by Lauren Wolk
This time, it spoke to me about my father.
Chapter Seven
“How’s our Maisie?” my mother asked as we went back into the cabin and found her still in the kitchen, grinding dried corn into meal. We’d have johnnycakes for lunch and maybe the last of the eggs.
“She’s tired,” I said. “But the puppies are all fine.”
Samuel took off his boots. “They’re ugly as bugs.”
“Not for long.” My mother had to raise her voice over the grumble of the mill. “In a week or so they’ll open their eyes and fluff up.”
My back to them both, I worked the pump until I had a pitcher brimming with cold well water.
My mother didn’t pay me any mind as I carried the pitcher past her, out of the kitchen toward the little room where we kept our basins and soap and the big metal tub we used for weekly baths. The floor had a drain to wash it all down the hill when we were done, though sometimes it let a snake come up . . . until Esther’s screaming would chase it back down again.
But I went on past that washroom and carried the pitcher to a door beyond it, closed as always.
Inside, I found my father not asleep but something deeper. More constant. As he had been for months now.
There was a terrible pink scar on the top of his head where the tree had felled him as he had felled it.
After the accident, Mr. Peterson had gone straightaway to fetch a doctor, though it had taken a whole day before he arrived on horseback, Mr. Peterson leading the way.
The doctor was as clean as any man I’d ever seen. Tidy, even after the rough trip from town. In a black suit and hat. His face as round and shiny as a dinner plate. He went straight to the bed where my father lay and examined him carefully, pricking his feet with a needle, listening to his chest. Holding smelling salts beneath his nose.
Then, “Coma,” he said. Which wasn’t a word we knew. “He might wake up tomorrow or never again. Can’t tell if he’ll be all right. Can’t tell much of anything except he’s hurt and his body has decided that rest is what he needs most. So rest he’ll have, until he either gets better or doesn’t.”
My mother and we children had stood in a huddle listening.
I remember trying to think of a question that wouldn’t have a frightening answer.
I remember failing.
I remember watching as my mother picked up the mandolin my father had bought for her as a wedding gift. I remember how she cradled it in her arms as if it were a fourth child. And then she put it aside, took her mother’s silver locket from around her neck, and handed it to the doctor as payment for what he had not done.
After he went away, I remember trying to find a way to explain what it had been like when that tree fell, what my father and I had tried to do.
I remember failing.
And so I had held my tongue.
* * *
—
We had learned, since then, how to care for my father. How to prop him up and pour soup slowly, carefully, into his mouth, just drops at a time so he wouldn’t choke. How to tuck his chin down close to his chest and stroke his cheek and massage his throat to help him swallow.
How to turn him, again and again, in an endless battle with the horrible, leaking bedsores that came from lying still for so long. Esther always took Samuel outside to play when I helped my mother clean those sores with vinegar. We couldn’t know if my father felt the terrible pain of that acid on his raw flesh, but I worried that he did, though he was not the one who cried.
Most of all, we learned how to make his little room into a world apart.
As soon as there were spring flowers in the world beyond the cabin, there were flowers in my father’s room, too. Jonquils and crocuses and snowdrops in little vases everywhere.
My mother had dragged in the gramophone, the one impossible thing she had insisted on keeping from our town house, the horse struggling to haul it up the mountain on a sled, and she played it for my sleeping father as she once had, though there’d been no dancing since we’d come to the woods to live.
When I asked why she no longer played her mandolin, not once since nearly giving it to the doctor in trade, she answered by sighing and shaking her head. Laying her hand flat on her chest. And I didn’t ask again.
Before the accident, Esther had read to me and Samuel at bedtime each night. Now, she read to our father instead, though Samuel and I lay at the foot of the bed and listened. She read nothing sad. Only happy stories.
Samuel’s part was to lie next to our father and tell him about the day. Funny episodes filled with dog-play and mountain business: a moose stranding Mrs. Anderson in the privy; Mr. Peterson, with only a weak lantern for light, mistaking a skunk for Dinky, his mouser. Things like that. Harmless. Gentle.
I had always done likewise, taking nothing into that room but light and loveliness, all of us sworn to tempt my father back into the life he’d had before. The life we’d had before he’d been hurt.
But I brought him something different on the day when Quiet was born.
Sun slanted through the window by the bed to light his thin, still face.
I watched him breathing.
And then I dumped the pitcher of cold water on his head and chest and waited for him to revive, as Quiet had.
“Mother!” Esther shrieked from the doorway, dropping her book and rushing to the bed.
My mother flew in behind her.
Saw me with the empty pitcher hanging from my hand.
Saw my father drenched, the wet bedclothes glued to his bones.
“Ellie!” she cried. “What’s the matter with you?”
She rushed to the bed and pulled my father into her arms, warming him against her chest, while Esther tugged away the wet bedding behind him . . .
. . . and I stood frozen in place, riveted by the sight of my father’s right hand.
