Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  When she finally collapsed and he believed she was sleeping, Tom listened to her breathe. Her nose whistled faintly and her chest fell and rose. He thought about her lungs and all the hidden parts within her. His skin was so moist and his muscles so drained it felt as if he, instead of Molly, had survived a bout of weeping. After thinking through her story many times out of order, he was vibrantly awake and felt the night sprawl around him. She had curled up fetal in the dark, very small, and when he tried to kiss her forehead, he missed and got her eye. She stirred but didn’t wake. He could have lain with her for hours.

  Instead he went to the door and left her in the room. The air was fresher downstairs, surprisingly so until he remembered the gaping hole in the storeroom wall. Ichabod had blocked it up with crates, more or less, but Tom had never left the tavern so exposed after dark. Otherwise the place was tight and everything was still.

  Bess and Ichabod had closed up early in his absence and retired upstairs. Nabby opened her door.

  “Me,” Tom whispered.

  She retreated into her room like a spider to its cranny.

  Tom unlocked the bar, poured a generous cup of rum, and wondered whether anyone—Nabby, Bess, the others—knew that he and Molly had been secretly together on his bed. What would Abigail think? What would Pitt really learn, riding out tomorrow for the traveler from Liberty? He’d learn she had a husband and believe it to be true. Plus the traveler had seen her and would likely tell others. People might come looking after the curious disappearance of the Smiths and John Summer, and no amount of reasoned explanation would suffice. Molly was a liar and a runaway. The daughter of General Bell. Pregnant out of wedlock, her baby dead and missing. Someone must have come upon Nicholas’s body and it was likely she was wanted by authorities already. Now that Tom knew, he was harboring a fugitive.

  He quaffed his rum and locked the bar. He didn’t know what to do.

  Boards creaked above him: Molly coming down. She had her own distinct sound as she moved through the tavern, more gingerly than Bess and less blundering than Ichabod. A slice of moon had risen, lighting her faintly when she entered. She was badly disarrayed: skirts crumpled, shoulders narrowing, hair on one side flattened to her head while the other side moved, staticky and mussed.

  He went to her—he didn’t know a soul he needed more—and kissed her so hard the force hurt his chin. Molly arched back, mumbling in his mouth. He caught her round the waist and took her struggles for excitement till she bit him on the tongue, shoved him off, and gasped for air. His rum was on her breath. He felt it in his blood and her refusal left him reeling off balance like a drunk.

  She seemed about to speak. Tom turned and walked away, through the kitchen to the yard, seeing items he had cared about as long as he remembered: chairs, cups, an ancient piece of antler on the wall.

  He hurried out back and stood beside the garden. Hummingbats fluttered, sipping nectar from the crescent-shaped flowers of the moon tree. The river flowed gently past the town and out of sight, and Tom imagined how it started in the mountains up north—just a trickle from a peak beyond Kinship and Burn, growing wider as it snaked down the Antler River Valley, bringing flowers in the spring and pickfish in winter, flowing past the smoakwood and Dunderakwa Falls and finally spilling open into the broad Eccentric Ocean.

  Something in the air reminded him of deadfall. Benjamin was right. It was coming any day—first the killing cold, then a week or two of quicksummer, leading to another long, abominable winter. He wasn’t yet prepared with firewood or brewing, and the Orange wasn’t ready, and he didn’t even care. He missed his mother and the doldrums of the last three years, and the warm, pressed darkness in his room upstairs.

  Molly followed him out. He turned around to meet her and she hugged him on the spin. His ankles tripped and down they went together, face-to-face. He landed on his back and Molly was astride him, and she kissed him with ferocity and fervor and saliva. He couldn’t talk her off because he couldn’t draw a breath, and so he lay and let her maul him, stunned with suffocation. When he finally got some air, he kissed her back and hiked her skirts. He heard a rip and pawed her thighs, grabbed her bottom, spread it open. Molly’s hair was in their mouths. Their noses squished and bent. She forced her hands between their hips and opened up his breeches. When she tugged them down his legs, she knuckled one of his balls, and though it hurt him like a punch, he didn’t mind—he almost liked it. She surprised him when she slipped him in, settling her weight. He had grit beneath his head and roots along his spine.

