Lake in the Clouds

by Sara Donati

  It did indeed look like a tooth with its three long pronged roots, but it was the size of a large man’s fist. Elijah put it in his wife’s cupped hands, and she ran her fingers lightly over the surface, weighing the shape and then holding it up to sniff.

  Elizabeth said, “Which old sailor?”

  “Little man with a red cap. Calls himself Tim Card.”

  “Tim Card!” Elizabeth put a hand on Nathaniel’s arm. “Do you remember I told you about Mr. Card? The last time I sailed with Captain Mudge he was on board. Oh, the stories he told … About pirates, and privateers, and Button Bay.”

  Selah said, “I suppose a giant tooth has got some story behind it.” She had taken the tooth from Splitting-Moon and was turning it in her hands. “Look here, grooves. Like he was gnawing on something.”

  “The old man claims it’s an angel tooth,” said Jode, who hadn’t moved from his spot by the door. “Says that all along the waterways you can dig and find the bones of angels that fell in the battle for the heavens.”

  “Never thought I’d see no angel bones,” said Stephan, his voice still a little raw from the fever he had left behind.

  “That old sailor told us he seen leg bones almost twenty feet long where he found that tooth.” Jode said this in his usual diffident tone, but the excitement was clear on his face. “Don’t believe in angels, though.”

  Pico reached up from his spot to swat at Jode with one of Mrs. Emory’s religious pamphlets. “How do you know that tooth didn’t come from an angel?”

  The boy snorted, and looked away over his shoulder.

  Conny said, “Well, I believe it. Mrs. Emory read to me from the bible not two days ago about big angels coming down to earth.”

  “That wasn’t nothing to do with angels.” Uffa frowned down at the tooth in Stephan’s hands. “It was giants. Ain’t that so?” She turned to Elizabeth.

  “From Genesis,” she agreed.

  “Go on and quote.” Nathaniel poked her lightly, not even trying to hide his grin. “You know you can’t leave it.”

  Elizabeth poked him back, but she raised her voice so that they could all hear.

  “‘In those days were the giants on the earth, and also afterwards, when the sons of God had come in to the daughters of men, and they had borne children to them; these were the heroes, who of old were men of renown.’”

  “I swear, there must be a hundred books in that head of yours.” Selah smiled at her from across the cabin. “Can’t see how you remember all them words.”

  “Now how do you get from giants in the earth to fallen angels, that’s what I want to know,” sniffed Flora. “And maybe it ain’t real anyway. Could be carved, out of ivory or some wood. Nathaniel ain’t said a word, and neither have you, Splitting-Moon. Is it real?”

  Nathaniel said, “It’s real. I’ve seen the bones, and so has Splitting-Moon.”

  They all went very still, but their faces were bright with differing degrees of disquiet and interest. Jode just looked irritated. To Splitting-Moon he said, “You never told us stories of giants.”

  She turned her face in his direction. In the bright morning light the scars on her face stood out in crimson ridges, as if she had painted herself for battle. Her head tilted to one side slightly and she smiled a little, the smile a mother reserved for an impatient child.

  “There are hundreds of stories,” she said. “It will be many years before you have heard them all, and longer still before you understand them.” She said this softly, but Jode dropped his head as if she had shouted.

  “Can we have the story, then?” Dorcas leaned forward. “It would help pass the time.”

  Splitting-Moon let the silence draw out and then she cleared her throat and raised her voice so that it filled the little cabin.

  “In the longhouse my fathers tell the story of the giants who lived among us long ago. They speak of Weetucks, who stood as tall as the top of the tallest trees, and his brother, Maughkompos, who stood still taller. Maughkompos could stand in the middle of the great river and catch up a sturgeon as big as a man in one hand. Weetucks could knock Sister Bear out of the tree where she hid from him. No animal could run fast enough to be safe from the race of giants. No teeth were long enough to hurt them, no claws sharp enough.

