Echo Mountain

by Lauren Wolk

  “I need an old pot you might never be able to use again,” I said.

  She frowned at me. “Pots don’t grow on trees,” she said. “Are you making something for your father?”

  “Not right now. This is for Cate.”

  “For Mrs. Cleary?”

  I was amazed that she saw a distinction.

  “Yes,” I said.

  My mother gave me a long look.

  Just days before, she had sent me to the shed to sleep with the dogs, my belly as empty as a hat on a hook, for trying to wake my father. Now, with only a little pause, she fetched an old, blackened pot and handed it to me without another word.

  I wondered if she was so willing because I had earned some trust . . . or because I was now trying to heal Cate instead of my daddy.

  I decided it didn’t matter.

  I carried the pot back to where Cate lay waiting.

  She watched me carefully as I took out my knife and sliced away a broad strip of deer hide from her leggings.

  She said nothing out loud, though her face made a comment or two, especially her eyebrows, before it settled into a smile.

  “Larkin told you some things about his father’s luthing, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” I said, wiping my knife on my sleeve and folding it away.

  I draped the deer hide over my arm and picked up the old pot.

  “This will take a while,” I said.

  “Not so long if you boil it hard,” she replied. “An hour over a fire is all you’ll need, though be ready to stir it right along.” She smiled sadly. “It would be different if I were a mandolin. For that, all night long, slowly, in an oven, works best.”

  I didn’t say, We don’t have all night long. Nor did I say, You’re not a mandolin. I said, “Close your eyes and rest while I do this. Captan’s here, and I don’t imagine he’ll leave you.”

  * * *

  —

  Esther was in the kitchen with my mother when I came back through on my way to the yard.

  “How’s Larkin?” I said, though I didn’t like to be the one asking . . . or her the one answering.

  “He’s sad and angry and ashamed of himself,” she said. “For you being the one who’s helping her.”

  So I was not the only one feeling out of sorts about such things.

  I wanted to go find him, right then, to tell him that I understood . . . and to be the one he understood in return.

  Later, I would do that. Find him.

  After I’d helped Cate. After I’d helped my father. After all that. If he hadn’t come to find me first.

  “What’s that?” my mother said, nodding at the deer hide that hung from my arm.

  “Deer hide,” I said.

  “What for?” she said as I gathered up my pack.

  “You’ll see. It’s hard to explain.”

  She followed me to the cabin door and stood watching as I laid the deer hide on the ground and scraped the hair away with my knife until nothing but leather remained.

  But she went back to her work when I knelt to build a fire where we had made soap. Before the fire got too big, I laid stones in a small circle around its edge so the pot would sit above the ground and the flames would stay where I wanted them.

  While the fire was growing, I cut the leather into strips and tucked them all into the old pot, added a little water from the well, and set the pot on the fire.

  “What are you doing?” Samuel said as he crept out of nowhere and my shadow merged with his.

  “Playing the piano,” I said.

  He made a sound that was mostly snort. “You are not, Ellie. You’re cooking something.”

  “Then why did you ask?”

  He peered into the pot. “But what is it? Is it something to eat?”

  “Maybe if you’re a wolf,” I said. “A very hungry wolf.”

  “Well, I’m not a wolf,” he said, though he sounded a little doubtful, as if he reserved the right to eat what I was cooking, should it prove to be something sweet.

  “I’m making glue,” I said, stirring the strips of hide with a bare stick as the water began to simmer.

  “What did you break?” he said happily. For once, he was not the one who had done the breaking.

  “Nothing,” I said. “But I’m going to fix it anyway.”

  Samuel poked at the fire with a stick of his own. “How do you know how to make glue? Did Daddy teach you that, too?”

  I shook my head. “I taught me how. I just hope I taught me well.”

  He made a face at that. “You’re silly.” He poked at the fire some more. “Do you need help?”

  “Always,” I said, though it wasn’t true. Though it was.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Samuel and I spent the next hour tending the fire and the pot as the deer hide slowly melted down toward glue and the day trod on toward evening.

  “I think it’s done,” I finally said, letting some drizzle from the end of the stir-stick.

  “That’s a lot of glue.” He looked around the yard. “What’s so big and broken that you need all that glue to fix it?”

  “Cate,” I said, using a rag to move the pot off the fire. I set it aside to cool.

  “You mean the hag?” he said, astonished.

  I nodded. “I do.” But I knew he was astonished by the idea that I could glue her back together, not that it was a hag I meant to heal.

  * * *

  —

  “What are you brewing out there?” my mother asked when we came into the cabin to check on Cate.

  I liked that we were brewing something. I liked that word.

  “Glue,” Samuel said.

  I could see that my mother wanted to ask more, but she didn’t. She simply turned back to her work, which was a supper of corn bread and beans and one of the trout . . . and a pie. Something as uncommon as hen’s teeth these days.

  “Is that a pie?” Samuel said, his eyes amazed.

  “Of a sort,” my mother said with a sigh. “Dried blueberries and apples with walnuts and a little maple syrup. Which is hardly what I’d choose to bake. But bake it I will.”

