Fire Along the Sky (17 page)

In your letter you wrote that you have taken up what you call sculpture and to me sound more like carving or working wood, as my husband Galileo may the Lord bless his everlasting good soul was so fond of. If it turn out you got a feel for wood it wouldn't surprise me none, coming up as you did surrounded by trees. What I mean to say, though the words don't seem to want to order themselves on the page, is this: you make good use of whatever they got to teach you up there, so when you come home again you ready to stay put. The truth is plain and won't be hushed. You belong here, Lily Bonner, on the mountain where you came into the world. Montreal may be a big city but it's too small a place for a soul like yours.

writ by her own poor hand your friend good and true Curiosity Freeman

Dear Lily,

This is the first time in more than a year that I have taken up quill and ink. It comes to me with difficulty, but I could not let another packet be sent off to you without at least a few words.

We miss you here at Lake in the Clouds, as you are missed in the village. Wherever I go on my rounds people ask of you and your studies and your life in Montreal. They tell stories of you and bring out the many drawings you have made and given over the years, as they might take out a letter from the president himself, with great respect and admiration.

Most of all I miss talking to you late into the night and waking to find you just across the room. I tell myself that this separation will not be forever, and I tell you the same. When you are come home we will have much to tell each other.

Your loving and devoted sister
Hannah Bonner, also called Walks-Ahead by her mother's people or Walking-Woman by her husband's.

Chapter 10

The morning was half gone when the sky came over dark and Nathaniel first tasted new snow on the wind. He wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve and in one practiced motion slung the doe he had tracked for more than a mile across his shoulders. She was young and there wasn't a lot of fat on her, but fresh venison would be a welcome change from salt cod and dried bear meat stew.

Game was thin this winter. The last few nights he had dreamed of bear and deer and moose on the run, side by side, in a hurry to be gone to the west, looking for a place less honeycombed with the trails made by white men. In his dreams the animals would sometimes bear the faces of the people who were gone from him: his first wife, old friends, the children they had buried. His grandfather Chingachgook, his father, who had walked away ten years ago to find some peace in the west.

He couldn't say for sure if Hawkeye was alive or dead. With every passing year it was a little more likely, of course. And still Nathaniel couldn't make himself believe that his father could be gone for good; he would come back to die here, where his people were buried. Nathaniel told himself this now and then, because he didn't want to think of Hawkeye in a shallow grave on the Great Plains someplace, with no mountains in sight. He might die alone or among strangers, but either way there would be no one there to sing him his death song in his own language.

On the morning Hawkeye left there had been no time or energy to feel much at all, not regret or fear or loneliness. Even at the time Nathaniel had known that those things would come later. His Hannah was about to leave home too, and the fact that Hawkeye was with her almost made up for the fact that his daughter was old enough to have chosen a husband.

The snow came fast and thick in a rising wind that was busy scouring away his tracks and all trace of the creatures that moved over the face of the mountain. He had thought to run across Runs-from-Bears, who should have come this way to walk the trap lines. No doubt Bears had started back to Lake in the Clouds a good while ago. He had more sense than Nathaniel when it came to the weather, but then most people did. Most years it didn't matter much.

None of them could remember a winter with so much snow so early, not even Curiosity Freeman, who had a memory for such things and was the oldest woman in Paradise. He was thinking about Curiosity when he came to a sudden stop.

A wounded animal makes a track all its own in deep snow, one any good backwoodsman could read with greater ease than words on a page, and Nathaniel didn't like what he saw in front of him. No sick wolf or moose, but a woman dragging her skirts along and fumbling through the drifts. That was bad enough—a woman on the mountain—but even worse was the fact that the snow was stained pink with blood.

His first thought was of his own womenfolk, but none of them would be so foolish. Just as soon as he had put that idea away he realized that Dolly Wilde had run off again, and from the tracks at least, nobody had caught up with her yet.

Nathaniel dropped the doe where he stood, an unwilling offering to the wolves who had given the mountain its name, and turned into the woods. With an impatient hand he pushed his hood back to make sure he would hear when the shouting started, as it must. The men from the village would be on their way up here with their dogs unless the storm turned into a whiteout. This time, though, Nathaniel doubted that they'd be able to find her in time. The north face of the mountain was treacherous in good weather, and that's the way she was headed.

