The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  Martha said, “This will go on all day, won’t it? Unless somebody gets hurt.”

  “Even then,” Susanna said. “When they are in the grips of the game, they hear nothing else.”

  “Runs-from-Bears is as fast as any of the younger men,” Jennet said. “And Nathaniel is faster still.”

  “They are a joy to watch,” Elizabeth said. “I have never tired of it, even after so many years.”

  “I doubt that I will either,” Susanna said.

  Martha turned toward her. “How did you and Blue-Jay meet? I don’t think I’ve ever heard the story. If that isn’t too personal a question.”

  Susanna said, “There wasn’t very much to it. One day when we had been here a few months, Ben came to our Seventh-Day Meeting. Ben’s sister-in-law is a Friend, and he sometimes went to Meeting with her when he lived in New Orleans. He was homesick, I think. Blue-Jay asked to come along with him to see what it was like.”

  She put her head back to study the boughs overhead.

  “My father met them at the door and directed them to the back bench, though there were spaces enough at the front.” Susanna closed her eyes and then she sat up straight and looked directly at Martha. “Thou must understand. If Daniel or Lily or someone like thee came to a Meeting, my father would be gracious and welcoming, and room would be made at the front.”

  “Oh,” Martha said, clearly unhappy to have raised the question.

  “Yes, oh,” Susanna said with a grim smile. “I was shamed by my father’s lack of charity and fellowship. And so I went to sit with Ben and Blue-Jay on the back bench. And that was the first time we spoke, though I had seen him before in the village. Thy expression, Martha. Have I surprised thee?”

  “Yes,” Martha said, “a little. So that’s why you don’t come into the village? Because of the way your family treated the Mohawk?”

  “Every day I pray for an opening,” Susanna said. “For a way to forgive my father and my mother too, for taking his part in what happened at Meeting. In the meantime, I have made my home with Blue-Jay at Lake in the Clouds, and I want no other.”

  Martha turned her attention back to the game, which had not slowed down at all in spite of the afternoon sun. Backs and shoulders, knotty with muscle, glistening with sweat. Martha’s eyes tracked Daniel and Elizabeth was struck with the memory of the first days of her own marriage. The powerful hunger, the strangeness of it all.

  To see Daniel playing was to see him truly happy. So much had been taken away from him, but here was one thing left from childhood that he could still do, even one-armed. He leapt into the air brandishing the bagattaway stick Hawkeye had made for him when he was a boy, and scooped the ball out of the sky into the net at its end. With a flick of his wrist he sent it flying again.

  When Elizabeth looked at him she saw her firstborn son, who had come back to them when she had begun to give up hope.

  Martha said, “I worry about being so happy.”

  None of the others had anything to say to that, because they knew too well what she meant. Rather than give her false assurances, Elizabeth covered Martha’s hand with her own.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For my son, I thank you.”

  55

  For Martha the last week of spring and the first of summer seemed to spin by like a top.

  She learned to rise at first light, to have that quiet hour with Daniel. As soon as Betty came up from the village with fresh bread and new milk, the day would begin.

  To Martha’s great relief school came to an end without any terrible missteps on her part, but the newly free hours were filled straight away. She helped Curiosity make soap and Lily organize hundreds of drawings and paintings accumulated over the years. The little people came to visit and she fed them all pancakes while they told her their newest stories. When Hannah went into the woods to find the herbs and roots and barks she needed for her medicinals, Martha came along and paid attention until things she had once known began to come back to her.

  She helped Annie and Susanna in the cornfields at Lake in the Clouds, so that her hands blistered, the blisters broke and then came again until finally she had calluses enough to protect her, and the hoe felt solid in her hands. Though she wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, her freckles multipled by the hundreds, much to Daniel’s interest and amusement. His own skin tone deepened until the green of his eyes stood out and took on a silver cast, so striking that she sometimes found herself unable to look away from him.

