Carry the World

by Susan Fanetti

  Chapter Nine

  “Easy now, baby girl. Don’t squeeze.”

  When he was sure Bluebird’s hold on the chick would keep it but not hurt it, Jonah dropped his hands from hers. The small yellow puff looked right at her and peeped. His little girl giggled happily.

  She was well. Whether it was the medicine, or the sickness had simply run its course, or some blend between them, two days after the book woman had left, the fever broke. Two days after that, his precious girl was herself again. He’d fussed after her for another week more, fearful she’d weaken again, but by the end of that next week, she was whiny and combative from being cooped up. For the past two weeks, she’d been at her normal activities and back to her natural happiness. She was well.

  Neither he nor Elijah had fallen ill at all.

  Spring had come fully in. The days were lengthening, and the sun was warming. All but the most stubborn bits of snow, those tracks that lived in the shadows of ancient trees, had melted from their tier of the mountain. New leaves were budding on the trees and the ground cover, and the wildlife had stirred and filled the forest and sky with bustle.

  Elijah’s birthday had gone by a few days earlier. He knew the day exactly because the book woman had brought up a calendar on a recent visit. He’d intended to ask her to do exactly that, but then Bluebird had taken sick, and he’d decided he didn’t want that woman bringing anything else to them ever again. And then she’d shown up with medicine, and he’d changed his mind again. In all the confusion she’d got boiling in him, he’d never asked. But she’d known anyway. They now had a paper calendar from the Callwood Mill hanging on the wall by the front door. And now both children knew their birthdays for the first time in their lives.

  He’d felt awkward about marking Elijah’s birthday, after letting so many go by unnoticed. Grace had been alive for only the first two, and they’d done what they could to make those days celebrations, but Jonah couldn’t replicate that. They’d lost too much since then.

  There was no cake or special meal, but he dug into the back of his bureau and found a token to give as a gift: Grace’s father’s pocket watch, a keepsake she’d held dear. It was a heavy piece, not real gold but fine enough nevertheless, with a steam train etched into the case. Jonah didn’t know the time, but he wound the watch to make sure it still worked, and it began a steady, soft ticking at once.

  Elijah had been awestruck, and now carried it with him everywhere, checking it frequently, studying its face as if it held more answers than the likely incorrect time.

  Bluebird had been envious, but then Jonah had come home from Red Fern Holler, after trading an afternoon’s labor for five new chicks, and she’d been mollified by the babies. And her birthday was coming up soon, in May. He knew that date as well. He’d find something to make for her or give to her to make her day special as well.

  There was only one other date in the past seven years he remembered, four days after her birthday. He’d stopped tracking the days then. This year would be the first since that he’d know when that date came around.

  He tried not to dwell on that.

  Since Christmas, Grace had been with him less and less. He hadn’t lost her yet, but he could feel her drifting away, taking the last wisps of herself from him, and no amount of pleading in the dark night alone in the room they’d shared could tie her to him. He’d seen her only once in more than a week, and a few weeks had gone by since he’d heard her voice in his head.

  Losing that last tiny bit of her he’d been able to keep had opened a new sore inside his chest that throbbed with every thought of her. A throb so keen it threatened to bring him to his knees. So he tried not to dwell, and focused instead on his children and their good hearts and wellbeing.

  He picked up another chick from the little box and turned it over. Gently, he squeezed its tail end, and he smiled at what he saw. “Look here, Bluebird.”

  With the chick she was holding, a little pullet, tucked under her chin, still held in both hands, she looked. And made a face. “What’s that?”

  “That’s what shows he’s a boy. This is a cockerel. He’ll grow up to be a rooster.”

  “Like Mister was?”

  “Like Mister was. And he’ll help the hens have more chicks. And soon enough we’ll have a bigger flock and more eggs.”

  “But we won’t let the foxes get ‘em, right Pa?”