  Tom slid his hands up her back, beneath her shift. Molly concentrated, seeming uncertain of her balance till she planted both knees and hooked her feet inside his calves. He helped her with the motion and she found a steady rhythm. Goddamn it if he didn’t get a glimpse of John Summer, but he put it from his mind, far as it would go. She had twiggy little legs and childlike fingers but her strength overpowered him, her willfulness disabled him. Her moans had the sound if not the melody of mourning doves, soothing and adorable and anything but sad. He had missed this, too, more than he had realized or wanted to admit. Good God, he’d thought her hands were warm.

  Molly closed her eyes, raised her head, and didn’t breathe, face covered by her hair, palms pressing on his lungs. She was moving with intention and he watched her, full of wonder, hoping—almost praying—Nabby was asleep.

  Molly rippled and contracted, panting out and going still. Tom was close, any second now. Don’t, he thought. Do.

  She opened her eyes and spotted something in the distance that alarmed her. Tom arched back and craned his neck to see. Even upside down, the figure was familiar: Lem Carver clomping off and disappearing into the trees.

  * * *

  Molly dreamt of the frigid river and woke at dawn, alone in her bed, to air so cold she leapt up straight, afraid that she was pregnant in the snowbound cabin. The windowpanes and rafters creaked, suffering contraction. Her breath was white. She looked around, goosefleshed and sore, and tried to make sense of the extraordinary change.

  Deadfall had come: the brutal end of summer. People had spoken of it often but the talk had not prepared her, and her spirit, like the tavern, shrank inside the cold. Molly went downstairs, where the air was even crueler. Her muscles hurt. Her stomach griped. She hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon, and everything—the cannon, her confession, Tom and Lem—made her jittery and queasy, unfit to meet the day.

  There were candles in the windows—a ritual of deadfall, believed to keep the cold-weather evil from a home. The practice had charmed her when she learned of it, in summer. Now it didn’t. Molly watched the flames and looked beyond them out the window, chilled to think of forces pressing on the glass.

  The central hearth was feebly lit and didn’t heat the taproom. She hurried to the kitchen, where the cooking fire blazed and the smell of fresh bread, boiled smoak, and bacon soothed her appetite for comfort, then increased it. Nabby went about her work, undaunted by the weather. She was livelier than normal, quicker with a knife, her wrinkled face glowing like a well-blown coal. The season of endurance and confinement seemed to suit her.

  Bess came out of the pantry with a huge sack of flour. She was breathy from the strain and powdered from the sack, and she looked at Molly with a bright-lit, curious expression.

  “I wondered when the cold would finally wake you up.”

  She laid the flour on the table next to Nabby, wiped her hands, and tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear. Nabby hummed. It was almost like a song; it was very nearly cheerful. Bulbous vegetables and berries, chickens, herbs, and cheeses covered the tables in profusion: they would feast against the freeze. The color and variety were painful to behold. Molly longed to spend the day with Bess and Nabby in the kitchen, safe beside the fire, cozying the home.

  “Where’s Tom?” she asked Bess.

  “Boarding up the storeroom wall, mad as guns. The inner door’s blocked with crates he had to move. Oh, but take a coat!” she said when Molly cros
sed the room, opened the kitchen door, and walked outside.

  The air rushed her lungs and made her stop and cough. She’d thought the tavern felt cold but this was shocking. This hurt.

  “If you’re going out back, fetch wood,” Nabby said.

  Molly shut the door, looked around, and blinked her eyes, which were instantly alive with cold-struck tears. The temperature had plunged well below freezing but there wasn’t any breeze. Cold was literally falling. She could feel it as a downpour, pooling on the ground. Plants were dead but green, perfectly preserved, and a glitter made of very fine ice filled the air. It moved in swirls and eddies and was gentle as a mist, but it prickled like pins into Molly’s skin. She rubbed her cheeks and hands and walked around the tavern, where the river looked sluggish, flowing but subdued. The sky was low and bright, a hard plate of cloud. Below, the world was dim as if the light were trapped above it, and the shadows on the ground were subtle and translucent.

