Lori Benton
Praise for
Burning Sky
“Lori Benton gives us seasons in her debut novel Burning Sky. Seasons of planting corn, beans, and pumpkins as backdrops to the ripening and challenges of lives working through chaos after a war and a terrible personal tragedy. The author gives us seasons of the journey through loss, risk, family, and love. The author’s voice is mesmerizing with evocative phrases like ‘The air inside the cabin swirled with stale memories, echoes of once-familiar voices trapped within, awaiting her coming to free them.’ Set on a frontier homestead in New York in 1784, we meet distinctive characters I came quickly to care about. And the promises of the opening poetic question of Burning Sky / Willa, ‘Will the land remember?’ is answered with passion and grace and the satisfaction of a good harvest. Enjoy this wonderful novel.”
—JANE KIRKPATRICK, award-winning author of One Glorious Ambition
“In Burning Sky, Lori Benton brings to turbulent life the bitter aftermath of the Revolution, when those who fought on opposing sides returned to ravaged homes, soul scarred by horrifying acts they both suffered and committed. With lyrical imagery and finely drawn characters who rise from the page, Burning Sky vividly portrays how God restores the bruised reed and the dimly burning wick and brings new life from the ashes of the past.”
—J. M. HOCHSTETLER, author of the American Patriot series
“Burning Sky is a beautifully written story of courage, love, and new beginnings. Author Lori Benton introduces us to a great cast of characters while keeping the action strong in every vividly drawn scene. Burning Sky had me reading deep into the night to see if Willa would find a way to leave her unhappy past behind and open her heart to love again. Highly recommended to fiction lovers everywhere.”
—ANN H. GABHART, author of Angel Sister, The Outsider, and other stories
“An authentic rendering of frontier life, full of heart and hope. Burning Sky takes the reader on a vivid journey into New York’s wilderness at a time when cultures collided and lives were forever changed. A memorable debut!”
—LAURA FRANTZ, author of The Colonel’s Lady and Love’s Reckoning
“Easily the best debut novel I’ve ever read. Burning Sky is a powerful account of a white woman born Wilhelmina Obenchain who lived as Burning Sky, a daughter of a Mohawk clan. Lori Benton writes with a colorful, spirited pen. Her distinct and compelling voice seizes the reader and holds them captive until the last line of this remarkable book.”
—BONNIE LEON, author of the Sydney Cove series and Alaskan Skies series
“By turns exciting and heart-wrenching, Burning Sky is a deeply engaging story with a tender, thoughtful heart.”
—DIANA GABALDON, author of the Outlander series
“In this classical frontier adventure, Lori Benton brings to readers a journey of the heart. Burning Sky is a vivid portrait of life in post-Revolutionary War New York. Ms. Benton’s prose is beautifully written, with a romantic edge reminiscent of The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, but with a bold heroine whose struggles through the harsh realities of life in the wilderness bring her to the realization there is something greater than herself.”
—RITA GERLACH, author of the Daughters of the Potomac series and other inspirational fiction
“There are any number of novelists who can make history come to life, but Lori Benton does so with writing so beautiful that you wish the story would never end. From the first line to the last, her characters and story transported me. Take notice, friends; Lori isn’t just a novelist. She’s an artist. I can’t wait for her next book.”
—KAREN BALL, award-winning editor and best-selling author of Shattered Justice
“Lori does an incredible job of using the characters, the setting, and the scene to wash the reader into the story’s flow. Burning Sky is captivating from its very first phrase; I sighed and wept with her characters. I yearned for their well-being—and missed them like old friends when I turned the last page. Lori Benton’s debut novel is one I’ll keep on my shelf to read again. It’s that good.”
—MESU ANDREWS, author of Love Amid the Ashes, 2012 ECPA Book of the Year—New Author
“Lori Benton expertly and vividly captures the challenges of life on the American frontier in this remarkable debut novel. An unforgettable story of a young woman’s brave journey to discover not only herself but the God who loves her.”
—SUSAN MEISSNER, author of The Girl in the Glass
“Lori Benton’s writing is magnetic, drawing you deeper and deeper into her debut novel Burning Sky. The woman who had been Burning Sky has loved two families and lived two lives, and hasn’t the strength to care anymore. But when she is needed, her heart is stirred and again threatened by loss. Lori Benton is a word-artist, crafting every captivating line to keep you turning the pages of Burning Sky.”
