Fire Along the Sky
Page 76

That was no time at all, of course. A man living rough in the bush might not have a chance to put pen to paper for weeks or months, even if there was a way to send a letter once it got written. He had told Elizabeth as much at the very beginning; she had nodded and smiled and refused to consider the possibility that her son would be so far away, unreachable, unknowable. That he might die without her permission or knowledge or tears.
Right now there was nothing they could do for Daniel or Blue-Jay, but Hannah was here. The urge to stay clear of the reading of Richard Todd's will wasn't near as strong as the need to be close by if his daughter needed him.
The afternoon was already sliding toward dusk when they were finally settled in the doctor's parlor with the door closed. Bump was sitting near the windows and Nathaniel perched on a stool next to him, where he could keep track of Elizabeth and Hannah and still watch for anybody who might approach the house from the front.
“You expecting an ambush?” Bump said, pulling Nathaniel out of his thoughts. “Richard's good and gone, never fear.”
And he was right: some part of Nathaniel was having trouble believing that Richard was dead. It would be easy enough to convince himself. He could go out to the woodshed and look at the body in its fine carved coffin, brought all the way from Johnstown some months ago, another dying-man's fancy. The body would be frozen solid as deer hung in a tree, sunken in on itself with no more personality than any cut of meat. But Nathaniel would recognize Richard Todd by the bones in his face and by his hands, broad across the knuckles, splayed thumbs, the deeply scarred palm that Nathaniel was responsible for. That summer day in the endless forests when they had shed each other's blood. For Elizabeth, for land, for everything important in the world.
Nathaniel looked at his own hands where they rested on his knees and saw the years in them: a certain looseness in the skin, the knuckle joints a little swollen with the cold and work and time flowing by.
“It won't be long,” Bump said. As if it were the hour spent here that worried him rather than the weight of days he felt on his shoulders.
Mr. Bennett cleared his throat and began to speak in his quiet, steady voice as he explained the ways of the law and what the government had to say about death and land and money, once again sticking its nose in where it was neither needed nor wanted.
Ethan, it turned out to nobody's surprise, was Richard's executor, which meant that he had the say of how things were to be done after the lawyer packed his bags and went back to Johnstown. A sensible decision on Richard's part, as Ethan was as sober minded a young man as could be found anywhere, and unimpressed by money.
Because, Nathaniel reminded himself as he looked around the comfortable parlor with its brocade and silk and velvet, polished silver and brass, glass and crystal and oil paintings on the wall—some of them Richard's own work from long ago, in the years he had tried to make himself into somebody he could never be—Ethan Middleton had never been without money and would never know what it was like to be hungry.
And still Elizabeth had worried about the boy every day of his life. Last night, before she fell asleep she said, “It is not good for him to be so much alone with his books.” She shifted a little, embarrassed and rightly so, for as a young woman her family had said just the same thing of her.
Nathaniel was so wound up in his thoughts that he missed much of the first part of the will, but one phrase caught his attention, for in it he heard Richard's voice as clearly as if he had taken over the elderly lawyer's portly body to speak his mind one last time.
. . . my soul into the hands of the Almighty that he might do with it as He deems fit, and may He have mercy on an Unrepentant and Enthusiastic Sinner. Second, my ruin of a body sore abused I leave to Dr. Hannah Bonner, Physician, that it might prove some use to the science of anatomy and autopsy.
Curiosity shifted uneasily at this bit of godlessness but Hannah herself seemed unmoved, and maybe, Nathaniel thought, studying his daughter closely, a little amused. The next paragraph took the half-smile from her face.
. . . unto said physician, my student, Hannah Bonner, my medical tools, books, supplies, and research materials of all kinds, and with them I pass into her able hands my medical practice in the village of Paradise. Further to Hannah Bonner I bequeath my laboratory and the parcel of land on which it stands.
They knew about this already, from Richard's own mouth, and still Nathaniel's pulse ratcheted up a notch to hear it put out there for the world to know. It was good and right and generous and still some part of Nathaniel wished it undone. In death Todd had found a way to tie the girl to him, something that he had wanted since the day she was born.
The next part of the will was like listening to Elizabeth read from one of Swift's stories, odd ideas and pictures all woven together to present a new view of the world.
To Curiosity—a freed black woman—Todd had left the house and farm and enough money to maintain them and herself in thin years. It was a bequest that might not hold up in a court of law if challenged, but it would not be, not by anyone in this room. To Curiosity's surviving daughter and granddaughters he left all of Kitty's clothes and shoes and trinkets, and to Joshua Hench and his son, whatever chemicals and materials they wanted from the laboratory, along with an annual stipend of twenty dollars to purchase what they needed to make firecrackers. If the boy showed an interest, there was money for him to go study at the African Free School in New-York City. At this Curiosity sat up very straight and still; he had managed to surprise even her.