The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  And something else. Something she had always feared but never felt before, with Callie. For the first time Callie seemed to be envious. The orchard was everything to her, but she envied Martha, and why, exactly? Did it come down to something as simple as money?

  Liam Kirby had left her his considerable fortune. Before Jemima ran off, when she had thought of herself as Martha Quick, she had daydreamed about her real father coming to claim her. He would take her away from Jemima and she would keep house for him, and if he had no fortune she never would have missed it. Instead he had died in the war and now she had his money instead, and with it came the Spencers, her guardians, and a new home in Manhattan. She had never asked for any of it.

  She thought Callie understood that much. Callie did understand that much, or at least, she had once understood it. This was not the friend Martha had grown up with. Something was far wrong, and it had only partly to do with changed plans for a new orchard house. Martha determined that the only way to get to the heart of it was to sit Callie down and demand the whole truth, come what may. She would do that as soon as she got back to the village. In the meantime, she would not let the party be ruined because Callie Wilde had got her head full of foolish ideas.

  She set herself that goal, and one more: She would see that the orchard house was built, whether or not she ever set a foot in it. Callie could protest; she might insist on paying back every penny, but she would have the house.

  Once Martha put Callie out of her mind, she found herself just as wound up with thoughts of Daniel, who hadn’t joined the group for the walk up to Lake in the Clouds either. Whether this meant he wasn’t coming, or had gone ahead, that Martha couldn’t know without asking. Something she would not and could not do.

  Out of sight Luke was telling a story about a trapper named Malone who had come into the Red Dog and tried to pick a fight, and how Charlie LeBlanc had made an effort to talk him out of it with liberal helpings of schnapps, and failed. Malone had just about got it into his head to take a swing at Ethan when Jim Bookman showed his face and things settled down.

  Once the trappers had gone all the way to Johnstown or Albany to trade their furs, but now they came only as far as Paradise, where they got fair prices from Luke Bonner. But that also meant fistfights and sometimes worse, fueled by hard drink and short tempers.

  Today Martha seemed to be overflowing with memories, things that hadn’t come to mind for years. Most likely, she told herself, it had to do with the fact that this was the path she had walked to school and home again, when home had been the big mill house that overlooked the river and the village. Martha had made herself look at it as they passed. Recently painted a light gray with white shutters, every windowpane polished, crisp white curtains. The brass door knocker winked in the late afternoon sun. A young woman with a baby in her arms stood at one of the uppermost windows, a room that had been closed off when Martha was a girl. As most of the rooms had been. They had lived in the kitchen and two tiny chambers. In the deepest, coldest part of the winter they had sometimes slept on pallets by the kitchen hearth where some small amount of heat came from the banked fire. And still Martha remembered waking with her breath frozen on the blanket over her face.

  It seemed all her memories of the house where she grew up were of cold. Drafty rooms with great damp splotches of peeling wallpaper, the smell of mice in dim corners. The casements that weren’t shuttered were boarded over because where was the money to come from, Jemima would ask out loud, to replace a dozen windowpanes? When Martha had nightmares, which was not so often in the last years, she always found herself in that house with its smells of cooking beans and cabbage, dust and lye soap. Chilblains kept her awake at night, listening to the sound of Jemima’s pacing.

  Martha straightened her shoulders and tried to pay attention to the world around her. Not much farther to the cabin that had been Elizabeth Bonner’s school. Where she had taught her own children and almost everyone else as well. If you lived in Paradise, were under forty and knew your letters, you most probably had learned them from her. As Martha had, and both her parents. As Callie had too.

  Martha paused and shifted the basket Curiosity had given her to carry. The smell of fresh cornbread and new butter made her stomach growl.

  “Martha!” called Ben Savard. “Make tracks!”

  It wasn’t safe to walk the mountain at dusk without a weapon. When darkness fell the big cats came out to hunt, and the first bears were about with empty bellies. Martha knew all that but somehow the danger didn’t feel real until she heard the tone of Ben’s voice. She picked up her pace and caught up to the others at the old schoolhouse.

  For a moment it seemed that time had rolled backward yet again, because there were children sitting on the cabin porch or playing nearby. Then she recognized the Oxleys, who had so recently lost their home and mother both.

  The children were telling stories to the unexpected visitors. Martha heard one of the older children politely offer tea and Ethan’s carefully worded refusal, always laced with easy good humor. He was very good with children. Good with everyone, really, able to put people at ease, though he himself never seemed to be.

  Mr. Oxley came to the door, or Friend James, as they called him. A tall and painfully thin man, his cheeks so sunken he could not have many teeth. But when he smiled his whole face erupted into a landscape of wrinkles, and it turned out he did have teeth, though not so many of them as most.

  They spent some minutes talking about the progress he was making rebuilding his own place near the river, how much help he had gotten and how thankful he was, and what a shame that Lily couldn’t join the party on such a fine spring evening. Hannah wanted to know how the children were getting on, who was doing the cooking, whether there was someone to take care of the littlest Oxleys and look to the endless list of chores a mother with five young children and a household must face every day.

  “My second cousin Belinda is coming,” Oxley told them. “A widow with two children of her own, older boys.”

