by Sara Donati
But all of that had come to a sudden end, because men must fight and to do that they started wars. Her own brother was infected with that need, her twin brother. The strangeness of it never faded.
Many-Doves was telling a story. Lily's mother laughed in response, a gentle hiccupping laughter that meant she was embarrassed. All these years living among the plain-speaking Kahnyen'kehàka women, but her mother still blushed and laughed like a proper young English lady when the talk turned to men and women and the things they were to each other.
This is the life my mother chose. Lily repeated this sentence to herself often, and every time she was overcome with admiration and resentment in equal measure.
When Many-Doves decided the time was right they put down the hoes to eat in the shade of the birch trees. Lily filled empty gourds with water from the stream and they unwrapped a parcel of cornbread and boiled eggs and peppery radishes plucked this morning from the kitchen garden, still trailing clots of damp earth. Lily listened for a while as they talked about the coming harvest and the day's work.
When it was clear that today was not the day they would decide among themselves what was to be done to heal Hannah, Lily went off to wade in the lake, digging her toes into the mud and pulling her skirts up through her belt so that the duck grass tickled her bare calves. She wet her handkerchief and wiped her face and the back of her neck free of dust and grit, thankful for the cool and the breeze and the very colors of the sky. Lily felt her mother watching her, her love and pride and worry radiating as hot and true as the sun itself.
The sound of drumming hooves brought her out of her daydream. The others heard it too, all of them turning in the direction of the village, their heads tilted at just the same angle, listening hard.
“Riders!” Her brother Gabriel exploded out of a clump of grass almost under Lily's nose, all pinwheeling arms and legs and spraying water. Annie, Many-Doves' daughter, was just behind him and they galloped toward the women, both of them sleekly wet and naked. Gabriel's skin was burned almost as dark as Annie's, so that his gray eyes worked silver.
“Five riders!” Annie shouted as if she must make herself heard on the top of the mountain.
“We hear.” Many-Doves raised a hand to screen out the sun as she looked in the direction of the village.
“Your uncle Todd's letter said he hoped to be home today,” Lily's mother said, wiping her neck with a kerchief. “But who does he have with him?” Her expression was a combination of worry and anticipation and excitement too.
“Whoever it is, they must be lost,” Lily said, wishing herself wrong even as she said the words. “No stranger ever comes to Paradise on purpose.”
The cornfield was on a little rise that gave them a good view of the village on the other side of the lake: the building that had once been the church but now was just a meetinghouse, as no minister seemed to want to stay in Paradise; the well; the dusty road that widened in front of the trading post and then narrowed again to disappear almost immediately into the woods; a few cabins; the smithy; here and there a curl of smoke from a chimney they could not see.
Every year Paradise was a little smaller, like an old woman hunching down into her bones. When a family gave up and moved on the cabin stayed empty and the garden around it lay fallow, simply because Uncle Todd could not be bothered to look for new tenants. At this moment the only sign of life was a cat asleep on the wall of the well, her fur gleaming in the sun. But folks would come soon enough: so many riders at once was almost as good as a fire for waking them up.
The sound of hooves on the road grew louder and louder still, and then the riders showed themselves. Five of them, as Annie had foretold. Uncle Todd and cousin Ethan among them—Lily made out that much and nothing about the others; she did not have her father's keen eyesight. Gabriel had it, though. Gabriel and Daniel and all her brothers; eyesight keen enough to count acorns on the highest branch. And now young Gabriel had caught sight of something that made every muscle quiver. He turned his head toward the women and his eyes were perfectly round with anticipation.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, answering the question he hadn't asked. “But put your breechclout on first. You too, Annie, you can't go greet people in such a state.”
To Lily she said, “That will slow them down a little, at least. Come along, maybe we can get there first.”
Without any discussion Many-Doves began to gather the hoes together.
“But there's six hours of sun left,” Lily said as her mother moved off. She found herself as uneasy about the strangers as she had been eager to see them just a moment ago.
Many-Doves laughed and poked her shoulder with two fingers. “As if you could work now with your brother just come home.”
All of the riders had dismounted but for one, a smaller figure—a lady by her bearing, Lily saw now. One of the men had a hand on the woman's saddle, his head canted up to talk to her—argue with her, Lily corrected herself, taking in the way he held himself—and in that moment she recognized him.
“Luke,” she said.
Her brother Luke, come from Montreal without word or warning, and in time of war. Lily felt the shock of it in the tips of her fingers, shock and joy and a flash of fear.
Lily's mother had recognized him too, and picked up her skirts and her pace both. Gabriel and Annie streaked past, heels flashing.
“Who is that lady?” Lily asked out loud.
Many-Doves made an approving sound deep in her throat. “Maybe your brother has finally brought a wife home with him.”
“They argue as though they were married,” Lily agreed.
Luke turned away from the stranger and pulled his hat from his head in frustration. The lady turned her horse away and started up the path that led to Uncle Todd's place while Luke watched her, his fists at his sides.