It was twitching, just slightly.
Chapter Eight
“They aren’t the same,” my mother said when my father was once again dry and the room once again a place apart. “The puppy . . . what happened just now . . . they’re not the same.”
“But why not? I saw his hand twitch. The water woke him up a little!”
I knew how tired my mother was. I knew how much she wanted my father back. And I knew that it vexed her if anyone shook what she tried so hard to make calm. But I was sick and tired of calm. “He moved, Mother. For the first time since he got hurt.”
I wanted her to be hopeful. To say, at least, “Maybe. It’s possible.” But instead she took me by the shoulders and said, “A body does things with or without our say-so, Ellie. Your father’s hand twitched because you made it cold. That’s all.”
But I wasn’t convinced.
“What if he’s trapped in there and we could give him a way out?”
She looked half sad, half impatient. “We do that every day,” she said. “Every day.”
She meant by speaking softly and reading to him. The feel of his small son tucked up against him. My hand in his.
“All we give him are lullabies,” I said, though I didn’t want to make things worse. “Why would he wake up for those?”
She took her hands from my shoulders and stepped back. “Go apologize to him,” she said.
Which made no sense. If he was too deeply asleep for cold water to slap him awake, how could he hear me say I was sorry?
And that, right there, was the first time I understood how complicated hope could be.
But all I said was “Sorry.” Because I was. Sorry that she had lost so much. That she might lose even more.
“Say it to him,” she said, turning away.
I bumped into Esther as she bustled out of his bedroom, her arms full of wet bedclothes.
“That was a terrible thing to do,” she said. “Do you want him to get sick?”
Which I ignored. None of us wanted him sick.
But sick he was.
And after months of watching him lie there, I was suddenly convinced I could do something about it.
My mother would have called that pride.
My sister: stupidity.
My brother: silliness.
But it was my father whose opinion mattered most.
“Daddy,” I whispered into his ear, up close, though a sourness had replaced the good, clean sweat, woodsmoke, dusty dog smell he’d had before. “Mother says I have to apologize to you, so here: This is my apology.” I paused and took a long breath. “I’m sorry if that water was cold.”
But, like Esther had said before, if was quite a word.
“I’m sorry,” I amended, “that the water was so cold. But I wanted you to feel it.”
I told him about the puppy. About Quiet waking in the cold water.
“You felt it, too, didn’t you?” I asked, but he didn’t move again. Not even a little.
I leaned away from him, looked toward the empty door, leaned back. “We’re in a bad way without you, Daddy. Mother is tired all the time and never laughs. Never. Hasn’t sung or played her mandolin since you got hurt. Samuel acts like a kid, but he’s as sad as a stump. I can tell. And Esther thinks she’s got to be grown up all at once.” I paused and gathered myself.
“And I want to burn down every tree on the mountain.” And I did. Though I didn’t. I loved trees. Even the dead ones. Even the one that had hurt my father as it fell. “It’s terrible without you, Daddy. We need you back.”
It wasn’t a lullaby.
No more lullabies from me.
“And you’re the only one who knows it wasn’t my fault,” I said, my voice breaking.
Although that wasn’t really true.
I knew it, too.
And maybe someone else, watching from the woods.
But none of that would matter, if he woke up.
When he woke up.
Before I left the room, I kissed my father on his head. On the scar there.
It felt like a map against my lips.
So I followed it.
* * *
—
For lunch, my mother and Esther and Samuel ate johnnycakes and eggs fried in butter.
I ate gruel.
“You need to learn a thing or two,” my mother said, though there wasn’t much bite in her bark. “Next time you have a wild idea, maybe you’ll think twice.”
“Or thrice,” Esther said. Every hair on her head was in place. Her shirt was buttoned at the cuffs. She was only three years older than me, but she acted like she lived in an older world. A smarter world. One where everything followed the rules, though I knew there was no such place.
So I ate my gruel in silence, and I washed the dishes without complaint. If that was the price for heeding the flame in my chest, it was a small one.
Then I took the table scraps—which we’d all left deliberately on our plates, hungry as we were—out to Maisie and fed them to her bit by bit while she lay in the straw, the puppies again at her milk. She was as thirsty and hungry as they were, and she licked my hand over and over until every trace of the food was gone. And then she drank the milk I’d brought her, as they drank hers.
Slowly, slowly, I reached out toward the puppies, and she did not object as I touched their tiny heads, lingering over Quiet, who pressed back briefly against my hand as if to say, I’m busy now but just wait. I’ll be along soon enough.
Then I left the shed and walked up the path and, after a bit, into the woods, through a hemlock grove so full of shadows that almost nothing grew between the trunks of the old trees, the deep layer of dead needles underfoot like the soft coat of a great, sprawling animal that didn’t mind the weight of me. The feel of my boots on its brown back.
And before long I came to the spot where I did my best thinking.
