Wild Indigo (5 page)

“They should have paid the exemption tax,” Schopp said.

Sister Krause harrumphed. “A threefold tax is a stiff penalty for farmers to pay during a war, Brother Schopp.”

“Having failed to do so, they should fight,” he persisted.

“Would you really have them fight, when it is an article of our faith not to bear arms for any government?” she asked.

Jacob ended the familiar, fruitless argument with a decisive change of subject. “As to the mill-race, I have added two men to work on it.”

“More deserters?” Schopp asked sharply.

“We think so.” Jacob withheld his belief that they were British. If so, they sought concealment desperately and would work all the harder. The British
might hold Charleston, and Cornwallis's Redcoats might be poised at the North Carolina border, but in skirmishes throughout the state, Whigs were overwhelming superior forces of Tories.

“Even with them, how much longer will repairs take?” Marshall asked.

“Yes, Brother Blum, how long? You know the Continental troops grow restless for their grain,” Elisabeth Marshall added.

Jacob had no simple answer for the Elders, none of whom participated in the heavy and dangerous communal work. “Twill take time. The damage from spring flooding was complete. The stream must be dammed and diverted, the waterway allowed to dry, all old timbers removed, new ones seated—”

“But when do you see the end?” Marshall prodded.

Jacob stifled his frustration. He saw an end to work at the mill, but not to this interminable meeting. He forced himself to sound patient, practical, knowledgeable, all of which he was, most days. “Another month, at best.”

Rosina Krause broke the stranglehold of pressing subjects by reaching across the table for the lot bowl. As head of the Single Sisters, the drawing of the marriage lot was her affair.

“'Tis time, Brother Marshall,” she said, pushing the bowl to the center of the table to make her point. “We have tormented Brother Blum long enough this afternoon.”

The women shared knowing glances. Abruptly the tone of the meeting changed. Marshall put away his notes, and Schopp's pinched face softened.
Tensions eased. A faint, hot breeze made its way through an open window, ruffling a sheet of Jacob's neglected ledger. He closed the book and self-consciously straightened the damp stock that choked his neck.

He had waited all afternoon for this moment. All week, in fact. Sweat poured off his body, but not from the heat. When the lot had been cast for Christina, he had been too brash to understand its power and far too young to imagine either the permanence or the poignancy of union.

Now he did. If the lot said yes, his fate, his family's fate was sealed. A pleasant fate, he thought, if satisfying his desire were his only object. But misgivings reared up, more potent than desire. Could Retha, the foundling, friend of Indians, rescuer of lame wolves, be the right woman to mother his children?

Brother Marshall bowed his head. “Guide us, Savior, in the matter of Brother Blum's proposal to Sister Retha. May all here present bear witness this time-honored expression of Thy will and cheerfully carry out Thy commands.”

Elisabeth Marshall retrieved the small, deep bowl and placed it in front of her husband. He closed his eyes. With a light click of wood on wood, she rearranged the reeds, turned the bowl, and guided his hand to its blunt rim.

Brother Marshall's lips moved in silent prayer as his fingers found the ends of the three reeds. For the fourth time, he selected a reed for Jacob, pulled it apart, and gave the slip of paper to his wife. Holding it up to the light, she squinted worriedly. Then a grin spread across her face.

“
Ja
, Brother Blum, yes,” she said, barely containing her feminine excitement. “Sister Krause may propose to Sister Mary Margaretha on your behalf. The lot says yes.”

Lowering his head, Jacob thought of a flash of white shift, a flare of gilded hair, a bold dance of slender feet. A surge of triumph flooded him. A triumph of desire.

But what had he done to his family?

More to the point, what would Sister Retha do to them?

 

“You think about it, Sister Retha. And you think long and hard about those children,” Rosina Krause said later that day in her immaculate office, moments after giving Retha the astounding news.

The lot granted Jacob Blum permission to ask for her hand in marriage.

Retha's head spun. Marry Brother Blum! Be a mother to his children! A week had passed since Jacob Blum took on the care of her wolf. His proposal, properly made for him by the senior Single Sister, left Retha speechless.