Richard Todd was the most prominent man in Paradise, the richest in both land and money, and a trained medical doctor. His fine two-story house was the only brick building in a village of squared-log cabins. It had been the largest house until the Widow Kuick bought the mill and built her own fine house, but the Kuick place had fallen into disrepair these last years and sat hunched on the hillside overlooking the village, like a frowsy old woman without the wits to look after herself.
Richard Todd was rarely at home and the Kuick widows rarely stepped out of doors, but when Richard went off to Johnstown or Albany, his place in the world and the things he called his own—house, gardens, pastures, cornfields, barns and outbuildings, books and animals and plowshares—were cared for. A small kingdom beautifully kept, and the doctor had spent less than three weeks in residence in the last six months.
It was a situation that suited his housekeeper very well. At seventy-nine Curiosity Freeman still ran things, overseeing the house servants—her own granddaughters—and the farm workers like a benevolent general presiding over well-trained and adoring troops.
Together Curiosity and Elizabeth and Many-Doves looked after the medical needs of the village; they dosed children for worms, set broken bones, delivered babies, laid out the dead and comforted the living. Sometimes Curiosity went for days without giving the absent doctor a thought.
They were in the laboratory, the farthest of the outbuildings on the Todd property. Once this had been the heart of Richard's medical practice, and it had surprised Hannah to find that while she was gone it had been given over to a different kind of research. According to Curiosity, Joshua Hench had been conducting experiments with metals and blackpowder explosives, all with Richard's approval.
“Wouldn't do no good to tell you,” Curiosity said in response to Hannah's questions. Her irritation was sharp and clear on her face. “You just have to wait and see for yourself. Unless you was wanting the laboratory for your own work?” She looked at Hannah hopefully. “Then Joshua will just have to clear out, go blow himself up someplace else where I don't got to hear it happen.”
Hannah didn't want the laboratory; she hadn't come home to practice medici
ne, after all, and she said so.
“You've expressed your concerns to Richard, I take it.”
At that Curiosity just snorted. “You wave a firecracker under a man's nose, he ain't going to pay no attention, no matter what kind of sense you be talking.” Then she pushed out a sigh. “Ain't nothing to be done, but it do set my teeth on edge.”
Hannah was relieved if Curiosity was willing to abandon the subject. She turned her attention to the stack of Richard's daybooks on the standing desk. Ledger after ledger in which he had logged his daily work: treatments, patients seen, raw materials ordered from Albany and New-York City and beyond, experiments he had undertaken and the results they had produced. All neat, well ordered and full of Richard's dry observations.
June 4 1808. Set right tibula on the youngest Ratz boy. Subject healthy if dull-witted ten-year-old; clean break; no tearing to the muscle or ligaments; prognosis good if he can be kept out of trees.
Curiosity had come along to keep Hannah company while she read. She sat near the door in the light from the single window, snapping beans in a bowl in her lap.
“Richard has been away a long time,” Hannah noted; the last entry in the daybook was six months old.
“Wouldn't care if he never did come home,” Curiosity said, her temper flaring again. “If it weren't for missing Ethan. I wish he'd leave the boy here with me. He won't ever make no doctor and everybody know it. Richard best of all.”
“Ethan is hardly a boy anymore,” Hannah pointed out. “He's nineteen.”
“Of course he a boy.” Curiosity poked into the bowl, fished an earwig out with two long fingers to crush it under her heel. “He tender at heart like a boy, our Ethan, and he always will be. I'm hoping that now that you come home they'll listen to reason, the two of them.”
Hannah looked up from a copy of a letter Richard had written to a chemical warehouse in London, requesting a list of things that were unfamiliar to her. A strange prickling on the back of her neck: interest in things she thought she had left behind, curiosity, irritation that those impulses she thought dead could twitch to life without warning or bidding.
Curiosity was watching her, eyes narrowed. Hannah cleared her mind and closed the daybook.
She said, “Curiosity, what makes you think Richard will listen to me? He never did before.”
For a good while there was no sound but the rapid-fire crack-crack-crack of bean pods while Hannah studied Curiosity and waited for an answer.
Of all the things Hannah had feared about coming home she had been most worried that she would find Curiosity gone. She should be, at almost eighty with a hard life behind her. But Curiosity was as steady and constant as the river itself, if bowed a little by the years. There were new sorrows etched into her face: she had lost her good husband to a stroke, a grandson to a brain fever, a daughter and granddaughter on the same day to a runaway horse and sleigh; and her only son was someplace in the west, fighting a battle that could not be won.
If he was alive at all.
But Curiosity's spirit was undaunted and her energy undiminished; the very nearness of her was a comfort.
Hannah had been home for weeks now, and while all the others were growing less and less able to keep their questions to themselves, Curiosity seemed content to wait until Hannah was ready to talk, if it took a year or ten years or never came at all.
Somewhere in the pines that ringed the clearing a kinglet was calling in a thin high seet-seet-seet; she heard kestrels and blackbirds and the soft, gentle song of a hermit thrush as sweet as the lullabies her grandmother Cora had sung to her as a child. In another month the birds would be gone south; they would pull the summer light along behind them like a bridal train. In two months the trees where they built their nests would be gravid with snow. Half-Moon Lake and the lake under the falls would freeze and beneath the ice, water without color would pulse and throb.
