Echo Mountain

by Lauren Wolk

  “Almost like we did,” I said, thoughtful, though the house we’d left behind was no longer ours.

  “A season before you.” He gave me a sad little smile. “And not quite as you did. She was from these mountains. From this one. And she came to us, who had made our home here because we wanted to. Not because we had to.”

  I looked at my boots. “You said it before. How hard it was to watch us in the beginning. How sad that was.”

  He nodded. “But it was different for her. For us. When she first arrived, everything was fine. Everything was really good.” He looked at nothing in particular. “But then, a few weeks before you came here to live, my daddy took sick.” He swallowed hard. “I don’t know what it was. Something terrible. And he was dead before we could do anything about it.”

  I waited.

  “My mother thought . . . well, she didn’t see how my grandmother, who had so much learning and had been a nurse and lived with a doctor for all those years, could be so . . . useless.”

  I thought about Esther. How much she needed someone to blame for what had happened to our father. I looked around the little cabin. “And Cate ended up here, by herself?”

  Larkin nodded. “It was just awful after my daddy died. My mother was like a wild woman.” He shook his head. “Three years it’s been, and she’s still not right.”

  I thought about that—how Larkin had lost his father just weeks before he stood in the trees and watched us come to live on the mountain. Watched our pitiful start. Listened to Samuel bleating like a lamb in the cold, gray time before the wilderness greened again.

  “You carved that little lamb for Samuel when your father had just died,” I said, wanting to touch his wonderful hair, his battered face.

  “I did,” he said. “But for me as much as him.”

  “And treasures for her, too,” I said, nodding at the tiny fawn on the windowsill. The little squirrel. The perfect mouse.

  When he looked at Cate, his face softened. “I think about how my grandmother lived before she came to us. In a fine, big house in town. And now . . .” He looked around the sad little cabin. “But she won’t leave me.”

  I looked at his black eye. The sadness in it. “And your own mother doesn’t want you coming up here?”

  He shook his head.

  “Just because your grandma is teaching you to read?”

  “That.” He sighed. “And other things, too.”

  I tried to put myself in his mother’s shoes. They were far too small. But I knew more than I had before. “She’s worried you’ll go off to school and become a doctor and she’ll never see you again.”

  He chewed his lip. “I think so.”

  We looked at each other.

  “And be useless,” I said.

  “Hard to know how she can feel that way.” Larkin wiped a clot of muck from the corner of his eye. Cleared his throat. “I keep hoping she’ll get better. But I don’t know what to do about that.”

  At which Cate turned from the wall.

  I wondered how much she’d heard.

  She reached for Larkin, who went to her.

  “None of that is your fault,” she said, and I knew she’d heard it all.

  Thoughts of my own father, my own mother, rose up like bread. “I should be getting home.”

  Cate nodded. “You’ll do your father good, being there.”

  I turned to go.

  She said, “You never said how he ended up in a coma.”

  And I didn’t much want to tell the story now. But after what Larkin had just told me . . .

  “He was cutting down a tree. It hit him on the way down.” I didn’t bother telling them the rest. It had nothing to do with how long my father had been asleep.

  “Where did the tree hit him?”

  “In the garden,” I replied. “We were—”

  “No, not that where,” she said impatiently. “Where on his head did it hit him?”

  “Oh. Here.” I tapped the top of my head.

  She nodded. “He may be right as rain after a while. The body is sometimes its own best doctor. But you may need to teach him how to talk again. And walk. And he may be . . . different now. Not quite who he was before. And he may not remember some things.”

  Four mays, and only one of them good. The other three were a mountain range I did not want to climb.

  “How do you know that?” I said in a voice far too small for any business involving mountains.

  “Larkin just told you. I was a nurse.” She frowned thoughtfully. “The brain’s like the world. Every part of it has a way of doing things. But you won’t know what you know until you know it,” she said. “Your father will come back to himself slowly, and along the way you’ll find out how to help him.”

  “Like with your leg?” I said. “We just wait and see and figure out what to do when the time comes?”

  She nodded. “Exactly right.” She pushed away her blanket and laid her hand on the bandage. “It’s not too hot. And my fever is gone. So we’ll let it be for now.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow and help you with a bath, if you like,” I said. “Larkin is going to do your wash now, and I told him to leave the water after. I’ll come back and add some hot when you’re ready.”

  If I’d wanted to surprise Cate, I’d succeeded. I could tell from the look on her face. But she didn’t say a word.

  Larkin said, “You can rest in a chair while I change your bedding.”

  Which made Cate gaze at him fondly. “You’ll need a good bit of water, and hot, for the wash.”

