Wild Indigo (29 page)

“But listen. The waterfall is near. Can you hear?”

He strained to hear past hums and chirps, and was rewarded. It sounded like breathing, or the wind. “That rustling?”

She nodded. “That roar. Or it will be after we cross the next ridge. But you won't hear it again for a while.”

The path disappeared. She took his hand. In places, low bushes overgrew the slope. “The huckleberry's spent.” She stepped carefully through them,
sparing wiry branches, balancing herself on the fulcrum of his arm. He was careful, too.

The ridge gave way to a steep-sided hollow. Retha went down it sideways, holding his hand in an awkward dance of slip-and-slide. She would have done better on her own, Jacob realized, but she wouldn't relinquish him. He noticed the pounding of his heart. It was from the pace she set, he told himself, unwilling to admit to rising hope, mounting anticipation. For her manner toward him was new. New trust, new confidence, new voluntary touch.

Together they descended to the slight flat of the hollow. Ankle-high, umbrella-like, four-lobed plants covered the ground. Giant clover, he thought.

“Don't step on the mayapple either. I can pick some on the way back.”

“What color do they make?” Jacob tried to relate to her purpose on this journey.

“They're not for dyes. They're for Sister Sarah. Her arthritis. Watch out.” She pointed just ahead. “'Tis wet here. There's a spring. That's why there are so many ferns.”

Well, he knew that. Ferns loved springs, as builders did not. Jacob's gaze was fixed on the curve of her hip. He looked down the lush hollow. Waist-high ferns arced into the air.

“Anna Johanna would love this,” Retha said. “She'd find fairies under toadstools, make them moss beds to recline on, and pluck fronds to fan them in the heat.”

Jacob was not thinking of his daughter. His gaze traced the spreading wetness that Retha called a spring. Springs were the bane and boon of his labors.
He built bridges over them, routed roads around them, changed plans for building sites where he had unearthed a dry one. He turned them into wells for needed water.

But this spring belonged to Retha. It bespoke her. Its generous moisture fed a wild garden of fanciful ferns, healing mayapple, and—the Lord only knew what else grew here that he had never taken time to learn the names or uses of. The spring's dampness spread down the hollow. He thought of women's life-giving, mysterious fluids. He thought of his young wife at her untouched woman's center. Of the moisture he would find there, arouse there. He thought of touching her. He had not done so yet, not in any of the husband's ways he knew.

He tried to wrest his attention back to wherever she was leading, but his mind could not convince his body that he had embarked on this walk for her sake, to gather dyes she needed. He wanted his wife with a fierce new appreciation of her, here in the wilderness where she seemed more at home than in his house—where the plants were her utensils, the trees her walls, their overspreading canopy her ceiling, which was no ceiling at all.

“Jacob! We'll never get there at this pace,” she said, laughing as she turned her bright gaze on him. Her eyes flashed, wild and golden in the forest's green shade.

He wanted her like this, uninhibited, untrammeled by whatever losses plagued her or fears pursued her.

Avoiding plants, he walked through the wet to her, the soggy earth cooling his feet through the soles
of his shoes. She all but dragged him up the next ridge, stopping only at the top, and gasping.

“There!” She spread her arms to include the scene. “Isn't it splendid!”

The waterfall was sublime. Tall and wide as a house, it roared over slate rocks stacked like plates, into a deep and roiling pool. Above it, a rock-strewn lazy stream widened. She led him in exploration, walking across the rocks and stretching back her hand, inviting him to follow her to the opposite bank. She slipped under a low overhang.

“My cave,” she said, beaming when he joined her.

The waterfall he knew by rumor, but he had not heard of this. He would have to stoop to enter. He lifted an eyebrow. “Yours?”

“In a way. I think I was here before I ever found it.”

He frowned.

“When I found it, I remembered it. I had hidden here once before. When I was lost, before I found my way to Salem.”

Taking his hand, she invited him in. They moved through the narrow aperture into a small opening, more a recess in the rock than a cave, its contours just visible in the midday light that filtered through. She had hidden here, a child no older than Nicholas, much smaller and more vulnerable. His heart squeezed with a powerful urge to protect the brave and frightened child she must have been, even knowing he was years too late.