It was an old place, left behind by people who’d come long before us, built a cabin, and abandoned it, so now nothing remained but a big hole lined with granite blocks and boulders, a caved-in well, and wood rotten and pocked by bugs and birds, weather and wear.
When I put my hand on those boulders, I could feel how much they missed the steady weight of a cabin above them. The idea that they had been of use.
And when I touched the soft timbers that had once stood firm against blizzards and hail, I could feel them dreaming of the time when they were stronger than storms.
That place made me sad and lonely, but when I climbed down to sit in the bowl of that ruined home, cupped in that granite hand, sheltered by the trees growing up in it, I felt strong and able, too. A mountain girl. Smart. Quick. On my way to wise.
I sometimes found old bottles there. Shards of rusted metal. Once, the head of a doll, its eyes forever open, still blue. Signs of life long gone. All of them wistful for what had been.
And I had found one of the gifts waiting for me there, too—the fat chickadee—perched on the stone where I myself often perched.
On the day Quiet was born, I sat among the tumbled boulders and slowly, carefully followed the map of my father’s scar, through every kind of cure I knew, and considered how they might help him wake.
I thought about what the balsam fir gave us for head colds, sores and cuts, and plenty more.
Jewelweed for ivy poison.
Barberry, in winter, so we never had scurvy.
Mustard plaster for clear lungs.
Mud for bee stings and spider bites.
The twin nurses—onion and garlic—for what’s coiled in a gut, and vinegar, as well, for the gut and cuts, too, when they festered.
I would try all of these, and more besides.
When I thought of the jonquils by my father’s bed and how they had failed to rouse him, I considered their opposite, and I came up with a plan that would surely earn me a week of nothing but gruel. Maybe worse.
When I thought of the songs that my mother played on the gramophone and how they had failed to rouse him, I considered sounds of my own, and I came up with a plan that would surely mean a mouthful of fresh horseradish . . . which gave me yet another idea to try.
Beyond that, I couldn’t think another thought. My stomach was sore with such ideas. I didn’t relish the thought of upsetting my mother. And the prospect of giving my father pain made me hurt, too. But the flame that lit my way felt true to me. And brave.
That’s what my father needed me to be.
That’s what I needed me to be, too.
So that’s what I would be.
Chapter Nine
“The venison,” my mother said when I came back to the cabin and found her in the yard, hanging wash.
I’d forgotten.
“Samuel!” I called.
We waited for his answering yell, which came from below the cabin where the brook crossed the slope and paused long enough to make a shallow pool where crayfish sometimes paddled foolishly into my brother’s waiting hands.
“See that you come straight back after the Petersons’, Ellie.”
There were two places my father had told us to fear. One was the river, which sometimes raged after a heavy rain and was, at all times, apt to drown things. The other was the part of the mountain above where the families lived. “Bears,” he often said. “And coyotes. And steep rock faces. And ledges that drop off into nothing. So don’t wander up too far, you hear me?”
And we did hear him, and we did obey, especially since there was a warning in his voice of something else besides bears and broken bones, though I didn’t know what that might be.
I knew that beyond the river was the road into town and beyond that more people than I could count, and buildings and bridges and trains and much, much else.
Beyond the mountaintop? Other mountains, old forests, caves and caverns, and more
of what I didn’t know than what I did.
But here, on this mountainside above the river, there was some of each. Some tame. Some wild. Some of what I knew. Some of what I did not.
And here, on this mountainside, among the families, in broad daylight, with two of us together—Samuel making enough noise for ten boys—there was little chance of a bear or coyote meddling with us.
But we’d be carrying a sack of fresh meat, which would be like hoisting a big come-and-get-it sign in the language of carnivores.
So, “Straight back,” I said, looking her in the eye, nothing soft about either of us.
I was the first to look away. I knew I was right about those lullabies. But that didn’t make her wrong.
I picked up a tangle of wet laundry and shook it out: my father’s bed shirt. It was marbled with brown from where his sores had bled.
I pinned it on the line.
“What?” Samuel called as he came out of the trees into the yard, faceless in the shadow of his hat but all Samuel, still, in the set of his shoulders, the way he pumped his arms as he climbed the tilted yard. He was, in many ways, my father, cast small.
“We’re going to the Petersons’ now,” I called.
“Says you,” Samuel muttered, but we heard him.
“Says me,” my mother said, swinging her head around to look at him.
“Well,” Samuel said, “I’m going up first.” And he charged past us, past the cabin, toward the path to the Petersons’.
He did that a lot. Charged through life without paying much attention to where he was going.
“Like a little bull.” My mother shook her head.
Finally, she’d said something beyond the barest of bones.
And I wanted to do the same. To tell her about the treasures I was hiding on the shelf in the woodshed. How lonely I was. What had really happened on the day my father got hurt.
Instead, I nodded. “Like a bull. Or a puppy.” Which led to “When can I hold Quiet again?”