  “They were such good hunters that little by little the giants killed many of the animals in the forest and drove away the others. The deer and bear and elk and buffalo and the beaver, all of them left and went to the far north, where no giants walked the earth. And our hunters came home empty-handed, and the people grew hungry and cold, for there was no meat or even a single beaver pelt to be had.

  “The Master of Life saw what trouble the giants had caused among his people, and he was angered. So he called forth lightning and smote them all, and wiped their race from the earth. Their bones he left behind, to remind my people of the giants, and how they brought about their own end.”

  “Greed,” announced Dorcas, switching from Kahnyen’-kehàka to English. “It was greed that done it.”

  Charlie stood suddenly, his whole body shaking. A man of middle years, short of stature but strongly built, he put Elizabeth in mind of the stunted oak that stood just outside her schoolhouse, not only for his build but because he seemed to have been struck to the core by the loss of his wife and daughter. Elizabeth often heard him weeping in his sleep; he moved through the day like a dream walker.

  “Pride cometh,” he called out in a harsh voice, raising his fists to his face. “Pride cometh and then the fall. The angels fell and the giants and we fell too. God used that fever to smite our prideful selves. We grew proud and he punished us, sure enough. He took the children.” He turned his head to look at each of them, pointing with a trembling finger. “He took your Joshua and your Mariah and Billy and my girl, my sweet girl, my Meg.” He swung around suddenly toward Selah. “He took our children and he’ll take your boy too.”

  He collapsed as abruptly as he had stood, and drew his knees up to his face, bending forward as if he could disappear inside himself by pure force of will.

  All the women seemed to turn toward Selah at once, but she held up a palm to stop them, shaking her head very slightly. Then she got up from the berth where she had been sitting with her son in her lap and picked her way across the room to Charlie. A whistle sounded on the deck and the captain’s voice rose in command, and then Selah crouched down next to Charlie and put a hand on his head. She stayed there like that without saying a word and they all waited with her until a shudder ran through the bowed shoulders and Charlie lifted his head.

  The two of them looked at each other for a long time, the young woman and the older man with tears running unchecked down slack and stubbled cheeks. Selah never smiled but there was an openness to her expression, a seeking that seemed to reach him. He blinked at her and blinked again, his mouth working without making any sound at all.

  Selah said, “Will you hold my son for me? I’d sure like to go stretch my legs a while, but I’m afraid to take him up on deck, in case I slip. Will you hold him? His name is Galileo, named for his granddaddy.”

  Charlie swallowed so hard that the muscles in his throat clenched convulsively. He said, “Galileo was the one who showed me the way to Red Rock, when I was first a voyager.”

  “This is his grandson,” Selah said in her calmest voice. “Will you look after him for a little while for me? I would appreciate it.”

  A trembling went through him. After a long moment when no one moved or spoke or even breathed, his shoulders came up and his back straightened by degrees, and then, finally, his fists relaxed.

  Selah put the sleeping child there in the cradle Charlie made of his arms. The baby flexed in his sleep, eyes fluttering and his mouth working noisily until he settled again.

  “Thank you,” said Selah. She got up gracefully and turned away to Elizabeth and Nathaniel. “Will you come up on deck with me? I’d like to walk a little.”

  The day passed slowly, divided between walks on
the deck and the cabin, food and sleep and talk, and one short period in which the weapons—brought to the ship in the dead of night and hidden behind a false bulkhead—were taken out to be checked and cleaned. Quakers did not bear arms, and it was as Quakers they would pass safely into Canada; as uneasy as it made them all, the rifles and muskets and hunting knives were put back in their hiding place.

  With every ship that passed without note or hail Elizabeth’s smile became a little less forced. Most were just merchant vessels, schooners and bateaux and great clumsy rafts that hugged the shore, but one navy cutter overtook them without a second look. Nathaniel saw how ready Elizabeth was to be cheered, how pleased she was by the good spirits in the crowded cabin, where the voyagers had fallen into the kind of storytelling that makes time pass, each of them trying to best the one that went before with the most outrageous or oddest tale.

