The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  Adam said, “If you mean we cheated the girls, I guess we did.” Adam had a talent for the truth. Sometimes when she was talking to him, she remembered the stories she had heard about the father who had abandoned him before he was born, how strange the ways of nature when a seed from such a poor tree thrived and grew into something straight and strong.

  “It wasn’t much of a wager,” Nathan said. Even at the end of a long winter his hair was almost white-blond. In their physical selves the two boys could hardly be less alike, but in mind and deed they were cut from the same cloth exactly.

  Adam did his best to change the direction of the conversation by pointing out a towhee perched on a pine branch, raccoon tracks, the remains of a squirrel that had run into a dog and never run away again. He talked until Nathan worked up his courage to ask a question.

  “Our folks won’t let us do anything or go anywhere since the flood. We haven’t even been to Lake in the Clouds yet. Why is that? The flood was so long ago.”

  “To your way of thinking it was a long time ago,” Elizabeth said. “But you must think of those who still do not have a roof over their head. It won’t be much longer before school starts again.”

  Nathan’s smooth face scrunched into thoughtfulness, and it made him look very much his mother’s child.

  “What worries you so?” she asked him. And then, after a silence: “You needn’t tell me if it’s a secret. As long as no one is in danger, you needn’t tell me.”

  “Is it a danger to make Aunt Birdie mad at you?” Adam asked, and Nathan flashed him a warning look.

  “If it is, something is very wrong,” Elizabeth said.

  The boys exchanged another glance, and then Adam spoke up. “Why doesn’t Birdie want to be in the same classroom with us? She’s only five months sixteen days older than Nathan, so why shouldn’t she be in the same classroom?”

  For the rest of the walk into the village they discussed the family generations, where Birdie stood in relationship to her own brothers and sisters, and what it was like to be stuck between them and her nieces and nephews. By the time they had come to the Red Dog, the boys seemed much less agitated and more thoughtful. Elizabeth sent them off to say hello in the smithy and then to go watch the men building the new bridge, with firm directions on where they may go and where they may not.

  The boys were off before the last word was spoken and Elizabeth turned toward the schoolhouse, trying to organize her thoughts and not getting very far. Both subjects she wanted to discuss with her son were difficult, and both were important. As she walked up the steps to the schoolhouse door, she was surprised and a little ashamed to realize she was holding her breath.

  But Daniel wasn’t in the school. She walked from classroom to classroom to the apartment in the back that he had so vehemently denied Martha—the rooms swept and scrubbed now, and free of all traces of mud.

  On the lane she asked Friend Emma Michaels, but Emma hadn’t seen Daniel and neither had any of the others Elizabeth stopped. In the shell of the new trading post the noise of hammering was so loud that she had trouble getting anyone’s attention. That gave her a moment to study the improvements.

  There had been a large hearth and a Franklin oven, but those things were gone now. The men who had gathered here to exchange news and opinions about everything from crops to presidents had already begun to migrate to the Red Dog, but now they would have no choice. So many memories tied up with the old trading post, most of them good, some of them so funny that she smiled even now when they came to mind. It occurred to her for the first time that the only gaol Paradise had—Anna’s pantry, as they still called it—had been lost with the rest of the trading post. She wondered if they’d build another one, and where. It was a question she wouldn’t put to Tobias Mayfair, who was very difficult to draw into conversation even on topics as uncontroversial as the weather.

  It was odd that the Mayfairs should be living here in Paradise for so long but still did not understand—or care to understand—the most basic of facts about their neighbors. They would build a larger and better lit and cleaner trading post, but their business would decline because they made no place for men to sit and talk. But maybe that was what Mayfair wanted; he might be hoping to bring in women, with pretty fabrics and ready-made clothes. The younger women showed little interest in spinning and weaving, after all, but just as much interest in fashion as their mothers and grandmothers before them.

  The new sign, freshly painted, was propped against the wall to dry. In strong black letters it declared the place to be Mayfair’s Mercantile. Anna could have told him, if she were still alive, how fruitless it was to try to rename things in Paradise. She herself had tried to call the trading post an emporium, but had to give it up as a bad job when Magistrate Bookman asked her what she meant, if she was declaring all Paradise an empire or just her piece of it.

  When Elizabeth finally had the attention of one of the Mayfair sons—which one she could not say, there were so many of them—and he had gone around to ask, she learned that Daniel had been seen in the early morning, but not since.

  Elizabeth stood in the soft spring sunlight and considered. Daniel might be helping Callie or working with Ethan; he might have gone to call on one of his student’s families, or he could have gone home to the small house he had had built for himself in the strawberry fields, an hour’s walk up Hidden Wolf. A walk she would not have hesitated to undertake even a few years ago. A walk she would have enjoyed, because it was her favorite time of year in the endless forests, when small things woke up and reached out. If you stood very silent for long enough, you could hear it happening, like the whispering a butterfly made working its way out of a cocoon.

  She read herself a short sermon: The smells of spring were in the air, and the light had a buttery color that was particular to this time of year. The walk would do her good, even if Daniel was not at home. Why, she could continue on to Lake in the Clouds and visit with Susanna, who was always glad of company, most especially company of women who had been married longer than she herself. It had been a long time since her last visit, when the snow was still deep and the cold unyielding.

