Journey Home Chapter Ten

            Israel Boone stood before the window in the Boonesborough jail looking out.  Behind him he could hear Adohi’s soft breathing.  Or Adam’s, he should say.  It was hard for him to remember to call his brother-in-law by his white name.  Israel had, after all, surrendered that part of himself when he married Adohi’s sister, Sunalei.  He had never understood why his old friend had chosen to walk the path he had forsworn.  Being an Indian gave a man a freedom he would never know living in a town or wearing a suit.

            Or sitting in a jail, Israel thought with a chagrined smile.

            It was still a mystery why he was locked up.  Try as he might, he couldn’t remember doing anything wrong – other than trusting the men he was with.  He suspected one of them had been working for the renegade Indians who were rampaging through the land, stealing all they could and killing and burning without conscience.  There had been a couple of strangers with them, but they had come on the recommendation of others he trusted.  Still, a good many Indians would see nothing wrong with what was happening.  They would call it justice for what they and their families had suffered. 

            In a way they were right.  But like his pa had said all those years ago, if even the smallest letter of the law was wiped clean on the slate, then you might as well clear it all away.  The law was all that kept man from behaving like the animal he was.  And his pa should have known.

            Human wolves had robbed him of near everything he had.

            Israel shifted and peered out into the darkness.  He had had a note from Sunalei that day – innocent enough looking on the face of it.  She’d told him about the children and how they missed him, and how their white wolf had run away and would no doubt find him and howl outside his window at night.  It was a prearranged signal they had.  Get ready, it meant, something is sure to follow.  Israel took it to mean that White Wolf was planning on breaking him out – tonight.  There had been a reference to his daughter Rebekah as well that he didn’t quite understand.  She had run after the wolf, the letter said, and was lost.

            Lost?  Now what did that mean?  Rebekah was 23 years old and more than capable of looking out for herself. 

            Israel peered out into the darkness one more time, and then returned to his hard bed.  The letter had seemed to indicate that it would be a few hours after midnight when the attempt was made.  It had passed that and was heading toward sunrise.  Maybe something had gone wrong.  Maybe Bekah was missing and White Wolf was hunting her.  His eldest girl was as stubborn as any man and about twice as smart.  If she had wanted to go missing, it would take all of the skills of his Miami friend to find her.  She had lived her entire life among the Indians and was as capable as any warrior at running, hunting and fighting.

            It was that last one that troubled him.

            Not that Israel thought a woman shouldn’t fight.  He’d learned long ago that, among the Cherokee, there was no safe place.  Women needed to be able to defend themselves, especially when their men were gone.  But Bekah….  Well, for her, the desire to excel as a warrior was fuelled by something other than need.

            Her war paint was worn to cover her guilt.

            No one else blamed her, but that didn’t stop her from blaming herself.  One night two years before she had begged her brother to take her along when he and a few of his friends headed out to hunt.  Squire had always indulged her.  They were less than a year apart, and more like two halves of one soul than brother and sister.  She had never explained it entirely – every time she tried the pain that she felt was palpable.  When they returned it was with the news that Squire was dead. 

            Israel drew a sharp breath.  He had always known it could happen – expected it, if the truth be known.  Still, the death of his eldest had come as a hard blow.  Sunalei had taken it better than him.  But then, as far as that kind of thing was concerned, his mixed heritage wife was all Indian.  Sunalei had known more than her share of grief and loss.

            Bekah told them they had been hunting by the river – running like the deer, laughing and feeling free.  A white man had shot her brother and he had fallen into the rushing water and been borne away.  They had searched, but after two days had given up.

            Squire’s body had never been found.

            Since that time Bekah had changed.  She had taken to wearing her brother’s clothes and filling his duties in the village.  At first he had tried to stop her, but Sunalei told him to let it go.  Bekah would find her way, she told him.

            Israel remembered his ma telling his pa something like that about him once upon a time.

            It had been a dozen years at least since he had written his pa.  He hadn’t meant to let it go, but one day led to the next and soon, thousands were gone.  There had been whole years that he and the Indians who called him ‘chief’ had spent in hiding.  The negotiations of wartime had promised them land and a portion of peace, and so long as the men who made them remained in power, it was possible they would have it.  But the general who had won the war in New Orleans was said to be looking toward the presidency and if he got it, Andrew Jackson would prove no friend to the Indian.