  They spoke of childhood pranks and tricks played, of spiders outwitted by flies and cats made to look foolish by mice, of people who grew wings and witch women whose love potions found unlikely targets. Pico told the story of a bullfrog in a pair of breeches that made Elizabeth laugh until she cried. They did not speak of death or the graves so recently dug, of escaping to the north or the lives they had run from; neither did they speak of the future, of the lives they might lead in Canada.

  With each story the fear that had given them the energy to come this far was driven back a little. All of the voyagers began to show more interest in the world outside the cabin, even Charlie, who had been roused from his grief by a giant’s tooth. Most of them ventured on deck for a few minutes to see the countryside on either side of the lake, the blue haze of the mountains rolling away to the west, the startling green of forests that crowded down to the lakeshore. Jode went on deck more and more often, drawn by fresh air and sharp wind and the sight of the sailors at work. As the day wore on the other men grew restless and went up in revolving groups of twos and threes. Nathaniel watched them from the window that opened onto the deck and caught pieces of their conversations.

  They wondered about everything, the working of the sails and the windlass and the wheel; they asked each other questions that couldn’t be answered about the things they saw on shore: how long a rotting hulk had been settling into a stretch of shoreline and how it had come to ground itself, how many kinds of ducks could be found on this water, if a strong man could swim from one shore to the other, how long it took to build the big rafts that moved timber to the mills. Sometimes Captain Mudge came to give them a few words about their progress, and Tim Card found them a willing audience when he could spare the time from his duties.

  The old sailor was never at a loss for a story to tell; simply by scanning the lake something would come to him. As he listened at the cabin window, it seemed to Nathaniel that most of Card’s tales seemed to be woven together, bits of Indian stories, of myth and bible stories and wars. It made a strange picture, little Tim Card with his bristled chin and tufts of white hair sticking out of the holes in his cap, surrounded by black men twice his size who bowed their heads politely, listening with real interest to stories of fur smugglers, Tory duplicity, and fallen angels.

  Elizabeth came to stand beside Nathaniel, leaning against the window casement with her arms crossed low and her chin on her chest. She listened with a half-smile as Tim pointed out landmarks and refought, moment by moment, the Battle of Champlain and the burning of the American fleet. His voice drifted to them in snatches: General Arnold and snuck out from under their noses and gave them a run the likes of which.

  In her Quaker gray Elizabeth seemed not quite herself, contained somehow and made smaller, but when she turned her head to smile at him the fire and fight of her were still bright on her face. She held out a hand and he took it, to trace the calluses and ink stains and to press her palm against his mouth and touch her skin with his tongue so that she jumped and pulled her hand away, sending him a look that was meant to be a reprimand but didn’t quite manage to hide the spark he had ignited.

  She pursed her lips and pointed with her chin to the men who stood with Tim Card at the rail. “With every mile they are more returned to themselves.”

  Nathaniel put a hand on her shoulder. “I was just thinking the same thing about you, Boots.”

  “Were you?” She lifted her face, heart-shaped and pale and sincere, to him to show him her surprise. The gray of her eyes seemed almost silver in the sunshine, and he noticed for the first time a thread of white in her hair. At that moment he could see the resolute old woman she would become someday, steely in her bones.

  He said, “What do you think you would be doing now if you had never left England?”

  She inclined her head. “Looking after my cousin’s children, visiting my brother in debtor’s gaol, and writing extracts from library books, no doubt. What do you think?”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you might have got it in your head to write books, like your Mrs. Wollstonecraft.”

  She put a hand to her mouth and laughed. “This is a new approach, Nathaniel. Most usually when you are taken with a fit of remorse and worry for my well-being you simply tell me I should have been safer had I stayed in England. Now you have me giving up fame and fortune as a lady writer to come to the wilderness. Very inventive.”

  Nathaniel put an arm around her shoulders to pull her to him. “You would have been safer, that’s true.”

  She pressed her face to his chest and laughed so that her shoulders shook and he felt the warmth of her damp breath through his linen.

