Lake in the Clouds (32 page)

A movement off to the left and she drew up short.

“No cause for alarm,” said Nathaniel softly. “Just Katie’s sons standing guard. Any blackbirders hanging around here will have to get through them first.”

“I wish Jode would come.” Elizabeth spoke to him over her shoulder and got no answer, because of course there was nothing to say; the boy would come or he would stay behind.

The smell of the lake grew strong and stronger and then the wild roses and juniper that lined the path gave way to hard-packed dirt embedded with thousands of mussel shells. Shacks of sail menders and rope makers kept watch in the shadows like sagging old soldiers; someone had nailed a piece of paper to a door and it flapped weakly in the breeze. Barrels and buckets and hogsheads, the ruins of a canoe and a cold fire pit, all the smells that added up to docks: rusting metal and rotting fish and tar and a hundred other things Elizabeth could not name.

A lantern flickered into life at the foot of the gangplank to show Captain Mudge standing there in its light. Elijah started straight up, but Splitting-Moon hesitated and turned toward the warmth of the lantern, her face a strange copper moon hovering for that moment between land and water. Elizabeth stepped onto the wharf, slick with dew and fish oil, and almost lost her footing.

In the shadows beneath the captain’s tricorne Elizabeth could not make out his face but she felt the fine tension that rolled off him, a hum like bees in the distance. He boarded after Nathaniel, quick for all his girth, and called out to the sailors—good and silent and well-paid men, he had promised—and just that easily the sails were raised to catch the wind.

There would be no more turning back. Elizabeth hesitated at the rail, caught by the sight of the brightening sky in the east. The sun would come soon and when it set again they would be more than halfway to Canada. If the winds were kind; if the revenue agents and blackbirders and border guards happened to be looking the other way.

Nathaniel pressed her elbow. Elizabeth followed the others to the aft cabin house, and there was Jode, standing tall and defiant until he caught sight of Splitting-Moon. He looked away, and straightened his shoulders, shrugging off the boy in him that wanted to go to her and put his head on her breast.

She had forgotten the noise a ship could make, wood and rope and sails and wind all groaning in tandem, a clutter of sound that itched until it bored its way beneath the skin and became as unremarkable as the rush of one’s own breathing. They were crowded, all of them, into the aft cabin house that served as captain’s quarters and chart room, barely large enough for
four. Selah and Splitting-Moon took the berth and Stephan, the weakest of the men, the only chair; some sat on the chart table and the rest of them sat on the floor, shoulder to shoulder. They sat in silence and listened to the wind that moved the
Washington
like a skitter bug across the surface of a pond.

Elizabeth thought she might never be able to sleep again and so it took her by surprise, one moment to be sitting across from Uffa, studying the solemn thin face, and the next to wake to a cabin filled with bars of sunlight from the shuttered windows that opened onto the deck.

“I dreamt of Julian,” she said aloud, to hear her own voice and to mark the dream.

“You always dream about your brother when you’re on the water.” Nathaniel eased his arm out from under her head and flexed it to loosen cramped muscles.

Pico handed her a dipper from the water barrel that sat near the door. She drank most of it and rubbed the rest into her eyes to open them to the day.

“Where is Jode? Did I dream him too?”

One corner of Nathaniel’s mouth turned down. “He’s up on deck with Isaiah.”

“Is that a good idea?”

He shrugged. “As long as we don’t all crowd up there at once.”

“Two by two, like Noah.” Uffa had a hoarse, almost toneless voice, but its strangeness was tempered by her smile. She held out her open ditty bag toward Elizabeth. “Hungry?”

In each canvas bag Mrs. Emory had packed a great bounty and variety of food: venison jerky, cornbread filled with nuts, flatbread spread with pork lard, blood sausage, onions in crackly skins, dried apples and pears, a pungent cheese that crumbled on the tongue. Elizabeth took some dried apple and a piece of cornbread and, when the older woman’s brow creased in concern, a bit of the sausage as well.