  Or she could go home again, and see how Lily was faring. If she had found a way to be comfortable in mind and body both.

  The letter she carried crackled as if encouraging her to hurry along.

  Don’t be a coward.

  She said this to herself aloud, and then she turned toward the lake, where most of the men—including some of her own—were trying to get the new bridge finished. People had had enough of waiting to be ferried across the river. Even fifteen minutes in the company of Willy LeBlanc was daunting, for the boy was as garrulous and distracted in conversation as his father. To Becca’s credit, he was a much harder worker. As were all the LeBlanc children.

  “Boots, if you were any deeper in your thoughts you’d drown.”

  Nathaniel grabbed her shoulders before she walked directly into him, and then he kissed her and let her go.

  “You look less than happy to see me,” she said. “I suppose because I was lost in my thoughts.”

  For years he had been trying to impress upon her the importance of paying attention to her surroundings, especially in spots such as this one, where trees cut off the view of both the lake and the village center. When she was first in Paradise she had heard many stories of panthers—or painters, as the woodsmen called them—attacking the unwary. Then she had seen it for herself, and thus should be all the more cautious, but still over the years the fear had faded.

  She could try to make this argument to her husband, but it would get her nowhere. Primarily because he was right.

  “I’m turning into a forgetful old lady,” she said. “But I will try harder. Where are you going?” She cast a pointed look at the empty bucket he carried.

  “Nails,” he said. “If Joshua has got the new batch done. And what about you, Boots? Why are you wandering in the woods? Never mind, let me guess. You’re looking for Daniel.
”

  He was grinning at her. A long strand of steel gray hair was caught up in the simple silver hoop he wore in his ear, and she reached up to smooth it. Nathaniel took the opportunity to grasp her hand and raise her wrist to his mouth.

  “Ow!” Elizabeth pulled away, laughing. “You nip like a bull calf. And don’t you dare start, I won’t have one of your conversations here in the open.”

  That made him laugh. “You are looking for Daniel, ain’t that so?” With the heel of his hand he pressed the spot between her breasts and was rewarded with the crackle of paper before she could slap his hand away.

  “I knew you were up to something when Hannah brought that letter and the two of you shut yourself up with Curiosity.”

  “And how do you know it has to do with Daniel? It could be Lily or anyone else.”

  “Because I know that look,” Nathaniel said. He let a long breath go and pulled her to him with one arm. “And because there’s a lot of talk about a box that came all the way from India, addressed to our Hannah.”

  It would do no good to deny any of it, and so Elizabeth looked around herself and then lowered her voice. “I promised Hannah I would talk to Daniel before I told you or anyone else.”

  His brow folded down, and then he inclined his head. “Fine then, Boots. But don’t make me wait too long.”

  “The sooner I find the boy, the sooner you’ll hear for yourself.”

  Nathaniel turned to look over his shoulder into the woods. “You don’t hear him?”

  “I hear hammering and geese but I don’t hear—” She stopped and concentrated. And there it was: the sharp, abrupt sound of a knife penetrating wood.

  Nathaniel nodded. “He’s been at it an hour at least. Give him a reason to stop, he won’t fight too hard.”

  25

  When he was agitated and ill at ease, Daniel worked with his knives.

  At just nineteen he had taken his rifle to war to make a name for himself, as his father and grandfather had done before him. He came home with an arm that could not support the weight of a book, much less a long gun. It took a year for him to accept that he wouldn’t ever be able to handle a rifle again, and another year before he turned all his effort and attention to throwing.

  He started with the tomahawk that belonged to his great-grandfather Chingachgook, practicing every day until his good arm shook and he couldn’t make a fist anymore.

  One day he came upon a doe and without giving it much thought he threw and killed her with one clean blow to the neck. He had to hold the doe’s head down with one boot to wrench the blade from the spine where it had lodged.

  Once he had mastered the tomahawk Daniel began working with smaller blades. Now he had a half dozen different weapons of all sizes and types, some of them of his own design, forged in the smithy. He carried five or six blades with him at all times, as he would have carried his rifle.

  Daniel was proud of the fact that he hunted for his own table, cleaned and cooked what he brought down. Rabbit and squirrel, grouse and turkey, ducks, and once a wild swine. He left the larger game for the most part, because he couldn’t get it home on his own and disliked the waste of field dressing. The skins he brought to Annie for curing, and paid her for her help.

  Now a knife came as easily to hand as a fork or spoon. Daniel tested the weight of the heavier hatchet before he let it go. It made the whoop-whoop-whoop sound of an eagle flying overhead, and then it severed a witch hazel branch as thick as his good wrist.

  He was sweat-soaked but not so weary that he didn’t hear the sound of his mother coming through the woods, a full five minutes before she stepped into the clearing.

  The sight of Ma out here in the open always surprised him, though he knew it should not. Thirty years ago she had gone into the bush a new bride and come out again changed. Able to care for herself in the endless forests, if need be. The wife of a backwoodsman.

  “You could cut a few more branches,” she said to him. “And put them in your classroom. They smell so sweet.”

