by Sara Donati
Ethan said, “I couldn’t eat any more, Aunt Elizabeth. But maybe there is something I can do for you? Shall I trounce these louts for their impertinence?”
“They may tease me all they like,” Elizabeth said over the laughter. “Today I can’t be ruffled.”
That silenced them for a moment, thinking of the village and the families who had lost so much.
“How bad is it?” Hannah asked.
“Not good,” Gabriel said into his bowl.
“Six missing,” Daniel said. “All three of the Sampsons, Noah True-blood, Grandma May, and the Crispins’ youngest, Alexander.”
“One of your students?” Lily asked her brother, and he nodded.
“Ten years old, good with numbers. Quiet boy, polite.”
“He’s got family on the other side of the river,” Ben said. “He might be there. Could be that the Sampson brothers and all the rest of them are sitting in the kitchen at the mill house drinking cider.”
Nathaniel said, “Let’s hope so. What we do know for sure is, a lot of stock went down the river. Oxley’s sheep and some goats too. A dozen or more milch cows.”
“And a good lot of Callie’s trees are gone,” Daniel added. “Maybe three quarters.”
When Daniel spoke of Callie Wilde it was always with a certain amount of warmth. Elizabeth had once had the idea that something more might grow out of their friendship, but that had never come to pass.
For the first time Martha Kirby spoke up to ask a question. She said, “And Callie herself? Is she safe?”
“She’s a little banged up,” Nathaniel said. “But last I saw her she was walking and talking. Becca gave her a bed at the Red Dog.”
Daniel’s eyes had settled on Martha and stayed right there while the conversation moved off in a new direction. It struck Elizabeth then that he didn’t recognize her, or maybe he was in too much pain to take note. The lines that bracketed his mouth said very clearly that he had strained his shoulder today and must now pay the price. Anything that might distract him would be welcome.
Elizabeth said, “Daniel, you must remember Martha Kirby.”
He started at the name and came up as if out of a dream, already rising from his seat. He leaned over the table and extended his good right hand to Martha.
“I haven’t seen you in five years at least. I guess I was away when you visited the last few times.”
Martha shook the offered hand and agreed that it was a very long time since they had seen each other. She looked as tired as any of them, but she bore it well: a dignified, friendly young woman, sure of herself without any hint of arrogance, though she was rich by most men’s standards and had spent half her life in the city. To look at her you wouldn’t know that just a week ago the life she had built for herself had fallen to pieces.
Elizabeth had taught Martha as a child, and looking at her now she saw that she had not changed very much after all. There was a quiet strength about her, a dignity that was easily read from the way she held herself. And sometime since they had arrived back in Paradise she had lost the stiff posture of the last weeks. As if she recognized that this place was truly safe, and she belonged here.
She wasn’t the only one to take note. All the men watched Martha when she crossed the kitchen. There was nothing untoward in it; they watched her as they would watch any well-favored young woman, with appreciation. The simple pleasure of looking at a girl in her first full blush. Martha had her father’s heavy, thick hair, though hers was many shades darker. Her complexion was clear and high in color, and her features strong. She might be shy of men for some months or even years, but if she showed any interest at all she would have proposals enough to choose from, before the summer came to an end.
“She’ll have to rebuild,” Martha was saying about Callie.
“I’d have her up here,” Elizabeth said. “But every bed is occupied, some more than once.”
When the laughing stopped, Elizabeth was content to sit quietly at the table and listen as the men talked about the work that would have to start the next day. How many houses would have to be torn down, how many might be repaired, if it might be possible to salvage materials from the great piles of rubble that marked the passing of the water.
Then the apple grunt went around and Elizabeth felt Nathaniel looking at her.
“You and your apple grunt,” she said, but she smiled.
“I’m fond of apples,” he said, winking at her. “Always have been.”
Martha got up to gather plates and take them away, and Daniel watched her go.
He said, “No apple grunt for you, Martha?”
Under the table Nathaniel bumped Elizabeth’s knee with his own and then he leaned forward to whisper in her ear, his warm breath stirring a few wayward curls.
“Stop it.”
She began to protest and his hand pressed into her leg, fingers sliding provocatively.
“If he gets a whiff of what you’re thinking you know he’ll run in the other direction. That ain’t what you want, is it?”
Elizabeth leaned into him. Nathaniel smelled of river water and mud and sweat, but he was healthy and whole. She said, “It is very shallow and selfish of me, but I do resent the fact that Lily’s homecoming has been ruined.”
He narrowed one eye at her, suspicious of this change in the subject.
“I wanted it to be—”
Nathaniel looked around the table, and then looked at her again, pointedly. “What could you want more than this?”
She could not challenge him on that point. He was perfectly right.
“A search party will be going out at first light,” Simon was saying. He didn’t add what they all knew, that the searchers were unlikely to find much to rescue.
“Aye then,” Nathaniel said. “Time we got to bed. Daniel, you planning to walk up the mountain after the long day you’ve had?”
