Echo Mountain

by Lauren Wolk

  “Venison is better,” Larkin said.

  “But where are the skins?” I said.

  “Pah. How many skins does one old woman need?” She held up her hand and turned it in the air. “I’ve got this one I was born with, which could use a hot iron. And I’ve got some deerskin leggings rolled up in that trunk. A coat, too, warm as any fur.”

  “Except bear,” Larkin said.

  “Except bear,” she agreed. “But I cut the snare on the one bear I caught and ran for home as soon as I did.”

  I tried to imagine that.

  “How did you kill the deer you snared?”

  “I used a knife. Cut their throats.”

  Larkin nodded. “And she has a hoof scar to prove it.”

  The two of them sounded very . . . satisfied, but neither of them was smiling.

  “And I gave away all the other skins.” She held the doll closer against her cheek.

  “Who did you give them to?” I asked.

  For a moment, she didn’t answer. Then, “To Larkin.”

  “How many skins does one boy need?” I said.

  “And his father,” Cate said, the doll clenched in her fist.

  Which was the first thing either of them had said about his father.

  I looked from one of them to the other.

  Both had gone quiet. The kind of quiet that hurts the ear.

  Something was very wrong, suddenly, and I was standing right in the middle of it.

  I looked down at Larkin. “Why doesn’t your mother like you coming up here?”

  Larkin looked up at me through his one good eye.

  “She doesn’t know how to read.”

  Which was not a helpful answer.

  “So what?”

  “So I do.”

  Which wasn’t any more helpful than what he’d already said.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with that,” Cate said.

  “She’s scared I’ll leave,” Larkin said quietly.

  “Leave?”

  “Leave here,” he said. “Leave the mountains.”

  I thought about Maisie and the things she might do to hold on to Quiet when Mr. Anderson came to take him away. But I couldn’t imagine her doing Quiet himself any harm of any kind.

  “What about your father?” I said. “Does he mind you coming here? Learning to read?”

  Cate turned her face to the wall.

  Larkin glanced at her. “He died when I was ten,” he said quietly. “Right after you came here to live.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, Larkin.” I looked at Cate. The doll quivered in her hand. “Did she know him?” I whispered.

  “She did,” he replied. “Very well.” I saw his throat working. “He was her son.”

  I looked from Larkin to Cate and back again.

  And suddenly I saw what should have been obvious. In the way Larkin was lanky and lean. In the shape of his mouth. His hands.

  “So Cate is—”

  “My grandmother,” he said.

  Chapter Forty

  It astonished me that neither of them had thought to mention that before now.

  But I was not about to scold Cate, who was crying softly. Especially since I had told very little of my own story, and even that in fits and starts.

  Nor would I scold Larkin, who had lost his father and, in a way, his mother, too.

  So I simply let Cate cry herself to sleep while I bustled about, drying off the potato juice that ran down Larkin’s cheek, fetching the deerskin leggings to make a pillow for his head, and taking the liberty of looking through what else was in the trunk.

  I set aside a clean tunic and some britches for Cate to wear when she was ready for clothes.

  First, I would help her bathe if she’d let me.

  “Is there soap?” I whispered to Larkin.

  “There is. In a box on the top shelf there.”

  “And washrags?”

  “With the soap.”

  “And a towel?”

  He cast a hand toward a canvas sack near the door. “Soiled. But she’ll do her wash when she’s better.”

  “Well, no. She won’t,” I replied. “You’ll do her wash today.”

  He frowned at that. “I will?”

  “While there’s plenty of sun. What does she use?” I said, looking around.

  “There’s a tub in the shed behind the cabin.”

  Oh, I thought. So that’s what she keeps in there. “Then when she wakes, you’ll strip her bed and heat some water for the tub and soap everything up good, rinse it out, hang it to dry. Save the water for her bath.”

  “I will?” he said again. He sat up and let the poultice fall away into his palm.

  I went to him and held out my hand. He gave me the wad of wet paper with the potato inside.

  “Here, let me.” I carefully plucked some stray potato off his lashes and gently smoothed the starchy mess from his cheek with the edge of my hand.

  “Thank you,” he said, patting his eye with his fingertips.

  Enough of the swelling had gone to let him blink. But his face was still a wreck.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Cate was your grandmother?”

  “You’re from town.” He got to his feet. “You’re new here.”

  “We’re not new,” I said. “We’ve lived here for three years.”

  “And my family has lived here for generations. Three years is birdsong.”

  I liked that birdsong bit, but I didn’t like the way he’d said it. “What’s wrong with people from town?”

  “They’re mean to her.”

  “Mean to Cate?”

  He lowered his voice. “They think she’s a witch.”

  I frowned at him. “Who’s they?”

  He made a face. “Maybe not everyone. But some.” He thought back. “Do you have people called Lock something?”

  “Lock something? The Lockharts? But I don’t have them, Larkin. They aren’t my people.”

  He looked at me, puzzled. “What are they, then?”

