Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

by Sara Donati

  “But it's a new story she's writing down for Alasdair, and she said she'd share it!” Callie's bright eyes blazed defiance, first at Jennet and then, subdued, at Curiosity.

  “What I said was that I would tell ye the tale. When I was finished with it. Which I am not.” Jennet drew herself up to her full height, which was not so very tall, and raised her chin. What she could not do, Elizabeth saw, was hide her smile.

  “But it's taking so long,” Martha said, wheedling now. “We can't wait.”

  “Och, but ye will wait. When I'm finished working it out you'll hear it. Or perhaps not.” She sniffed. “It will take some wooing to get me back in the mood to tell tales.”

  “Tea?” said Callie, brightly.

  Jennet pursed her mouth. “And some of the little cakes Sally baked this morning too, I think.”

  At that the girls laughed out loud and ran out of the parlor, followed closely by Jennet. She stopped and turned, and saw that Curiosity was holding out the stolen letter at arm's length, her eyes narrowed to read the small hand.

  Jennet snatched it away. “Et tu, Brute?” Then she laughed and, tucking the rumpled paper away, she left for the kitchen.

  “My Lord, what I wouldn't give for a half of that girl's energy,” Curiosity said.

  “I'd settle for a quarter of it,” Elizabeth said. “In any case, it is certainly doing those girls some good.”

  “I will miss Jennet's stories,” Ethan said. “By the time I come back here I suppose she will be married and settled in Montreal.”

  That silenced both women, who exchanged sober looks over the boxes of books.

  “Montreal ain't so far off,” Curiosity said finally. “I suppose folks have traveled that far to hear a good story. Once folks got full bellies and warm feet, a story's what they like best.” And then, looking out the window: “Here come Nathaniel now, and by the look on him he got a story of his own to tell.”

  Elizabeth turned to look out the window. Then she put the book she had in her hands down and left the room.

  “What is it?” Ethan said, still sitting on the floor before the hearth.

  “Your cousin Lily is come home,” said Curiosity from the window.

  “Is Luke with her?” asked Ethan as he got to his feet.

  “No,” said Curiosity. “But that Simon Ballentyne surely is, and all the rest of the Hidden Wolf folk. Something's up, for sure.”

  Hannah, dragged against her will and wishes back into the practice of medicine, found that of all the small tasks she was called on to do, midwifery was the thing she liked the best.

  Or had been, until she was called to Dora Cunningham in travail, and found herself in the middle of a scandal the village had been talking about for months. Now she wished she had paid more attention.

  The woman on the narrow cot was thirty-five years old, unmarried, and about to bring her fourth child into the world. Only one of the others had survived beyond its fifth birthday, and that boy sat playing with blocks in the corner, his too-small head wobbling atop a spindly neck. He was called Joseph, and while he had little language he was sweet and biddable, content to sit by himself or work at the small tasks he had been taught to take on.

  “I want to push now,” Dora said, grabbing for the ropes tied to the foot of the bed.

  “Not yet,” said Hannah. “But soon.”

  “You listen to her now, Dora, or you'll tear up your fundament worse than last time.” Goody Cunningham had a single tooth left in her head, but somehow she managed to speak clearly enough that Missy Parker heard her from her spot at the door. Hannah knew she had heard by the sharply indrawn breath that was louder even than Dora's moan.

  Dora's face was contorted, her eyes near popping out of her skull, as she lifted herself up on her elbows.

  “Listen to your mother,” Hannah said. “She's right, you'll tear, and badly.”

  Hannah said it calmly, and with little hope that Dora would listen. Curiosity had warned her that Dora Cunningham, normally an even-tempered woman, could turn into a hellion when the misery was at its worst. And still she would find herself in this situation again, no doubt; every village had a woman or two whose generosity or need for affection outstripped good sense. In Paradise, that woman was Dora Cunningham. It was enough of a scandal that her brother Praise-Be had taken his wife and children and moved to another cabin, leaving his mother and sister without male protection.

  “I want it OUT!” Dora bellowed. “Get it OUT!”

