The Endless Forest (87 page)

“That morning after Cookie died, when I woke up and found Ma gone, I knew right then. I knew that if Ma was dead, it would be my fault. And so she was, and so it is.”

Martha held Daniel’s hand tight, and her gaze cast downward. If she concentrated, she might be able to clear her mind and find some way to think clearly. Some way to rid herself of the images Callie had put there, of blowing snow and dark water and of Jemima, standing on the old bridge looking down at the water closing over Cookie.

For all those years Martha had a different image, one she had never told Callie about, though she had testified to it in front of the village. Mrs. Wilde, underdressed for the weather, her hair flowing loose down her back, walking up the mountain on the morning of that same blizzard. Standing at the kitchen window Martha had seen it all very clearly. The woman in a dress the color of dried blood, bent forward a little as she walked into the wind and first gusts of snow. Her skin already translucent, as if she were melting away into the weather.

She tried. She asked again and again.
Ma, Mrs. Wilde’s got out somehow; let me take her home. Ma, there’s something wrong with Mrs. Wilde. Ma, let me go get Cookie
.

Her mother’s answer she remembered clearly, and the tone: firm, cool, inflexible.

That’s her concern and none of ours
.

Knowing that Cookie was dead, Jemima had said that.

Now Martha looked at the woman who had borne and raised her, sitting wrapped in blankets on the hottest of July afternoons. Her face composed, even blank. The idea came to Martha that the spark that animated her mother for all her life was already gone, and the woman who sat there was somebody else entirely.

Callie was sitting down again. Levi put his hand on her shoulder, leaned over and asked her something. She shook her head. Then Ethan came to her and crouched in front of her and took her hands. He talked for at least a minute, in a hushed voice. The kind of voice you might hear someone use in a church or a sickroom. Again Callie shook her head.

Martha wondered if it was her own turn now to go and comfort Callie. To tell her that she wasn’t responsible, that she wasn’t to blame. To say,
I don’t mind that you kept all that to yourself all these years, that you didn’t speak up back then. I’m happy that you made that decision for yourself without asking me what I wanted
. But those were things she couldn’t say. She might have said something closer to the truth of what she was feeling:
Look at all the pain and trouble we might have been spared if you had told somebody what you saw
.

Jim Bookman was saying, “Mrs. Focht, do you wish to respond?”

Jemima raised her head as if the sound of his voice had called her up out of a daydream. “What?”

“Do you wish to respond? Tell your own story?”

“My story.” The idea seemed to amuse her. “Of course, I’ll tell you my story.”

“F
irst before I start, John Mayfair has drawn up a last will and testament and I’ve signed it. The little bit I have in the world—and it is just a very little bit—I am leaving to my boy. To Nicholas. I have asked my daughter Martha and her husband to act as guardians until the boy reaches his majority, but I have named Susanna as the person who should take over his upbringing. She has agreed that she will take him in and raise him here at Lake in the Clouds.

“You can tell yourself I am doing this because I want to keep Nicholas away from Callie just to make her mad, but the fact is I don’t want the boy raised by somebody who hates me. If that causes Callie pain, why, that’s an added bonus and nothing more.

“See how Susanna is looking at me, so’s I remember that I promised her to be civil. I will try harder, I promise.

“As a girl the thing I wanted most was to be here. Right here, at Lake in the Clouds. When Hannah started home after school everyday, I wanted to follow her. I never let on, of course, but this place was like some kind of palace in my mind, back then. Maybe because I knew I
didn’t belong and never could belong. Don’t things out of reach just glow in your mind? And then sometimes when you do get what you’ve been hoping and planning and fighting for, the glow is gone. Rubbed off in the getting of it.

“Most things I fought for turned out that way. I’d think, that’s what I need to be safe and happy, and I’d fight and fight, and then when I got it in my hands, it wasn’t gold but brass needing to be polished and polished if it was to give any service at all. That’s the way it was marrying Isaiah. I knew he didn’t want anything to do with me and that was fine. I thought the money would be enough. I thought I could withstand anything if I had nice clothes and enough food and firewood and a house to call my own and servants. I told myself it didn’t matter how he hated me or if I disgusted him, as long as he kept up appearances. But I found out soon enough, pity is much harder to swallow than hate. You all think I’m made of stone, but I never was.

“The thing is, everybody I ever wanted, every single person, wanted somebody else and only made do with me. My father was mad I wasn’t born a boy and the minute my brothers came along, he couldn’t see me anymore. Liam Kirby was bound heart and soul to Hannah, who didn’t even want him back. I took what he wouldn’t give me of his own free will, and to this day I’m glad I did it. If you’re honest you’ll admit you’re glad of it too, all of you, or Martha wouldn’t be sitting there, precious as she is to you.