  After Martha had watched her new husband shave himself a few times, an awkward process he had trained himself to do with one hand, she offered, hesitantly, shyly, to be taught. At first she thought she had offended him, but the next day he showed her how to sharpen the razor on the strop and to beat soap into a lather and then, step by step, how to scrape the stubble from his cheeks and chin, from his upper lip and finally from his jaw and throat. She loved his neck for reasons she couldn’t explain to herself, and running the razor down its length unsettled her in a way she would have found odd and disturbing, if she had not seen the same reaction on Daniel’s face.

  Betty looked after the laundry and the cleaning, while Martha found other ways to look after Daniel. Sometimes she washed his hair out in the open, Daniel on a chair tilted back and propped against the pump while she rubbed soap into his scalp and then rinsed it. Water ran in rivulets over his arched neck and down his chest, and it often took all her concentration to stay focused on the job at hand. As if she had set him a challenge, Daniel took over the brushing of her hair in the evening. It was her turn to sit in the chair, and she found herself looking forward to it at odd moments during the day.

  They talked about everything. He told her family stories, sad and funny and outrageous, about his grandfather Hawkeye, his own adventures on the mountain as a boy, the time in the militia before he was shot and captured. The time in the garrison at Nut Island. He talked about his injury, and gave her extracts to read from books on anatomy and medicine, so that she would have a better understanding of the damage to his shoulder, and what it meant.

  He told her the story he had heard from Lily about Gabriel Oak and his grandmother. It was hard to believe that Elizabeth’s parentage was as unorthodox as Martha’s, but it made her feel closer to her mother-in-law.

  “She should have been Elizabeth Oak,” Martha said, and Daniel looked directly surprised at that suggestion.

  She told him more about the years she had lived alone with Jemima in the old mill house. Things she hadn’t allowed herself to think about swam up out of the dark and Daniel listened while they sat together on the porch, his fingers laced through her own.

  Elizabeth went to Albany and took Birdie with her, and for that week Martha went more often to Uphill House to help Jennet and visit with Lily. She sat with Nathaniel and Simon and Luke while they ate supper and listened to tall tales that made her laugh until her sides hurt and she wept tears.

  Every third day Hannah came with her box of needles. Sometimes Birdie came along and sometimes Hannah brought her youngest, and Martha sat outside with him until Hannah had finished. Simon was a sturdy, cheerful child who was very serious about learning to crawl. Martha’s courses came again and for all her affection for the little people, she was relieved. She wanted to remember this summer exactly as it was; she wanted to keep Daniel to herself for a while at least.

  In the normal course of things she would have spent a year or more learning about him before they ever entertained a serious thought about marriage. He would have come to call on her, and they would have gone for walks and buggy rides, and little by little they would have given in to the attraction between them. She said this to him and he laughed at the idea outright.

  “You think either of us could have waited a year?”

  “Well, yes,” Martha said. “Or at least, I could have.”

  He raised one eyebrow, which was his way of calling her less than truthful.

  “You have a high opinion of your powers of seduction,” she
said.

  “Oh, I would have had my work cut out for me,” he said as he pulled the brush down the length of her hair. “But I imagine we would have had a good time, both of us.”

  It made no sense to argue with Daniel about these things—mostly, Martha admitted to herself, because he was more comfortable with the subject matter, and worse, he was usually right. And still, he did ask her thoughts and listen when she gave them. He valued her opinion, and he trusted her.

  Martha understood the full measure of his trust the day he emptied his satchel out in front of her. Nothing there was much of a surprise: whetstone, handkerchief, string, compass, the stub of a pencil, a folding of paper covered with notes, and neatly trimmed newspaper clippings held together by a pin. The only item that gave her pause was a tightly wound ball of yarn that smelled of lanolin. Before she could think to ask him about it, he had taken it up and begun to squeeze it rhythmically with his injured hand.

