by Sara Donati
“Do you mean, does the Green Man still come to me? I think I have finally outgrown him, Elizabeth. Or perhaps he has found someone else more to his liking. There is no lack of Green Men here, I think, if one wanted to seek me out.”
Joe’s face came to Elizabeth: and the hot, dry light in his eye when he realized that night was falling. The fierce determination to protect himself, fear of one kind of death when another sat breathing heavily on his chest.
“Here they are called stone men,” Elizabeth said, and then, a little breathlessly: “Have you seen them?”
Amanda turned her face up to the canopy of naked branches, bony fingers against the sky. “I have seen men in the forest, but they were all human enough. They smelled very human, at least.” She managed a smile. “No, Elizabeth. I have no need to look for new ghosts.”
Her eyes lowered to Elizabeth’s waist and when she looked up again there was the soft glittering of unshed tears in her eyes. Amanda, pretty, quietly dependable, with a titled husband and more land and money than she needed or cared about, was without the children which had been her only ambition. And unless she opened up the subject, Elizabeth could not talk to her of that single, most important fact in her life.
“I must go,” Amanda said hoarsely. “Mother will be looking for me.” And she squared her thin shoulders and turned back to the house, pulling her cape around her.
At Lake in the Clouds they found Baldwin O’Brien firmly settled into the best chair by the hearth. The high color in his cheeks and nose might have been due to the cold, but Elizabeth suspected a very different origin from the halo of scent that surrounded him and made Hannah’s nose wrinkle. He had been interrogating Liam—that much was clear from the stony look on the boy’s face—and he squinted up at this interruption as if Elizabeth were the interloper.
“Why are you alone, Liam?” she asked.
“I sent the Mohawk squaws away,” O’Brien said. “Didn’t want them here.”
Hannah quickly situated herself next to Liam, and scowled at O’Brien.
“That is most abominably rude of you,” Elizabeth said. “Who are you to direct people in and out of my home? I must ask you to leave, and immediately.”
Liam blinked at her thankfully, his mouth pressed hard together.
O’Brien scratched at his dusty beard and got up slowly. “I’m an agent of the state treasury,” he said. “Got inquiries to make.”
“Your role as an official of the government does not give you leave to harass us, or to trespass. If you had a passing acquaintance with your Constitution and Bill of Rights you would know that.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “I’m going,” he said. “But if you folks got nothing to hide, then there’s no reason to be so closemouthed.”
“My husband has spoken to you at length.”
“He’d make a good poker player. Don’t give anything away.”
“There is nothing to give away, as you put it.”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, looking around himself “It’s curious. You see this musket of mine? I had her thirty year—she went through the war with me. A fine gun, but wouldn’t I like to have one of them expensive new rifles? You know I would. Like your man carries, and that big buck, too. The thing is, I ain’t never come across Indians better outfitted, even the ones running furs out of Canada. Curious, like I said. Glass in the windows, there. And somebody’s been burning wax candles.”
Elizabeth forced herself to produce a grim smile. “What you see is nothing more than the fact that my husband married well. That is not a criminal offense, or even one to raise the interest of the treasury, as far as I understand it. Now,” she said firmly. “I suggest that you leave before he finds you here and throws you out.”
“I’m going.” O’Brien threw up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t want to give Bonner an excuse to toss another man off this mountain.”
Liam’s color came up in a rush. Elizabeth put a hand on his shoulder and pressed.
“He’s going now,” she said softly. “Steady on.”
At the door, O’Brien pulled on his cap. “I’m heading home to Albany, but I’ll be back in the spring if that gold hasn’t showed up in the meantime.”
“Pray do what you must,” Elizabeth said tightly. “And so shall we.”
After a simple meal of stewed beans and squash, when the chores had been seen to, Elizabeth sat down to read aloud in the hope that it would calm them all after an eventful and emotional day. Falling-Day and Many-Doves joined them, bringing along the last of the corn for shucking and braiding.