“Nicholas wanted Lily, he wanted her so bad he was sick with it, but she didn’t want him. Not really, or she wouldn’t have fallen so hard in love with that Scot. So I took things into my own hands. Yes, I did. Levi wants to hear me say it, and so here it is: I did what needed to be done. When Cookie fell and knocked her head I did the rest. I lied to Nicholas about Lily, and I let Callie’s ma walk away into a blizzard. I did all that because I knew I could be a good wife to Nicholas and that he would take care of us. By that time I had given up the idea of an easy life. I just wanted to know there’d be food and firewood.

“A man goes out and fights and kills sometimes for his family, and that’s honorable. Nathaniel knows what I’m talking about, don’t you? That’s what it means to be a man. A woman is supposed to take what fate hands her and be satisfied with that. She’s supposed to be
thankful
for that. If I had any strength left that idea would still make my blood boil.

“When things went bad and Nicholas was close to losing his mind
for grief and anger and hurt male pride—because that’s what it was, even if you refuse to see the truth of it—I knew I had to go before he killed me or I killed him. Of course I left the girl behind. I couldn’t look after her. If I had taken her, you would have raged about that. Sometimes I wonder who got the brunt of your anger once I was gone.

“It didn’t matter that I left without Martha. She wouldn’t have wanted to come with me anyway. Can’t say as I blame her, to tell the truth.

“So I went. I went and I found my way and I had my boy.

“You’ll be surprised to hear me admit this, but there’s something sour in me. Something spoiled. It has been there since I was a girl, since Ma and my brothers choked to death with the quinsy. I nursed them as best I could. I went to Curiosity and got tea and medicine, and none of it did any good. I begged them, but they died anyway. Something settled on me then, and I never did get rid of it. Like a tattoo on my face, I could scrub at it but it wasn’t going nowhere. And after a while, I liked myself like that. I looked in the mirror and I liked what I saw. I’m crabbit and mean and vindictive, always have been.

“But I did mean for the boy to grow up healthy. So I sent him away with Lorena to look after him, and every month I sent money. I couldn’t have kept him in any case, because by that time I had regular work singing in the theater. You didn’t know that, did you? I sang every night under the name Monique Moreau. And I’d still be singing but for this cancer in my belly.

“I hate that the cancer has got the best of me. I hate that after all I did to keep my head above water, my own body has betrayed me. They told me a year ago I didn’t have long, but I was determined to see that the boy was took care of. So I spent the last of my money hiring Dan Focht to play my husband, hired the carriage and horses and the extra servants. Dan wanted his boy Harper along and I didn’t object. If I hadn’t been sick maybe I would have realized the boy was quick-fingered and always looking for easy money. He’s dead and no doubt he deserved it, whoever did it. I can’t hold a grudge on his account.

“I went and claimed my son and we lived all together for that short time so I could know him better. And what I found was a child so sweet and good, I could hardly believe he was mine. But he is mine. He’s the only thing I can claim as my own.

“All I wanted was for the boy to have what is rightfully his. Martha
has money enough to raise him proper, but I wanted him to have something of his own, something of his father’s. You all thought I wanted the orchard because of that apple, the Bleeding Heart, but the truth is I didn’t know anything about it. I’d swear it on my son’s life. What I did know was that my boy had some property owing him, and I wanted to make sure he got title to it before I died.

“Then Focht wanted more money to keep up the charade and I didn’t have it, so he left and I went too. I had a few ideas, how to raise a little more money, take the boy’s claim to the courts. But time caught up with me and the money ran out, and there I stood, sick unto death with the almshouse staring me in the face.

“I stole a horse and buggy to get here, but I don’t think they’ll track me down in time to hang me. You all may decide to hang me anyway, or maybe Levi will put a bullet in my head to avenge his ma. It would be a blessing, truth to tell. I’m ready to go, now that I know the boy will be looked after. I like to think of him growing up here on the mountain. Not because I’ll die here, but because it’s a good place and Susanna is a good woman for all she married a Mohawk.

“So now you can sort things out among yourselves. I’ll sign anything you care to put in front of me, as long as John Mayfair says I should. Susanna, could you help me? I feel the need to lay my head.”

F
ollowing from a hearing held this 6th day of July in the year 1824, I find sufficient evidence to charge Mrs. Jemima Wilde (known also as Jemima Focht, or Jemima Southern, or Jemima Kuick and also as Monique Moreau) with Manslaughter in the death of Mrs. Cookie Fiddler on or about the 18th November 1812. She is charged also with Depraved Indifference in the death of Mrs. Dolly Wilde on or about that same date.

Because the accused has signed a statement confessing to both these crimes, and further because she is close to death, no trial will be ordered. A report will be submitted to the district court in Johnstown.

May God have Mercy on her Soul.

James Bookman

Magistrate

Paradise on the Sacandaga

O
n a bright September morning Curiosity-Bonner-called-Birdie flew down the hill into the village and then straight to the schoolhouse where her brother and sister-in-law were getting ready to start classes for the day.