The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  In fact, Elizabeth couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him mount a horse for so short a distance. But today he insisted on riding. And it made sense; the mud would be a foot deep and more.

  Nathaniel rode Romeo, named by Birdie for his beauty, and for Elizabeth he saddled Pepper, a mule as dependable as the sunrise, and devoted to Elizabeth.

  “Because you feed him apples.” Birdie wanted it recorded for posterity that her mother was willing to bribe mules for their good behavior, a tactic she never employed with children.

  It was good to be out in the weather in the early morning, even such gray weather as this. And the birds were coming back. There was bird-song all around; veeries, thrush, phoebes, robins, all announcing their presence and claiming territory. She was very glad to be home.

  The trip to Manhattan had been unusually difficult. First waiting for the ship to dock—three days, listening for the messenger who would bring word—and then so overwhelmed with the fact of her daughter that her mind could not be still, even when she slept. If things had gone differently—

  Beside her Nathaniel said, “The best-laid plans.”

  Elizabeth made a face at her husband. “It’s very rude, the way you read my thoughts.”

  He grinned at her. “How does the rest of it go?”

  “I can’t recall. How odd.” She frowned. “Once I would have remembered the whole poem, word for word.”

  “You’ve got a lot less space in that head of yours than you used to. Close to thirty years of raising up a family and teaching don’t leave much room for poetry.”

  He always knew how to distract her. Elizabeth straightened in the saddle to relieve the ache in her back, and said as much to him. “I don’t like to think of it that way, in years. Thirty years! That can’t be correct.”

  It was a conversation they had often, but she had never been able to adopt Nathaniel’s matter-of-fact way of looking at things. Time moved on, and so must they.

  They passed the Downhill House, and the smell of wood smoke and baking bread drifting from the chimney. Curiosity came to the kitchen window and waved a floury hand to them as they passed.

  “I’d like to stop by to see Lily,” Elizabeth said suddenly.

  Nathaniel made the thoughtful face, the one that meant he had reservations but would keep them to himself. That one expression was more effective than any argument; as much as Elizabeth liked to depend on reason in her deliberations, Nathaniel was far better at holding that line when it came to dealing with the children.

  Then they came around a corner and saw the village, and for the moment all thought of Lily left her.

  Elizabeth had imagined a flood as a lot of water pouring into a basin that eventually drained away through a plug at the bottom; the receding water would leave dirt and scum and unpleasantness. But what was before her was nothing as simple as that. What she saw before her was disaster.

  The river had retreated far enough to release the schoolhouse, the smithy, and a few other buildings, but the meetinghouse and the trading post were closer to the Sacandaga and still stood in four good feet of water.

  Between the new waterline and the place the horses had come to a stop, the ground was littered with debris. Whole trees, branches broken like toothpicks, great tangles of roots. Stones too big for a man to lift; slabs of ice, mud-covered and leaning together. Heaps of gravel that had yesterday been buried in the riverbed. Beaver traps, shingles, a pitchfork already rusting, a window frame with most of the glass knocked out, a half door. A whole henhouse, intact, filled with muddy carcasses. A piece of railing from the bridge that had been washed away. On top of a table half submerged in mud sat a battered tin cup. A length of linen, twisted like a ribbon. A child’s shoe.

  In the distance, just above the receding waterline, a group of people were trying to pull what looked like a pig out of the mud.

  “From the smokehouse,” Nathaniel said.

  She hadn’t thought of the smokehouse. The men had got together some years ago and built it for the use of the whole community. A dozen families had the entire winter’s worth of meat stored there. All gone.

  There were scavengers everywhere, mud-covered and grim as they searched for anything that might be used to rebuild. Katie Blackhouse went by with a chamber pot under one arm and a cooking pot under the other.

  Joshua Hench and his sons were at work shoveling mud out of the smithy. At the trading post there was a makeshift raft tied to the hitching post, and they watched as the Mayfair sons threw bundles and sacks and parcels out of the window and onto it.