             His pa would be over 80 now, if he was still alive.  His ma’s death back in 1813 had been a blow to both of them.  In truth, it was part of what had come between them.  Neither one of them could stand to talk about it and so, they just didn’t talk.

            Across the cell from him Adam shifted and sat up.  He stretched and then ran a hand through his deep brown hair.  “No pyrotechnics yet?”

            “Only in your head,” Israel answered softly.  “How are you doin’?”

            “No more Brown Thunder for this lawyer.  My head feels twice its normal size.”

            “Ah, that’s just that big city education.”

            Adam rose and walked over to the cell door.  He gripped the bars and rattled them once, as if – perhaps – they would magically give way.  As he turned back he asked, “Are you still mad at me?”

            “Nah.”

            “How about Sunalei?”

            Israel shrugged.  “She weren’t ever mad.  She’s missed you, that’s all.”

            Adam went to the window and looked out onto the sleeping town.  “I’ve missed you as well, both of you.  But, I felt I could do more good fighting from the inside.  Adohi was just another Indian.  Adam is a lawyer, living in the white man’s world, and only Adam can make things better for Adohi’s people.”

            “You don’t have to explain it to – ”

            Adam indicated with a gesture that he should be quiet.  He turned back to him with a frown.  “What was that signal you were waiting for?”

            “A whistle….”

            “And then two cries of the wolf?”

            Israel jumped to his feet.  He caught his friend by the arm and pulled him away from the window, shouting, “Adohi, get down!  Now!”

            A minute later, they were both still ducking – and nothing had happened.

            Adam looked at him, puzzled. 

            Israel shrugged again.  More than enough time had gone by.  His tribe had a small store of dynamite.  They had borrowed it from some men who had more than they needed and kept it for just such an emergency as this.  

            “You sure you heard the wolf cries?” Israel asked.

            His old friend nodded as he rose to his feet.  Adam waited, listening, and then headed for the window.  “Maybe it was just a wolf – ” 

            “Adam, I wouldn’t do that!”

            Israel’s warning came an instant too late as the wall of the jail cell blew in.

~

             Simon Keller couldn’t sleep.  He had risen from his bed, leaving his wife sound asleep.  She was making a little clicking sound with every intake of breath, but that wasn’t what was keeping him awake.

            It was these damn Injuns.

            After the last war ended, a man would’ve thought the Injuns had learned their place.  Everyone who supported them was gone – the French, the British.  It was high time they were gone too.  Civilization was advancing at the pace of a horse running with breakneck speed.  One either adapted or got out of the way.  The Injuns refused to adapt.  Their men still wanted to sit on their land – and their red behinds – and smoke and tell tall-tales all winter long while they waited for the spring hunting season to begin.  And while they played at war, their wives would work their fingers to the bone and break their backs planting and then harvesting squash and corn.  ‘Injun men don’t farm’, the Redskins said with their noses in the air, as if there was something wrong with farming itself.  They had no understanding of industry or getting ahead.

            The savages didn’t understand what it was to be American.

             Simon Keller dropped into the desk chair in the small room in his home he used as an office, and placed the candle he had kindled on the desk’s wooden surface.  Then he picked up the papers relating to the upcoming trial of Daniel Boone’s renegade son.  It was a sadness almost overwhelming to him, that the son of one of the greatest adventurers and wilderness trail blazers in the country had chosen to marry an Injun – and to have more Injuns!  There had to be something wrong in that boy’s head.  Of course, his father had put the nonsense in Israel Boone’s head in the first place by having a friend who was Cherokee.  Nothing good had come of that either.  They all remembered the day Mingo just up and deserted his old friend, and how hard the tall frontiersman had taken it.

            Shifting the pile of papers, Simon picked up a recently delivered letter, addressed in an elegant and obviously well-educated hand.  It was from that uppity Injun named Adam Fox he had tossed into the jail.  Israel Boone had sent for Fox, thinking no doubt the fancy lawyer could somehow talk him out of being hanged.  Well, it only went to show – the Injun hadn’t been in the area for one hour before he found old Dent’s establishment and got himself drunk! 

            The lawyer’d probably been in on the whole thing the whole time anyhow.

