Embrace the Day (32 page)

Luke tensed. "That's enough, Hance. It's over."

Hance ignored him. "What got you so fired up anyway, little brother? Have you and the squaw got an
amour
going on the side, or—"

"I said that's enough," Luke hissed through gritted teeth.

Hance chuckled and accepted a mug of cider from Hannah. "Yes, sir," he said softly into the mug, "never thought I'd see the day an Adair got soft over an Injun."

Luke turned sharply away, gripping the edge of the pine table so hard his knuckles whitened. Slowly, the hard edge of rage ebbed away, leaving only the dull ache of anger in its wake.

When Luke turned back to the room, he saw Hannah watching him. Her eyes searched his, and then she gave him a wistful smile of understanding. Her woman's wisdom had already told her what Luke himself didn't know.

The clock's halfpenny moon crept into view as the Adairs sat together on a soft autumn evening. Roarke had designed the room to open out onto the porch, with a view of the verdant acres of their farm.

Soft, metallic chimes, ringing the hour of eight, stirred Luke to his feet. He went to the door and stared out at the land, the sturdy new barn and outbuildings, the granary packed to its walls with corn. He was unconscious of the restless tension in his shoulders and the fist that pressed hard against the door frame.

Genevieve glanced at Roarke and fitted her hand into his. Then she turned her eyes to Luke. "They're saying the Adair men aren't the marrying kind," she mused.

Luke wandered out to the porch and sat on the step, drawing up one knee and resting his elbow on it. The ripe corn stirred in the twilight breeze.

"I reckon I've got enough work to do with the farm," he told his mother. "If I had a wife she'd feel cheated out of my time."

Roarke and Genevieve exchanged a look of amusement. "You don't work any harder than your father did when we were first married. I never felt cheated." She laid her head in the hollow of Roarke's neck in a way that bespoke years of familiarity.

Luke shook his head as he lit a cheroot. "You're different, Mama. You worked right alongside Pa every day. Lexington girls aren't like that. They all want pretty houses and slaves to do their work for them, to raise their children for them, even."

"Those are girls, son. What about the Widow Redwine?"

Luke exhaled a cloud of smoke and gave her a keen look. "What about her?"

Genevieve laughed, that sweet, rippling sound that was so much a part of her. "It's not much of a secret, son, that you've been keeping company with her for over two years. Haven't you ever thought of marrying her?"

Luke had, more than once. But he and Hannah had a comfortable relationship. Too comfortable. If they lived together day in and day out, he knew it would begin to grate on him. Without quite knowing what it was, he wanted more from a marriage.

"Hannah and I have an understanding," he said. And he believed it. She'd never made any demands on him, never asked for a thing.

Genevieve felt a sudden wave of compassion for the widow. Luke truly believed that Hannah wanted nothing from him, and the woman was wise enough to allow him to think as much. But Genevieve knew better. She'd seen Hance staring at Luke in church, had recognized the stark look of unfulfilled longing, a look she herself had worn during the years of wanting Roarke and denying him. Hannah loved Luke desperately and was not about to make the mistake of driving him away by asking for a commitment.

Roarke glanced at the clock. "Well, we're not getting any younger, son," he said, only half-joking. "We'd love to have some grandchildren to spoil."

Luke shrugged. "Sarah's the prettiest little thing in Lexington right now. In a few years she'll probably be happy to oblige. Or Israel—"

"Israel doesn't take his nose out of his books long enough to tell whether it's night or day," Genevieve explained. "And Sarah may think she's ready, but she's still a child."

"Nathaniel Caddick doesn't seem to think she's a child." Luke studied his parents' reactions closely. The youngest Caddick had been courting Sarah for a few months, as taken by her pink-and-white prettiness as she was by his family's fabulous wealth. The Caddicks were different from the Adairs, acquiring money and slaves at breakneck speed, determined to forget their pennyroyal farming heritage. Luke suspected his parents didn't quite approve of their life style. They had created a tobacco and cotton dynasty, with a stable of house slaves that occupied what amounted to a small village.

"I suppose you're right," Genevieve sighed. "But it's you we've always been able to depend on, Luke. Israel and Sarah are so wrapped up in themselves… I once had hopes for Hance and Ivy Attwater, but Hance has been off in Louisville ever since the trouble with Farley Caddick."

