Lake in the Clouds

by Sara Donati

  “You’re mighty far away in your thoughts, Boots.”

  Nathaniel’s voice woke her up out of her daydreams. Galileo was humming under his breath as he whittled, Hawkeye and Nathaniel were cleaning rifles, and even Joshua had settled down to examine a trap that needed repair.

  “I was indeed,” said Elizabeth. “But here I am again. I wonder why Curiosity and Hannah are so long.”

  “Things to talk through,” said Galileo. “Got to know what we’re dealing with here before we send the girl on.”

  Nathaniel and Elizabeth exchanged glances, but it was Joshua who spoke.

  “We never meant for you to get mixed up in this,” he said, looking directly at Elizabeth. “Never meant to cause you any trouble.”

  “You haven’t caused us any trouble,” said Elizabeth. “And neither has Miss Voyager. We would have done the same for anyone in need.”

  Curiosity appeared at the door to the workroom, wiping her hands on a piece of toweling. “And a good thing too. The girl has got a chest full of trouble. She ain’t about to die, though, Hannah has seen to that.”

  “How long before she can set out again?” asked Galileo. Curiosity spread out a hand. “A week, I’d say.”

  “Unless the child comes,” added Hannah. “Maybe she should stay until it does. I don’t like to think of her out in the bush.”

  “She won’t be alone,” said Joshua. “That’s one thing you don’t need worry about at all.”

  Hawkeye said, “We don’t need to know where she’s going.”

  “Maybe not,” Curiosity said. “But there’s things you should know, and now’s the time to tell the story. You best start off husband. It began with you, after all.”

  Chapter 4

  “I suppose you could look at it that way,” said Galileo. “As I was the only one to home when the first two voyagers came to Paradise. They had run off from old Squire VanHusen—you’ll know the farm.”

  Hawkeye nodded. “German Flats.”

  “Big family,” added Nathaniel.

  “That’s right,” said Galileo. “How many children did the man have, Joshua?”

  “Eighteen children of his own, and just as many slaves.”

  “You know VanHusen?” Hawkeye turned to Joshua in surprise.

  “I was born on that farm,” Joshua said. “My mama is buried there.”

  Joshua told his part of the story in his usual deft manner: his father had been a slave of Sir William Johnson’s, while his mother belonged to Squire VanHusen; the two farms stood within a mile of each other on the Mohawk. Either Johnson didn’t want to sell Joshua’s father to the squire, or VanHusen wouldn’t buy him, but the family had always lived apart.

  “We saw Daddy most Sundays, until Sir Johnson died.”

  “I remember this,” Elizabeth said. “Your father told us the story of how Mrs. Johnson sold him to a farmer in Pumpkin Hollow.”

  A muscle fluttered in Joshua’s cheek as he nodded. “Didn’t see him much after that. It was the next year VanHusen sold me to the Johnstown blacksmith and there I stayed fifteen years almost to the day when Mr. Hench bought me to set me free.

  “The way my brothers told it, Mama got word about me getting my manumission papers and it was her who encouraged them to run. She sent them up here to find me, thinking I’d be able to help them on their way to Canada. Said she could die easy, knowing all three of her boys was free. And she almost got her wish.

  “Elijah is still alive and well, but Coffee always was a little weak in the lungs, and he caught himself a fever in the bush. Passed on soon after they got here. So that’s how the whole business started.”

  Nathaniel said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I remember it, VanHusen has been dead more than five years. When exactly did all this happen?”

  “July of ninety-four.” Perched on the edge of her chair, Curiosity spoke up. “While we was on our way home from Scotland.”

  The surprise of this statement made Elizabeth put down her knitting. “That was eight years ago.”

  “It was indeed,” said Galileo. “Eight years and twenty-one slaves run away to freedom. Coffee the only one we ever lost.”

  “Twenty-one,” echoed Elizabeth. “But how?”

  Hawkeye made a soft rumbling sound deep in his throat.

