Echo Mountain
Page 22
“Ellie’s the only one who deserves your gratitude,” my mother said, still jangled from our sudden arrival, but also by a new confusion I saw on her face, in the way she clenched her hands.
“And she has it,” Cate said, though she hadn’t yet told me so.
“I helped,” Esther said too loudly. “Didn’t I?”
Cate nodded. “You did. And brought me such lovely remembrances.”
“Remembrances?” my mother said.
Cate nodded, smiling. She paused. In the silence, nobody said a word. We all watched Cate curiously, as if she were the only one of her kind. And then she said, “Do you not know me?”
My mother leaned closer and looked into those blue old eyes, much as Esther had done.
And then she must have recognized the woman she’d known from Bethel. Who couldn’t possibly be this hag, sitting here in our kitchen as if she, too, had come up through the drain hole like a cold snake or fluttered down through the chimney like a lost bird or threaded her way from a stray seed in the floorboards to sprout branches and leaves above the table and through the window into the sunlight.
I watched as my mother reached out a hand and touched Cate’s shoulder. “Mrs. Cleary?” she said softly.
Cate put her hand over my mother’s. “Not much like I was when you knew me, am I?”
My mother smiled, though there were suddenly tears in her eyes. “No, you’re not.”
“Quite a hag now. Oh, it’s all right,” she said at the look on my mother’s face. “No harm in calling me that. You weren’t wrong. It’s what I am. Nothing at all wrong with being a hag.” She gave me a look. “Nothing wrong with being smart that way. And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to think again.” She held out a hand to me, which I took. “I’ve come to help Ellie. Who is also a hag, you know.”
And I, in that moment, became an oak. A snake. A bright bird.
But then Samuel said, “Why can’t I be a hag?” and I was a girl again, just like that.
She smiled at him. “I didn’t say you couldn’t.”
“What’s a hag?” he said again, just days after Esther had answered with a witch.
“I’m a hag,” she said.
“Oh.” Samuel looked at her for a long moment. “Is there some other kind of hag I could be?”
“Of course,” Cate said. “But you might need to grow up for a while first.”
He shook his head. “You said Ellie’s a hag and she’s only twelve.”
At which Cate nodded. “Well, some people are born to it. Others, like me, need to work at it for a long time.”
When she struggled to rise from her chair, I held out my arm and Larkin came to help. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to meet your father, Ellie.”
So we slowly made our way back to the bedroom where my father lay sleeping no matter how hard the jonquils outside the window blew their yellow horns.
Cate stopped in the doorway.
I thought she’d been brought up short by the sight of my father.
But after a moment she started forward again, leading us not to him but to my mother’s mandolin.
Which Cate picked up carefully. Tenderly.
She smiled at me, my mother. “My son made this.”
She hadn’t needed to look inside to know that.
I nodded. “Larkin told me.”
Cate looked at me, amazed. “Do you play?”
“A little,” I said. “My mother does.”
Cate turned to her, holding out the mandolin. “And will you?”
“Oh, perhaps later,” my mother said, taking the mandolin and setting it aside. “It needs tuning and—”
“Oh, it’s all right. I understand,” Cate said. I’d never heard her sound so sad.
I pulled the rocking chair close to my father. Larkin settled her in it carefully.
The rest of us took up stations around the bed.
My father was as he’d been. Pale. Still. Thin enough to break.
“You said he’s been asleep since January?” Cate said.
“He has,” I said.
“Then where’s his beard?”
“We shave him, every day,” Esther said proudly.
“You shave him?” Cate looked at my mother.
My mother nodded. “Should we not?”
“Oh, it’s not a matter of should or should not. I just don’t know why you’d bother.”
My mother looked confused again. “He has always been a clean-shaven man,” she said. “In the beginning, when we didn’t shave him, he began to look too—”
“Dirty?” Cate said.
“Wild,” my mother said.
Cate shrugged. “Nothing wrong with wild.”
It was odd to be in the room with so many people, all of us clustered around the bed looking at my father, as if he were a bug in a jar.
Esther put the big book on the bed. “What do you want to try first?”
But Cate shook her head. “Nothing written down.”
She turned to Larkin. “Thank you for taking such good care of me for so long.”
And there, in those twelve words, I heard the beginning of some kind of goodbye.
Larkin must have heard the same thing. “I didn’t take care of you,” he said, his voice trembling. “You took care of me.”
She nodded. “Then we’re even.” Her lips twisted. “But now I wonder if you would go home and look after your mother for a while. I have some things to do here, and they are things best done alone.”
Larkin looked stricken. “Without me?”
“I think so.” And the tears she’d been holding spilled down her cheeks all at once.
“But I can help.”
“Not this time. But, oh, my sweet boy, don’t you ever forget how much you’ve already done. And so much more to come.” She held her little doll out toward him.
