Tsuga's Children (2 page)

But the mountain was always a forbidden place. No man went to Cascom Mountain. There were old legends about the gods the Old People had abandoned when they died away, and how the gods, being immortal, still lived lonely and bitter within the mountain.

One evening, a cold, late November evening when the winter had snapped down hard and all the small cabin windows were furry with frost, Tim Hemlock said, “The Traveler isn’t coming this year. It’s too late. The ice is forming on the river.”

They had all been thinking this, but it was too important to talk about. Now they all sat in silence, for without powder and ball, and oil, salt and steel and flint, the winter would be long and hard at best, and at the worst they might starve. Jen saw the fear in her mother’s blue eyes and went to her, to stand between her mother’s knees and look up into her eyes that had turned dark, like the blue of a stormcloud you think is sky until you see it is really part of a dark cloud. Jen put her head against her mother to feel the warmth.

Arn was silent too, because he knew how little powder and ball his father had left. Each year the Traveler could bring just so much of everything, because of the long hard journey up the river, so in the fall they were always short of supplies. He looked up at the long flintlock rifle that hung on its deerfoot racks on the log wall, at its full stock of bird’s-eye maple, and at its brass fittings engraved with animals and plants. From its tang hung his father’s beaded leather possibles bag, the small priming horn and the large powder horn, now only half full of black powder.

The old woman sat more quietly than all the rest, but now her bright eyes were upon Tim Hemlock, and she began to speak to him with her hands. He replied, and soon their hands moved swiftly, seeming to dance in the air, Tim Hemlock’s great horny working hands and the old woman’s small bent brown ones gleaming in the fire-light.

After watching this for a while Eugenia cried out, “What are you saying? What are you saying?” She was close to tears.

Tim Hemlock and the old woman stopped moving their hands, and he turned to Eugenia. “She says the Month of the Iron Ice will be the worst,” he said. “I can’t quite understand all she wants to tell me.”

“It’s not right!” Eugenia cried. “Why can’t she talk?”

“She doesn’t know our language.” He saw how unhappy Eugenia was, so he went to her and put his arm around her. There was nothing he could say to reassure her, other than a lie, so he said nothing at all.

The children looked at the old woman, who sat as still as wood, the orange flickerings of the fire reflecting from her dark face.

It was Jen who first thought she saw something stranger and deeper in the eye hollows of the old woman than any of them had ever noticed before. She said nothing about it because even though the old woman wasn’t supposed to know their language, she couldn’t talk about her right in front of her as if she weren’t there.

But late that night, after everyone was asleep, Jen woke up with a strange question in her mind, as though something had called her awake. The children slept on the loft at one end of the cabin, where it was warmest. Jen got up and put her quilt around her shoulders, for the fire had burned down low, and even on the loft it was bitter cold. She went around the log partition that separated her bed from Arn’s. It was dark; from the fireplace came only an occasional spark of flame that would dimly light up the rafters before it died down again.

“Arn,” she whispered. She had to feel for him, and found the very top of his head, which was the only part of him that wasn’t bundled up in his quilts and blankets. “Arn!” she whispered again. “Wake up!” She patted him on the top of his head.

“Umph grumph,” he mumbeled

“Wake up!” she whispered.

“Wha?”

“Shh!”

“Wha mattuh?” “Wake up!”

Then he did wake up all the way. “What’s the matter?” he whispered. “It must be the middle of the night.”

“It is. But there’s something very peculiar we’ve got to find out about.” “In the middle of the night?” “Yes, because she’s asleep.” “Who’s asleep?”

“The old lady. She goes sound asleep. I’ve watched her. She sits there just like always, but she goes sound asleep. And there’s something we’ve got to find out. I don’t know why. But it’s her eyes. There’s something funny about them.” “I know that,” Arn whispered back. “But this is really strange. I’m scared to go down and look by myself, so you’ve got to come with me.” “I don’t like the idea.”

“I don’t either, exactly, but it’s something we’ve got to do.”

“You want to look at her
eyes?
How can you do that if she’s asleep? And suppose she wakes up?”

“We’ve got to take that chance. We’ve got to, Arn. I don’t know why, but we’ve got to.”

