Twin Willows: A Novel (12 page)

Shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, Anna watched James give her a final wave, then ride away, bound for the familiar life of Bedford.

She felt a strange sense of isolation as she realized that her last contact with her old life was gone. From now on, she’d truly be on her own.

O
HIO
R
IVER

After James rode out of sight, Anna turned back to the camp, where she noticed that a plump, motherly-looking woman regarded her with a blend of curiosity and sympathy.

“Looks like your man ain’t comin’ with you,” she observed. “Will you be travelin’ alone, then?”

Instinctively Anna raised her chin. “The boatman will look after me.”

The woman’s laugh showed that she still had strong, white teeth. “I’d not depend on Master Perkins for that if I was you, lass. He’ll have all he can do to pilot the boat. I’m Mary McIntosh, and that big fellow yonder helpin’ build the pens is my man, David. You’re welcome to join up with us.”

Anna looked in the direction the woman indicated, to see a Goliath of a man whose beard all but obscured his face.
He’d be a fine champion to have in a fight
, Anna thought. She turned back to the woman and nodded. “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. McIntosh.

“I’m Anna McKnight. I’m going to visit my father in Lexington.”

“Glad to know you, Anna. All the folks at Harrodsburg call me Mary, and so should you.” She glanced at Anna’s hand. “Do you not have a ring?”

“A ring?” Anna repeated, not understanding the purpose of Mary McIntosh’s question.

Mary gestured toward the half-dozen other men working alongside her husband to secure the boat’s superstructure to its base. “If those young bloods know you’re spoken for, they’ll leave you alone.”

“I do have a ring,” Anna said, truthfully enough. For a moment she considered letting Mary McIntosh continue to believe that James was her husband, but she didn’t think she could sustain the falsehood all the way to Kentucky. “However, I’m not married—the man you saw me with is my cousin.”

“Well, if you ain’t lookin’ for a husband, you might better put on the ring anyhow and let the bachelors b’lieve you’re spoken for. Otherwise, they could get mighty pestiferous around a pretty thing like you.”

Anna glanced at the men and fervently wished one of them were Stuart Martin. “I’m going to Kentucky to see my father, not to find a husband,” Anna said aloud.

Mary McIntosh laughed, a merry sound that started as a chuckle and ended in a near-whoop. “Aye, but the men’ll find
you
, I can tell you that. You’d best do as I say. Bring your things over to yonder tree—that’s where we’re camped. David will see to your horse.”

“It’s been sold. Someone’s to come for it tomorrow,” Anna said.

“Did you sell the saddle with it?” Mary asked.

“I don’t think so, just the bridle and halter.”

“Take the saddle off right now, and put it with your things—saddles fetch a fair price in Kentucky.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Anna said.

Mary inclined her head. “There’s much you haven’t thought of, lass.”

True
, Anna thought, but without fear as she walked into the woods to screen herself from view while she retrieved her aunt’s ring from its hiding place inside her bodice. The trip hadn’t yet begun, but Anna felt a strange blend of excitement and contentment.

Edward Perkins might have intended to get under way at first light, but by the time the animals and supplies had been loaded onto the flatboat, the sun stood more than halfway up in the morning sky.

Anna watched the Pittsburgh road in vain for the man from the livery stable to appear. When she knew that he wasn’t going to get there in time, she reluctantly gave up another coin so her horse could join the rest of the livestock making the trip.

“’Tis probably for the best, lass,” David McIntosh told her. “You might need it, and if you don’t, you can sell the animal there for a lot better price than you’d a-got in Pittsburgh.”

The boatmaster had assured all the passengers that it would take the flatboat no more than eight or ten days to reach Limestone, where Anna, the McIntoshes, and a few others would leave it.

“That’s if nothin’ out of the ordinary happens otherwise,” Mary McIntosh added under her breath.

“Indians don’t raid boats as much now as they did there for a while, but when we get to the narrows, every man, woman, or child what can fire a piece will have some kind of rifle at the ready. Sometimes just seein’ that we’re ready seems to scare them off.”

“What kind of Indians?” Anna asked, not wanting to think her mother’s tribe could do such things.

Mary shrugged. “Who knows? They’re all the same to me.”

That is not so
. Not wishing to argue with this kind, though misguided, woman, Anna kept the thought to herself.

The first few days of their voyage passed so peacefully that Anna began to think that Mary had exaggerated the dangers. The steady motion of the craft soothed her by day, and at night when they’d made camp along the shore, Anna enjoyed sleeping under the stars. When she was a small child, her father had told her wonderful stories about the constellations, the Hunter and the Bear. His formal education in Scotland had been scanty, but to Anna, her father was about the closest to perfection that any human could be, and her only regret was that they had been apart so much in recent years.