Aunt Merriweather had brought Elizabeth a great many books, but when she suggested them one by one there was no particular excitement in the room.
“Hamlet,” suggested Liam.
“Again? But we just finished it.”
Falling-Day agreed with Liam. “It is not often we have tales of O’seronni ghosts.”
Many-Doves and Hannah were quite willing to hear the same story again—Elizabeth thought that perhaps they could listen to it many times without tiring—and so she settled down near the hearth and began to read by the bright light of a pine knot, always with one ear turned toward the porch. Nathaniel and Runs-from-Bears had gone out to check trap lines and they had taken Will Spencer with them.
Full dark, and inside the cabin there was only the sound of the wood hissing softly in the hearth and the gentle crackling of corn husks. Elizabeth read the conversation between Hamlet and his father’s ghost, and hands slowed at their work as they were caught up in the familiar story.
There was a step at the door. Elizabeth put down the book while her heart picked up an extra beat. It seemed to her, as it always did, that the men brought the forests in with them: the quiet room was transformed suddenly by the mere fact of their size, and the energy with which they moved. Everyone was up: there were traps to be put aside for cleaning and repair, a brace of fat snow geese and one of grouse to be hung, bowls of stew and rounds of corn bread to be provided, dry moccasins to fetch, damp heads to be toweled.
Will Spencer looked truly relaxed for the first time since he had come to Paradise, and he let himself be drawn into the normal flow of things without protest. While they ate, Nathaniel and Runs-from-Bears told of their day, and the things they had seen: a moose in rut; at dusk, a flock of ravens at roost that numbered in the hundreds; a single gyrfalcon on the cliffs above the falls. Falling-Day drew in air between her teeth at this last bit of information.
“Winter pushing hard from the north,” was her explanation of such a rare sight.
“How was tea with your aunt?” Nathaniel asked Elizabeth, looking up from his bowl.
“Eventful,” Elizabeth said. And seeing Hannah ready to tell all, from Kitty’s story to what had passed with O’Brien, she said: “We have been reading this evening.”
“Oh?” said Will. “Do you read aloud, then?”
Hannah brought him the worn volume, and he looked around the table with an expression of mild surprise.
“What do you think of the Danish prince?”
This question had been directed at Many-Doves, who sat to the side with her lap full of corncobs.
“Revenge is a bitter meal,” Many-Doves said, without looking up from her work. “It is not one to linger over.”
“He takes too long to get down to business,” agreed Liam.
Falling-Day said: “He is like most of the O’seronni I have known.”
“And how is that?” Will asked, looking distinctly unsettled. “He thinks when he should act, and acts when he should think.”
No one laughed at this, because Falling-Day did not mean it to be funny.
Nathaniel left a short time later with Will to show him the way down the mountainside to the judge’s, and the rest of them returned to their work. Runs-from-Bears stretched expansively, working the muscles between his shoulders.
“How was Will in the forest?” Elizabeth asked, too curious to wait for Nathaniel’s opinion.<
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“He moves like a cat,” said Bears. “He knows how to listen.”
“Ah,” Elizabeth said, pleased with this, the highest of praise from Runs-from-Bears. “Nathaniel thinks him strange.”
“Oh, he is strange,” said Bears. “For an O’seronni.”
Falling-Day said: “There is more than one kind of man in the world.”
“And what kind of man is Will Spencer?” asked Elizabeth, intrigued.
“A rich one,” said Liam.
“That is not what my grandmother means,” Hannah chided him softly, and Liam dropped his gaze to the corn in his great red-raw hands.
“He is a dreamer,” said Many-Doves for her mother. “He lives in other worlds and comes into this one only when he has some purpose to serve.”
Falling-Day nodded. “Among the Kahnyen’kehàka he would become a shaman, if he survived at all.”