  I shrugged. “Neighbors. Friends. Okay, yes, my people, I guess. But they don’t have any children, so I don’t see them much. My sister and my brother and I are the only children on the mountain.”

  “On the town side.”

  “Yes, on the town side.”

  “And why do you think no one ever bothers with the other side?”

  I remembered my father telling me to stay close to home. “My parents don’t want us roaming too far. They say it’s not safe. Because of coyotes and bears and steep places where we might fall.”

  “And mountain people like me. And a witch like her.”

  I huffed at him. “No one ever even talks about her, Larkin.”

  “Not even the Lockharts?”

  I shook my head. “What would they have to tell?”

  He sighed. “I was up here one day—a long time ago—when the Lockhart woman came up. She said she had a bad pain here.” He put his hand on his belly. “Nothing helped, she said. The doctor didn’t help. The medicine he gave her didn’t help. So she came up here, and my grandma asked her a lot of questions and then went in the cabin and came out with a jar of greens. Told the woman to make it into a tea and drink it every day until she felt better. And then my grandmother said what she always says to me, every time I leave here.”

  I waited. “What does she say?”

  Larkin paused. “‘Saol fada agus breac-shláinte chugat.’ Or maybe it was ‘Slainte mhor agus a h-uile beannachd duibh.’ One or the other.”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  He repeated himself.

  “Is that a spell?”

  “No, it’s not a spell. You see what I mean? Words don’t make people witc
hes, Ellie.”

  I was bothered by that. Him talking to me like that. “Then what is it?”

  “It’s Gaelic. Her mother, my great-grandmother, came from Scotland. It means ‘Good health to you and every blessing.’ Not a spell. A blessing.”

  “Well, that’s not much of a reason to call her a witch.”

  “No, but the Lockhart woman didn’t get better. She got worse.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  Larkin shrugged. “I know a lot about what happens on this mountain.”

  I remembered, then, some fuss about Mrs. Lockhart having a stone in her belly. Having it cut out. I remember wondering how it got in there in the first place.

  “So one person thinks she’s a witch,” I said. “That’s enough for you to think bad things about people from town?”

  He shrugged. “They tend to take things that don’t belong to them.”

  As before, I was glad he’d said they and not you. But not very glad.

  “What things?”

  “Mountains,” he said.

  I thought back to how we’d come up from town. How we’d built our cabin. “My mother and father spent the last money they had to buy our land,” I said.

  He sighed. “I’m not talking about you.”

  “Sounds like you are.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m talking about people who decide they own something just so they can sell it.”

  And I remembered having a similar conversation with my father.

  And how I’d had a similar thought: A mountain didn’t seem like something that could be owned.

  But I had said our land. Just now, I had said that. And I had meant it.

  And I’d stood just outside Cate’s cabin, in the clearing, and named it Star Peak. And named the mountain Ellie’s Mountain. Though not just Ellie’s Mountain.

  If I had felt tangled before, I felt even more tangled now.

  I opened my mouth to sputter something, I don’t know what, when he said, “It’s all right. I don’t think of you that way.”

  I looked at his face and was torn between hating how his poor eye looked and loving the colors that bloomed around it.

  “Then why didn’t you just come right out in the open?” I said.

  I watched as his one good eye grew big. “What do you mean?”

  “When you left those things for me to find. Why didn’t you just come to meet me?”

  “What things?”

  “A lamb. A dog. A cow. A chickadee. A full moon and an inchworm. A snowdrop.” I thought back. “An acorn. And a honeybee.”

  He looked at the floor. Looked back at me. “And you,” he said.

  Chapter Forty-One

  I glanced at Cate. Led Larkin out into the clearing.

  “Why did you just leave them for me like that?” I said. “Why didn’t you answer me when I called to you? Why not show yourself?”

  He shrugged with just one shoulder. “I didn’t know you.”

  “Then why give gifts to someone you didn’t know?” I asked. “And to a girl like me?”

  He looked confused. “What’s a girl like you?”

  I crossed my arms. “You just said some pretty bad things about people from town.”

  He shook his head. “I could tell you weren’t like that.”

  I waited.

  “I could just tell,” he said.

  I waited some more.

  “And you were all so . . . poor,” he said, which really meant something, coming from a boy whose clothes were a matter of patches held together by burrs. “Sad,” he said, which was the truth of it. “You were hard to watch when you first got here.”

  It had been hard to be those people, so I knew it must have been hard to watch us, too.

  “That little lamb you sent on Capricorn’s collar . . .”

  “I meant it for the boy,” he said. “That little boy.”

  “Samuel.” It hurt to know that it had not been meant for me after all.

  “If the wind was right, I could hear him crying from a long way off.” He shook his head. “At first I thought he was a lamb.”

  “There are sheep on this mountain?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s why I went looking.”

  I thought back to that muddy day as I had stood outside the tent, skinny and cold. “Were you watching when I found it?”

  He nodded. “I was.”

  His smile told me what I needed to know.

  “And the others?” I said. “The dog? The chickadee?”

  “They were for you, Ellie. All of them.”