  “I’ll get some going.”

  “And I’ll bring bread when I come back,” I said. “Mother makes good corn bread.”

  “Which she won’t want to share with an old witch like me,” Cate said, some thistles in her voice.

  I thought she might be wrong.

  Now that I had a story to share with my mother, she was sure to find in it a reason to be generous with what little we had.

  Especially now that my father was awake, and her own wound surely healing.

  * * *

  —

  When I got back home, I stopped in at the woodshed and found the puppies all back in their nest and sleeping alongside Maisie, who scrambled to her feet when she saw me.

  “Are you a very fine girl?” I said, rubbing her ears and kissing her on the head. “Are you my very fine girl?” She answered with a whimper, her tongue just kissing the tip of my nose before she returned to the nest and curled up again with her litter.

  “Wake up soon, Quiet,” I whispered. “We don’t have much time left.”

  But with my father awake again, I found myself hoping that other things might have changed as well.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  I expected the cabin to be as I’d left it.

  My mother smiling again. Singing again as she worked. Esther on her way back to kindness. Samuel that much farther from the boy who had chased a rabbit into such long, sad trouble.

  But when I went through the door, I found the kitchen empty, the cabin quiet but for the sound of Esther’s voice.

  I followed it to find everyone clustered around my father as he lay sleeping.

  Samuel was curled up beside him, my mother by the window, watching. Both of them listening as Esther read a book out loud.

  Which was when I began to be afraid again.

  My mother wasn’t hushing anyone.

  She wasn’t telling them to let my father get his rest.

  And the look on her face had no song in it.

  “‘Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off,’” Esther read, “‘and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand
.’”

  I knew that book. I knew that story. The Velveteen Rabbit. One of my favorites. It brought to mind the little doll clutched in Cate’s hand.

  When my mother saw me standing in the doorway, she let out a breath and said, “It’s high time you came in.” Esther stopped reading, and everyone turned to look at me. “No reason on earth why you should want to be anywhere but here.”

  And it was, truly, at first glance, a scene from a storybook, my family all together, their cheeks rosy with the warmth they’d breathed into the little room. All except my father, who was still as pale and thin as a parsnip.

  And he was still sleeping.

  I wanted to tell them about where I’d been and how much Cate had liked the stew and how she was Larkin’s grandmother and all the rest, but I wanted to be part of this story, too. The one right here in this room.

  It would take a lot of work to be a character in both stories without becoming two characters. Or one, split in half.

  But it was work I could do, so I would do it, even if I felt tangled and torn along the way.

  For a long time, I’d thought that people simply were who they were and became who they became. But I didn’t think that anymore.

  “Hasn’t he woken up again?” I asked.

  My mother shook her head. “Not yet.”

  I went to the side of the bed, looked at my father’s still face, and said, “Wake up, Daddy.”

  But he didn’t wake. Or move at all.

  I looked over my shoulder. Met my mother’s eyes.

  I reached out and shook my father by the shoulder.

  It was like shaking a bag of seed.

  “Ellie, don’t,” my mother said. “Let him be.”

  “Daddy, wake up,” I said again.

  But he didn’t.

  My mother left the room.

  Esther started to read again. “‘“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. “The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”’”

  Which was the only thing I wanted in that moment. For some things to last for always. And other things to end.

  * * *

  —

  I found my mother in the kitchen, at the stove, doing nothing.

  “He’ll wake up again,” I said. “I know he will.”

  She turned to look at me.

  Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that?” she said, coming to finger the blood splattered on the jacket I was wearing. “Is that blood?”

  “It’s—”

  “Take it off,” she said roughly, working the buttons free. “Take it off this minute.”

  Which I did, quick as I could.

  She snatched it away and thrust it under the pump, drenching it with cold water again, working tallow soap into it, her hands turning red as she worked.

  I didn’t say, It will come clean. I didn’t say, Daddy will make me another one. I didn’t say, I can learn to stitch ivy like that.

  I thought of Cate as she smelled the hot chisel I’d meant to use on her wound. The alarm on her face. The relief when I hung it straight to cool.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, as tangled up as I’d ever been, and went out into the yard to look at the sky and try to know what I couldn’t know.

  The sun was slipping down the far side of the day, and the shadows were slowly unspooling like black ribbons across the yard.

  I wanted to follow them.

  I wanted to stay where I was.

  But I found myself in a third place altogether when Larkin’s mother suddenly appeared through the trees.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  She was a small woman, which should have made me feel better, but she was like the centipedes that sometimes raced in a frenzy across the cabin floor, their legs like brittle hair, so fast and shivery that I’d leap in terror at the sight of them.

  “Stay away from my boy,” she said.