  “That’s enough,” their father called to them, ready to take up his pole. But even as he spoke a small barrel came flying out the window and thumped onto the raft, which immediately listed and began to sink.

  “Nails?!” he shouted. “Hast thou lost thy head, Samuel?” He was trying to lift the keg of nails to hand it back through the window, but instead he lost his balance and fell backward into the muddy waters. There was a great cry from inside the trading post and from the smithy as well. Three Mayfair sons catapulted themselves out the window to their father’s rescue and, in the process, sank the raft and everything on it. Tobias Mayfair came up coughing, the keg of nails clasped in his arms.

  The schoolhouse stood on dry land now, and it looked to be intact. Two windowpanes had broken and some boards were missing from the steps, but the roof was whole and in general the building had survived. What it must be like inside, Elizabeth could hardly imagine. She very purposefully turned her mind away from the question of schoolbooks.

  “There’s Daniel,” Nathaniel said. He pointed with his chin to a group of men who were examining what was left of the smokehouse. Gabriel was there too, prying something out of the mud with a crowbar. Luke and Simon would be nearby.

  “This is so much worse than I imagined.” Elizabeth turned to Nathaniel and saw that his attention was elsewhere, somewhere behind her, and that there was something wrong.

  The first scream was so loud and piercing that everyone turned together, like ladies and gentlemen performing a country dance. The screams doubled and then tripled before Elizabeth could locate the source.

  A group of women stood pointing, all of them, toward the far shore of the bloated river. Men were running from every direction, jumping over debris, swerving around fallen trees. Jumping from safe spot to safe spot rather than risk sinking neck-deep in the muck. And all the time the keening spiraled up and up.

  Elizabeth did not want to look, but she felt helpless to resist.

  For twenty years on the mountain she had never feared the wolves it was named for. Not once had she seen a wolf attack a man, or even threaten. They never lacked for prey, even in hard winters. But now a large wolf—an animal she recognized by the blaze on his forehead and one damaged ear—was pulling at a human form, half submerged in the river. He had grasped it by the wrist in a pose that looked almost dainty.

  “Who is it?” someone shouted. “Who is that?”

  It was impossible to tell, battered and muddy as the body was. The wolf tugged harder and the corpse turned.

  “His eyes are open!” Jane Cunningham moaned.

  “It’s one of the Sampsons,” shouted a man’s voice.

  Old Father. The wolf’s name came to her suddenly. They called him Old Father, for his calm dignity, and for his intelligence. Now he had judged himself safe from the humans across the water, or his hunger had overridden such calculations.

  Old Father tore into the soft, bloated belly of the dead man on the ground.

  Nathaniel took her horse by the bridle and was turning her away, but she couldn’t leave, not yet, because Daniel was moving.

  He ran forward, his good arm hooked behind his back to grab a tomahawk. That same arm came up and around in an arc and then the tomahawk was flying, flashing as it turned over and over, like a child’s whirligig.

  The heavy thunk of the blade burying itself in bone was loud enough to hear over the rushing river water.

/>   “By God,” said someone nearby. “I doubt there’s another man living who could have made that kill. An angel of death with a bloody tomahawk instead of a scythe.”

  “You see,” Nathaniel was saying. “Daniel’s took care of it. Come, Boots, come away now.”

  13

  Along with Ivy House, that had been made available for Lily and Simon for as long as they cared to stay in Paradise, came a Mrs. Thicke. The housekeeper was a widow and good-sister to Ethan’s own housekeeper, another Widow Thicke; both had come with him from Manhattan when he moved back to Paradise.

  “Ethan would tear every building down just to build it up again, if we let him.” Lily’s father had told her about this soon after they arrived in port, in one of many long conversations about the changes she would see at home. Ethan had hand-picked families to take up vacant farmsteads in Paradise, and made sure that they would bring the skilled labor he wanted. There were carpenters, joiners, cabinetmakers, and masons. Farming was a risky business in the Sacandaga valley, but Ethan kept finding things to build or rebuild, and he paid the skilled workers well.

