The Endless Forest (10 page)

Most people could not imagine a place in the real world—in their own world—for a mixed-race child. In Henry’s face were the best features of every race that populated the continent, white and red and black, and there was more. The bright and intelligent eyes, the naked curiosity in the way he observed the world. He had never known a hateful word, but the day would come. For all of them, that day would come. Others would pronounce them worthless and unclean.

Elizabeth would spend the rest of her life making sure that these grandchildren—every one of them—learned their own true value. They were healthy and whole, full of light and promise. Not of her blood, but hers just the same.

There would be others. It seemed now that Gabriel might be the first
to bring her a grandchild, something she would have never imagined even ten years ago. She had believed for a very long time it would be Lily. In those first few years while they were away, Elizabeth opened every letter in a state of excitement and then folded it away more thoughtfully.

Why this should be, Lily had never written, and Elizabeth had never asked. Some things were too fragile to put on paper, but tomorrow she would sit with her daughter, her most loved firstborn, and Lily would tell her those things she had been holding back.

Because Elizabeth could not wonder in silence another day.

B
ecca LeBlanc said, “Charlie, you’ll have to go out and look for her. She should have come back by now. I wish I had never let her go.”

It was full dark, and all through the Red Dog people were trying to let go of the terrible day they had survived in order to sleep. Every bit of floor space was taken up, and every bed with the exception of one.

“Callie Wilde is too smart and too tough to get herself in trouble,” Charlie said, folding his hands over his middle. “If she gets it in her head to go check on her trees, then there’s no stopping her. You know that yourself.”

“But it’s so late,” Becca said, not for the first time. “What can she be doing?”

Charlie yawned noisily. “My guess is she’s over there with a lantern taking the toll.”

Becca woke sometime later to the sound of murmured voices. Charlie had already gone to their chamber door and opened it a crack. He listened for a moment and then he closed it and came back to bed, stubbing his toe in the process.

“I told you,” he said. “Now will you stop fussing about Callie Wilde? You need all your strength for tomorrow’s worries. We all will.”

The finest room at the Red Dog was the one that looked down over the lane. It had a big bed hung with faded curtains and an adjoining room no bigger than a closet with a single bed, a servant’s lot.

The entire Cunningham family had crowded into the bigger room and now slept uneasily, older children wrapped in blankets on the floor and what looked like two or three grown-ups in the bed with Jane’s youngest between them. Callie stepped carefully by the light of a tallow candle and then closed herself into the servant’s cabinet.

It was narrow and stuffy, but she had it to herself for the simple reason that there was not room enough for anyone to stretch out on the floor. She sat down heavily and started to peel herself out of clothes that were drenched with water and dirt. Her face and arms were tight with dried mud, but the very idea of looking for a washbasin and water was so absurd that it brought out a small smile.

When she was naked she wrapped herself in the rough wool blanket, put out the candle, and lay down.

The dark was a comfort. Absolute and unyielding, she made a place for herself inside it. A safe place, where she could let her iron grip loosen for a little while. She wept until her eyes were swollen shut, silent tears that burned like lye. For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to want to go to sleep and not wake up again. She understood why her father had simply … walked away.

Callie wished for the thousandth time that she hadn’t sent Levi to Johnstown for supplies. But she had, and so had spent the day alone, walking her property lines back and forth for hours, venturing as far as she could go before water and mud stopped her.

With some effort she turned her mind to other things. The cider house still stood, minus a few shingles but otherwise intact on the hillside above the orchard. Inside, the cider press, rows of jugs, and stacks of baskets and barrels, all as she had last seen them. She continued on, a quarter mile into the woods to the spot where Levi’s small cabin stood in a circle of birch trees, undisturbed. It was one thing to be thankful for.

And they still had three dozen trees that had survived and might still bear fruit this year. Even poor fruit could be made into applejack, and applejack would carry them through yet another disastrous year.

In the close, damp dark she found she could not keep control of her
thoughts, or of the images she had gathered by the light of a pierced tin lantern.

Every single Bleeding Heart was gone, and in the rushing and confusion of the escape from the flood, she had lost her scion wood bag too.

As soon as Levi got home she would ask him to go searching downriver to see what he might find. There must be something, and if there was not, then she needed to know about the wild apple tree.

If God was at all merciful, the wild Bleeding Heart would be there. Callie tried to pray, and had time to realize she didn’t know where to start before sleep overcame her.

Levi came back from Johnstown with the supplies, spent ten minutes listening to Callie’s halting story of the disaster that had come upon them, and then set out immediately downriver. He took two axes with him, a bucket, and a long rifle on his back, and told Callie he might be gone until dark or after.

She swept out the cider house, fetched water, built a fire to heat it, and scrubbed the press and the buckets clean of dust and mold. Her hands were red and swollen with work, and she was so light-headed that sometimes she had to sit for five minutes until her vision cleared.

In the village they would have started the digging out, but Callie had no intention of leaving this place until she knew the whole story. She would wait for Levi if it meant sleeping on the bare ground.