  So the women gossiping in the village had been right. A man like this one must remarry quickly or lose his children. James Oxley had acted quickly, and Martha liked him for it. Callie’s father had not dealt so well with loss and disappointment, while Martha had never once seen her own father in the flesh.

  Finally they walked in silence for a while. Martha wondered if the men were still thinking of the Oxleys or if their minds had gone on to other things, the evening ahead or the work that waited tomorrow, whether it would be necessary to go to Johnstown for supplies before long, the things that needed mending, chairs and traps, a hoe, shingles.

  The women’s minds were still with the Oxleys, there was no doubt of that. Jennet had a look Martha had come to recognize, determined to accomplish something others told her she could not. The Oxleys wouldn’t want for clothes or food as long as Jennet had a say. Hannah kept her thoughts better hidden, but Ben must have known what was going on behind those dark eyes, because he leaned over and whispered something in her ear and she laughed and batted at him. With that the melancholy spell was broken and they began to talk again.

  The woods thinned and then they were in the strawberry fields, a long narrow meadow that would be fragrant with fruit in the height of summer. As girls she and Callie had often played in the ruins of an old cabin right off the deer path that angled from one corner to the other, but even that had changed. A newer house stood where the old cabin had been. This one was larger, and in the shape of an L with a porch across the front. Daniel Bonner’s place, then. She had known about it but never come so far up the mountain to see it on any of her visits. It hadn’t interested her enough then, but she was interested now. Her pace slowed as they passed so she could take in more details.

  There was one old oak in the meadow, close enough to the house to provide shade in summer. Daniel had planted a few more trees to make a half circle that would protect the spot from the worst of the winter winds, once they had grown in. There was no garde
n unless it was on the other side of the small barn.

  The house itself she recognized as similar to the ones Ethan had built on the Johnstown road. Not fancy or fussy, but pleasing to the eye. She had been expecting a cabin similar to the one she had grown up in: two rooms at the most, and just as many small windows to break up the squared log walls chinked with clay.

  Martha was looking so hard that she walked right into Ethan, who had come to a stop on the path without her notice. He grabbed her shoulders before she could fall over.

  Jennet said, “He’s gone ahead to Lake in the Clouds, or we might invite ourselves in.”

  Her tone was unremarkable, but Martha was aware of the way the others were holding themselves, as if they were intruding on something private. Martha might have corrected them. She could have said there was nothing to be secretive about; she had no claim on Daniel nor he on her. If she felt some inexplicable urge to tell everything, all she could confess to was a few conversations. The only time he had touched her was to help her up out of the mud, and of course there was the episode with the hat—

  “We’re losing the light,” said Luke and so they went on. Martha resisted the urge for one look back at the cabin and concentrated on keeping up with the others, now that they were in the woods again and the way was growing steeper.

  A nightjar called and its mate answered, and Martha’s skin rose in goose bumps all along her spine.

  Daniel stood out of sight in the woods for no other reason than to watch Martha Kirby.

  The party passed single file on the narrow path, Luke up ahead, Ben at the rear, Ethan in the middle, all of them carrying their rifles cradled and ready. Ben looked up to the spot where Daniel stood out of sight, and for a moment Daniel was sure he had been sensed if not seen. But if Ben knew he was not willing to show himself, he also knew why and was not in a hurry to draw attention to Daniel’s odd behavior.

  Because it was odd. He had come right out and made his interest in Martha clear at the dinner table, after all. He had startled himself, speaking up so early when it was clear that Martha was interested but not ready, not yet, to consider him. His own interest, the depth of it, unsettled him. Now Daniel watched Martha, who walked the path through the woods with the easy stride of someone who had grown up on this mountain. Contained within herself, but aware of everything. As she moved away Daniel told himself she could be anyone. Any woman running an errand, a basket on one arm and another on her back, the very last of the sunlight tracing her shape, gilding the curve of her shoulder. The light caught her hair and set the red in it to sparkling.

  He had yet to kiss her. There was nothing more between them than some teasing and a few conversations that he remembered word for word. And the fact that some nineteen years ago he had come upon her mother and father coupling in the light of day, in the hour she was conceived, as Lily had reminded him.

  When they were gone far enough ahead that he could no longer hear them, Daniel got up and followed.

  28

  Birdie knew she was being unreasonable, but she was out of sorts, though she had tried hard to hide it all day. The little people had all been put to bed—though by the thumping that came from overhead, she was sure they were far from asleep—and she was allowed to stay up, which was a very good thing. On the other hand, it seemed she would never be old enough to go to ice-out at Lake in the Clouds. Today she had asked Da when she might be asked along and he had put his hand on her head and rocked it back and forth.

  “Why such a hurry to grow up?”

  She tried Lily instead.

  “How old do you think I’ll have to be?” she asked. Too late she realized that her sister was likely feeling very low herself. She had missed a lot of ice-out parties and now she was going to miss another one.

  “Oh, someday,” she said easily. “When you’re old and gray and you have grandchildren of your own.”

  In spite of herself, Birdie had to smile at such an odd idea. She decided she had been shirking the job of keeping Lily occupied and distracted, except she did seem to be in a better mood. It was right that she was at home, but Birdie did miss the long afternoons together.