That would soon change, however, and they would be together again when she got to Kentucky. In the meantime, travel aboard the flatboat had been far more enjoyable than Anna had expected.

Inevitably, the pleasant days came to an end. They encountered their first, quite frightening, stretch of shoals. Although Edward Perkins kept assuring his passengers that the broad-beamed craft was in no real danger of being swamped, the strained faces of the polemen testified that even they had their doubts. Finally, though, the shoals were successfully run.

Then rain fell in a deluge for two days. It was nearly impossible to keep a fire going on shore at night, so everyone had to endure the discomfort of wet clothes until the sun and a warm south wind combined to dry them.

A new challenge appeared the next afternoon when the flatboat reached a narrow stretch of the Ohio River where it would be forced to pass much too close by the wooded north shore for comfort.

“Over yonder’s home to thousands of savages,” David McIntosh said. “They like nothing better than to get their hands on a boat like this, loaded down with goods and livestock.”

My mother’s home was somewhere over there too
, Anna thought. From everything her father had told her about Silverwillow and her people, Anna couldn’t believe that they could be the bloodthirsty murderers that everyone seemed to make Indians out to be.

“The Delaware are gentle people unless they are provoked,” her father had told her. “Never forget that they were always kind to me, Anna Willow. They would have kept you and raised you as their own had I not taken you away. Remember that, if you hear ill said of your mother’s people.”

So Anna grew up thinking that, no matter what other kinds of Indians might do to whites, her mother’s tribe was different. The thought that she might well have been brought up as one of them had made her even more eager to see how the Delaware lived. Ian McKnight had promised that when she was older, he’d take her there.

At that thought, Anna felt a wave of uneasiness. For the first time, it occurred to her that circumstances could have changed since then. Her father might not be able to take her to her mother’s village, after all, thus removing a major reason for making this journey.

Don’t borrow trouble
, Anna reminded herself. With the others, she stared across the narrow channel at the opposite shore. Edward Perkins cautioned the passengers to be ready to fight, if necessary.

“Fresh prime your guns, and keep them to hand,” he ordered.

True to his word, the shipmaster provided Anna with a sturdy old flintlock rifle, along with powder, ball, and flint. Anna knew how to fire it, but she couldn’t imagine aiming it at any human being, and hoped that such an action would never be necessary.

All conversation ceased as the channel narrowed even more, putting them in easy reach of rifle fire from the northern shore.

“They’re over there, just watchin’ us,” David McIntosh said quietly.

“Who lives there?” Anna asked, almost afraid to hear his answer.

“This part’s ’most all Shawnee.”

Anna strained her eyes, expecting top-knotted and war-painted Shawnee braves to erupt from the dense woods at the water’s edge at any moment. In addition to their rifles, they’d probably all have tomahawks raised in readiness to scalp all the passengers . . .

Anna held her breath and listened. Were those faint cries only from the usual shore birds? Or Shawnee signals that would soon change to loud war whoops?

Anna turned to David McIntosh and whispered as if she feared the Indians could overhear her. “I don’t see anything.”

“If they’re there, they don’t aim for you to see them ’til they’re ready,” he replied.

Everyone continued to watch in tense silence. When the flatboat finally reached a wider part of the river without incident, a collective sigh of relief rippled throughout the passengers. Edward Perkins circulated among them, saying that the worst danger had passed, and Anna gladly put down her borrowed flintlock.

Before they had time to fully relax, however, another incident again brought the passengers to attention. One of the lookouts pointed to a cleared area on the far shore, a few hundred yards downstream. When the boat got closer, they saw a white man, naked to the waist. Frantically he waved a tattered shirt over his head. When the flatboat came within hailing distance, he fell to his knees and clasped his hands before him and cried out.

“Help! Save me!” he said, over and over.

Anna stood to get a better look at him and her heart skipped several beats. Like Ian McKnight, this man was tall; and also like her father, his faded red hair seemed streaked with gray. Although the man’s heavy beard and the distance between them obscured his facial features, Anna had no doubt that this poor man could actually be her father—or someone eerily like him. She expected the flatboat would be poled to a stop and a party sent to the man’s aid.

But to her horror, the boatman kept an impassive and steady hand on the rudder and ordered the men at the flatboat’s corners to pole even faster. In moments the current had swept them past the man, and his pleading cries gradually receded in the distance.

