Fire Along the Sky
Page 176

As a boy he had resembled his father, but Manny had grown into a copy of Galileo Freeman: compactly built but broad in the shoulder, hard muscled, with the gleam of steel in his eye. His skin glowed deep brown in the evening light from the open door, and Nathaniel saw that there were lines of raised tattoos on his forehead and neck and at his wrists.
English came hard to him, all his sentences laced with Kahnyen'kehàka rhythms, softened sounds, long pauses.
To Elizabeth, who understood what it was to worry for a son, none of that was of importance.
“You haven't been to see your mother,” she said for the third time. She was sitting at her place at the table, too angry to get up and greet Manny properly.
Nathaniel stood behind her, his hand on her shoulder.
“Give the man some room to breathe, Boots.” He squeezed lightly. “It ain't exactly easy.”
It was the wrong thing to say, he felt that from the way her muscles tensed beneath his hand. But Manny saw that too, and jumped in before Elizabeth could take the opportunity.
“I don't suppose I got anything easy coming to me,” he said in his deep, quiet voice. “I don't even know why I stopped here, except I saw the smoke coming from the chimney and I thought maybe there'd be some familiar faces.”
Elizabeth's expression softened, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them they were damp with tears.
“I'll go with you.”
Nathaniel said, “We'll all go.”
In Curiosity's kitchen garden they stopped, all three of them, in shadows that smelled of new turned earth. In the dark Elizabeth's face floated like a heart carved from bone. She gripped Nathaniel's arm so hard that he felt the bruises rising under the skin.
“Go ahead,” he said to Manny. “We'll be in directly.”
Then he walked her over to the deeper shadows and held her head while she was sick, each spasm rocking her like a fist to the gut. He spoke calm words, nothing that made any sense, nothing that she would remember later; it was the sound that mattered, she had told him once. Something to hold on to.
When she had finished he held her, trembling, against his chest and stroked her hair. Her breaths came deep, with a hiccup at the end like a child who has cried itself into exhaustion. What he wanted to do, just now, was to pick her up and carry her home, but already he could feel her gathering her strength.
“I must go in to Curiosity,” she said. “She will need me.”
Nathaniel pressed his mouth to the top of her head. “I'd say Manny is the one needing help. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes just now.”
That got him a weak smile. Elizabeth said, “I shall have to write to Hannah, now. It can't be put off any longer. She will need to hear what Manny has to tell, after all.”
They thought of that, each of them. The things Manny hadn't told them he would tell—must tell her. They each imagined Hannah with that letter in her hands, reading. Her husband's name on the page, followed by a line of words like crows on a fence, like footprints. She would have to follow them wherever they might lead.
“Maybe she'll be glad,” Nathaniel said. “It might be a relief, to know something for sure after all this time. You wrote just that in the last letter, if I recall right. ‘Any report is preferable to the work of the imagination.'”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said softly. “I said that, and it is true, I think. But I do not like to be the one making the report.”
“You won't be,” Nathaniel said. “Whatever happened, it's for Manny to tell the story.”
Within just a few days it became clear that Manny had few details he was willing to share with anyone at all, even his mother. To those who deserved an explanation—his sister, his brother-in-law and nieces and nephew, the Bonners—he said the same things: he was sorry to have worried them, he was glad to be home.
“He don't even ask many questions, not even about his boy,” Curiosity told Lily when Manny had been back three days. Lily had stopped by on her way to the village to say hello, though she couldn't keep from blushing at such a transparent half-truth.
But Curiosity was too distracted to tease her about Simon; her only son showed no interest in news of his only child, and for all her wisdom of the world, that was one thing she had trouble digesting.
Mostly to herself Curiosity said, “No doubt he was counting on Hannah being here. Got things to say to her before he can move on.”
At times like this Lily tried to think like her mother, who had the knack of saying just the right thing, or of knowing when silence would serve better than any words. Then she said what came to mind, before she could stop herself.
“He knows Hannah will be back,” Lily said. “But I think it will be a while before he understands that the others are really gone. He spends a lot of time at the graves.”
Lily knew this because both the graveyards—the one for the slaves and the other one—were between the meetinghouse where she did her work and the woods that went down to the lake. Now that she kept the door and shutters open for light and air she saw everyone who came and went on that path. There were people who visited their dead every day. Anna McGarrity spent a few minutes in the early morning talking to her father as if he were lying abed, too lazy to get up; Callie and Martha tended the little flower bed they had planted at Dolly's feet.
Manny went by the meetinghouse windows every day and stayed in the graveyard for long hours. Just yesterday Lily had followed him, out of equal parts curiosity and worry, and found that he did nothing more than stand and study the crosses that marked the graves. Galileo Freeman, Polly Freeman, Margaret. Father, sister, niece, all out of his reach, unable to hear his apologies and explanations.