Fire Along the Sky (59 page)

Mr. Stiles was particularly fond of St. Paul's gospel and his wisdom on the place of women, and returned to the topic—it seemed to Lily at least—every other sermon. Now he had decided he must bring the word to her directly, and there was nothing she could do, really, to evade him. Her mother, who was both frustrated by the man and vaguely interested in him, had made it clear that they were all to be polite.

Which would not include turning around and running away, Lily reminded herself, though the thought had a certain appeal. She could spend some time with her mother, just the two of them. It was something Lily hadn't done since they moved into the village.
Because I've been busy,
she told herself.
No other reason.
And:
What an awful liar you are. You can't even fool yourself.

“Miss Bonner,” Mr. Stiles began, bowing stiffly from the shoulders. “Can you spare me a little of your time?”

Lily managed a tight smile and a nod, and then she went through the door he held open for her.

He was patient, Lily had to give him that much. While she arranged her worktable and sorted through brushes and looked at great length for a drawing that didn't exist, he stood quietly, hat in hand, and waited.

It was no use, of course. Lily pushed out a sigh. “How can I help you, sir?”

“I would like you to take my likeness,” said Mr. Stiles. “And one of my nephew as well. To send to my brother and his family in Maine.”

She had been expecting something very different, and for a moment Lily could hardly think what to say.

“You do take commissions?” Mr. Stiles cocked his head, lifted a shoulder.

“I suppose I do,” Lily said. “The question has never come up before. Did you want a painting? Oil? Watercolor?”

“Oh, nothing as fancy as that.” His gaze skimmed over the work pinned to the walls. “A good likeness in pencil will serve very well. I can pay any reasonable price.”

Lily stood with her hands pressed to the tabletop, leaning forward a little. “Mr. Stiles, I have the impression you do not approve of the work I do here. From your sermons . . .” Her voice trailed away. She had not meant to give him that, the acknowledgment that she must listen to his preaching.

It pleased him, as she knew it must. His expression was eager. “Yes?”

“You do not hold a very high opinion of independent women.” And then something occurred to her, something that struck her as almost funny. She said, “You will preach to me while I work, is that it?”

“I will read my Bible,” said Mr. Stiles.

“Aloud.”

“It has a fine sound to it, read in a sure voice. I assure you.”

Lily had to bite back a smile. “Sir, no matter what you may have heard about my family, I am not unfamiliar with the Bible.”

Mr. Stiles had a disquieting smile; it drew his lower lip down into a corner and made a bow out of the small red mouth. “You will take the commission?”

She let out a laugh, short and sharp. “You are persistent, Mr. Stiles.”

“I am much blessed,” he agreed.

“You don't really want your likeness taken, do you? This is just a way to get me to listen to your preaching.”

The older man leaned forward so far that Lily caught sight of a perfect pink circle at the crown of his head, the first clear sign that he was struggling with his temper. When he straightened again he said, “You are refusing my custom?”

Lily thought in silence for a moment. She said, “I propose a compromise. I will take your nephew's likeness first. If you are satisfied with my work, and we can come to agreement on how to proceed, I will take yours when his is finished.”

It was a fine piece of reasoning, Lily thought, as she watched him think it through. A wily old man, her mother called him, not without some measure of appreciation.

He bowed again. “Very well. I will send Justus to you.”

Lily watched Mr. Stiles walk away through the village, his pace deliberate. He left her with the uneasy feeling that she had somehow managed to give him what he wanted without ever revealing to her what that might be, exactly.

In spite of the visitors who came by at the oddest times, Lily liked her spot in the middle of the village; she liked the movement and noise and most of all she liked sitting on a stool in the doorway and putting what she saw down on paper. This morning it was old Mr. Hindle, Jock's father, who sat on a stump plying the blade of his scythe with a whetstone. A dry stump of an old man, with a face carved out of leather under a straw hat. He had tucked a bunch of heartsease into the wide leather belt that held the whetstone pouch, wilting now but the colors still bright: yellow and a deep purple just the color of the old man's eyes. What delighted Lily most was the fact that he had the biggest ears she had ever seen on a human being, great boats stuck to his head with lobes like limp griddle cakes.