  “For Miss Cate?” I said.

  She nodded. “How often do we have a guest in this house?”

  I wouldn’t have called Cate a guest, but I was glad that my mother saw her that way.

  At the bedroom door, we found both Cate and my father sleeping, though differently. I could see that just by looking at them. Even asleep, Cate looked as if she were . . . aware.

  Esther was there, too, sitting alongside the bed in the rocking chair, reading aloud to both of them—and to Captan, too—as they slept. A very good book about a bear named Winnie and a pig named Piglet and a host of others that I had loved and still loved and would always love.

  I was jealous at the thought that Cate might be meeting Pooh and Piglet for the very first time—like tasting a first strawberry or hearing a first loon—since the book was only a little older than Samuel and meant for children at a time when her son was already grown. But perhaps she had read it to Larkin when he was little, as my mother had to me.

  As Esther had to me, too, I realized, when she had only just learned to read, the story coming out word by word, slowly and carefully, like a cat when a dog’s nearby. But that hadn’t mattered at all.

  What I remembered best was lying next to my sister at bedtime, tucked in together, while she read that story to me.

  When Esther looked up from the book to find me and Samuel standing in the doorway, watching, she stopped.

  I expected annoyance. Impatience. But she simply paused, as if we were a couple of songbirds on the windowsill—not so much a distraction as something worth noticing—and I felt my heart swell, the way a bud will when the days grow warm.

  And that’s when Cate said, without open
ing her eyes, “Why did you stop, girl?” and I heard in her voice that she was in more pain than she should be. More pain than I’d thought.

  And I knew it was time for me to do something about that.

  “Is the hag going to live here with us now?” Samuel whispered after we’d crept out of the room.

  “If now means right now, then yes,” I said. “But beyond that I can’t say.”

  Which seemed to satisfy Samuel, a here-and-now sort of boy if ever there was one.

  “Can I have some vinegar?” I asked my mother

  She looked at me curiously. “For your father this time?” she said as she pulled a jug of vinegar from the cupboard.

  “Maybe later. Right now, for Miss Cate.”

  “Right now, supper,” she said. “You can take her a plate and then eat your own. And then you can do whatever it is you plan to do.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, though I was. “And I need to tend to her leg now. I’ll feed her, and myself, after I get that sorted out.”

  My mother turned to Samuel. “Go fetch Esther,” she said and then, when he had gone, turned to me with a hard look on her face. “Ellie, I can’t make up my mind about all this. Mrs. Cleary seems to think it’s all right that she’s come here to . . . get better, I suppose, and help your father, though I don’t see how when she’s the one who needs a doctor. She needs a doctor, Ellie! Not some barbaric kind of glue . . . and vinegar . . . and Heaven knows what else you’ve got in mind.” She sighed. “Yes, I’ll admit it, you’ve done some . . . interesting things for your father, and he’s no worse for them, maybe even better. But you’re not a doctor, Ellie. You’re twelve! You’re just a girl, whatever else you might be. Whatever else Mrs. Cleary thinks you are.”

  More elses.

  I waited.

  This was my mother, sorting herself out.

  Which was her job more than mine.

  “I must be mad as a hatter to stand here baking a terrible little pie while Mrs. Cleary rots away in that bed alongside your bee-stung father.” She wiped her hands on her apron and heaved another sigh. “But in the morning we will all come to our senses and send Mr. Peterson to fetch the doctor.” At the look on my face she held up a hand. “And that is that.”

  She handed me the vinegar.

  I poured some into a pot, careful to hold back the cloudy “mother” that we’d need to start the next batch, and put the pot on the back of the stove where the heat from the oven would warm it.

  “Yuck,” Samuel said, coming back into the kitchen, Esther with him. “Another bad smell.”

  “Just vinegar,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For you,” I said. “You’re too sweet. You need a little tart.”

  Samuel took a step back. “What does she mean, Mother?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Now wash up and sit down and eat.”

  Instead, he sidled up next to me.

  “But what’s the vinegar for?” he asked again.

  “For Cate.”

  “Glue and vinegar?”

  “Glue and vinegar.”

  “Samuel,” my mother said. “Get washed up. I won’t tell you again.”

  But when I went out to the yard to fetch the glue, he followed me, as a puppy would, and I realized that when Mr. Anderson took Quiet I would need Samuel more than ever.

  The thought brought me to a stop.

  Samuel looked up at me as I stood there with dusk coming on.

  “What’s wrong, Ellie?”

  I didn’t want to think about losing Quiet. Losing anything. “Nothing. Go on in to supper now or you’ll get no pie.”

  But I almost called him back as he scampered off toward the cabin.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  “This first part shouldn’t hurt a bit,” I told Cate as I settled a lantern and the glue pot next to the bed, “but I brought some willow tea down from your cabin and never used it. Would you like some now . . . for what’s coming?”

