The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  “Scaring you off, am I?”

  “No!” She sputtered. “Of course not. There’s nothing to be scared about.”

  “Then come in,” Daniel said. “I’ll give you a tour.”

  “Of the schoolhouse?”

  “Have you seen it before?”

  She had to admit she had not; she had left for Manhattan before it had been put into use.

  “Then come in, have a look.”

  —

  Daniel’s sisters chided him for his lack of playfulness and spontaneity, and how surprised they would be to see him invite Martha Kirby into his school on a moment’s whim. Out of curiosity, he told himself. Simple goodwill toward someone who had come home after a long absence.

  The truth was, he hadn’t expected her to agree. She’d fluster and make excuses or she’d hold herself very straight and decline with dignity. Or—and this thought came to him too late—she might laugh outright.

  But she had accepted, after the smallest hesitation.

  Daniel closed the window, listening to her run her boots over the scraper. He went out into the foyer to greet her.

  “Martha. Maybe I spoke too quick—” He stopped, disconcerted by the way the color rose up from her throat and fell again. From deep red to white. As if she had been slapped.

  “I only meant to say that tour is too big a word for this little school-house.”

  “Oh,” she said, visibly relieved. She made a small ceremony of putting down her basket and retrieving her handkerchief from her cuff, and then hid her face in it.

  He had flustered her so badly that she had lost her command of language. For some reason, that pleased him. But he was not heartless, and so he turned away to give her time to gather her thoughts.

  “My mother designed it all,” he said to the wall. “The two classrooms, with the cloakroom between—”

  “She was always coming up with new ways to keep mud and wet out of the classroom,” Martha said. She had regained her composure. “It seems like she found the solution. And there?” She inclined her head to a door at the other end of the hall.

  “The teacher’s apartment. We’ll have to put it to rights before Mr. Moss comes in the fall or he’ll turn around and leave again.”

  Daniel sounded more and more like his sisters, talking so fast that he himself was having trouble making sense of it.

  “It’s all very nice,” Martha said, quite formally. She looked uncomfortable again, but then Daniel felt uncomfortable himself for no good reason. He said the next thing that occurred to him.

  “Did you know you’ve got a bucket on your head?”

  She blinked, and a ghost of a smile ran across her face. “You don’t like my bonnet? I bought it from the very best milliner in Manhattan.”

  Daniel put his good hand on the wall and leaned into it. “You familiar with every milliner in the city?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Very well, I should have said he’s the most fashionable milliner in the city.”

  “And this Mr.—”

  “Henricks.”

  “Everyone wants one of his buckets.”

  “That’s right,” Martha said, her smile widening.

  “Because his shop is fashionable.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I see what you’re about. You mean to point out a logical fallacy on my part. An argumentum ad populum. But I won’t walk into that trap.”

  “Argumentum ad populum?” Daniel found himself smiling too. “You took your philosophy and rhetoric studies seriously, I see.”

  “Your cousin Ethan is an exacting taskmaster.”

  “And you liked your studies.”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “It was very unladylike of me. I should have detested philosophy and longed for a pony to go riding in the park.”

  “You didn’t like to ride?”

  “I did,” she said. “But I liked my lessons as well.”

  She crossed her arms at the waist and lowered her chin until it touched the buttons at her throat. As if she were trying to remember something, or maybe she was sorry to have said so much.

  “So what does a young lady do with an education in Manhattan?”

  She raised a shoulder. “Why, nothing. In fact it’s wise of her to keep her education to herself, if she intends to—” She studied her own feet for a moment and raised her head. “Of course, if she must support herself that’s a different matter. If she is very quick, she might find a school who will hire a female teacher, in a small village or town. Otherwise, there are more female clerks in the shops these days, so she might end up—selling hats.”

  “Like the bucket you’re wearing.”

  “Bucket?” Martha lifted the bonnet off her head. She held it up on the flat of her hands to examine in a patch of sunlight.

  “You may be very well educated,” she said. “But clearly you know nothing about fashion or the workmanship that goes into something like this. Do you see the way the silk seems to glow, and how the colors complement each other? That is all by design. And see how smoothly the shape tapers from front to back. This kind of ruching is very difficult, especially with such delicate material. The workmanship is impeccable.”

  “Maybe so,” Daniel said. He took the bonnet from her and held it at arm’s length. “But being well put together and being pleasing don’t necessarily go hand in hand. This bonnet of yours is plain ugly, girl. Admit it, even a goat would have to be mighty hungry to bother with it.”

  Her mouth fell open. “I’ll admit no such—” She drew up. “Now you are teasing me.” And her expression was so affronted that Daniel had to laugh.

  “And? Don’t young ladies get teased in Manhattan?”

  “Daniel Bonner,” Martha said. “You are trying to distract me, because I have argued you into a corner. I find this bonnet charming and beautifully made, and that’s the end of it. Aesthetics have nothing to do with logic. De gustibus non disputandum. Now may I have my bonnet back?”