It was midafternoon when she looked up and saw him coming toward her, and the only thing she felt in that moment was fear. The strongest urge, almost too strong to resist, was to turn her back and run. The things he had to tell her, the things he must tell her, were the things that would break her in half or set her on the road back to herself.

He put down the bucket so she could see that it was filled with scion wood. Callie glanced up at him and he shook his head.

This wood was not from the Bleeding Heart, then. A shudder ran through her, but Levi took no note. He was reaching behind himself to undo something strapped along his spine.

A three-year-old Bleeding Heart sapling, its root ball wrapped in wet and muddy cloth. Two branches had been broken off, but there were three others.

“I found it sitting right on top of a mountain of deadwood and rock twelve feet high. Still got your tag on it.”

They had been hoping for fifty Bleeding Hearts, and had now only this one.

She said, “Tell me about the wild tree.”

He didn’t answer until she raised her face to look at him.

“Gone,” he said. “Ripped right up out of the ground and pounded to pulp, is what I guess. No sign of her anywhere. But we got this one, Miss Callie. We got a healthy tree, and that’s all we had two years ago. We just got to start again.”

J
ust past dawn, and Elizabeth watched Nathaniel dressing to go down into the village. Into what had been the village. There would be search parties and salvage parties. Everyone strong enough to lift a shovel would be set to work digging what was left of Paradise out of the mud.

Elizabeth had dreamed of the women from the village wading through the mud, pulling out fine silver spoons and porcelain chargers rimmed in gold, beeswax candles by the dozens, delicate little mantel clocks, shoes with sapphire buckles, portraits of laughing children in ornate frames. Everything beautiful, sparkling clean.

She had come to give credence to dreams over the years. More often than not there was the spark of truth in them, but presented from such an odd angle that her waking mind could dismiss them. Many-Doves would have had much to say about this dream. It had been her gift, the ability to reach inside the images Elizabeth recalled in bright snatches, and pull out a single truth hidden among the silver and jewels.

In the village women would be digging in the mud for fragments of far simpler lives. Tin plate ware and barn clogs much mended. An old
Farmer’s Almanac
handed down from grandfather and father. A family Bible, a spinning wheel. Even the smallest thing precious.

She sat up suddenly.

“Boots?” Nathaniel half turned toward her. His hair was still unbound and it flowed over the bulk of his shoulders, black and silver in the firelight.

“I can’t stay abed, not with—not with the trouble in the village. I’m going with you.”

For a moment he considered arguing with her; she could see it working in his face. And then he gave it up as a lost cause.

When Nathaniel had a choice, he walked. Raised up by a father who looked like a white man but thought and acted like a Mahican, he had learned to value the silence of the forests, and the things that could be learned from them when a man was on foot. A horse was a fine creature, but of little use to a man who was out looking for game.

In fact, Elizabeth couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him mount a horse for so short a distance. But today he insisted on riding. And it made sense; the mud would be a foot deep and more.

Nathaniel rode Romeo, named by Birdie for his beauty, and for Elizabeth he saddled Pepper, a mule as dependable as the sunrise, and devoted to Elizabeth.

“Because you feed him apples.” Birdie wanted it recorded for posterity that her mother was willing to bribe mules for their good behavior, a tactic she never employed with children.

It was good to be out in the weather in the early morning, even such gray weather as this. And the birds were coming back. There was bird-song all around; veeries, thrush, phoebes, robins, all announcing their presence and claiming territory. She was very glad to be home.

The trip to Manhattan had been unusually difficult. First waiting for the ship to dock—three days, listening for the messenger who would bring word—and then so overwhelmed with the fact of her daughter that her mind could not be still, even when she slept. If things had gone differently—

Beside her Nathaniel said, “The best-laid plans.”

Elizabeth made a face at her husband. “It’s very rude, the way you read my thoughts.”

He grinned at her. “How does the rest of it go?”

“I can’t recall. How odd.” She frowned. “Once I would have remembered the whole poem, word for word.”

“You’ve got a lot less space in that head of yours than you used to. Close to thirty years of raising up a family and teaching don’t leave much room for poetry.”

He always knew how to distract her. Elizabeth straightened in the saddle to relieve the ache in her back, and said as much to him. “I don’t like to think of it that way, in years. Thirty years! That can’t be correct.”

It was a conversation they had often, but she had never been able to adopt Nathaniel’s matter-of-fact way of looking at things. Time moved on, and so must they.

They passed the Downhill House, and the smell of wood smoke and baking bread drifting from the chimney. Curiosity came to the kitchen window and waved a floury hand to them as they passed.

“I’d like to stop by to see Lily,” Elizabeth said suddenly.

Nathaniel made the thoughtful face, the one that meant he had reservations but would keep them to himself. That one expression was more effective than any argument; as much as Elizabeth liked to depend on reason in her deliberations, Nathaniel was far better at holding that line when it came to dealing with the children.

Then they came around a corner and saw the village, and for the moment all thought of Lily left her.