by Lauren Wolk
Chapter Twenty-Eight
This time, Cate was not alone.
A boy was standing by her bed.
“Well,” she said when she saw me. She was breathing too hard for a woman lying down. “Larkin, this is the girl I told you about. The one who speaks dog.”
And this was the boy whose face I’d seen in the woods.
He was about my age but a little older and a fair bit taller. Thin, winter-pale, with hair as thick and black as a bear’s.
His clothes were ragged. Many times patched. His hands were covered with scratches, as if he’d been handling wild kittens. And his bootlaces bristled with burrs.
Even from across the room, just looking at this boy, I hurt all over.
I could feel his loneliness as if it were mine. And, in that moment, my own loneliness doubled . . . and then receded down to less than what it had been.
Which was when I learned that loneliness shared is loneliness halved.
He looked at me much as the dog had at first. Unblinking. Still.
“She’s not going to bite you,” Cate said, as if I were the dog.
“The rabbit. The fish,” he said. “That was good of you.”
I wanted to say, You’re my carver! You’re the one who made the beautiful bee that’s in my pocket right now! Right this minute! You’re the one who’s been watching me all this time!
But he was part of a secret that was still mine to keep. It would have been wrong to blurt it out, especially when it was his secret, too.
“The dog caught the rabbit,” I said. “And a slug caught the fish.”
He seemed to like that. He lifted his head up and let his shoulders settle down. “I brought her some food and did some chores a few days ago. I would have come back sooner if I’d known she was sick.”
Cate reached for his hand and gave it a little shake. “This one sneaks up to see me whenever he can.”
I wondered about the sneaks. And about the up, too. Up from where?
Cate closed her eyes. “Not from the town side of the mountain,” she said, as if she had read my mind. “From the other side.”
The side that led nowhere except to more mountains and valleys and forest.
“You new people aren’t the only ones who live on this mountain,” Cate said.
Which I had always known but hadn’t really believed: that there were people here who chose to keep their distance from us, though we were harmless. Although, come to think of it, a person might say that we had kept our distance, too.
And a person might not know we were harmless.
Except this one did. This boy who had been leaving me gifts for such a long time.
Surely he knew that I was a girl he could trust.
But if that were true, why had he never come closer? Why had he not just come straight up to me, this lonely boy who could make a knife sing? Why had he not just said, “Hello. My name is Larkin. I live on the other side of the mountain.”
And that would have been that.
I turned to Cate. “I figured there were others, somewhere else. But nobody comes down past us to get to the river,” I said. “Or to get to the road into town. We’d know if they did.”
Cate frowned. “There’s more than one way down a mountain, or up one, for that matter. More than one way across a river. More than one road into town. And more than one town, too.”
In my mind, I flew up like a turkey buzzard to circle above the hills and valleys, looking at them with a new eye. “But why not come down to meet us?”
I was really asking Larkin, though I looked at Cate, who said, “Would you want to traipse down a slope you used to know, tree by tree, brook by brook, that’s someone else’s now?”
I felt bad about that—the idea that I had taken something that didn’t belong to me—but I had no good answer.
Larkin stood by, watching us. I read a little bit of sorry in his eyes.
“But that’s not your fault,” Cate said, sighing. “So let’s let that be. Did you find some honey?”
“I’m not sure find is the right word. More like, did I manage to collect it even though I got stung and some bees died and the rest of them will probably starve to death now.”
She seemed to like that. “Spunk,” she said, nodding. But then her face changed. “I am sorry about the bees. But I need their honey as much as they do.”
“Why do you need honey?” Larkin asked her. “For your tea?”
As if she would have sent a stranger to get honey for sweetness alone. To ruin a hive for such a small reason. And I hoped this boy wasn’t the kind of person who needed to be told everything.
“I hurt my leg,” she said. “It’s festering.”
He frowned at her. “You said you were sick. Why didn’t you tell me about your leg?”
“I just did. And the flies have been talking about it all along.”
“I thought they were just spring-waking.”
“And you didn’t want to say ‘Why is your cabin full of flies?’” She sighed tiredly. “Such a lad. Such manners. Now you can help her with the rest of it.”
Larkin turned to me. “What’s your name?”
Cate made a face. “Oh, mercy. Where are my manners?”
Again, talk of manners. So odd in this rough place.
“My name is Ellie.” Which he had to know. Had to have heard my mother calling me through the trees.
Larkin nodded. Almost bowed a little. If he’d had a hat, he might have doffed it. More good manners.
“I’ll help you with the honey,” he said, his face serious.
“You’d better have a look first.” Cate plucked at the edge of the blanket that covered her legs. “It’s going to be a terrible business.”
Larkin lifted the blanket away and gasped at the sight of the maggots churning and rolling on the wound. A smell rose from it.
