Into the Wilderness (98 page)

"
Elizabeth
,"
Nathaniel said.

"We're
done here."

"No
you ain't," said Moses Southern. "I still got a question to
ask."

Hawkeye's
rifle stock hit the floor with a thump, and the group of men around Moses
jumped like rabbits. Moses himself stayed steady, his fist curled white around
the barrel of his own rifle.

But
Hawkeye talked to all of them, drew each man in the room in with his eyes. "You're
wanting to ask about Hidden Wolf, and by God it's time to get it out in the
open. The mountain belongs to my daughter—in—law and my son, by law. They got
the paperwork, anybody wants to doubt my word." He pointed to an old
hand—drawn map on the wall. "I can draw the boundaries, if that's
necessary. But I think you all know where they lie."

"You
planning to keep us from hunting on the Wolf?" asked Dubonnet, his thin
voice spiraling up in a harsh arc.

"I
don't make the gaming laws," Hawkeye said coldly. "If you hunt out of
season, it's the judge you'll answer to—ain't that so, Alfred?"

The
judge nodded, reluctantly. "The gaming laws and restrictions will be
enforced on private and public lands."

Hawkeye
grunted. "So this is what we got to say. You can track your game onto the
Wolf same as always. Berrying, that kind of thing, that we've got no problem
with. But there'll be no more timber taken from our land—" Billy Kirby
made a protesting noise, and Hawkeye nodded at him. "I see you, Billy. Not
another tree from our land, do you hear, and we don't care what terms you got
to offer. There's plenty of timber out there otherwise. No trappin',
either."

"How
about looking at the Wolf, Hawkeye, that still allowed?" Moses' tone was
all spit and poison.

"Well,
now, I dunno," Hawkeye said slowly."I suppose so, long as you all
don't get too close, Moses. As for the rest of you, stay off the Wolf past the
strawberry fields. Any man found farther up than that, my son here will take
you before the judge for trespassing. Now, me personally, maybe I'll shoot
first, depends on what I catch you at."

Billy
Kirby spoke for the first time. "Ain't like you ever caught anybody up
till now."

There
was a new silence in the room as Hawkeye looked at Billy. As he held the gaze
past the point of no return, the younger man blanched, but he did not look
away.

"You
don't want to be the first, Billy," Hawkeye said, so softly that the skin
rose on Nathaniel's nape. "Not now that you've had fair warning. You all
leave us to our own business, keep your hounds and your hands off what don't
belong to you, and there won't be any trouble."

"What
about them Mohawk? How many more of them you got headed this way?" Archie
Cunningham directed this at Hawkeye, but Nathaniel stepped forward.

"My
family is my own business," he said. "Anybody interferes with them,
I'll deal with it myself. And the law will back me up on that, won't it,
Judge?"
 

Nathaniel
had never seen Middleton look so miserable. He cast a glance at his son, whose
jaw was strung tight enough to hear his teeth grinding, and then nodded.

"That's
all we wanted to set straight," Hawkeye said. "You'll find us good
neighbors, if you'll leave us in peace."

* *
*

Elizabeth
was silent most of the way up the mountain, busy sorting through the
conversations in the trading post. Snatches of sentences came to her, so that
her temper flared and flared again. She saw Julian's pale face, the way he had
avoided looking at Kitty at all. He had gambled on the knowledge that
Elizabeth
could not
expose him without exposing Kitty at the same time; he had won. She could not
cause more pain where there was already so much.

In
front of her Nathaniel walked with his head up, watching the woods. She knew
that Hawkeye did the same behind her. The men carried their rifles at the
ready, and their tension hummed almost loud enough to be heard.
Elizabeth
fought with a
wave of fear and anger. She would not be forced from her new home; she would
not be Miss Middleton again, to please her father and console her brother. But
she remembered Robbie's words, and she knew he was right: this would take no
good end. Hawkeye had offered a truce in a conciliatory tone, he had sought out
every eye in the room. But few had met him in return; she had watched
carefully. It had been a rational offer; the only possible way to live together
with these people who had been at war so long that they could not face the idea
of its alternative.
You'll find us good
neighbors, if you'll leave us in peace.

Axel,
bless him, had stepped forward. "Ja, Dan'l. We've never been anything
else," he had said. "Ain't no need to expect less now. You're welcome
here anytime, and you'll find most of us will be glad of the company of any of
the Hidden Wolf folk."

It
had been a relief to be reminded of this. That there were other people,
reasonable people, in the village. Jed McGarrity, and his family. Curiosity and
Galileo and their children. The Gloves, who had greeted her kindly. And other
families, enough of them to make
Paradise
home.

Elizabeth
had accepted Nathaniel's arm to leave the trading post, and then stopped to
speak to Anna about the pile of dry goods on the counter. Hurrying to catch up
to him at the door, a foot on the tail of her skirt had held her up.

We'll find that mine
,
came a soft voice.
And then we'll find
you dead in your beds
. It might have been Moses, but perhaps not. She had
not turned around.

Elizabeth
held her breath well into the second week of the school session, and then,
cautiously, she allowed herself to exhale. There had been no trouble from the
village, no disruptions of any kind to herself or her students. Every morning
thus far, she and Hannah had walked down Hidden Wolf with no escort save for
the company of Hector and Blue, Hawkeye's dogs. The hunters were sorely vexed
by the unprecedented and apparently endless ban on deer tracking, and were
willing to take on escort duties, even if they did not take them very
seriously; they were easily seduced away by the promise of a squirrel, and
would turn tail and head for home as soon as Elizabeth put the key in the
schoolhouse door. Nathaniel was less than enthusiastic about this arrangement,
but
Elizabeth
had argued for it and persuaded him in the end that it would not serve anyone
to have her appear frightened to her students.