Just past Squirrel Slough he came across a shred of shawl caught up in a hawthorn bush, proof at least that she hadn't wandered off in nothing but a night rail. With every minute he was surprised not to come across her. Nathaniel picked up his pace and his breath rose up into the swirling snow.

He skirted a windfall and then a hibernating bear jutting up from a hollow like a gently trembling hillock. Dolly's tracks went around the bear, and he was glad to see that even in her extremity she hadn't lost all her common sense, which meant that if she had got as far as the top of Hidden Wolf she wouldn't just walk off a cliff. If she was still walking at all.

In time Nathaniel began to wonder if maybe nobody realized she was gone, down at the Wilde place, because it seemed to him he was the only living thing moving on the mountain. He was considering that when he came across Dolly, sitting up against a young alder bent low with snow. She sat there as if it were summer and she had sought out the tree for its shade, as if there were no better spot to watch the world go by.

Her gaze flickered toward Nathaniel as he squatted down next to her. He took a hitching breath and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

Dolly was dressed warm, at least, which was both a good thing and a surprise. The question was, how had a woman as sick as this one managed to put on so many skirts and shawls and then walk away from the cabin without drawing attention to herself?

“Dolly?”

She looked at him from the corner of her eye. Wary, like a deer that had never seen a man before, or maybe, Nathaniel corrected himself, more like a hungry dog with a bone. Suspicious, not exactly afraid, willing to fight for what was hers.

The tip of her nose and the ears that peeked out from the tangle of her hair were the color of milky ice. Worse than that, the right side of her face and her right hand were jerking and trembling, as if to make up for the silent rest of her. The blood that speckled the snow around her came from the cuts and scratches that covered her hands.

“Dolly.” He said it louder this time and in response she closed her eyes. Her cheek muscles jumped and shivered as though she had tucked a frog up there for safekeeping. Then she rocked forward and cradled her right side with her left arm and let out a low moan.

She resisted at first, but Nathaniel picked her up. Even through the layers of wool and linen he could feel the heat of her.

All the way down the mountain she lay across his shoulder as heavy and inert as the doe he had abandoned on the trail behind him. Every now and then she tensed and began to shudder and tremble and flex like a fish on the line.

Nathaniel began to sing under his breath, a death song he had first learned from his Mahican grandfather as a boy and had sung too many times to count. In case she passed over to the shadow lands before he could get her back to Lake in the Clouds.

It was a full two days before the blizzard blew itself out and Nathaniel could start down the mountain to tell people what they must know already: there was no need to come in search of Dolly Wilde, because she was dead. She had lived for a few hours on a cot in front of the hearth while Elizabeth and Many-Doves worked to bring down her fever, but in the end she had died in a convulsion so extreme that her spine arched into a bow.

He went by back trails so as to avoid meeting anybody before he had a chance to talk to Nicholas Wilde directly. The man had a right to know first, to break the news to his little girl in his own way and time. But when he came out of the trees into the Wildes' orchard he saw straight off that something wasn't right. There was no smoke coming from the chimney though the temperature was well below freezing. The empty feeling in his gut was replaced by something much more solid, a foreboding that coated his mouth with the taste of bile.

The snowdrifts reached up to the window shutters and blocked the doors to the cabin and barn both. Nathaniel called, and called again.

It took him a good while to clear the door, and all the while he was at it he was listening, too, for any sound that would explain all this strangeness away. In the end he braced himself for the worst and knocked once and then again. Unlatched, the door swung open.

Nathaniel left it open for the light and walked through all four rooms, his footsteps echoing. Little by little he began to believe what he was seeing, which was nothing at all. No blood had been shed here, there had been no struggle. He opened shutters to see better and walked through the rooms again.

The common room, the workroom crowded with loom and spinning wheels, and both small chambers were clean and well ordered in the winter light. Bright counterpanes were spread neatly over feather beds. Someone had arranged dried maple leaves in a blue bowl that sat centered on the scrubbed plank table. In the cold hearth where motes danced in the slanted sunlight cooking trivets and pots hung, polished to gleaming. Cookie's sewing basket was in its place next to her rocker, and the pipe Nicholas sometimes smoked in the evening sat on the mantelpiece next to a school primer with a warped spine. There were four books, two of which, a volume of poetry and
Macbeth,
had been presents from his own wife to Dolly, presented at the end of each year she spent in Elizabeth's classroom.

