Storyteller

by Patricia Reilly Giff

  Gerard came to my mind. Gerard would tell me.

  I waited until I saw glimpses of the sun directly overhead, and then I went toward his lean-to, not on the path I usually took, but along its side.

  I didn’t call out, but he heard me coming. As quiet as I was, I could never surprise him. He held out his arms, and I fell into them. “What have you done to your hands, child?”

  I looked down. They were blackened, charred, but strangely, there was no feeling in them.

  He motioned to Elam, who was in the doorway. Elam went for a cup of water, and Gerard held it, icy cold, to my lips. Nothing had ever tasted so fine.

  But what about Mother?

  My words tumbled out: the house, the coop, Mother. Gerard listened. And then we were both silent for a moment.

  “She was right,” he said. “You must go.”

  “I have to go back to her.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t go back.”

  I didn’t answer. I knew she was gone, that the house was gone, that there was nothing left to go back to.

  I wanted to sink under Old Gerard’s walnut tree and close my eyes. If only I could wrap my arms around myself until the trembling died down, until I could stop thinking about the whoosh of fire as it had gone through the roof of the coop. If only I could forget the moment I’d seen the house, seen the black smoke coming from the doorway. But most of all, I wanted to stop seeing Mother with those dark shapes around her.

  I couldn’t stay; I knew that.

  Gerard went into his lean-to and came out with a clay jar. He covered my hands with a thick poultice that smelled of bark, and grease, and maybe rum.

  My hands felt as if they were encased in thick mitts, and my fingers were stiff. As he helped me lie down, I knew I had the beginning of a fever.

  I slept for what must have been hours, and awoke at last to see Gerard coming across the field. Elam followed, head down, a spade in his hand.

  I sat up. They had buried Mother. Mother, with her soft face, her warm hands. Gerard and I looked at each other in silence.

  “Under the trees, I’ve marked her grave with a stone,” he told me. “I think it is a good place for her.”

  “I’m grateful,” I said, my voice strangled. Only that morning she had turned the cheese in its tray.

  I saw then that the sun was a red ball beyond the fields. “I must go,” I told him.

  He nodded and I could see the pity in his dark eyes.

  I almost asked him to come with me, almost blurted out the words I can’t go alone. How do I know where to go? But I knew that as long as he was alive, he’d stay there, straddled between the Patriots and the Loyalists.

  “You will go north,” he said, “and somehow find your father and your brother.” He held out a cloth bag he’d filled with more of the poultice, a water jug, dried meat, fire starters, and lengths of linen for my hands.

  I thought of the piece of parchment I had carried with me since the day Father had left. It would show me the lines my feet had to travel, the high points I’d climb first, the earth gentling out, rolling in front of me, the sweep of the rivers I’d have to cross.

  Gerard spoke again. “You will have to find your way. You won’t know whether those you’ll meet are friends or enemies. Stay alone; keep to yourself until you are sure.”

  I half listened to his reminder about what to do for thirst and hunger. I was thinking it would take weeks to find Father and John. I looked down at my hands. What use would they be?

  The sun had disappeared, but the sky to the west was shot through with its rays. “You must leave now,” Gerard said, “before someone realizes you are here.”

  I stood, and he eased the bag over my shoulders. He slashed some of the linen into pieces with his knife and wrapped them gently around my hands. He touched my forehead, and then I turned, my eyes burning, and went toward the field. When I was halfway across, he came after me and dropped his knife into the bag.

  How could I leave him?

  Almost blind from tears, I stumbled away.

  My head told me to go north, but my feet knew where I belonged, and that was the path I took. I skirted the trees until what was left of the house was in front of me: the blackened logs, the spirals of smoke still wafting upward, and the chimney standing high and alone. The land was scorched, the corn shriveled away. The stench of it burned my nostrils.

  I waited, watching, until it was almost dark, and then I went closer. Nothing was left of the chicken coop but ashes. The cow was gone, and the sheep.

  Oh, Father, your sheep, a Loyalist prize.

