Stony River (20 page)

“That’ll be menzezia sap,” said Joel. “From that leafy brush you were walking through. It’s a nuisance that way.”

She washed her face and hands with the washcloth he offered her, even ran it over her hair. “There’s a comb and mirror in my room,” he told her, sensing what she needed. “Help yourself. And as soon as I get this soup going, we’ll see to that arm.”

Sevana found the comb and tediously worked out the tangles in his bedroom, which was as neat and spartan as the rest of the house. A Hudson’s Bay blanket smoothly covered the log-frame bed, and a shelf above it contained little more than the leather-bound Bible she’d seen in the pasture, a thick stack of envelopes all the same size, and a withered spray of faded flowers tied with a purple velvet ribbon. Resisting the desire to take a look at the names on the top envelope, she tied her hair back in a ponytail and critically viewed the result in the mirror. She was presentable, even though what she really needed was a shower and clean clothes. The only mar to her appearance was a light scratch across her cheek. She was thankful it wasn’t conspicuous like the one on her arm.

She emerged from his room wondering about the significance of the letters and flowers. That they were keepsakes from a girl, she had no doubt. She wondered what she was like, and if he saw her anymore or if it was in the past, and if a broken heart was the reason for the trouble he kept locked inside.

When she appeared, Joel called her over to the sink. “Let’s get that cut cleaned out.”

Holding her wrist over a basin of warm water, he began softening the dried blood with a wet cloth. He showed no uncertainty in what he was doing, and it occurred to her that he was accustomed to caring for his sheep and even himself, in his life on that isolated mountain.

Trying to take her mind off the throbbing that began the moment he applied pressure to the wound, she studied the oiled pinework of the cupboards and counter, and the varnished planks of the dining table. At the far end of the table, a raw, white fiddle was suspended in the front window. “Why is that violin in the window?” she asked.

“I’m advertising my work,” he kidded to make her laugh. “No, actually it’s curing in the sunlight to age and darken the wood. I’ll finish it this fall.”

After the scab had softened, he went down after the dirt in the cut—hurting her so much she had to bite her lip. He glanced up, saw her strained face. “Sorry, Sevana—I’m almost done.”

Soon he was tipping out a single stinging drop from a tiny brown bottle. “There you go. Now it can heal up.” He sounded satisfied as he wound a clean strip of cloth around it. “You just rest that arm while I finish dinner.”

“Thank you, Joel.” Wrapped snugly in the bandage, her wrist felt better already.

While Joel tended the soup pot, Sevana went to take a closer look at the unfinished violin in the window. Its fine-grained wood was sanded satin-smooth. Then she stepped over to his desk on the other side of the front door. Books, mostly scientific in nature, lined its back—studies of botany, geography, geology, and astronomy. A notebook lay open on the desktop filled with a printed bold longhand, and beside it lay another violin of mahogany-brown.

“Did you make this violin, too?” she asked.

He turned from cutting meat off a shank bone. “That was my first. It’s seen a lot of weather. But the funny thing is, it plays better now than when it was new.”

She ran a finger over the intricate carving and lustrous finish. “It’s beautiful, Joel,” she said admiringly. “So smooth and fine.”

“It should be,” he rejoined. “It has thirty-nine coats of varnish.”

“Thirty-nine?” She didn’t think him serious.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it? But the varnish is very thin, a mixture of shellac and other resins, and it takes that many applications—sometimes up to fifty—to get a rich, even veneer.”

“Why then, it must take forever to make a violin!” she concluded in astonishment.

“Just about,” he agreed wryly. “First the sprucewood must age until it’s the right degree of dryness—months are acceptable, but years are better. Then the hand-construction itself is no fast procedure. After that, it has to cure in the sunlight at least six months before it can be varnished, and hung again afterwards to cure the finish—the longer the better; and then it still must be rubbed out and polished, and fitted with a soundpost and bridge.” He added the meat bits to the kettle.

“Do you like doing it?” she asked dubiously, after listening to this extended explanation.

