“New England.”
That group landed in 1620 … thirteen years after the Virginia colony was
finally established at Jamestown. Yance had been curious, as were all the boys,
for the tales they heard from their mother and me, as well as the others of our
group, were not enough. Only Yance went so far north.
He usually went alone or with a Catawba or two. He had gone several times with
their war parties against the Iroquois or the Cherokee … with whom, in fact,
the Catawba were often friendly.
Yance found the place called New England, already scattering out from the
original settlement. He went into the village bringing meat. My boys always
brought meat when they went anywhere, including their home.
He made friends, for he was genial, agreeable, and a hard worker, but for them
he was too filled with good spirits, too energetic, and not Godfearing enough in
their way. So one day when he had offended they put him in the stocks. It took
nine men to do it, but they did it.
Only that night a girl stole her father’s key and came down and set him free. He
built a careful fire against the stocks and burned them down, but by the time
the fire was discovered Yance was in the hills, and being Yance, he took the
girl with him, and she, being the kind of a girl he would choose, came
willingly.
Oh, she was a lovely one! Gay, filled with good spirits, singing always … and
not always hymns, for she took readily to our wild English ballads of lost
loves, highwaymen, and the fairs.
For we sang much in our hills, the gypsy songs, the Scotch Highland songs, the
Irish songs.
There was always the fighting, for the Indians came against us, and no morning
sun arose without its risk, no day in the field without its danger.
The Catawbas were firmly our friends as they were to be the friends of the white
man always. As warriors came from afar, hoping to kill a Catawba and have the
scalp to boast of in the villages, so they came to fight us also as our name
grew.
We were fighters all. John Quill, who had made his great defense of the fort
after the death of Slater, was remembered by our enemies, for they gloried in
the strength of any fighting man, enemy or friend.
But time has a way of stealing strength from a man, and even before that, his
swiftness and agility. One day they came upon Glasco, working at his forge.
The boys were off hunting. I with my wife and our new daughter was at the river
… only Tim Glasco was there. Usually an uncommonly wary man, that time he was
not wary enough, and they came very close. He heard them, got off a quick shot
and laid about him with his hammer and tongs.
They got an arrow into him, but he did not drop. They rushed him, and he swept
two of them, right and left, into the dust. One went down from the red-hot
tongs, another from a freshly sharpened spit for roasting meat.
Still they came, and they killed him.
We heard the shot from afar—Wa-ga-su, Pim Burke, and I, leaving Kane O’Hara with
the women.
Too late. Glasco was down and his scalp taken. He was not quite dead, and
somewhere he had picked up some Indian thoughts. “Get them,” he whispered
hoarsely, “and my hair back. I’ll have my own hair upon my head when I cross the
divide.”
With Jeremy, Pim, and Kane O’Hara we set out after them, and we fled them down
the nights and down the days, and across the rivers that men had given names,
over the Broad and the Wateree, across Rocky River and Coldwater Creek to a
skirmish on Long Creek, and then on to the Yadkin.
Suddenly, on the Yadkin, they turned to fight, and outnumbered we were, but
better shots. And two warriors died and lost their hair before we moved again.
Through the woods and across the savannas, through blackberry patch and under
the hickory trees, and suddenly before us we heard a burst of firing, and then
another, and we closed in swiftly to see the Senecas trapped in a bend of Lick
Fork of the Dan. We saw one man down in the water, another trying to crawl a
bank in a trail of blood, and we closed in swiftly.
From the bank beyond, a huge warrior suddenly stood up and shouted a challenge,
and from the brush leaped Yance. He rushed forward, knife in hand, and the two
met there in the open glade in a fierce and desperate fight. The big Indian
threw his tomahawk. It caught Yance on the shoulder and the big Indian went in
as Yance started to fall. But as the Indian charged, Yance kicked up both feet
and boosted the Indian clear over his head. Then, swift as a striking snake,
Yance turned on him and buried a knife in his chest.
The Catawbas, who ran the war trail with us, took many a scalp that day, and
evened the score for their own people slain. And when the scalps were taken, we
turned our backs and started slowly home.
My sons had been hunting the Blue Ridge, looking for caves of which we had
heard, caves in which white men were said to be buried … men from some
long-ago time before the beginning of years.
An Eno found them there and told of the war party of Senecas heading south upon
a raid, and so they had come down from the high-up hills, too late to help
defend our settlement, but in time to intercept the Senecas’ return.
From far away they had heard shooting, then saw the Senecas coming across a
savanna, and moved to meet them on Lick Fork.
Yet when we returned, Glasco was dead, only hours before.
“I wish he could have known,” I said. “We brought back his hair.”
“He knew,” Lila said. “I told him. For I saw it as in a dream, saw Yance come
charging with a knife in his hand, saw blood upon his shoulder, saw him go down,
then come up and turn, and saw his shoulder move.”
She went to Yance and uncovered his shoulder. There was a deep gash there, the
bleeding stopped with moss. “Come,” she said, “we will make it clean.” And he
went with her, as he had when a child.
Abby stood waiting, her face still, her eyes round and serious.
“Barnabas,” she said, “we must go down to the river. I would speak with you
there.”
I knew it would be a serious talk, for long it had been since she’d called me
aught but Barney.
And when we sat together on the bank, she said, “We have a daughter, Barnabas,
and she will be a beautiful girl.”
“She is your daughter,” I said.
“It is a wild land here. What will be her future?”
Uneasiness stirred within me, and for the first time I truly felt fear. “I do
not know,” I said, “But by the time she is grown—”
“It will be too late, Barnabas. Our daughter will not become a hunter or a
fighter of Indians. She must have education, she must know another world than
this.”
My fingers felt the grass. I pulled a blade and tasted it and waited, my heart
beating slowly.
“You have your sons, and they will grow your way. I want our daughter to have
another choice. If she stays, who will she marry? One of your wild wilderness
men? Would you have her curing buffalo hides, growing old before her time?”
“What else can we do?” I asked, though in my heart I knew the answer.
“In all things, Barnabas, I have done as you wished, for in all things they were
what I wished as well. In this I do not know, and you must help me. I do not
know, Barnabas, but I am filled with misgivings.”
“You would take her from me? Soon Brian will go to England to study law. Already
Sakim has taught him mathematics and logic, government and philosophy. I have
learned much from Sakim, for I, too, have listened when he taught Yet I am no
scholar, and but a simple man.”
Abby put her hand over mine. “Not so simple, Barnabas, but so wise, so strong,
and yet so gentle. You forget that I have known you for a long time. And a good
time,” she added quietly, “a very good time. And I do not want to leave you.”
It was there. The word had been said.
“Where would you go?”
“To London, at first. Perhaps to Paris. I would need time, Barnabas, for I have
been long away. I would need to learn again how to behave as an English lady.”