Echo Mountain

by Lauren Wolk

I held it up. “It sure is,” I said. “Used to be bigger, but I’ve worn it down some. I’d like to know who made it.”

  “People here long before us.”

  I liked that. That he had said us.

  He watched as I collected some tinder and showered it with sparks until there, a thread of smoke. I bent low and blew gently, gently until a small flame leaped out of the smoke like a bright tongue from a gray beard.

  We watched as it caught, grew, consumed the twigs we fed it and asked for more.

  I tended it carefully until it was big enough to handle a stick we’d use to smoke the hive.

  “That’s good work,” Larkin said to me.

  “Thank you,” I said. “The hive’s pretty close to the ground, but since you’re taller, would you mind being the one to reach in?”

  At which he smiled ruefully. “Oh, the curse of tallness.”

  “Except you have no gloves,” I said. I pulled mine from my pack. “And I don’t think these will fit you.”

  He tried to pull them on.

  “Not quite,” he said.

  I sighed. “Oh, the curse of smallness.”

  Which made him smile again.

  But I wasn’t smiling when I did as I had done before, emptying my pack so I could wear it as a hood.

  Larkin helped me tuck my sleeves into my gloves, my pant legs into my boots, the hood into my collar.

  I’m sure I looked stupid and funny, but neither of us laughed.

  Larkin directed me toward the tree and then told me to wait while he slipped the hot branch into the hole and filled the hive with smoke, and then he rushed away to wait up the path at a safe distance.

  It went much as it had the other times.

  I stumbled back with all the comb that was left in the hive, most of the bees stunned by the smoke but some dying as they attacked my thick gloves and a few coming after me, dying on my clothes, my hood, though some made their way through a gap in my collar to die on my neck as they stung me.

  And I cried as I had before. From all that hard, unnecessary pain. Mine. Theirs. Except it was necessary. We had decided that it was necessary, Larkin and I. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t cry as I lurched out of the undergrowth, saying sorry sorry sorry, and huddled on the path, waiting for the bees to give up and go home to what was left of their hive.

  I felt their misery, which was much too big for such tiny animals, and their fury and their confusion. But, most of all, I felt their hunger.

  And I was determined all over again to make Cate well.

  * * *

  —

  When I finally pulled off the hood, I found Larkin coming cautiously back down the path toward me.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  And I would have said yes if a last bee had not just then come to spin a halo around my head and kill itself on my neck where three other stings were already swelling.

  “No,” I sobbed, swiping the bee away. “I’m not all right.”

  So he put his arms around me while I cried some more.

  As it turned out, a boy like Larkin was a fine antidote to bee venom.

  “Okay,” I said after a bit. “I’m okay now.” I put the honey jar and everything else back in my pack. Smoothed my wild hair and wiped my wet face.

  I rubbed the tears on my neck.

  They did little to soothe the hot, bumpy terrain of my poor skin, though their cool saltiness helped for a moment.

  Bee venom, even in a bee-sized dose, was a sharp and painful business, more shocking than a burn or a hard slap.

  But it also infused, in me, a good kind of sharpness. A keenness. As if the poison were medicine as well, brewed from the best the mountain had to offer: something ancient and pure and perfect.

  Larkin looked at me curiously as I smiled.

  He didn’t know what I’d just decided to do.

  And then we hurried off toward home with a jar full of honeycomb and a few furious bees trying their best to bore straight through the glass.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  To get to the hive, we had taken a path from the Lockharts’ that cut through the woods well below home, but we were now on the one that took us straight there.

  “We’ll stop there for a minute before we go back up,” I said.

  “No time for that. We should be getting back.”

  “I know, but my mother won’t forgive me if we go straight past without stopping. And there’s something I need to do for my father.”

  “Ellie, we need to get back up-mountain. And I expect your mother won’t thank you for bringing home a stranger.”

  “Don’t worry. This will only take a minute. Besides, you’re not a stranger.”

  “Even worse. One meeting, and it was a bad one.”

  “Not because of anything you did.”

  He shrugged. “Even so.”

  I wasn’t likely to knock on my own door, but I wanted to give my mother some warning that I had brought Larkin home with me, so I called out, “Mother!” as soon as we got there and then waited just inside the door until she came.

  “Oh!” she said at the sight of him. “Larkin. Come in.” And then, before he had a chance to say a word, she blurted, “I have one of your father’s mandolins.”

  He smiled. “My father never knew what became of them, after they left him.”

  I thought that was a very lonely thing to say.

  “She used to play it all the time,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows at the used to.

  “Oh, I’ve just been busy lately,” my mother said. She didn’t seem aware of how her fingers plucked at her skirt. The collapse of her face.

  And then Samuel came running out of nowhere, yelling, “He opened his eyes, Ellie!”

  And I felt myself swell like a blossom.

  But my mother put up her hand, her own eyes closed, and said, “He means Quiet.”

