Longshadow's Woman

Now even the pleasure of sitting in the creek and trying to remember her favorite stories was ruined. She wouldn’t dare linger knowing her prisoner was nearby, even if he was locked in the barn. From now on, she wouldn’t even be able to go near the place without picturing him standing in the edge of the water, with his smooth, muscular body, his mocking gray eyes, and those dark, mysterious places that made her bones feel weak as tallow.

And damn-blast it all, her hand ached! Every three days she poured turpentine on it and packed it with sugar again, the way Emma had showed her, but bandaging one hand with the other was difficult. If her prisoner had been an ordinary criminal instead of a savage heathen—if she hadn’t seen him naked—she might even have asked him to help her, but that was out of the question.

“Git to it,” she snarled, much as she would have addressed Sorry.

By the time the sun had passed overhead she intended to have three of the five stumps out of the ground. Using gestures and a few simple words, she explained how they would go about it, then propped the rifle against a nearby stump within easy reach. While her prisoner sawed through the first of the newly exposed roots, she dug out around the next one. When the roots were all cut through, she cussed Sorry into position, fastened the harness to the stump and whapped him on the behind. “Pay attention,” she said when the mule set his weight against the heavy stump. “This is the way we do it.”

With the first stump hauled to the edge of the field, they moved on to the next. The mule was powerful, she’d grant the miserable bastard that much. It took a lot of swearing to get him to moving, but once he did, things happened fast. Small roots popped and snapped, earth broke, and one stump after another surrendered.

Once, in a moment of triumph when a deep taproot gave way, she glanced up and grinned at her prisoner. He looked startled, then embarrassed. And then, of course, she was embarrassed, too, and so she swore at the mule. Snatching up his lead chain, she led her prisoner to the next stump.

Jonah was used to hard work. Back on the reservation it had been the women who had done most of it, freeing the men to hunt and trap and make war and ponder on the changes that were coming to their world and how best to deal with them. But he’d worked, even then. Mostly with horses. He understood horses far better than he understood men, either red or white. Both as a prisoner and as an ordinary seaman, he had worked, but he’d worked hardest of all after retrieving his money from the bank and buying his own land here in the East.

Breeding horses was a noble thing. It was not drudgery. His people were convinced that if a man followed the plow, the drudgery would take away his manhood and he would become like an old woman, withered and good for nothing.

Jonah feared the yellow-haired woman might force him to follow the plow. So far she had not. He did as she directed, but he did no more than that. He could have made things far easier for her, but he did not.

The second day, she drew another of her lines in the earth, outlining the section she intended to clear of stumps and eventually plant. He told himself that she would have to do most of it without his help, for by the time winter passed and the earth grew warm again, he would have long since cleared his name and returned to his own land.

Or failed in his attempt and been returned to jail, to be tried or hanged without benefit of judgment. The white man’s justice was not always logical, or even just.

Sawing through the thick, damp roots, he thought about what he must do, and knew he could not wait much longer. Soon he must escape long enough to retrieve the papers he had hidden on his horse farm and return before he was found missing. If he was caught trying to escape before his work parole was over, he would be shot down before he had a chance to prove his innocence.

Timing, Jonah told himself, was important. Meanwhile, he must allay the woman’s suspicions and allow his ankles more time to heal. When the time was right, he would set out as soon as darkness fell, running hard for as long as it took, uncovering his papers and running all the way back before the sky grew pale again. Once he had proof of his innocence in his possession, he might even work in her damned field one more day. She had fed him well. She had even forgotten herself so far as to give him one of her rare smiles.

As tired as she was by the end of each day, Carrie felt like celebrating, seeing the progress they were making. Even Sorry was easier to manage with the prisoner nearby. It was almost as if the two of them spoke a silent common language. As if they had some secret understanding. Like to like, she told herself, unwilling to admit she could possibly envy a mule, just for having someone to talk to.

Carrie hadn’t been able to visit Emma since she’d brought her prisoner home. She could hardly leave him behind, but she didn’t dare take him with her. Poor Emma had seen enough misery over the years, having outlived a husband and a whole slew of children. Living alone, with the rheumatism so bad she could hardly hobble around on damp days, the last thing she needed was to come face to face with a wild Indian in her own home, even though renting him had been her idea in the first place.

Although Carrie had to admit that cleaned up, he didn’t look quite so fierce. He still wore those same old ragged clothes, but then, her own weren’t much better. His hair, the color of polished mahogany, was long enough to be tied back with a piece of string, while hers had been hacked off with a butcher knife back in the spring, when she’d caught a fever and Emma had said she had to stay cool. Instead of the neat braids she had always worn, her hair had grown in thick and curly, reached a certain length and stopped growing. Emma said it was because of what she ate—or rather, what she didn’t eat.