            Simon dropped the letter on the pile and sat back, suddenly plunged into a deep despair.  His eldest son was dead.  Dead.  Peter had been a good man; a husband and father of two small boys.  When Peter heard the Injuns were rising up and killing innocent women and children, he had volunteered to hunt them down.  It came as no surprise that another uppity Injun – Little Bear, the son of the Wyandot renegade that had plagued Boonesborough years before – was in the thick of it.  Like father, like son, Simon thought.  He’d come back to the area making a show of his grief over the death of his white ‘parents’, and all the while he had been plotting to take up where his Injun pa had left off!  Thanks to a smart half-breed who knew which side his bread was buttered on, they’d caught the Injun and Boone’s traitor son red-handed.  There’d been a fight.  Justice had come swiftly to Little Bear.  One of the men had taken a bead on him and shot him clean through the head.  Israel Boone was wounded, but escaped.  Peter was alive at the end of the day.  They next day he was dead.

            Dead.

            He knew what had happened.  Israel Boone had returned with the sun seeking blood vengeance for his Injun ‘brother’.  There was no civilizing them.  They oughta all be driven into the sea and drowned, Keller lamented.  But the bleeding hearts wouldn’t let that happen.  The men like Boone who had Injuns as friends.  The ones like the fancy city folk who had let one become a lawyer.

            General Jackson had understood.  Simon had served with him at New Orleans.  All the Injuns needed to be corralled like animals and shipped out west where they wouldn’t be able to do any more harm.

            Where, God willing, they would all dry up and die.

            Simon Keller leaned forward and placed his head in his hands.  “Peter…” he whispered.  “My son….”

            And then the floor trembled under his feet.

            Simon heard his wife call his name as the expensive glass rattled in the windows of their house.  He jumped to his feet and ran to the window.  In the direction of the jail there was a red glow. 

            Fire!

            “Damn Injuns!” Simon shouted as he caught his rifle from the gun-hold and headed out the door.

            He wouldn’t rest until every one of them was dead!

~

             Israel looked up from his position on the jail floor.  A lone figure stood silhouetted against the fires the explosion had kindled.  It wasn’t White Wolf as he had expected.

            It was his daughter.

            “Rebekah, help me!” he called as he reached for Adam.

            “There’s no time, Pa,” she exclaimed as she wended her way through the rubble and came to his side.  “Whoever it is, leave him!  It’s you they want to kill.”  As she spoke, Bekah lifted a flintlock pistol from her waistband.  “We need to go – now!”

            Israel knelt on the broken floor holding Adam’s unconscious form in his arms.  Sunalei’s brother had been struck by flying debris and knocked senseless.  Blood poured from a gash in Adam’s forehead, spilling on and ruining his elegant city suit.  From her position, in the darkness, Bekah had no idea who the man he cradled was.  She couldn’t tell that he wasn’t just another white man who happened to be incarcerated in the jail.  Israel’s heart sunk as he contemplated her actions and words.  Bekah had grown cold since her brother’s death.  He loved her dearly –

            But he certainly didn’t like her.

            “I ain’t doin’ that,” he answered firmly.  “We both go or no one does.”

            She pivoted toward him.  “Pa, there’s no time.  Whiter Wolf never showed.  It’s just you and me.”

            “And him,” he said.  “And the more time you spend arguin’ about it, the more likely we are to be caught.”

            Already there were shouts.  The townsfolk were awaking to the fact that something had happened.

            “We will never make it out carrying him,” she pleaded quietly. 

            “Doesn’t matter.”

            Bekah scowled, but he could see she that she realized he meant it.  She looked one direction and then the other.  Then her face lit with a slight hope.  “Dent’s bolt-hole!  If we can just make it there…”

            “Is your mother still there?”

            He could see she wondered how he knew.  “No.  Neither is Dent.  He took her back to the People.”

            That was different then.  He had not been about to put the kind old man and his wife’s lives in jeopardy.  “Help me lift him,” he said, rising.

            As Bekah moved in to do as she was told, she asked, “Who is he?”

            Israel glanced at her.  “No time now.  Just lift him onto my shoulders.”

            “Pa, no.  You keep watch.  I will carry him.”  With that, she held out the flintlock.  As he started to protest, she shook her head.  “You know I am stronger.”

            He hated to admit it, but she was probably right.  “Well,” he said with a laugh, “I’ll grant that you are younger.”  Accepting the flintlock, Israel stepped into the tumble of bricks and looked toward the main part of the settlement that was about a half mile away.  Unlike the past, Boonesborough’s jail was now on the edge of the town.  “I see lights.  They’re comin’.”