  I could not recall ever feeling so disappointed over something I’d wanted so badly.

  “Not Daddy?”

  She shook her head. “He’s the same.”

  “I went out to the shed to give Maisie some water and Quiet looked up at me!” Samuel was fairly dancing. “Come see.”

  “That’s awfully soon for a puppy to open his eyes,” I said doubtfully.

  Samuel made a face. “He wanted to see us, Ellie. And Quiet’s different from the others.”

  Something I’d known since I’d pulled him, dripping and squirming, from a bucket of well water just days before.

  “Where’s Esther?” my mother said, looking past us and through the open door.

  “Still up there,” I said. “Miss Cate’s leg is worse and we had to come down for honey again.”

  “I don’t understand.” She looked more and more confused. “Esther stayed on?”

  I said, “Yes, Mother. She wanted to.”

  Which made her sigh and shake her head.

  Samuel pulled on my hand. “Come see Quiet!”

  “Just for a minute,” I said. “Miss Cate’s waiting.”

  He led us out to the woodshed and pointed at Quiet, who was the only one of the litter to raise his head toward us, blinking, as we came in from the sunlight.

  Maisie, standing over the pups, stared at us uncertainly.

  “It’s all right, girl,” I said. “It’s just Larkin.”

  Who got down slowly onto his knees and held out his hand.

  Maisie looked at me. I nodded. So she went to him, sniffed his hand, looked at me again.

  He peered at the pups. “They’re much like Captan was as a puppy. Do you know who their sire is?”

  I shook my head.

  “I believe I do,” he said thoughtfully. “Unless there’s some other brindled dog on this mountain.”

  “Huh,” I s
aid. “You think Captan is Quiet’s daddy?” I liked that.

  “Who’s Captan?” Samuel said.

  “Do you remember that dog on the path? The one with the rabbit in his mouth?”

  “Yes, I do,” Samuel said. “Is he Quiet’s daddy?”

  “Maybe so.” I picked Quiet up and looked him in the eye. “You do have some of Captan in you, I think. I bet you’ll look a lot like him when you grow up.” But then I remembered, all over again, that Quiet was not to be mine. That I would not see him grow up, except perhaps from a distance. “I hope you’ll be like him.”

  “Brindled?” Samuel said.

  “Strong enough,” I said.

  Larkin climbed to his feet. “For what?”

  “For anything,” I said, holding Quiet closer.

  While Samuel was busy with the other puppies, I pulled the footstool below the high shelf where I’d hidden Larkin’s carvings.

  “Look,” I whispered to him, tipping my head up toward the shelf.

  So he stepped onto the stool and looked at what I’d hidden there. For a long moment, he simply looked.

  Then he climbed down and pushed the stool away.

  “You missed a few,” he said.

  “What? I didn’t find them all?”

  He shook his head. “I made a fox. And a bear cub.” He thought back. “And a box turtle.”

  “But where?” I hated to think that he’d made me such things and I’d missed them. That they were out there in harm’s way when they should have been with the others, safe. Mine.

  “You’ll have to find them yourself,” he said. He sounded . . . unhappy.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, leading him out of the woodshed, Quiet asleep in my arms.

  He shrugged. “Why are you hiding them?”

  Which surprised me a little, coming from a boy who had given those gifts in secret, much as I had kept them that way.

  I thought about how it had felt to find them, one by one, and to think that they were meant for me. To think that someone understood what they would mean to me. To think that someone understood me.

  “Finding those carvings, keeping them to myself, how mysterious it all was . . . made me . . . happy,” I said, looking away.

  I waited.

  “So is it all right?” he said. “Or is it ruined now? Knowing me without the trees in between.”

  I smiled at him. “It’s not ruined,” I said. “Let’s go see my father.”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  “Where are you going?” my mother said as I led Larkin past the kitchen table where she’d laid out two buns stuffed with jerky and dried apples.

  “Just for a minute, to see Daddy,” I said, the bees buzzing in my pack, Quiet nesting in my arms.

  Larkin gave her an apologetic look. “If that’s all right with you, ma’am.”

  “I, well . . . it’s just . . .” She gave me a stern look. “I thought you were in a hurry, Ellie?”

  “We are, but this won’t take more than a minute. I want to introduce them, is all.”

  To which she said nothing. But she went along with us as we headed toward the bedroom.

  I led Larkin through the door.

  When he followed me in, he went not to the bed but, after a moment, straight to the corner of the room where he picked up my mother’s mandolin as if it were made of glass.

  He carried it to the window. Tipped it in the light and looked inside for the maker’s mark.

  When he turned to my mother, I had a hard time deciding which of their faces was the more stricken.

  “If you don’t want this anymore, I’ll trade you anything for it.” He sounded as if he had something stuck in his throat.

  My mother went to him. Took the mandolin in her arms and held it against her chest.

  “What in the world makes you think I don’t want it anymore?”