He took the doll. Thrust it into his pocket and left his hand there with it.
The others must have heard the goodbye now, too, since they all, even Samuel, looked much as Larkin did, though we were not all kin. Though we were.
Then Cate said her old blessing. And again. And a third time, her tears like rain.
Which was when Larkin began to cry, too, bending to hold her in his arms.
“What’s that she said?” Samuel whispered.
“That was Gaelic,” I said, my throat tight. “It means ‘Good health to you and every blessing.’”
“Come along now,” my mother said, herding everyone toward the door. “Let’s let her work.”
When I turned to follow, Cate said, “Not you,” and we all turned back.
She beckoned to me. “Not you,” she said. “You stay.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
When everyone else had left, Cate and I looked at each other for a long time without saying a word.
From beyond the bedroom door, I could hear Samuel yammering away, my mother answering him softly.
Then, from the near distance, came a long, lingering howl.
It was as mournful and wild as any coyote I’d ever heard, but I recognized the voice. And I imagined little Quiet nearby in the woodshed, hearing his father for the first time.
“Oh Captan, my Captan,” Cate whispered.
Then a second howl, longer and louder than the first.
I listened to it with every kind of ear I had. “What does that mean?”
“My boy is calling me,” she said, her tears starting again.
But I knew what the howl meant. “His name, I meant. Captan. Without an i. What does that mean?”
“Ah,” she said. “I was wondering when you’d ask that. It means ‘song.’ In the old language of my family, it means song.”
An apt name for the dog of a luthier with Gaelic blood in his veins.
“I don’t.” And I didn’t see what that had to do with Captan’s name, either.
“She was a nurse. Maybe the most famous nurse, though there aren’t that many famous nurses.” She closed one eye. “Can’t think of a second one, to tell you the truth, and I should know.” She opened her eye again. “Her first patient was a sheepdog whose master meant to hang him, over a broken leg.” At the look on my face, she said, “Oh, not because he was mean. The thought of hanging that dog brought him to his knees. But because the dog was in such misery, you see.”
And I did see that. I saw it clearly. Though I was still waiting to see what any of this had to do with Captan.
“Miss Florence Nightingale, who was not yet a nurse . . . or didn’t yet know she was a nurse . . . loved animals so much that she decided the dog mustn’t hang. And, in the end, he didn’t. Because she brought in a doctor, and the broken leg turned out to be a bruised leg, nothing more, which healed rather quickly when Florence dressed it with warm compresses.”
Cate looked at me expectantly.
“That’s a nice story,” I said.
“Isn’t it, though?”
She waited.
“But what does it have to do with Captan and his name?”
At which Cate smiled, though she was weary and worn and feverish and hurt. “His name was Cap. The sheepdog. His name was Cap, too, though I learned it long after I’d named Captan.”
I smiled, too. “I like that.”
She nodded. “Sometimes things seem to happen out of order, or in an order of their own, but they make perfect sense if you don’t worry too much about how they ought to line up.”
We both spent a moment pondering that.
“And why do you always say ‘Oh Captan, my Captan’?”
Cate sighed sadly. “It’s from a poem about a great man dying. Only in that case it was Captain. With an i.”
I thought about that. “Do you think you’ll ever feel better?”
Cate wiped the tears off her face. “Ever,” she said. “Such a word.”
But I didn’t want to think about what she was saying. That ever, for her, might not be a long time, even if she got well.
Thinking about that would do me no good.
Do her no good.
Wouldn’t help my father at all.
“Not your leg,” I said. “I mean you.”
She sighed. “I know what you mean.”
“I’m sorry,” my mother said, opening the door. “But he wouldn’t go with Larkin, and—”
“Oh, there he is,” Cate said as Captan barged into the room and went immediately to lay his head in her lap. “There’s my good boy.”
She sounded like I did. “Can Quiet come in, too?” I asked my mother.
“Well, I don’t know if—”
“Captan won’t hurt him,” Cate said. “I can promise you that.”
So my mother sent Samuel, who handed Quiet to me and then went out with her again, protesting loudly.
Through the door, I could hear him asking, “How is the hag going to use two dogs to make Daddy well?”
Cate smiled a real smile. “That’s some boy you have there.”
“Samuel?” I said. “Or Quiet?”
“Both. But especially Samuel.” She looked at me gently. “Yes, of course you were in the way, too, Ellie. You did what you were supposed to do. Trying to save your little brother. And your father did what he was supposed to do. Trying to save you both.”
I cleared my throat, which was still too tight. “Not just trying.”
I held Quiet out so he could look his father in the eye. “This is Captan,” I said into his little ear. “This is maybe your daddy.”
“Oh, I’m not fond of maybes,” Cate said. She watched Captan sniff Quiet’s little head. “What is, is.”
