Echo Mountain

by Lauren Wolk

  “She’s not,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s better than that doctor who did nothing at all.”

  “Because there’s nothing to be done!” my mother said, letting go of my shoulders.

  “I brought Daddy some willow bark tea. Which won’t hurt him at all. Not a bit.”

  “And won’t help him either, Ellie. Now, that’s all I’m going to say about it. And that’s all I want to hear.”

  She handed me my jacket. “Go do your chores. And if I find out that you’ve been back up to see her . . . I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  As I went out the door, I thought about all the ways my mother might punish me if I disobeyed her again. But I couldn’t think of a single one that was worse than giving up on what I’d started.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The cows were eager to be milked, so I obliged them, soothed by the music we made in the process—the rhythm of the milk hitting the metal pail and then the wet hush, hush of its froth building.

  All the while, I thought about my mother and my father, Cate and Larkin, his mother. All of it building toward something, though I knew not what.

  I felt . . . tangled. Snarled up. Caught. Which made it hard to breathe. Hard to think straight. Hard to know where to turn next.

  But chores helped.

  They were simple. Straightforward. The same every day.

  So I put the cows out to roam, carried the milk to the cabin, left it just inside the door, and went on with my chores.

  The dogs came next. I mucked out their nest of straw, laid in fresh bedding, put Maisie out into the yard for a while.

  The puppies cried for her, but I said, “She’ll be back soon.” When I picked Quiet up, he promptly peed down my arm.

  “You little scamp,” I said, putting him back in the straw.

  I took off my jacket and put it aside for washing. Beyond wanting to be clean and dry, I knew that few things attract predators more quickly than a baby’s scent.

  While I worked in the kitchen garden, getting it ready for seeds, loving the feel of sun on my bare arms, I imagined Cate, her face pink with fever, her leg swollen and purple, Captan by her side.

  I imagined her hungry, thirsty, wondering what might come through her door next. Wondering if she would ever go out that door again.

  But she had to know that Larkin would be back soon, no matter what his mother said, and that her wound would heal, now that we’d tended to it. Surely she’d get better now that we’d done that.

  I thought of my father. What my mother had said to me.

  Surely I hadn’t made things worse by trying to make them better.

  * * *

  —

  “What have you done with your jacket?” my mother said when I came through the door and spent a moment taking off my boots.

  “Quiet peed on it,” I said, washing up at the kitchen pump. “I left it in the woodshed.”

  “Where it will not clean itself. See that you wash it when you do the rest of the laundry.” She turned back to her work.

  Another chore, then. One that Esther usually did. But I did not dare say so.

  “I will,” I said. “I came in to visit Daddy. But I’ll do the wash straight after that.”

  She pulled a tray of venison jerky from the oven and slid in a fresh one. The venison had shrunk and blackened in the heat, but it would last long that way. Tough. Dry. Not given to rot.

  I thought about Cate’s leg again.

  “Esther’s in there with him now,” my mother said. “And she’ll be in there for as long as you are.”

  Even the heat from the oven did not warm me as I stood there, chilled by what she’d said.

  “Is Esther standing guard?” My voice had too much mouse in it. “Because I fed him?”

  “And threw cold water on him. And put a snake in there with him.” She scraped the hot jerky onto a rack to cool. “And who knows what else.”

  What else.

  Nothing yet, but I thought back to the other elses I’d considered. Horseradish, which had blown open every head cold I’d ever had. Skunk stink, which would surely tell him that something was amiss. The willow bark tea that was still waiting in my pack.

  But Esther would never allow any of those elses to happen.

  “Nothing else,” I said. And now there was no mouse in my voice. No cat. Not much of anything. Not even me.

  My mother must have heard that emptiness. That defeat. Because she suddenly turned and pulled me into her arms, her chin resting on the top of my head, and sobbed just once. And I could feel a softness I hadn’t felt for a long time. “He’ll come back to us. Or he won’t,” she whispered. “And what we’ll do is wait for him.”

  I nodded against her shoulder. She stepped back. “Go see him, then.” She used her clean forearm to push strands of hair off her sweaty forehead.

  I left her to her work.

  Went into my father’s room.

  Found Esther in the rocking chair alongside his bed, reading aloud from the book in her lap.

  Found Samuel sitting on the floor in the corner by the window, playing with a wooden top. Setting it on its pointed foot. Pulling the string to send it into a wobbly spin.

  He looked up at me. Said, “Hi, Ellie.” Slid under the bed to fetch his toy.

  While I stood in the doorway, barely breathing, and looked at my father’s thin, pale face.

  And he looked calmly back at me.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I wasn’t the one to call out for my mother to see that Daddy had awakened.

  I was the one who went quietly to his bed, sat down on the edge of it, took his face in my hands, and cried the tears I’d been saving.

  Esther looked up from her book and must have thought he’d died.

  “Oh no!” she said at the sound of my sobbing. “Mother! Come quick!”