  “If you keep laughing at me we’ll have to have a little talk. One of those discussions you like so much.” He said this against her ear, and felt her laugh shift to a different kind of shudder. “When we’re alone.”

  She pulled away and touched her face with the handkerchief she pulled from her sleeve. “Don’t be silly,” she said finally. “We won’t be alone for another two days at least, Nathaniel Bonner. You’ll just have to save your … lecture until then.” And she ducked away before he could pin her there against the wall to prove her wrong, laughing at him over her shoulder.

  A great shouting on deck and she froze just like that, the smile wiped from her face. The door was flung open and Elijah appeared there with Jode and Pico close behind.

  “We’re heaving-to.” Elijah said it tonelessly, his voice almost lost in the noise coming from the deck: orders shouted, the groaning of the ship, and sailors moving double-time.

  “What is it?” asked Splitting-Moon. “Why are we slowing?”

  Nathaniel leaned out the window to repeat the question to one of the sailors as he trotted by. He didn’t like the answer he got but he passed it on anyway.

  “Customs signaled. They’re coming on board.”

  Elizabeth said, “But we are still hours from the border.” She was fighting to keep her tone even, but it didn’t matter—every face in the cabin was still with fear.

  “It’s sooner than we expected, that’s true. But it won’t do any good to panic.”

  That got him what he needed: she flashed him a hard look and her fear gave way to indignation. Before she could protest he leaned down to look her directly in the eye.

  “You’ve stood up to the governor of Lower Canada, to common criminals and Jack Lingo and to peers of the realm, Boots. I think you can manage a few customs agents.” He turned to the others as he reached to take his hat from its nail on the wall. Broad brimmed and low in the crown, for now he must be the Quaker he professed himself to be.

  “Cover your heads and put on your sober faces. We’re going up on deck to take the air, all of us.”

  Jode made a move toward the false bulkhead, but Elijah stepped in front of him, put a hand on his shoulder and said nothing at all. The boy jerked free, but he could not stare Elijah down. When he dropped his gaze the older man said, “Stay close to Splitting-Moon.”

  Elizabeth had dealt with customs officers before, and on this very ship. At that time, with Nathaniel and his father being held in Ca
nada as spies, she had been too distracted wondering how she was going to break them out of gaol before they went to the gallows to take any note of such things.

  Now she must pay attention, and she did not like what she saw. They had passed from the southern part of the lake—the Broad, as the captain called it—to this region of islands and shoals to weave their way along the New-York shoreline. To the east a handful of schooners and cutters lay at anchor in a small harbor of an island, among them a ship flying the colors of the American navy and another of the customs patrol, but more disturbing still: a bateau headed their way. She counted six oarsmen, a number of customs officials and marines. Trailing after the bateau were two canoes, but it was the marines that had caught Elizabeth’s attention.

  “Marines assigned to customs officials? Is that normal?”

  Nathaniel shrugged. “Those canoes worry me more.”

  “They look like Kahnyen’kehàka to me,” said Elizabeth. “Don’t you know them?”

  “Stone-Bird in the far canoe,” said Nathaniel. “Probably been downlake, trading.”

  Elizabeth caught the tone of his voice, tight and uneasy, and looked again to see what she had missed. “Surely that must be good news, if they are headed for Good Pasture? We need not travel alone.”

  And she stopped, because at that moment she realized what she was seeing—who she was seeing—in the second canoe. The nearer canoe. Two men, and one of them was Liam Kirby.

  Nathaniel caught her elbow as she swayed. “Steady on,” he whispered. “Steady.”

  “But—”

  He squeezed her arm hard enough to leave a bruise. “Don’t let on.”

  Don’t let on. Panic crawled up her spine like milling wasps. She shook her head sharply to clear it and when she looked up again Liam Kirby was still there, paddling toward them in this gilded hour before sunset with the light on his hair, such a deep and startling red that there could be no mistake. A few more moments would bring him to the Washington.