by Lauren Wolk
“But you’re—”
“The hag. Yes, I know.” She nodded at me this time. “Your daughter Ellie found me sick in my cabin. She’s been taking care of me.”
My mother stroked my father’s hand. “And she’s been taking care of you, as well.”
* * *
—
In the days that followed, we all helped my father and Cate mend, and ourselves along with them.
On the morning after he woke up, my mother sat by my father, who was now propped up in bed, and fed him a little porridge with maple syrup on it.
“If I’d known we had maple syrup, I’d have woken up sooner,” he said, his voice still raspy from disuse, his head bowed a bit with the hard work of waking.
Cate liked that. “You remind me of my son.” She stroked Captan’s ears. “He made me laugh.”
I’d spent more time on her leg, scraping away the hide glue and pulling open the wound to wipe the honey out, pouring vinegar into the breach and letting it scour her clean.
She had moaned with the pain of the acid on her raw flesh, Captan joining in, and Samuel had stood outside the room and said, “Will you stop hurting the hag please, Ellie?” until she called out to him, “It’s all right, boy. She’s fixing me up good as new.”
But it wasn’t easy for either of us. Or Captan, who had found his voice again in a big way and would bark and mutter if she cried out.
Bit by bit, her wound began to improve. Her fever to abate. And before long I was able to leave her leg alone, with nothing but a single ribbon of cloth to cinch it closed.
Still, I checked it again and again for any sign of trouble.
And every time I did, I found my father’s eyes on me.
“Where did you learn to do that?” he finally asked me.
“Do what?”
“Heal.”
Which I liked. “The things we need to learn to do, we learn to do by doing.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Who said that?”
At which I smiled and said, “You did.”
I turned to Cate. “And so did you.”
* * *
—
Esther made herself useful and with good grace, helping both my father and Cate as they made their way slowly back toward well.
But it was Larkin who surprised us, on the morning of the third day after Cate had come to stay.
We had wondered at his absence. Cate, especially, had watched for him, sighing and fretting when he didn’t come to see how she was doing.
“That mother of his,” she said. “She must be keeping him away. Why else would he not come?”
And I had asked myself the same question. Felt a similar hurt.
But then he did come, and with him the doctor from town. The same one who had said coma when my father got hurt. The same one who had taken my mother’s locket in payment for doing nearly nothing, though he had made the trip from town, the climb to our cabin, which was worth something.
“What’s this?” Cate said when they came through the door, Larkin and the portly doctor in his just-so coat and his dinner-plate face. “Larkin, where have you been?” But she looked happy enough when she said it.
“To town,” he said. “To fetch the doctor.” Who had been away, delivering a baby in Rumford. “Right after I left here. Esther thought so, too, that I should go get help. So I told my mother,” who had not been pleased, “and walked down the mountain and out to the road and caught a ride in a rubbish truck,” which explained why he smelled like he did, “and had to sleep under a bridge,” which also explained why he smelled like he did, “until the doctor got back the next day. And then it took us a while to get here.”
“Just in time to tell me all’s well,” Cate said, her voice equal parts relief and apology.
And that’s pretty much what the doctor told her, though he cleaned the wound with carbolic acid (which was one last and awful thing), stitched it up tight, and bandaged it in dressing so white it made my eyes hurt.
And I was sorry I’d been so hard on the man.
He’d managed to do, in short order, what I would never have been able to do half as well.
But he said some kind things about what I had done.
“And you just twelve,” he said. “You’ll make a fine nurse someday.”
Which did not bother me a bit, that he didn’t say doctor.
Perhaps I would be a nurse, as Cate had been. As she still was.
Or a doctor.
Or something else.
The elses, I had found, were everywhere.
Chapter Seventy-One
While he was there, the doctor examined my father as well, listening to his heart, his lungs. Looking into his eyes and ears. Testing his reflexes, which were understandably sluggish. Had him roll his tongue. Close his eyes and stretch his arms out, one at a time, and bring his index finger to the tip of his nose. He was spot-on with his left arm, a little off with his right.
“You may have some problems along the way,” the doctor said. “But you won’t know until you have them.”
“Like what?” my father said.
The doctor shrugged. “Could be some dizziness. Some permanent weakness in your muscles.” He looked at my mother. “No seizures?”
She shook her head.
“But maybe some confusion. Time will tell.”
We’d already had my father on his feet once, helping him slowly into the washroom for the first proper bath he’d had in months, and that had been an ordeal.
His legs didn’t want to work very well.
The doctor, when he saw for himself, told us another word we hadn’t known. “Atrophy,” he said. “He needs to build up his muscles again.” Which wasn’t so frightening after all.
