by Sara Donati
And she looked at Strikes-the-Sky, who held back because she had not made her choice and his role here was unclear. Finally she turned to her grandfather.
“I am going to sit with Kitty as I promised I would.” Hannah wished that she could banish the tremor from her voice, but she held her head up and spoke clearly. “I promised her and I promised Curiosity, who is as close to me as my own mother or grandmother or stepmother. I will stay with Kitty until she needs me no more.”
Until she is dead. She could not yet say those words out loud, but the men around her understood what was to come. “No one will interfere with me while I am attending her, not even O’Brien.”
Strong-Words’ frustration burst out of him. “You are putting all of us in danger.”
“I will stay with Kitty until she needs me no longer,” Hannah said calmly. “As my grandmother Falling-Day, your mother, taught me to do.”
He threw up his hands in disgust. “Strikes-the-Sky,” he said. “Speak to her. Tell her what it is like for a red woman in a white man’s gaol—”
“Uncle!” Her anger flashed so sharp that even Strong-Words must falter, and stop.
She said, “Your temper has got the best of you. Now, do you have something to say to me, Strikes-the-Sky?”
He said, “I have nothing to say. You have made yourself clear, Hannah Bonner.”
It was at that moment that she knew she was ready to make her choice.
Hannah heard no discussion of who would see her down to the village, but when she came out on the porch Strikes-the-Sky was waiting for her with his rifle resting in his crossed arms. In the light from the door he looked like something carved from stone, as immovable as the mountain itself.
Because they did not know for sure where O’Brien was, they carried neither torch nor lantern. But the sky was clear, and in a few days the moon would be full.
Strikes-the-Sky moved so silently that he might have been a ghost and she his shadow, trailing behind. When he stopped she must stop; he turned his head to listen and so did she, but the difference was this: he threw all his senses out into the night to whatever threats might be waiting for them in the dark, while she strained only to hear the sound of his breathing. They moved down the mountain like this, stopping now and then to listen and look before they moved on.
Where the forest paused at the beginning of the strawberry fields, Strikes-the-Sky stopped again, his eyes scanning the open expanse. The smell of the last of the berries hung over-sweet in the night air. And another smell, sharper and salty: spilled blood.
“Panther.” He pointed to the other side of the field where the cat lay in among the strawberries, tawny gold and flexing muscle in the moonlight. The white leg of a deer jutted up, jittered, and jerked.
“A sign,” said Strikes-the-Sky.
A sign, yes, but how to read it? Hannah rubbed her hands over her arms to calm the gooseflesh, and they set off again. He moved faster now, and did not stop again until they came into the village and stopped in the shadows behind the church. The call of a nightjar, and then a wolf trotted up from the riverbank, stopped to put his nose in the air and sniff, and moved back into the trees just as the mill house dog began to bark fiercely from up on the hill.
In the village the only light came from the lantern hanging at the tavern door.
“That is good,” said Strikes-the-Sky. “O’Brien will drink as long as Metzler lets him.”
“Then he will drink all night,” said Hannah. She turned her head up to look at him, and found he was much closer than she had imagined.
He made a sound deep in his throat, that rough sound she recognized already as doubt, and at the same moment he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her toward him.
As if we were dancing, Hannah thought as she followed the gentle pressure of his hand. His fingers threaded through her hair and she had to tilt her head to look at him. His eyes moved over her face and then his finger, tracing the line of her lower lip and her jaw while his other hand covered her back.
He said, “You are trembling. Are you cold?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I am not cold.” And then: “I have no scarf to put around your shoulders, Strikes-the-Sky.” How strange those words sounded in her own whispered voice, loud enough to echo over the mountain and down the river valley. Loud enough to fill the world.
“But you have arms,” he said, smiling now. “They will serve the same purpose.”
It should have been awkward to stand like this with him in the dark as she put her arms around his neck. All her uncertainty was gone, and in its place a calm acceptance and more than that, the beginning of something she thought might be joy.
The smell of him was already familiar, high and sharp; his voice reached inside of her, left his mouth and slid down her throat, sweet and heavy so that deep inside her body, in places still unknown and unknowing, a pulsing began.
She put her face to the curve of his neck and inhaled, and in response he drew her closer.
“The last time you tricked me into kissing you.” Her own voice, high and far away.
His hands tightened across her back, drew her up on tiptoe and brought her mouth to his.
“The way I see it, you made me work hard for that kiss.”
She made a fist and thumped him on the shoulder, but his mouth came no closer.
“Does that mean you intend to make me work hard for this one?”
“No,” he said, his breath moving on her skin. “This time I’m going to do all the work myself. I’ll work until you ask me to stop.”
He meant to make her laugh, to shock, to draw her in, and he did all those things with his words and mouth, with the heat of his kiss and his hands that cradled her head. He kissed her until she gasped with it and then before she could catch her breath he kissed her again, drawing her closer to him and closer still until her body had softened to something strange and pliable to be wound around him, a vine around an oak reaching up and up.
Strikes-the-Sky broke off the kiss, held her away from him with an expression so fierce that it should have frightened her. He said, “Will you come with me, will you come west?”