  “That’s right, baby girl.” He’d figured a new way to lock the coop door, and had taken to walking the yard after the children were asleep, to make sure everything was closed up tight before he bedded down himself.

  He turned the cockerel right side up and brushed his thumb over its soft yellow head. This boy was a good sign. Maybe this spring would be good for them.

  It had been a long time since he’d had a thought like that.

  As always, Jonah double-checked his pack, made sure his field-dressing kit was where it belonged, counted out the cartridges for his rifle.

  Ammunition was a great expense, well more than he could bear comfortably, and he used it like the precious resource it was—almost never, in fact. He had a substantial array of firearms, handed down to him from generations past. There was even an old musket from a forebear who’d fought the redcoats long ago, and a Kerr’s Patent revolver, carried by his great-granddad during the Civil War. But those guns were relics, and he’d let all but two rifles fall into poor repair.

  Circumstances had not yet forced him to trade away these pieces of family history, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever want to. Most weren’t good for hunting, and he didn’t like the idea of scattering out so many ways for people to kill each other. People who had guns tended to find them necessary. Jonah himself found them to make more trouble than they fixed, even in hunting. So he’d left his guns to rot in a locked chest, though trading them or selling them might have brought comfort to his family.

  Guns had hurt his family, too. Not only in war. Also simply in anger and despair.

  Few folks lived this high up the mountain, and most of those few were of families that had staked their claim generations ago. Jonah’s family were practically newcomers, from that perspective. He was the fourth generation to live in this house, and his children were the fifth.

  There were two ways to prosper way up in this thin air, and they both had to do with the land: coal or timber. You could scrape by with a plot for growing, have a little surplus to sell, as Jonah usually did, but the soil was too rocky to grow a real cash crop. But if there was coal under your feet—and there was often coal—or if the forest was strong, you could make a real nice life for yourself.

  Jonah’s great-grandfather, Jackson Cable, had been a younger son from a wealthy family, down in Kentucky horse country. He’d been an officer in the war that had torn apart the country, and ravaged the South, and after it, he’d fled into the mountains to turn his sight away from the ruination of all he’d known. All his family was dead. All his history was gone. He’d dug up what he’d buried before he’d left to fight, staked himself some land up high, and made himself this home in what quickly became known as Cable’s Holler.

  He’d built this house, far grander than most other dwellings in the hills, but far humbler than the mansion he’d grown up in. And then he’d stripped the land of its timber and sold it for profit to the rebuilding world below.

  Jonah had been told the story of his great-grandfather and Cable’s Holler from the time he was old enough to sit still and listen. His father’s mother was Jackson Cable’s only child, born right here in this house and never lived a day anywhere else. She was the first to love the mountain. Her father despised it—though he was wildly prosperous by the measure of the mountain folk, he’d never again been truly wealthy, never approached the luxury he’d known as a child. He held hate in his heart for the war that had ended his way of life, and he was a bitter, brutal man.

  When Jackson shot and killed his wife and then himself, their daughter, Isabelle, Jonah’s grandmother, stayed on with her new
husband and baby boy, but she closed the timber operation and let the forest reclaim itself. In that way, she made the life she wanted, humble though it was.

  By the time Jonah came into the world, the Cable family had been the Walker family for two generations already, and its circumstances were much reduced. But they were still the leaders of their little community, the people who’d built up around them while the timber was falling and stayed when it stopped, and Jonah had grown up well and happy, unaware of his isolation.

  Over the years, the family had sold or traded away most of the baubles and trappings of prosperity. Now this old house was mostly empty of anything beyond the essentials—and some might say not enough of those. But Jonah still held on to a few old things, more out of a sense of futility than nostalgia. Most of those useless things, he let time to do them what it would.

  This rifle, a 30.06 bought by his father, he kept well and kept with him. Another one, a smaller .22-caliber, he kept up, too, and had taught Elijah to use. For protection.

  He could count on his hands the number of times in his whole life he’d shot his rifle except in practice, and every one had been when he’d had no other choice. Thankfully, Elijah had never yet had to shoot at anything but a pinecone on a post.