The men ate in silence but the women whispered among themselves in English and Kahnyen’kehàka and Dutch. Splitting-Moon, Selah, Conny, Flora, Uffa, Dorcas—Elizabeth studied each of their faces and remembered them as she had first seen them, weeping soundlessly over a new grave scratched out of the forest floor. There was a watchfulness about these women, but neither their sorrow nor the long
walk to the lake had been enough to break them. Dressed in the clothes Mrs. Emory had provided, hastily dyed in shades of muddy gray, the women put Elizabeth in mind of winter sparrows crowded together for warmth, and willing to take comfort and hope where they found it.

The men worried her more. Stephan because of his fragile health, Charlie because of his prolonged silence—Elizabeth doubted that she had heard more than five words from him together—Pico and Markus for the depth of their mourning, and Jode and Elijah for the pure power of their anger. Quaker gray could not dull that, or even hide it.

“Would you care for some of African Katie’s bread?”

Elizabeth was startled out of her thoughts. Dorcas had eyes the color of brandy, a soft sweet voice, and a mass of scar tissue on her cheek where there had once been a brand mark. An
R,
Dorcas had explained, making the shape in the air with a sweep of one finger. Runaway. And she had opened the deerskin pouch she wore around her neck to show Elizabeth the part of herself she had refused to keep but could not discard, a dry and wizened dark curl of flesh.

“So I never forget,” she had explained.

“There’s no need to whisper,” Elizabeth told her now. “You could sing at the top of your voices and no one would hear you out here on the water.”

But the women smiled at her suggestion in surprise and unease, as if she had told them that they could fly.

The door opened and Jode appeared there, looking awkward and out of place in leather jerkin, homespun shirt, and breeches. Behind him was Elijah, who carried what looked like a great chunk of polished bone in two cupped hands.

“Now what have you got there?” asked Dorcas, standing up to get a better look.

Elijah stepped over people to reach Splitting-Moon. “A tooth. At least that’s what the old sailor claims. Said Splitting-Moon could tell us about it.”

It did indeed look like a tooth with its three long pronged roots, but it was the size of a large man’s fist. Elijah put it in his wife’s cupped hands, and she ran her fingers lightly over the surface, weighing the shape and then holding it up to sniff.

Elizabeth said, “Which old sailor?”

“Little man with a red cap. Calls himself Tim Card.”

“Tim Card!” Elizabeth put a hand on Nathaniel’s arm. “Do you remember I told you about Mr. Card? The last time I sailed with Captain Mudge he was on board. Oh, the stories he told … About pirates, and privateers, and Button Bay.”

Selah said, “I suppose a giant tooth has got some story behind it.” She had taken the tooth from Splitting-Moon and was turning it in her hands. “Look here, grooves. Like he was gnawing on something.”

“The old man claims it’s an angel tooth,” said Jode, who hadn’t moved from his spot by the door. “Says that all along the waterways you can dig and find the bones of angels that fell in the battle for the heavens.”

“Never thought I’d see no angel bones,” said Stephan, his voice still a little raw from the fever he had left behind.

“That old sailor told us he seen leg bones almost twenty feet long where he found that tooth.” Jode said this in his usual diffident tone, but the excitement was clear on his face. “Don’t believe in angels, though.”

Pico reached up from his spot to swat at Jode with one of Mrs. Emory’s religious pamphlets. “How do you know that tooth didn’t come from an angel?”

The boy snorted, and looked away over his shoulder.

Conny said, “Well, I believe it. Mrs. Emory read to me from the bible not two days ago about big angels coming down to earth.”

“That wasn’t nothing to do with angels.” Uffa frowned down at the tooth in Stephan’s hands. “It was giants. Ain’t that so?” She turned to Elizabeth.

“From Genesis,” she agreed.

“Go on and quote.” Nathaniel poked her lightly, not even trying to hide his grin. “You know you can’t leave it.”

Elizabeth poked him back, but she raised her voice so that they could all hear.

“‘In those days were the giants on the earth, and also afterwards, when the sons of God had come in to the daughters of men, and they had borne children to them; these were the heroes, who of old were men of renown.’”

“I swear, there must be a hundred books in that head of yours.” Selah smiled at her from across the cabin. “Can’t see how you remember all them words.”

“Now how do you get from giants in the earth to fallen angels,
that’s what I want to know,” sniffed Flora. “And maybe it ain’t real anyway. Could be carved, out of ivory or some wood. Nathaniel ain’t said a word, and neither have you, Splitting-Moon. Is it real?”

