Lake in the Clouds

by Sara Donati

  Lily turned on her brother and Blue-Jay. “When are they coming home?”

  The boys exchanged a look, and then Daniel shrugged.

  “He didn’t say.”

  Lily pushed herself up out of the chair as far as she could without disobeying Curiosity. “What do you mean, he didn’t say? Who brought the message?”

  “Three-Crows,” said Daniel, and Lily sat back down with a groan.

  Three-Crows was an old Mahican hunter who wandered the Great Lake from Canada to Ticonderoga, picking up news in one place and putting it back down in another. Hidden Wolf was far off his normal route but he came by once or twice a year to see Hawkeye and talk about the old days.

  There were a few things Lily knew for sure about him. Three-Crows would eat everything put in front of him and some things that weren’t; he wouldn’t stay long at Lake in the Clouds because Many-Doves wouldn’t let him drink spirits; and he couldn’t be hurried into sharing his news. He was as set in his ways as Magnus, who brought a single mouse every morning to put on Curiosity’s doorstep and slept in the same spot in front of the hearth every night.

  When Three-Crows came to Lake in the Clouds he started by announcing what kind of news he had to offer. Sometimes he’d say just enough to keep you interested—like the news about Selah’s baby—and then he would make you wait for the rest.

  Right now Lily knew he would be hunkered down on the porch with Hawkeye, listing every Indian they knew in common to see if either of them had news the other did not. If somebody they had known when they were boys had died, then they would tell each other the whole story of that person’s life. After that Three-Crows would tell the rest of his news in order of importance, from the least to the most: the quality of the winter furs and what prices they were fetching; who had a new canoe or a new wife or trouble with the law; what the politicians were telling themselves; what wars the whites were fighting, where, and why. They would have the same old debate they always had on how to stay clear of O’seronni quarrels without picking sides.

  Even Runs-from-Bears would not sit for long on the porch when Three-Crows came to call, and Bears was always glad to sit with the Kahnyen’kehàka elders when they got to telling stories. Bears stayed out of the way because all the telling would be done in Mahican, and nobody on Hidden Wolf spoke more than a few words of Mahican except Hawkeye, Nathaniel, and Hannah.

  Of course Hawkeye wanted to know when his son and daughter-in-law were coming home, but he wouldn’t interrupt his visitor or even try to hurry him along. Two old Mahican men with a pipe of tobacco would need most of the day to get to what everybody was wanting to know.

  “What I don’t understand,” Lily said more to herself than the boys, “is how he came across them to start with. Three-Crows won’t go into the bush.” And she looked up to see that the same thought had already occurred to Daniel and Blue-Jay both.

  “That means he saw them on the lake. But what would they be doing on the Great Lake with Selah Voyager?” She put the question out for anyone to answer, but if either of the boys had anything to say it was chased away by the sound of scratching at the door, which swung open only far enough to admit Bump’s round head cocked at that odd angle that always took Lily by surprise because it made her think—uneasily—of a chicken’s neck newly twisted.

  “Time for your lesson, Miss Lily. Gabriel’s waiting. Boys, help me with the lady’s carriage, will you?”

  It was the same joke he made every morning when he came to fetch her with the wheelbarrow, but Lily smiled politely while she thought through this new problem.

  If she sent the boys away so she could have her drawing lesson in peace, Daniel would take offense again and maybe he’d make her wait for whatever news Three-Crows finally spat out. But if she invited them to come along they would look over her shoulder at what she was drawing, talk to Gabriel and ask him hundreds of questions, and ruin her lesson. She had missed yesterday because Gabriel wasn’t feeling strong enough after he finished with Uncle Todd in the laboratory. She didn’t want to waste the little time she’d have with him today.

  Bump said, “You boys hear about the bear Claes Wilde found cold as the grave right at his front door, come first light?”

  The boys swung around to him. “A bear?”

  “Yes sir. It’s a bear for certain, or the best imitation I ever saw. Must stand six feet tall, and when Claes opened the old fellow up, guess what he found.”