  And I yelled, “Mother!” as loud as I could. And then again, “Mother!” more loudly still.

  Maisie appeared at the door of the woodshed, growling.

  Samuel came out into the yard.

  He took one look at the woman and seemed to be split, as I had, between wanting to stay and wanting to go.

  I loved him more than ever when he scampered to my side and took hold of my hand.

  “Who’s that?” Samuel said.

  “That’s Larkin’s mother.”

  He peered at her. “I don’t like Larkin’s mother.”

  “Where’s your own mother at?” she said.

  “Mother!” I called again, more loudly.

  And she came through the cabin door all at once.

  Esther, who followed behind her, took one look at the situation and stopped short, wavering in place, like a dress pinned to a line.

  My mother didn’t slow for one moment.

  “And what’s this about?” she said firmly, taking her place at my side.

  But just then Larkin came down the path, too, yelling, “Mother! Mother, wait!”

  We all stayed in place, like game pieces on a board.

  Larkin slowed as he came into the yard.

  I tried to see him through my mother’s eyes, this lean boy with his dark, dark hair and his worn-out clothes, and his half-this-half-that face. From one side: just a boy. From the other: a boy hurt.

  But we were looking at him straight on, and he was both of those things and more besides. “I’m sorry if she scared you,” he said. “Mother, what are you doing?”

  “Who’s that boy?” Samuel said.

  “That’s Larkin,” I said.

  “I didn’t scare them,” his mother said, though she had.

  But, up close, I could see that this was no centipede.

  Looking at Larkin’s mother was like looking at a broken bowl. Jagged. A woman in pieces.

  And I didn’t see how she could ever be whole again.

  Or hold anything properly ever again.

  Not with that look on her face.

  As on the mountaintop, I could feel the mad-sorrow coming off her like a stink.

  “I don’t know you,” my mother said. “I’m Evelyn.”

  “You don’t need to know me. Or my boy either.”

  My mother looked at Larkin’s battered face. “Did you do that to him?”

  “Of course not. He did that himself, paying no attention to what he was doing. But she’s the one who cut him.”

  My mother turned to me.

  “I only let off the blood so he could see better!”

  “That blood,” my mother said. “On your jacket.” She put her hand on her forehead. “Esther, take Samuel into the cabin.” To me, she said. “Is that something else the hag taught you?”

  “No,” I said carefully. “Miss Cate taught me to do that. And how to fill a wound with honey. And how to use maggots to eat away dead flesh. And how to make a potato poultice. And—”

  “What’s a poultice?” Samuel said over his shoulder as Esther dragged him toward the cabin.

  “All right,” my mother said, holding up her hand. “That’s more than enough.” She turned to Larkin’s mother. “What is it you want?”

  “I want your girl to stay away from my son. She has no business telling him to wash an old woman’s underthings.”

  Which might have sounded comical if someone else had said it. But there was nothing funny about Larkin’s mother.

  “They needed washing,” I said.

  She nodded. “Then you’re the girl to do it.”

  My mother held up both hands now. “You came all the way down here because your son had to do the wash?�
��

  “I came down here to tell you that Larkin already knows his business,” she said, looking not at my mother but at me. “Without you telling it to him. You and his grandmother. Teaching him things that won’t do anyone a bit of good. Telling him to scrub her sour bedsheets when there’s work to be done at home.” She leaned closer. “I’ll thank you for seeing to your own business and letting us see to ours.”

  Larkin shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “No need to apologize,” my mother said mildly. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “You don’t know a thing about it,” his mother said. “Or about your own girl. Out in the night alone, roaming around in trousers, telling Larkin what to do. When she’s the one who needs a strong hand but no man at home to give it.”

  My mother stared. “Whatever gave you the idea that there was no man here?”

  “You mean that little boy?”

  My mother snorted like a spring horse. “I mean my husband, who built this cabin and made these clothes we’re wearing and cut a notch in this mountain for our garden there and a great deal more. None of which is any of your affair. So, as you said before, I’ll thank you for seeing to your business and letting us see to ours.”

  She lifted her chin and looked down her nose, as if she had royal blood running in her veins. Which, as far as I was concerned, she did. “And unless you own this mountain, my daughter will climb it whenever the spirit moves her. And she will visit Miss Cate whenever Miss Cate wants her to.”

  “You’ll be sorry. I know more about it than you do.”

  “Oh, now, look,” my mother said impatiently. “This is easy. My daughter is a kid. Your son is a kid. They are kids on a mountain that has very few kids. Is it really such a terrible thing that your son knows how to wash a bedsheet? That he has a friend in my Ellie, here?”