  Which brought Samuel out from under the bed, pushing up alongside me to see what was going on. “Did you bring another snake, Ellie?”

  And then my mother arrived like a summer storm in time to see my father’s eyes, still open.

  I didn’t see her fall to her knees, though I heard her cry out.

  I didn’t see Esther’s face when she realized that our father had not died after all, that he had come back to us. But I felt her put her arms around me from behind, so she was holding both me and him, too, and then my mother scrambled across the bed to kneel beside him, crying like a child, while Samuel said, “You’re supposed to cry when you’re sad, Mother.”

  I slipped aside so Esther could cling to his arm, smiling and crying, and Samuel could climb onto the bed and bounce into the happy fray like a puppy.

  Through all of it, my father lay quietly.

  “He might need us to calm down a little,” I said, sounding a lot older than I was.

  Esther turned to look at me and I thought she’d be angry, but she wasn’t.

  She let go of my father’s arm, and she came to me all in a rush and hugged me like she hadn’t hugged me since before the accident, back when she still loved me.

  “Oh, Ellie,” she whispered. “You were right. You were right.”

  But as I watched my father’s slack face, I was afraid that my mother had been right, too.

  He hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t smiled. And there was no light in those open eyes.

  My mother pulled back from him, smiling, wiping the tears from her cheeks, and gave a long sigh. “You scared me,” she said to him.

  “Ellie put a snake in your bed,” Samuel said.

  And then my father closed his eyes and went to sleep again.

  * * *

  —

  My mother knelt on the bed, her hand in his, until her legs began to cramp, and then she scooted slowly away, careful not to wake him.

  I was amazed to see that. To s
ee her try not to wake him.

  She beckoned for us to follow her from the room.

  “Go get Maisie and the puppies,” she said softly.

  I didn’t ask why. I knew why.

  “You better stay here,” Samuel said to Esther. “Maisie is kinda nervous about the puppies.”

  “There’s jerky in the oven,” my mother said to her. “Go turn it and then fetch one of your father’s work aprons and spread it next to him on the bed.”

  For the puppies, I imagined. For the mess they might make.

  I was amazed, again, at such a thought in a moment like this, but my mother and Esther spent a lot of time trying to manage mess.

  I couldn’t imagine what they’d say if they knew that I had, just the night before, scooped pus and maggots from an old woman’s wound.

  “Come on, Ellie,” Samuel said. “I’ll help you get the puppies.”

  Which he did, carrying two of them, while I carried the other two and Maisie danced alongside us, rising up on her hind legs to butt us with her nose, singing with confusion and worry as we took them all into the cabin and along to where my father lay sleeping again.

  I hoped that his sleep was just a simple sleep now.

  Maisie looked surprised when I urged her up onto the bed, but as soon as I put Quiet and his sister on the apron and added Samuel’s pair, she jumped eagerly up, herding them with her nose into a bundle next to my father and then circling three, four times before settling herself next to them. Without warning, she licked my father’s face.

  He didn’t move at all.

  “Good Maisie,” I whispered to her. “Good Quiet. Good pups.” I ran my hands over their neat little bodies, their perfect little coats, before leaving them all to their nap.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  While the cabin sighed and settled toward noon, I sat at the kitchen table and poked new holes in my father’s belt, now that he was so thin.

  Then I got up and went to the door of his room to see if he was awake.

  Then I used the tip of my knife to pry dried mud from the tread of his boots.

  And went back to see if he had wakened.

  After that, I worked dubbin into my father’s work gloves to make the leather soft again and ready for his hands.

  Then I went to see if he had opened his eyes.

  “You’re going to wear a track in the floor,” my mother said.

  She had started a pot of venison stew with potatoes, carrots still sweet, and a tune she sang under her breath as she worked.

  I listened to that song with every kind of ear I had.

  Esther had gone to fetch some firewood, something I usually did, for which I was grateful, though I had not forgotten that standing guard over my father had been, just an hour earlier, her first purpose. That I had been, just an hour earlier, a threat.

  Samuel had joined me at the kitchen table and was drawing a picture of a black snake. “So I can show Daddy what was in his bed while he was sleeping.”

  The snake looked about three times longer than the bed in the picture. It had a forked tongue and a wild eye.

  “Whatever happened to that snake?” I asked my mother as she diced a yellow turnip for the stew.

  She paused for a moment. “I would have put it in a soup. I would have chopped it up and put it in a soup . . . if I had caught it before it escaped down the drain.”

  She turned to look at me, the knife poised in her hand. “But I was glad I didn’t kill it when I realized it could never have found its own way into your father’s bed with the door shut as it was.”

  “Snake soup,” Samuel muttered, his head low over his work. “That’s silly, Mother.” By now the snake in his picture had acquired a set of enormous fangs. “Nobody eats snake soup.”

  “Maybe not, if they have something better to eat,” my mother said. “But some people don’t, you know.”

  I thought of Cate and Captan.

  “I’m going to show this to Daddy,” Samuel said, hoisting the picture like a flag.