  Hannah had come to the conclusion long ago that no man could really know the woman he called his wife unless he had seen her in travail. The man who had fathered this child had no idea what his few minutes of pleasure had wrought. Not that he would care; men were endlessly philosophical about the agony of childbirth. This one, at any case, might never even know he had a child. Not unless Dora gave up his name and demanded the little bit of support the law promised her.

  And that explained Missy Parker standing at the door of the cabin with her hands folded primly in front of herself. Since Paradise had lost its last man of the cloth, Missy Parker had taken many of those responsibilities on herself.

  “It's coming,” Dora said. “It's coming now.”

  Dora Cunningham was a big woman, well built and comely, strong in body and mind, if not especially bright. If she got it in her head, Hannah thought to herself, she could probably expel her own internal organs. Her first push was evidence of just that, for it brought the child's head to crowning. The next pushed it into the world, but only as far as the neck.

  Hannah, all her concentration on the proper rotation of the baby's shoulders, had not noticed Missy Parker moving. From the other side of the bed she leaned over and said, “Now is the time you must ask the question.”

  “Ask it yourself,” Hannah answered.

  “Oooooooh!” Dora wailed.

  Missy Parker leaned in closer. “Dora Cunningham, in accordance with the laws of God and man, I ask you, who is the father of your child?”

  Dora opened her mouth and wailed again and shook her head, this time covering her inquisitor with a shower of sweat and spit. Thus it happened that as Dora delivered her fourth child, a girl, Missy Parker was howling as loud as mother and child.

  “The name of the father!” Missy thundered, using her immaculate apron to wipe her cheeks. “Tell me now, is Horace Greber the father of this child?”

  Dora fell back against the bed and howled one last time. Then her gaze focused on Missy Parker, and something sour came into her expression.

  When she had caught her breath she said, “You want the truth?”

  “Of course,” said the older woman, unable to hide her eagerness. Three other times she had carried out this ritual with Dora, and three times she had gone away disappointed.

  A deep sense of unease came over Hannah, but she forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. While she examined the child and cut the cord, she listened.

  “Then here it is,” Dora said, her hoarse voice raised above the cries of her daughter. “As you're so eager to know. You remember last May, when the letter come from Johnstown saying Mrs. Greber had run off from her husband and wasn't coming back?”

  In Missy Parker's round, full face her eyes darted from side to side. One corner of her mouth jerked.

  “Yes. Yes, I remember. Mr. Littlejohn brought the letter and Mr. Greber asked Mrs. Bonner to read it for him, right there at the trading post. And all those people right nearby.”

  She seemed to relish the memory.

  “I need another push,” Hannah interrupted. “Not too hard. For the afterbirth.”

  Dora's face knotted while she gave Hannah what she had asked for. When it cleared again, she blinked the sweat from her eyes and looked at Missy Parker.

  “You remember it was Jonas Littlejohn who rode post that day.”

  Missy drew back. “Well, of course. Yes. What does he have to do with Mrs. Greber and her letter?”

  “Listen and I'll tell you. Jonas Littlejoh
n left more than bad news behind him when he rode off the next morning. Say hello to his daughter.”

  Missy Parker clutched fists to her bosom, her mouth working wordlessly. A great rash of color had broken out on her face and neck. “You're lying.” She turned on her heel and marched to the door, where she fumbled with the latch, and then out into the cold.

  The fire in the hearth roused at the sudden draft and then settled again. In the quiet the new mother and grandmother giggled softly.

  “You gave her a shock,” Hannah said, handing the swaddled newborn to her mother. “But what does Mrs. Parker have against Jonas Littlejohn?”

  “He's married to Missy's youngest, her Thea,” said Goody.

  “Oh, dear,” said Hannah. “I fear you'll have a hard time getting any help out of Mr. Littlejohn, then.”

  “Never thought I would,” said Dora. “Never would have said his name, except—” Her chin trembled and she let out a squawk of laughter, rocking the mewling baby to her breast. “It was worth it though, wasn't it? Here she was hoping to get a new club to hit Horace Greber over the head with, and instead— Wasn't it worth it, to see the look on her face?”