Nathaniel said, “It’s real. I’ve seen the bones, and so has Splitting-Moon.”

They all went very still, but their faces were bright with differing degrees of disquiet and interest. Jode just looked irritated. To Splitting-Moon he said, “You never told us stories of giants.”

She turned her face in his direction. In the bright morning light the scars on her face stood out in crimson ridges, as if she had painted herself for battle. Her head tilted to one side slightly and she smiled a little, the smile a mother reserved for an impatient child.

“There are hundreds of stories,” she said. “It will be many years before you have heard them all, and longer still before you understand them.” She said this softly, but Jode dropped his head as if she had shouted.

“Can we have the story, then?” Dorcas leaned forward. “It would help pass the time.”

Splitting-Moon let the silence draw out and then she cleared her throat and raised her voice so that it filled the little cabin.

“In the longhouse my fathers tell the story of the giants who lived among us long ago. They speak of Weetucks, who stood as tall as the top of the tallest trees, and his brother, Maughkompos, who stood still taller. Maughkompos could stand in the middle of the great river and catch up a sturgeon as big as a man in one hand. Weetucks could knock Sister Bear out of the tree where she hid from him. No animal could run fast enough to be safe from the race of giants. No teeth were long enough to hurt them, no claws sharp enough.

“They were such good hunters that little by little the giants killed many of the animals in the forest and drove away the others. The deer and bear and elk and buffalo and the beaver, all of them left and went to the far north, where no giants walked the earth. And our hunters came home empty-handed, and the people grew hungry and cold, for there was no meat or even a single beaver pelt to be had.

“The Master of Life saw what trouble the giants had caused among his people, and he was angered. So he called forth
lightning and smote them all, and wiped their race from the earth. Their bones he left behind, to remind my people of the giants, and how they brought about their own end.”

“Greed,” announced Dorcas, switching from Kahnyen’-kehàka to English. “It was greed that done it.”

Charlie stood suddenly, his whole body shaking. A man of middle years, short of stature but strongly built, he put Elizabeth in mind of the stunted oak that stood just outside her schoolhouse, not only for his build but because he seemed to have been struck to the core by the loss of his wife and daughter. Elizabeth often heard him weeping in his sleep; he moved through the day like a dream walker.

“Pride cometh,” he called out in a harsh voice, raising his fists to his face. “Pride cometh and then the fall. The angels fell and the giants and we fell too. God used that fever to smite our prideful selves. We grew proud and he punished us, sure enough. He took the children.” He turned his head to look at each of them, pointing with a trembling finger. “He took your Joshua and your Mariah and Billy and my girl, my sweet girl, my Meg.” He swung around suddenly toward Selah. “He took our children and he’ll take your boy too.”

He collapsed as abruptly as he had stood, and drew his knees up to his face, bending forward as if he could disappear inside himself by pure force of will.

All the women seemed to turn toward Selah at once, but she held up a palm to stop them, shaking her head very slightly. Then she got up from the berth where she had been sitting with her son in her lap and picked her way across the room to Charlie. A whistle sounded on the deck and the captain’s voice rose in command, and then Selah crouched down next to Charlie and put a hand on his head. She stayed there like that without saying a word and they all waited with her until a shudder ran through the bowed shoulders and Charlie lifted his head.

The two of them looked at each other for a long time, the young woman and the older man with tears running unchecked down slack and stubbled cheeks. Selah never smiled but there was an openness to her expression, a seeking that seemed to reach him. He blinked at her and blinked again, his mouth working without making any sound at all.

Selah said, “Will you hold my son for me? I’d sure like to
go stretch my legs a while, but I’m afraid to take him up on deck, in case I slip. Will you hold him? His name is Galileo, named for his granddaddy.”

Charlie swallowed so hard that the muscles in his throat clenched convulsively. He said, “Galileo was the one who showed me the way to Red Rock, when I was first a voyager.”

“This is his grandson,” Selah said in her calmest voice. “Will you look after him for a little while for me? I would appreciate it.”

A trembling went through him. After a long moment when no one moved or spoke or even breathed, his shoulders came up and his back straightened by degrees, and then, finally, his fists relaxed.