Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  Her identity was fodder for a host of shifting rumors. She had been called a woman and a child, golden-haired and dark, destitute and wealthy. She was said to have floated from the distant northern mountains or emerged like the murkfins from underneath the river. There were rumors she might be a victim of the Kraw—a fierce tribe of women so bonded to the forest, they were said to be part of the flora, only semihuman—but the Kraw had not been seen around the valley since the war.

  Her name was Mary, Martha, Dolly, Georgiana, or Elizabeth, and her death had been assumed with somber regularity as no additional news of her condition came to light. She had been kept in the care of Dr. Benjamin Knox and his wife, Abigail, since the hour of her rescue. After prohibiting visitors for the first two days, Benjamin had summoned his friend from the tavern that morning, and Tom had done his best to look respectable in polished buckle shoes, a fresh shirt and coat, and a tricorne as crisp as Silas’s was limp. Tom never wore a wig—few in Root saw the need—and he kept his shoulder-length hair tied behind him with a ribbon. It was a perfect white ribbon from his younger cousin Bess, who had embarrassed him with smiles over the effort he was making.

  “Now you’re dandy as a jay,” Silas said, and grinned. “Off to see her, I expect, and claim her as a prize.”

  “God damn it, no I ain’t. You’re as frivolous as Bess. I didn’t save her life to warm my ruddy bed.”

  “She’s better than a murkfin,” Silas said sincerely. “People seem to think—”

  His words were interrupted by a passing group of sawyers, one of whom complimented Tom’s shiny buckles.

  As owner of the tavern, Tom was wed to the community, and everyone in Root presumed to know his business. He was popular and didn’t spurn the neighborly regard, but at the age of twenty-seven, he was tired of attention—for his valor in the war, for the scandal of his father—and now, in a year when public interest seemed finally on the wane, here was Silas spreading gossip that would set the town talking.

  “He’s off to see her now!” Silas hollered out, turning heads and sending Tom, hot as smoakwood, on his way.

  He walked toward the Knoxes’ house, avoiding people’s faces to discourage any questions but intuiting—he felt it in their overlong stares—that they suspected he was going forth to meet his future wife. The sun at his back lit the houses he approached, but the unlit sides were shadowy and grim, caked with old snow the morning couldn’t reach. Winter hung tough in spite of warmer air, yet the town’s growing bustle had the energy of spring and the walk began to soften Tom’s hard-packed spirit, which had seemed for many weeks impossible to thaw.

  The Knoxes’ modest house stood at the corner of the green. He had begun to cross the road when a sunshower fell, altering the hues of everything in sight. There were marmalade sheep grazing in the common, indigo trees, houses rippling blue. The air looked alive with shimmering gold and green, touched with spectral colors difficult to name. The colorwash was another of the town’s native marvels. Tom felt as if a rainbow were pouring down around him, filling him with hopes he didn’t quite believe.

  The shower had ended by the time he reached the Knoxes’ door, and it was only when he knocked and felt the water in his stockings that he realized just how bedraggled he’d become.

  Abigail Knox opened up to let him in. She was a devout Lumenist whose faith coexisted with unembroidered fact, and she composed herself and dressed in rigorous accordance. Her frame was sharp and lean—the most Tom had ever seen her eat was half a dinner—and she covered herself completely in an ankle-length gown, bed jacket, ruffled cap, and, according to rumor, two layers of underclothes regardless of the season. Children ceased laughing in her presence, dogs cowered when they saw her in the street, and however much anyone disagreed with her in secret, no one saw the need to openly defy her.

  “If you had come on time, you might have avoided the rain and kept yourself presentable.”

  “I didn’t see a cloud.”

  “Or a clock,” Abigail said. “At least you were invited. Do you know how many busybodies have come to the door in the last two days?”

  “I’d imagine—”

  “Twenty-nine, and those were only the ones who had the impudence to knock. Everywhere I go, they want to know the news, and everyone who comes receives the same answer: show me blood or broken bones or you have no Lumenous reason to be muddying the steps. My husband is a doctor, not a storyteller. There, they’re looking now. Come inside before they think it’s open house. And wipe your shoes. You should have worn boots.” She pulled him inside, closed the door, and said, “Sheriff Pitt is here.”

