The Endless Forest
Page 166

“I’ll make tea,” Elizabeth said. It was a way to be alone for a few minutes in order to gather her thoughts and calm the beating of her heart, and beyond that, she thought, the tea might do them all good. While she stoked the stove and set the kettle to heat she was listening, but the house might have been empty, it was so quiet in the parlor.
Nathaniel called, “No bloodshed in here, Boots. We’re just waiting for you to get started.”
“So who wants to start?”
They had moved to the dining room where they could sit around the table. Levi’s back was as straight and stiff as the chair itself. Callie was curled over, her arms crossed on her midsection.
Ethan cleared his throat. “Whatever it is, I can promise you—both of you—we are not here to find blame or make accusations.”
“In other words,” Nathaniel said, “one of the two of you had best start talking.”
Callie was staring down at the floor. When she raised her head Elizabeth started to see the anger and misery there.
She said, “It’s complicated.”
“Most things are,” Elizabeth said. “But we are here to listen and to offer what help we can.”
“I’ll start,” Levi said. “As I’m the one stands accused.”
“Of what?” Nathaniel said.
Levi glanced at Callie, but she had lowered her head again and she wouldn’t raise it.
“Miss Callie here thinks I been conspiring with Jemima behind her back. I guess she forgot it was Jemima who killed my ma. I’d as soon snap her neck as lift a hand to help that woman. I’ll do it too, if I ever get the chance.”
Elizabeth caught Ethan’s eye. She thought probably her expression looked like what she saw on his face: numb surprise.
Nathaniel said, “You know more about what went on back then than the rest of us?”
“Maybe I do,” Levi said. “But that got nothing to do with this business we got to settle right now.”
“So tell us,” Nathaniel said. “You have got our full attention.” Under the table he put a hand on Elizabeth’s knee, and she covered it with her own.
“It has to do with an apple tree,” Levi said. “We call it the Bleeding Heart.”
Levi talked for a half an hour. For that entire time none of them spoke or even moved, but Elizabeth’s mind raced back over the last weeks, back to the flood and further still. Callie’s grim determination when her crop failed once and then again, her unwillingness to talk with any seriousness or in any real detail about the orchard. What it must have been like to harbor such hopes and to lose everything on the cusp of success. How she had kept it all to herself; how in the confusion and chaos of the flood nobody had seen her distress. She and Levi had supported each other in their common cause, and now something had turned them against each other.
That it had to do with Jemima did not surprise her. She should feel anger, but instead there was only a deep weariness.
Ethan was asking questions about the surviving apple tree, the reaction of the orchardists Levi had called on, the potential for earnings.
“Once we got enough trees bearing fruit, I reckon cider and jack will bring in two thousand a year.” Levi hesitated. “If Callie wants to sell saplings, those will bring in quite a lot as well. I hope she doesn’t. Sell saplings, I mean.”
There was a small silence around the table, mostly, it seemed to Elizabeth, out of pure surprise. A small family could survive comfortably on twenty dollars a week; farmers, who traded for most things and grew a lot of their own food, could make do with less. An apple orchard that earned two thousand a year for its cider was a valuable holding.
Ethan and Nathaniel had a lot of questions, and between Callie and Levi they all got answered.
Then Elizabeth spoke to Callie directly. “Tell me about what happened today, with Nicholas.”
“I’d sure like to hear that myself,” Levi said.
Callie’s mouth tightened. “You heard it yourself, Elizabeth. When Nicholas was carrying on about Jennet’s story. You heard him say the words Bleeding Heart.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Yes, I did hear that.”
“About an apple, he said Bleeding Heart,” Callie repeated. “And where did that come from?”
She wasn’t looking at Levi, but her whole posture said clearly what she was thinking.
Levi said, “Before today I ain’t never spoke those two words aloud to anybody in this world except you.”
“You must have,” Callie said. “It can’t be a coincidence.”
“Wait,” Ethan said. “Levi, when you went to call on the orchards with the cider samples, you didn’t say the name even then?”
“No, I did not,” Levi said, much calmer now but with an anger very near the surface. “I handed over the letter Callie wrote and I answered questions, and that’s all.”
“You never told Lorena about the tree.” Callie’s tone was flat.
“Nobody,” Levi said. “You want to send for her? You can ask her your own self.”
“Callie, think. You wrote that name in your letters,” Ethan said. He turned to Levi. “Did you go as far as Boston on your journey?”
“No,” Levi said. “I went along the Mohawk trail as far as Greenfield, and then I was out of samples and so I turned around for home.”
“Where is Greenfield?” Elizabeth asked, and Nathaniel glanced at her.