  For the first time, I thought about Stout Lucy, our irritable cat. Did you escape, Lucy? Please be safe.

  The house door hung there. How strange, a door that was supposed to protect us led to nowhere. I stood outside, seeing floorboards that were still smoking. The linens, and even the bed, had burned away. The pot on its hook in the hearth was covered in soot.

  I wept, my hands held high in front of me. There was no strength in my fingers to open the cellar door. I was glad I wouldn’t see what had happened to the herbs, the apples, and the potatoes that looked like old men’s faces.

  One of Mother’s spoons and her iron kettle lay close to the doorway. I could see that spoon in her hand; I could see her grasp the kettle’s handle, pouring water into a cup. I managed to slip the spoon into my bag and loop the kettle over my arm.

  How foolish. Oh, Zee, what will we do with you?

  Even more foolish, I curled up against the door outside, my head against the splintered wood, and slept.

  My dreams were strange. Weird dark shapes wandered in and out of them, and a voice said, Hurry, Zee.

  I awoke to a terrible thirst. I didn’t try to unstop Gerard’s water jug, but walked slowly to the river’s edge.

  I lay in the mud, drinking, the water cooling my mouth, my throat. I walked into the shallows; the cold water bathed my fever while above hundreds of fireflies blinked their yellow-green lights.

  I thought of a hot July night the past summer. Who could have slept in that damp heat? Together Mother and I had tiptoed out the door and watched the fireflies. Mother’s hand had been on my shoulder; I could almost feel it there now.

  How could I live without Mother?

  I thought of John; I thought of Julian and Miller, whose father had the gristmill down the road. Miller trying to make me laugh when I was in a testy mood. And then his face in front of me one night last summer: “Who doesn’t fight for what belongs to him?”

  And now I knew he was right.

  If John had been here … If Julian and Miller had still lived just over the hill … And Father? If.

  I had done nothing to save Mother, to save our house.

  Fiercely, I promised myself: I would be different. I would be strong and tough. Never again would I let anyone take away what was mine.

  I turned to look at the ruin behind me, a smoldering mass. It was the last of home. I went back to the doorway for the bag and began to walk.

  elizabeth

  TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  It’s Saturday night. Elizabeth sits opposite Libby at the kitchen table eating dinner: wrinkled peas and chicken tenders. The peas were cooked too long, the tenders not long enough.

  It’s late. They waited all afternoon at the arts and crafts shop, not willing to leave the drawing. They chose a narrow silver frame and bent over looking at the back of the drawing while the shop owner talked on the phone.

  “Strange,” Libby said as they stared at the pale markings: the three triangles, the center one towering over the other two, and the lines meandering across the page. What could those marks have possibly meant to Zee?

  Elizabeth finishes the last of her dinner and looks across at Libby. “I’m going to change,” she says. She feels almost desperate about it. “I’m going to save money and pay for the frame.” She takes a breath. “I’m going to start my life over, be more careful.”

  Libby laughs. “Your mother was always
starting over, too.” She goes to the china closet and pulls a picture out from the bottom drawer. “I meant to give you this.”

  A seven- or eight-year-old girl smiles out at her from the photo. “You know that her name was Sarah,” Libby says. “We called her Sisty.”

  She was real, Elizabeth’s mother who died when Elizabeth was a baby. She wasn’t an angel who floated around on a cloud somewhere, like the one in the Christmas card picture Elizabeth keeps in her dresser drawer.

  “How much she loved you,” Libby says.

  Elizabeth’s eyes burn. Strange, she’s never once cried for her mother. She glances toward the hall. The drawing is back on the wall: Zee, another person who once was real. And Elizabeth’s mother looks a little like Zee.

  Libby clears her throat. “I’ve been thinking about my cousin Harry.”

  A name Elizabeth doesn’t know.

  “He’s a second cousin, I guess,” Libby says. “We used to spend holidays together when my grandparents were alive.” She smiles. “Your great-grandparents.”