  On the way home, smiling to herself at nothing in particular, a series of sudden and unsettling realizations stopped Hannah in the snowy woods.

  On her way home. She had a place that she thought of as home. Not her father's house or her grandmother's longhouse or her husband's village, but the house that was as much her home as Curiosity's. People had called it the doctor's place while Richard was alive and they called it that still, except that now she was the doctor. They gave her that title, some of them at least. In a village of whites, she was the doctor. She lived in a brick house with ten rooms, and fine furniture, and china, and beeswax candles. A library. A dispensary, filled with all the instruments a doctor might need. A laboratory, to experiment with whatever interested her by way of new herbs or medicines. A microscope.

  Paradise had accepted her, because Richard Todd had made it clear that he found her worthy.

  Hannah shook herself, and thought it through again.

  The people of Paradise accepted her because they had known her all her life, as a girl and then as a young woman, at first carrying a basket for her grandmother or Curiosity, and later to bind their wounds and treat their fevers and to comfort their dying children. Nowhere else in the white world would such a thing be possible.

  And then this idea, more surprising still: she was comfortable here, against all hope and expectation, and with that comfort came a new peacefulness and a quickening of the mind.

  Sometimes when Hannah was looking at a sore ear or a gash or a listless child that needed worming, she thought of her journals and notes with regret, an emotion she had almost forgotten. Now and then she took down one of the books she had been left, an anatomy or a treatise on fevers, and found herself drawn in by the formal language of medicine. She understood that her native curiosity was coming back to life. The part of her that was a doctor approved; the rest of her, when occupied too long with these thoughts, began to hum with panic.

  At times she saw glimpses of what life might be, here. With family around her, and girls to look after who were of an age to be her own daughters. She could live out her life like this or she could force herself back, all the way back, and live a woman's life.

  Well nourished, her body had woken at a pace with her mind. At the last moon she had bled again, though it had been a year or more. To remind her: she could bear more children of her own, and raise them in the fine brick house. She could marry again; as strange as the idea might be, it had presented itself. In theory, she could marry again.

  Or she could follow Dora Cunningham's example, and take pleasure and release where and when she pleased. It would be easier than finding the right husband in this white world.

  There were trappers and backwoodsmen who would be glad of her, men who cared little what others might think of them. Such men often took Indian wives. Some of them helped themselves to more than one such woman at once.

  It would shock her stepmother to hear such a thing said, but some part of Hannah did not dislike the idea. Such a husband would leave her with most of her freedom. He would spend a few weeks with her in the fall and spring; he would satisfy himself and her too, if she was lucky or demanding enough, and give her a child every year. Children three-quarters white, who would be accepted here in Paradise, begrudgingly, because they were Nathaniel Bonner's grandchildren.

  She felt Strikes-the-Sky nearby. He had started coming to see her again, though not often. She wondered if he would go away for good, if she were to take another man. The laws of her people allowed her this, of course; she could have put him aside even while he lived. He had teased her about it now and then, when she was angry with him.

  Look, he said. Look at Kicking Bird. Would he be a better husband, do you think? Such a small thin man as Kicking Bird, surely he is not so selfish and thoughtless as to eat the last of the red corn soup.

  He said that with his arms wrapped around her waist and his mouth at her ear, tickling her with his breath while she struggled, saying ridiculous things until her anger slipped away from her. Then he would take her down to the furs and cover her until she forgot that she had come back to their hearth after working all day among the sick, to find that he had emptied the cooking pot.

  Strikes-the-Sky, her husband. Gone now more than two years and still her tongue remembered and craved the taste of him.

  As meat craves salt. She said those words aloud and watched them drift off in the white cloud of her breath. In that substance she could see his shape, far off at the edge of the forest. His voice was much closer.

  There are other kinds of food in the world, he said to her. Food without salt still fills the belly.