  After a few minutes sweat appeared on his brow and ran in rivulets down his face, but his expression was resolute and he continued on, looking neither left nor right, looking at nothing at all except whatever goal it was he set for himself.

  She wondered if anyone knew he did this, and what Hannah would say. In the end she only brought him a cup of water and a damp rag to wipe his face. It was an hour before Daniel came back to himself, and then he spoke to her about the window sashes they expected any day, and how good it would be to have the renovations to the house done.

  The next day Hannah came alone, and Martha stayed close by to watch. Daniel stretched out on the table, bare to the waist, so his sister could work on his back and shoulders and on the arm that had never healed. She worked in companionable silence, only stopping now and then to talk to Martha about what she had before her, as if Daniel were the subject of an anatomy lesson.

  For the most part Martha kept her questions to herself. She wanted to know if Daniel thought the treatments might be helping, if the pain came less often, if he was feeling hopeful. But now was not the time to ask such things; maybe there would never be a good time unless Daniel raised the subject himself.

  Hannah left, and they went to the spot on the stream where Daniel had killed the timber rattler. They spent the rest of the afternoon in the sun, napping or talking. Sometimes Daniel read aloud to her while she made flower crowns for both of them and for Hopper, who was growing fast out of puppyhood but still insisted on chasing every insect and inspecting every rustle in the grass.

  Every few days Martha went into the village to the trading post. It seemed now certain that no one would ever call it the emporium or anything but the trading post, regardless of how big a sign the Mayfairs nailed in place. She stopped to talk to almost everyone she met, and realized one day that she had lost her reserve. She was too busy to be shy, too happy to be self-conscious. Even the sight of Baldy O’Brien’s scowl couldn’t stay with her for long.

  The only worry was Callie, who seemed ever more distant and preoccupied. She and Ethan had begun building a new house in the orchards—far too big and fancy for Paradise, according to the O’Briens—with room for both the Misses Thicke and for Nicholas too.

  Nicholas was so much a part of the village already that Martha wondered if he ever thought of his other life. The urge to ask him about that life she had been able to keep to herself. So many questions that had to go without answer.

  When Nicholas was not off exploring with Adam and the rest of the little people, he followed Ethan around asking questions. Ethan had always been good with children and he had endless patience; he answered Nicholas calmly no matter how often the question had been asked and answered.

  To Martha it seemed that Ethan was better with the boy than Callie, who was always on guard. The circles beneath her eyes darkened and the wit that had made her conversation so lively rarely showed itself. She had no interest in talking about the new house or the orchards or anything, really. Unlike Nicholas, who was eager to tell every detail.

  To Daniel Martha said, “Nicholas can show you where the windows in his room will be. He wants a dog, and snowshoes, and a hammer of his own. And Callie promises him everything he asks for.”

  In the first fragrant quiet after sunset they were sitting on the porch with a smokepot downwind to keep the blackfly at a distance. It would be Martha’s favorite time of all, if not for the blackfly. Even the pennyroyal ointment she had from Hannah only worked in part. When she grumbled Daniel threatened to tie her down and smear her from head to toe with bear grease, his own way of coping when he went into the bush.

  Daniel said, “I was hoping Callie would calm down after a bit.”

  “Is Ethan concerned?”

  He looked at her, surprised. “I haven’t asked him, and neither should you. They’ll work things out between them.”

  “Or they won’t.”

  He didn’t protest. For a long minute his thoughts seemed very far away, and then he surprised her. “Have you heard Nicholas singing with Levi when he’s helping in the orchard?”

  Martha sat up in her surprise. “Nicholas can sing?”

  He pulled her back to rest against him. “Ma mentioned it to me. She said he has a pure tenor voice, clear as ice. According to Levi the boy can sing harmony to any tune, even ones he never heard before. It’s a natural talent, seems like. To make up for other things.”

  It explained why Levi seemed less distant around the boy and less suspicious in general. When Callie’s father had been alive, there had always been singing in the orchard. It made Martha glad, and it made her deeply uneasy.

