The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  She had been drinking applejack for as long as she could remember. From a single mouthful she could tell what kind of apples had gone into the press, how many nights of freezing temperatures it had been set out for, and if there would be a market for it.

  This jack was very strong and fragrant. It burned a path down her throat into her belly, where its heat spread out a warmth that burrowed deep.

  Levi said, “Well? What’s it taste like?”

  Callie took a deep breath and then a smile broke out across her face. “Money,” she said. “It tastes like lots of money.”

  They fit as many quart jugs of applejack as they could in the bed of the wagon secured under a tarp covered over with straw. Levi set out again and was gone the entire month of March; in that time Callie harvested the first of the scion wood from the mother tree and grafted it onto her best rootstock. The Bleeding Heart grafts had gone into the ground in the rich soil at the bottom of the hillside, where they had some protection from the wind and even shallow roots could profit from the fast-running Sacandaga.

  Now those saplings were in second leaf. The right thing to do, the way she had been trained, was to wait another two or three years until they were sure of the fruit before they began to graft the Bleeding Heart in earnest. This time they harvested the scion wood at the first opportunity. With the cuttings from the wild tree and this year’s grafting, they should have more than fifty trees this year, and a half-dozen of them would bear first fruit.

  The rain was coming down so hard that Callie finally took note. She pulled her hood more tightly around her face and shoulders, and cleaned her knife on her apron.

  The ringing of the meetinghouse bell came to her on a gusting wind, as frantic as the beating wings of a caged bird. On a clear day the meetinghouse bell seemed loud enough to wake the dead, though it was almost a mile away. She turned to listen, and as she did, the ringing stopped. Most likely one of the Ratz boys getting up to mischief, but then the ringing started again and a knot pulled tight in her belly.

  A fire or somebody underneath a fallen tree. Somebody in trouble. She folded her knife, put it in her pocket, and set out for the path along the river, the quickest route into the village proper. And then stopped at the sight of the Sacandaga, already breeching its banks.

  Callie looked back to her saplings, but somebody was screaming. One of her neighbors, screaming loud enough to be heard over the rushing river and the rain.

  She ran.

  With Florida turning and dancing beneath him, frantic to be away, Daniel pulled hard on the reins and brought the horse to a shuddering stand so he could get a proper look.

  On the far west slope a gash had opened up in the tree line, a long rip down the mountainside. As he watched, trees fell like children’s blocks; the earth itself seemed to be moving, as a plank floor would give under the boots of a big man.

  Even in the mildest winters it took weeks for the ice to break up, but today it shivered and shifted and then the ice began to crack. It sounded like a barrage of rifle shots.

  The whole surface of the lake was pulsing and twisting, breaking apart into hundreds of pieces, some three feet thick and twice as long. The force of water coming off the mountain was pushing the ice forward, and at that moment Daniel fully understood what this flood would do.

  He turned Florida and galloped up the lane. All over the village people were running uphill. Some carried belongings—a candlestick, a small chest, a milk can—while others led cattle and goats. Many were without any kind of wrap or mantle and most were barefoot. Children were squalling in unison, confused and frightened. Michael Yarnell—the most fidgety student in Daniel’s classroom—was running with a hen under each arm.

  The sound of the water crashing along the valley floor was deafening.

  Daniel pulled up hard and reached down to lift Jed MacGarrity up behind him on the saddle. The old man weighed next to nothing, but his whole thin body was alive with excitement.

  “You just saved my sorry hide,” he shouted into Daniel’s ear.

  “Don’t make me regret it!” Daniel shouted back and Jed let out a squawking, terrified laugh.

  A crowd had gathered in front of the Red Dog, it seemed because everyone believed the water would not come so far uphill. Daniel hoped they were right. He pulled up there to pass Jed over to the care of his daughter Jane, who broke into noisy tears at the sight of him. No one else took any notice. Every one of them was staring down toward the lake, expressions curiously slack but for the eyes that scanned the scene, back and forth. Daniel turned to watch.

  The wall of water came on with an almost regal slowness, roaring like a charging bear. Whole trees and boulders and huge clumps of ice tumbled before it. The bridge broke in two and disappeared into the churning waters.

  Whole buildings were lost in a heartbeat. Ice flew through the air in chunks, like dried corn left too close to the fire. A piece as big as a door flew hundreds of feet through the air and hit a bawling cow. Later Daniel would tell himself that he had only imagined the sound of the cow’s spine cracking. Then the animal was gone too, sucked into the melee.

  Around him many voices were raised in prayer. Others shouted to each other the things they were seeing but didn’t want to believe. Couldn’t believe, until they saw the truth of it all in the faces of neighbors.

  “Hast thou seen Friend Amos? What about the Crispins?”

  “I fear Grandmother May didn’t get to safety in time.”

  The crowd had doubled and continued to grow as people staggered in, many of them soaked and muddy, some bloody. Daniel wondered where Hannah was. For a moment panic overtook him and then he remembered she had gone to a birthing at the Rountrees, farther up the hillside. Surely the flood waters couldn’t reach that far. Surely not.