And kissed her again, before she could answer, kissed her until she would have agreed to live in a cloud with him or at the bottom of a lake, anywhere as long as she could have this, have him and his mouth and the way he looked at her, the feel of him. He held her as if she were the earth itself, and the sky and all the stars, and he must draw her inside his skin to be complete. Her body ached.
“Will you?” His hands on her shoulders, fingers spread as he pulled her up to look into her face. She blinked at him, struck dumb by the things he was calling forth out of her, shocked at how simple it was, the truth of it.
“Will you come west with me and be my wife?”
The answer he wanted was pushing up from her belly, filling her throat, and it spilled out of her in a whisper. “Yes, I will come with you.”
He went very still for a moment, and then he pressed his mouth against her forehead. Then he stepped back, held her steady while she found her balance again.
He said, “When your work is done there will be time enough to make plans.”
She said, “You don’t think I should run?”
The smile he gave her was only half-serious. “Then you would not be the woman you are.”
When Hannah came into the room they were all asleep: Ethan curled into a ball at his mother’s feet, Richard with his head thrown back and his hands gripping the arms of a lady’s chair far too small for him, Curiosity with her cheek bedded on her shoulder.
To see Curiosity idle was strange and somehow comforting too, to know that even she must take her rest. Her hands were folded in her lap with fingers intertwined, as if they must be restrained, even in sleep. Her head wrap had slipped to reveal hair that gleamed silver and black in the lamplight. In the last few months the soft wrinkles around her eyes and mouth had deepened, so that it seemed to Hannah that her age had finall
y caught up with her. In repose she looked her age, and more.
Kitty slept too, so quietly and deeply that Hannah waited, motionless, to see the hesitant rise and fall of her chest. Her skin was transparent in the soft light of the lamp, as tender and dry as silk. Veins like faint blue rivers etched their way across her forehead and over cheekbones, along the column of her throat. The same blue that tinged lips and eyelids and the fingernails of the hand that lay curled on the top of the blanket.
Ubi est morbus? She whispered the question.
Kitty’s breath hitched and paused, caught and hitched.
Curiosity and Richard woke at once. Ethan stirred more slowly, and then bolted upright to roll off the foot of the bed, landing on his feet. To Hannah his eyes seemed as large and round as a rabbit’s in that moment it feels the wolf’s breath: the time for fear had passed, and in its place a placid acceptance.
Kitty’s eyelids fluttered once and then opened.
“Curiosity.” Her voice came remarkably clear, but very soft.
“I’m right here, little girl.”
“Richard?”
“Here, my love.” He sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand.
Kitty was trying to raise her head, and Curiosity bent down to support her neck with one long hand.
“There you are,” Kitty said. “Come here to me, Ethan, come.”
The boy sent a questioning look to Richard, who nodded his encouragement.
When the boy had climbed up beside his mother and laid his head down beside hers she sighed, a welcoming and content sigh. She lifted an arm and put it around him.
Her gaze drifted from one face to the next.
“Hannah, you came back.”
“I told you that I would.”
“No sickness at Lake in the Clouds?”
“No,” Hannah said. “They are all well.”
“Good. You gave Elizabeth my message?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Kitty echoed, and then, “I am so tired, Richard.”
“Yes,” he said gruffly. “I know you are.” He put a hand on her chest very gently and closed his eyes.
Hannah saw it all reflected on his face: the fluttering of muscle underneath the curve of his palm, the last beats of a tender and imperfect heart.
“My sweet good boy,” Kitty murmured, her fingers trailing over Ethan’s face. “Stay with me while I fall asleep.”
Almost dawn, and Hannah and Curiosity sat at the kitchen table, silent in a silent house where Richard Todd kept watch over his wife’s still form.
Hannah rested her head on her arms and tried to order the thoughts that presented themselves to her in a random jumble. Bump would be digging two graves today, one for Molly LeBlanc and one for Kitty. Tomorrow he might dig one more or two, but it seemed as if the scarlet fever was done with Paradise, for now at least. Either way she would not be here to see any more of her neighbors into their graves. She would be walking west with Strikes-the-Sky, leaving her father and family and home.
Or, if Jemima Kuick and Judge O’Brien had their way, she would be on her way to Johnstown and the gallows.
Curiosity put a hand on her head and Hannah started up. The older woman smiled at her, such a kind smile, a beloved face. Hannah realized she had been weeping when Curiosity wiped her cheeks with a gentle thumb.
“You know I ain’t ever really met your Strikes-the-Sky,” she said. “He’s been waiting outside all night. Why don’t you call him in here and let me feed the man? I’d be thankful for the distraction, to tell the truth.”
“I’m going with him,” Hannah said. “I’m going west with Strikes-the-Sky. I’m—I’m going to marry him.”
“I know you are,” Curiosity said, sitting down and leaning across the table to grasp both of Hannah’s hands in her own. “I know that, child. I will surely miss your shining face, but it’s time, ain’t it. He’s a good man?”
“Yes,” Hannah whispered.
“Well, then. You’ll come back here to show us your babies someday, I expect. Won’t that be a homecoming.”