  “Don’t hush her, Dan’l,” said Galileo. “It’s a reasonable question. The truth of it is, that first time we didn’t have no plans, and no idea of where to put Elijah to keep him safe except that he had to be got out of Paradise. Liam Kirby ain’t the first bounty hunter ever to show up here, you realize. So I took him into the bush. All these years now I been wondering if you had any idea, and I see we kept things pretty quiet. So I won’t say no more about the where and how unless you ask me.”

  “I don’t think we’re asking, are we?” Nathaniel turned to look at Elizabeth and then his father. When he came to Hannah he said, “I have the feeling you know more about this than we do.”

  “Not very much more,” said Hannah quietly. “The place where Miss Voyager is going, you call it Red Rock.”

  Curiosity blinked at her in surprise. “Sometime you’ll have to tell me how you came to hear that name, child.”

  “Sometime,” said Hannah, steadfastly refusing to meet her father’s gaze. “But Galileo needs to finish his story.”

  The old man lifted a shoulder. “Don’t know as I can finish a story that ain’t over yet, but let me see if I can move it along some.

  “After Coffee and Elijah, why I thought we was done with the business of hiding slaves. But our young folk, they had other ideas, Almanzo most especially. Now you got to recall that he was sick with the lung fever that summer. I suppose it was laying in bed for so long that did the job. The idea got a chance to put down roots and by the time he was better, that son of ours was ready to free the world. So when Curiosity got home that last week of August, we all set down and talked it through.

  “Now the truth is, I’m as proud as the next man of my children, but I cain’t deny that they are all three stubborn as mules—”

  “They come by it honest,” said Curiosity, but Galileo only smiled.

  “—and it didn’t much matter what we had to say about the trouble they were making for themselves, or for us old folks. They worked it out. Almanzo went off to New-York City and Polly and her husband to Albany. Took almost a year till they had things organized—summer of ninety-five it was that the next voyager came to us. We’ve been careful, you understand. Almanzo takes his time and he don’t set nobody on the path who cain’t make the journey.”

  Elizabeth said, “I don’t doubt that he is careful, Galileo. But a young woman in Miss Voyager’s condition …?”

  Curiosity smoothed her skirt thoughtfully. “This is a special case,” she said. “Didn’t have much choice.” When she looked up at them, her expression was as drawn and strained as Elizabeth had ever seen. Curiosity was a woman who kept her troubles to herself, but something about Selah Voyager had touched her in a way that made that impossible.

  Nathaniel was thinking in a different direction. “How is it you knew she was coming?”

  “Three months ago we got word from Almanzo,” said Galileo. “Come by way of Albany, with our Polly. Said he was planning to set the next voyager on the road as soon as the worst of the thaw was over, and that’s what he did. But things got complicated, as they often will.” He paused to draw on his pipe.

  “Kitty’s travails came upon her on the first night of the full moon, and on that same evening Zeke cut hisself right bad at the mill, so Daisy had to go sew him up. Neither of them could be at the judge’s old place, the way we planned. The thing was, Almanzo told Selah to look for a black woman at the old homestead once it got to be full dark. And if she didn’t see that woman where she was meant to be, why then she was supposed to go hide herself away from the village and try again the next night. That would be tonight, except Miz Elizabeth and Miz Hannah come across her this morning.”

  “Thank
the Lord you did,” said Curiosity. “Otherwise I expect we would have lost her. Hawkeye, spit out whatever it is that’s bothering you. I can see it sitting in your jaw plain as a plug of tobacco.”

  Hawkeye had been listening bent forward with his forearms resting on his knees, but he sat up straight to answer Curiosity. “You’re right, something don’t make sense to me. I can see how she could get to Albany—the men who sail those ships up from the city have got smuggling in their blood, after all. But I cain’t see how she would find her way to Paradise from there. Either that young woman is a natural-born pathfinder, or she had a guide.”

  “She had a guide,” said Curiosity. “Of sorts.”

  Hannah took some folded material out of the basket beside her chair to hold up for them to see: a quilted shift made of scraps laboriously pieced together. It looked like nothing more than the undergarment of a poor woman who couldn’t afford muslin.

  “A map,” Nathaniel said. “She sewed herself a map.”