  “Of course.” But he turned it around, examining it. It was a desperate move on his part, a play for a few moments in which to figure out what he was up to, flirting with Martha Kirby in the deserted school-house.

  With a sigh he leaned forward and placed the monstrosity of a bonnet on her head. Her hand came up to hold it in place, and without thinking about it at all, he caught her fingers in his and held them there.

  He saw the muscles of her throat working when she swallowed.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I believe I can manage.”

  And when he failed to step away, she raised her face and looked at him with a combination of doubt and irritation.

  “Do you realize that the little bit of reputation I have left will dwindle to nothing if someone finds us—”

  “Kissing?”

  She stepped backward, and he forward.

  “I said nothing about kissing.”

  “Not with words. But your mouth is all set to do just that.”

  “Daniel Bonner,” she said, her breath coming fast. “Let my hand go.”

  The door opened, and Daniel released her.

  Martha turned from the waist to look over her shoulder, and a ray of sunlight fell across her face and hair and slanted over her throat. For that moment she might have been an apparition, color and form and movement conjured up like a magical being.

  Callie Wilde said, “Oh ha. Am I interrupting?”

  “You are most certainly not interrupting,” Martha said, too loudly. “Come in.”

  “Come in,” Daniel echoed. His voice creaked a little.

  “I’m filthy,” Callie said. “I just wanted to leave this basket. Will you take it up to your ma, Daniel? I promised to get it back to her. I’ll say good-bye, then. Sorry to have interrupted.”

  The door closed before either of them could deny the obvious.

  22

  Martha ran so that when she caught up to Callie, she was flushed and out of breath.

  “Let me walk with you,” she said. “I’ve
been meaning to come by and see how things stand.”

  Callie gave her a lopsided smile that Martha took to be an invitation. She fell in beside her friend and for a minute they walked in silence. Martha considered things she might say, but every one of them only made the situation worse. Better to be still.

  All over the village people were still busy putting things to rights, repairing the flood damage, digging and sweeping, sawing and hammering. Some of them called out to Callie, and she answered without slowing. I might as well be invisible, Martha thought, and didn’t know why she minded.

  They passed the Cunninghams’ place, one of the few old-time cabins left in Paradise. A new door hung from leather hinges and there was a pile of shingles sitting on the ground. Through the window Martha caught a glimpse of women at work. Everyone was busy, but there was nothing frantic about it. The sun had come out and the air smelled of growing things, of wood drying out and of lye soap and sawdust.

  “Would you have thought things would be back to normal so quick?”

  Callie rubbed her nose with a bent wrist. “I wouldn’t exactly call this normal,” she said. They stopped on the rise where the orchards came into sight. In the fullness of spring this would be the prettiest spot in Paradise, when the first apple trees were in blossom. If there was to be a crop this year.

  Of course things were not back to normal and might never be again for either of them.

  The Wilde farm was on a long sloping stretch of land that ran along the river on one end, three quarters of it orchard. The buildings that made up the homestead—the house and barn and outbuildings—they were all gone. The only evidence that they had ever existed was a scattering of stone where the chimney had stood.

  “It was your home too,” Callie said. “Do you ever think about that time?”

  To be truthful, Martha did her best not to think about that year when she and Callie had truly been stepsisters.

  “I try not to,” Martha said. “I try to give my—to give Jemima as little thought as I can manage. I don’t know how I’d live with what she did, otherwise.”

  “You mean marrying my da?” Callie asked. “Or forcing him out?”

  At that moment Martha was glad that the orchard house was gone. So many bad things had happened there, she had never wanted to cross the threshold again, and now she wouldn’t have to. Now Callie could start over again.

  Just across from where they stood was the cider house, still intact, and all around it evidence of Callie’s hard work. A few dozen split oak baskets had been scrubbed and set out in the sun to dry; a goat and a mule both grazed within a hastily fenced pasture, and chickens hunted through the sparse late-winter grass. From behind the cider house came the sound of an axe on wood.

  “Levi?”

  Callie nodded. “Most of the trees we salvaged couldn’t be saved. At least we’ll get firewood out of them.”

  Martha had the sense that Callie was holding something back. Something too awful to talk about for fear of what those words might trigger. The only thing Callie cared about so much was the orchard and the trees.

  She cleared her throat. “How many did you lose?”

  Callie held herself very still. “Too many. Do you remember what Cookie used to call you and me? Working fools.”

  Martha smiled. “I dream about Cookie sometimes.”

  Callie drew in a deep breath. “Me and Levi, we talk about her a lot and I dream about her almost every night,” she said. “Mostly about the way she talked to my ma, like there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with her. Other folks were afraid of Ma, but not Cookie.”

  “She knew how to talk so your ma heard her. She took care of all of you.”

  Cookie had died in the same blizzard that killed Callie’s mother. In Martha’s view of things, Cookie was the greater loss. Not that she could say such a thing out loud, but it was true. Cookie had been an irritable and prickly old woman, an emancipated slave with no good opinion of white people, with the exception of the Wildes. She ran the household and kept an eye on Dolly, who would wander off if not watched. It was Cookie who had raised Callie.