“Would you believe me if I said, yes, I do?” he asked, opening a can of milk. “To be sure, it’s a tedious, drawn-out process. And much of the finer planing and chiseling can’t be done freehand in the pasture, so it makes for some late evenings down here. But it’s the challenge of the work to get it exact—to get precisely the right hollowness when the top is tapped, just the right color and finish.”

And then Sevana could understand it. He was an artist just the same as she; only the medium was different. “Sometime I would like to hear you play,” she requested shyly.

“It would be a pleasure.” He gave a formal nod, but his eyes were teasing. “I don’t often get to serenade any but the sheep and the mountains.”

He went out the back door with a metal bowl, and she moved over to look at the map pinned on the far wall above an orderly woodworking bench laid with hand tools. She studied the myriad of places she would never see because they were too far, too steep, too risky for a person riding a borrowed horse. She hunted for Avalanche Creek, Hidden Creek, Snowshoe Summit, and Stormy Pass, eventually locating them all. She found Mount Graystone and Bearclaw Peak. She found other mountains whose names she had not heard.

She stared at the map. To think, the high country was a real place, documented with ink on paper. It struck her hard, oddly—for even though Joel had told her of the high country, it was still difficult for her to fathom that those mountains were anything more than a shining vision before her eyes.

Joel came back in with the bowl filled with leafy greens. “Soup’s about ready. How’s the arm?”

“It doesn’t hurt much at all.” Padding over in the thick socks, she helped him set one end of the table with a collection of mismatched tinware that rivaled Fenn’s. “This is very kind of you,” she said, when he had dished up two steaming bowls of chowder and they sat down to eat.

“I can’t have a visitor to the mountain have her experience end on a sour note,” he said, regarding her tolerantly from the opposite bench. “Greens?”

“What kind of greens?” Skeptically she viewed the bowl of fresh-picked leaves he proffered.

“Wood-sorrel, chickweed, twisted-stalk, round-leaf violet.” Joel picked out a specimen of each as he spoke.

“Just like the sheep,” Sevana laughed, finding odd the idea of eating them herself. She helped herself to a very few.

“Sure, they know what’s good.” He took a generous heap for himself.

With the food before them, he hesitated. “Do you say grace?”

“No,” she said truthfully. For she had come away from her visits to school chapel with little more than a familiarity for a few hymns and a vague concept of some benevolent Being presiding over the universe, if distant and unseen. But remembering the Bible, she said, “Go ahead, if you do.”

“I don’t know if He’d want to hear from me.” The grim look suddenly in his eyes, so uncharacteristic of him, made her cringe—and she wondered again what dark conflict or distress tormented him deep in his soul. But he had begun to eat, so she put the question aside and reached for her spoon.

As soon as Sevana tasted the creamy soup with salty bits of ham, she resolved to try it out on Fenn. She was sure he would like it: potatoes and ham were among the most common ingredients in his kitchen. “Is this bear?” she asked, wondering if he hunted like Fenn.

“Yes, do you like it?”

“I’m getting used to the idea. This tastes just like real ham, really,” she said seriously, so that a smile flickered almost unseen at the edges of his mouth.

The hearty chowder did much to ease the tight knot of hunger she’d had inside, as did the gritty boiled coffee. But the astringent greens she found most peculiar. Joel ate the rest, after she, with an odd look, had declined any more.

“I have just the thing for a city girl,” he said then, teasingly—and rummaging in a high cupboard, produced a bar of chocolate in gold foil they shared as dessert. Sevana gladly accepted the offered candy, but she wasn’t sure she liked being called a city girl. She supposed she still was—even though of necessity she had stopped using a hot iron on her hair, and had finally dismissed as futile the rite of polishing her nails. But she almost wished she could fit in there, into that rustic environment. She admired the simplified life he lived, and felt the poorer for being unaccustomed to it.

Leaning back against the log wall to finish her potent brew, she contemplated the man in whose house she unexpectedly found herself guest. Dinner in his cabin encircled by the silent mountains was much the same as dinner in Fenn’s cabin. And yet when she looked across the table, she didn’t see a hard-eyed logger, but a shepherd whose dark eyes were unwary. Strong like Fenn and independent of bearing, yet without walls to keep her out…she felt more at home with him than she did with Fenn.