  Which was when I smiled, too. “I saw you, you know. One time. In a thicket of bushes.”

  “I remember. You looked my way. But I didn’t know you saw me.”

  “I did,” I said. “But just your face.” I looked into that face. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t show yourself.”

  At which he ducked his head. “I’ve been sad for a long time.” He glanced at me and away again. “Making those little carvings. Leaving them for you.” He sighed. “Made me happy.”

  I waited. I thought I understood. “So is it all right?” I said. “Or is it ruined now? Knowing me without the trees in between.”

  He looked up at me, startled. “It’s not ruined.”

  * * *

  —

  When we went back into the cabin, Cate was as she’d been, her face turned to the wall.

  “I should have known she was your grandmother,” I said softly. “You’re so much the same.”

  He liked that, I could tell.

  I had already pried a lot out of him, and I didn’t want to push too hard, but there was a lot here that I still didn’t understand. “You said your mother’s afraid you’ll leave here, if you learn too much, if Cate teaches you too much.”

  He nodded.

  “But you actually get in trouble because you come up here? You have to sneak around, to see your own grandmother?” I said. “It sounds like your mother—” I stopped.

  Larkin sighed. “She doesn’t like Cate.”

  “But why not? Cate’s . . . wonderful.”

  “It’s complicated.” He looked at the floor. “My grandmother grew up on this mountain, but she left to go to school, to become a nurse, and married a doctor and had a baby: my daddy.” Larkin glanced at Cate. “She brought him here a lot when he was a boy, and he loved the mountain, but he grew up in town and he went to college and he lived in a city and had a job in an office. All that. For a few years. Until he got sick of it.”

  “The city?”

  “And the job, too. And that life.” He looked around the cabin. “He liked it here. And he decided to come here to live.”

  “By himself?”

  “Yes, at first. He wanted to be a luthier, and he wanted to live with trees all around him. He—”

  “What’s a luthier?” I said.

  He looked surprised. “A luthier makes instruments.”

  “What kind of instruments?”

  “The kinds with strings. Guitars. Fiddles.”

  “Mandolins?” I said, thinking of the one gathering dust in the corner near my father’s bed. I remembered the sound it had made in my mother’s hands. There was no finer sound. No better music than that, except her voice, which had also gathered far too much dust since my father’s accident.

  “Especially mandolins,” Larkin said. “He was famous for his mandolins. He named them for my mother. Keavy. Every music shop for a hundred miles had them.” He looked proud, despite the bruises on his face.

  “My mother has a mandolin.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Maybe my father made it.”

  I thought about that. Pictured Larkin’s father up on this mountain, living with trees all around him. “He made them out of tr
ees?”

  Larkin nodded. “Sugar maple. Red spruce.”

  I imagined his father waking the memory of wind and rain and sun and snow and starlight from wood otherwise mute.

  I thought of my mother sitting by the fire, playing her mandolin, releasing all that rain and snow and sun and starlight. The thought made my bones hum.

  “He must have been a very good musician,” I said.

  Larkin sighed again. “Of all the things I miss about him, that may be what I miss the most. How he played. Which was why he was able to make such beautiful instruments. Because he understood what they could do, in the right hands.”

  I looked at Larkin’s long, slender fingers. “Did he teach you?”

  At which Larkin bowed his head. He didn’t look at me when he answered. “Of all the things I wish I’d done before he died, that’s the biggest thing. To spend more time at my lessons, learning to play. Though yes, he did teach me.”

  I tipped my head toward the tools hanging on the wall. “He used those?”

  “He did. And he made the glue out of deer hide.”

  “Deer hide!?”

  “Sometimes rabbit. Mostly deer. You cut it up and add a little water and boil it and it makes the strongest glue you could want.”

  Which sounded awful to me. But if that was what it took to make a mandolin, then it couldn’t be all bad.

  And that explained why Cate had given deer skins to his daddy.

  But it didn’t explain the rest.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “That still doesn’t explain why your mother doesn’t like Cate.”

  He thought back. “I guess that’s the wrong way to put it.” He paused. “My grandfather died a few months before the crash. He had a heart attack.” Larkin paused again, thinking back. “I didn’t know him all that well. I told you, he was a doctor. And that’s most of what he was, being a doctor. When my grandmother came up here to see us, he stayed in town. He didn’t like to leave his patients.”

  Which was something I understood: how a sick stranger might count more than a grandson, even.

  “We went to town sometimes,” he said. “And I saw him then, but he was a serious man. I don’t think I ever saw him in anything but a suit and waistcoat. Always very proper . . . and a little cold . . . and it was always my grandmother who was the big, warm, jolly one.” He looked over at her in her little bed. “Not like she is now.” He sighed. “She’s changed a lot.” The look on his face made my heart hurt. “After he died, she waited too long to come out of her grief and decide how she would live. She waited too long to sell the house. The crash came and no one wanted to buy a big house like that. So she locked it up and left it behind and kept nothing much but her books, really, when she came to live with us.”