  “I think you and I are a great deal alike,” Lily said.

  “And what am I like?”

  Lily looked out the window and studied what she saw there for a moment. “Not easy. Certainly not complaisant. At odds with the world, and always fighting your way forward. Birdie, I am not scolding you. Those are good qualities in a woman who has dreams for herself. I wish the same for my daughter, though at times I’m sure I’ll wonder what I was thinking.”

  Birdie sniffed, mollified. “How do you know it’s a girl?”

  The question seemed to catch Lily by surprise. “I’m not sure. It just feels to me as if it must be.”

  “Is it worth not going to the ice-out party?”

  “I think so,” Lily said. “The ice-out party and much more. And you know, I like the idea of some time with just you and Ma and Curiosity.”

  “That’s good,” Curiosity said as she came into the parlor. “’Cause that’s just what I had in mind.”

  Curiosity said, “I been thinking about this all day, just the four of us. Here’s your mama with the tea.”

  “Gingerbread,” Birdie breathed happily. “Oh, gingerbread.”

  “We got to have a little party of our own, don’t we?” Curiosity leaned over and tugged on Birdie’s plait.

  It took a moment to pass the teacups and plates, and then there was silence while proper attention was paid to the food. Birdie looked through her mother’s drawing exercises while she ate, and held each one up to make a comment or ask a question.

  “You see,” Elizabeth said to her. “I am struggling, but I think I grasp the concept. Lily is a good teacher.”

  Lily swallowed and said, “Ma, you’re the teacher. You and Daniel. I don’t have the patience.”

  “You’re patient when you’re drawing,” Birdie said. “You concentrate so hard I think you wouldn’t notice if the roof fell in.”

  “That’s different,” Curiosity said. “That’s Lily’s gift. Handed down from your daddy, Elizabeth.”

  The silence that followed was so sharply defined, Elizabeth imagined she could hear the beat of her own heart. Everyone was looking at her. Birdie with some confusion, Lily with dawning surprise. Curiosity sat, her hands folded in front of her, nothing of fear or hope in her expression. Elizabeth had been waiting many years for Curiosity to raise this subject, but now that it was here she felt a trickle of fear at the back of her throat.

  “What?” Birdie said, looking between them. “What?”

  Elizabeth took a sip of tea to steady herself, and then she put the cup down on the table.

  “Is it time?” She wanted to look away, but she forced herself to hold Curiosity’s gaze.

  “I think so,” Curiosity said. “High time.”

  “What are you talking about?” Birdie said, her voice rising. “Lily, what are they talking about? Time for what?”

  Lily smiled at her. “Curiosity is going to tell us about Gabriel Oak. Isn’t that right, Curiosity?”

  “Gabriel Oak?” Birdie’s forehead creased and for a moment she looked so much like her infant self, determined to make sense of the world, that Elizabeth’s heart ached. The story Curiosity wanted to tell them—needed to tell them—was one Birdie might not understand fully, but it was right that she was here. The four of them, together.

  Elizabeth wondered if Curiosity’s choice of time and place had mostly to do with Lily, whose discontent over Daniel’s growing attachment to Martha Kirby she didn’t even attempt to hide. Her concern for her twin was such that she might do more harm than good, though she could not see that, just now. Why Gabriel Oak should be relevant was not at all clear, but Elizabeth had a strong feeling about this. Curiosity’s stories were carefully timed.

  She cleared her throat. “Birdie, you must let Curiosity talk without interruption. She is going to tell us the story of why
my mother left Paradise and went to England.”

  “What does that have to do with Gabriel Oak?” Birdie said.

  “Everything,” Curiosity said.

  “Do you know this story already, Ma?” Birdie was looking at her sharply, her tone both surprised and offended at the idea that she had not been told something of such clear value.

  “I think I do,” Elizabeth said. “Over the years, I think I have worked it out for myself. But I don’t know any of the details. We must let Curiosity tell us.”

  29

  Curiosity began:

  Back then things was a lot different.

  Only a few families, and the wood come right down to the marsh in most places. In those days the Mohawk was still strong and the other tribes too, hadn’t none of them give up the fight. The only reason the settlement survived at all was Hawkeye. He was on good terms with the Mohawk and just about everybody else, except the Huron and they didn’t come this far south. Hawkeye had him a reputation. Those that didn’t like him were sore fearful of making him angry, and so the tribes made a circle around this little village, for a few years at least.

  You know the first thing I saw, when we came into Paradise? It was your man, Elizabeth. Three years old, and so full of life, you had to smile just to see that boy. We come out of the woods—the forest came all the way down to where the trading post stands today, back then, oh, yes. We come out of the woods and there was Half Moon shining in the sun, bright enough to make your eyes water. Somebody was chopping wood, and there was birdsong all around, and the air smelled so good you would want to eat it. To all that came the sound of a little child laughing. You know that laugh the little ones got, so full and deep you got no choice but to laugh along with ’em? And there was Nathaniel rough-housing with Maddie. With your mama, Elizabeth. They were playing some game with pinecones and did she have that boy wound up?