  Elizabeth thinks of holidays. Her mother would have had Thanksgiving dinner with great-grandparents Elizabeth has never heard of, and maybe Christmas with Harry, whoever he is.

  “Harry would know much more of the family history,” Libby says, and veers off to talk about Zee’s fire. She ends with “It was neighbor against neighbor here during the Revolutionary War.”

  That one word intrigues Elizabeth.

  Here.

  Neighbor against neighbor here.

  All this time, she’s thought the Revolutionary War was far away. Maybe down on Long Island, or in South Jersey. “Here?”

  “Zee’s farm was north of Deposit, along the Delaware River,” Libby says. “That was the frontier.”

  Elizabeth can’t believe it. An hour or two by car, maybe.

  “They burned her out,” Libby says. “Was it Loyalists? Iroquois? No one knows. But they burned the farmhouse down, and the outbuilding. I walked that land when I was a child. Harry and I did that. He still lives there.” She raises one shoulder. “There’s nothing left, just the fields, the river, and Harry’s house.”

  Elizabeth blows across the surface of her tea. Zee had a place. She lived in that place.

  “It’s strange about family stories,” Libby says. “The first generation remembers all of it, but what passes on to the next is just in pieces, and those pieces get smaller and smaller.…”

  This is a lot for Libby to say at once, Elizabeth thinks as she leans forward, waiting for more.

  “After the fire,” Libby says, “Zee went to find her father. We know that much. And we know about the cave. I remember my grandmother telling me the story. Zee’s father was fighting somewhere in the north.”

  She leans forward, too. “Remember, her hands were burned. There were no antibiotics, no medical help. She nearly died in that cave. Can you imagine? A young girl alone. Her mother gone—”

  Libby breaks off. She must realize what she’s saying.

  But Elizabeth wants to hear it all. “Don’t stop.”

  Libby smiles at her. “You can read the next part of the story in the library. Zee left things in the cave—”

  Elizabeth puts her cup down without looking. It clatters onto the edge of the saucer and spills. She mops at it with her paper napkin. “Sorry.”

  Libby waves her hand. “Don’t worry,” she says, and goes on. “No one knows what was in the cave, what are still in the caves that riddle the mountains. People who cleared out left things they couldn’t carry. But after the war, there were mudslides, and caves were buried. People looked for those caves for years. Harry looked.”

  Elizabeth nods. There’s so much for her to think about. So much for her to take home and remember.

  “We’ll just have to go to Harry’s. I know you’ll want to talk to him,” Libby says. “It’s the last day before your father comes.” She says this as if the words are being pulled out of her.

  One last day for Elizabeth to know Zee, to take Zee with her. She’ll hold on to the way Zee looks, her eyes, the silly cap, even the lines on the back of the drawing. She wants to remember all of it forever.

  Libby grins at her. “We won’t even call Harry to say we’re coming. We won’t give him the chance to say no.” She wipes her face with her napkin. “Harry can be”—she hesitates—“difficult.”

  She shakes her head. “I was the shy one. I never opened my mouth, and Harry was mostly grumpy. It was your mother who kept us friends, kept us laughing. After Sisty died, we just stopped seeing each other. I always meant to get in touch with your father, to see you. The years got away from me.”

  Elizabeth takes a sip of her water, the ice cubes clinking.

  “Harry knows more about Zee than I do,” Libby says, “and at least you’ll have that.”

  At least, Elizabeth thinks.

  zee

  EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  The path ran along the side of Big Fish Water like a ribbon. I followed it as the sun came up, a red-hot ball over the trees, a fire against the side of my face. My mouth felt like the dust at my feet.

  How could I be so thirsty when I could see all that cool water rushing over the rocks and frogs, splayed out, their throats swollen with mating songs?

  The night before, I had slipped into that water to drink, letting the thirst go downstream with small swirling sticks, and leaves, and fish the river carried. Had it been the night before?

  I walked on. I knew I was ill and fevered and not thinking properly. And despite my thirst, it was too much effort to kneel down and put my face in the water.