“Oh,” he said. It was part groan, as if he were the one who was hurt. And I knew, from that sound alone, that he was not one of those people who needed to be told everything.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“It’s awful bad,” Larkin said when he saw the disaster of Cate’s leg.
Honesty. Good manners and honesty. I liked those qualities in a person.
“Oh, now, you know better than that. There are things still to be tried,” Cate said. She turned to me. “I’ve been teaching Larkin about healing. This and that. Now and then. Else it will all be wasted when I go.”
She closed her eyes, clearly worn out by all the talk.
“First we clean it,” Larkin said, swallowing. “Then the honey. Then we take care of the fever.”
I was glad to have an order to things.
It had been just hours since I’d found this place, this woman, her wound. If I’d had an order to this day, it might have sent me back to bed instead of out into such a surprising world:
Eat breakfast.
Feed Maisie.
Find bee-gift on trail.
See wild dog on path to river.
Go fishing with Samuel.
Build fire.
Get bee stung.
Learn that Quiet isn’t mine anymore.
Put snake in Daddy’s bed.
Climb mountain.
Find dog again.
Find the hag.
Make fire.
Cook rabbit and trout.
Feed Cate and Captan.
Go back down-mountain.
Look for Samuel and Quiet.
Feed potion to Daddy.
Get honey.
Get stung some more.
Climb mountain again.
Meet Larkin.
And now there was more to come, all in this one same day:
Clean terrible wound.
Pack wit
h honey.
And surely other things I could not predict.
But it all felt oddly perfect, so we lit the lamps as the day went dark and washed our hands with tallow soap and spring water. Then we pulled Cate’s blanket down to her feet and stood staring at her poor leg.
My mother had taught me not to say the Lord’s name in vain, so I didn’t. But I did send a prayer skyward before I took up my spoon, and Larkin his, and we began to carefully scrape the maggots off Cate’s ruined skin, tapping our spoons against the lip of the jar so the maggots would fall, like dollops of oatmeal, to collect in the bottom.
We breathed through our mouths as we worked, the smell of her leg sweet and sour both.
Even Captan retreated to a far corner, though he watched us steadily from there, his eyes like small moons in the lamplight.
When we had removed the last of the maggots, I used my spoon to scrape away the pus welling up out of the holes that the fisher cat had made.
I decided that I would never again be able to eat custard without thinking of that pus.
“What does it look like?” Cate asked through her clenched teeth.
Larkin held the lantern close and peered at it.
“I need to cut you to get the honey in there.”
She nodded. “Clean the knife first,” she said, her whole body rigid, her feet arching with pain and the thought of more to come.
It didn’t make much sense to clean the knife when her leg was already festering, but I didn’t want to add insult to injury, and being clean was almost never a bad thing.
I took out my knife. “I’ll put it in the fire.”
Which I did, all of us quiet while the flames burned it clean.
Then Cate turned her face to the wall, tucked her little doll up between her shoulder and her ear, and waited for us to begin.
I handed the knife to Larkin. I could have done the cutting. I thought I could have done the cutting. But she had told him to do it, not me, and I confess that I was happy to let him do it. And not happy at the same time.
Larkin held the knife over the wound for a long moment, blinking and breathing hard, and then he made the cut with one hard, slow sweep, Cate jerking only a little, groaning only a little, the blood sweeping down as if Larkin had pulled a set of long red curtains across her leg.
When we pulled apart the edges of the wound, we could see that the infection had worked its way down into her muscle but not too far. I hoped not too far.
I took the honey jar from my pack and went out into the clearing, unscrewed the lid, tipped it quickly off, and waited, at a safe distance, for the trapped bees to fly away. When they did, I took the jar back inside.
Then, while Larkin held the wound open, I squeezed the comb like a wax sponge until the wound was full of honey. Then we pushed the wound closed with our fingers, the honey oozing up and gluing the seam mostly shut. For bandages, I cut the sleeves from my shirt—which my father had made for me with his own hands, which I hated to ruin, which I chose to ruin—and used them to bind up the wound, to keep it closed.
Oddly, it was only after we had finished, after the part that was hardest for someone awake, that Cate fainted. It was as if she had managed to be strong while she had to be strong but gave in to weakness as soon as she could.
And I felt much the same as we finished our work and finally sat down on the floor to rest.
Chapter Thirty
“We’ll keep them, just in case, though they’ll turn to flies soon,” Larkin said, peering into the maggot jar at the terrible little nurses in their white uniforms. How odd that creatures so mixed up with mess could be so clean and tidy. “We can always get more if we need them later on.”
“How do we do that?” I asked, watching Cate’s face as she slept. I hoped she was dreaming about something pretty.
“We’ll kill something—a rabbit maybe—and wait for the flies to find it. Lay their eggs. Wait for the eggs to hatch. It takes no time at all.”
I imagined that. Cate, alone on the mountain, doing that.
“She said those weren’t her tools.” I nodded toward the workbench.