  That thought was still in his head when Lincoln Coleman came galloping up shouting for Becca. When she turned, he tossed a screaming, thrashing infant into her arms, wheeled about and was off again.

  Daniel came out of his daze. He turned Florida and kicked her to a gallop. Ethan passed him going the other way, two white-faced children crowded together before him.

  The first group Luke came across was Maria Oxley with her children. Her left arm hung at an unnatural angle, but she had one child on her back and another one on her right arm. She looked close to collapsing. Daniel pulled up beside her, took the reins in his teeth and leaned down with his good right arm to grab hands and pull the bigger children up, one behind and one before him. Maria passed the babies up for the older children to hold and then sat down just where she was. The children were screaming, and his bad arm was screaming, and the earth itself seemed to be screaming.

  Callie Wilde came around a corner, mud-covered and barefooted. She had a bulging sack over one shoulder and her expression was murderous. Furious with God himself, and ready to do battle. Her orchards were right on the river. Daniel had a brief image of her apple trees popping out of the ground one by one.

  She shouted, “Go ahead. I’ll bring Maria along.”

  A man might hesitate at such a moment, knowing full well that if things took a bad turn, these two women would be dead within the quarter hour. But Daniel had been well trained, and he would not allow himself such weakness. He kicked Florida hard, pulled her head around and galloped away, hung about with wailing children who stank of piss and vomit and fear.

  9

  Martha Kirby had a hard time working out for herself exactly when she had last visited Paradise. She believed it must have been two years ago, just after New Year.

  In the middle of winter Paradise was a peaceful place. Even the most constant sounds of water rushing downhill, of the river and the lake were hushed by the cold, slowed down and then stopped. That last visit the ferocious cold had surprised her, how absolute it was. At the time they had teased her, asking if she had forgot everything about home while she was away, and whether she needed somebody to show her around.

  She had stayed with the Bonners for that vis
it too, because Nathaniel Bonner was one of her guardians. Nathaniel and his sons had been out on a week-long hunt, and so they were a household of women: Elizabeth and Birdie and the two LeBlanc girls who came every day to cook and clean. Curiosity and Hannah came by almost every day, always with Hannah’s children in tow. There were visitors enough, and still there had been little to do but help with the household chores, read and write letters, and pay visits.

  The only person she cared to call on was Callie Wilde. Callie was not a blood relation but she was a stepsister, and the only family Martha would claim. The hardest part about going to Manhattan had been leaving Callie behind. She had asked about taking her stepsister with them to Manhattan, but Callie herself had no interest in that proposition.

  Even at that young age her friend’s only interest was the orchard her father had started, and the pursuit of the perfect apple.

  The storm picked up its rhythm when they were less than a half mile out of Paradise, and Martha realized that some would take it as a sign: a turn for the worse in the fortunes of the village. Most likely some would hold even this against her, and truth be told, she couldn’t be sure they were wrong.

  Lily hunkered down under the oiled tarp and told herself yet again that it would not do to scream at the heavens. So close to home after so long, and the oxen had slowed to a painful crawl, their heavy hooves sending up sprays of mud and water with every jolt forward.

  The irony of it was not lost on her. She had left Italy with doubts; then one day she had come up on deck at first light and there was the shoreline, Long Island stretching as far as she could see. Everything in her had clutched in joy and fear; she was sure, at that moment, that they had been right to come home.

  And it was at that very point that things began to go wrong with the journey. Broken axels, lamed horses, lost trunks, misplaced letters of credit. They had finally boarded the steamboat that would take them up the Hudson in a fraction of the time it had once taken to sail the same route, but even that had not gone to plan. She had given up counting the delays after the third time they were required to disembark because of trouble with the boilers.

  People were burned to bits every year when steamboats caught fire, she reminded herself each time she made her way onto the shore. Better to arrive home like this than not at all.

  Once they finally reached Albany the men had been keen to have a look at how the great canal was coming along. Even Simon, who understood how much she wanted to get home, even Simon couldn’t hide his fascination with the idea of double-stair-step locks. Only the promise of more bad weather put an end to the discussion.

  “Better to wait until it’s done,” Simon had said—to console himself alone. Lily would go to see it with him, but for his sake rather than her own. She would draw the locks and the boats and the mules who trod the towpath, but it was Simon who looked forward to the outing. And they had not even reached Paradise yet.

  “Next year you’ll be able to travel from Manhattan to Albany to Lake Erie without a single portage,” Luke added. “It’s a great advance for commerce.”

  No doubt it was, but at that moment Lily wouldn’t care if the whole thing collapsed upon itself and sunk into the middle of the earth. She wanted to be home. She was desperate to be home.

  Now the wind rose in eddies, picking at wet bonnets and capes. It set the trees to twisting and bowing low to the ground like agitated old ladies, all flutter and creak. The sharp crack of a branch giving way made them all jump.

  So close to home, and the storm dug in its heels, sending down a cold driving rain that cut right through the stoutest boiled wool mantle. Were the little girls weeping? Lily thought she might join them.

