Fire Along the Sky
Page 155

“Mama, Abe told you the weather was turning,” said Daisy Hench to Curiosity. She was already busy at the hearth with kettles and pans, and Lily went to help her. There was a great ham stewing in pot liquor, and from the oven built into the hearth wall came the reviving smell of fresh bread.
Curiosity only sniffed. “You Callie, you Martha,” she said in her gentlest voice. “Fetch the good sugar crock, would you please? A day like today call for as much hot sweet tea as a body can hold.”
Soon the whole kitchen was in movement: a stack of toweling appeared, clothes were hung up, heads were rubbed dry, and cups of tea were passed from hand to hand.
Elizabeth watched Curiosity set Callie and Martha one task after another, and she saw, too, how some color came into Martha's pale cheeks, and the vacant look left Callie's eyes.
She was standing with Daisy at the big cutting board, wound in fragrant steam from the ham on its platter. “Your mother is a wise woman,” she said.
Daisy ran the carving knife over the whetstone. “Sly too.” She grinned. “You watch, she'll coax smiles out of those two poor lambs before dinner is done.”
Though she didn't like the dining room and rarely used it, Curiosity had decided that the mourners would get their dinner there today. There were fifteen of them gathered around: five Henches, Curiosity, Callie and Martha, Simon, Abe, and four of the Bonners, along with Annie.
Curiosity said, “Ain't this a sight. I wonder what Richard thinking just now, looking down at us.”
Next to Elizabeth Nathaniel made a humming sound. She put a hand on his leg to quiet him, and he took her hand in both his own.
“Now I'ma talk a bit, words I was going to say over his grave.” Curiosity grinned. “Before the weather made us all cut tail and run.” Her glance ran around the table as if she expected an objection and knew just what to do with it should she find any. After a moment she cleared her throat.
“Richard was a troubled man,” Curiosity started slowly. “But he did some good. In the end I think he did more good than bad, and may the good Lord give him the credit he got coming. Cain't nobody deny but he had his share of sorrow and more. Times I thought it would get the best of him. He struggled, he surely did, and sometimes he misstepped, but there ain't nobody—not at this table nor who ever walked this earth—but can say the same.”
“Amen,” murmured Black Abe.
“So I'll ask the Lord to be merciful, and grant the man some rest.”
She sat down abruptly, and there was a small silence. Then Elizabeth stood. She said, “I am glad to have known Richard Todd, in spite of all our early difficulties. He took on our Hannah as his student and taught her well. She would be here if she could, to pay her respects.
“Ethan should be here too, and so should Richard's uncle Bump. But even in death Richard had a—I suppose I must call it a compulsion—to hold the people who care most about him at a distance.”
Her voice began to waver. Nathaniel squeezed her hand and picked up where she had left off.
“There's something we ain't said, but need to. Most men wouldn't have left an old shoe to a black woman or a Mohawk girl, but Richard Todd left this house to Curiosity and his medical practice to our Hannah. He never did care what other people thought, and I appreciate that about the man. Whatever history there was between us, he wiped the slate clean.”
From the far end of the table where Gabriel sat next to Abe came a sharp double rumble. Gabriel clapped both hands over his belly and sent his mother a sheepish look.
“Sorry, Mama,” he said.
Abe ducked his head. “It do smell awful good, Miz Elizabeth.”
The laughter came and went easily while dishes were passed and passed again. Rain rattled the windows in their frames and the wind made the trees that ringed the house creak and scream, but the food was hot and plentiful and there was an endless supply of hot tea laced with milk and sugar. Elizabeth felt suddenly very sleepy, but then Curiosity raised her voice again.
“I got a letter,” she said. “Abe brought it with him when he come from Johnstown. I was waiting for the right time to read it aloud to everybody at once. From Bump.”
“Your Bump?” Simon Ballentyne asked Lily, who sat across from him.
“Why, he ain't her Bump,” said Gabriel, his brow drawn down in outraged disapproval, as if Lily had tried to claim the pies sitting on the sideboard for herself alone.
“That's not what he meant,” Lily said to her brother. “And you know it. Simon, if you mean Mr. Bump who called on me in Montreal, yes.”
Elizabeth caught Simon's eye, and smiled. It seemed that for today, at least, Lily had decided that she could afford to put aside her irritation with them both.
Gabriel was of a different mind. He studied Simon for a moment and then said, “How'd you get that bruise between your eyes?”
“I was wondering about that myself,” said Nathaniel. There was a telltale quivering in the muscles of his jaw, and Elizabeth pinched him under the table.
“Did you fall?” Gabriel asked. “Did you run into a tree?”
“You're mean,” Annie said to Gabriel.
“I should rather say he is being rude,” Elizabeth corrected Annie. And then: “My, listen to that rain. And it feels to me as though the temperature must be dropping.”
“Dropping fast,” Nathaniel agreed.
Black Abe glanced up from the pile of ham and potatoes on his plate and nodded. “A hard freeze coming.”