Daniel barely looked up from his cup. He didn’t seem to notice that the table had gone quiet in anticipation. Elizabeth couldn’t remember the last time he had agreed to stay in the village, or when she had dared ask him to stay.
“I want to walk down to the village with Simon and Lily,” he said finally. “And then I’ll see.”
Gabriel and Annie declared it time to set out for Hidden Wolf, and would not hear of bedding down in the parlor or anywhere but their own cabin beside the waterfalls. At the door Elizabeth took Annie’s face between her hands and kissed her soundly on the forehead. She was so much like her mother, and her mother was so missed. How young they were. Children, setting off on their own. Tomorrow, when she had slept, Elizabeth would sit down and think it all through.
By ones and twos they began to drift away to their beds, until she and Nathaniel were alone in the kitchen with the only light coming from the banked hearth where coals pulsed hot beneath the cinders.
“We’ve got the whole summer and into the fall,” Nathaniel said. “Right now it’s time we slept.”
Up the stairs, stepping quietly with Nathaniel behind her, Elizabeth stopped at the top and stood to listen. From behind Luke’s door they could hear the soft rise and fall of voices. The small chamber Martha had for her own was quiet, and the children’s rooms were just as silent.
“You’ll wake them,” Nathaniel said. He was right, of course. But still she hesitated at the door, listening for some sign. She imagined the girls asleep, all four of them wound together in a bed meant for two adults. The twins on their backs with chins pointed to the rafters, and Hannah’s two girls back-to-back. The boys would be on the floor in the next chamber, all of them claiming to be more comfortable on hard board than soft mattress. Sometime in the night one or all of them would climb into the bed, half asleep, and have no memory of doing so the next morning. Or none that they would admit to. They were good boys, but in such a hurry to grow up and prove themselves. As her own boys had been, to her constant worry. When the next war came—and it would, she could not deny the inevitability of it—she hoped these children would be wis
e enough to know better.
And if they did not, she would remind them. Wherever they were, she would remind them. It was increasingly clear to her that Paradise would one day be too small for Hannah’s children. Their alternatives would be few and limited. She had become fully aware of this when she took Henry with her to Johnstown when he was just three. People stopped to stare at him without hesitation or apology, because he was beautiful. Because he was long-limbed and graceful. And because his eyes were turquoise and his features symmetrical and his complexion the color of copper seen through old honey.
Like a painting, strangers stop to say. Like an angel. And: Such a shame.
Most people could not imagine a place in the real world—in their own world—for a mixed-race child. In Henry’s face were the best features of every race that populated the continent, white and red and black, and there was more. The bright and intelligent eyes, the naked curiosity in the way he observed the world. He had never known a hateful word, but the day would come. For all of them, that day would come. Others would pronounce them worthless and unclean.
Elizabeth would spend the rest of her life making sure that these grandchildren—every one of them—learned their own true value. They were healthy and whole, full of light and promise. Not of her blood, but hers just the same.
There would be others. It seemed now that Gabriel might be the first to bring her a grandchild, something she would have never imagined even ten years ago. She had believed for a very long time it would be Lily. In those first few years while they were away, Elizabeth opened every letter in a state of excitement and then folded it away more thoughtfully.
Why this should be, Lily had never written, and Elizabeth had never asked. Some things were too fragile to put on paper, but tomorrow she would sit with her daughter, her most loved firstborn, and Lily would tell her those things she had been holding back.
Because Elizabeth could not wonder in silence another day.
11
Becca LeBlanc said, “Charlie, you’ll have to go out and look for her. She should have come back by now. I wish I had never let her go.”
It was full dark, and all through the Red Dog people were trying to let go of the terrible day they had survived in order to sleep. Every bit of floor space was taken up, and every bed with the exception of one.
“Callie Wilde is too smart and too tough to get herself in trouble,” Charlie said, folding his hands over his middle. “If she gets it in her head to go check on her trees, then there’s no stopping her. You know that yourself.”
“But it’s so late,” Becca said, not for the first time. “What can she be doing?”
Charlie yawned noisily. “My guess is she’s over there with a lantern taking the toll.”
Becca woke sometime later to the sound of murmured voices. Charlie had already gone to their chamber door and opened it a crack. He listened for a moment and then he closed it and came back to bed, stubbing his toe in the process.
“I told you,” he said. “Now will you stop fussing about Callie Wilde? You need all your strength for tomorrow’s worries. We all will.”
The finest room at the Red Dog was the one that looked down over the lane. It had a big bed hung with faded curtains and an adjoining room no bigger than a closet with a single bed, a servant’s lot.
The entire Cunningham family had crowded into the bigger room and now slept uneasily, older children wrapped in blankets on the floor and what looked like two or three grown-ups in the bed with Jane’s youngest between them. Callie stepped carefully by the light of a tallow candle and then closed herself into the servant’s cabinet.
It was narrow and stuffy, but she had it to herself for the simple reason that there was not room enough for anyone to stretch out on the floor. She sat down heavily and started to peel herself out of clothes that were drenched with water and dirt. Her face and arms were tight with dried mud, but the very idea of looking for a washbasin and water was so absurd that it brought out a small smile.