  He leaned so far forward that Lily thought he might topple right over and hit the floor with his nose.

  “A porcupine quill, stuck clear through the heart. A bear near as big as a cabin brought down by a porcupine.”

  Blue-Jay looked politely at the floor, but Daniel’s brow folded itself in a way that meant he couldn’t keep his doubt to himself.

  “You know a porcupine can’t shoot a quill into a bear’s heart, Bump. That’s impossible.”

  Bump rolled the shoulder that stuck up so high that it looked like a mountain wanting to take a walk.

  “So you’d think. But you can head right down to Claes and see for yourselves if you don’t believe me. I expect he’ll be busy butchering for a good while.”

  The boys loved to visit with Gabriel Oak, but neither of them could forgo the possibility of a bear killed by a porcupine. They were out the door before Lily could ask when they would be back, but at least Blue-Jay turned to call to her.

  “We’ll bring news as soon as we’ve got it!” And he went loping off after Daniel, solving Lily’s problem about her drawing lesson, which was less satisfaction than she had thought it would be.

  “Always in a hurry to get gone,” she sniffed. “Who cares about an old bear.”

  Bump closed one eye to look at her. “Is that so. And here was I, hoping to take you down there to see for yourself after your lesson. Now don’t scowl at me, Miss Lily, you’ll be wrinkled as an old prune before you’ve got a full decade under your belt. What’s sitting on you so heavy this morning?”

  “I want to go home,” she said. I want to go home to shake news out of Three-Crows. But she couldn’t say that, not to Bump or even Gabriel Oak, because she had given her word that she wouldn’t talk about any of it. People were supposed to think that her mother was in New-York City with Kitty and Hannah and Ethan, and that her father had gone up to Good Pasture to see to Kahnyen’kehàka family business.

  Good Pasture was just a day’s walk north of the Great Lake. Maybe that’s where they were headed, but why?

  “Won’t be long before you’re home again,” said Bump. “But think on this while you’re waiting. Life moves fast enough without putting spurs to it.”

  Lily bit her lip to keep the sharp words that wanted to come out on her tongue, because as mad as she was she couldn’t be mean to Bump.

  He held out his arm to lean on so that she could climb into the wheelbarrow without putting weight on her foot. When she was settled, Magnus stretched himself hard and jumped in for the short trip up to Gabriel’s cabin curled across Lily’s middle. The wheelbarrow went down the kitchen steps with a bump-bump-bump that made Magnus put his claws into Lily. She hiccuped out a little screech, but then she was out in the air and the sun and just like that she felt better.

  On the horizon the mountains stood out green and blue against a bluer sky. The air was full of birds and the smell of last night’s rain, and Magnus was purring against her chest in time with Bump’s humming. Then Lily saw Gabriel Oak sitting in front of his cabin waiting for her and she decided that Three-Crows and his news could wait, for a few hours at least.

  There was a book sitting on the little worktable in front of her stool, one Lily had never seen before. It was bigger than most, with cracked covers that might have once been brown but were now stained and even blackened in parts, as if it had been rescued from a fire more than once. The spine was gone, and the whole was bound together with twine. The bindings were swollen and straining at the burden of papers layered in between the leaves.

  Gabrie
l said good morning and then went right back to his drawing. Lily knew that it wouldn’t do much good to talk when he was caught up in his work and so did Bump, who just went about the task of helping her get out of the wheelbarrow. When he was sure that her foot was propped up on a bolster the way Curiosity had showed him, he laid out her paper and pencils and her little book—her sketchbook, Lily reminded herself—on the table where she could reach it. Then he went off to his chores, humming to himself.

  Lily should have begun her own work, but instead she sat studying the book that Gabriel had left for her to see. Under her fingertips the cracked leather boards were smooth in some places and grainy in others. The book felt so full to bursting that Lily would not have been surprised if it had moved in her hands, opened its covers in order to find some ease from the burden it carried. As full as her mother had been with Robbie, just before he came into the world. Lily blinked in surprise that such a thought might come to her about a book.