  And then Elizabeth saw it too—a narrow strip of blue came up from the hem to branch into a Y. By squinting she could see it: the Mohawk flowing into the Hudson, and a small patch of brown on the spot that must be Albany. Blue thread had been used to trace the Sacandaga River from the Hudson to Paradise, passing through a muddy brown patch that might have been the marsh at Barktown. All along the rivers was a pattern of straight stitches in groups of two.

  “It is not out of proportion?” Elizabeth asked.

  “It’s like a Kahnyen’kehàka map,” said Hannah. “It doesn’t show distance in miles, it shows how long it takes to walk. You see, two marks for a half-day’s walking. You see how the ferry is marked.”

  “No white man would recognize that for what it is,” said Hawkeye approvingly. “But I have to say, it don’t quite seem enough.”

  “She got the directions memorized too,” Curiosity said. “Almost tree by tree.”

  Galileo nodded. “Ask her to tell them to you when she’s well again. Between the map and a good memory, she got herself here.”

  Hannah looked at Galileo and then Curiosity. “You say that there’s people to look after her where she’s going?”

  “They’ll take good care of her, or I wouldn’t let her go,” said Curiosity.

  Galileo put a hand on his wife’s arm. “Getting her there is the problem.” He looked directly at Hannah. “We ain’t talked about Liam yet.”

  “Maybe Liam isn’t looking for her.” She said this lightly, but the tilt of her head when she met Curiosity’s gaze gave away her anxiety.

  “I’d like to believe that, I truly would,” Curiosity said in her kindest tone. “But it don’t feel right to me, him showing up today. So I got something else to say, something I maybe would keep to myself if it weren’t Liam Kirby out there in shouting distance.”

  She put her hands down on her lap, palms up, and studied them for a moment. “On the day me and Galileo got our papers, we walked away from the Paxton farm with bloody backs. The overseer called that whipping a ‘going-away present,’ and he put some muscle into it. The last my mother ever saw of me I was sitting on Elizabeth’s granddaddy’s wagon seat, dripping blood, laughing and crying all at once. And on that day Galileo and me, we swore to each other that no child, no grandchild, of ours would ever know what it was to live the life we was born to. Ain’t that so, husband?”

  “It is,” said Galileo.

  “Now you know that both our girls married free men. Polly’s children and Daisy’s, all of them born free as the Lord meant them to be. What you cain’t know is this: that girl lying sick in the next room, she has already had a child sold away from her. A daughter. But this one she’s carrying, this is Almanzo’s child. Our seventh grandchild.

  “I’m not telling you this to oblige you any further, or to ask you for anything more than you already done. We cain’t hardly repay you as it is—Don’t interrupt me now, Elizabeth.”

  “But I must. Why did you not come to us, Curiosity? Perhaps we could have bought her papers—”

  Galileo shook his head slowly. “Now you must know we tried to see to that ourselves. Between us we got enough money saved.”

  Elizabeth felt herself flush with fear for them, and she saw the same on Nathaniel’s face.

  “Then Almanzo is already implicated, if he offered to buy her freedom and she disappeared after he was turned down,” said Nathaniel.

  “You would be right,” Galileo said. “But it ain’t our Almanzo who made the offer. There’s somebody—”

  Curiosity cut him off sharply. “No need to get particular with names, now. Don’ matter anyway, because the man who lays claim to Selah wouldn’t sell her, and there ain’t a law that says a slave owner has to sell a slave at any price if he’s got a mind to keep her. So maybe you’ll understand that we didn’t have much choice, not with a child on the way.”

  Elizabeth felt herself flushing with embarrassment. “I would never imply that you had neglected—”

  “Hush now,” Curiosity interrupted her gently. “No need to start with apologies. Just know this, Elizabeth. If I thought it would have made a difference, we would have come to ask for help. Which is what I suppose I’m going to do right now.”

  She pushed out a breath and drew in another. “Here’s the way it look to me. You took Liam in when he was half-dead and you treated him like a son. The boy out there waiting to hear if he’s welcome at your door again, and once he’s here, why there ain’t no telling what he might ask of you, or how you’ll feel about it when he do. But understand this. If anybody—Liam Kirby or President Thomas Jefferson hisself—were to threaten that young woman, we will do what need doing.”

