Authors: Julie Doherty
Chapter 30
They left for Harris’s before dawn with Alexander’s assurances that he would ask about Mary in every tavern on his way home. He promised to spread the word among the traders making their way into the Alleghenies and Adirondacks, hinting of a reward if the girl was found. If Mary turned up—and Alexander asserted wholeheartedly that she would—he would send word, even if it meant traversing the wilderness himself.
Henry knew that day would never come. He was done crying over it, his last tears shed yesterday behind the gristmill where only a few chickens witnessed his sorrow. His head still ached from it. Mary was gone. Crying wouldn’t change that. Carrying the burden of hope into the future would yield naught but continuous disappointment. He planned to abandon hope and move on, into the woods where an Indian might bash in his brains and put him out of his misery.
Lancaster Road narrowed into an ankle-deep groove pressed flat by generations of feet, first red ones, then white. The fields diminished in size and number until just past Elizabeth’s Town the ancient forest closed in on them and swallowed them whole.
At the Black Bear tavern, situated next to a spring about two hundred yards into the forest, no one knew George Gibson or Mary Patterson. One patron asked about Mary’s relationship to James Patterson, an inquiry that quickened Henry’s pulse, until the patron added, “Captain at Patterson’s Fort, along the Juniata River.”
They’d been climbing ridges and descending into deep hollows ever since, winding around trees and spines of rock jutting out of the earth.
Henry trudged behind his father and the ox. The animal seemed attached to them already, and they gave up carrying its lead. It strolled readily between them, and although it seemed to grow more emaciated by the hour, Henry thought it a fine purchase . . . if it lived until they reached the cabin. He hoped so, not just because they needed the beast to plow the fields, but because an animal’s company was a good thing to have.
The trail ascended a steep slope and made a hard turn around one of many stumps, giving the ox some difficulty in bending to pass it. Henry grabbed the animal’s tail and pushed against its haunches. His heel slipped out of his shoe, and something hard tumbled in.
With the ox moving again, Henry limped to a level spot just off the trail.
“Got another acorn in my shoe.”
His words echoed into the hollow below as he dropped onto a fallen log.
The ox took advantage of the break to feast on deep piles of nuts trapped by exposed tree roots.
Father offered their canteen, and Henry drank from it before handing it back and slipping off his shoe. He caught his father’s concerned look, the hundredth that day. He felt sorry for his behavior yesterday, especially since it left his father distracted at a time that demanded vigilance.
“My feet are so blistered.” He looked around for the leaves Alexander described in one of his many letters. “There should be some squaw’s root someplace.”
He limped to a small clearing, where he found velvety leaves as long as his arm growing in a patch of sunlight. “Here’s some.”
He snapped leaves off the stems and carried them back to the stump, then trimmed them into plush stacks that fit inside his shoes.
Father took some of the foliage and ambled to a different stump.
Henry knew only he could remedy his father’s dangerous preoccupation.
“I’m sorry for the way I talked to ye yesterday.”
“Gi’ no more thought to it, son. It is already forgotten.”
Father ripped at the leaves. He focused on his work, but his shoulders were rounded, and he wore an expression Henry had not seen in years, not since those terrible months following his mother’s death. His father probably thought Henry bore no witness to his suffering in those days. After all, he donned a courageous face and worked in the fields from dawn until sunset. But when the moon rose above Burt Castle and Henry headed to bed, Father’s mournful cries often pierced the wall between their bedchambers.
As if reading his thoughts, Father looked up from his shoes. “Losing someone ye love is a pain I would nae wish on my worst enemy, let alone a son I love. When I lost your maw, a little of me died, too.”
A cloud of reality rained on Henry and soaked him with shame. “I know my heartache canny compare to yours. Mary is alive. I should be happy about that.”
“She is as lost to ye now as your maw is to me. Make no apology for your feelings, for I will nae judge ye for them. Grief is grief. I still hold hope that we will yet find—”
“Nay.” Henry shut his eyes and shook his head. “I beg ye to not speak of finding her. I canny get o’er my pain while there is yet hope in my heart. Today, when the man at the tavern mentioned James Patterson, I nearly died on the spot. I canny take the rise and fall of it. It would be better to accept that she is lost to me.”
His father gave him a knowing look. “I will do as ye wish and not speak of it, but come spring, I will resume my search for her. I have my own reasons for wanting to find her.”
Henry admired him for intending to keep the promise made to James Patterson.
“I will advertise a reward for her wi’ the profits from our spring harvest.” Father put on his shoes, the heels of which were red again.
A twig snapped. The ox flinched and stared mid-chew at a swaying hemlock bough on the ridge across the hollow. Crows scattered, cawing as they soared overhead.
