Fire Along the Sky
Page 8

“Of course he a boy.” Curiosity poked into the bowl, fished an earwig out with two long fingers to crush it under her heel. “He tender at heart like a boy, our Ethan, and he always will be. I'm hoping that now that you come home they'll listen to reason, the two of them.”
Hannah looked up from a copy of a letter Richard had written to a chemical warehouse in London, requesting a list of things that were unfamiliar to her. A strange prickling on the back of her neck: interest in things she thought she had left behind, curiosity, irritation that those impulses she thought dead could twitch to life without warning or bidding.
Curiosity was watching her, eyes narrowed. Hannah cleared her mind and closed the daybook.
She said, “Curiosity, what makes you think Richard will listen to me? He never did before.”
For a good while there was no sound but the rapid-fire crack-crack-crack of bean pods while Hannah studied Curiosity and waited for an answer.
Of all the things Hannah had feared about coming home she had been most worried that she would find Curiosity gone. She should be, at almost eighty with a hard life behind her. But Curiosity was as steady and constant as the river itself, if bowed a little by the years. There were new sorrows etched into her face: she had lost her good husband to a stroke, a grandson to a brain fever, a daughter and granddaughter on the same day to a runaway horse and sleigh; and her only son was someplace in the west, fighting a battle that could not be won.
If he was alive at all.
But Curiosity's spirit was undaunted and her energy undiminished; the very nearness of her was a comfort.
Hannah had been home for weeks now, and while all the others were growing less and less able to keep their questions to themselves, Curiosity seemed content to wait until Hannah was ready to talk, if it took a year or ten years or never came at all.
Somewhere in the pines that ringed the clearing a kinglet was calling in a thin high seet-seet-seet; she heard kestrels and blackbirds and the soft, gentle song of a hermit thrush as sweet as the lullabies her grandmother Cora had sung to her as a child. In another month the birds would be gone south; they would pull the summer light along behind them like a bridal train. In two months the trees where they built their nests would be gravid with snow. Half-Moon Lake and the lake under the falls would freeze and beneath the ice, water without color would pulse and throb.
A sound bubbled up from deep in her throat and she swallowed it back down again.
How can you fear anything at all after the battle of Kettippecannunk?
In her mind Hannah could hear her husband's voice as clearly as the kestrel's. If she answered Strikes-the-Sky, if she reacted to his tone—calm and teasing all at once—he would be with her for the rest of the day. He would argue with her for hours and take great pleasure in it, if she let him. The only way to make him go was to ask him the one real question—the only question, the one she would not ask for fear of getting an answer.
She ignored him, but he was not willing to be ignored.
Walks-Ahead, you cannot hide within your silence.
Here was the most irritating thing of all: in this strange absence of his, gone but not gone, alive in some ways and dead in others, Strikes-the-Sky was always right, his arguments without flaw.
At Lake in the Clouds the women forbade talk of war in their hearing, but that changed nothing. It was all around and drawing closer every day. Twice a week the post rider brought the most recent news and the papers and the men gathered in the trading post to weigh it all out, bullet by bullet. Hannah turned her face away when her brother and cousin tried to tell her about it.
But she knew the truth of it: she could not protect herself from sorrows old or new. War was not coming; it had already pushed into their midst. It would not die of her neglect or be turned away by calm words.
More and more often Hannah had the urge to say these things to Curiosity, who was none of her blood but as close to her as her own grandmothers had been. Both those grandmothers—one a Scot and the other Mohawk—were long dead and content to remain silent in their graves, but Curiosity would speak for them and herself. Once Hannah gave her permission, Curiosity would ask questions that dug themselves beneath the skin like gunpowder.
“That's the thing about Richard,” Curiosity said, and Hannah started out of her thoughts.
“What about him?”
Curiosity flicked her a concerned look. “I've known old mules beset with fly-bots less ornery. But I expect that don't much surprise you.”
“He was never known for his brilliant personality,” Hannah agreed. And then: “But there's something more, isn't there. Is he sick?”
“He is,” Curiosity said, her tone subdued.
“How sick?” Hannah asked the question knowing she would not get an answer; the older woman could be deaf when she chose.
Curiosity had turned her head toward the door. She stood, clutching the bowl to her narrow chest.
“Speak of the devil.”
Hannah heard the riders now, the drumming of hooves that seemed as loud as thunder. A flush of panic mounted her back to set its teeth in the tender curve of her neck.
Curiosity put the bowl of beans aside and crossed the room to Hannah in three steps. One hand, as lean and rough as leather, cupped her cheek. “There now,” she said softly. “Rest easy.”
Hannah blinked at her, swallowed hard and tried to speak.
“Hush.” Curiosity made a comforting sound. “No need to explain, child. A rider don't necessarily mean bad news. Just settle yourself down again and I'll go see to it.”