She was still occupied with those ears when a shadow fell across her lap and she started out of that place where she went while she worked.

The morning was half gone, and the world was full of noise: from the sawyer's pit by the new school building came the rough voice of metal cutting into wood; a child was weeping piteously—one of the Ratz girls, she saw now, who had spilled an apron full of eggs into the rutted lane and flapped her hands at a riot of puppies who were determined to take advantage of her poor fortune. Mr. Stiles in loud voice, reading from Corinthians from an upended box in the lane in front of the trading post. From the mountain came the echoing bellow of a moose in rut.

Manny Freeman was standing beside her.

“Didn't mean to startle you.”

The first needlelike pain of a headache darted behind Lily's eyes, but she smiled. “I need to get out of the sun anyway.”

He followed her into the shade of the meetinghouse, where a botfly bounced and buzzed against the walls.

“Blackfly coming on now,” Manny said in a conversational tone. “Won't be no peace until frost.”

That was a fact of the north woods, one so obvious to anyone who had grown up here—as both of them had—that Lily found it odd to have it raised as a topic of discussion. For the rest of the season she would start her day by rubbing Curiosity's pennyroyal ointment into her skin and looking at the world through a beating, shimmering haze of gnats and no-see-ums and blackflies. Horses and mules and oxen would have the worst of it, twitching and switching and sometimes running mad when the flies got the better of them.

“Oh,” Lily said. “You've been thinking about Polly.”

Manny stood at the window, looking down the lane to the point where it disappeared into the woods. “The team run away with them, did I understand that right?”

“Yes.” Lily came up beside him. “Just there. It happened very fast, I think. The team took off and the wagon turned over. They didn't suffer, either of them.”

“Good,” Manny said. He glanced at her, and Lily saw the sweat beading on his upper lip. He said, “Might I have a look at your drawings?”

Lily hardly remembered Manny, who had already moved away to Manhattan when she was a little girl. Maybe, she reasoned to herself, that was why he seemed comfortable with her.

“Of course,” she said, taking care to keep her voice even. There were tears on his face now, but she turned away as if that were as commonplace as the buzz of flies. She went to her worktable and let him be, and in a quarter hour he cleared his throat, as if to tell her that he had got hold of himself.

“It's like walking back in time,” he said. He had switched to Kahnyen'kehàka, but Lily had the sense that he didn't even realize it. Kahnyen'kehàka was her second language and she answered him in kind.

She said, “If you would like to take some you're welcome to them. There are quite a few of your father and your sister. And here.”

She walked to the far wall and searched for a moment. “Here's one of your son. He was just walking when I drew this. When he was little Polly sent him here to spend the summer with your folks.”

A laughing child, bright-eyed and keen, with full round cheeks. Lily held out the drawing to Manny and he took it without looking.

“Here's another one, the last time he was here. Two years ago, I think, just before he started as a cooper's apprentice.”

Manny looked at the drawings, his face set and blank.

“A cooper's apprentice, you say.”

“In Albany. He's got a real talent for the work, I've heard. And he writes to your mother faithfully, every month.”

In a voice small and far away Manny said, “He looks like his mama. Like my Selah.”

“Does he?” Lily leaned over to look at the drawing. “I never did get to take her likeness, I'm sorry to say. She was here for such a short time with us.”

“It was a short time,” Manny said. “Too short.” Then he raised his head and looked at her. “I think of her every day.”

“Of course you do,” Lily said. “How could you not?”

Without warning Manny leaned toward her, and Lily had the odd and disquieting idea that he was going to whisper a secret in her ear. But he had nothing to say, not in words. Manny simply put his forehead against her brow, gently, lightly. She felt him tremble and then stop trembling.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“Why, you're welcome.” Lily brought up a hand and patted him on the shoulder, as a mother pats a child who needs comfort but believes himself too grown-up to ask for it and would be mortified to know how very clearly he wore his need on his face.