Father moved to the ox and slipped an axe from their pack. He tossed a hammer to Henry. They’d been making too much noise. Even the birds knew to be quiet, for Henry realized now that the forest was silent except for the rustle of a few shuddering leaves on a dead oak sapling.
Another bough waved. The ox’s nostrils flared, and it blasted its nut-scented panic on Henry’s arm. Henry retrieved its rope. As his fingers closed around the hemp, something crashed on the opposite ridge. The ox reared and thrashed its head, lifting Henry out of his shoes and throwing him to the ground. He wrapped the rope around the base of a sapling just before the ox bolted. The beast met the end of the lead and halted, rolling its eyes and snorting slime.
Henry tied a quick knot and stood to find his father.
Father crouched on the path, his eyes fixed on a magnificent elk stag observing them from a rocky crest. Its tapered antlers grazed its back as it lifted its nose to the wind. A few cows trotted out of the hemlocks, ears flapping. The bull stamped its hoof and snorted, then disappeared in a mighty crash with the rest of the herd.
“Did ye see that?” His father’s face was like snow. “Mercy, the size of him. I nearly shat my breeks.”
“Me, too.”
“We must be more vigilant. It could have been a bear, or wolves, or a panther, or . . .”
Henry scrubbed a hand over his scalp, relieved to find it there.
Father threw Henry’s shoes to him and untied the ox. He returned his axe to its loop on their packs. “Throw me the hammer. I’ll put it back.”
Henry tightened his grip on the hickory shaft. The hairs on his neck and arms stood up. He sought the source of his agitation on the opposite ridgeline. Something watched him, something sinister and predatory. The stalker’s view flashed in his mind. He saw himself through his enemy’s eyes, a gaunt soul standing on the trail next to his father and the bony ox.
“Something’s oot there,” he whispered.
“Aye, elk.”
“No, there’s something else. Something bad. Something moved those elk toward us.”
“Then let’s go. Harris’s canny be that far away.”
Chapter 31
Great slabs of rock broke up the forest and offered a panoramic view of the valley below. Dense cloud collected in a gorge and snaked its way northwest, obscuring the waters of a river winding through a succession of ridges, the northern Appalachians.
Edward pulled William’s map from his haversack and alternated his gaze between the paper and the vista. “That’s the Susquehanna. Harris’s will be o’er there.” He pointed to a wisp of smoke while the paper fluttered in the breeze. “That’s the Cumberland Valley across the river.” There, a series of ridges lay like parallel boards on the ground, one after the other, the nearest of them green, and the rest fading to shades of blue and then gray. He wondered which two cradled William’s cabin between them.
Beside him, the ox nipped grass from crevices between the rocks. The animal’s hooves looked splayed and sore.
Henry’s feet were no better. He sat on a rock, his shoes and the hammer beside him. His bloody stockings stuck to his heels.
The wind wrenched the map from Edward’s weak grip and plastered it against the ox’s front leg. He stooped to retrieve it, and when he stood upright again, he rocked on unsteady legs. They would have to spend a night or two at Harris’s, where he hoped to find grain for the ox and a river full of fish for themselves. They’d eaten no meat since Alexander’s grouse.
A semblance of civilization would do the boy good. He’d been jumpy since the stag surprised them near Elizabeth’s Town, refusing to relinquish the hammer and spending more time looking behind them than ahead.
John Harris’s trading post stood along the river on a patch of black earth that once supported an Indian village. Generations of habitation left the soil flat and shoved the forest back, giving Harris and his watchmen an extended view of approaching visitors, a handy thing to have in such a vulnerable place.
At the blockhouse, a stalwart log-and-chinking structure, men hammered at pegs on a rising stockade.
“Looks like Harris is fortifying his outpost,” Edward said.
Just before a range of sheds lining the riverbank, several mules lazed in a corral. One of them brayed an ungodly sound that startled Edward and made Henry grin. Their owners, traders by their garb, encircled a fire and watched men and horses drag more sharpened logs from the river.
One of them rose from a sooty stump. “Welcome, sirs.” He doffed his wide hat. “Saw ye a while ago. By the look of yon ox, ye’ve come far.” His speech marked him as a son of Ulster.
Edward smiled and nodded, glad to be among his own kind again. “Aye, one more step and I’ll be draggin’ naught but a leather bag of bones.” He offered his hand to the trader.
“McConnell. Edward McConnell. My son, Henry.”
Shite. Their real names.
Henry’s face betrayed his unease.
Edward’s cheeks heated, and he held his breath, praying no one would ask to see their papers. God damn the hunger and exhaustion stealing his wits! Well, it was done. No going back now.
The trader shook Edward’s hand.
“William Robinson. This is Simon Morris, Joseph McKay, and Thomas McElroy.”
The men nodded.