  The cannon hole was grim, a maw with jagged edges that compelled her to approach. She walked toward it at an angle and was about to look inside when Tom popped his head out. She swatted him reflexively.

  “Sorry!” Molly said.

  He checked his nose for blood. “You say that a lot,” Tom answered through his hand.

  She held herself and shivered, wishing she could hug him. Broken wall barred the way.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “I’m frozen to the ruddy fucking joints,” Tom said, “and I’m a day away from following my brother into the navy.” He turned and laid a board on wooden horses in the storeroom, picked up a saw, and faded into the shade. “You get a hole at sea, at least your house has the decency to sink straightaway.”

  The rasping of the saw sounded personal and grave, more like cutting bone than ordinary wood. Another swirl of glitter frost-burned her cheek. Molly leaned into the hole and saw the wreckage from the blast—splinters, broken crates, the barrel of the cannon. Sawdust sprinkled like snow upon the floor where a puddle from an overturned jar had frozen black.

  Tom finished with the board. The end clattered down and in the newfound lull, he looked at her and said, “What are you doing here?”

  She didn’t rightly know.

  He tucked a hammer under his arm, clamped nails between his lips, and mumbled out of the corner of his mouth, “Give me a hand with this.” He placed the cut board horizontally at the hole. Molly held it there as Tom nailed it up from inside. Many more were needed for a temporary fix, and yet the single board functioned as a barricade between them.

  “Did Pitt ride out to look for Mr. Bole?” she asked.

  “First thing this morning,” Tom said. “Serves him right. His balls’ll freeze hard as lead bullets on the saddle.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Everyone’s preoccupied with deadfall,” he said. “Maybe Pitt will turn back. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  He softened his expression, held her hand and gave it a squeeze, and then he turned to cut another length of board to cover the hole.

  They spent the morning and much of midday securing the tavern, going about their work as ordinarily as possible while Nabby, Bess, and Ichabod pondered and observed, knowing there was something unusual between them. Molly stayed at Tom’s side as much as she was able. They spoke but didn’t laugh, traded weary glances, and behaved like a couple who’d been married so long that everything they did had a private implication.

  In the late afternoon, they were putting away glasses in the taproom when Benjamin and a stranger walked through the door.

  Benjamin wore a beaver cap and lightly frosted glasses, his slender frame lost inside a fur-collared coat. Behind him was a tall, slender man of roughly thirty who was handsome but for nostrils that were permanently flared.

  “Tom,” the man said, shaking hands and smiling broadly. He was as spirited and loose as Benjamin was grave.

  Tom smiled back. “Davey Mun. It’s been a year.”

  “Last September.” Davey entered with an exaggerated sigh, no less genuine for being done with flair. He tugged off his gloves, approached the hearth, and looked at Molly. She was flattered—it was that kind of look. He said, “You’re new.”

  “I’m Molly Smith,” she said and shook his hand. His skin was snowy cold.

  “The Orange’s latest attraction,” Tom said. “You should hear the way I found her. Davey here’s a horse trader, one of the best in Floria. He tried to buy Bones last summer.”

  “Fairly offered.”

  “That’s what Pitt keeps saying when he tries to buy the Orange.”

  Davey smiled once more except his heart wasn’t in it. He turned to warm his hands, standing next to Molly. “Pitt’s the man I came for. I’m told he’s ridden off. Figures he would do it in the wrong damn direction.”

  “What’s the need?” Tom asked.

  “A man has been shot,” Benjamin told him.

  It was the first that he and Tom had acknowledged each other. Molly had been told about the prior day’s tension—tension over her and finding Mr. Bole—and she had never known Benjamin to speak with such frigidity, nor Tom to view his friend with so little warmth.

  “Who?” Tom said.