—MONA HODGSON, author of the Sinclair Sisters of Cripple Creek series, the Quilted Heart novellas, and Prairie Song
BURNING SKY
PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS
12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921
All Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version.
The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Lori Benton
Cover design by Kristopher K. Orr; cover photography (Willa) by Mike Heath, Magnus Creative; cover photography (landscape) by Tai Power Seeff, Getty Images
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York.
WATERBROOK and its deer colophon are registered trademarks of Random House Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benton, Lori.
Burning sky : a novel of the American frontier / Lori Benton. — First edition
pages cm
eISBN: 978-0-307-73148-7
1. Women—Fiction. 2. Frontier and pioneer life—New York (State)—Fiction. 3. New York (State)—History—1775–1865—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E6974B87 2013
813’.6—dc23
2013007114
v3.1
In memory of two special women …
My grandmother, Margaret Johnson,
who kept my first story.
And Lauri Klobas,
without whom the journey would have taken longer
and included a lot less confetti.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Onerahtókha: The Budding Time—April
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Onerahtohko:wa: Time of Big Leaf—May
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Ohiari:ha: Ripening Time—June
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
/>
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ohiarihko:wa: Time of Much Ripening—July
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Seskeha: Time of Freshness—August
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Seskehko:wa: Time of Much Freshness—September
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments
Readers Guide
Glossary
About the Author
I remember the borders of our land, though I have been gone from them nearly half the moons of my life. They are these: the hilltop stone to the north; Black Kettle Creek to the south; to the east, the lake where the warriors found me; and west, the bottomland acres where the corn and wheat were sown, hard by the track that led to Shiloh.
But who there will remember me? Who will know these sun-browned arms, these callused hands, these legs that stride mountains without tiring and stand me taller than other women? What I have seen, what I have done, it has changed me.
I am the place where two rivers meet, silted with upheaval and loss.
Yet memory of our land is a clear stream. I shall know it as a mother knows the faces of her children. I will walk its borders. I will search its ground for what was taken, and what was left behind. It may be I will find me there.
If the land remembers.
ONE
New York Frontier, 1784
The woman who had been Burning Sky had kept off the warrior path that came down from the north through mountains, along the courses of rivers and creeks. Doing so meant traveling slow, over steep ground unfriendly to trudging feet, but she had not wanted to be seen by men on the path. Red men or white men.
She’d slept on the cold ground thirteen times before she saw the stone that marked the end of her journey—and the boundary of her papa’s land, the place she once called home. Time had not dimmed it in her memory. The stone, tall as a man and pointed as a blade, thrust from the crest of a ridge. But with her step quickened and her gaze fixed on it as she neared, she failed to notice the dog slithering out of the laurel thicket below the stone, until the muddy animal stood in her path and showed its teeth.
The woman who had been Burning Sky halted, shaken less by the dog than by her own inattention. If Tames-His-Horse had been there, he would have scolded her for it.
He was not there, but another was.
The sun had slipped from behind clouds and sent a shaft of light lancing down the ridge into the laurels, full across the man lying in the thicket, showing her a booted foot, a length of knee breeches, a hand cradled on the breast of a brown coat. A white hand.
She caught her breath, while the blood thundered in her ears. When neither the man nor the dog moved, fear began to sift from her like chaff through a winnowing basket. The dog was only standing guard. But over the living or the dead?
It was tempting to assume the latter, but for this: the man lay on her papa’s side of the boundary stone. The significance of that settled on her, a heavier burden than the long-trail basket she’d carried on her back these many days. Maybe the man was dead and it would not matter what she did, but she could not turn her back and walk on as though she had not seen him.
There was still the problem of the dog in her way. It was one of those bred for bullying sheep, black and white, rough coated. The English word for it surfaced in her mind: collie.
The woman who had been Burning Sky slipped the tumpline from her forehead and the cord loops from her arms, lowering the basket to the ground. She gripped the musket slung at her side, even as she spoke kindly in the language of the People. “You are a good dog, guarding your man. Tohske’ wahi. It is so?”
The collie did not alter its rigid stance.
It occurred to her the dog might not know the speech of the Kanien’kehá:ka, called Mohawks by the whites. She tried English, which felt to her like speaking with pebbles in the mouth.
“You will let me near him, yes?” She took a step toward the laurels. The collie moved its matted tail side to side. “Good dog.”