His head butted against a ceiling beaded with dampness. A drop of moisture fell onto his forehead. He took another step and could not stand upright.
He reached out to touch the wall and encountered a stubble of damp moss.

Gradually a feeling of wonder stole over him. Albeit little more than a depression under a ledge, it was an honest-to-goodness hideaway, the likes of which boys dreamed of.

“Retha, we must bring the children.”

She nodded. “I thought you might like it.”

“Me? I mean the boys.” He knew he meant himself as well. A boyhood dream of pirate hideouts had manifested in front of his eyes. A little embarrassed, he shifted the topic. “Do you suppose anyone ever lived here?”

“I did, for one. For a few days that summer. Until I tired of living on rotten acorns and despaired of eating frogs and lizards. Then I came looking for Salem. So I could steal your potatoes.” She looked at him sideways, teasing.

“You knew naught of Salem! You stumbled on us!” He laughed at her patently false story. Her bravado.

“Of course I stumbled across you. I don't remember how I got to Salem. Or even how I found this cave. 'Twas years before I came upon it again.” She paused, touching the damp walls, reflective. “Oh, Jacob, I was very lucky that you were the one who caught me in the Square. You didn't tell a soul about the potatoes.”

“Christina knew,” he said gently. “We agreed the town might not understand, and naught required us to report it.”

“So you protected me. So did she.” Retha was silent for a while, exploring—perhaps remember
ing—the space that once sheltered her, breaking small clods of dirt off the walls and crumbling them with her fingers before turning to him. “You never say a word about her. Everyone knows you loved her.”

Ah, he thought. All this was about that. His first wife. Whom his new wife never mentioned. To deny that he loved Christina would be the worst kind of lie.

“Yes, I loved her,” he said simply.

“Sometimes it feels so strange that she is gone and I am here. You must miss her.”

“For me, she lives on in the children.”

Doubt creased Retha's brow. He could see it even in the low light of the cave.

“But you miss her still—you mourn her.”

He couldn't back down. She deserved the truth. He hoped she had some store of wisdom on her own. “I remember her. Just as the children do. Better than they do. That doesn't mean I can't love you.”

Turning away, Retha pressed her hands against a patch of moss on the wall and then pressed her head against it. He was a clumsy oaf. He did not have the right words. It wasn't as if he had a map for charting new territory like this, he thought, frustration rising.

“You know the way of mourning, Retha. You have endured many losses. 'Tis not over in a week, a month, a year.”

He waited. Still no response. Still she was talking to that wall. Cupping her face in his hands, he insisted on her gaze. “You know that you don't forget them.”

“I remember my Cherokee family.” Tears seeped out of the corners of her eyes.

He wanted to kiss them away. “Of course you do.”

“But I don't remember my real family.”

“Naught?”

“I think not. Perhaps. Flickers, shadows. Sometimes a dream. He was a tall man. She was a…” She shook her head and fell silent. “A woman. Hair like mine. The dreams, they never last.”

“But you were very young when the Cherokee found you.”

“I was very hungry. And lost. Singing Stones guessed that I had four summers, perhaps five. Five years old,” she explained. “Perhaps I knew then. But she didn't speak English, nor did anyone in her clan. By the time I learned enough Cherokee to make myself understood, no one thought to ask. If I indeed remembered.”

Tears leaked down her cheeks, freely, sadly. Without a doubt, she understood loss. Jacob didn't know what else to say. Or to do. Though cool on this hot day, the cave had not turned out to be a happy place. After all the difficulties of their first weeks together, he wanted her to be happy, today of all days. He put his arm around her and turned her toward the light. “Let's go back out. We should eat.”

After stepping on the stones for a while to cross and recross the sunlit stream, Retha recovered her bright demeanor. Relieved, he clambered with her down the steep side of the waterfall and sat at the edge of the deep pool carved out by plunging water.

