabriel had it, though. Gabriel and Daniel and all her brothers; eyesight keen enough to count acorns on the highest branch. And now young Gabriel had caught sight of something that made every muscle quiver. He turned his head toward the women and his eyes were perfectly round with anticipation.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, answering the question he hadn't asked. “But put your breechclout on first. You too, Annie, you can't go greet people in such a state.”

To Lily she said, “That will slow them down a little, at least. Come along, maybe we can get there first.”

Without any discussion Many-Doves began to gather the hoes together.

“But there's six hours of sun left,” Lily said as her mother moved off. She found herself as uneasy about the strangers as she had been eager to see them just a moment ago.

Many-Doves laughed and poked her shoulder with two fingers. “As if you could work now with your brother just come home.”

All of the riders had dismounted but for one, a smaller figure—a lady by her bearing, Lily saw now. One of the men had a hand on the woman's saddle, his head canted up to talk to her—
argue with her,
Lily corrected herself, taking in the way he held himself—and in that moment she recognized him.

“Luke,” she said.

Her brother Luke, come from Montreal without word or warning, and in time of war. Lily felt the shock of it in the tips of her fingers, shock and joy and a flash of fear.

Lily's mother had recognized him too, and picked up her skirts and her pace both. Gabriel and Annie streaked past, heels flashing.

“Who is that lady?” Lily asked out loud.

Many-Doves made an approving sound deep in her throat. “Maybe your brother has finally brought a wife home with him.”

“They argue as though they were married,” Lily agreed.

Luke turned away from the stranger and pulled his hat from his head in frustration. The lady turned her horse away and started up the path that led to Uncle Todd's place while Luke watched her, his fists at his sides.

Richard Todd was the most prominent man in Paradise, the richest in both land and money, and a trained medical doctor. His fine two-story house was the only brick building in a village of squared-log cabins. It had been the largest house until the Widow Kuick bought the mill and built her own fine house, but the Kuick place had fallen into disrepair these last years and sat hunched on the hillside overlooking the village, like a frowsy old woman without the wits to look after herself.

Richard Todd was rarely at home and the Kuick widows rarely stepped out of doors, but when Richard went off to Johnstown or Albany, his place in the world and the things he called his own—house, gardens, pastures, cornfields, barns and outbuildings, books and animals and plowshares—were cared for. A small kingdom beautifully kept, and the doctor had spent less than three weeks in residence in the last six months.

It was a situation that suited his housekeeper very well. At seventy-nine Curiosity Freeman still ran things, overseeing the house servants—her own granddaughters—and the farm workers like a benevolent general presiding over well-trained and adoring troops.

Together Curiosity and Elizabeth and Many-Doves looked after the medical needs of the village; they dosed children for worms, set broken bones, delivered babies, laid out the dead and comforted the living. Sometimes Curiosity went for days without giving the absent doctor a thought.

They were in the laboratory, the farthest of the outbuildings on the Todd property. Once this had been the heart of Richard's medical practice, and it had surprised Hannah to find that while she was gone it had been given over to a different kind of research. According to Curiosity, Joshua Hench had been conducting experiments with metals and blackpowder explosives, all with Richard's approval.

“Wouldn't do no good to tell you,” Curiosity said in response to Hannah's questions. Her irritation was sharp and clear on her face. “You just have to wait and see for yourself. Unless you was wanting the laboratory for your own work?” She looked at Hannah hopefully. “Then Joshua will just have to clear out, go blow himself up someplace else where I don't got to hear it happen.”

Hannah didn't want the laboratory; she hadn't come home to practice medicine, after all, and she said so.

“You've expressed your concerns to Richard, I take it.”

At that Curiosity just snorted. “You wave a firecracker under a man's nose, he ain't going to pay no attention, no matter what kind of sense you be talking.” Then she pushed out a sigh. “Ain't nothing to be done, but it do set my teeth on edge.”

Hannah was relieved if Curiosity was willing to abandon the subject. She turned her attention to the stack of Richard's daybooks on the standing desk. Ledger after ledger in which he had logged his daily work: treatments, patients seen, raw materials ordered from Albany and New-York City and beyond, experiments he had undertaken and the results they had produced. All neat, well ordered and full of Richard's dry observations.

June 4 1808. Set right tibula on the youngest Ratz boy. Subject healthy if dull-witted ten-year-old; clean break; no tearing to the muscle or ligaments; prognosis good if he can be kept out of trees.

Curiosity had come along to keep Hannah company while she read. She sat near the door in the light from the single window, snapping beans in a bowl in her lap.

“Richard has been away a long time,” Hannah noted; the last entry in the daybook was six months old.

“Wouldn't care if he never did come home,” Curiosity said, her temper flaring again. “If it weren't for missing Ethan. I wish he'd leave the boy here with me. He won't ever make no doctor and everybody know it. Richard best of all.”

“Ethan is hardly a boy anymore,” Hannah pointed out. “He's nineteen.”

“Of course he a boy.” Curiosity poked into the bowl, fished an earwig out with two long fingers to crush it under her heel. “He tender at heart like a boy, our Ethan, and he always will be. I'm hoping that now that you come home they'll listen to reason, the two of them.”