Luke's shoulders tensed beneath the unseen burden of his parents' dependence. Trying hard not to feel resentment, he walked down into the yard, to concentrate instead on the coming harvest. Crews would be arriving soon to bring in the corn. And then, Luke thought with relief, he'd be free to lose himself in the wilderness for a time.

He didn't mind thinking about tomorrow. It was the years to come that he avoided considering. The weight of his parents' expectations settled on him, pressing, smothering. All his life he'd worked hard to live up to an ideal of steadfast responsibility.

Luke ground out the cheroot with a savage twist of his boot heel. Just once, he thought, just once he'd like to do something reckless, something totally out of character. Something that went against everything he tried so hard to be.

Mariah walked across the square to the library, her feet moving eagerly beneath her calico skirts. Her visits to the musty-smelling reading room gave her a hunger for learning that filled her mentor, Abraham Quick, with quiet, indulgent joy.

She slipped inside to find Mr. Quick speaking with an aging, rotund man who wore a garish suit of clothes and sported a thick mustache.

"Excuse me," she said, turning back toward the door. "I didn't mean to interrupt—"

"Mariah, wait," Mr. Quick said. "This is someone I'd like you to meet." He made an endearingly formal bow. "Miss Parker, this is Mr. John Bradford, publisher of the Kentucky
Gazette
."

She inclined her head slightly. "Mr. Bradford. I've read your paper."

He puffed his chest out and grinned broadly. "Then you're a friend of mine, Miss Parker. Mr. Quick has been telling me about your achievements."

"It's Mr. Quick's doing," she insisted. "I couldn't even write my name when I wandered in here over a year ago."

"She's quite remarkable, John," Abraham said. "She's been reading a translation of Chateaubriand's 'Atala,' and writes a fine hand, too."

Mr. Bradford cocked an eyebrow at Mariah. "Chateaubriand?"

"Yes, sir."

"And how do you find his work?"

"I—it's quite interesting, sir."

"But you don't care for it."

She flushed. "No, sir. He deviates much too far from the truth. I doubt there's ever been an Indian woman even remotely like Atala. I closed the book when she and Chactas escaped into the 'Allegheny desert.' "

"You sound offended, Miss Parker."

"I am, Mr. Bradford. No wonder the Indian is hated and feared by white settlers. Writers like Chateaubriand lead people to believe we are aliens who live in a fantasy world. But we are human beings, Mr. Bradford, following a way of life we've known for generations. We cannot understand the man who stakes out boundaries and claims the land as if claiming ownership of the very air he breathes."

Bradford stared at her in amazement. His attention had been arrested by the fact that Mariah had used the word
we
, aligning herself with the Indians.

Mariah took a step backward, expecting him to rebuff her. But, still gaping, he grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil from Mr. Quick's desk and thrust them at her.

"Write it down," he said.

"I don't understand, Mr. Bradford."

"What you just said. Write it down—that, and anything else you'd like people to know about Indians. I'll print it in my newspaper."

Luke held a copy of the Kentucky
Gazette
with a vague feeling of guilt. While the harvest crew labored in the September fields, he'd been reading, fascinated, in the bright light of late morning.

When Luke had first seen the name M. Parker on an essay in the
Gazette
, he hadn't given it much more than a glance; Parker was a common enough name. But then he'd realized what he was reading. An essay as full of passion and flame as Mariah herself. Where had she learned to write, he wondered, and with such deadly precision?

In the words he heard her voice, saw her blue eyes snapping as she expounded her opinions skillfully, persuasively, demanding to be heard. Luke could sense Mariah's quiet anger as he read. She didn't sensationalize what had happened to her family; her straightforward narrative and subdued description were much more powerful than a graphic tale of the carnage Luke had seen at the Licking River.

He felt a strange ache in his throat as she told of readying her family's bodies for their journey into the world of the spirits. Not once did she beg for sympathy, but Luke felt her pain as if it were his own.