She ate as well as she could when half the time Darther forgot to leave her enough money even to buy salt, much less bacon and flour. She needed a damn-blasted cow, was what she needed. She’d taken her nanny goat to Shingle Landing and traded her for a supply of tinned milk, but tinned milk didn’t make butter.

Once her corn crop came in, she vowed, she would get herself a fresh cow and six more hens, and maybe a pig. Maybe even two pigs.

She got through the day without cursing more than once, when Sorry deliberately stepped on her foot. It was something she was working on—not cursing. Something else she was working on, she amended. Today they had cleared out all but the last few stumps and dragged them over to the edge of the field to burn. Carrie watched the sky, unwilling to risk setting a fire unless rain was in the offing. According to Emma, her cabin had once been a tenant house, the big house having been burned when Colonel Draper and General Wild had led their Union forces on a rampage though Camden and Currituck counties, burning more than a dozen homesteads.

Carrie thought it must have been something like the Indian raid that had taken her own family. Years had passed, the sharpest pain had faded, but the memories would be with her until the day she died. Looking back, the home she remembered as a child had seemed large, but it couldn’t have been too much larger than Darther’s small cabin.

At any rate, a small cabin was enough for her needs, as long as the land was still fertile. Emma said it had once grown cotton, the bolls as big and as white as snowballs. Carrie didn’t want to grow cotton. She couldn’t eat cotton, wouldn’t know how to harvest it even if she could grow it. But corn…

It was going to be so beautiful. Row after row of tall, green stalks. Enough to grind for meal, to save for seed, to feed her stock and still have some left over to trade for cloth, salt, side-meat and calico. And then, she would clear more land and grow still more corn.

The air was lavender with dusk as they headed home from the field. Sorry plodded along behind her prisoner like a faithful hound. Carrie could have chosen to be jealous, but instead she felt only satisfaction with the amount they had accomplished. It would have taken her until Christmas to get this much done alone, even with two good hands.

She was smiling when she happened to notice the way her prisoner was walking. He was exhausted. They both were. His stride was hampered by the heavy irons, but it was more than that. Her smile gave way to a look of concern. He was limping. If he was injured—if he could no longer work, she would have to return him, and then she’d be right back where she’d been before, only now she owed Emma two dollars which she was fairly certain the jailer would refuse to refund.

Biting her lip, she shifted the heavy rifle to her other shoulder. She no longer even attempted to keep it turned on him. It was almost impossible to manage when they were working together, anyway. They both knew that.

He was definitely limping. It had to be the leg irons. The heavy things allowed him to walk, but not to run. If the jailer hadn’t warned her not to remove them, she’d have been tempted to unlock them before this. He could work twice as hard if he could clamber in and out of stump holes more easily. But in that case, she’d be the one who was handicapped, with the gun in one hand and a bandage on the other. Besides, she suspected he knew she would never shoot him.

By then they had reached the yard. Uncertain how to proceed, Carrie came to a dead halt. “Whoa, there—you, too, Sorry.”

Jonah winced from the indignity of being addressed in the same manner as she addressed her mule. At least she hadn’t sworn at him the way she did Sorry. The mule was neither deaf nor stupid, but somewhat slow to make up his mind whether or not it suited his interests to obey.

Scowling, she stared down at his feet. Pride would not allow him to acknowledge his pain, just as pride would not let him reveal his understanding of her language. Caught in a trap of his own making, he had endured days of pain and humiliation, wondering why the stubborn woman couldn’t see the truth before her eyes—that a man couldn’t work in irons. That if she wanted to get her money’s worth before his parole ended, she’d do better to release him, sit on a stump with her rifle pointed at his head, and let him get on with clearing her field. If he had to follow the Plow Road, he’d as soon get it done as quickly as possible.

“Leg, um—hurt?” She pointed to his ankle, her pale eyebrows knotted in concern. Jonah had heard the jailer tell her she must return him in good condition. She was obviously worried about her investment.

He knew she carried the key in her pocket, along with the napkin in which she had wrapped two chunks of bacon and cornbread, which they had devoured at noon, sitting in almost companionable silence in the shade of the hedgerow. For a few moments he had felt almost as if they might be…not friends, yet not quite enemies.

To his astonishment, she dropped to her knees before him. When he felt her hand on his foot he stopped breathing, but he couldn’t restrain a soft oath when the irons dug into his raw flesh as she folded the two halves back on their hinges.

Seeing the blood caked with dust until it looked like mud, she crooned in dismay. “Oh, my mercy, oh, sweet Jesus, you’re torn all ragged.”