  Lying in bed that first morning Lily took in the details that had been lost on her yesterday. Carved lintels where rabbits played among foliage; a washstand with a marble top; the hearth lined with beautiful tiles of a type she had never seen before, with a raised pattern in deep cobalt blue.

  When she finally managed to get out of bed, Lily found that Mrs. Thicke had put out a full breakfast, from fresh biscuits to shirred eggs and bacon.

  Simon grinned at the housekeeper from over his teacup. He had washed and shaved and found clean clothes in the confusion of their trunks, which meant he had risen long before. Simon was abominably cheery in the early morning, a habit Lily had not been able to break him of, nor could she bring herself to approve it.

  She said, “What’s happened to Daniel?”

  Mrs. Thicke’s eyelids fluttered. “He was leaving as I came in, just after sunrise. Wouldn’t stop for coffee nor tea nor anything else, either. Now they say you and he are twins, is that right?”

  “We are twins,” Lily said. “But I’m the elder, by a good half hour.”

  Simon leaned across the table to kiss her when Mrs. Thicke’s back was turned. “I’m off to see if I can be some help in the village, hen.”

  “Well, of course you can be a help,” Lily said, a little grumpily. “You’ll have a dozen people asking you to build for them before the day is out.”

  “And do ye object to the idea?”

  Simon was looking at her with a patient expression that she disliked intensely. It meant that he was prepared to wait out her bad mood and could not be goaded into arguing.

  Lily drew in a deep breath and concentrated. Did she wish to start out this new chapter of her life like a fishwife?

  “Of course not.” She gentled her tone. “I’ll come down in a bit and see what I can do. Right now I’ve got trunks to sort through.”

  There was a knock at the front door.

  “And company to visit with, forbye.” Simon got up before Mrs. Thicke could even turn toward the door.

  “Please permit me.”

  The housekeeper giggled like a schoolgirl, something that often happened with women when Simon flashed his dimples at them. A long time ago he had promised Lily never to let his beard grow again, but lately she’d begun to reconsider. As satisfying as it was to know that other women found her husband handsome, it could be tiresome.

  “Now that’s a fine man you’ve got there, Mrs. Ballentyne,” Mrs. Thicke said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Good-tempered, sweet, but a man all the same.” She sighed her way through a memory. “My first husband was a Frenchman, you know. Jock come over here from Paris, France—as a young man. For to make his fortune. And a sweet talker, oh my, with that accent. Like a dove cooing. I do like a man with a foreign accent so long as he’s got a good deep voice, like your—”

  She broke off because Curiosity stood at the door.

  Lily jumped up from the table, her surprise and pleasure banishing the last of her mood. “You are out very early.”

  “Child, half the morning is gone,” she said. “Couldn’t wait no longer to see your sweet face again. With all the trouble yesterday I hardly got a chance to look at you.”

  “Is Ma coming too?”

  “She be by soon enough,” Curiosity said. “Went down to the village with your daddy, see what help they could be. Let me set, my joints aching this morning something fierce. Here now, that will be Hannah and Birdie at the door.”

  Lily went to let her sisters in, and was enveloped immediately in Birdie’s strong hug. It seemed as though the youngest of them would take after Da in terms of her height, because she was almost as tall as Lily at just ten years old.

  Hannah had her Simon tied to her chest in a large square of linen folded into a sling. The baby peeked out like a very comfortable and satisfied owl as Hannah leaned forward to kiss Lily on the cheek.

  Birdie was breathless with excitement. “I wanted to come an hour ago but Hannah said to wait, you needed to catch up on your sleep. The nieces and nephews wanted to come too, but they can’t, not yet.” Said with considerable satisfaction.

  Birdie continued, “The boys had a plan to sneak out of the house to go down to the village, but Ben saw right through that, and he took them all off with him to check his lines. If he’s got any left.”

  Hannah didn’t reply to this, which was sound practice; it seemed to Lily that her little sister was looking for something to worry about.

