Fire Along the Sky (7 page)

He had given her the choice of a number of arguments. Hannah picked the easier one. “I hope you're not talking about the Widow Kuick,” she said.

“I am.” Richard grinned at her, all of his old combative spirit rising up so that blotches of color stained his pale cheeks.

Hannah looked away, afraid that she would not be able to keep hold of her temper if she met his eye. “Jemima isn't about to let me treat her mother-in-law, and you know it.”

He laughed hoarsely. “I'll admit she won't like it much.”

“The Widow will spit in my face and die,” Hannah said.

“Then you'd be doing her a favor. She should be dead the last three years at least. I expect it's all that venom running through her veins that keeps her going.”

“Oh, something to look forward to.”

He was untouched by her tone. “Venomous though she may be, you won't hear her complain. She hasn't spoken a word since that night in the meetinghouse. When I saved you from hanging, let me remind you.”

Lily and Jennet were coming along the path now, swinging a basket between them. Jennet was ten years Lily's senior but at this moment, with the summer sun bright on her head of cropped blond curls and her cheeks flushed with running, she looked no more than seventeen. Hannah took a deep breath and then another.

“All right then,” she said finally. “I will offer my services.” And then: “And who's the other patient you're worried about?”

Richard lost his smile. “Dolly Wilde.”

It would have come as no surprise if Hannah had been thinking like the doctor she was trained to be. Since she had come home Hannah had seen Dolly only once, and at first she had not recognized her.

They had grown up together, sat next to each other in Elizabeth's classroom, picked berries together, and on the rare occasion that Dolly was free to play, they had spent that time together too. But the Dolly she had known held no resemblance to the woman who went by that name now.

Hannah tended to think that the things she had experienced during the wars to the west had robbed her of the ability to be surprised, but Dolly had proved her wrong. Hannah had crossed her path at twilight, a woman wandering through the village like a lost spirit. Her unbound hair was streaked with white and it floated around a face blank of all expression. And in her eyes Hannah saw something she had hoped never to see again: Dolly reminded her of men left to die of their wounds on a battlefield where they had fallen. The stunned, placid look of the almost-dead.

“You're thinking there's no treatment for dementia,” Richard said.

Hannah might have corrected him, but Lily and Jennet were close enough to hear. They came running up, full of laughter and good spirits.

“Sister,” Hannah said. “Maybe you had best take Jennet to see the meetinghouse instead of coming with us.”

Lily's glance darted from Richard to Hannah and back again. “You're going to see Dolly.”

“And the Widow Kuick,” added Richard.

The small mouth twitched. “All right then.” She touched Jennet on the arm. “We'd only be in the way. Come, there are better things to see.”

On the way to the Wildes', walking through the orchards so lovingly tended, Richard told Hannah the little there was to say about Dolly's history and condition. There was nothing surprising in the story: a difficult pregnancy, a hard birth followed by prolonged melancholia and a general decline into senselessness.

“The worst is her tendency to wander away,” Richard finished. “Once it took a day and a night to find her. Since then Nicholas has been locking her in her room at night.”

“Not all the time. I saw her in the village at dusk, not three weeks ago.”

The air was filled with the hum of wasps feasting on fallen fruit, and from somewhere on the far side of the orchard the sound of men singing.

On the day Cookie and her two grown sons had received their manumission papers they had all come to work for Nicholas. In the village folks liked to joke that Nicholas Wilde would pay Levi and Zeke any wage they asked, just as long as the three of them could sing together while they worked.
Like a heavenly chorus come down to earth,
Anna McGarrity had told her, and now Hannah heard it for herself.

The cabin was visible now, small and well kept, with shutters closed against the sun. Dolly sat in a rocker on the porch, her hands folded in her lap and her daughter at her feet. The girl's eyes, sharp and bright, watched them as they came closer. She took after her mother, dark-haired and round of face, but instead of having her mother's sweet temperament she seemed to bristle.

“There's a child who never learned to smile,” said Richard while they were still out of earshot.

