Fire Along the Sky
Page 39

Elizabeth finished with her hair and went out to start breakfast. At the door she paused to look back at the bed, and for a moment she wished she had left it unmade, at least until Nathaniel was home again.
When Luke went back to Canada and left Jennet behind she had two things to sustain her: his promise, and her own natural curiosity.
Every day Hannah must wonder at her cousin, at her enthusiasm and a courage that often bordered on the reckless. At home in Scotland she had roamed far and long, and no threats or punishments had ever been able to curb her curiosity or her determination to see it satisfied. Age had not tamed her, and loss had only taught her to be bold in seeking out what she wanted for herself.
When Hannah pointed this out to her Jennet had an answer, as she did for most things.
“Because I have no bairns,” she decided after some thought. “It's the raising of bairns that teaches a woman the meaning of fear.”
They were sitting on Eagle Rock after an afternoon of helping with the corn, both of them sweaty and in want of a swim but still unwilling to move out of the breeze. Beneath their bare feet the rock was warm and all around the forest was a sea of burning color, almost too bright to look at.
Jennet said, “You've never asked me why it is I bore Ewan no heir. In Carryck the old women decided long ago that I'm barren.”
“And do you think you're barren?” Hannah asked.
Jennet lay back suddenly and put an arm over her face. “I wished them away, the bairns. I told them to stay away, that I couldna be a mother when I didna ken how to be a wife.”
One part of Hannah, the woman who had trained with Richard Todd and studied O'seronni medicine, that part of herself did not believe that it was possible to wish unwanted children away. In the months she had worked in the poorhouse in the city she had seen too many women hollowed out with children they did not want and could ill afford, women not thirty years who looked fifty or more, who greeted the birth of a fifth or sixth or seventh child with cold indifference or plain fury.
“You think I'm daft,” Jennet said.
“No,” said Hannah. “I was thinking about the time I spent working in the sick wards at the poorhouse.”
“Tell me about it,” Jennet said, settling in for the story.
So Hannah told her something she had rarely told anyone at all, about the dissections she had watched, what she had learned from those women who had died heavy with child or in childbirth or of fever soon afterward. Women whose bodies were claimed not by families but by doctors ravenous always to know more, men who stood around in bloodied shirtsleeves, their heads bent together over flawed wombs, the smell of pipe smoke intertwined with blood and decay while they pointed and prodded and argued. Misshapen wombs, withered or lopsided or torn, diseased in ways she would not tell Jennet or any woman for the dreams those words would conjure.
When Hannah had finished talking about what she knew and what she could not know, no one could know, about the bearing of children, Jennet said nothing for a long while. One of her hands lay lightly on her stomach, fingers curled. There was a blister on Jennet's thumb, perfectly round and pulsing with rich blood. Hannah was taken with such deep affection and sorrow that her throat swelled with tears. But instead of weeping she forced herself to go on.
“But this is only one kind of medicine,” she said. “And it comes from men who only know how to look in one way, with a knife. My Kahnyen'kehàka grandmother and great-grandmother and aunts would laugh at such blindness.
“They taught me that it is possible to will away a child, to keep it waiting in the shadow lands. They taught me the songs to sing to keep a man's seed from taking root. They showed me how to make the tea that washes the child away before it is a child at all.”
Jennet was studying her, but Hannah did not let her ask the question. “Yes,” she said. “I have drunk the tea, three times.”
“But you loved your husband,” Jennet said quietly.
“Oh yes, I did. I do still.”
“Then why?”
Hannah pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs.
“After our son was born, Tecumseh called on Strikes-the-Sky to travel with him,” she said. The familiar names had a strange taste on her tongue, but she went on. “I followed the men as they went from village to village, recruiting warriors from all the tribes to join the battle to hold the land. With my son on my back I followed them. Everywhere people were desperate for food, for clothes, for weapons to defend themselves, for hope. The things I saw—the things my son saw when he was still a baby—they were worse than the poorhouse could ever be.”
She paused to sort through her thoughts, and in the silence she counted the birds in the sky.
“Go on,” said Jennet. “Please.”
“Late one summer the army burned all the crops, and so when the winter came many of them starved, youngest and oldest first, as it always is. Their empty bellies swelled and then they died. All my medicines, the things I had spent so much time learning—none of that meant anything at all.”
Hannah forced herself to take a deep breath and hold it for three heartbeats.
“That winter was the first time I drank the tea that sends a child back to the shadow lands.”
And later, Hannah might have said, later when the fighting started in earnest I wanted no other child. Foolish woman that I was.
Jennet drew in a shuddering breath. “And is there a tea to do the opposite, when a woman wants a child?”