“And you make up your mind as quickly as you can. Don't you change back and forth as Sister Grimm did last winter,” Rosina scolded.

“I'll try,” Retha said feebly.

“Those children cannot be expected to wait on girlish indecision.” Rosina's words followed Retha as the enormity of Jacob Blum's proposal drove her blindly from the little office.

She was a girl no more.

Throughout the night and the next day, Retha did think long and hard about the children and their father, even into the afternoon while she stood folding the Tavern's fresh linens into a willow basket.

Jacob Blum had gone and gotten permission to marry her.

Dizzy at the thought, she pressed a hand against her forehead. She hadn't decided to agree to it. There was so very much to consider. Accepting him meant accepting them.

Jacob Blum, Rosina Krause, and the whole community, when it came right down to it, would expect her to marry him now that the lot had said yes. Would expect her to put her work behind her, even her life as a Single Sister, such as it was, even her wolf. Would expect her to join his household and care for his children.

What did she know of children? Especially boys.

Worse, what did she know of men?

She wished her thoughts would fold as neatly into place as these sheets and pillowslips. In her heart of hearts she knew that her wolf was the least important thing, yet at first it was the hardest to let go. The wolf had come to her, wild and free and needy, reminding her of everything she once loved of her woodland life with the Cherokee. In saving its life, she had won back a piece of that past. She would be trading its wildness for the mysterious misery of Jacob Blum's strange daughter, a misery so like her own after her own mother's death that she wasn't sure she could face it.

The prospect of any child needing her to be her mother daunted her. Let alone one who had fits. She
had heard Anna Johanna screaming once in the streets of town, had seen her clinging to that dress. Retha sympathized. She herself had suffered terribly, having lost both parents at once. But how would she manage the child? It was one thing to talk to her for a few moments, quite another to have the care of her for life.

What if the little girl hated her?

And what of those half-grown sons?

She couldn't even talk to Brother Blum about the marriage. Yesterday he had left town, committing his children to the care of Samuel and Eva Ernst. He hadn't said a word to her, either about his proposal or about tending her wolf.

Retha slapped the last pillowslips in place just as the haunting sound of Samuel Ernst's conch announced the afternoon's market on the Square. Well, she thought, tucking her load inside the basket's rim, the market won't be crowded, the weather being what it was. Outside, the afternoon was muggy, the sky dark with scudding clouds, like her thoughts. Sometimes in this dry, hot summer, clouds like that brought rain, but not often lately.

What had Brother Blum been thinking, to ask for her hand in marriage?

She swung the heavy basket to her shoulder and headed up the street.

He must be desperate. She tried to ignore gossip, truly she did, having too often been its subject. Even so, everyone knew he had had trouble with the lot. Twice, some said three times, his proposals had been denied. Surely that was why Sister Rosina urged her to decide.

Retha regretted asking him to feed her wolf. Now that she was actually doing the laundry, it was clear she could have managed feeding it herself. Since she asked Brother Blum to do it, he had spoken to her only once. She stopped in midstride.

Only once. The day
after
the Elders' meeting. The day after the lot had been cast.

She balanced her load and put her thoughts together. He had known then. Even while he had been talking to her about her wolf, he planned his proposal. And said not one word of his intentions. Never mind that Rosina Krause was supposed to tell her first. Such secrecy made her mad enough to turn him down. She had the right to do so.

And she owed him nothing. Not much, she amended.

That day, they had met accidentally in the Square.

“I have yet to see your wolf,” he had said, his voice rough, almost grumpy.

“You have fed her though, thank you very much.”

“How do you know?”

“I see her.”

“That wasn't our agreement.” Although he scowled in the bright afternoon sun, his lake-blue eyes were drilling hers.

She tried to placate him. “'Tis naught. I stop by the creek before I come back with the laundry.”

“We agreed that's too risky for you,” he said sternly.

We didn't, and it isn't, she thought. Alone outdoors, she was smarter than she had ever been. More slippery, more careful.

Brother Blum grunted, gathered up his children, and left. As if he hadn't known the first thing about his pending proposal. As if he had no feelings for her at all.