  “No,” she said, after a moment. “It will lower my fever, and I need that fever right now, to fight the germ.” She nodded at the glue pot. “It’s cool enough?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  It felt odd to be sitting with Cate, intent on her instead of my father, who lay just there, on the other side of her, without a sound or any suggestion of life except the slow bellows of his lungs, the heart that I could hear somewhere inside my own chest.

  I turned all my attention back to Cate.

  I untied the bandages again and gently unwrapped her leg.

  “We should thank those bees,” I said, leaning close to study the wound. It didn’t smell as bad as it had before, but it was still foul enough.

  “No should about it,” Cate said. “Do. Every day. Them and the trees and the flowers and every other kind of doctor to be had.”

  Which was all true. And more besides.

  “Now don’t move. I want the glue to stay put.”

  Cate huffed. “Isn’t that the whole point of glue? And why go to so much trouble? Why not clean things out and wrap me up again?”

  She looked like she already knew the answer to that, but I sat back, the pot poised in my hand, and gave her one anyway. “I thought of just pouring the vinegar again and again, over the bandages so they’d keep the cut good and wet for a day or two. But I think the cut needs to be drenched. I think the vinegar needs to seep all the way in to keep the honey soft and sink down deep to the bottom of the wound. I think we need to clean it out from the bottom up, else we might not get at all the corruption.” I leaned again toward the wound. “I don’t want it to spread any more than it already has.”

  Cate smiled tiredly. “That’s a lot of thinking.”

  I remembered what she’d said to me on the mountaintop. About whether a hag was the kind of person who would read books.

  “A lot of thinking for a twelve-year-old girl?”

  Which earned me her customary snort. “A lot of thinking for anyone.”

  Slowly, bit by bit, I spooned the glue in a ring around Cate’s wound, then stirred what was in the pot while I waited for the stuff on her leg to firm up a bit.

  In the lull, I wondered where Larkin was and hoped he would come back soon . . . and with no rancor.

  It was more important that Cate got well than who got her there.

  Captan, who had stayed as close to Cate as he could, climbed to his feet and stretched his front legs out before him, his tail in the air, threw his head back, and yawned a mighty yawn. Then he shook himself all over and looked at me expectantly.

  “Do you need to go out, boy?”

  “He’ll go to the door if he does,” Cate muttered without opening her eyes. “And he’ll ask for some supper after you’ve had yours.”

  I spooned another ring of glue above the first, using the smooth side of the stick to nudge it back to neat, though I can’t say it was a pretty business.

  “None of this should feel good,” Cate said. “But it does.”

  I smiled. “When I’m sick, I love how my mother takes care of me. The sound of her moving around my bed while I lie with my eyes closed. How it feels when she lays a cloth on my forehead.” I began another ring of glue atop the last. “Almost worth being sick.”

  Cate sighed. “I’d like to think I made someone feel that way when I was a nurse.”

  Which astonished me. “Ask Esther,” I said.

  She smiled. “I can smell the hot vinegar.”

  I could smell it, too, sharp as broken glass.

  She opened her eyes. “Won’t it melt the glue away?”

  “It might, a bit. But maybe not too much. And if it does, it does.”

  I didn’t care what kind of mess it made.

  Cate lifted her head up again to watch me working.

  For a time we
were silent while I added more glue, blowing on it until it had a skin, soft but firm.

  My mother, at the door, said, “I’ve brought you some more tea.”

  The smell of balsam twined with the smell of the vinegar, and I felt as if I were in a fresh winter garden, though the stink of the glue failed to give much ground.

  She brought two mugs of tea into the room and set them on the windowsill. She made sure not to look at what I was doing to Cate’s leg. “Is everything all right?”

  “It is,” I said. “Will you bring that vinegar now?”

  She waited for a long moment.

  Then she went to do as I’d asked.

  After a moment, she came back into the room, carrying the pot of steaming vinegar. “I don’t know what you—”

  But as she neared the bed, she saw Cate’s wound, and she almost dropped the pot.

  “Mercy,” she whispered. “What are you doing, Ellie?”

  “Here. Just put it on the floor by the bed. I’ll need a ladle, too, please. And a clean rag or two.”

  She looked at us, a little wild-eyed, but then she stopped and took a closer look at what I’d made, at the glue dam and the swollen wound in the middle of it, and said, “You mean to pour hot vinegar in there?”

  “I do. But not hot enough to burn her. And just a little at a time. So it can seep in with the honey and clean the wound.”

  She looked at Cate. “Is this another thing you’ve taught her?”

  “Heavens, no,” Cate said. “This is her idea. If anything, I’ve bungled the whole deal since the beginning. If I’d let her run the show, I’d be right as rain by now.”

  “Though I did plan to burn you with a hot chisel,” I said.

  Which made my mother flinch. She put the pot on the floor. “If it’s bad enough to do this, should we not send for the doctor right now?”

  I looked at Cate and could see that she didn’t want to get into that again: the business of paying or not paying a man who might arrive in a day or two or three when she would either be better or beyond whatever help he could give.

  “I believe we have a doctor right here,” she said, nodding at me. “And I’m a nurse, don’t forget. So all we lack is some medicine that people have been doing without for thousands of years.”