  Jonah brought the 30.06 with him whenever he left the homestead, but it was a bow he hunted with. Quiet and clean. He could make his own arrows, and they didn’t spoil the meat of the kill, or its hide.

  “When can I hunt with you?” Elijah asked, watching Jonah pack up for a hunt.

  Bow hunting required more strength and skill than the gun. Elijah couldn’t yet pull a strung bow—not Jonah’s, at least. He’d considered making him something smaller, but hadn’t decided whether that was a good idea.

  “Not till your sister can stay on her own. You know that, boy.”

  Relenting quickly, Elijah couldn’t stifle a short-tempered huff.

  “It’s important work, tendin’ Bluebird and keepin’ the homestead safe. I count on you, Elijah. What you do helps me do what I gotta do. You get that?”

  “Yessir. I jus’ ... I don’t like it when you’re away.”

  Jonah put his hand on his son’s shoulder and squeezed. “I don’t like it, either. But we need meat. I’ll be back quick as I can, soon’s I bag a kill. Then I’ll need you to help me butcher and smoke it.”

  His serious son nodded. Jonah gathered Bluebird up for a hug and left his children alone while he went to find them food.

  Jonah went out the front door. A powerful spring storm had lashed the mountain all day, driving the rain sidelong and whipping the trees wildly. Lightning and thunder had blown bad temper unabated since morning.

  Elijah stood on the porch, his arm looped around the post. He was dripping wet, and the spring was not yet truly warm. Certainly not today, when storm clouds had shrouded the sun all day.

  “Come on, boy. Come sit for your supper.” He took hold of his son’s arm and tugged gently, but with determination. “She’s not comin’. The storm’s too bad.”

  “She always comes.” He turned and looked up at him. “Always. Rain, snow, wind, it don’t matter. Mizz Ada always comes.”

  “It’s near dark, Elijah. If she comes now, she’d have to go down in pitch black. She wouldn’t be safe.”

  “She always comes.”

  Jonah let Elijah’s arm go and stood beside him, squinting into the grey gloom, the rain so hard and fine it closed off the view. He was right. The book woman had come in all manner of weather before, including storms like this. She’d never missed a day. Every two weeks, once or twice a day or two early, but never late. Now that they had the calendar, she’d taken up a habit of showing them the day she’d be back, marking it down right before she said goodbye.

  But she wasn’t coming today, and it was too late to keep expecting her. The sky had never gotten much light all through the day, but night would fall soon.

  “Elijah, come inside. Supper’s ready.”

  “What if somethin’ happened to her?”

  The thought had crossed his mind as well, but she was a good horsewoman and knew the mountain near as well as he did.

  “It’s been stormin’ this bad all day long. If she even tried to get up the mountain today, the weather drove her back soon enough. She’s home and warm by her fire, I reckon.” He set his hand on Elijah’s shoulder. “She knows this mountain, and she and Henrietta make a fine team. She’s fine, but she’s not comin’ today. She’ll come soon’s she can, you know that. Come on, boy. We got a warm fire and good food inside.”

  His son nodded and complied, but he looked out to the woods until Jonah got him inside and closed the door.

  He’d kept the fire stoked all day, and the front room was cozy and warm, crackling with good heat and aromatic with venison stew with dumplings bubbling in the pot. He got his children to the table. Bluebird was sad and cross as well, missing the book woman just as keenly as her brother, and the two of them sagged at the table, resting their heads on their hands.

  Jonah tried to be patient with them. They were good children, obedient and good-natured, and he asked much of them both. They should be allowed to feel and show their disappointment, he thought. Grace would have thought so, too. But he felt odd as well, jumpy and frustrated, and it took a force of his will not to snap at his children. He ladled stew into their bowls and served them up glasses of milk. Then he served himself and sat at what passed for the head of their little table.