The hooded wall clock enumerated the moments as he continued reading. Cleverly, Mariah had decided to end her lengthy essay by describing other aspects of the Shawnee. Using words like an artist's paintbrush, she depicted her tribe's medicine man, whose gnarled old hands offered cures sent down by the ancients, and a crone named Cocumtha, who spun endless tales at the fireside while the women wove sieves from hackberry bark.

In her fifteenth winter, Mariah had met a woman called Outhoqua—Hair of Red Metal—a mysterious white adoptee who sang the Shawnee songs as well as the hymns remembered from her childhood, who read ceaselessly from her battered red-bound Bible with a curious raised design on its…

The words began to swim before Luke's eyes, and the blood drained from his face. His hands clenched convulsively around the paper, rending its edges. Somewhere in the back of his mind he heard a little girl's voice, singing with a militant air. Blinking hard, he reread the words, not daring to believe, yet feeling a terrible hope well up from deep inside him even as he denied it.

The door opened, and he stood quickly, folding the newspaper.

"What's keeping you, Luke?" Roarke asked impatiently. "We've got two wagons full of crew men waiting for…" Roarke frowned as he took in Luke's pale, shaken expression, the white lines of shock around his mouth. "What is it, son?" he asked.

"I can't go with you today," Luke said raggedly.

"Are you sick?"

"No, I…" Luke swallowed. His parents had accepted Rebecca's death years ago. To resurrect the hope that she lived before he knew for certain was wrong. It would only lay the old wounds open to more hurting.

Luke clutched the paper more tightly. "I've got to go, Pa."

"Son, you're needed here."

The men looked at each other tensely. Pushing his fingers through his hair, Luke said, "You know I wouldn't do this if it weren't important, Pa."

Mariah was humming as she pinned a load of freshly laundered clothing to the line. It was a tune she'd learned from Doreen, who had an uncommonly pretty voice. Mariah's mouth curved in amusement as she shook out a cherry-red petticoat. How the girls loved their gaudy clothes.

But her mind wasn't on the laundry, not completely. John Bradford had been effusive with praise for the first set of essays she'd submitted to him. He'd paid her decently and promised more space in the
Gazette
.

As she worked, Mariah was mulling over a score of ideas that tumbled through her mind. There was something endlessly exhilarating about sharing her ideas with readers, provoking their thoughts.

Luke Adair's sudden appearance startled her into dropping a pair of snow-white breeches onto the dusty yard. She picked them up, frowning at the brown streaks that soiled them.

Luke didn't seem to notice. A look of chilling intensity darkened his eyes as he thrust a crumpled copy of the
Ga
zette at her.

"Did you write this?" he demanded. "
Did you
?"

Mariah was a little shaken by his harshness, the hand that bit into the soft flesh of her upper arm.

"I did," she told him quietly. "And it's the truth. Every word of it."

Her quiet dignity seemed to bring Luke to himself. He relaxed his grip on her. "Tell me about the woman you call Outhoqua," he said. "Tell me everything you know about her."

Mariah pulled away and edged toward her basket. "I've got work to do, Luke."

"Mariah,
please
."

There was a raw edge of desperation in his voice that startled her. This was important to him. She wiped her hands on her apron.

"I never knew her well. There was a strangeness about her, a distance. Outhoqua belonged to a Shawnee renegade warrior. His treatment of her was—dishonorable. Yet he'd made her completely dependent on him. The woman was loyal as a dog. She—"

"What did she look like?"

Mariah hesitated, forming an image from the shreds of her memory. She remembered Outhoqua's head of thick, curling hair, its color always a source of comment among the women. The image came together, and Mariah raised large, disbelieving eyes to Luke. Her hand flew to her mouth.

"Oh, my God," she breathed. "Oh, my God."

Luke impaled her with an intense stare. "Tell me, Mariah. What did she look like?"

She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Luke's jaw tensed with impatience. Finally, she found her voice.

"Outhoqua looks like you, Luke."

The newspaper dropped unnoticed to the ground. "Not Outhoqua. Rebecca Adair, my sister," he said in a ragged whisper. "Did she never speak of her family?"

"No." A look of pain flickered across Luke's face. "Luke, she never spoke of anything but her God. You see, she was touched by madness. Black Bear was hard on her."

Black Bear. The name sparked a flame within Luke, contorting his features with rage.

"Where is she now, Mariah?" he demanded.