“They aren’t,” he said. It wasn’t a sad thing to say, but it sounded sad.
“Then why are they here?”
He didn’t answer for a long moment. “They were her son’s.”
“And he . . . ?”
“He died.” Larkin looked away.
“Oh. Now I know why she didn’t like it when I heated up a chisel.”
He looked back at me curiously. “Why did you do that?”
“I thought I might try to kill the infection.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You were going to burn her?”
“She was unconscious when I found her. I didn’t know the maggots were there on purpose.” I thought back to how it had felt to stand in that dim cabin with no one to teach me what to do. “I figured I would burn the cut clean.”
He opened his eyes wide. “Do you think you could have done that?”
I lifted one shoulder. “I don’t know. But I meant to try.”
He seemed to like that. But he said, “Burning can lead to infection. You shouldn’t try that unless someone’s bleeding to death.”
I thought back to my father, burning the cut on his hand. I remembered how he treated it afterward with vinegar. “I’m glad she woke up when she did. So, what now?”
Larkin used his knife to stab a hole in the lid and then put the jar of maggots on the shelf next to the one with the blood-fat tick. From the books on Cate’s desk, he chose one as thick as three Bibles. “She likes this one.”
I carried a lantern to the desk. “Health and Longevity,” I read. The cover was chapped and raw with handling.
“You know how to read?” he said.
I nodded. “Of course.” But then I realized that not everyone had started life in a town. “I went to school before we came to live here,” I said. “And my mother was a teacher, so we still have lessons every day.”
Larkin stared at me. “Every day?”
I nodded, though lately I’d had lessons of another kind. “You can come down and get some whenever you want.”
He thought about that. “If she’s teaching you lessons, why did you say she was a teacher?”
I thought back. “Is, then.”
He made no answer except to turn again to the book, which he opened to a section near the end. He turned the pages slowly, his lips moving, until he stopped and said, “‘Poisoned wounds.’” He stopped again and read to himself, then aloud: “. . . ‘wounds sometimes received by butchers, cooks and fish-dealers, who handle—’” He paused. I looked over his shoulder.
“Putrefying,” I said.
“. . . ‘putrefying animal matter,’” he continued. “‘Such wounds are particularly—’” He paused again.
“Virulent,” I said.
He looked at me. “I’m not a very good reader.” He tipped his head at Cate. “She’s been teaching me.”
“It will get easier, the more you do it.”
He nodded. Turned back to the book. “‘A wound of this . . . character should be thoroughly washed,’” he read, “‘opened and swabbed with pure carbolic acid, then washed with’”—he skipped a word or two—“‘mercury solution, and wet antiseptic dressing. Bites by animals should be so treated, the human bite being one of the worst.’” He took a deep breath, as if he’d climbed something steep.
I thought about how snippy Samuel became if I helped him with a tough word. “I hope you don’t mind that I helped you with that.”
“Why would I mind?”
I shrugged. “My little brother thinks he should already be able to do things he doesn’t know how to do.”
Larkin frowned. “Why would he think that?”
To which I had no answer. I looked again at the book.
“What does it say about fever?”
“I already know enough about fever.”
“But I don’t,” I replied.
So he turned the pages one by one, past drawings of how to bandage and carry a wounded person, to a section called “Inflammation.”
We read the section together. “We don’t have what they say to use,” he said. “But she taught me about willow bark, and there’s some in that jar there.” He pointed. “I’ll build up the fire. You fetch some water from the spring. We’ll make her a tea.”
“And what do we use instead of carbolic acid or . . . those other things in the book? In case the honey doesn’t work?”
He tipped his head again. “Why would you worry about what might not happen? The honey is good for now, and we can brew witch hazel for cleaning her. And if we need something else, we’ll try something else.”
I thought of my father. I thought of the elses I had tried and the others that were waiting their turn.
Larkin was reading more of the book, Captan watching Cate like a mother, while I went out into the night to tap the spring, so I was alone when I saw that the stars had also come to be with us. They leaned down as if they thought I might have something to say. Or as if they did.
But the wind had a louder voice, and it told me to hurry now. To heat some water for willow bark tea. To wake Cate so she could drink it. To make enough to take down the mountain for my father, though he had no fever.
Willow bark was one of the elses I would try.
“What else?” I asked the stars, but they were silent on the matter.
“Star Peak,” I said to them. “That’s what this mountaintop is called now.”
And I felt I had a perfect right to name it, as long as everyone else did, too. Like the river. Like the mountain itself, which someone else had named Echo, which was also Ellie’s Mountain. Which was also Larkin’s. Which was also Cate’s. And my father’s. And Samuel’s, too.
But I didn’t think my mother or Esther would want their names on any part of this mountain. And it made me sick and sad to think so.
We would need something else to bind us back to whole. All of us. To make them want to be where they were. To wake my father. To make me understand how I could be theirs and they mine and yet none of us the same, me least of all.