“Put yon ox in the corral wi’ the other yins and take a seat. Simon was about to throw some venison in the pan. There’s a lazy git sleeping in the byre. Tell him I said to gi’ your poor beast a scoop of grain and an armful of hay.”
“How much—”
Robinson shook his head. “Nay, sir. News from hame will be payment enough.”
While the ox chewed his grain and brandished his horns at a greedy mule, Edward and Henry rejoined the traders.
Henry groaned and removed his shoes.
“God’s nightgown, lad, that looks bad.”
“Hurts, too.”
“I’d say it must.” Joseph McKay walked away and returned with a bucket of water. “Soak your feet in there for a while. Ye’ll need to clean them up or they’ll go foul.”
“Now then”—Robinson waved at smoke wafting toward him—“let us have the news from hame. Where ye from?”
Simon’s venison sizzled in its own broth, triggering a painful roar in Edward’s belly. He tore his gaze away from the pan. “Donegal. There was a cattle plague about ten years ago, harvest failures the same year. Linen trade is still good, but nearly all of the landlords have increased the rent to make up for what the church takes from the harvest. Flax crop has been better since the seed from here started making its way to Ireland. Other than that, it’s the same auld story, new laws and taxes that serve no purpose but to line the rich man’s purse and empty the bellies of the poor.”
“What brought ye here?” McKay asked.
“Drought. Lost my entire crop and decided enough was enough. Came here wi’ what we had left, and that was nae much.”
“It ne’er is.” Morris packed tobacco into a pipe and offered it to Edward, who thanked him but declined. New to tobacco, he worried smoking on a hollow stomach would sicken him.
Morris lit the tobacco and sucked on his pipe until the bowl glowed red. “A while back, a man from Kerry came through these parts. Know what his reason was for leaving Ireland? It was too wet. While ye were praying for rain, he was praying it would stop. His crops rotted, so he herded his wife and son onto a boat. Lost both of them on the way o’er. It’s always the same, isn’t it? Our folk are kept so low that one kick knocks us face doon in the dirt. And just when we rise up on our elbows, they pass some new law or claim a tax that knocks us doon again. A man does wonder how long it will take them to do that to us here.”
“They canny do that to us here,” McElroy said.
Morris pointed the stem of his pipe at McElroy. “Mark me, Thomas, they’ll try. For now, they need us to break open the frontier and fight the French for them, but as soon as this war’s won, they’ll turn their bayonets on us.”
McElroy took a long draw on his pipe. “Let them try. There will be too many of us here by then, and we’ll be smarter. If there’s one thing we learned from the Injuns, it’s that ye canny win a war by lining up in an open field. I know many men who would welcome the chance hide in the woods and shoot holes in red wool.”
Edward could not hide his shock at McElroy’s seditious words. He was no Loyalist, but such open treason was dangerous. He did not want to be associated with it.
“Now, now, Thomas,” Robinson muttered. “We’re a good ways off from that sort of thing.” To Edward, he said, “Forgive our good friend. His hatred of the English is nae wi’oot merit. His maw was swiped from a Glasgow street when she was but ten-and-two, and his father was wrongly accused of theft in Dublin at the same age. Both were sent here, probably to die, but our Thomas here is the proof of their fortitude and perseverance.”
“Thomas’s maw suckled him on milk soured by hatred,” Morris added.
Thomas pulled a knife from his belt, and although his face showed no outward signs of offense at Simon Morris’s comment, Edward prepared to throw himself in front of Henry.
Thomas stabbed the roast and turned it out onto a board.
Edward breathed a sigh of relief.
Thomas cut into the venison and placed a slab of meat on a trencher. “McConnell, ye say. There’s another McConnell in these parts. A real sound skin.”
“William?”
“Aye, do ye know him?” Robinson asked.
“He’s my brother.”
“Well, what do ye know? William McConnell’s brother! If ye’re as fine a man as he, then I’m glad to know ye, sir. Does he know ye’re here?”
“Not yet. He’s in the Ohio country, by all accounts.”
Robinson pursed his lips. “A lot of our traders are. Rough place to be these days, though profitable.”
He handed the trencher to Henry, who looked longingly at it. “Sir, I am most grateful, but we canny pay for—”
“Lands, lad, take it. What sort of man eats in front of another wi’ no food?”
Henry’s face conveyed his disbelief. He closed his eyes and mouthed a prayer before taking a bite.
Robinson handed Edward a trencher next. “One thing ye’re gonny have to get used to is the bigheartedness of most of the folk here. Ye’ll not understand it at first. I know, because it took me a while, too, but ye’ll see. Accept relief from others, be likewise generous, and ye will go far.”
“If the Injuns do nae kill ye,” Morris added.
“Aye,” McKay said, his mouth full, “if the Injuns do nae kill ye.”