The sun ducked behind a cloud, and she gestured to a bench beneath the shade of a chestnut. “Care to sit?”
She stored her baskets in the nearby shed, then returned to find he’d sat down, when she’d expected he’d head straight to the fields. Now every thought in her head emptied. She took a seat beside him, so close her skirts brushed his leg.
“You missing Keturah?” he asked, resting his rifle across his knees.
“Nary a minute goes by that I don’t think of her.” Though I think of you more.
“They should have reached the Tuscarawas by now.”
Should have. No promises.
“How will we ever know?” she wondered aloud.
“Pay them a call at some peaceful juncture in future.”
“So far,” she lamented. “A hundred miles or better?” With you, I’d brave it. Especially if we went east.
“A day’s walk, aye,” he said.
Her smile was wry. “You’ve got sturdier moccasins than I.”
“Beautiful country. Takes the tired right out of you.”
She looked to her lap, smoothing a crease in her apron. “Still no word from her kin?”
“Nay. There might be none. I believe she’ll be more content with the Moravians.”
She swallowed. Dared. “How was it for you when you were taken and returned?”
A pause. “Harsh.”
She waited for more, his one-word answers wearing a discontented hole in her. “You never speak of it . . .”
“I favor the Lenape custom of not discussing the dead.” Even though they sat talking quietly, his gaze made a repeated sweep of the clearing and edges of the forest. “Let the past stay in the past.”
His simple explanation only stoked her curiosity, the yearning to know more, to tread the untraveled, untrammeled parts of him.
“I felt the same after Pa died. But I find it helps not to skirt around him, not tread too carefully. I want to remember, if only the good.”
“I’d like to have met him.” He traced the scrolled engraving on his rifle’s brass mountings with a callused forefinger. “Which of your brothers is most like him?”
“Ross,” she said without thought. “Pa rarely spoke a surly word. He stayed on the sunny side. Ross is the same.”
“And you? Or are you a bit waspish like Hester?”
“You tell me,” she replied, raising her chin to look at him.
“I could put you to the test, as Daniel Boone did with Rebecca.”
“What means you?”
“He mislaid his hunting knife and made a tear in her cambric apron.”
“On purpose?”
“Aye, to try her temper.”
“The rascal!”