  It was true. There were worthwhile things in the world, and many of them were already in her hands. A home, a family, work, people who needed her help. Good things that held her here as surely as a pinned fly. Life here would be safe, and comfortable, and sterile.

  Hannah wondered how long she could manage such a delicate balance, and where she might land when she lost it.

  That thought was in her head when she stepped out of the woods a hundred feet from her door, candle lit in the dusk, and saw the snowshoe tracks leading up to the door. Many people, come at once, and with them, she knew somehow, the answers to some of the questions that haunted her.

  At first, the shock of what Lily and Simon had to tell them took all the air from the world. In Curiosity's crowded kitchen they sat, each of them, robbed of the ability even to breathe.

  It reminded Jennet of the day her father died. At the time it had been a revelation to her, that words, insubstantial words that could not be held or touched, could have silenced a whole village. The laird is dead. Four words that first struck the world dumb and then drew a cry from it that must be heard in the heavens.

  Hannah said, “Of course I will go to them.”

  “I'll take her,” said Nathaniel, and with that the turmoil began. Nathaniel would go; Elizabeth would not have it, nor would Curiosity. Nathaniel had promised his wife never to set foot in Canada again, and she would hold him to that promise.

  “And if it means hog-tying you,” Curiosity added with grim conviction.

  Elizabeth said, “I will not lose both of you at once.”

  And Lily: “He is not dead. No one said that my brother was dead.” That word, spoken for the first time, brought forth weeping: from Elizabeth and Lily and young Gabriel, who sat beside his father as still as stone while the tears ran down his face.

  “I will go,” said Runs-from-Bears. His tone was steady and low and in response Elizabeth's tears welled again; in thankfulness, Jennet thought, and shame.

  It was Simon Ballentyne who brought some quiet and calm back into the room. When he stood they turned their attention to him, and Jennet saw how much he was like his grandfather. The Ballentyne, they called him, capable and strong and clear-sigh
ted in the face of disaster; her father's right hand for so many years.

  Simon said, “The men who know the situation best are your son Sawatis”—he nodded to Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears. “And the sachem Spotted-Fox. They know the island and many of the soldiers. Their faces are familiar but not suspect. They will do everything they can to see that your sons come home again hale. They have asked for Hannah, and she has agreed. Runs-from-Bears knows the territory better than I do, but I know it well. Will you let us take her to them?”

  Jennet saw the words do their work. Elizabeth's face, cold and pale, Nathaniel's, alive with frustration and anger. Many-Doves, unreadable as ever to Jennet, and Runs-from-Bears, who stood behind his wife, unable or unwilling to sit.

  Then Elizabeth turned to Lily. She said, “What do you think, daughter?”

  Lily's hands were knotted in her lap. She studied them for a moment, and when she raised her head Jennet saw how much these months away had changed her. Lily said, “Simon is right.”

  “I will travel on my own and leave first,” Runs-from-Bears said to Simon directly. “When will you follow?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “If you can be ready, Hannah?”

  Hannah stood and smoothed her skirts with her hands. Then she managed a smile, a small one but a smile nevertheless. “There is a great deal to do, but yes, I think I can be ready.” And here was the surprise: it had taken such catastrophic news to finally wake Hannah fully out of her long sleep of loss and sorrow. For the first time since she had come home, they saw in her the girl and daughter and sister they had been missing. Because she had been called back to the war she dreaded, to care for young soldiers who needed her.

  Nathaniel made a sound, a clicking like a death beetle in the wall, perceptible to nobody but the two of them. She closed her eyes, and summoned the image of her son to her mind's eye.

  They worked late into the night to make things ready. Hannah was in the middle of it all. She moved from room to room, giving direction and answering questions. She examined all the surgical instruments and sent most of them to the smithy for Joshua to sharpen, as Richard Todd had trained him to do. She sorted through baskets of linen and set the little girls to tearing what she needed into serviceable pieces. She sent Gabriel and Annie out to borrow every mortar and pestle in Paradise, and then under Many-Doves' watchful eye, dried herbs and roots were ground and mixed and carefully wrapped in greased paper.