  Every step I took was an effort.

  Suppose I left the bag Old Gerard had given me. It was heavy. Or I might let Mother’s kettle go, but the clank of it with each step was comforting.

  Something was wrong with my hands.

  What had happened to them?

  Ahead of me were the mountains. The tall one picked up glitter from the sun and almost glowed in its light. The other two, one on each side, leaned toward each other.

  “See there, Ammy,” I’d said once, pointing. “Sisters whispering to each other.”

  “Which one are you?” she’d asked. “Which one am I?”

  “I’ll be the tall one, the glittering one.”

  She’d touched my shoulder. “We will call that one Zee.”

  Now I crossed over the rocks, slippery with moss, to the other side of the river and began the climb upward.

  The land rose gently, but still my breath was loud and uneven. Ahead of me, the sisters no longer had the look of green velvet we’d seen from the distance. Among the evergreens were silver boulders. Browning trees that had fallen the past winter were held up by their neighbors. Neighbors helping each other.

  I was glad for the shade overhead. I pictured Mother reaching out, Mother’s cool hands, and thought about making soap. My petticoat was stiff with mud. “Needing soap,” I said aloud.

  I hadn’t made soap; I remembered that. And remembering the Patchins reminded me we’d come up this mountain the past summer. Isaac and Ammy, Miller and Julian, John. We were gathering …

  Blueberries in the mountains?

  “These are soft mountains,” Miller had said, “worn from centuries of wind and water.”

  My cap had caught on a branch, and Isaac had loosened it, smiling down at me. How tall he had grown.

  Something about that summer day …

  There had been a cave, hadn’t there?

  Miller had warned me: “Be sure the cave is empty. It’s a place for black bears, cubs and their mothers who would take a sweet bite of you.”

  I couldn’t go farther. I began to count my steps. Seventy, seventy-one. Began again. One, two—

  And there was the entrance to that cave.

  Beyond the entrance, I saw movement.

  Not Isaac. Not Julian or Miller. How fuzzy my thoughts were.

  I remember Miller moving rocks that summer day until he had made a circle of st
ones so we could sit. He’d given me the flattest one. We’d all eaten the blueberries, blue juice dripping.

  Leaves on a low bush quivered. I stood still, watching. Squirrels flitted overhead. Mourning doves called in their sad voices.

  The cave had been empty last year. That was as far back as I could think. I ducked my head and entered. It smelled of damp and maybe something dead. The ceiling was low and I could not stand straight.

  I dropped Old Gerard’s bag, and the kettle clattered away. I crouched down to sit against the rocks, to stare outside at the green world. I pulled the bag closer, remembering that my hands were burned, remembering the poultice.

  Mother was gone. And I was alone.

  I opened the bag and pulled off a bit of the dried meat, but it made me gag.

  I unwound the cloths from my hands, the thick poultice sticking to the linen. My skin looked strange; some spots were blackened, others pink.

  I slathered on more of the poultice and thought about wrapping the linens around my hands again.

  Slept.

  When I awoke, it was dark, but I could see the pale path the moon made through the cave opening.

  My forehead was burning, burning. My lips were thick, dry. I reached for the water jug and took a sip, watching water drip down my arm like a thin stream of rain running off a tree branch.

  Stiff hands.

  Slept.

  I awoke suddenly to another day.

  How much time had gone by?

  And I was alone.

  I looked up at that rock ceiling. I’d never been alone before. Mother had been there, or Father. Ammy planting with me in the field. John. Isaac. Julian and Miller. I had dreamed about Miller. He’d helped Father the past winter, shoveling heavy snow from the roof, grinning down at me.

  I picked up the water jug, which lay on its side. It had no weight to it: almost empty, then.

  I pushed myself up against the wall with my feet and held my hands out in front of me, my fingers too stiff to bend. How would I ever get to Father? To John?

  No one was there to tell me what to do. “Think,” I told myself aloud. “Think by yourself.”