  Daniel said, “Are you going to tell me what has got you so worried? Does it bother you that the boy can sing?”

  “Yes,” Martha said. “My mother can sing, and so could Callie’s father. It was the only thing they had in common.”

  “Were you doubting Jemima’s claims about the boy’s parentage?”

  “I suppose I was,” Martha said. “The tighter Callie holds on to the boy, the more I want to draw away. What is she going to do when Jemima comes to claim him?”

  “Maybe she won’t come back for him,” Daniel said. “Maybe she really did mean to dump him here for you and Callie to take care of.”

  But Martha remembered the look on Jemima’s face when she spoke about the boy. The obvious pride, and something that was as much like love as Jemima could produce.

  “She’s coming back,” Martha said. “Like a bad penny. I can feel it in my bones.”

  Callie Wilde Middleton had just brought the workmen their dinner when she saw Lorena walking toward the cider house with a basket over her arm. Her pace was slow and she held herself like a queen, as if she owned everything she saw around herself. As if, Callie had heard said in the village, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

  Lorena visited every day, and sometimes more than once. Callie had been ready to raise the subject to Levi when Ethan made a remark at supper that changed her mind.

  “Did you notice Levi is smiling again?”

  Callie had noticed. It was so unexpected that at first she had wondered if his bowels gripped him.

  “I think he’s pleased about the way the orchard is coming back from the flood.”

  Ethan had a look he used sometimes, not exactly sharp but certainly clear. As if he could see into a person’s head to the worst things hidden in the deepest corners.

  “It might have to do with that,” Ethan said in his usual even way. “But I’m wondering if it has to do with Lorena. You don’t like that idea?”

  Callie often found herself guessing at the answer Ethan wanted to hear from her, because he seldom gave her any obvious clues. His tone left Callie with only two choices: to say nothing at all, or to tell the truth, which must disappoint even Ethan.

  The truth was that Callie didn’t want any outsiders talking to Levi. Not so long ago he had gone for weeks at a time talking to nobody but Callie herself. Now he spoke every day with Ethan, because, she had to remind herself, the marriage meant that Ethan
was the legal owner of this land and everything on it, and as such, he was Levi’s employer. To Callie’s surprise and satisfaction, Ethan had paid Levi’s back wages—two years’ worth, since the last half-decent harvest—and had begun paying him every week on Friday, seeking him out wherever he was to put the money in his hand and spend a few minutes talking.

  Levi was smiling these days, but it didn’t necessarily have to do with Lorena or with wages or even with the fact that for the first time they had the tools and supplies they needed. Callie believed that Levi was smiling about the Bleeding Heart tree, hidden away in the nursery. Callie found herself smiling too, when she thought of it.

  Just yesterday she had gone at sunrise to see for herself, and found that she was afraid to even touch the green fruit no bigger than walnuts.

  Levi said, “All we can do now is pray.”

  It wasn’t like Levi to depend on anybody but himself. She couldn’t ever remember him talking about God, or anything to do with religion. Callie wondered if it was Lorena’s influence, but she bit her tongue.

  Levi scratched his jaw with a thumbnail and looked over her head to the orchard.

  “I have got to ask you a question that maybe ain’t none of my business.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your husband don’t know yet about the Bleeding Heart?”

  She had known this subject would come up sooner or later, but still she was at a loss. “I keep meaning to tell him,” Callie said. “But I can never get started. I know I am being superstitious.”

  “You got reason to be touchy on the subject,” Levi said. “Maybe it’s best to wait until he can taste the fruit for hisself.”

  “Have you—” She almost stopped herself, but then pushed on. “Have you told anybody?”

  His level gaze gave away nothing, not surprise or hurt or anger. “No, I have not,” he said. “But then, I ain’t got a wife. I wouldn’t hold it against you if you told Ethan about it.”