“Whether it’s true or not?”
Cate huffed. “Tell me what true is.”
I thought about that. “I know a million true things.”
“As do I. And a million I can’t explain, though they’re real. And quite a few I can’t believe, though they happened. Whether they should have or not.”
She looked at my father in the bed next to where she sat. “Here’s a true thing, and a good one.”
I was surprised by that. “Good?”
She gave me a long look. “He might have died.”
Which was also true.
I considered his face. How deeply he slept. “How will we wake him? I thought maybe we could try skunk stink or—”
“Skunk stink?” She looked amazed.
“The doctor who was here tried smelling salts, but they didn’t do any good. I thought maybe skunk, though, would make him curious enough to wake up.” I looked at my father’s slack face. “And horseradish might do some good, too. I don’t know anybody who could sleep through a dose of horseradish.”
Cate took my free hand and held it to her cheek. “It’s a terrible thing,” she said, and I thought she was talking about my father. “That I have only just met you.”
I smiled at her. “All this time you were up there, not far at all. But you’re not so old, and that leg will heal, and we’ll have plenty of time.” But I heard the doubt in my voice.
“Perhaps,” she said. “If I am to get well, it will be for Larkin and you both.”
Which was when the flame decided to flare in my chest, as it had on the morning when Quiet was born. And the voice decided to speak to me again, so sure and strong that I didn’t doubt it for a moment.
And I listened to that voice, which was as clear as my mother’s as she opened the door and said, “Will you have some balsam tea, Mrs. Cleary?”
And I said, “We will.”
And then to Cate, I said, “You will.” Though I wasn’t talking about tea.
Cate looked at me curiously. And began to smile. “You know what to do, don’t you.” It wasn’t really a question.
I nodded. “I do,” I said.
And I did.
Chapter Sixty-Five
I took Quiet to Samuel. “Will you give him back to Maisie?”
“Okay.” He looked Quiet over carefully. “Did the hag do something to him?”
“Yes, she turned him into a goat, can’t you tell?”
He made a face. “Don’t be foolish, Ellie.”
I looked around. “Where’s Esther?”
My mother said, “She went with Larkin, partway back up-mountain.” She sounded sorry about it. “He was upset. She thought he might want the company.”
I tried not to care. Which wasn’t too difficult, since I had other things to care about. But it wasn’t easy, regardless.
When I turned to go back to my father, my mother gave me a worried look. “Are you all right, Ellie?”
“I’m fine,” I said, the flame in my chest roaring.
I went into the bedroom and shut the door gently.
I went to Cate.
When I put out my arm, she took it without question and let me help her around the bed to lie down next to my father so I could check her leg.
She didn’t say a word when I pulled off her leggings and carefully unwrapped the bandages.
The wound was still as swollen and angry as it had been, despite the honey. Maybe even worse than before.
“I think we should send Mr. Peterson for the doctor now,” I said, wrapping the wound again. “So he’ll get here in time if the honey doesn’t work.”
We both knew what I meant by “in time.”
“And if the honey works? And he comes here for no good reason?”
/> “He’ll want to be paid either way.” I thought about what I had to give in trade. I looked at my mother’s mandolin.
“No,” Cate said. “Not that. Not for me.”
And I remembered another of the hundred questions I had not yet asked her. “Larkin said he used to help his father make mandolins. Doesn’t he want to be a luthier, too?”
At which Cate closed her eyes. “I asked him that very thing. But all he said was ‘Maybe someday.’”
I thought of what else we could use to pay the doctor. “Have you no wedding ring?”
“Gone,” she said. “In trade. Long since.”
I thought about the years since Larkin’s father had died. The crash that had made those years even harder.
“The doctor won’t know that we have no way to pay him,” I said. “Until he’s already here.”
“And if you fool him like that, he’ll never come back here again.” She reached out to scratch Captan between the ears. “Cry wolf and you won’t have him next time.”
“Then we’ll do what we can without him. But right now, no wait-and-see this time.” I remembered the other things she’d tried. “Can I pour in some hot vinegar?”
She considered that. “I don’t know what it will be like to pour it into an open wound. And we don’t want to melt the honey away.”
“Then I’ll keep the cut mostly closed for now, to hold the honey in. And I’ll build a . . . a dam around the cut and fill it with vinegar so it seeps in slowly and doesn’t spill away.”
She watched me without saying a word.
I thought about the possibilities.
There was a candle next to the bed. But I’d been burned by candle wax before, and I was not eager to give Cate a new hurt trying to heal an old one.
So I closed my eyes and listened to myself for a while, letting my mind tick through the possibilities, until I came to one I liked, for more reasons than one, all of them good.
* * *
—
I found my mother in the kitchen, tucking balsam chips into pouches.