Nathaniel walked Will Spencer as far as the village, and agreed to have a drink with him in the tavern. Axel had been dozing near the hearth while his customers served themselves, but he roused himself when he heard Nathaniel’s voice.
“There’s a rumor,” he said, pouring their ale.
“There always is,” Nathaniel agreed. “Do you mean the one about Todd heading back this way?”
Axel’s teeth flashed in the lamplight. “I should have known it’d be no surprise to you, Nathaniel. His servant brought word down to Anna today, said she needed to get things in order for him. So it’s true he’s been up in Montreal all this time?”
“Actually, it was I who carried the message to his household staff,” Will volunteered. “Dr. Todd was staying with a Mr. McTavish, in Montreal. A merchant.”
Charlie LeBlanc turned from the drafts board. “The McTavish who started up the North West Company? By God, I’d like to make his acquaintance. There’s a fortune to be made up in those parts.”
“Which is exactly why Todd is spending time with him,” suggested John Glove, chewing thoughtfully on his pipe. “He’s got a keen eye for the right connection.”
“Maybe Todd will move up that way, permanent. Leave us without a doctor.” This from Ben Cameron, the brother-in-law of Asa Pierce.
Axel scratched his head thoughtfully. “Well, we done fine without him all summer. Those that passed on he couldn’t have helped much, anyway.”
There was a silence as they thought of the men they had buried in the past few months, Billy Kirby the most recent.
“We’ve had a bloody season, all right,” said Axel. “Lost our heads, some of us. In more ways than one.”
Nathaniel said: “Here’s to a peaceful winter.”
When they had raised their glasses together, Axel went off to see about a new keg, and the other men turned back to a game of draughts.
“At first I wondered what could possibly keep Elizabeth so far from civilization,” Will Spencer said to Nathaniel. It was the longest sentence he had had from him all day, and the most curious. Will would not meet Nathaniel’s eye, his gaze roaming instead over the room.
“I thought she might be disappointed in her plans to teach school. But this is a good place for her,” he went on. “She always wanted adventure in her life.”
“She’s got more than enough of that,” Nathaniel said. “Too much, maybe.”
“You are a fortunate man,” said Will Spencer.
On their way out, it occurred to Nathaniel that Spencer had made a confession of sorts, and that he would probably never hear such a personal statement again from him, should he see him every day for the rest of his life. The fact that he was setting off tomorrow loosened Nathaniel’s tongue.
“In this part of the world, we think highly of men who know how to keep their peace,” Nathaniel said to him as they stood in the small circle of lantern light at the door. “But you got most of them beat. I’ll tell you, Spencer, I’ve got no idea what goes on in that head of yours. At first I thought you had a hole inside you, but now I’m wondering if it isn’t just the eye of the storm.”
That much earned him a flicker of a smile, and a flash from the mild eyes. “Elizabeth’s imagination has found its equal,” he said. “You see before you a rich man of little use to the world. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more,” Nathaniel echoed, laughing softly. It was their last exchange of the evening.
LX
While Nathaniel was gone to Albany to see aunt Merriweather settled in for another visit with the Schuylers, the winter seemed to give up its purpose and fall back. They were thrust into inordinately warm days: suddenly it was possible again to sit on the porch without a shawl, and to go bare-legged to fetch water. The sun shone on the harvested fields where crows hitched and hobbled after the overlooked kernel of corn. A flock of snow geese on their way south for the winter settled on Half Moon Lake as if the lack of cold stole from them their ability to fly, sending the villagers running for their muskets.
Runs-from-Bears took an immense bear already settled in for the winter, and there were days of rendering fat and storing it in lengths of washed and knotted deer intestines. The smells were so strong that Elizabeth found it hard to hide her reaction, and she was waved off, as she had been sent away during the setting of soap.
“Sooner or later I shall have to learn to do this, too,” she said to Many-Doves, who only laughed at her.
“Why?” she asked. “Why should you do work that you were not raised to do, when we are here to do it?”