Closing his eyes against the fresh pain, he willed his mind to escape to another place, another time. For once, it didn’t help. With harsh, shallow gasps, he waited for the pain to recede. Yesterday he had torn strips from his shirt and tied them around his ankles to pad the irons, but the cloth had only stuck to his blood and dried, tearing away still more flesh when he moved. Crossing her line in the dirt floor of the barn, he had found a jar of hoof dressing and plastered both ankles with that.

“You’ll have to let me wash it and dress it with turpentine and sugar. Emma—that is, my friend who knows about these things, says that’s the best medicine.”

Still on her knees, she gazed up at him, her eyes dark with concern. Jonah felt as if he’d swallowed a fish bone. It had not yet pierced his gullet, but he was afraid something irreversible had just happened.

Her hand was still resting on the top of his dusty bare foot. Her own feet were bare, too. He had seen her wearing boots but once. They were worn through on the bottoms, good only for trapping rocks and sharp pine seeds against her naked feet.

His own feet were bare because the men who had come to arrest him had not allowed him to take away anything, not the papers that would prove his innocence, not his boots, not even the freedom papers he had received from Lieutenant Pratt.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know you can’t understand me, but I’d never have had this happen, not even to a wild animal. I saw a wolf once that chewed his foot off to get free of a trap, and…”

A wolf. He was no more than a wild animal, caught in a trap. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he did know that if she didn’t take her hand off his foot, he might do something they would both come to regret.

Leading the mule into the small fenced paddock, Carrie forked him a ration of hay and then led her prisoner toward the cabin. He was no longer shackled or chained, which meant that if he were going to escape, it would be now. He could knock her on the head, grab the rifle from her hands and take off through the woods.

Yet, something she’d seen—or fancied she’d seen—in those clear gray eyes of his, told her he wouldn’t try to escape. Not yet, at any rate. Without thinking, she had knelt in the middle of the lane to examine his injuries, just as she would have stopped to examine any wounded creature in her care. But the instant she’d touched his warm flesh, the strangest sensation had come over her. She had looked up—he had looked down—and for one brief moment something tangible had passed between them. Her only comfort was that he’d been as startled as she was.

Now she tried to think of a way to make him understand what needed to be done. “Now listen carefully,” she said in slow, measured tones. “I will help you.” She placed her hand over her heart. “You must not try to escape.” She pointed to the road and shook her head vigorously. “If you run away, you’ll die.” And then, all in a rush, she blurted out the fearful consequences. “You’ll end up with the blood poisoning and die out there in the woods all by yourself, and then the jailer will come after me and hold me responsible, and I’ll end up in jail in your place.”

But of course he couldn’t understand a word she said. Shaking her head, she said, “You sit.” She pointed to the three-legged milking stool she’d brought inside when the cow had gone dry and she’d traded her to a farmer in Snowden for a rooster, two hams and a side of bacon, and said, “You sit.”

He sat. They were both dirty after a day in the field, but he had rid himself of vermin. She’d broken off branches of wax myrtle and told him in words a child of three could understand how to use them to keep the fleas from his straw bedding. Evidently, he had taken her meaning.

“This is going to hurt,” she muttered. Lifting his foot in her hand, she felt again that peculiar awareness—like the quivery feeling of the air just before a lightning storm. Embarrassed, she glanced up to see if he had noticed anything.

He felt something, all right. His lips were clamped together and his eyes had the strangest expression. Maybe this was the way Indians looked when they were hurting. She’d never seen one up close before, not since the night they had come a-whooping and a-hollering into the settlement near Redwood Falls. Those had been Sioux. The sheriff had called this one a Kie-oh-way heathen. It had been more than ten years, but he looked different from the Indians she remembered. He was taller, for one thing, and his features were…

“Well. Enough about that,” she said decisively, earning a puzzled look from the man whose ankles she had just cleaned, treated and wrapped with strips of an old bed sheet. She was tempted to see what he would do if she asked him to help her rebandage her hand. Some things were hard to do one-handed, and the old bandage was in tatters after a day’s work. “I don’t reckon you could…?” Shaking her head, she answered her own question, “No, I reckon not.”

Jonah had learned long ago to lock away all emotion. He could not afford to think of the woman as anything more than a means of escape. A means of eventually clearing his name so that he could return to his land and his horses. She made it difficult, however, first by treating him with such disdain he wanted to shake her until her teeth flew in all directions—then by treating him not only with kindness, but with sympathy. It was enough to undermine his determination.

He told himself she was crazy. For all she knew he could be a murderer, yet she had brought him into her house and tortured him with her careless kindness. She had stared at his naked body that first day. She knew well that he was a man. She had scrubbed his wounds with her lye soap and mopped them with turpentine until his eyes watered with the pain. She had shared her food and water with him, sat beside him to share a patch of shade, yet she considered him less than an animal. A wolf caught in a trap. Not only deaf, but stupid.