Echo Mountain

by Lauren Wolk

  I liked that, but Larkin’s mother didn’t, and she said so.

  “Friends now, and I hope that’s all they’ll be. But when things get better in town, you’ll all go back again. And she won’t be taking Larkin with her.” She looked at me. “So don’t think you will.”

  I felt myself pink up.

  Larkin looked like he had swallowed a bug.

  His mother glared back at mine. “We know what we need to know, and we have what we need to have.” She turned and headed toward the path up-mountain. “Come on now, Larkin.”

  Larkin sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said yet again.

  “I’ll come up tomorrow,” I said softly.

  Then I realized what I’d done.

  “I’ll come up tomorrow,” I called after him—loud and clear—as he followed his mother out of the yard.

  But only his mother looked back.

  I didn’t like what I saw on her face.

  And when we went inside the cabin again, I locked the door behind us.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Now, tell me what just happened,” my mother said when we were back in the kitchen.

  Esther and Samuel sat waiting for us, clearly eager to know more about Larkin and his mother and Cate.

  It had been a long time since Esther, especially, had seemed interested in anything I had to say.

  Samuel was most curious—and alarmed—about the maggots. “What’s a maggot?” he said, his eyes big. “And, Ellie, what did you mean, they eat dead flesh? Do they eat alive flesh, too? How big are they? Do they eat boys? Have you ever seen a maggot?”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” Esther said, looking a little green around the gills. “A maggot is just a worm, Samuel. About as big as an oat.”

  “But how can a worm as big as an oat eat a boy?”

  “Hush now,” my mother said. “Go on, Ellie.”

  So I told them the story of what I’d done over the days since Quiet’s birth.

  It took me a long time.

  Samuel interrupted to ask why Cate had saved the tick from Captan’s ear.

  The rest they listened to in silence.

  I felt almost as good telling it as I had felt living it.

  “So that poor woman lost her husband,” my mother said, clearing her throat. “And that poor boy lost his father.”

  Esther got up from the table and went to the window.

  “You left out a few things,” my mother said. “Like how I made you sleep in the woodshed. And how I had Esther stand guard over your father before he woke up.”

  “But how were we supposed to know that all her weird business might help Daddy?” Esther said. “She’s not a doctor. She’s just a girl. And she’s too wild and willful. You know she is. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t have been under that tree when it fell and none of this would have happened in the first place.”

  I took a step back.

  I couldn’t help it. I was amazed by how ugly a pretty girl could look.

  Samuel said, “You’re as nasty as a rat, Esther. Ellie didn’t mean to be in the way of that tree.”

  Which brought me up short.

  “I’m not nasty,” Esther said. “You just wait until you’re fifteen and all you want to do is get off this mountain.”

  Nobody said a word.

  My mother looked away.

  I thought back to town. For me, that life was hazy. Not only because I’d been so much younger then, but because I’d given myself instead to the here and now.

  Esther surely had strong, clear memories of that time. That home. And I knew that, for her, life on the mountain was the thing she’d rather forget.

  For the first time, I realized that town wasn’t just a place where Esther wanted to be.

  Town was Esther’s mountain.

  And I felt newly sorry for my sister, who had once held me in her lap with a doll and a book.

  But mean was mean. And it wasn’t any more useful to Esther than it was to me.

  “I won’t,” I said. “I won’t want to get off this mountain. And if I do, I’ll find a way to go.”

  “Now hush, the both of you,” my mother said. “Nobody’s going anywhere. Esther, what’s gotten into you? Ellie didn’t make us poor. And Samuel, Esther’s not mean. She’s just mad. Because she’s fifteen. And don’t ask me to explain that, but you’ll understand when you get there.”

  “Then I don’t want to be fifteen,” Samuel said.

  “That has nothing to do with it,” Esther said. “It’s this place. It’s snakes that come up in the washroom. And mice in the grain. And spiders in the privy. And everything, Mother. And you know it, too.”

  “I know no such thing,” my mother said.

  “But you do! You know Daddy’s gone again. Because of a stupid tree that he shouldn’t have had to cut down. For what? To make a bigger garden? When we should be able to go to market and buy whatever we need?”

  “He woke up once. He’ll wake up again.”

  “And if he doesn’t? No matter what kind of potion Ellie tries next?”

  “Esther, stop.” My mother looked as if she might cry. “You’re just cold from a long winter.”

  “And the one before that,” Esther said. “And the one before that. But that doesn’t make me wrong.”

  She went back to the room where my father lay sleeping.

  I thought of Cate in the midst of a blizzard, shaken by the screams and wails of a storm as it rolled over the mountain.

  “Maybe I should take Esther up to Miss Cate’s cabin,” I said. “Maybe she’ll like ours better after that.”

  “She’s just upset.” My mother sighed. “We’re all just upset. To have your father back for such a short time. Almost worse than if he hadn’t woken up at all.”

  I disagreed. “He woke up once. He’ll wake up again, just like you said.”