“But you must watch those sores of his and get them closed up quick as you can,” he said, looking at my mother. “You’ve done a good job keeping him clean. And you must not stop doing that until he’s well.”
For that, he gave her a salve, though she’d already brewed a fresh batch of vinegar with the “mother” from the last batch.
“Any trouble with your words?” the doctor said.
My father looked bemused.
“What’s this?” The doctor held up the stethoscope that hung around his neck.
“A stethoscope,” my father said.
“And this?” the doctor said, pointing at Captan.
“A loud dog.”
Which made Captan smile.
“Do you have a book handy?” the doctor said, looking about.
My mother stood up and left the room. She came back with the book that Esther had been reading to my father while I was up-mountain with Cate.
She handed it to the doctor, who handed it to my father, who let it fall open where it wanted him to begin.
He read the words aloud, slowly, but not as if he didn’t know them. “‘“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.”’”
He looked up at me. “So that’s another thing that seems to be all right.”
“How’s your memory?” the doctor said.
My father tipped his head. “How can I know what I might have forgotten?”
“Well, it’s clear you know everyone you ought to know. Do you remember your childhood?”
My father nodded.
“Coming here to live?”
“Yes, all of that.”
“What about how you got hurt?”
But that drew a frown. He looked at my mother. Then he looked at me, for just a moment, and I saw something in his eyes. Something that wasn’t confusion. Something else. “No, that’s a day I can’t recall. They’ve told me about it, but I
can’t bring it back.”
“Anything about that day?”
He glanced at me again. “Not really.”
“Which is probably a blessing,” the doctor said, snapping his bag shut. “No sense in remembering something like that.”
* * *
—
When it came time to pay him, the doctor waved us off. “The boy has already paid my bill.”
We all looked at Larkin.
“Not with your father’s last mandolin!” I gasped, remembering what his mother had said.
“Not that,” Cate said in a small voice. “Not for me.”
Larkin shook his head. “With my first one. Though I have yet to make it.”
The doctor cleared his throat and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He doesn’t know how to make one yet. And I don’t know how to play one yet. So we both have some work to do.”
Yet. Another word I’d hold on to.
And I promised myself, right then and there, in that moment that will always be, for me, an else worth trying, that I would never again make up my mind about anything too quickly. Not ever again.
Including doctors.
Chapter Seventy-Two
I didn’t blame Esther for sending Larkin in search of better help than I could give. Or better than she had thought I could give.
Cate had scared us all with her sad goodbye on the day she’d come to stay with us.
But, had I not been so scared, maybe I would not have been what she needed me to be.
No more lullabies, I had said.
Not for my father.
And not for me.
Until they were what we needed most.
* * *
—
Nor did I blame Larkin, for leaving as he had.
He’d done a brave thing, to face his sad and angry mother. To go to town despite her wrath. To make the long trip, ride in a rubbish truck, sleep under a bridge. All the while thinking that Cate might be leaving him, as his father had, though more slowly.
* * *
—
And I didn’t blame myself, either, for being in the way when that tree fell. As Cate had said, I’d been trying to help, which was never a bad thing.
I’d been in the way quite a lot since then.
Saving Quiet.
Helping Larkin treat his black eye, which the doctor had said was healing nicely, though he had his doubts about a medicine made from potato.
Trying to wake my father, bit by bit.
Looking after Cate.
Picking up that lonely mandolin and handing it to my lonely mother.
* * *
—
I knew a thing or two about loneliness.
And so did Larkin, who climbed the mountain with me on the fourth day after my father woke up, to get Cate’s cabin ready for her again.
“Does she have a broom?” I asked when we got there and found the floor littered with dead flies.
“Of course. In the shed behind the cabin.”
He led me around there, opened the door.
I’d expected a washtub. And, of course, a broom.
But I hadn’t expected a great pile of wood in chunks too big for a hearth. Or walls and rafters hung with wood cut rough and raw but clearly meant to be mandolins someday. Necks and bodies. Coiled strings hung from nails. A bowl of turning keys.
“Your father left all this,” I said.
Larkin sighed a sigh too big for a boy, even one like Larkin. “He did.”
Some of the cut wood had warped from years of cold and hot and the steam from Cate’s bath, but I knew that wood was both forgiving and eager to please.
“You’ll make the doctor’s mandolin here,” I said.
Larkin nodded. “And another for you, too, if you want.”
Which I did, of course.
“Will you teach me how to carve things?” I said.
He ducked his head. “Anyone could do that.”