  “You don’t play it.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”

  She put the mandolin back in the corner.

  And then she left without another word.

  Larkin watched her go. Then he turned to my father.

  Since the doctor had come months earlier, no one else outside my family had been allowed to see my father, and it was odd to watch Larkin as he went curiously toward the bed.

  “Daddy, this is Larkin, who lives on the mountain. On the other side. He’s helping me help that woman who told you to put a leech on your ear.”

  I didn’t expect an answer, and I didn’t get one. His face was as pale as a candle, his skin just as waxy, and he was more still than a stump.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you lately,” I said. I was sorry, too, that I had tried nothing to wake him since he’d rolled his eyes. But I would do something now, though it frightened me.

  I tucked Quiet alongside my father’s neck.

  It was amazing how different the little dog looked now that his eyes were open.

  Larkin moved around me so he could see the place where the tree had hit my father’s head. “That’s quite a scar.”

  I glanced up and found him looking not at my father but at me, as if I were the one who’d been hurt.

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t take his eyes off my face. “Trees don’t usually fall on the person cutting them down.”

  I blinked too many times. “Not usually,” I said.

  I pulled the blanket up over Quiet and my father. To Quiet, I whispered, “Teach Daddy how to open his eyes while we’re gone.”

  Which sounded too much like a lullaby, such gentle talk.

  I put my hand on my father’s scar. “Everyone thinks I’m the one who caused this,” I said, without looking at Larkin. “They think I was in the way when the tree fell. They think my father ran to save me. That he got hurt instead of me.” I swallowed, but my throat stayed just as tight. “I’m pretty sure my sister would have preferred that I was the one hit by the tree.”

  “Oh, that’s not likely,” Larkin said.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. He’s hurt, all the same.”

  Larkin frowned at me. “You said people think you were in the way of that tree.”

  “They do.”

  “You didn’t say that you really were in the way.”

  I wiped the tears from my eyes before they could fall. “But I wasn’t. Samuel was. And my sister was supposed to be watching him.” I looked up at Larkin. “Imagine Esther knowing she’s the reason Samuel was in harm’s way.”

  Larkin didn’t move. Didn’t blink. He looked at me steadily, his face serious.

  I said, “Imagine Samuel knowing he’s the reason his daddy got hurt.”

  But Larkin shook his head. “Imagine a girl deciding to take a blame that isn’t hers.”

  I turned back to my father. I hated the way his skin pulled hard across the bones of his face, as if someone were making him into a drum. As if he were hollow. As if someone was supposed to hit him to make any music at all.

  I thought of things like skunk stink and horseradish.

  I went to the pack I’d left by the door.

  The bees inside the honey jar were pulsing quietly on the comb, their feelers sweeping the air as I looked at them through the glass.

  “What are you doing?” Larkin asked.

  “No more lullabies,” I said, shaking the jar as I went back to stand beside my poor father.

  And then I unscrewed the lid and quickly put the mouth of the jar up against his temple where there was nothing between the bees and his brain but flesh and blood.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  At first, the bees simply tumbled across my father’s temple, looking for a way past the rim of the jar where it pressed against his skin, but when I rapped my knuckles against the glass and bent low with a quick shout, they both stung my
father and died doing it, protecting a comb they’d already lost, their church-window wings going still, their fuzzy bodies broken, poor little unlucky things that they were.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered as I pulled the jar free and gently swept them away with my fingertip.

  And, just like that, twin lumps rose up on my father’s temple.

  I watched my father’s eyes, hoping they would roll, hoping they would open.

  And that was when he groaned.

  Not loudly. He didn’t wail. But the sound that came up out of him was the first one he’d made since the accident.

  “Daddy!” I said, patting his cheek lightly. “Daddy, wake up.”

  He groaned again as my mother came through the door.

  “What was that?” she said as she hurried to the bed.

  Which was when my father groaned again and turned his head just a little.

  “What did you do?” she whispered.

  “Bee sting.” Though it was more than those two words. It was every single thing I’d learned along the way.

  I pressed the back of my hand against his cheek. He was not as cold as he’d been.

  “Good Lord,” my mother said. “Good Lord, Ellie. I should be angry.”

  I moved aside so she could come close to lay her hand on my father’s forehead. And then she kissed it and said, “Ethan? Ethan?”

  But he was still and quiet again, though his eyes were crimped a little at the corners.

  We waited, watching, barely breathing, but my father didn’t surface again.

  I put the lid back on the honey jar.

  Larkin looked at me.

  “One more minute,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “I don’t know why he won’t wake up all the way. I don’t understand.”

  My mother sighed. “It’s what the doctor said, Ellie. His body knows what it needs.”

  But I knew that a person was more than just a body.

  We waited.

  Larkin said, “I’m sorry, Ellie, but we need to go now. Or I can take the honey and you can stay.”

  I imagined Esther pulling apart the edges of the rotten wound while Larkin squeezed the honey into it.