The Frontiersman’s Daughter (5 page)

She suppressed a sigh. “Ma nearly had a fit, finding six Indians at her door.”

Ma Horn drew deeply on her pipe. “And you didn’t?”

“I . . .” Lael left off, unable to sort out the tangle of emotions she’d felt at their coming. Fear. Curiosity. Fascination. Shame. “It’s been hardest on Ma,” she lamented, looking down at her basket.

Ma Horn nodded sagely. “I reckon she don’t like the reminder.”

So that was it.
Ma’s black mood hinged on being confronted with a past better left alone. Lael looked hard at Ma Horn, free to ponder it all for the very first time. She felt a sudden stab of sympathy for her moody mother. Was she now reliving the ugly day of Pa’s capture? Her own disgrace? Could she ever forget the shock of his homecoming or the ensuing silence that shut them out and seemed to overlook two lost years? When they thought the worst was over, the Canes and Hayes clans had brought about a court-martial branding him a traitor. Had that returned to haunt her too?

“Some family skeletons are best left buried,” Ma Horn said, interrupting her reverie.

Lael sighed and set down the basket. “Seems like the Clicks have more than their share.”

The old woman’s face creased like a dried apple when she smiled. “We ain’t a boresome bunch, are we?”

Lael shot her a wounded look. “Am I supposed to be proud of that?”

“Beats cryin’, don’t it?”

Lael swallowed down another sigh and looked at the finished baskets at her feet. Tomorrow they’d fill every one. The long days offered plenty of daylight to wander the woods, and a huge harvest still waited. As if pondering the work ahead, Ma Horn rose from her rocking chair and bade Lael good night, taking a small pallet in the corner and leaving Lael the prized feather tick. Though she’d protested, Ma Horn wouldn’t hear otherwise.

Left alone, she moved the tallow candle closer and took Simon’s note from her pocket. Smoothing the crumpled paper, she wondered if Ma Horn watched her from the shadows. The bold words still seemed to leap off the page. That he’d remembered her middle name and signed off with his own was almost intimate somehow. But it was what he didn’t write that held her. Simon Henry Hayes was in need of a wife and he meant to have her.

She expelled a rush of air, suddenly sleepy, wondering when her father would come back to fetch her. How had he and Ma explained her absence at the wedding? Likely, they hadn’t. Her disappearance would simply be another secret whispered of in the settlement. Just one in a long line of secrets.

Truly
, she thought wearily,
the Click clan is rife with them.

6

Lael and Ma Horn traipsed from hollow to cove, then ridge and river bottom and back, baskets adorning their arms like jewelry. Every morning they would go gathering once the dew was dried, with nary a thought for the heat. Though her feet felt scalded, Lael refused to complain, knowing she’d toughen in time.

“Take care to find four of the same plant before you take the one, lest they won’t grow back,” Ma Horn cautioned her, standing knee deep in a patch of boneset.

Lael helped strip the tiny white flowers and leaves from the stalks, listening as Ma Horn talked.

“Boneset tea will nearly always break a fever, but it’ll make you sick if you take it hot. Now, look at this Jack-in-the-pulpit. Take this here hoe and dig some roots. Nothin’ better for snakebite.”

Up so high, Lael seemed to shed her burdens. Thoughts of Captain Jack were fleeting, if at all. She had less luck with Simon. The note remained in her pocket, perused in solitary moments when she relieved herself behind a bush or tree. With Ma Horn busy stuffing her head full of herbal lore, Lael felt she was back in settlement school again, only the learning was different and altogether more pleasurable.

Unexpected riches bloomed around every bend. Golden ginseng. Velvety sumac. Indian peaches and pale red serviceberries. Lael would bend down a limb and stand and eat her fill before filling her basket. Once back at the cabin, they dried herbs and berries on strips of chestnut bark in the sun. A butter churn was filled to the brim with blackberry wine. Lael looked about in wonder as every barrel, bucket, piggin, and washtub seemed overflowing with nature’s offerings.

Ma Horn never stopped until nightfall when she’d crack the cabin door and sit and smoke her pipe. Her rifle was ever near, a reminder of troubled times. Lael wondered if she used it for much other than meat. She didn’t know what one old woman and an older gun could do against even one Indian but held her tongue.

Each evening Ma Horn would make a tonic, one for herself and one for Lael, and Lael would try to guess which herbs she’d used by the way they scented the room.

“Take this basswood blossom tea,” Ma Horn urged. “It’s good for female troubles. I’ll settle for some clover. It’ll help me to sleep.”

“But I don’t have any female troubles,” Lael said. “Leastways, not bodily.”

“Well, fine and dandy, just drink it down anyway. It does a body good.”

June melted into July. The woods were kiln hot, flowers and berries bursting forth before their time. Lael felt feverish and wondered how her mother’s garden fared. Up so high, Ma Horn had no garden to speak of. Most everything she ate she ate wild from the woods. Meat and meal were traded for her herbs, but when her larder ran low, she simply prayed and it was provided.

“The Almighty knows what I need before I ask Him,” she’d say, “but I ask just the same.”

Lael wondered if the Almighty knew she needed to stay atop Pigeon Ridge, out of sight and trouble. She missed home, but not Ma’s fractious temper. Once Pa came and left a sack of salt, but they didn’t see him, busy as they were gathering wads of wild grapes and Indian peaches to dry. Although he wasn’t there, she sensed he was often with her. Comforted, she clung to this whenever she felt afraid, when the shadows of twilight fell and she imagined she heard Indian drums in the distant darkness.