She
had eight of them, each more well behaved, attentive, and hardworking than the
last. Each with some talent, small or large, that she could clearly see and
lovingly encourage. Each with problems small enough to address carefully after
long contemplation. And five of the eight were girls, two of whom—Dolly Smythe
with her painfully crossed eyes, and her own Hannah—showed real curiosity and
intelligence. This final blessing she kept to herself for she did not wish to
discourage the other children by showing favoritism.

Now
they worked with heads bent over precious paper, quills held tightly in curled
fingers. Once a day they put aside their hornbooks to practice penmanship, and
they copied today's sentence from the board exactly as she had put it there:

No man is an island, entire of itself —

John
Donne

Elizabeth
watched Ruth Glove chewing her lower lip almost ragged in concentration as she
carefully dipped the quill in the ink pot she shared with her sister. Behind
Ruth and Hezibah, Ephraim Hauptmann had put down his quill. No doubt he had
rushed through the sentence and produced something barely legible.

"If
you are satisfied with your work, Ephraim, then sit quietly until we are
finished," Elizabeth said to him. "However, if you think you could do
better, you might try again."

He
picked up his quill with a resigned sigh. Ephraim was a good boy, but his mind
did tend to wander from the task at hand. Not so Ian McGarrity, who would fill
the whole paper if she let him.
Elizabeth
watched Ian squint at the board even from the spot closest to it, and wondered
once again when she should speak to his parents about his eyesight. The
McGarritys had no money for spectacles, but
Elizabeth
could and in fact intended to buy some for the boy when she was next in
Johnstown
or
Albany
.
First there would need to be some arrangement; she would have to accept half of
a pig, or a keg of maple syrup, or something that the McGarritys could spare as
payment, to suit their sense of equity.

The
only sounds in the room were Henrietta Hauptmann's labored breathing, the
scratching of quills, and the ticking of
Elizabeth
's
little clock on the desk in front of her. Absent—mindedly, she paged through
the bible, searching with only half her concentration for tomorrow's penmanship
verse. This half hour was one of the few times she had for her own thoughts in
an otherwise busy school morning, for all the children were needed at home in
the afternoon and she was determined to fit not only reading, writing, and
arithmetic into each day, but also some rudimentary history and geography. Many-Doves
could no longer spare the time to help, and thus Elizabeth could not conduct
extra lessons with the older and more advanced students: Dolly, Hannah, and
Rudy McGarrity needed more complex arithmetic and they were ready to start
French. Perhaps in the fall.
Elizabeth
closed the bible and turned and looked out the window.

The
haze on the lake had not yet burned off: it would be a hot day. She suppressed
the urge to pull at her bodice, which was uncomfortably tight these days, and
especially uncomfortable in the heat. As she did many times every day, she
wished herself back in Kahnyen’keháka dress. Her students wore loose—fitting
over shirts of airy muslin and light, high—wasted summer full frocks. Her own
summer clothing was made for the damp, cool mornings of Oakmere. She would have
to have some dresses made, and soon.

Elizabeth
sighed again, and tried to focus on a suitable verse for the next day's lesson.
For some time she had been considering "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself," but each time she came across the sentence Moses Southern's
scowl rose in her mind's eye and she felt incapable of adequately defending
this choice. And when she thought of Moses, she must also think of his
daughter. She could not deny it was a relief not to have Jemima in her
classroom, but neither could she deny that this was a guilty pleasure. The little
girl needed the experience of school, even if
Elizabeth
did not especially enjoy the
challenge she presented. Once again she thanked God for her sweet—natured and
biddable students.

"Miss?"

The
small voice startled her out of her daydream. Ephraim Hauptmann stood before
her desk, his hands folded in front of himself. His usually pale seven—year—old
face was flushed the color of ripe strawberries, and under the luxuriant fringe
of hay—colored hair his eyes darted this way and that, unwilling to meet hers. The
classroom went suddenly even more still than it had been.

"Yes,
Ephraim, what is it?"

"Please,
miss," he said in a whisper that was heard in every corner of the room. "My
winkle's got stuck."

Elizabeth
blinked. The little boy blinked back at her, his eyes as round as pennies, his
color deepening to plum. She looked more carefully at his grubby hands, crossed
so primly in front of himself, and saw the glint of dark glass between his
fingers. His ink pot

Biting
her lip, she looked down at her own hands, at a fading scar on her thumb.
Elizabeth
looked at
anything and everything that might keep her from laughing out loud. From the
corner of her eye, she stole a look at the class. Each child sat there
completely engaged, waiting for her to solve this problem, as if it were an
everyday occurrence for little boys to try ink pots on for size. Which,
Elizabeth mused to herself, might be the case. She wondered what other mischief
she had overlooked.

"I
said, I've got my——”

“I
heard you, Ephraim," Elizabeth interrupted him. "I'm thinking."

The
first hushed giggles came from Ephraim's sister Henrietta, with Hannah fast
behind.
Elizabeth
sent them what was meant to be a firm look, but which she thought probably came
closer to a grimace.

"Well"
she began slowly.

Thump!
Elizabeth
sprang up from
her chair, nearly overturning it in her alarm. The children were up, too, and
looking around. There was an outraged cry from outside, and another thump which
set the open window behind her desk to rattling. As she turned in that direction,
she had a brief glimpse of Ephraim's shocked face, his ink—stained fingers
pressed to his mouth and the small glass bottle dangling incongruously from his
unbuttoned breeches.