Arn could tell that she meant it. His little sister was only seven, but when she made up her mind, it was made up. And he was curious, too, even though he was scared. So they fumbled around on the loft in the dark, finding clothes and putting them on, and Jen followed Arn down the ladder.

In the dying flickers of the fire they could see, across the room on her bench, the upright figure of the old woman sitting as straight as if she were awake. But they also heard the long, even breaths of sleep. Slowly, as quietly as they could, they crossed the room. The smooth breaths continued. They were both trembling with fear, yet they had to go toward the shadowy old woman who sat so stiffly upright in her sleep. What were they doing? They both thought this, but something seemed to make them move quietly, in stockinged feet, toward the very presence they feared.

“We’ve got to have a candle,” Jen whispered into Arn’s ear. “We’ve got to be able to see her face.” Though it seemed even more dangerous, Arn took the candle from the table and lit it noiselessly from a small flame in the fireplace.

Nearer, the old woman’s smell grew stronger. To Arn it was like the first puff of air from the paunch of a deer as his father’s long knife cut it open to free the tripes from the body, or the way the very leaves could hold and keep the news of a black bear’s passage through them, so the hairs on the back of your neck stiffened almost before you could remember what the smell meant, and then when you knew, and looked around quickly for your father, it seemed that your stiffening hairs and not your nose were what had told you. To Jen it was the smell of small animals just after being born, a vixen licking her still-damp kits deep in a moist cave. She had smelled it in the early spring when it came in a warm wave of air.

Closer and closer they came, the old woman’s body never moving at all, just the regular, even breaths. They had thought they were getting used to the old woman’s presence in the cabin, but now, at night, when everything was asleep, on this strange quest they knew must be guilty because they were so quiet about it, she seemed to loom above them.

Arn held the candle up before the ancient sleeping face. If the eyes had opened at that moment, Arn was sure he would have died of fright. But the eyes didn’t open. The wrinkled face shone, brown as polished wood, shining squares and diamond shapes and triangles cut by the deep cracks. The old woman’s mouth was closed, her lips folded and collapsed at the outer edges. Gray hairs curled and straggled from a black mole on her sunken chin.

And then as if in a dream Jen found her own shy arm reaching out toward that face. She came closer, closer, till she felt the warm, rich air of the old woman’s breath on her hand. She reached toward the brown, wrinkled eyelid and lifted it up from the sunken eye.

What they both saw then was so strange that in their wonder they almost forgot to be afraid, for in the eye was no pupil or iris but a clear lighted glasslike globe in which they could see with the clarity of a bright winter day green spruce trees and a great crystal waterfall, and behind the wildly flashing water a dark mountain. Over its gray rock, black clouds rolled and climbed against a dark sky.

When they had seen the waterfall, the mountain and the clouds just long enough so they would never forget them, ever in their lives, Jen let the old skin of the eyelid settle once again. With a long glance at each other, but not a word, they crept back from the old woman, put the candle out, and climbed back to the loft, where they slept, each one, a sleep full of dreams of the ominous beauty of a mountain, surging clouds and falling water.

Early the next morning Jen and Arn woke up to hear Eugenia putting wood on the fire beneath the hissing kettle. It was cold, bitter cold even on the loft. They kept their bedclothes around them right up to their noses, not wanting to make the jump out of their warm beds into their frosty clothes.

But then all at once they remembered what they’d seen in the middle of the night, and they were both amazed and a little frightened by what they’d done.

“Jen,” Arn whispered across the partition between their sleeping places. “Jen, do you remember what I remember?”

“Yes,” Jen whispered back. “It must have really happened.”

“I think we’d better not tell,” Arn said. “What do you think?”

“I’m not sure why, but I think so too.”

“Come on, children,” Eugenia called up to them. “I can hear you’re awake. It’s hot porridge, cornbread and honey for breakfast!”

That sounded good, so they gathered up their nerve and were soon down the ladder in front of the warm fire, both of them, toasting themselves on one side and then the other. The old woman hadn’t yet returned from whatever mysterious place she went before dawn, but both Jen and Arn cast an occasional guilty look at her place on the wooden bench by the fire.