As the days melted together they worked feverishly to harvest all they could, for it would keep them—and the settlers—in good health through the coming winter. When the gathering was done, they simply filled the hours a different way, distributing tonics and herb bundles all over the settlement. Once, Lael awoke to find Ma Horn gone, but by dusk she’d returned with a fresh ham to hang and a mess of beans as payment for a birth. Twins, she said.

“Ain’t you ever fretful, Ma Horn?” Lael asked, staring pensively at the dark woods.

But Ma Horn just chuckled, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “If them Indians want my old hide, they can have it.”

Lael found it hard not to laugh at the sight of her on old Soot, her black-clad legs thin as broom handles, one stiff petticoat rising above boots bearing silver buckles. With her black bonnet on her head, she looked dark and pensive. Like a crow, Lael thought.

“I believe your pa’s fixin’ to come get you,” she said in early August. “I’ll sure be lonesome when you go. But before you do, there’s one last call we need to make.”

The intensity of her tone made Lael wary. “Where to?”

Ma Horn looked straight at her. “Your Uncle Neddy.”

She felt her mouth go slack, then she recovered and looked around for the mule. She’d not thought of Neddy since Susanna had mentioned him in early summer and revealed that his land bordered Simon’s own. What would Pa think? Ma? Neddy’s face came to mind, more shadow than substance. She’d spent years trying to put his memory down only to have it resurrected twice now.

Ever perceptive, Ma Horn studied her and said, “You still sore about it all?”

Lael shrugged, her face as stoic as her father’s. The youngest of the Click clan, Neddy looked enough like Pa to be his twin, and some said this was the reason Ma ran off with him. But to Lael they were as different as sugar and salt. While Ezekial Click was taciturn and callous, Neddy was like his name, affable and dreamy, tending his crops by day and reading poetry by night.

Ma Horn’s voice was gentle yet firm. “Your ma thought your pa was dead, understand.”

But he wasn’t.
She bit back the retort and stared straight ahead. If not for the Hayes clan, who would have taken her in when she’d been left at the fort? Though Ma had come to her senses in just a few days, the damage was done.

“I remember how excited you was when it was your mother’s time,” Ma Horn said quietly, getting back on the trail. “I thought for sure the way she was carryin’ spelled a girl.”

Lael smiled wryly. Ransom Dunbar Click was hardly the girl she’d been hankering for. Even Pa had seemed surprised, as if he thought such dallying was sure to produce a female. Recently escaped from the Shawnee, he’d come in and held the infant up to the light. The tiny boy grimaced and opened wide blue eyes. Looking on, Lael thought he was the handsomest baby she’d ever seen, no matter who’d fathered him.

“One Click’s as good as another,” Pa had said with a shrug, handing him back to Ma.

And so it was that Uncle Neddy, a bachelor recluse, fathered his first and only son. Pa’s revenge was to keep him.

“I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Uncle Neddy since Ma ran off with him,” Lael told her.

“Well, time’s a-wastin’, ” she said.

The trip to Uncle Neddy was not a simple social call. As they neared his home place, Lael remembered he’d never married and rarely went to the fort named after his brother, even in times of Indian trouble. Though he’d once been a beloved uncle, Lael felt he was dead to them. His name was never mentioned, at least not in their own cabin.

But now, riding nearer, the past was fast unfolding and curiosity overcame her with every step. “What’s ailin’ Uncle Neddy?”

“Settlement fever.”

Lael shuddered. The malady was generous with its misery, sapping the life from many a settler, fooling them into a period of wellness only to take them down at a later date. “You see him often?”

“Often enough. He’s in need of an herb bundle now and again.”

“What do you suppose he’ll do when he catches sight of me?”

Beneath the black bonnet came a chortle. “What’ll you do when you catch sight of him?”

Lael fell silent, unable to say.

Ma Horn continued, her voice a bit hushed, as if sharing some family secret. “Neddy’s changed a mite. I give him a Bible sometime back, after all the trouble. He was always one for readin’, if you remember. Before long I began to see a change in him. Turns out he can quote whole passages by heart. All that bitterness toward your pa—his lonesomeness for your ma— just left him. I reckon if you spend enough time in the Word it changes you, just like Scripture says.”

Lael thought of their Bible at home, rarely removed from its wooden box. Only in times of stress did Ma reach for it. And Pa, never.

In the distance, Neddy’s cabin was nearly as small as Ma Horn’s, hemmed in by corn on all sides. Lael flicked a yellow jacket off her sleeve and tried to swallow, but her throat was so dry she felt strangled. The sun was directly ahead and heat shimmered all around them, the land giving off its rich, ripe scent. They dismounted and from somewhere—the fields?—Neddy appeared. Lael took off her bonnet and flipped her heavy braid back over one shoulder, her feet in a firm stance that belied her skittish feelings.

He was walking slowly toward them, scarecrow thin, his fair hair tied back with whang leather. When he saw her, he stopped. She took a shy step toward him and did the same.

Try as she might, she couldn’t master her swirling emotions. Something lonesome and long dead pulled at her as she looked at him and remembered a great many things at once. Neddy reading to her in the firelight. Neddy teaching her to spell her name. Neddy bringing her a sugar lump from the fort store. Tears mingled with her salty sweat and stung her flushed face.

Without a moment’s hesitation Neddy did what Pa would never do. Reaching out a long arm, he pulled her into a snug embrace and let her cry.

“Lael girl, you look the same as you did when you were six years old, only handsomer.” His voice was deep and warm; he smelled of smoke and dirt and toil. His thin face seemed almost to shine.

“Well, now,” Ma Horn huffed, looking as if she might crow at any minute. “Let’s go in and have us a little visit.”