  “She deserved better than she got.” Callie’s voice had taken on an edge.

  “They both did,” Martha said.

  Martha wondered if they would start up the old conversation again, the one they had had so many times. How Cookie had died, if she had fallen from the icy bridge by accident, or if she had been pushed. Whether she had gone out to find Callie’s ma before she got lost in the storm, and how Dolly had slipped away in the first place.

  They had been young girls and ready to buckle under the weight of what they dare not tell the adults. And if they had come across solid proof that Jemima had pushed Cookie to her death, they still would have been silent. They had only each other at that point, and in their minds and hearts they believed that if Jemima were to go to the gallows, Martha would be sent to a workhouse, or worse.

  I couldn’t bear it, Callie had said. I can’t lose you too.

  How frightened they had been, and how foolish.

  In the end the court had dismissed the charges against Jemima for lack of evidence, and the two girls had cried themselves to sleep out of anger and relief.

  “We should have told,” Martha said. “If we had told—”

  “She wouldn’t have come back again,” Callie finished for her.

  Martha said, “If I could empty out the half of my blood that comes from Jemima, I would do it right here, on this spot.”

  “Cut it out, bad from good.”

  “Just so,” Martha said.

  “There’s things I’d cut away too, if I could. Did you know my ma’s grandma was just as mad as Ma? It comes down through the bloodline. Sometimes I feel it in my brain, like a seed waiting for rain so it can come up out of the ground and bear fruit.”

  Martha drew in a shocked breath. “Do you really believe that, that you could turn out like your ma?”

  “Yes,” Callie said. “I do believe it.”

  For a long moment Martha listened to the sound of the axe meeting wood, the steady thunk thunk thunk and then the pause before it started again. The wind was rising cool on her hot cheeks. At this moment, standing next to Callie, she was overcome with regret and sorrow. She had left Callie behind, in the end.

  “I wish I had never gone to Manhattan,” Martha said.

  To which Callie said nothing, and rightly so. It did no good to worry about things long gone. Things she couldn’t change. Martha cleared her throat.

  “Where are you going to build?”

  Callie had taken a few steps forward, and she looked back at Martha over her shoulder. “I’m not sure yet. Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” Martha said. “I can’t stay with the Bonners forever. I shouldn’t even be there now. If I left, there would be room for Lily and Simon. Nobody has said as much to me, but I know Elizabeth thinks about it.”

  Callie’s arms were crossed against her waist, her head lowered as though she saw something crucially important in the mud in which she stood. “I can’t build yet,” she said. “It will be a good while before I can get enough money saved up. What little savings I had went with everything else.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Martha said.

  As children they had often read each other’s thoughts, and Callie still had the knack. She said, “I couldn’t take money from you.”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” Martha said. “You supply the land, and I build a house big enough for the both of us.”

  Callie went still, her whole body stiff and wary. Martha wanted to apologize for giving offense, but Callie cut her off with a movement of her hand.

  “Tell me this,” she said. “When you want to get married and start a family of your own, what then?”

  “I could ask the same of you,” Martha countered.

  Callie looked up sharply. “I’m never going to get married.”

  She was so vehement that Martha was taken aback.
>
  “Don’t look at me like that. If you think it through you’ll know that it’s the only reasonable thing for me to do. Ma didn’t lose her mind until I was born. I don’t want children, not if it means turning into—that.”

  Martha hesitated. “You won’t be lonely?”

  Callie grimaced. “No,” she said sharply. “I’m far too busy to be lonely.”

  When Martha had disappeared from sight, Callie walked slowly down to the farm where she had been born and worked for all of her life, past the cider house to the new nursery. A small plot of land with a new-woven fence of beech saplings eight feet high all around it, as close as was possible to deer-proof.

  On the other side of the fence was the single Bleeding Heart Levi had found and brought back, along with five new grafts from that same tree. Whatever other chores he turned his hand to, Levi was always within sight of the nursery. Every day he wove new wood into the fence that surrounded it; he had closed the gate with a complicated twisting of wires that were not easily undone. Levi’s vigilance was the difference between success and failure. They bore the burden together, and told no one about the Bleeding Heart.

  23

  Martha was on her way back to the Bonners for supper, lost in her thoughts, when a hand tugged at her mantle from behind and she let out a small cry in surprise.

  “Birdie,” she said. “You startled me.”

  The girl had been running, and she took a moment to catch her breath. She said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  Birdie had the same dark and unruly hair as her brothers and sisters, and some of it had escaped the plaits to dance around her face. She was flushed with running and her eyes—an odd mixture of green and brown—seemed almost to glow. Birdie wouldn’t be called pretty, but there was an energy about her that drew a person in. As tired as Martha was and as preoccupied by her conversation with Callie, she stopped to listen to what Birdie had to say.

  “My da says it’s best to be straightforward when you’ve got a favor to ask. So I’m asking.” She hesitated anyway, as if waiting for permission.