            “I have him,” Bekah grunted.  “He is light.”

            Israel nodded.  “Comes from not having a woman to feed you.  Now, let’s go!”

            And with that, they moved into the darkness and headed for Curious Dent’s tavern.

~

            Simon Keller arrived at the scene some five minutes after they departed.  He stood for a moment, stunned beyond words, and then let loose with a string of invectives that startled the men who had accompanied him.  Simon felt no shame.  God’s curse should be called down upon the man who killed his son.  He couldn’t understand why the Almighty had let the white Injun escape – not until his deputy, Nicholas Barnes spoke.

            “I suppose we’ll have to hunt them down now – Boone and that city Indian who came to get him off.”  Nicholas came to stand beside him.  He shook his head as he surveyed what was left of the jail.  “I don’t suppose we’ll be able to bring them in.  They’ll be desperate this time.  Guess there won’t be any trial.  Most likely we’ll have to kill them.”

            Simon turned and looked at the other man.  “Most like,” he answered.

            There was a God.

~

            The bolt-hole wasn’t very big.  It had been intended for one adult and maybe two or three children.  Rumor had it that Dent had a family and had prepared it for them – and then his wife refused to come out west.  Rebekah had carried Adam to the inn, but had relented and allowed Israel to help her get him up the stair.  She had left them both in the hole to go back and cover their tracks, and was only now ducking and entering the space.  The hiding place had been built into the eaves of the tavern in such a way that only a keen eye would realize the two sides of the room were not equal.  After Dent sought them out and befriended Israel’s tribe – he had been given directions to their camp by the dying Cincinnatus – he had offered the hole as a sanctuary in time of trouble.

            And they were in trouble now.

            Bekah sealed the hole off plunging them into darkness.  The only illumination they had was a series of small holes punched into the ceiling through which diffused moonlight fell.  After her eyes had adjusted, his daughter  looked at him.  “I do not like being trapped here,” she said.

            As he turned to Adam, Israel answered, “Hopefully it will only be for a few hours.  They’ll search here and, if they find nothin’, go away.  We might have to stay half a day.”

            “Will he last that long?”

            Israel touched his old friend’s skin.  It was chilled.  Adam was in shock.  Fortunately there were supplies in the hole.  Still, it would be best to get him to their home and let his sister look after him.  Israel smiled to himself.  Sunalei had had quite a bit of experience patching him up.

            His daughter sat back against the wall.  “If something is amusing, I would appreciate knowing what it was.”           

            Israel reached over and caught up a small blanket that was laying on the floor.  It had probably been used by his wife while she was holed up here.  He pulled it over Adam and brought it up to his chin.  Then he looked at his child.

            “Do you know who this is?”

            She frowned.  Her hazel eyes flicked to what she thought was a stranger.  “No.”

            “This is your uncle.  Adohi.”

            Bekah paled.  “Uncle….”

            “Your mother’s brother.  He’s called Adam Fox now.  He came here to represent me.  To save my life.”

            “I didn’t know.”  She shifted uncomfortably.  “I’m sorry.  If I had – ”

            “If you had, you would have saved him.  If not – if he had been a stranger – you would have let him die.”  Israel paused.  “Bekah, what’s happened to you?”

            He watched her squirm.  Her gaze shifted to the bolt-hole cover as if she considered ripping it loose and running away.  “Nothing has happened to me,” she said at last.

            “Yes, it has.  Since your brother’s death – ”

            “I don’t want to talk about Squire.”
            “Bekah, if you don’t, then nothing says he ever lived.”

            She remained silent for a moment.  “Then, I can’t.”

            Israel drew a deep breath.  He understood that.  He still hadn’t talked about his mother’s passing, but there was more to Bekah’s reaction than grief.  Somehow, deep inside, she carried a heavy burden of guilt.

            “You’ll never be free until you do,” he said quietly.

            Again, she said nothing.  Then she shook her head. “Pa, don’t make me….  Please.”

            Whatever had happened that terrible day, it had cost him not one child – but two.

            Israel reached out and touched her arm.  “You know your mother and I love you, no matter what you have done.”

            He felt her start.  Her voice was small.  “I know.”

            A moment later a tear fell on his hand.

            “Bekah,” he began, but at that moment Adam moaned and shifted –

            And the door opened in the inn below.