For that moment they stood just so, forehead to brow, her small hands patting. Lily made soft sounds, humming sounds in her throat; she had no singing voice but wished just now that she had, so that she might sing to him as Curiosity would.

Then another sound, an indrawn breath, and Lily jumped in surprise.

Justus Rising was standing in the open door, his mouth a perfect
O
of surprise and astonishment and delight. Lily saw that much before he dashed away, his heels kicking up dirt. And she saw something else, something more disturbing: a look flashed across Manny's face. She could not call it anger, no more than she could compare the weak flame of a tallow candle to a lightning strike.

Most days she would wait for Simon to break at noon and they would walk together to their dinners: he ate at Curiosity's table and Lily went home to her mother's. But the morning's work had unsettled her and she started off with Manny. No sign of Mr. Stiles or Justus, and Lily was relieved and then angry at herself, to be so easily unsettled by the disapproval of a slow-witted boy.

It might have been awkward walking together; most men could not suffer to be near a woman who had seen them in a moment of weakness as she had seen Manny, weeping for his father and sister. But Manny seemed to have forgotten the whole episode, or at least to have put it away for now.

Lily's own mind was not so obedient; she could hardly walk this path without thinking of Simon. First she had run away from him in Curiosity's kitchen and now she had gone ahead without him to dinner. He would think her angry, or playing at games, when in reality she was disappointed to have missed him.

And what a surprise that was. After Nicholas she had believed herself unreceptive to such things, but Simon had sneaked up on her, wooed her so efficiently that she had little way to defend herself. She had gone from liking him to falling in love with him in a long, slippery sliding motion, her heart and her body wound up in it so tightly that she couldn't say what part of the things she felt were love and what was lust.

And here was the stand of birch trees where they often stopped, without discussion. Simon would catch her wrist and pull her to him and they would kiss until they were both breathless, with the birds flitting around them, buntings and cedarwings and sparrows. They would press together and move together until he broke away, flushed and at the point of no return. It was always Simon who stopped, and every time Lily was surprised and unsettled and frustrated by his self-control. Later, her irritation was replaced by other worries: that he would think her wanton. A strange word she had never really understood until now, the power and heft of it.

When Lily got up the courage to ask him, to use that word, he had looked at her with such honest surprise that she had the first vague understanding that he was as lost as she was, as given up to it.

Sometimes, when she was feeling the weather and the rush of her own blood with more intensity than usual, Lily would touch him in ways that she knew he could not ignore, and with those touches she would draw him deeper into the shadowy woods and they would make a place in a bed of new ferns, and come to dinner late, each making excuses to the faces around the table that no one believed.

But now there was Manny, walking not with her but a little ahead, his eyes moving constantly as any good woodsman's must. It was his walk that made it clear how long he had lived among Indians, and how deeply he had gone into that way of life. Lily thought of Hannah when she first came home after such a long time away.

She said, “You could write to Hannah, you know. My parents send letters and packets through my brother Luke, every few weeks.”

“I haven't writ a word in more than ten years,” Manny said. Not an outright rejection of the idea, and that meant something.

“It's not something you forget. If you've got a mind to write, that is.”

He pushed a thoughtful breath out and pulled another in, and then he smiled a little. “Don't know that I've got much of a mind for anything at all these days.”

“I've seen you helping Abe with the charcoal.”

Manny shrugged. “He's got a restful way about him.”

They were quiet the rest of the way until the fork in the path that would take Lily back home.

He said, “I'll have to go see the boy.”

Lily waited, watching his face for some sign of what he was asking. Then she saw that he hadn't really been talking to her, but to himself.

Manny touched a finger to his brow and left her, and for a moment Lily watched him walking away.

The Bonners ate their dinner in the kitchen as there was still no table in the dining room, Lily and her family and the women who came to help in the house and garden all crowded together. Gabriel entertained them all with his stories, and sometimes Lily's mother would read something aloud from the latest newspaper and there would be a discussion.