Lake in the Clouds (62 page)

At night sometimes she lay awake thinking of what happened at Eagle Rock, of Jemima’s face twisted with anger, the grip of her hand, the way she spat out her words.

Nothing to lose if you talk.

When Curiosity and Daisy started in on Jemima there was never any mention of Liam Kirby, who had disappeared into the bush without a word to anybody that very day.

Maybe because Hannah was gone, or maybe because he wanted to get away from Jemima. Both, Daniel had said when they talked about it one morning when they had a few minutes alone. And to these reasons of Lily’s Daniel added his own, the least appealing of all: Liam was still hoping to pick up Miss Voyager’s trail, and he had gone north to the Great Lake to take up with other blackbirders, men who hunted like wolves when the need was on them.

It gave her a bad feeling deep in her gut to think about it. In the dark she wished herself at home where she could wake Daniel and they would talk until it all made some kind of sense. Alone it just stuck in her head like a cocklebur and wouldn’t be shook loose. Maybe together they could go to Hawkeye and tell him the story. He would listen with that quiet look he got when something hard had to be said. Then he might even smile at the idea that Jemima could cause them any harm, the laughing kind of smile that meant the idea was too odd to take seriously or the grim smile that meant that Jemima might try, but she would regret it mightily if she did.

And then Lily looked up and saw her grandfather standing in the door of Curiosity’s kitchen, taller than the door itself, as tall as any mountain. As if he had heard her thinking about him, as if she had called his name loud enough to hear at Lake in the Clouds. The sight of him loosed something tangled inside her so that she felt her bones go loose and tears pushed up without warning. She wiped them away while he was greeting Curiosity and Daisy, because she didn’t know why she was crying and she didn’t want him to see.

He came to kneel next to her chair. Lily leaned a little forward to get more of the smell that always clung to him, pine trees and Indian tobacco and gunpowder and hard work. Different from her father, who liked to chew mint, but the same too.

“Is there news?”

“There is,” he said. “Three-Crows brought you a letter from your mother.”

“But—”

“Read the letter first.” He smiled when he put it in her lap
to show her there was nothing to be afraid of, and then he leaned forward so that the eagle feather tied into the side braid above his ear tickled her face, an old trick that still made her laugh. His face could be hard as iron when he was worried or angry but now he was relieved, she could feel it herself.

“I’m going to pay Gabriel my respects, and then we can talk.”

Curiosity lit a candle for her to read by and stepped away to leave her alone, something that must have been hard because Curiosity wanted news as much as Lily did. So she opened the folded pages—the sight of her mother’s handwriting was so familiar and so welcome that Lily touched the paper to her cheek—before she began to read out loud, a little shyly because she had never liked recitation, and had always left that to Daniel.

Lily read the letter twice, and then another time, but they were all agreed that it raised more questions than it answered.

“The rest of the story must have come through Three-Crows,” Lily said, a little unsettled by the look on Curiosity’s face. “Hawkeye will tell us why they’re on the lake.”

Curiosity made a sound deep in her throat that meant she was far less than pleased with another delay. Then Galileo came into the kitchen and Lily was asked to read the letter aloud again.

They sat wondering about what could have caused such a big change in plans, if it might have been blackbirders that kept them from taking Selah to Red Rock and what was it they planned to do with her once they got to the Canadian border. Daisy went back and forth to serve Uncle Todd his supper while her parents talked in a low whisper, as if he might hear them from the dining room.

Lily never could understand why Uncle Todd would want to eat alone while Aunt Todd and Ethan were away; he could be in the kitchen with people, but this evening at least she was glad of his ways because Curiosity and Galileo would never talk so freely in front of him.

“She was being careful,” Galileo said, it seemed more to convince himself than anyone else. “Don’t mean bad news, necessarily. It wouldn’t be wise to say too much in a letter, might fall into the wrong hands.”

“I have got to set down and write that letter Manny been waiting for.”

“Let’s wait, see what Hawkeye have to say,” said Galileo softly. “He’s coming now.”

Lily was glad when her grandfather picked up a stool and settled it and himself down next to her. Galileo, Curiosity, and Daisy all drew up close, Galileo with his arms folded and propped against his knees so that he bent forward, Curiosity and Daisy with fingers wound tight together, sitting close enough to touch shoulders. Hawkeye was a good storyteller and nobody interrupted him, even at the worst parts when Curiosity drew in a sharp sigh.

When he was finished there was quiet for a long minute, the kind of quiet that sets on a house when somebody is laid out in a coffin to look at one last time. Lily tried to imagine it, twelve people dead in five days, young and old. She had seen her brother dead and Falling-Day too, both of them so still in the wood box that her father had built for them, but she could not make herself see twelve dead people all at once. If you counted everybody in both cabins at Lake in the Clouds from Sawatis to Hawkeye, youngest to oldest, that would be twelve people.

A brain fever that could put twelve people in their graves inside of a week was worse than any sickness Lily had ever heard her sister Hannah talk about. Worse than croup, worse than yellow jack.

Curiosity cleared her throat; her voice came rough and thick. “Lord have mercy on their souls.”

“They died free,” Daisy said. “There’s that much to be thankful for.”