Her eyes wide in shocked disbelief, Anna turned to David McIntosh. “Why didn’t we stop and help that poor man?”

David McIntosh looked at Anna, his dark eyes soft in his grizzled face. “Ah, lass, don’t take on so. He’s probably only a decoy, sent out by the savages to trick us into stoppin’ to help. Once we did, we’d be overrun and scalped afore we’d have time to prime our rifles, much less to fire them.”

“How do you know it’s a trick? Surely, as many as there are of us, we could cover anyone willing to take the canoe to him.”

“It cannot be risked, Anna,” Mary McIntosh said. “Too many travelers have died just that way because they were taken in by such ruses.”

Anna shook her head impatiently. “You don’t understand—that man could be my father—he looked just like him!”

David McIntosh regarded her with pity. “They allus look like someone’s father, lass, but they almost never are.”

“Likely he’s a renegade white, or maybe a prisoner who’s bargained for his life in return for ours. Don’t think any more about it,” Mary added.

Her heart heavy, Anna looked back at the man, who appeared smaller and smaller as the flatboat moved farther and farther downstream. Just as the boat was almost out of sight, the man turned and walked back toward the woods, and the passengers went back about their business as if nothing unusual had happened.

I won’t forget about this
, Anna vowed.
I’m going to ask Father what he’d have done if he were in the boatmaster’s place
.

She felt a chill run down her spine. If that man really was her father, she’d never again have the chance to ask him anything. For the first time, Anna realized that she ought to have some alternate plan ready if, for any reason, she couldn’t find her father when she got to Kentucky.

Anna sighed as she recalled how she’d chastised James Barfield for even considering going to Kentucky without money or land or the means of getting either.
I’m not really much better off
, she admitted to herself.

Although she had a modest amount of money, it wouldn’t last long. She’d have to find someone willing to take her in until she could find a way to get back to Pennsylvania. She already knew that she couldn’t return by flatboat, even if she wanted to—the boatmaster had confirmed that this vessel, like all the others he’d brought downriver, would be broken up and its timbers sold after it reached Louisville.

Anna would have to find someone traveling east who’d be willing to take her along. She didn’t know what she’d do then, but one thing was certain—she would never go back to the Barfields.

K
ENTUCKY

The rest of the journey passed in relative calm, apart from some unpleasant weather that forced them to tie up to the shore for almost a full day, thus delaying their landing at Limestone.

“Will your father be meetin’ you?” David McIntosh asked Anna when the Limestone landing came into sight.

“I don’t think so. I doubt that he’s had time to get the letter saying I was coming.”

“Then you can ride with us—Lexington’s on our way and still several days’ travel from there.”

Anna’s heart sank. With no clear idea of where Lexington was, she’d expected that when the flatboat reached Limestone, her journey would be over.
It’s a good thing I kept the horse
, she thought.

The road from Limestone to Lexington passed through land that both closely resembled Pennsylvania and was quite different from it. The forests were thick, but honeycombed with deer paths and buffalo trails, which David McIntosh told Anna were also used by the Indians who crossed the Ohio to raid Kentucky settlements. Near creeks and in other places stood thickets of nearly impenetrable cane, some twenty and even thirty feet tall, which the McIntoshes told her Indians used to ambush white travelers.

“Do many Indians live in Kentucky?” she asked.

“Nay, lass, Indians never lived here—they just use the land for hunting.”

“First they hunted buffalo and deer, and now they stalk whites,” Mary McIntosh said grimly. “That’s the way of it. You won’t come and go in Kentucky as free and easy as you did back home.”

After passing near to a few small settlements, the small party that had left the flatboat at Limestone reached the walled town of Lexington. Anna had expected something on the order and size of Fort Bedford, and she was disappointed.

“’Tis a great deal smaller than I thought,” she remarked.

The McIntoshes pointed out the cabin of an old man who could direct her to the place where her father lived. With mutual expressions of hope that they would soon meet again, they and Anna said their farewells.

Half an hour later, Anna rode out of Lexington in the company of Hezekiah McCanless, who had the longest, whitest beard she had ever seen.

“This here’s an old buffalo trace,” the old man explained. “It wanders some, but it’ll get us there.”

“I thank you for taking the time to come with me, Mr. McCanless,” Anna said.

Her companion grinned, revealing gaps where he had lost several teeth. “Just call me Hezzy, like everyone else. You don’t need to thank me for nothin’. I’ve knowed your pa a long time. We was both hunters in the old days, y’ know. Now I’m seized up with the rheumatics, an’ your pa sees that I’m kept in meat, even salts it down fer me. They’s not much I wouldn’t do to help out Ian McKnight or his kin.”