  Daniel had to laugh at this suggestion. All her years in Paradise among trappers, and she had never resigned herself to the stink of sour clothes stiff with grime. She never gave up on trying to improve what she called the miasma of the classroom, and retiring from teaching hadn’t dampened her ongoing dedication to a problem that Daniel could live with.

  He said, “Ma, I’ll cut some for you if you like. To put by your window for when you’re working.”

  “That would be lovely.”

  A woodpecker rattled overhead. Daniel went about caring for his weapons; his mother would raise whatever topic sent her looking for him soon enough. But she surprised him, reaching out to take his grandfather’s tomahawk from him to run her fingers over the carving.

  “Hawkeye told so many stories,” she said. “And most of them had to do with war. This is the hatchet that saved your grandmother Cora’s life on more than one occasion. But that was three wars ago.”

  She seemed to be talking more to herself than to him as she traced the carving.

  “You are very pensive today,” he said. In his mother’s company his vocabulary began to stretch and grow and words he never used anytime else—except in spelling lessons—would come out of hiding.

  “Am I?”

  “You’ve got all of us together in one place; what is there to worry about now?”

  “Lily. Lily worries me. Her health and her state of mind both.”

  Daniel wished now he could take back the question. His mother did enough worrying without his encouragement.

  “Ma,” he said. “Did you come to talk about Lily?”

  She cast a frowning glance and then turned away to look into the trees, her arms folded over the ends of her shawl and her head canted forward, her gaze focused on the ground beneath her feet. She was patient, and demanded the same of her children. The words would come when they presented themselves in the proper order, and not before.

  “There is a letter,” she said. “It came with the post yesterday, for Hannah. She asked me to talk to you about it.”

  Elizabeth was braced for what must come next, and so she watched the animation leave his face and his jaw settle hard. Inscrutable. The very image of his father when he sensed a battle ahead.

  He said the one word.

  “No.”

  “Daniel,” Elizabeth said quietly. “I want you to listen until I’m finished, without interrupting me. Will you please do that for me?”

  Oh, how he wanted to deny her. She could see it in the way his gaze jerked away into the woods. But he was a good man and he had been trained well by his father. It took a concentrated effort but he calmed himself.

  “Go on.”

  She sat down on a fallen log and took the letter out of her bodice. Fine paper, closely written. Not a watermark or crease beyond the folds. It had come in a chest with medical supplies and books, and a manuscript written in the same clean, tight hand.

  “Do you remember Hakim Ibrahim?”

  “Only from stories,” Daniel said. He would not volunteer anything, and in some ways that made her task easier.

  “Hakim Ibrahim and Hannah have been corresponding for many years, before she went west with Strikes-the-Sky, and again since she came back from New Orleans after the war.”

  Hannah corresponded with so many doctors and healers of every stripe. Sometimes she recited bits of their letters when they had a meal together, but for the most part the tone and subject were of interest to Birdie and Curiosity and no one else.

  “Apparently she asked his advice about your nerve damage,” she went on. “Some years ago.”

  The muscles in Daniel’s jaw jumped, but he stood his ground.

  “Hakim Ibrahim is recently returned to his home in India after five years in China.”

  She paused then, searching for the right words, and with that he let out a sigh.

  “What is it? Another herb? Another tea? I’ve had enough, Ma. A few green things steeped in water can’t f
ix what’s wrong with me. I’ll never have the full use of the arm again. If I can live with that, why can’t you?”

  It was an old argument, and one they both hated.

  “Let me ask,” she said, her voice firm. “Have we brought anything to you recently? In the last two years, even. And let me remind you, we have not. If Hannah and I are willing to risk your anger and another week’s long disappearance, does it not seem reasonable to you that this time what we have to propose must be something very out of the ordinary?”

  She was breathing rapidly and made an effort to calm herself. When she looked up again, some of the tension had left his face. His expression was still aggrieved, but there was a good amount of reluctant acquiescence there as well.

  “So,” he said. “Go on and tell me about this miracle cure that comes all the way from China by way of India. I’ll listen, but that’s all.”

  “Very well. Hakim Ibrahim spent his time in China studying a medical procedure that involves targeting specific nerves. The evidence indicates that this treatment will have a positive effect in the majority of patients.”

  “But not all,” Daniel said.

  “Not all,” Elizabeth echoed. “But there is some reason to believe it might help your symptoms. There is no tea or herb or ointment, no medication in the traditional sense.”

  His mouth contorted. He was interested in spite of himself.

  “A scalpel, then,” he said.

  “No,” Elizabeth said quickly. “No surgery.”

  His patience was at an end. “What then, Ma? Will you spit it out?”

  “Needles,” Elizabeth said. “Long, very thin needles. Hakim Ibrahim has sent Hannah a full set of these needles in a beautiful ebony wood box, along with a hundred-page treatise on their application and use. Dozens of illustrations. Hannah was up until very late studying them, and today she has a headache. She should know better than to read by candlelight—”

  She stopped herself, because the corner of Daniel’s mouth was twitching.

  He said, “And Hannah would like to try this procedure. She’d like to turn me into a pincushion to see if she can put things right.”