  “Can I look inside?” She hadn’t meant to interrupt Gabriel, but the question came out anyway.

  He gave her one of his distracted smiles without looking up from his sketch. “That is something for thee to take away and study later, to help thee pass the time in quiet contemplation. For now we’ll start with Magnus, I think. Canst thou see the bones of him beneath the fur and fat and muscle, Friend Lily?”

  The cat blinked sleepily at her with his slitted yellow-green eyes, one ragged ear cocked forward as if to hear her answer. Lily put the book in her lap aside and picked up her pencil.

  If Gabriel Oak was having a very good day, he could work with Lily for two hours before he started coughing. On bad days it would be a half hour or less when he pulled out his handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth, and then Bump would come to help him back into his cabin, where Lily had never been invited and most probably never would be, another one of the nonsense rules that grown-ups made and couldn’t be argued out of.

  In the week since Lily had been staying at the Todds’ so that Curiosity could keep an eye on her—something Lily thought Many-Doves could have done very well, but nobody listened when she said so, not even Many-Doves herself—it seemed to Lily that Gabriel’s bad days were getting to outnumber the good ones. Today, though, his voice and hand were unusually steady as he guided Lily through her exercises. Circles and triangles, boxes and cones, shaded from one side or the other, from above or below.

  Everything in the world seemed to be built out of a few simple shapes, once you knew how to look. Drawing was mostly learning to see the shapes that built the bones of a thing—a tree or a face or a bucket—and once that much was done, it was all a matter of catching light and shadow to show how it all fit together. Lily spent most of her time drawing on scraps of paper Gabriel gave her, from sunrise to sunset and beyond, if Curiosity would let her work by candlelight, and every drawing just made her want to do another one. To see if she could, again. If she could make things truer and clearer and more alive.

  Curiosity didn’t disapprove, exactly; she’d watch Lily work and raise her eyebrow, cock her head. “Now look at that,” she’d say. And, “You going to wear that lead pencil down to nothing in no time, but that surely is pretty what you got there. Your mama going to be proud to see how hard you working at these drawing lessons.”

  And still Lily hadn’t drawn anything in the little book, although every day she meant to start.

  “Daniel wants to know when I’ll draw him a picture of Lake in the Clouds, but he wants it to be in color,” Lily said into the silence.

  Gabriel cocked his head thoughtfully. “Does he?”

  Lily studied the sleeping cat stretched out before them and the way the sun seemed to lift color out of his coat, ginger and orange and mottled brown, the raw red of a healing scar over his haunch, the way the insides of his ears shaded from the dull dun of eggshells to a delicate pink, like the sky just after sunrise.

  She said, “Don’t you ever make likenesses in color?”

  Gabriel raised his head to look into the forest. There was a sadness in his expression Lily had not seen before, and she felt a sudden panic, that she had made him think of something that might hurt. Then he smiled a little and turned to look at her.

  “Thy grandmother was a Friend, but thou canst not know much of the life or the teachings.”

  He had not asked a question, but Lily nodded anyway. “She died in England. When my mother was just a little older than I am now.”

  Gabriel picked up his pencil again and moved it gently over the paper, as if it would help him find the words he needed. “My father was a Friend of the plainest sort. I can hear him still speaking sternly to my sister Mary when she brought home a silken hair ribbon she found in the street. He believed that to wear such colors was a terrible burden on the soul.”

  “But why?” Lily asked, thinking of her hair ribbons back at Lake in the Clouds, wound together in a rainbow. She did not wear them often, but she liked having them.

  “Because they encourage vanity and worldly excess, as do so many things. We had only one likeness on the wall, an engraving of the Peaceable Kingdom. Does thou know the prophecy of Isaiah, Friend Lily?” Without waiting for her to answer, he quoted in a low singsong: “‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatted beast together, and a little child shall lead them.’”