  He stretched his arms across the corners of the table, offering his hands. The children set theirs in his and reached across to touch their fingers together, which was as far as they could reach.

  If their mother had been there, she would have sat at the other end of the table and joined them all more tightly. Jonah had that thought every meal.

  “Bluebird, it’s your turn.”

  Usually, she enjoyed saying grace, and recited the little prayer with gusto. Today she sighed heavily and mumbled, “Dear Father, kind and good, we thank Thee for our daily food. We thank Thee for Thy love and care. Be with us Lord, and hear our prayer. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Jonah and Elijah said together.

  He’d let God fall away from their lives, except for these little ritual moments of prayer, at bedtime and mealtime, that he’d known Grace, the preacher’s daughter, would want her children to know. These moments caused him pain like any other that should have included her but didn’t, but in their simple ritual, their rote recitation, he’d been able to preserve them. They required little of him but to hold his children’s hands and say ‘Amen.’ He considered them honors to Grace, not to the God she loved and he’d discarded.

  “Wait, Pa,” Bluebird said as Jonah picked up his spoon.

  “Yeah, baby girl?”

  “Can I add a prayer?”

  “You want to say more?”

  She nodded.

  “Alright, go ‘head.”

  This time, Bluebird squeezed her hands together and clamped her eyes shut, as she did at bedtime. “Dear Father, please keep Mizz Ada safe. She was s’poseda come today and didn’t and I’m scared she’s sick or hurt. Please let her be alright.”

  “Yes, Father,” Elijah whispered, and Jonah saw that he had his hands folded and his eyes closed, too. “Please watch over her.”

  “We love her,” Bluebird said. “She brings us books and tells us stories and makes us things and takes care of us and”—her little voice had taken on a moan of worry—“and we love her.”

  “Please don’t let her be hurt,” Elijah said.

  “Amen.” Bluebird said it first.

  “Amen,” her brother echoed.

  The children picked up their spoons and began to eat. Bluebird sniffed softly and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.

  Jonah sat, stunned, and stared at the center of the table. His heart thudded heavily in his ears.

  After that prayer, Jonah found himself peering out the window himself several times during the few remaining hours
before he put his children to bed. Bluebird wanted them all to sleep in the front room, the thunder frightened her and made her worry more for the book woman, so they pulled their winter pallets out and made their beds near the hearth again.

  Once they were down for the night, Jonah went to sit at the table as he often did, to think in the quiet dark. He no longer waited for Grace. It hurt too much to wait and not see her, and he so rarely saw her these days.

  For all these years, she’d promised to stay with him. I’m here as long as you need me, she’d said, time and time again. That she was disappearing suggested she didn’t think he needed her anymore. But he did. He always would.

  But she wasn’t real. He knew that, or knew it as well as anything else. She was in his head, only his head. If she was disappearing, then, something in his head had stopped conjuring her. Something inside him, the thing that knew when she was needed, no longer had the need.

  But he needed her. He did. He always would. He would.

  He looked out the window into the stormy dark. There was nothing to see; the cloud cover was too thick for moonlight or starlight to push through, and all that was left was an impenetrable black, broken occasionally by jagged blasts of lightning.

  One hit just then, lighting the yard with a white light as bright as midday, then a quick flicker before it went dark. Jonah leapt to his feet and ran to the door. Flinging it open, nearly losing it in the wind, he jumped out into the night.

  He’d seen something in the yard. The blackness was back, and the howl of the wind clawed at his ears, but he ran surefooted off the porch toward what he’d seen. If he was wrong, and it was something else, he could be running into deadly trouble. But he didn’t think he was wrong. The image was burned into his eyes like a photograph.

  Henrietta.

  “Mizz Ada?” The name felt odd to say, and he realized he’d never said it before. “Mizz Ada?” Under the snarling storm, he heard the horse whine, but no human voice accompanied it.

  Another, softer flash of lightning flickered and showed him the horse—saddled, exhausted. Riderless.