Loaded with laundry now, she slipped around to the Tavern's back door, angry just thinking about his silence, his indifference. She would tend the wolf herself.

Brisk and genial, Jeremiah Meyer lifted her basket over the bottom half of the door.

“You wait,” he said, retrieving a mound of linens from a corner of the room and piling dirty bedclothes high on her basket. “Here are more. The British lieutenant and his detachment rode out before noon.”

At the sight and smell of a blood-soiled sheet, she sniffed fresh air and made a face. “'Tis a foul task I do for you, Brother Meyer,” she teased, hoping her manner would mask the queasiness that flooded her.

Brother Meyer laughed. “The Lord loves a cheerful heart.”

Retha swept the basket to her other shoulder, then climbed the hard-packed, dusty street, dodging ruts. She wouldn't think about laundry now. She would think about her wolf. It needed food, but she had best avoid the larder.

She neared the Square, her destination straight across it, through the crowd. She searched the vendors, hoping her friend Alice would be here with husband Gottlieb Vogler. Some years ago on market day, Retha had met the exiled couple, and they had become fast friends when Retha spoke to Alice in her native language. A full-blooded Cherokee who
naturally shunned settlers, Alice sometimes didn't come for weeks.

The marketplace bustled with traders. With little regard to rich or poor or Whig or Tory, Moravians in neat, plain dress set up their wares alongside ragged settlers and backcountry trappers in buckskins. Two-wheeled carts and heavy wagons displayed smoked meats, tanned hides, a smattering of early summer beans and corn. One woman offered flowering herbs. On any other day, Retha would have bought some to try for dyes. A shabby man at a rickety cart hawked small game. The wolf would love a squirrel, but its price was beyond her means.

She stopped at a spotted cow tied behind a wagon. A tired-faced woman with an infant at her breast urged her closer to the cow. “She didn't freshen again this year so she weren't worth naught but for butchering.”

Retha peered over the wagon's side to see what else they had brought. One poorly made quilt, whether for themselves or for sale, she couldn't tell. Her nose wrinkled at the pungent smell of cow. The Cherokee she lived with had survived on game, had hated stinking cattle. For her, learning to eat beef had been no easy task.

“I need marrow bones,” she said anyway.

“Got no marrer bones. Kept 'em at home. Don't make no money,” the woman's husband said.

Retha understood. They were so poor they probably lived off bone soup. She backed away, but her legs struck what felt like a log. She collapsed, spilling her load of greasy tablecloths and smelly bed sheets on top of her. Shoving them off her face, she
pushed herself up and braced on the heels of her hands. A giant man extricated his legs from her load and crawled out from under his wagon.

“Oh, Gottlieb,” she gasped. “I am sorry.”

Gottlieb Vogler stood and gave her a hand up. He was bigger even than Jacob Blum, his hands ham-sized and facial features big out of all proportion. So was his gentle welcome.

“Alice will be glad to see you,” he said heartily.

“She came?” Retha looked but saw no sign of her friend's flowing black hair. “Where is she?”

“T'other side of the wagon, handing me my tools. The wheels almost came off since the Continentals requisitioned it last winter. I guess we were lucky to get it back.”

Retha streaked around the wagon and found her only Cherokee friend in the world standing by a cumbersome toolbox, her Indian face beautiful even where smallpox had etched it. Alice greeted her in the broken German she had striven so hard to learn. The minute Retha explained about the wolf, they switched to speaking Cherokee, consciously hushing its loud tones so as not to draw attention to themselves.

“Marrow bones?” Alice laughed. “Of course you can have marrow bones. And for a wolf.”

Retha heard approval in her tone. Alice would have proudly saved such a noble animal herself. She skirted the wagon and helped Retha restack her linens. Her friend showed a lot of courage, Retha thought, to come here with her husband and risk facing crowds of white men who hated her kind. Locals and Continentals had obliterated Alice's clan
that terrible spring seven years ago when Retha's own adoptive Indian family had been killed. Only Alice's ravaging smallpox had repelled the soldiers and saved her life.