Tim Hemlock soon came in from the barn, knocking the snow from his outer moccasins by the door where it could be swept out with the round rush broom. He had milked Oka and the nanny goat, cleaned up and fed Oka, Brin, the pig and the goats. He put the two buckets of milk on the cooling shelf in the pantry where it was coolest in the cabin (but not freezing), and before he could take off his deerskin parka the door opened again and the old woman, all in brown deerskin, glided in as smoothly as if she had no legs. Just as always, her wrinkled, brown old face without any expression except that look of the very old that seems to say, “How heavy the sky is to hold up,” she went straight to her place on the bench and sat down.

It was as if she had no idea the children had seen into the depths of her eye.

The days grew colder and shorter as the winter came down upon them from over the dark bulk of Cascom Mountain. Cold squeaked in the rafters, in the window frames, in the frost-white hinges of the door. For a hundred miles the evergreen trees turned from green to almost gray in the terrible cold. Those trees that lose their leaves in winter creaked their bare branches against the cold sky. The snow came and came again, until the paths to the barn and outbuildings and to the storage cave in the hill were almost tunnels in the white. Tim Hemlock, when he went hunting for the meat they began to need more desperately than in any winter they had ever known, moved across the high snow on his longest, widest snowshoes. In the late afternoon, just before dark, he would come back exhausted, his eyebrows white with frost until they melted in the warmth, hang up his unfired flintlock rifle on its pegs, remove his ice-stiff leggings and parka to hang them by the door. The children knew how tired he was from the cold, the deep snow and the long journeys he had made. His face grew thin and gaunt, and one place on his cheek where he had once been frostbitten turned bright red as he sat slumped before the fire. It made the children afraid to see their father so tired, though he pretended to be cheerful when they sat down together for supper, even though the portions were growing smaller day by day.

One day when the sky was nearly black even in the middle of the afternoon, when a blizzard was hovering over Cascom Mountain ready to come howling down, he came in exhausted, limping from where he’d fallen and hit his knee on his snowshoe. Eugenia got him a bowl of hot potato soup, and he blew his tired breath across it, holding its warmth in his cold hands. He seemed too tired even to speak, but finally he said to Eugenia, “We’re going to have to slaughter the pig.”

This was a big disappointment to the Hemlocks. They had paid the Traveler many moccasins and several knives for the little piglet he had brought them the year before, hoping that it would begin to fatten on the fall mast and corn. But this pig ate and ate and never grew very big or fat at all. He was a rangy, long-snouted pig, more like a wild pig than a domesticated one.

“There may not be enough feed for Oka and Brin, and we can’t live without them. We just can’t feed the pig any longer,” Tim Hemlock said. “I don’t think this blizzard will hit till tomorrow night, so we’ve got to do it in the morning first thing.”

“There won’t be much fat or meat on that pig,” Eugenia said.

The old woman looked from one to the other as they spoke, just her eyes moving in the dark old sockets.

So the next morning, just after first light, there was blood in the snow, bright red as it dissolved down into the crystals of ice. The pig died quickly, never knowing, stunned by a sledge hammer, then bled as he hung from his hocks on a tripod of saplings. Arn helped with the skinning and the cutting of the lean meat. Eugenia and Jen saved the entrails and all the blood they could. Nearly everything was saved, even the four split, pointed hooves, for what could not be cured or boiled down would be eaten, fresh, and what could not be eaten fresh was put into a wolf- and bear-proof cache at the roofpeak to be frozen by the winter itself. But when they had finished, that afternoon as the first stings of the blizzard began to be felt, they had gotten very little meat from the pig, and even less of the precious fat that gives energy against the cold.

Arn and Jen thought about the pig. They hadn’t ever got to know him very well, the way they did Oka and Brin—especially Oka, who was Jen’s favorite. And now the pig was no more, just chops and lean roasts, uncured bacon slabs, spareribs, parts for head cheese and sausage casings, a skin to be made into leather, and marrow bones. Jen wondered if the other animals knew what had happened, if they would miss his company in the chilly dark barn. Especially she wondered about the goats, whose bright eyes with their strange oblong irises seemed to know more than they said. The pig’s pen was empty; they must all know that.