She set her musket within reach and turned her attention to the man. He was too tangled in the laurels to have crawled in. Likely he’d fallen from the ridge above. Not a long drop, but steep. Closer now, she could see his face. Even for a white man, it was pale, the hollows of his closed eyes bruised, sickly. Hair almost black stuck to his brow in stiffened curls.
While the dog nosed her heels, she wrenched away twigs, keeping one eye on the man’s still face. With the small hatchet from her sash, she hacked away larger branches, sending down a shower of leaves and insects, until she knelt beside the man. He had not stirred, but the warmth of his breath against her palm told her he lived. From the way he cradled his right arm across his chest, she knew it to be injured. His legs lay straight and seemed undamaged, save for scrapes where his leg coverings had torn in the fall.
Not leg coverings, she thought. Stockings.
She did not know about his ribs, or what hurts might lurk beneath them. Moving him might cause further injury, but he could not remain as he was, unless she stayed and cared for him. She tipped back her head, lifting her eyes to the boundary stone, then to the sky at which it pointed.
Why the man? Why now, so near her journey’s end?
Neither the stone nor its Maker gave answer. For whatever inscrutable reason, the Great Good God—the Almighty—had placed this man in her path, as He’d removed so many others from it.
It did not seem a fair exchange. But sitting there, wishing it was not so, would change nothing. This she well knew.
Returning to the basket, she found a length of sturdy basswood cord. With the hatchet, she cut cedar saplings to serve for poles and crosspieces, then retrieved the elk hide from her bedding. Through all this and the building of the travois, the dog milled about, whining. She met its fretful gaze but had no promises to make it. She would do what she could.
Though she was strong for a woman, and tall, the man’s deadweight proved no easy burden. While she maneuvered him out of the laurels, she expected him to rouse. But not until she knelt to secure him to the travois, sweating from the exertion, did she look up to find his eyes open. He had blue eyes—the drenching blue of trade beads—and they were fixed on her in glittering bewilderment and pain.
Responding to his pain, she touched his face to reassure him. His beard was coming in. The rasp of it against her palm stirred memories. Papa’s face had sometimes rasped with stubble, against the touch of her childish hand. Not black stubble—reddish brown like her own hair. Was it red still, or had the years made it white?
Then she thought she should stop touching the face of this man who was not Papa, whatever memories he stirred, but her fingers stayed pressed to the cold, bristly cheek.
While she hesitated, bewilderment fled the man’s blue-bead eyes, replaced by something like awe, then a look she had not seen in another face since the day she watched the longhouse burn. He was gazing at her with the trust of a child, innocent and complete.
“Oh, aye, that’s all right, then,” he said. The warmth of his breath brushed her face as he exhaled, closing his startling eyes.
The woman who had been Burning Sky sat back on her heels, stabbed beneath her ribs by a blade so sharp she wanted to beat her breasts to drive it out. Never again had she wanted to see that look of trust on the face of the sick, the dying. She’d fled far, thinking she could outdistance that sorrowful pairing. Had she not seen suffering enough to fill a lifetime?
A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench. The words
settled in her mind like a hand on the shoulder, large and steadying. She drew a breath through lungs that fought with grief for space inside her, and looked at the man on the travois. A bruised reed. There would be many such scattered over the land, broken and uprooted by the war just past. She was not the only one.
Though she was no longer adept at judging the ages of white men, this one seemed young. Not as young as she, though she doubted he was past thirty winters. No white threaded his hair, and the lines at the corners of his eyes were faintly drawn. The quality of his woolen coat marked him a man of consequence. Not a farmer, she thought.
She could not begin to guess why he was there, fallen on the edge of what the whites called the Great Northern Wilderness, a sea of forest rolling away in mounting crests to Canada, where the redcoat soldiers of the defeated English king had retreated since the war to lick their wounds. Was he someone Papa knew, here by his leave? If so, Papa would be glad she helped him.
She wanted Papa to be glad when he saw her again. If he saw her again.
Though the long winter had finally ended, the day was chill for the moon of budding leaves. She unrolled her rabbit-skin cloak and spread it over the man. She gathered the few belongings she found scattered around him and secured them on the travois. One of those was a small glass bottle, dark with the liquid it contained. She uncorked the glass, put it to her nose, and grimaced at the bittersweetness of opium dissolved in spirits. Was this the reason he’d fallen, or had he found it afterward and dosed himself to bear his injuries? It explained why he had remained unconscious, save for that brief moment.