  There was a long silence from the group around the hearth. The fire hissed to itself; somewhere not too far away the pack of wolves who gave the mountain its name began to howl. Then Hawkeye spoke up for all of them.

  “Why now, Curiosity, Galileo,” he said quietly. “We been neighbors and friends for forty years or more. Curiosity’s been at every birthing and deathbed at Lake in the Clouds since I brought Cora here as a bride. Galileo helped me dig her grave, and Sarah’s too. We’ll be whatever help we can to you and yours, you must know that in your bones.” He said this in the tone he used with hurt things, calm and easy, and it did its work. There was another long moment of silence, and then Curiosity smiled.

  “I do, Hawkeye. I do know that.”

  Galileo got up slowly. “That’s that, I suppose. Nothing more to say tonight, so we’ll leave you to your rest.”

  Squirrel tried to slip away again when the visitors had gone, but this time Nathaniel stopped her.

  “Is it my imagination, daughter, or are you avoiding me?”

  She turned to face him, but her gaze flickered first toward Elizabeth. “Of course I’m not avoiding you. But Miss Voyager—”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “Ten minutes more won’t hurt. Will it?”

  For a moment she hesitated, and then she came back to sit again in front of the hearth.

  Elizabeth stood there uncertainly until Hawkeye took her by the elbow and turned her toward the bedroom. “Let these two work it out without your help,” he said firmly. “You sleep.”

  She went, but only reluctantly and after sending Nathaniel a pointed look over her shoulder. “We all need our rest.”

  “I’ll be in directly,” he promised, and hoped that he was telling the truth.

  Hawkeye picked up his rifle. “I’ll just go have myself a little walk. If you don’t need me.”

  “Looks like rain,” Nathaniel said not to his father directly, but to the room, and still Hawkeye gave him a grim smile. Nathaniel knew that he sounded like Elizabeth when she was trying to distract one of the children from some undertaking that made her uneasy, but then he had legitimate reason to worry.

  The truth was, Hawkeye had always walked the mountain in the evening no matter how bad the weather, but in the last few years he had been going farther and staying out longer. Sometimes he
didn’t appear again till dawn, and once in a while it occurred to Nathaniel that his father might take it into his head to walk west and just keep going.

  When he had gone, Squirrel looked up from the basket of dried greenery she was sorting. “He doesn’t sleep well indoors,” she said. “You needn’t worry about him.”

  Nathaniel bit back a smile. His oldest daughter had never been a difficult child, but recently he found himself hard-pressed for the right words, especially when she took it upon herself to teach him something she thought he didn’t know. Now she was sending him a sidelong glance, not without an edge of guilt and some impatience to it.

  He said, “You’re not in any trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just wanted to set some things straight between us.”

  The crushed chamomile filled the air with a sharp, almost bitter smell. In a quieter tone Squirrel said, “I don’t know anything more about Liam than you do, Da. What is there to talk about?”

  Nathaniel smiled. “You ain’t slow-witted, Squirrel. Don’t play at it, it don’t suit you.”

  Her mouth twitched in annoyance, but she said nothing at all.

  “You know it ain’t Liam I’ve got on my mind right now. It was Splitting-Moon who told you about the runaways in the bush, wasn’t it?”

  A little sound escaped her, the kind of sigh that you might hear from a woman when she puts down something she shouldn’t have been carrying in the first place.

  “When did you figure it out?”

  “Don’t take much figuring. Twenty-some house slaves and farmhands, surviving eight winters in the bush and keeping hid. That’s not something they could do on their own, at least not to start with. They had to have help, and no white man I know in the bush would go to the trouble, much less keep quiet about it. That’s when Splitting-Moon came to mind. It’s in her nature to help any hurt creature she comes across. Did she come out and tell you about Red Rock?”

  Squirrel hesitated while she put down the basket and rubbed her hands. Her gaze fixed on the window over the desk, as if she could see through it and farther. “When she came in the fall to trade she had a little boy with her. He had a Kahnyen’kehàka face—” She touched her own cheekbone lightly. “But his hair was kinked, and he was as dark as Galileo. He called himself Joshua, but she called him Renhahserotha’.”