  “Don’t you wake him up,” my mother said. “He needs his rest.”

  And I was amazed, once again, by the idea that she wanted him to sleep now that he had finally awakened. I wanted him up, on his feet, wearing that belt, those gloves and boots, a hat on his poor, battered head, ready for what came next.

  “What will we do now?” I said.

  My mother gave me a puzzled look. “That’s a broad question, Ellie.”

  “I mean when he wakes again. Will we get him up so he can walk?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. It’s too soon for that.” She sighed. “We have to be patient. It might take a long time for him to be well again. And he’ll need all of us to help him. I know you’ll do a lot of that work.” She stirred the stew. “It’s too bad you’re not a boy, Ellie. You have all the makings of a fine doctor.”

  It wasn’t possible to live without a heart that could beat, but I still managed to stay right where I was, upright, when she said that.

  I’d never thought about being a doctor—that wasn’t the word that had ever come to mind—but doing the work to wake my father and mend Cate had made me feel so very good that I wanted to be more like that girl. The one who tried to make people well. The one Cate needed. To help her heal. To be the reason she got better. Or one of the reasons.

  One would be enough.

  “I’m going back up the mountain to take care of Miss Cate,” I said slowly.

  I remembered the last words my mother had said on that subject: If I find out that you’ve been back up to see her . . . I don’t know what I’ll do.

  This time, she spent a long moment looking at me before she said, “I just told you that your father would need a lot of help. And you haven’t had a lesson in days. You can’t go without lessons. And—”

  “Miss Cate taught Larkin to read. And she’s already taught me how to heal a festering wound.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” my mother said. “If you had, I would have said that I’m surprised you would rather help a stranger than your own father, especially since you worked so hard to wake him up. And you want to leave? Now? When he’s only just come back?”

  “But that’s why I have to go,” I said, learning the reason as I said it. “He’s on his way home to us, and she’s the one leaving. She’s the one who needs help the most.”

  But my mother just shook her head. “You confuse me, Ellie. Every time I turn around, you’re wearing a different face. One minute you’re beating a path back and forth to your father’s door, and now you want to go help a stranger when she already has that boy to help her.”

  “She’s not a stranger,” I said, which had been true from the moment I laid eyes on her. “And, even if she were, she’d be just as sick. And Larkin just as much one boy all alone with her.”

  “Nonetheless. It’s not safe for you to go up there, Ellie.” She put a lid on the stew. “Not on your own.”

  “Then come with me. Just to check on Miss Cate. Just to make sure she’s all right.”

  She looked at me with wide eyes. “Do you honestly think I’m going to do that?”

  “But she’s sick, Mother.”

  Samuel said from the doorway, “One of the puppies peed on the apron.”

  My mother gave me a last look, filled with disappointment.

  “That’s what puppies do.” She wiped her hands on a rag. “They don’t know any better.”

  When she followed him toward the bedroom, I did, too. “Why can’t he clean it up?”

  “Who, Samuel?”

  “Yes, Samuel. If a boy can be a doctor, why can’t a boy clean up dog pee?”

  “I don’t want to be a doctor,” Samuel said. “Who said I wanted to be a doctor?”

  My father was still sleeping when we went into the room.

  One of the p
uppies had found his neck and was nesting against it.

  Another had draped itself over his arm.

  A third was licking his hand, its tongue a tiny pink petal.

  And Quiet, the dog who had started so much, was sound asleep on his chest.

  “Oh, well, that’s a sight,” my mother whispered, smiling.

  She folded the wet apron over on itself and gave it to me to take outside for washing. “Go get Esther,” she said softly. “She should come see this.”

  My father was still deeply asleep, his mouth parted, his arms limp at his sides.

  It could be hours before he woke again. And when he did, he would need me much less than he had before.

  I went outside.

  My sister was hanging laundry on the line, humming as she worked, her face happy.

  “Mother says to go on in and see the puppies with Daddy,” I said.

  Esther looked up at me, smiling, as she pinned up the last of the wash and then headed for the cabin, the empty basket swinging in her hand.

  I stood in the sun for a moment, thinking.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I said aloud, though I was alone.

  But the sky was busy being the sky. And the trees were busy being trees. And the birds, likewise, were busy being exactly who they were.

  Which was, in itself, an answer.

  So I made up my mind to listen to the flame in my chest, which sighed and roared and sighed again like a long piece of music I knew by heart but still seemed to be hearing fresh.

  I went into the woodshed to fetch my jacket. Took the little wooden bee from the pocket and put it on the high shelf with the other gifts Larkin had given me.

  Then I took the jacket with the apron to wash under the well pump. Wrung them out. And put the jacket back on, wet as it was. The cold was like a slap. but when the jacket dried, it would take the shape of me. Just so.

  Then I hung the apron on the line, went back into the cabin, filled a jar with venison stew, and stirred in some cold water from the pump so I could add a lid. Took it out to the woodshed and switched it for the jar of willow bark tea in my pack.