When she was naked she wrapped herself in the rough wool blanket, put out the candle, and lay down.
The dark was a comfort. Absolute and unyielding, she made a place for herself inside it. A safe place, where she could let her iron grip loosen for a little while. She wept until her eyes were swollen shut, silent tears that burned like lye. For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to want to go to sleep and not wake up again. She understood why her father had simply … walked away.
Callie wished for the thousandth time that she hadn’t sent Levi to Johnstown for supplies. But she had, and so had spent the day alone, walking her property lines back and forth for hours, venturing as far as she could go before water and mud stopped her.
With some effort she turned her mind to other things. The cider house still stood, minus a few shingles but otherwise intact on the hillside above the orchard. Inside, the cider press, rows of jugs, and stacks of baskets and barrels, all as she had last seen them. She continued on, a quarter mile into the woods to the spot where Levi’s small cabin stood in a circle of birch trees, undisturbed. It was one thing to be thankful for.
And they still had three dozen trees that had survived and might still bear fruit this year. Even poor fruit could be made into applejack, and applejack would carry them through yet another disastrous year.
In the close, damp dark she found she could not keep control of her thoughts, or of the images she had gathered by the light of a pierced tin lantern.
Every single Bleeding Heart was gone, and in the rushing and confusion of the escape from the flood, she had lost her scion wood bag too.
As soon as Levi got home she would ask him to go searching downriver to see what he might find. There must be something, and if there was not, then she needed to know about the wild apple tree.
If God was at all merciful, the wild Bleeding Heart would be there. Callie tried to pray, and had time to realize she didn’t know where to start before sleep overcame her.
Levi came back from Johnstown with the supplies, spent ten minutes listening to Callie’s halting story of the disaster that had come upon them, and then set out immediately downriver. He took two axes with him, a bucket, and a long rifle on his back, and told Callie he might be gone until dark or after.
She swept out the cider house, fetched water, built a fire to heat it, and scrubbed the press and the buckets clean of dust and mold. Her hands were red and swollen with work, and she was so light-headed that sometimes she had to sit for five minutes until her vision cleared.
In the village they would have started the digging out, but Callie had no intention of leaving this place until she knew the whole story. She would wait for Levi if it meant sleeping on the bare ground.
It was midafternoon when she looked up and saw him coming toward her, and the only thing she felt in that moment was fear. The strongest urge, almost too strong to resist, was to turn her back and run. The things he had to tell her, the things he must tell her, were the things that would break her in half or set her on the road back to herself.
He put down the bucket so she could see that it was filled with scion wood. Callie glanced up at him and he shook his head.
This wood was not from the Bleeding Heart, then. A shudder ran through her, but Levi took no note. He was reaching behind himself to undo something strapped along his spine.
A three-year-old Bleeding Heart sapling, its root ball wrapped in wet and muddy cloth. Two branches had been broken off, but there were three others.
“I found it sitting right on top of a mountain of deadwood and rock twelve feet high. Still got your tag on it.”
They had been hoping for fifty Bleeding Hearts, and had now only this one.
She said, “Tell me about the wild tree.”
He didn’t answer until she raised her face to look at him.
“Gone,” he said. “Ripped right up out of the ground and pounded to pulp, is what I guess. No sign of her anywhere. But we got this one, Miss Callie. We got a h
ealthy tree, and that’s all we had two years ago. We just got to start again.”
12
Just past dawn, and Elizabeth watched Nathaniel dressing to go down into the village. Into what had been the village. There would be search parties and salvage parties. Everyone strong enough to lift a shovel would be set to work digging what was left of Paradise out of the mud.
Elizabeth had dreamed of the women from the village wading through the mud, pulling out fine silver spoons and porcelain chargers rimmed in gold, beeswax candles by the dozens, delicate little mantel clocks, shoes with sapphire buckles, portraits of laughing children in ornate frames. Everything beautiful, sparkling clean.
She had come to give credence to dreams over the years. More often than not there was the spark of truth in them, but presented from such an odd angle that her waking mind could dismiss them. Many-Doves would have had much to say about this dream. It had been her gift, the ability to reach inside the images Elizabeth recalled in bright snatches, and pull out a single truth hidden among the silver and jewels.
In the village women would be digging in the mud for fragments of far simpler lives. Tin plate ware and barn clogs much mended. An old Farmer’s Almanac handed down from grandfather and father. A family Bible, a spinning wheel. Even the smallest thing precious.
She sat up suddenly.
“Boots?” Nathaniel half turned toward her. His hair was still unbound and it flowed over the bulk of his shoulders, black and silver in the firelight.
“I can’t stay abed, not with—not with the trouble in the village. I’m going with you.”
For a moment he considered arguing with her; she could see it working in his face. And then he gave it up as a lost cause.
When Nathaniel had a choice, he walked. Raised up by a father who looked like a white man but thought and acted like a Mahican, he had learned to value the silence of the forests, and the things that could be learned from them when a man was on foot. A horse was a fine creature, but of little use to a man who was out looking for game.