  In any other household, Tom would have cursed.

  “He thinks incessant questioning will finally win the day,” she said. “Never mind that our enigma has yet to speak a word in self-defense.”

  “Defense of what?”

  “Now you’re talking like Pitt,” Abigail replied, knowing the comparison would rankle Tom to silence.

  She walked upstairs, expecting him to follow. Tom wiped his feet and wished he hadn’t come, but by the time they reached the top and turned the corner into the hall, his curiosity was greater than his private reservations. They entered a small, bright room crowded with a bed, a night table, a chest of drawers, and one spindly chair that nobody was using. The bed faced the hall, but with the sunlight glaring after the darkness of the staircase, Benjamin leaning over his patient, and Abigail pausing just inside the door, all Tom could see was Sheriff James Pitt. He stood in his scarlet coat and yak-hair wig, skinny-legged but mutton-faced, as if whatever he ate and drank congealed above his neck. His wee protruding eyes were ardently suspicious but betrayed a constant panic that they might, at any moment, spot an actual offense.

  “Out!” Pitt said.

  He was a baritone who often tried speaking as a bass. Tom grinned wide and stepped inside the room. Before he knew it, Pitt’s palm was firmly on his chest, pressing on his broken ribs and holding him at bay.

  “Tom,” Benjamin said, turning from the bed and smiling at his friend.

  Pitt dropped his hand but didn’t move aside.

  Abigail inserted herself between them with a frown. She might have sighed if any part of her was ever less than rigid. “The two of you are worse than unbreeched children.”

  The Knoxes were childless after fifteen years of marriage, had never been known to kiss or embrace, and were generally viewed as siblings: sharply unalike but unmistakably related. Crueler whispers in the town called their childlessness proof of God’s mercy, sparing unborn souls from such a bitter-apple mother. Benjamin, a popular man, was pitied for his lot, and yet he generally seemed content and wasn’t given to complaint.

  “I’m sorry, Abigail,” Pitt said, “but I won’t be interrupted in the middle of my questions.”

  “Saints support us, are you only at the middle?” she replied.

  “Tom is always welcome,” Benjamin said to Pitt, sounding as if the tension were a slight misunderstanding. He was a short and slender man of thirty-nine years, gentle as a fawn, gray in every hair, delicate of movement and possessing a voice best suited to a bedside. A calm exterior disguised his boundless energy and thought.

  “Furthermore,” Benjamin continued, “I invited Tom myself, and as the doctor of my patient and the head of the household”—Abigail raised her eyebrows—“I assure you that his presence is not primarily social, nor secondarily a matter of good form, given that he saved her, but rather tertiarily—or chiefly, I should say—a stroke of opportunity in both of our endeavors.”

  Pitt stood inert.

  “What?” Tom said.

  “Meet Molly,” Benjamin told him, standing aside so Tom could see her.

  She sat in bed with her legs beneath a quilt, supported by pillows, clean and alert and remarkably intact. Tom had a high opinion of his friend’s abilities—Benjamin had treated nearly everyone in town at one time or another, and commonly saved his patients’ lives in all but the most egregious cases—but Moll
y’s good condition bordered on miraculous.

  She was pretty in a weird, rather homely sort of way. Her hair was long and black, partly matted, partly tousled. She had slightly gapped teeth. Her eyes were out of alignment, one noticeably higher, and rounder, and darker than the other, so she looked half grieved, half luminous with wonder. Her expression, most engagingly, was volatile and ripe, as if she wanted to embrace him, fall to tears, or both at once.

  It was strange to meet her again surrounded by the others, to be watched so intently while they shared a private look, one as wordless and profound as when he had held her in the water.

  “Thank you,” Molly said.

  “It’s good to see you dry.”

  She smiled with a twitch and rubbed her fingers on the quilt.

  “You recognize Tom?” Abigail asked.

  “Yes,” Molly said.

  “Excellent!” Benjamin cried without actually raising his voice. He turned to Tom and said, “I hoped if she remembered you, we might construct a memory bridge and cross the floodwaters, so to speak, to other recollections of her history and identity.”