It surprised Hannah to hear him say such a thing. Richard looked at the human body as he would at a mechanical clock that needed repair. In her experience he put little importance in a patient's state of mind.

She said, “Smiles won't get her through the world she was born into.”

Richard grunted his agreement.

The little chamber that was Dolly's alone was crowded with people: Cookie, who stood nearby with her arms crossed at her waist; Callie, who sat next to her mother and held her hand; Nicholas, his hat crumpled in his hands and his work clothes wet with sweat. All of them were watching Hannah as if she had some magic that would fix the woman who sat silently on the bed, staring at a pebble she held in her hand.

Richard stood back and said nothing while Hannah examined Dolly. She seemed content to be touched, smiling vaguely when Hannah said her name or asked her to turn, like a friendly stranger from another land, without the language or any understanding of the customs of the place where she found herself.

Physically Hannah could find nothing seriously wrong with Dolly: she was thin, and her muscle tone was poor, but her heart was strong and steady and her lungs and eyes were clear. While Hannah gently probed her liver and spleen and abdomen Dolly turned her face away.

Cookie was watching closely, and now she spoke up.

“She ain't in any pain, if that's what you looking for.”

Hannah turned to her. “How do you know?”

Callie was stroking her mother's hand. “She cries when something hurts.”

Very evenly Hannah said, “Does she ever try to harm herself?”

Nicholas cleared his throat and studied his shoes before he raised his head to meet her gaze. “I don't think she means to cause herself harm . . .” His voice trailed off.

“She likes to swallow pebbles,” Callie said. “She knows she's not supposed to, but she still does. And sometimes she eats dirt, if we don't watch her.”

Hannah glanced up in surprise and caught Nicholas's expression: worry and sorrow, desperation and disgust, all fighting for the upper hand. And he was ashamed and angry, at his wife and at himself. That he could not cure her; that she had retreated away from him and the world to a point out of reach but not quite gone.

There was little to offer him in the way of hope or relief, and so Hannah turned back to the patient. She touched her on the cheek and tipped her head up to look directly in her eyes.

“Dolly,” she said firmly. “You have a beautiful daughter. Can you tell me her name?”

Dolly blinked at her, opened her mouth and closed it again. A flicker of consciousness chased across her face and was extinguished as quickly as it had come.

“Callie,” Hannah said. “Does your mother ever seem to wake up and take note of you when you are sitting with her?”

The girl glanced at Cookie and then at her father, as if there were more than one answer to this question and she was afraid of choosing the wrong one.

“No,” she whispered finally. “Never.”

“She could live to be eighty just as she is,” Hannah said much later, when she and Richard were alone again.

“Or she'll choke to death on a stone tomorrow. And it would be a blessing.”

Richard's complexion was very bad, and in spite of the fact that they were walking slowly and in the cool shade of the forest his face was wet with perspiration. He stopped to pass his handkerchief over his brow, and then he lowered himself to sit on the stump of an old oak that shifted and groaned beneath him. His breathing was labored as he took out a small flask of dark glass from his coat pocket and uncorked it. The smell was unmistakable.

Hannah watched his throat work as he swallowed enough laudanum to kill a smaller man. How long had he been dosing himself like this, to have built up such a need? It was a question she did not bother to ask, because he would take pleasure in refusing to answer. His mind was still with his patient, and he would discuss nothing else.

“I've never heard of this compulsion to eat rocks and dirt before,” he wheezed. “Have you ever seen the like?”

She shook her head and leaned against a tree. “I have seen many things, but nothing like this.”

He squinted up at her, and for the first time since Hannah had come home, she saw the worst of his old self: the acid mockery that he spat up now and then like an excess of bile he must share with whoever stood next to him. “What have you seen, little Hannah Bonner? Men's battle wounds, women's sorrows.”

It had been so long since Hannah let herself feel anger, true anger, that she did not recognize it at first: the rush of blood to her face and hands, the way the nerves in her fingertips tingled. A force like water falling, unstoppable. The words leapt from her just like that.

“You haven't asked me about my uncle,” she said sharply. “Why haven't you?”