Tears slid down Hannah’s face and dropped on their intertwined fingers. “I don’t know,” she said, bowing her head. “I don’t know how to go away from you.”
“Why, of course you do,” Curiosity said. “You do it just like you do all the other hard things that come your way. One foot ahead of the other, and looking ahead. You know you can.”
After a while Hannah nodded.
“Now you can call me a selfish old woman, but there’s one reason I’m glad to see you go. I won’t worry about our Manny half so much knowing Hannah Bonner’s nearby to keep an eye on him.”
Hannah managed a smile. “I’ll do my best, but he is a willful sort.”
Curiosity rocked forward, laughing softly, and kissed Hannah on the top of her head.
Bump came in with Strikes-the-Sky and they sat around the table, the four of them, eating Curiosity’s cornbread and drinking strong coffee laced with good cone sugar. Bump gave them the news they needed to hear: no new cases of the fever, no deaths except the one they had witnessed themselves.
“Bless her soul,” Bump said. “Bless her weary soul.”
“What about that Baldy O’Brien?” Curiosity asked, pouring more coffee into Bump’s cup. “Any news of him?”
Strikes-the-Sky shook his head. “Slept in the tavern, as far as I can see.”
It was a revelation to Hannah, how well Strikes-the-Sky spoke English when he cared to. She wondered what other talents he had kept a secret from her.
Curiosity ran her hands over the tabletop thoughtfully, and then she looked at Hannah, her mouth set hard.
“You going to run from that little no-account man, girl, or stand and fight?”
“I’m not running from him,” Hannah said, drawing back in surprise.
“That’s what it look like to me. You don’t even know what lies Jemima been telling, and you ready to bolt. From Jemima Southern, of all people. From Baldy O’Brien.” She looked as if she wanted to spit.
Hannah sent Strikes-the-Sky a questioning look, but his expression was unreadable.
“I am not running from Jemima Southern,” Hannah said. “Or from anybody else. I have no reason to run, I have done nothing wrong. I never thought of running away. It’s your son who came up with that idea.” She cast a glance in Bump’s direction, but if he was surprised by this revelation he showed no sign of it.
Neither did it slow Curiosity down. “Just ’cause Manny is my son don’t mean he cain’t be pure stupid at times. Look at all the trouble he stirred up while I was gone, sneaking around and tying people up and poking at Jemima Southern until she lost what little bit she had left of her mind. If he was here I’d be mighty tempted to turn him over my knee. Don’t you listen to those hotheaded men, girl. You stand and fight.”
Hannah had intended just that, but Curiosity’s sudden insistence made her hackles rise. “Why should I?” Hannah shot back. “Why should I give O’Brien the satisfaction? I might as well leave now.”
“Lordy, you can be slow at times, child. Don’t you see? If you run then you giving Jemima what she want. You will never be able to come back home without sneaking around, hoping she don’t call the law out on you again. You going to give her that kind of power over you?” She reached out and took Hannah’s hand. More softly she said, “Don’t you give her that, Hannah Bonner. Don’t you run.”
There was a persistent rapping at the door.
“I’ll bet that’s O’Brien now,” said Curiosity, jumping up with all the energy of a sixteen-year-old girl. “Come to a house in mourning to do Jemima Southern’s dirty business.”
Strikes-the-Sky got up to follow her as she marched down the hall but Hannah stopped him with a hand on his forearm. “Don’t make this worse than it already is,” she said to him in her own language. “Don’t give him an excuse to arrest you too. Let Curiosity talk.”
He cupped her face in his hand. “Walks-Ahead,” he said. “I k
now not to get in the way of a bear protecting her young.”
To prove his point the sound of Curiosity’s voice rose in the hall, sharp as claws.
“We better go rescue poor Mr. O’Brien,” said Bump. “Before she really gets started.”
Judge O’Brien was a soft lump of a man with a small pink circle of a face stuck dead center in a maze of hair. It radiated out from his scalp in a white halo and from his chin in a grizzled gray fan, interrupted only by two very pink earlobes that peeked out when he tilted his head a certain way. His head was tilted now, and his face flushed red with indignation. From what Hannah knew of him he did not like to be challenged, most especially not by a woman. A little man with a big picture of himself, tenacious as a mule and inflexible as rock.
A rock who seemed to be encountering Curiosity Freeman in a temper for the first time.
“You got no business here,” she was saying to him in a harsh whisper. “If you want to speak to Miss Bonner you will just have to wait till she got time to come see you.”
“I will see Hannah Bonner now,” huffed O’Brien, stepping back from an advancing Curiosity and clutching his hat to his chest. “And if I feel it’s necessary I will take her with me to Johnstown to be tried there. You cannot thwart the law because you don’t like what it says, missus.”
Just then he caught sight of Hannah and Strikes-the-Sky standing behind her. Hannah might have laughed at his expression —satisfaction followed quickly by shock and plain fear—if the situation had not been so dire.
“Miss Bonner,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height. He cast Curiosity a triumphant look. “As duly appointed circuit judge—”
“She’s not going anywhere, O’Brien.” Richard’s voice boomed down the stairs so unexpectedly that they all jumped.