“Because I must do my share,” Elizabeth protested.
“You do your share,” she was told, and banished to the porch to sit in the warm sun and clean bushel after bushel of beans with Liam’s help. A quiet work, a contemplative work, when what she wanted was to be up and active in these last days of freedom from the weather. She wished for Nathaniel, but was glad of Hannah, whom she would take with her into the woods to gather the last of the beechnuts, or just to explore the mountain. Although it meant leaving an unhappy Liam behind, Hannah was always pleased to have Elizabeth to herself.
In the fifth month of her pregnancy the curve of her belly was no longer possible to overlook. The child had recently become very active, rolling and kicking when she sat down to rest, as if to make her get up and go again. Elizabeth sometimes laughed out loud at the outrageousness of it. Leaning back with her weight on her hands, she let Hannah probe gently as she had seen her grandmother do. She called the small roundness nihra’a ri’kenha, Little Brother, and chided him indulgently for his exuberance.
“Four more months,” Elizabeth said. “By then I will be waddling like a duck.”
“You do that already, when you’re tired.” And Hannah screeched and rolled away from Elizabeth’s tickling fingers.
They expected Nathaniel by the end of the week, calculating extra time for him to spend at the Schuylers’ and for buying winter provisions and supplies for the schoolhouse. He was traveling by wagon, which would add an additional two days onto the journey or more, if it rained. The afternoon before the earliest day he might be expected to return, Elizabeth found herself agitated, unable to read or concentrate on any sedentary work. Liam hobbled out to the porch behind her with the help of a length of hickory that he had whittled into a rough cane.
“I always wanted to swim in that gorge,” he told her, as they stared at the rushing water of the falls.
“Bears and Nathaniel swim in it every morning, summer and winter,” Elizabeth told him. “They say it makes them resistant to the worst weather. You could join them, once your leg is healed.”
“I can’t imagine it,” Liam said, his pale skin rising in sympathetic gooseflesh.
Hannah came shooting around the corner, her arms full of pelts.
“Where are you off to?” Liam asked, pulling her up short.
She looked back the way she had come, and Falling-Day and Many-Doves appeared leading the roan, his packsaddles piled high with provisions and small barrels strapped to either side. There was an awkward silence. It was not Elizabeth’s place to tell
Liam about the cave under the falls, but it would also be very hard to have him living at Lake in the Clouds and not share this knowledge. For the next few days they would be busy transporting supplies there, and he would soon figure out what they did not tell him.
Falling-Day said: “This is your home now.”
“I got nowhere else to go,” Liam said. “I don’t want to go anywhere else.”
There was a long pause while she examined him, and then she nodded.
“We store our provisions there—” She gestured with her chin over her shoulder.
In response to Liam’s confused look, Many-Doves said: “Behind the falls.”
Hannah hefted her load to a more comfortable position. “In case we get robbed again.”
Liam dropped his head, but he could not hide the rush of color that moved up his neck and face and made the freckles on his forehead leap into relief. Elizabeth shook her head silently at the women, and they moved off into the forest to make their way around the shoulder of the mountain. It was many minutes before Liam found his voice again.
“They don’t trust me,” he said sorrowfully. “And they’re right not to trust me. We did some terrible things, last year. It was a kind of fever in Billy, wanting them gone. It seemed important to me, too, I guess.”
Elizabeth thought for a moment. She was both encouraged by the boy’s willingness to take responsibility for actions he had known about and even participated in, and concerned that he took too much on his bony shoulders. For a moment she thought of his brother, and her anger caused her to lose focus of what Liam most needed.
When she could gather her thoughts again, she said: “I don’t know many people who are as good a judge of character as Falling-Day. Do you?”
Liam shook his head, scuffing one bare foot back and forth on the smooth boards of the porch.
“She knows how to look inside a person’s head, seems like.”
“Yes, it does seem like that. She is slow to grant her trust, and loyal once she has done so.”