  My mother nodded. “I hope so.”

  “And tomorrow I’m going back to see Miss Cate. She knows a lot about how to make people well, and she has books. There are plenty of other things we can try.”

  Samuel said, “I want to go see Larkin.”

  “You’ll stay right here,” my mother said. “Now fetch some potatoes from the root cellar. I’ll mash them for supper.”

  She had not said that I couldn’t go back up to Cate’s. She had not said anything about locking me in the woodshed. She had not said that I was entirely too wild and willful.

  Something was changing. I could feel it.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  When Samuel had left the kitchen, I said, “You miss town, too.”

  My mother looked at her hands. They were rough and red and split at the knuckles.

  After a long moment, she said, “I do, Ellie. Every day.”

  “The house we had?”

  “That.” She took her apron off its hook and put it on. “Lots of things.” She closed her eyes. “I miss being a teacher.”

  I remembered what Larkin had said. “You’re still a teacher.”

  Which made her smile for a moment. “I suppose I am. But I miss the people. Molly Peterson is nice enough, but I had real friends in town, Ellie. The other teachers at the school. The choir at the church. We had neighbors close by. Even the people I didn’t know well, I still knew. Mr. Turner, the butcher, used to tell me a new joke every time I went into his shop. That nurse, in Bethel. Mrs. Cleary: I liked her a lot. She used to call you Rapunzel, for all that long hair you used to have. Remember all those trips to Bethel when Esther had her earaches? Mrs. Cleary was so kind to Esther. To all of us.”

  At which a seed began to sprout in my startled brain, and I sat up straighter in my chair.

  “And so was Mrs. Stark,” she said, pulling me back. “The grocer’s wife. So kind. Did you know she lost four babies, one right after the other? But she s
till smiled every time I walked in the door with you children.”

  “I remember,” I said slowly. Distracted. “She gave us peppermints.”

  “She did. Every time she saw you.” My mother thrust a log into the stove.

  She pulled a mug from the cupboard and measured some balsam chips into a scrap of rag. Dropped the pouch into the mug and stood quietly, gathering wool, as the kettle began to tick and rumble.

  “Yes, I miss town,” my mother said quietly, after a bit. “But I have people here, too.”

  She poured water in the mug, and the steam rose from it like wet, white fire.

  I watched her as if she were a bird perched on my finger. “I wish Daddy could have seen you out there.”

  My mother looked at me through the steam. “Out where?”

  “In the yard. Standing up to Larkin’s mother like that. Talking about Daddy and all he’s done.”

  My mother made a face that was part rue, part something else. “If he’d been there to hear all that, I wouldn’t have had to say it in the first place.”

  Which was true enough but not the whole story. “You might have added a thing or two about us, still here and all right no matter how long Daddy’s been asleep.” I paused, but she didn’t say anything. “How you yourself have managed.” I swallowed. “And Esther, too.”

  And Larkin’s mother, I thought, years beyond when her own husband had gone to his rest.

  I wondered if my mother would well up with the same kind of darkness if, years from now, my daddy still hadn’t come back to us or, worse, left us altogether.

  As Esther had once said: If was quite a word.

  My mother nodded thoughtfully.

  I waited for her to say something about how I, too, had managed since my father’s accident.

  “We have done our best,” she said. “But I fear that Esther and I are not meant for this kind of life.” She met my eye. “Not like you seem to be.”

  Which was both praise and accusation. Not just what she said but how she said it. Enough bitterness to spoil the sweet.

  “And that’s it?” I said. “We’re born to one thing and that’s it?” Of all the things she’d ever said to me, this was the most confounding.

  “Of course not, Ellie. I hope we all have at least a little chameleon in us. But chameleons change to suit what’s around them, and it was the other way around in town.” She looked at her ruined hands. “I feel like a stranger in this new skin. I left behind too much of who I’ve always been, with not enough new to fill up what’s empty now. Not enough new that suits me.”

  I thought about that.

  “So it’s not just Daddy being asleep that makes you feel that way?”

  She shook her head. “I’m stronger now because I have to be, and I suppose I should find some satisfaction in that.” She picked up her mug with both hands. “And I do, Ellie. But satisfaction doesn’t hold a candle to what I had before.”

  I watched her drink her tea, her eyes closed.

  “What would you call that?” I said.

  “What I had before?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t think there’s a word for it.” She paused. “I was who I was, without thinking too much about it.”

  And I realized that she must have forgotten how it felt to be a girl untying a new ribbon, opening a new box every day, and finding, again and again, what it meant to change, to grow, all of it troubling and exciting and true.

  Surely Esther knew how that felt.

  As if she’d heard my thoughts, my mother said, “Esther is like me. Holding fast to who she’s always been. And what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Except . . . what about the other things she might become?”

  “That’s Esther’s business.” My mother rose to her feet. “Not mine. Not yours.”

  And I had no argument with that. Not if it was really true.