  “Almost there!” Luke rode up alongside the wagon. His voice had the hearty tone that was meant to comfort his frightened children, but the boys only scowled at him and the girls wouldn’t meet his eye at all. Lily saw him exchange glances with Jennet, a whole conversation in a flash. Worry for their children bound them like a sturdy rope, intricately knotted.

  As they came around the last curve and onto the road that led down through the village and to the west branch of the Sacandaga, the rain began to slacken again.

  “One last bluster,” Jennet announced. “The storm is played out now. I can feel it.”

  The children immediately perked up and began to look about themselves, but the oxen took no note of the weather one way or the other and plodded along at their usual pace; it was enough to drive a person mad.

  Adam said, “The road is a river. Look, the oxen are pulling us down a river.” Nathan giggled. Neither of the boys were concerned; they were enjoying the novelty of being out in the weather. They had already forgotten the morning’s scolding, but then it had been Gabriel who had been taken aside, he and Annie with him, for a discussion that had taken the defiance from his expression and replaced it with something else, far more thoughtful.

  The nieces and nephews loved the idea of Gabriel and Annie getting married. And despite the surprise of it all, Lily found she liked it too. It seemed right, once she saw them together. It was one more bit of evidence of what she had known in theory: Everyone had gone about their business while she and Simon were away. Gabriel was a man, as good a shot as their grandfather had been. “Better than I was at his age,” Lily’s father had told her. “Better than I was at my peak. As good as Daniel was.”

  Nobody said, before he lost the use of his arm. But they thought it, every one of them.

  The little girls were asking questions, anxiety raising its head once again. Jennet clucked and comforted and began a story about a rain so hard it made the trees go hide.

  “There,” said Nathan, interrupting his mother in his excitement. “There’s Uncle Ethan’s new house; he wrote to us about it, do you remember?”

  It was a neat, well-built house with a satisfying symmetry. Lily could imagine her cousin Ethan there with no difficulty. What she couldn’t understand was why every house window as far as she could see down the main street was dark.

  “Where is he? Where is everybody?” The only light was in the window of a building that was new to Lily, but must be the Red Dog.

  She had had many letters from home about the changes in the village, but still the sight of an inn on the Johnstown road was a surprise. Another one of Ethan’s projects: an inn that catered to locals and travelers alike, with a tavern on the ground floor and rooms to let above. There would be an apartment for the innkeeper and his family. Then he had hired Charlie LeBlanc to manage it—a daring experiment, as her mother had written, but one that might eventually take a happy ending, not so much because Charlie showed a talent for innkeeping, but because his wife would. What Charlie lacked in ambition, Becca made up for.

  The Red Dog was a popular place, one Lily had heard about a great deal in the letters that came from home. A lively place, her mother had written. Except not this day. The shutters were closed and everything seemed very still.

  There was something very wrong.

  Lily started when her father nosed his horse up right next to her, rain still coming off the brim of his hat when he turned his head. It was so good to have him near, she regretted being cranky about something as inconsequential as rain.

  “We’ve got to get to high ground.” He raised his voice so it would carry, and then his gaze fixed on Lily’s mother, sitting with her arms around the twins.

  “Boots, take the blackberry path, the one that starts from behind Ethan’s place. Move smartly. Carry the girls if you must.”

  “Very well.” She caught Lily’s eye and gave her a firm, determined smile. “Who wants an adventure?”

  The men went down to the village on horseback to see what help they could be, and the women and children abandoned the wagons and oxen where they stood. Simon left too, raising a hand to Lily before he turned his horse’s head and trotted off. He was glad to be here, among family, among the men, with serious work to do.

  The women and children waded through ankle-dee
p snow water and mud that tried to suck the boots off their feet. The land behind Ethan’s house inclined sharply and then disappeared into the forest, where the trees gave the group some protection from the rain and wind. The path was littered with broken branches and last year’s sodden leaves. Wet snow fell from the trees in huge, unwieldy clumps.

  It was a path Lily had walked hundreds of times in her life, and was full of memories: games, rivalries, feats of bravery, and utter foolishness. It was immediately familiar but strange too. At the top of the rise the woods would open up onto a clearing, and in the middle of that clearing she would see what some people still called the doctor’s place, though Richard Todd was dead many years and the whole homestead belonged to Curiosity Freeman.

  And maybe that house would be dark too, and empty.

  Lily shook herself to dislodge the image. They would stop first at Curiosity’s kitchen, where the fire in the hearth would warm them, and the teakettle would be whistling, and where Hannah and her family would be waiting, and little sister Birdie and Curiosity herself. Lily’s heart was racing in her chest, and it had little to do with the steep uphill climb.

  She was concentrating on her footing and so lost in her thoughts that she bumped into Martha Kirby. They were stopped because at the front of the line Lily’s mother had stopped.

  At first Lily wondered if her mother was trying to catch her breath, but then things shifted and she got a better view. Lily knew every one of her mother’s expressions; six years or sixty years apart from her made no difference. What Lily saw in her mother’s face was surprise and deep concern. Elizabeth Middleton Bonner, normally unflappable, was watching something happening in the village through a gap in the trees, and it frightened her.

  The boys scrambled up to see for themselves.