  “You don’t remember what happened?” Tom asked.

  “She doesn’t remember anything,” Abigail said curtly, “aside from you and her name.”

  “Molly,” Tom said, just to try it out.

  She stared at him and froze as if afraid he didn’t trust her.

  “And what is your last name again?” Abigail asked. “It’s hard to keep it pinned.”

  “Smith,” Molly mumbled.

  “Yes, Smith. And yet I’m sure you gave a different name the first time we asked.”

  “We’ve covered that,” Pitt said, clinging to the fact, regardless of its truth, and glowering at Tom as if his visit were undoing even this one precarious clue.

  The room was close and humid after the quick dose of rain. There was moisture on the window glass and sweat in Tom’s clothes, and since it wasn’t truly warm, it lingered like a fever chill, shallowing his breath and clouding up his thoughts. Molly touched a locket on a ribbon around her neck. He thought to ask her what it was—it might remind her of her past—but she hid it, growing flushed, when she saw what he was thinking.

  “You don’t remember anything at all?” Tom asked.

  “Now and then,” Abigail said, “she can’t remember how to answer when she’s spoken to.”

  “Enough, enough,” Benjamin said, reassuring Molly with a light, avuncular pat. “I have been explaining to Abigail and Sheriff Pitt,” he told Tom, “that certain traumas, such as drowning, knocks about the head, unconsciousness, exhaustion, and extremity of fear, to say nothing of certain phases of the moon, noxious plants, chronic malnutrition, and diseases of the brain—though I am confident in laying most of these aside—have been known to produce severe but often temporary amnesia. If we take into consideration—”

  “Tom was knocked about the head,” Abigail noted. “I believe he still remembers his last name.”

  Benjamin considered this but quickly disregarded it. “Now that Tom is here,” he said, looking down at Molly, “does seeing him ignite a spark of recollection of the hours or the minutes that preceded your arrival? Perhaps by training your memory directly on the branch—”

  Molly fidgeted discreetly, meeting Benjamin’s look as if the memories might be there, written in the features of her doctor’s kindly face.

  “Describe your house,” Pitt said, seeming to think authority was all they really needed. “Did you have your own room? A family or a husband?”

  Molly sighed until she shrank and didn’t breathe back in, looking down so her hair fell loose around her cheeks.

  “Why don’t you try something else?” Tom told Pitt.

  “Like what?”

  “Get on your horse and ask around. The Antler flows south, so chances are you ought to ride north. That’s your left-hand side if you look toward the sun, but here’s the complicated part: when the sun is going down—”

  “I won’t put up with this.”

  “You’ve already asked your questions,” Tom said. “What are you still doing here?”

  “What about you?” Pitt said, stepping forward. “All fopped up like a proper macaroni. Are you trying to impress the young lady, or puff your reputation so you sell more cider?”

  “Mind your tongues,” Abigail said, “or both of you can leave.”

  Tom unclenched his fists, aware, on loosening up, of how much pain he’d caused his sprained wrist. Pitt stood his ground, breathing boldly through his nose, as if he might arrest Tom for contempt of civic office.

  “I apologize, Abigail,” Tom said at last, feeling something like a rum burn rising in his chest. “But we ought to spread a net wider than the room.”

  Pitt crossed his arms. “Now apologize to me.”

  “I only want to help.”

  “Like your father?” Pitt replied.

  It was all Tom could do not to throw him out the window.

  “Root’s hero has a deep black stain upon his name,” Pitt said, speaking to Molly without the courtesy of facing her. “You might consider the facts of his storied past—”

  “I don’t care!” Molly said. “He saved my life. Let him be.”

  Pitt was startled to have pricked Molly’s nerve instead of Tom’s. She shivered under the quilt and seemed about to swoon, lapsing forward on the bed and covering her face. She cried into her hands, surprising them anew.

  Benjamin consoled her with a hand upon her back and looked to Abigail, speaking with the courteous authority of doctors. “Please show them out.”