She took bread and cheese out of her pocket, and he divided it between them. Beyond them, sunlight danced on the pool, its surface disturbed by the water's ceaseless flow.

“I can't see the bottom,” he said.

She chewed her food as if it were long-awaited manna. “Yes, you can. There it is. Look.” She pointed to a shaded area of calm where he could, in fact, see bottom if he squinted. “I swam in it.”

He looked at her, astonished. “In your clothes?”

“Of course not. Who'd want to walk home in wet clothes?”

She had startled him. Swimming naked was a bold act for a woman, although not, perhaps, for one raised by Indians. What did he know of them? What did he know of her? Only that this wild, unknown side of her character and experience attracted him, drew him, called to him like the hawk to its mate.

Or like a wolf. Wolves, he had read, mated for life.

In his mind's eye he saw her here, naked in the sunlight, hair freed from its braids, water streaming over the dips and valleys of her body he had more guessed at than seen. He felt the sharp, unmistakable lift in his loins of pure, hot desire. He kissed her. Her mouth, not her image. And broke off, curbing frustration in his voice as best he could.

“'Tis no place—”

“No place for…?”

“What I want to do with you.”

She gave him a quizzical look. “I don't see why not.”

He scanned the scene. Thorns, brambles, rocks. Panthers, bears. Her element, perhaps. Not his. “'Tis not safe.”

She watched him, laughing. “There's no one
here, Jacob. 'Tis the safest place in the world. I swam here many times.”

“I suppose,” he conceded. But he did not take up the kiss again. “You even came that day, before Captain Scaife…” He trailed off, railing at himself. Stupid, callous of him to remind her of that day, of Scaife's accusations, when she had turned into this tempting, free-spirited, illusive wood sprite, glowing with her forest freedom.

Glowing, perhaps from his touch.

She lowered her head. But not before he could see a blush steal over her countenance. A sweet, innocent blush. Relief flooded him. Spies didn't blush. Virgin brides blushed. At the thought, he hoped, of swimming naked in front of their husbands. The very idea brought his excitement to a fine edge.

“No. I didn't come here that day.” She spoke deliberately, softly. “I never meant to. I went to see Alice. Only to see Alice.”

The unexpected words dropped into his heart like stones. She was a spy. He waited. She was going to confess it. Everything he had denied, all his defense of her came to this.

“To ask her about the feelings,” Retha muttered, sounding embarrassed, almost ashamed. She did not look up.

“The feelings?” he repeated dully.

“To ask her about being a wife,” she whispered, the words droplets against the water's roar.

Jacob's heart started to beat again.

No one had told her.

No one had ever told her.

He hadn't helped either, he realized, chagrined to have failed her, too. His virgin bride had come to him in ignorance. And she had sought out a friend to find out how to be his wife.

“You could have asked me,
Liebling
,” he said, his voice grating against a tension of desire that rose in his manhood like a burst of song. “I would have told you everything.”

“Yes. Sister Rosina said you would, about that.”

“She did, did she?” He bit his lip against untoward amusement at the thought of the staid Single Sister broaching the subject.

“Yes, she said you knew what to
do
,” Retha said solemnly. “But I thought you would know naught about my feelings.”

“Ah,” Jacob said, intrigued. What had she been feeling?

“So I went to Alice. And asked.”

“You went to Alice and asked.” He waited with growing impatience.

“And she explained…how a woman feels…about a man…as a woman.”

For Retha, he had exerted iron control for weeks. But control had never been his forte. No, with a woman he was thunder, lightning, great gusts of rain.

“And how does a woman feel?” he croaked.

“Like that.” She made a sweeping gesture that included the raging waterfall. And then she put her hands where her skirt folded over her womb. “Here.”

The fall of water roared in his ears, the way his blood drummed through his limbs, his chest, the trunk of his body, into the root of his desire. Alice,
and his wife, had the image right. His desire felt as inevitable as that ceaseless stream, as urgent as that heavy downward rush.

And Retha must have felt it, too. Whatever happened in their bed, or had not happened, she felt what he felt. She wanted him.