  He smiled at her. “It is a wondrous vision. When I was small I climbed up on a chair to study that likeness. I could draw it now, I think, line for line. Then one day I picked up a bit of charcoal and began to draw on the hearthstones, and it was as if a great light had been lit inside of me. A Friend prays his whole life to find Inner Light, and I thought I had found it in that piece of charcoal when I was just your age.”

  Gabriel stretched out his hand, long fingers slightly bent, and looked at it as if he had never seen it before.

  “What did you draw?” Lily asked.

  “The likeness of my sister Jane as she sat knitting. It was an awkward thing, but still it was very like her. So much that it frightened me a little to see what I had done, so I did what I always did when I was in doubt, I went to my father. He was a printer, and kept his shop in the house.”

  “Did he recognize your sister?”

  Gabriel swallowed so hard that Lily thought he would start coughing, but the moment passed. “Yes, he did. I can see his face still, the shock in it and the disappointment. He had eyes the color of cornflowers, and they were filled with tears to see what I had wrought. On that morning he made it his Concern to lead me away from such worldly indulgence.”

  Lily sat up straighter. “Your father wouldn’t let you draw? But why not?”

  “What I saw as a gift, he saw as a trespass on Divine law. He was a good man, Friend Lily, and I wanted to please him but I could not forget what it felt like, to put those simple lines down and to see my sister there in them. When I was sixteen I left my father’s house to make my own way in the world. He died the following year.”

  “That’s very sad,” Lily said, thinking of her own father and mother and remembering quite suddenly that there might be news, now, about when they would be home again.

  “It is sad indeed, but I did not tell thee the story to see thee weep. Thou asked if I never use color, and here you have the answer. I have lived a willful and disobedient and often selfish life, but in this one thing I have stayed true to my father’s hopes for me. I draw the world as I see it, but in the shades of gray that are my birthright. So I cannot teach thee how to put color on paper. But there is a secret I have learned over the years, and I will share it with thee.”

  Lily waited while Gabriel paused, different expressions moving across his face, doubt and weariness and other things she could not name. His thumb ran gently along the pencil.

  “The more that is taken away, the more clearly will thou see what is left behind. It is true of Magnus sleeping there in his disguise of fiery fur, and it is true of
worldly possessions, and it is true of the human heart.” And then Gabriel let out a small, dry laugh, something Lily had never heard from him before and it startled her greatly.

  “When thou hast learned to value what is left behind, then thou wilt be ready to find another teacher, one who can teach thee about color.”

  Lily’s mouth felt very dry. She said, “Do you think I will ever come so far?”

  “I have no doubt of it, Lily. None at all. Now I think that thou should have another look at Magnus, thou hast missed the angle of his ears.”

  The cat had turned over in his sleep and was splayed on his back with his belly to the sun and his paws stuck straight up. It was a silly sight, but Lily could not find it in herself to smile or even to do as she had been told. She felt as she did after she had eaten too large a meal, filled up now with words and sleepy, in need of quiet so that she could make sense of the things Gabriel had told her. There were so many questions—she wanted to know where he had gone at sixteen and how he had earned his living, who had taught him as he taught her now—but they would have to wait until she had thought it all through.

  She said, “You look very tired. Shall we stop for today?”

  He reached out a hand and let it rest on her shoulder, something else he had never done before. “There is all eternity to sleep, Lily. Ah, here is Friend Curiosity.”

  She was coming up the slope toward the cabin with a basket over her arm, walking like a girl so that her skirts swirled around her legs and snapped back again. Curiosity in the best of moods, well pleased with the world. Her son has a son, Lily remembered and it saddened her not to be able to share such good news with Gabriel.

  “Dinnertime,” Curiosity called. “Come away now, Lily, and let the man eat in peace. Bump on the way up from the barn.”

  Then she stopped in front of them and opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. Her expression had gone very quiet and empty, but there was a sharpness there, some surprise that did not sit well. Lily followed the line of her gaze to Gabriel, who had lifted his face up, his eyes narrowed against the sun under the fringe of gray hair and the broad brim of his hat. His skin was very white, and his eyes were rimmed with red.