“Does my father ever talk about me?” Anna asked.

Hezzy made a noise deep in his throat that she took to be a chuckle, then he turned his head and spat before speaking. “All the time, missy—‘Yer oughter to see my Anner Willer, she’s pretty as a pitcher,’ he allus says. Why, I reckon he’ll be purely tickled to have y’ come in like this, and him not a-knowin’ a thing in the world about it.”

They reached a stretch of cleared land on which corn grew, and Anna recalled that her father had written that he had to grow a crop of corn in order to claim more acreage.

“Whose corn is that?” Anna asked.

Hezzy shook his head. “I don’t rightly know, but it b’longs to someone what’s livin’ at the Station. There’s the trace to it yonder.”

Her guide pulled his horse to the left and motioned for Anna to follow him across a shallow creek. On the other side, a rectangular palisade occupied the highest ground in the area.

“Hallo, there!” Hezzy called out.

Someone called back, and after a moment a man in a long buckskin hunting shirt opened the gate and waved them through.

Inside, in an area slightly more than two hundred yards long and some fifty yards wide, forty cabins faced one another in parallel lines, protected by twelve-foot-high palisades and firing towers at each corner. In the large open area between the cabins, men worked at various tasks, several women tended cooking fires, and a blur of children chased after one other in a game of tag. All activity soon halted, however, as everyone in Bryan’s Station regarded the newcomers with interest.

“Don’t tell me you’ve done gone an’ wed yerself a young squaw,” one of the men said to Hezzy.

No one had referred to Anna in that way for some time, and her face warmed in surprise and anger.

“I’d be proud t’ tell y’ such, but I can’t—this here’s Ian McKnight’s daughter.”

A spare woman wiped her hands on her apron and squinted up at Anna. “You don’t say! Welcome to Bryan’s Station, missy. I’m the Widow Stucker, and this here’s my boy Jacob. Don’t just stand there like a dead stump, son. Holp her off’n her horse.”

Immediately several other residents surrounded Anna, telling her their names and adding their welcome to the widow’s.

“Go fetch Master McKnight,” the widow directed yet another son, but someone else had apparently already thought to do so.

A tall man in buckskins hurried toward them, his mouth open wide in astonished surprise. “Anna Willow! Is it really ye?”

Anna’s relief and joy rendered her temporarily mute as she slid down from her horse and threw her arms around her father’s neck. The people who at first had crowded around them returned to their occupations, thus giving them a measure of privacy for their reunion.

“Praise the Lord that ye got here safe,” her father said at last. “But what are ye doin’ in Kentucky, lass? I thought ye’d bide a time in Bedford.”

“I wanted to see you.” Anna stepped out of her father’s embrace and looked closely at him. As she had anticipated, his red hair had faded somewhat, but nothing about Ian McKnight looked frail. If anything, the eyes that searched her face were even bluer and keener than she remembered.

“I see ye got the necklace I sent ye,” he said. A look of wonder crossed his face as he stared at her. “Why, ye’re a woman grown now. How is it that no man has yet claimed ye?”

Stuart Martin wants to
, Anna almost said, but she wanted to wait before she spoke of Stuart to her father. “Did you send me to Miss Martin’s only to wed me off so soon?” Anna asked instead.

“Ah, Anna Willow—” Ian began, but before he finished the thought, they were joined by a slender woman whose mobcap didn’t entirely conceal the straw-colored hair beneath it. She stopped just short of Anna and stood with her arms on her hips as she regarded her. “I suppose you must be Ian’s girl.”

“Yes, I am,” Anna said. She smiled and waited for the woman to identify herself, but her father spoke first.

“Anna, this is Rebecca—my wife.”

If she had been physically slapped, Anna could not have been more surprised. Her mouth fell open, and a weak “Oh” was all she could manage.

Her father stepped between them and put his right arm around his wife, with his left arm circling his daughter’s waist. “I reckon ye didn’t get the letter I sent about weddin’ Rebecca, but now that ye’re here, ye can get to know one another right well.”

Anna felt numb. “The only letter I got had this necklace in it,” she said.

Rebecca gently disengaged herself and adjusted her cap. “I’ll go see to makin’ up some kind of place for you in the lean-to. We’re not much used to company here.”

“I’m not company,” Anna said, but Rebecca had already turned away, and made no reply.