“No, anyone could not. And I’m pretty sure I won’t be any good at it. But I’d like to try.”
Which was something I could do. So I would.
* * *
—
Larkin’s mother had been so happy and relieved to have him back and likely to stay, at least for a while, that she’d made some promises and vowed to keep them.
“When I told her I was going to try to make mandolins like my daddy did, she started to cry,” he said as we made up Cate’s bed in clean sheets.
I didn’t blame her one bit for that. “Maybe now she won’t mind you learning to read or how to make a poultice.”
“I just hope I remember enough from watching my father,” he said as he scooped cold ashes from the hearth. “Otherwise, there’s no one to teach me how to make a mandolin.”
“You’ll remember,” I said. “And you’ll learn as you go.”
“You sound like Cate,” he said.
“And my father.”
“And mine, too,” Larkin said, while his father’s tools watched us, their heavy, black hearts beating a little more quickly at the idea that they would soon be put to use again.
Chapter Seventy-Three
As I helped my mother grind corn the next day, she said, “I’ve changed my mind, Ellie.”
I thought she was talking about making corn bread instead of corn cakes, or when it would be best to help Cate move back up-mountain, or almost anything except what she said next.
She gave me a small, sad smile. “Quiet can stay.”
I let out a breath I’d been holding for a long time. Since even before Quiet had been born. “And the others?”
She turned back to her work. “We’ll see.”
And I knew what she meant. If my father got well enough, fast enough, to manage a passel of dogs. To do without Mr. Anderson’s milk cow.
We couldn’t know any of those things. Not yet.
But there were some things I did know.
That Quiet was mine. And I was his. And there, right there grinding cornmeal, close enough so I could touch her, was the mother I had missed. Who’d been coming back to me, bit by bit, over these past few difficult, wonderful days. And was all that much closer, now, because I’d met her halfway.
* * *
—
When we finished with the corn and cleaned up the mess, my mother said, “Cate’s not ready to go home yet, but I think we can move her now.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “To your bed, perhaps?” I’d continued to sleep in the shed with Maisie and the puppies while my mother gave her own place to Cate, and I hadn’t minded one bit. So I nodded, smiling at the thought of Cate and Samuel and Esther all sharing a room, telling stories by lantern light.
It was easy to move Cate from one room to another, carefully, slowly, with Captan dancing alongside and Samuel in the lead, chattering about a dog army in which Captan was a captain and Quiet was a general and Maisie was a lieutenant, until we all told him to hush and get out of the way.
I was the one to go back for Cate’s pillow. So I was alone with my father for the first time since he’d woken up.
“Ellie,” he said, as I turned toward the door with the pillow in my arms.
When I looked back, ready to fetch him something, to give him some water . . . whatever it was he wanted . . . he gave me something that I wanted, instead.
“Ellie,” he said, softly. “I do remember.”
I went to stand close to him. “What do you remember?”
He took my hand. “That day. The day the tree fell.”
At first, I thought he meant that the memory had finally surfaced. And I said so.
“No,” he replied. “I always remembered. As soon as I woke up all the way, I remembered all of it.”
And I remembered how Esther had told him about the accident and ho
w he had looked at me—straight at me—and said, “Not Ellie.” How I had heard, in those two words, everything I needed to hear.
“I wish you could have been with me these past weeks,” I whispered. “To watch what happened.” Though much of it would have been different, had he been well.
My father smiled at me, his eyes full of sun in the shadowy room. “I see it all very clearly,” he said. “I see it in every bit of the girl you’ve become.”
* * *
—
Quiet was waiting for me when I went out into the sunshine later that day.
He had managed to find his way into the yard while Maisie was busy with the other pups, their eyes open now, too.
I found him watching an ant make its way up a blade of grass.
When he felt my shadow, he turned toward me, his little tail wagging, his tongue like the tip of a pink ribbon.
“Oh, what a fine present you are,” I said, scooping him up and rubbing his nose with mine. “What a boy. What a good little Quiet you are.”
And I realized, then, that Quiet wasn’t the first person I had saved.
Or the last.
Captan, coming up the path from below, stopped at the sight of us and then came on again, more quickly.
He had taken to spending most of his time near the cabin door, no longer welcome inside, but patient about that.
No more howling. Still, though, the occasional bark and a certain amount of singing, as if he had something to say. To which I always listened.
And I did now, as he came to me and crooned for Quiet.
Some father dogs could be unkind to their pups, but not Captan.
When I put Quiet on the ground, Captan licked him with his big, rough tongue. To clean him, yes, but to kiss him, too.
And I knew again that doing one thing was doing everything.