A sound bubbled up from deep in her throat and she swallowed it back down again.
How can you fear anything at all after the battle of Kettippecannunk?
In her mind Hannah could hear her husband's voice as clearly as the kestrel's. If she answered Strikes-the-Sky, if she reacted to his tone—calm and teasing all at once—he would be with her for the rest of the day. He would argue with her for hours and take great pleasure in it, if she let him. The only way to make him go was to ask him the one real question—the only question, the one she would not ask for fear of getting an answer.
She ignored him, but he was not willing to be ignored.
Walks-Ahead, you cannot hide within your silence.
Here was the most irritating thing of all: in this strange absence of his, gone but not gone, alive in some ways and dead in others, Strikes-the-Sky was always right, his arguments without flaw.
At Lake in the Clouds the women forbade talk of war in their hearing, but that changed nothing. It was all around and drawing closer every day. Twice a week the post rider brought the most recent news and the papers and the men gathered in the trading post to weigh it all out, bullet by bullet. Hannah turned her face away when her brother and cousin tried to tell her about it.
But she knew the truth of it: she could not protect herself from sorrows old or new. War was not coming; it had already pushed into their midst. It would not die of her neglect or be turned away by calm words.
More and more often Hannah had the urge to say these things to Curiosity, who was none of her blood but as close to her as her own grandmothers had been. Both those grandmothers—one a Scot and the other Mohawk—were long dead and content to remain silent in their graves, but Curiosity would speak for them and herself. Once Hannah gave her permission, Curiosity would ask questions that dug themselves beneath the skin like gunpowder.
“That's the thing about Richard,” Curiosity said, and Hannah started out of her thoughts.
“What about him?”
Curiosity flicked her a concerned look. “I've known old mules beset with fly-bots less ornery. But I expect that don't much surprise you.”
“He was never known for his brilliant personality,” Hannah agreed. And then: “But there's something more, isn't there. Is he sick?”
“He is,” Curiosity said, her tone subdued.
“How sick?” Hannah asked the question knowing she would not get an answer; the older woman could be deaf when she chose.
Curiosity had turned her head toward the door. She stood, clutching the bowl to her narrow chest.
“Speak of the devil.”
Hannah heard the riders now, the drumming of hooves that seemed as loud as thunder. A flush of panic mounted her back to set its teeth in the tender curve of her neck.
Curiosity put the bowl of beans aside and crossed the room to Hannah in three steps. One hand, as lean and rough as leather, cupped her cheek. “There now,” she said softly. “Rest easy.”
Hannah blinked at her, swallowed hard and tried to speak.
“Hush.” Curiosity made a comforting sound. “No need to explain, child. A rider don't necessarily mean bad news. Just settle yourself down again and I'll go see to it.”
But Hannah could not stay away from the door. She followed Curiosity out into the sunlight just as a young woman pulled her horse to a quick stop and slid from the saddle to land lightly on her feet.
A woman, yes, but no taller than a boy with a pointed chin and sea-green eyes. Then Hannah saw the blond hair and the smile, and while her rational mind said it could not be so, her heart knew without hesitation or doubt. She felt herself moving forward, her arms open wide.
“Jennet.” The word caught in her throat in a great rush of tears. “Jennet.”
“Aye, it's me.” She pulled the bonnet from her head with an impatient yank to show off a head of short-cropped curls as yellow as tow.
“Hannah Bonner, why do you look so surprised? Have I not written a hundred times at least that I'd come one day?”
Others were running up now, Gabriel and Annie first and foremost with what seemed l
ike half the village streaming behind them.
“And what great adventures we'll have,” Hannah finished for her. “I've been waiting for you, cousin, and I didn't even realize it.”
“I see you brought the doctor with you too,” Curiosity said, coming forward now to catch Annie before she ran into the two women and knocked them over.
“And Luke.” Jennet looked over her shoulder. “Here he comes now, with Simon Ballentyne. Hannah, you'll remember his great-granny, Gelleys the washerwoman.”
“I remember a Thomas Ballentyne too,” Hannah said. “It was on his horse I first came to Carryck.”
“Simon's uncle, aye.” Jennet laughed. “Everywhere I go I drag a wee bit of Scotland along. Like cockleburs.”
“But how are we going to feed them all?” Annie wailed, and they were laughing still when Luke Bonner swung down from his saddle.
After Elizabeth greeted Luke and Jennet and the rest, she stepped back and watched, her hands pressed to her cheeks to keep herself from weeping. In the center of the crowd Hannah stood between Luke and Jennet, laughing and talking, touching one and then the other while Annie and Gabriel capered from person to person like puppies.
“Where are Richard and Ethan?” Elizabeth asked this question out loud and was surprised to get an answer from Lily, who had come up behind her.
“They went straight to the house.”
“It looks like the whole village is on its way,” Elizabeth said.
Lily made a sound in her throat that meant she would not take the trouble to correct her mother's exaggeration. Elizabeth glanced at her younger daughter in surprise and saw many things there: joy and disappointment at odds, and frustration. Like a child left out of a party with no chance of gaining an invitation, Elizabeth thought.