  Neither man objected. Pitt left first, neither frowning at nor bumping into Tom when he passed. After Pitt and Abigail were gone, Tom took a final look at Molly—the poor thing had crumpled into sobs—and Benjamin said, “Wait for me downstairs.”

  Tom nodded and turned to go, relieved to hear the front door close behind Pitt but hollow, almost glum, to leave Molly there in tears. He met Abigail in the foyer. She gave him an unspoken censure for his part in the commotion and retired to the kitchen. Tom refused to pace but his thoughts roamed far, first to Pitt as a child, then to both their dead fathers, then to Molly’s rush of color when she spoke in Tom’s defense.

  Benjamin joined him downstairs and led him outside. Abigail’s hearing was alarmingly acute, and even on the street they kept their voices lowered.

  “What do you know?” Tom asked.

  “The brain is a fabulous organ,” Benjamin said, “as capable of silence as of melody and storm. Oftentimes the lulls are more dramatic than the notes.”

  Tom paused as if to demonstrate his own dramatic lull, and after waiting a respectable length of time he asked again, “What do you know?”

  Benjamin blinked behind his glasses, returning from abstraction to the muddy terra firma. “More than Pitt,” he said. “Abigail is right: Molly remembers more than she admits, and I have gleaned several facts she believes are safely hidden. First and foremost—”

  Benjamin’s eyes were drawn away with an illuminated thrill.

  “An upfall!” he said.

  Tom looked to see the tall, swirling columns in the east. They were droplets being drawn from the river to the sky—upside-down rain resulting in a cloud that would swell until it drifted off, pregnant as a storm.

  “There was a colorwash right before I got here,” Tom said.

  “I saw, I saw, but those are common. This is something else, something wonderful and rare. The flood,” Benjamin said, grasping Tom’s arm. “Is it rising or receding?”

  “Going down,” Tom said. “It was minor this year, barely crested—”

  “The last recorded upfall was 1756, when the Antler swamped the creek and took the millwheel away. And now the Planter’s Moon is Saturday night, and feel the eastern wind! Every weathercock turned! I dare say the river hasn’t finished with its swell.”

  Benjamin checked his pocketwatch and memorized the time. Later he would note it in a thick black ledger, along
with the temperature, barometric pressure, angle of the grass, and numerous other observations he was certain would lead to his ultimate deciphering of Root’s climatological marvels. Tom was skeptical but smiled at his friend’s high excitement. Before they could speak of it further, a red-haired boy sprinted up the road, splashing puddles on the way with devilish abandon.

  It was Peter Ames, the youngest son of William the cabinetmaker, and he ran so fast toward Benjamin and Tom they had to catch him by the elbows before he skidded past.

  “Easy,” Tom said.

  Peter slipped and fell. He stood without embarrassment and said with gleeful fear, “The Maimers is back! Another victim’s just come; they took him to the Orange.”

  Benjamin slumped but steeled himself, sad and resolute. Tom hardened with a scowl, putting a hand too firmly on Peter’s shoulder and frightening the boy with his expression.

  “You’re sure it’s Maimers?”

  Peter sniffed and nodded, scared of saying more.

  Abigail appeared at the door with Benjamin’s medical bag, her preternatural hearing having caught the brief exchange. She gave it to her husband, cast a disapproving look at Peter’s clothes, and said to Tom, “You were right.”

  He took no more pleasure from her words than Abigail took in speaking them, and said again to Peter, “Are you sure—”

  “Robbed and naked as the rest,” the boy said. “He just come out of the woods and Fanny Buckman set to screaming. Mr. Ichabod and Bess took him inside, and Nabby said run to the doctor’s, find Tom, bring ’em back straightaway. He’s bleeding awful bad. The Maimers took his tongue!”

  Chapter Three

  Tom entered the Orange and bounded up the stairs between the taproom and the parlor, both of which looked empty at a glance, and squinted in the darkness after so much sun. He pressed past his ancient cook, Nabby, who knelt below the landing with a bucket and rags, wiping blood off the steps and angry with him now, not only for his pell-mell approach but for sloshing her water, bumping her head, and tracking mud where she had cleaned the minute before he came.