“If anybody can get the rest of them to Canada, Nathaniel can.” Galileo said this in his own firm voice, the one he used with the horses and oxen and creatures he meant to send in a particular direction.

Lily said, “I don’t like it.” Because she didn’t, not at all. All day she had wanted news, and now she wished she had never heard it.

“Together your daddy and ma can manage just about anything,” said Curiosity, reading her. “Don’t you doubt it.”

Hawkeye leaned forward and lifted Lily as easily as he might lift a sack of cornmeal, settled her on his lap so that she was surrounded by the hickory hardness of his arms beneath the soft leather of the hunting shirt. Another time she might have been insulted to be treated like a babe in arms but now it seemed just
right, and she was glad of him and of Curiosity and Galileo and Daisy too, all of them sitting together in a circle.

“I’m going to take her home tonight,” he said over Lily’s head. “Daniel is feeling mighty alone right now.”

Curiosity gave him a vague smile. “All right, then,” she said. “But don’t you let her put weight on that ankle more than an hour a day until I say otherwise.”

Hawkeye generally walked everywhere but this time he had come down to the village on Toby, the ancient piebald gelding as quiet and gentle as an old toothless dog, the horse that pretty much belonged to the children as the men walked faster than Toby did. The Kahnyen’kehàka took pride in walking, but Lily was glad to see the old horse.

Galileo handed Lily up so that she sat astraddle in front of her grandfather with her sore ankle tied to a bolster and the rest of her wrapped in a blanket. Curiosity had put all her things in the side basket, and then she stood back with her arms folded tight.

“It surely was nice to have you, child. I’ll be up to see you tomorrow afternoon.”

Bump was standing by the garden fence and he raised a hand to her, white as linen in the gathering dark. Lily waved back and called out to him but he stayed silent and later she wondered if she had imagined him there.

Galileo touched her hand and then they were off. Lily was glad that Hawkeye didn’t try to talk to her because she was so confused, to be heartsick at leaving when all she had wanted was this, to be going home again to sleep in her own bed.

They headed home around the west end of Half-Moon Lake, Toby’s long legs whooshing through the high grass, mud sucking at his hoofs where they skirted the marsh. She leaned back against her grandfather and listened to his heartbeat and the frogs singing in the marsh louder than any children at play and the steady rhythm of Toby’s breathing.

It was almost full dark but the lake drew all the starlight to itself, flickering like a copper penny tossed up spinning into the sky at midday. When light left the world they would be blind
(like Splitting-Moon,
she whispered to herself) until the sun came again. Lily closed her eyes and opened them again trying
to imagine that loss, living in a world stripped of color and shape and shadow.

If she looked hard enough she could make out the shape of the mountain ahead, as familiar to Lily as her mother’s face, the line of her father’s back.

“I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad you came to get me.”

Hawkeye made a humming sound deep in his throat, but that was all she needed.

Married only a few weeks and finally in possession of all the feather beds, china dishes, silver knives, beeswax candles, and copper tubs she had ever imagined, Jemima Southern Kuick came to the conclusion that life would be better still if she only had an orphan for a husband. She was sitting in the parlor across from her mother-in-law when this thought came to her on a rainy June morning. They were alone, as they usually were for a good part of the day.

The hidden costs of becoming a wife had begun to make themselves known, and the most surprising was this: marriage had freed Isaiah Kuick from this parlor and his mother’s company, and sentenced Jemima to take his place.

“Privilege has its duties, missy,” said the widow, her bristled chin bobbing. “And you’ll do what’s proper, stand next to my son—”

“My husband,” interrupted Jemima in a monotone.

The widow’s mouth twitched. “Next to my son when they put that boy in the ground at noon. It’s the right thing to do when one of the slaves dies. Mark that, now. The right thing. It falls to you.” She jabbed her needle in Jemima’s direction. “It falls to us to provide an example to the village.”

Jemima turned the pages of the newspaper in her lap. It was a month old but far more interesting than the widow in a lecturing mood.

“And if I don’t care to get my feet wet?”

“If you don’t go see Reuben buried his mother will pout,” said the widow. “And you won’t like Cookie in a pout. She’ll burn the porridge and lose your left shoe and misplace my basket of wools and that will go on for months. The slaves are sly creatures when it comes to getting their own back, missy. Don’t you forget it. You must say a few words of praise about the boy, as my representative.”

“Anything to save you the trouble of moving out of that chair.”

“I’ll have a respectful tone from you!” The widow’s thin cheeks flushed a color so deep it was almost blue. Pushed just a little farther, her temper would roar to life and she would reach for something to throw. First the empty teacup and saucer that stood on the side table at her elbow and then a book, as there was nary a china figurine left in the house. When nothing else was available she was not above launching knitting needles like spears. Jemima knew without any doubt at all that if her mother-in-law were strong enough to pick up furniture to hurl it through the room, she would do so.

She turned the page of the newspaper while she watched the widow from the corner of her eye. For a short while she had been amused by the sight of a refined lady hopping from one foot to the other like a two-year-old who wanted a sugar-tit she couldn’t have; now she was ready to bolt if the need should arise.