In the chamber where Dolly and Nicholas had slept—Nathaniel knew it by the wooden dowels that had been nailed across the window casement to keep Dolly from climbing out and wandering away—he could find no sign of trouble. Dolly's clothes still hung on the wall pegs, along with the one good suit of clothes Nicholas owned.

Back in the common room Nathaniel stomped his feet to keep his blood moving and took another look around. Now he saw that some things were gone: no mantles or coats hung on the wall pegs, and the mat next to the hearth where boots must stand as a matter of course was empty, as was the gun rack over the door.

It didn't take quite so long to dig his way into the barn, but whether he was working faster out of dread or simple curiosity, Nathaniel couldn't say. What was behind this door would either solve the mystery in the worst possible way—he kept thinking of the empty gun rack—or make it all the more complicated.

The doors opened silently on well-oiled hinges and showed him what he had hoped for: the horses were gone, and the sleigh too. Not a tool or bucket or bushel out of place. The only thing wrong, as far as he could see, was the fact that the Wildes kept a cow, and the stall where she normally stood was empty.

He found the cow in the pasture, frozen in place where she had died on her knees, the snowdrifts behind her gory with evidence of a burst udder. Her eyes were gone, plucked out by ravens who had retreated at the sound of Nathaniel's approach and stood waiting, impatiently, for him to go and leave them to their meal.

Nathaniel turned toward the village and tried to order all the things he had seen in his mind. He would have to give an accounting to Jed McGarrity, who was the constable and would have no choice but to listen.

In all the years Elizabeth had lived on Hidden Wolf, she had never quite been able to talk herself out of the fanciful notion that each winter storm had a personality and a voice all its own. The storm that had come down while they tended to Dolly and watched her die was malicious, clamping a great cold hand down on the face of the earth to trap each living thing just where it stood. Like a witless and mean-spirited child who caught up beetles in a jar for the pleasure of watching them scramble themselves to death.

The storm had gone, leaving a world of blinding white, and Elizabeth found herself alone, something that happened very rarely. Gabriel and Annie were staying in the other cabin with Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears, Nathaniel was gone to bring Dolly's family the sad news, and Hannah and Jennet had been stranded in the village by the storm. No doubt they had spent the whole time reading tarot cards with Curiosity and laughing over Jennet's stories.

One part of Elizabeth, the part that was a mother first and always, was glad that the girls were spared Dolly's terrible last hours, but the rest of her was impatient for the company of women. Dolly must be laid out; her body must be washed and dressed and wrapped in a shroud. Then the men would carry her out to the shed where she would stay like so much firewood until the spring thaw, when her grave could be dug.

Most especially Elizabeth wanted Cookie to be here, as Cookie had been with Dolly through all the years of her marriage, through childbirth and illness. Aside from Dolly's own daughter, there was no woman in the world who was more attached to her.

To anyone who did not know their history, it must seem a strange arrangement. Mild, sweet Dolly, who could not raise her voice to save her own life and Cookie, a dry husk of a woman, taciturn in word and deed, rubbed raw by loss and anger and fifty years of slavery to a woman with a heart like cold steel. On the day that Cookie and her sons had been given their manumission papers and found themselves on the brink of a world full of uncertainties, Dolly had offered Cookie a home and work for a fair wage, apologizing that she and Nicholas, newly wed and already in debt, could not offer as much to Cookie's grown sons. A few years later, when their hard work had begun to return a profit, they had sent to Johnstown. Levi had made a life for himself there, but Zeke came back to Paradise to work the orchards with Nicholas.

Cookie must come to tend to Dolly; she would come, if it was in her power. This last thought made Elizabeth get up and poke nervously at the fire, because it raised the question she had been avoiding now for days: who was responsible for this sad business?

Elizabeth glanced at the still form folded into a blanket at the shadowy end of the common room, and then she sat down again and took up her sewing, smoothing the linen that would serve as Dolly's shroud with the palm of her hand.

She had just finished the last seam when the door opened and Hannah and Jennet came in, shuddering snow with every step and laughing like schoolgirls. They stopped where they were when they saw the work in Elizabeth's hands.

“Who?” asked Hannah.

“None of us,” said Elizabeth quickly. “Dolly Smythe. Dolly Wilde, I should say.”

The girls exchanged a look that told Elizabeth the worst of it: no one knew that she was missing; and therefore, no one knew that she was dead.

“You mean to say that no one is looking for her?” Many-Doves asked. It was a question already asked and answered, but even Many-Doves, the very soul of calm, was shaken.