  “Will you take your nephew?” Hannah asked, and then passed him over to Lily without waiting for an answer. The large, warm, squiggling lump of boy regarded her for a long moment and then broke into a very wide smile.

  “He’s got a tooth.” Lily leaned forward to examine the crest of white peaking out of the gum line.

  “Believe me, I’m aware of that.” Hannah made a face at her son and he burbled back at her.

  Curiosity said, “You won’t break the child, Lily. He so fat that if you did drop him he’d bounce.”

  And so they sat together as if it were the most normal thing, as if they did this every morning and always would. The baby played with Lily’s buttons and Birdie called out commentary from one room and then another. Curiosity picked up a sketchbook and began to look through it while Mrs. Thicke went about her business, contributing now and then to a conversation which ranged from the treacherous weather and flood damage to the quality of the most recent batch of flour from the mill, to Friend Lincoln Matthews’s propensity for doing arithmetic in his head, and had they heard about young Billy Crispin, carrying a goat almost as big as himself away from the flood?

  Finally Curiosity stood up. “Mrs. Thicke, I am going to ask Lily to show Hannah and me around this pretty little house.”

  Mrs. Thicke’s small, round face wrinkled in thought, as though Curiosity had spoken to her in a language she didn’t know, but needed to understand. Then her expression cleared as the underlying request revealed itself to her.

  “Oh, sure. I’m just finished here. I’ll go across and see if my sister needs any help; she’s baking this morning. If that’s agreeable?”

  Lily nodded, because there was a knot in her throat. For such a long time she had wished for these women to talk to, and time to talk, and privacy. But first she would show them the house, which she assumed they knew better than she did. She had been so tired the night before that she had gone to bed without taking in anything at all.

  It was a very pleasing house, carefully planned and built with a great deal of attention to small details. Cupboards and shelves and drawers everywhere she looked, carved lintels and a beautiful tiled oven that was fed, very cleverly, from a grate in the kitchen next to the wood box.

  The three of them walked at Curiosity’s pace, from hall to parlor to bedchamber, to the small dining room and finally to the study.

  To give you another reason to come home, Ethan had written. There’s a
study with good light; it would serve as a studio.

  The room would be sunny indeed—if the sun ever came out again. And there were cubbyholes and shelves enough for her supplies.

  Hannah said, “Ethan likes to build with somebody particular in mind.”

  “Ma didn’t put him up to this—” Lily gestured around herself.

  “No, she did not,” Curiosity said. “But I’m glad Ethan did all this without being asked. That boy has got a feeling for family. I have rarely seen the like.”

  They settled in the parlor, where Ethan had hung some framed drawings—Lily’s own work, some of it fifteen years old and more. When she was still feeling her way along and learning the shape of the world. It was like seeing through her own girlhood eyes.

  “Snug,” Curiosity said. She lowered her head as if she were looking at Lily over the top of spectacles. “So you planning to stay put for a while?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lily said.

  Hannah smiled at her with such kindness and understanding that Lily felt herself relaxing.

  “Well then.” Curiosity looked around the parlor with satisfaction. Finally her gaze came back to Lily and settled there. “So tell us, is it that you cain’t catch, or you cain’t keep?”

  In her surprise Lily expelled a soft puff of air and then a small laugh, which triggered a bigger one. In response, her nephew let out a husky chuckle from deep in his lungs. It was such a pure and natural sound that it set them all off, and then Birdie came in to see what she had missed and what they were all laughing at, and really, did they need to treat her like a child? She understood quite a lot; they should realize that much.

  Hannah sent her off with the baby and orders to see that he went down for his nap on Lily’s bed. Birdie took him with a resigned sigh. At the door she said, “Lily, your trunks aren’t unpacked yet.”

  “Go ahead,” Lily said. “You can sort through whatever interests you.”

  “But keep an eye on that child,” Curiosity added. “Or he will roll right off that bed and put a dent in the floorboards.”