Richard's gaze flickered just enough to show his surprise and he shrugged. “I heard through Nathaniel that Otter—”

“Strong-Words,” Hannah corrected him sharply. “Otter was his boy-name.”

He inclined his head. “That Strong-Words fell at the battle at Tippecanoe. If you were expecting my condolences for a man who took every opportunity to shoot at me—”

All the old history between Richard Todd and Hannah's family rose up like a battalion of ghosts as distinct and undeniable as the moving shadows cast by the trees. For a moment there was silence, and then Richard found the good grace to look away and clear his throat.

“Over the years I've come to regret the part I played in what happened at Barktown. I would have told Strong-Words so had I ever had the chance.”

“I'm sure that would have meant a great deal to him,” Hannah said, her tone as bitter as the words themselves.

Richard sighed and ran a hand over the bristle on his chin. “I'm not asking your forgiveness, girl, but I'll give you my condolences. Your uncle was a brave man from what I've heard, and he died honorably.”

“Honorably,” Hannah echoed, the word like gall on her tongue. “He died in a battle that was lost before it even began. They brought me his body in a pile with ten others, two of them his sons. Do not presume to speak to me of women's sorrow, Richard Todd. Do not dare.”

For a long moment there was no sound but the birds: the chittering of the wrens, crows bickering, a solitary blue jay at odds with the world. Hannah's own heartbeat seemed as loud in her ears. Finally Richard got up with a sigh and started off again in the direction of the village.

Over his shoulder he said, “Come along then, woman. I don't have all day to listen to your tales of woe.”

It was then that Hannah saw that he had laid a trap, one that she had walked into without hesitation. No amount of questioning could have made her talk about the last few years, but he had turned her anger into a tool for his own use and got what he wanted anyway. He had opened the door, and now she would find it hard to close.

For a moment Hannah watched Richard Todd walk away and she was filled with reluctant admiration. She took note of his thinning frame, the way he stooped in pain, the set of his shoulders. That his death was not far off Hannah could not deny, but she knew something else just as unsettling: he would try to get her stories to take with him; he would work to dig them out of her one by one, using whatever tools necessary.

From the outside, Jennet could see nothing particularly interesting about the abandoned meetinghouse. A wood-frame building in a village of buildings built of square-hewed logs, all in the middle of a remarkable world crowded with trees. It sagged at the door and windows but the floor was solid underfoot and the door hinges had been recently oiled. When Lily opened the shutters, the emptied room filled with light.

“Holy Mary,” Jennet whispered reverently. “Lily, what have you done?”

She turned in a circle, trying to take it all in at once. Everywhere she looked, every inch of wall space was covered. Paper had been tacked up from floor to ceiling, and every paper was filled with Lily's work, drawing after drawing in lead or charcoal or ink. Her whole world was here: everyday items from buckets and shoes to chairs and doors, studies of trees and leaves and animals. A whole sea of human figures rolled across one wall, waves of hands and feet, eyes and noses and ears, floating aimlessly.

But it was the portraits that drew Jennet to them. Hundreds of portraits: Daniel running, holding a chicken under his arm, firing a musket, scowling, sleeping, laughing. Up the wall and down again Jennet could follow him through the years. They were all here, all the Bonners, and most of the villagers, a history drawn in quick and knowing strokes. Sometimes the drawing could not be contained by the paper and seeped out over the rough whitewashed walls: a forest in chalk, full of life and wind.

She stopped in front of a study of Luke, his hair tousled and his eyes half-cast, and she knew without a doubt that Lily had caught him as he got out of his bed, before he had had anything to eat. She reached out a finger to touch his chin, sure that she must feel the stubble there, and stopped herself. Instead she wrapped her arms around herself and turned.

In the very middle of the empty building was a single table with a chair beside it and a stool tucked beneath it. It was piled high with books and stacks of paper, cracked pottery cups filled with bits of charcoal, ink pots and quills, a small pile of stones, an empty bird's nest, a piece of broken glass. Jennet fell into the chair and spread out her arms.