Ian McKnight continued to hold his daughter in a loose embrace. “How fares the family in Bedford? When did ye leave there, and how did ye manage to get here alone? ’Tis a long, hard journey.”

Anna smiled at her father’s earnest puzzlement. “All in good time, Father. Right now, my horse needs seeing to, and I could use a bit of rest myself.”

“Of course,” Ian said. “I’ll tend to the animal whilst ye wash up. Rebecca’ll be glad to show ye where everything is.”

I’m sure she will
. Anna tried to stifle the uneasy feeling that she was an intruder in her father’s home. Rebecca seemed civil enough, but Anna was quite aware that a newly married couple didn’t need anyone else around.

I’ll stay out of their way. Anyway, this can’t be any worse than living with Helen Barfield
, Anna thought wryly.

Later that day, as they worked to make a bed for Anna, Rebecca explained that her first husband, Richard Engler, had been killed by Indians a few months ago, soon after the death of their two children from a fever. She spoke matter-of-factly, but Anna could imagine how hard this woman’s life must have been. Her father’s new wife didn’t want to talk much about herself, however, and asked many questions about Anna’s childhood and upbringing.

“I thought Father would have told you all about me,” Anna said after briefly tracing her life’s history—less her love of Stuart Martin—for Rebecca.

“Ian said he’d married a Delaware woman and had a girl-child by her that his sister raised. He said you’d had a lot of fancy schoolin’. The way he talked, I thought you’d stay East.”

Perhaps I should have—had I known that Father had taken himself a wife, I’m not sure I’d be here now
, Anna thought.

“I don’t intend to stay in Kentucky. I’ll be going back as soon as I do what I came for,” she said aloud.

“And what is that?” Rebecca asked.

“I want to see where my mother’s people lived. Father promised to take me when I was old enough.”

Rebecca raised her eyebrows. “He never told me that. With things like they are now and the Indians raidin’ across the river every chance they get, it’s too dangerous to travel up that way.”

Anna tried not to show anger at the way Rebecca so quickly dismissed her cherished dream. “I’ll leave it up to Father.”

“Of course. But don’t be surprised if he says no.”

Anna’s first chance to broach the subject came that night after supper, when Rebecca made an excuse to visit a neighbor, and left them alone.

“I still can scarce believe that my nephews would let ye come all this way by yourself,” he said when Anna finished the account of her journey.

“Don’t blame them, Father. They both tried to talk me out of it at first. When James saw that I was bound to come, he offered to travel with me, but I wouldn’t let him. Besides, as I’ve said, good people saw to me on the boat.”

Ian McKnight narrowed his eyes and regarded Anna closely. “Ye were never good at dissembling. Every word may be true, yet there’s something ye’ve left unsaid, lass.”

Anna looked down at the logs that made up the cabin’s puncheon floor, then back at her father. “The last I heard from you, you didn’t know that Aunt Agnes had died. Did you ever get a letter from Henry about her will?”

Ian’s mournful expression made his denial unnecessary. “Aye, lass, your news was a bitter blow. I’ve had no letters from the Barfields.”

Holding her father’s hand, Anna told him how Anges had died and what her aunt had written in her will. “Aunt Agnes wanted me to have the old farm for a dowry.”

Ian sighed heavily. “Aye, Agnes was a good woman, and from the first she loved ye as her own. I wanted no part of the farm myself, but it pleased me that she wanted ye to have it.”

Anna glanced at her father in surprise. “You knew all along that she’d leave me the property? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know for certain—it was a matter about which we always disagreed. I sent ye to Miss Martin’s so ye wouldn’t have to marry a poor farmer, but she always hoped ye’d come back to Bedford.”

Anna sat silent for a moment, debating if she should tell her father about James Barfield’s marriage proposal. She decided against it.

“Be assured, I have no intention of living in Bedford, nor do I want the property. I do want something else, though, something that only you can give me.”

“Oh? And what is that, lass?”

Anna leaned forward and spoke with quiet sincerity. “Many times over the years you promised to show me where my mother and her people lived. You said that when I was old enough, you’d take me. I want to go there now, Father.”

Ian McKnight began shaking his head even before Anna finished speaking. “Ah, Anna Willow, I’ve ever been a man of my word, but in this case, I canna grant what ye ask. I doubt that Silverwillow’s village still stands, and ’tis far too dangerous to chance finding out. Some weeks past we heard that the British had massacred over two hundred Delaware under their chief Netawatawees, who had taken the name of Abraham. All through the Ohio the Redcoats have stirred up the Indians so much that even I’d not feel free to walk among them in peace.”