  “Now go find out what’s taking your brother so long,” she said, turning away. “He could have grown those potatoes by now.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  I sat on the cabin step, lost in thought until Samuel came up from the root cellar, a basket of potatoes over his arm and a grin on his face.

  “I saw a white spider as big as my hand. It was disgusting. Kinda squishy.”

  “You didn’t kill it, did you?” I pictured the spider smashed into the root cellar floor like a spent star, dingy and dark.

  “Don’t be foolish. Of course I didn’t kill it. I just touched it to see how it felt. It was disgusting.” He grinned some more. “I might want one for a pet.”

  “Hmm. I bet Mother and Esther would love that.”

  “No, they wouldn’t, Ellie,” he said, shaking his little head. “Mother’s right. You have lost your wits.”

  “Do you want me to teach you how to make a potato poultice?” I said. “To make Daddy’s sores better?”

  Samuel made a face. “A what?”

  “Come inside. I’ll show you.”

  Which I did, though I ended up doing most of the work myself while he told me how to do it.

  As I squeezed off some of the potato juice, he said, “Why isn’t Daddy awake?”

  I stopped what I was doing. “He’s tired, is all. He needs a lot more sleep before he wakes up again.”

  “But he’s already been sleeping for a long time.”

  I nodded. “I know that. But he’ll wake up soon.” I set aside the potato. “Now we’ll collect some witch hazel twigs.”

  “Some what?”

  By answer I took him out again into the yard and across to where the witch hazel grew. “The bark makes a good skin cleaner.” I yanked off some twigs.

  Samuel spent some time on one of the bigger branches before he gave up and dedicated himself to a twig as thick as his little finger. But even that was too much for him.

  “It would be easier if these were dead,” I said. “But they’re alive, so they bend a lot before they break.”

  Which made me think of Cate, and my father. And mother. And Larkin. And his mother.

  The list was long.

  “Here,” I said. “Let me.”

  But he shrugged me off and used both hands, bending the twig back and forth until he’d sawed through the raw green of it.

  He held the twig up like a trophy. “Do you want some more?”

  “No, that’s perfect,” I said. “We’ll boil this up and mix some with the potato.”

  Which we did. The result was a goopy mess, but I had learned to have quite a lot of faith in goopy messes.

  “Just lay this onto his sores,” I told my mother, holding out the bowl. “And cover them with something. The witch hazel might sting, but it won’t be as bad as vinegar.”

  My mother didn’t take the bowl. “Don’t you think you should do this yourself?”

  I thought about how I had managed to squeeze honey into Cate’s wound but had not imagined treating my own father’s sores.

  “Won’t you?” I said in a small voice.

  She considered me for a long moment, chewing her lip, before she reached for the bowl. “Yes. I’ll do this part, Ellie. You go on and help Samuel with his lessons.”

  Except that wasn’t right. That didn’t feel right. Or good at all. When she said that, my gut—the spot at the top of my belly, just below my heart—swung off-kilter.

  I remembered teaching Samuel to catch the trout. How I had been the one to club it over the head. But he was just small, and I wasn’t. And if I was to be the one to start something, I would be the one to finish it.

  So, “No,” I said slowly, swinging back toward true. “I don’t mind. I’ll do it.”

  “I don’t want to do my lessons,” Samuel said. “And I made the potato thing, so I should get to help, too.”

  “Esther needs someone
to read to while we take care of your father,” my mother told him. “Let that be you.”

  He wasn’t entirely convinced, but my mother’s face gave him no choice in the matter, so he went with us toward my father’s room to fetch Esther.

  When she heard what we meant to do, she stood up so quickly that her book fell to the floor.

  “Come on,” Samuel said, picking it up. “You can read to me now.”

  For a long moment she stayed where she was, looking at me and the bowl of potato in my hand, looking at my mother, a fair amount of regret plain on her face. But she didn’t say a thing.

  It was clear that she wanted no part of what we were doing, though I would have thought some messes worth making, even for Esther.

  Maybe if I could help my father all the way to well again, she would come back to me, too, as she had for a little while, not so long before. But that would be up to her.

  * * *

  —

  When Esther and Samuel had left, my mother turned my father over and used clean rags to cover him everywhere except the sores themselves so I was looking at a landscape of white cloth and red flesh.

  All the while, he lay still and showed no signs of waking.

  Nonetheless, I talked to him as I had for months now, hoping he could hear me.

  “I’m sorry if this hurts,” I said as I spooned the potato mixture onto the wounds and laid more rags over the poultices.

  My mother stood out of the way while I worked, holding her own hands, but as soon as I was through, she covered my father with a blanket and pulled the rocking chair up close beside him.

  “I’ll stay with him,” she said. “You go and finish getting supper ready.” She stroked his hair.

  At the door, I turned back to see her lay her head next to his, her whole body shaking.

  But then Samuel came running, shouting. “Come see! That big dog is at the door, Ellie. And he has a doll in his mouth.”