She looked past him to the hand-constructed rooms he had built. It took no great powers of deduction to see that his precise woodworking skills had manifested themselves in a house as tightly crafted, and as expertly finished and maintained, as one of his fiddles.

He left the table to get more coffee and was gone a long time, or maybe it was she who was gone. Time seemed to be gapping; the thoughts in her mind ebbed from coherent to incoherent, seeming sensible until she focused on them and realized they made no sense at all. The room spun, and she jerked herself back to alertness. For an instant she had almost fallen asleep. She was physically bone-tired, and the hot food and fire-warmed room were causing waves of drowsiness to roll over her, drowning her.

“Sevana,” Joel said, seeing her drooping, “I’ll take you home if you want to go. But perhaps it would be better if you stayed here tonight, and went home after a night’s rest.”

“Maybe so,” she murmured. The trip down the mountain did seem too much to negotiate just then. “I can stay in the barn with Trapper.”

“There’s no need. I can make you a bed right here by the fire.” At her doubtful look, he added, “Don’t worry, Sevana, you’re not infringing on my hospitality. In the mountains, formalities are not so much the rule as common sense. And as soon as you’re situated, I might take the sheep up to evening pasture—since their grazing time was cut short today.”

Which was her fault entirely. “Please do,” she put forth earnestly. “And don’t bother about me. The hay is fine.”

“Whatever you’re comfortable with.” He began collecting the dishes.

Sevana staggered to stand up. Her muscles had stiffened, and her limbs felt leaden from the effort demanded of them that day. For one uncertain minute she almost collapsed back onto the bench. It took concentration and willpower to steady herself enough to retrieve her boots from behind the stove, and sit down to tug them on.

“Let me,” Joel offered, as she fumbled ineffectively with the laces. He knelt and tied them adeptly.

“Thank you,” she murmured, and stood dumbly while he helped her into one of his heavy flannel shirts.

But when she had followed him to the barn to get the sheep and horses, her muscles began to limber up with the activity. And out in the cool evening air, with the strong coffee kicking in, she felt much more alive. “Maybe I’ll go with you,” she considered, looking up the trail with a waked-up expression. “I’ve never seen sunset in the pasture.”

“I would have suggested it myself if you weren’t so tired,” he said. “Come to think of it—let me get my violin.”

CHAPTER 13

They sat in midslope, the meadow around them streaked with coppery evening light. Hawthorn thrilled Sevana by coming over seeking her attention, which she gladly granted before he went off to harass playful Blazingstar. Goldthread was hanging close to Joel, and he pinned him under his arm. “Better get to eating, fella,” he said, looking down at him affectionately. “You know you’ve got a long way to catch up with the others.”

Sevana smiled at the picture the two of them made together. “Do you think he ever will?”

“He’ll always be smaller, but he’ll do all right—won’t you, Goldie?” he asked, scratching the slack, fleecy coat. For while the other lambs were round and sturdy as balls of yarn, Goldthread’s woolly coat hung loose on his scrawny frame, as if he couldn’t quite fill out the skin given him. “He’s been gaining faster these past few weeks. Of course, it could be the apples I’ve been sneaking him,” he confessed.

Sevana liked him better for his softness. “Where did you get his name?”

“It’s a forest plant that grows around here. Same with Blazingstar.” When Goldthread wandered away to nibble the grass, Joel went into the trees and brought back the two plants to show her, scraping the dirt from the root of the goldthread with his thumbnail so she could see its color—bright yellow-gold.

Sevana liked to hear him talk. On several occasions he had named for her trees and flowers. He had pointed out birds—the bald eagle perched atop a snag, the saffron-breasted thrush she had known only by its call. He’d told her of the pika, a small member of the rabbit family who lived in rock piles on the mountaintops, and was busy through the summer cutting grasses and shrubs to build the underground haystacks it fed on all winter long—and how it sometimes stopped its busy labor to sing for the joy of its high alpine life.