  “We left Shepherd’s Inn this morning,” Davey said. “Me and four other men who rode together out of Grayport the day before. We didn’t fear the Maimers, ’cause to hell with them, and all of us together gave us better odds. A little ways along, we heard a shot up the road and galloped off to see. We came around a bend and there were four of them on horseback. They’d shot a man and one of them was searching through his bags. We missed our own shots but chased the bastards off, and then the man they’d tried to kill was in the road, still alive. Two of our party took him back to Shepherd’s Inn while me and the others rode here to get the doctor. They’ll be coming along soon. I rode ahead the last few miles, straight for Benjamin.”

  “You’re sure it was Maimers?” Tom asked.

  “Black cloaks and masks.”

  “They’ve never shot a man before.”

  “The fellow they shot was frantic,” Davey said. “Said he knew them. Said they chased him out of Grayport to kill him. Then he clammed up tight and wouldn’t say more.”

  Molly watched Tom make fists at his sides. She suspected he was picturing a rifle in his hands. It made her ill, and made the cold seem deadlier and darker.

  “I’m riding back to Shepherd’s with the doctor,” Davey told him.

  “What about your friends?”

  “Craven louts,” Davey said. “The two who went back spoke of tucking tail for Grayport. The ones who came with me are heading straight for Liberty. They claim it’s too cold, riding back and forth, and that the fellow must be dead by now. Scared to stick their necks out.”

  Benjamin removed his cap. He hadn’t left the door and looked at Tom across the room. “I said that you would come.”

  “You said wrong,” Tom replied.

  The doctor opened his mouth and shriveled in his coat. Davey laughed and looked at Benjamin to understand the joke, then studied both men with questioning sincerity.

  “I got a hole in my wall needs proper mending,” Tom said, “a storeroom blown to smithereens, and firewood to cut before Nabby has my head. You’ll have to find someone else.”

  “Everyone else is fastening their homes against deadfall,” Benjamin said.

  “So am I. We’d have a sheriff on hand, ready to assist, if you and Abigail hadn’t sent him off chasing rumors.”

  Benjamin’s eyebrow twitched three times in quick succession. He put his cap back on slightly cocked above his ear and looked at Molly, who was flustered by the shame that lit his cheeks. They’d shared a garden, and a home, and pieces by Gorelli. Benjamin fumbled for a handkerchief and cleaned his blurry glasses.

  Davey knew something unspoken was afoot and looked relieved, or else intrigued, when Molly grabbed Tom’s arm and tugged him into the rear of the taproom to speak with him in private. T
om allowed it, seeming eager to explain. She didn’t let him.

  “You’re going to let your best friend risk his life?”

  “He won’t—”

  “He had to side with Abigail. I can’t believe he meant me any harm.”

  Tom tried to speak.

  “Either way,” Molly said, “they need you if they’re riding out with the Maimers on the road. Someone’s dying; he’s a doctor. Can’t you see he has to go?”

  “The Maimers won’t be there,” Tom said. “They never stay in place after an attack.”

  “They never shoot people, either.”

  Tom hesitated, sneaking a look at Benjamin and Davey. Molly pinched her wrist to strengthen her resolve, wishing all of them could stay and share a pot of smoak.

  “I can’t go,” Tom said.

  “Ichabod can chop the wood, and Bess and I—”

  “I won’t leave you, not with Abigail and Lem vulturing about and Pitt riding back knowing God knows what.”

  “We have to leave,” Benjamin said across the room. He opened the door. “A man is dying.”

  “I can go, too,” Molly told Tom. “I’m not afraid.”

  Except she was and couldn’t hide it when he frowned, and cupped her cheek, and said, “We have enough danger right here, you and me. I didn’t get a man shot or make Benjamin a doctor. This ain’t my concern and it ain’t yours, either.”

  She was his concern. What was hers? Molly wondered.

  * * *

  A busy day, a dying day. Davey Mun’s two companions arrived shortly after he and Benjamin departed for Shepherd’s Inn. Tom told her to be civil—they couldn’t be blamed for not riding back—but he said it with contempt and didn’t greet them when they entered. Molly seated them at the table farthest from the fire. They were portly, gray, and loud, unremarkably identical. They ate and left quickly, eager to reach the next cozy inn and get away.