The Spirit Keeper

A PLUME BOOK

THE SPIRIT KEEPER

K. B. LAUGHEED
is an organic gardener and master naturalist who has spent a lifetime feeding the earth. Her efforts have culminated in
The Spirit Keeper
, her first novel and largest contribution to the potluck so far.

“This is a sweeping and beautiful novel. The rich characters move through a frontier world that is as magical as it is raw. We hope this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Katie O’Toole.”

—Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear,
New York Times
bestselling authors of
People of the Black Sun

Plume

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Copyright © K. B. Laugheed, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distrivbuted in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Laugheed, K. B.

The spirit keeper : a novel / K. B. Laugheed.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-14-218033-4 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-101-62734-1 (eBook)

1. Teenage girls—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3612.A93255S65 2013

813'.6—dc23 2013010092

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Ledger One

~1~

~2~

~3~

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~6~

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~8~

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~12~

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~14~

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~30~

’Tis all you, Captain.

Author’s Note

I
N THIS BOOK YOU
will encounter variations in spelling, grammar, and syntax which were common to language usage of the eighteenth century. This variation is a result of the fact that language lives inside the heads of the people who use it, and, like any living thing, it wanders and grows and becomes something other than what it once was. The spelling of a word can change. The pronunciation of a word can change. The meaning of a word can change. Therefore, if you have any hope of understanding this story as the author wrote it, read quickly—before it all changes.

Ledger One

~1~

T
HIS IS THE ACCOUNT
of Katie O’Toole, late of Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania, removed from her family by savages on March the 2nd in the year of Our Lord 1747.

I wish I could say this is a true and honest account, but I see no way the likes of me can make such a claim. Still, I’ve no reason to lie in the pages of this ledger and plenty of reason to unburden my guilty soul. Mine is such a surpassing strange story. I honestly hope by writing it all down I’ll somehow see the truth of it.

I feared at first I might disremember how to write, especially in a language I no longer speak, but now that I’ve begun, I find my fears unfounded, as fears so oft prove to be. I wonder—what use is fear in a world where the worst catastrophes are those you ne’er see coming?

Ah, well—I’m too practiced a storyteller to fall prey to my own impatience. I’ll tell my tale apace, withholding my conclusions ’til the end.

 • • •

I was the thirteenth child my mother conceived—a circumstance of some significance for her, I believe, as she took great pleasure in reminding me thirteen was the number of Christ’s betrayer. Her belief that I was an unlucky child was routinely cited as justification for beatings, and I grew to envy those children of hers who ne’er breathed air, believing they were, indeed, the lucky ones. Our home was always too full for comfort and there was ne’er enough of nothing—food nor clothing nor compassion—to go ’round.

By the time I reached my seventeenth year, my elder siblings had all married, thereby adding more children and chaos to our already o’erflowing household. On the morning of the attack, I was in the loft with a mob of children, readying them for the day. I cannot recall how many children were with me nor e’en which ones they were, but I recall with crystal clarity the shrill scream we heard in the distance.

At that moment all feuding and fussing stopt, and we stared at one another in stunned silence.

I peeked through the shutters and saw savages everywhere. Now I knew why various of our countrymen had warned against settling in this territory, the proprietorship of which is still in dispute, but no one ne’er could tell my father nothing, especially when he was liquored up, which he was, alas, every day I knew him.

When I was small, my gran told tales of how Father had been the son of a lord back in Ireland, how rich he was, and wanton, due to inherit the earth or such like. In trembling whispers, Gran described how her comely daughter schemed to advance herself by catching the young nobleman’s eye, only to cause the ruin of them both. Instead of becoming gentrified, Gran suddenly found herself the hapless chaperon of the exiled couple as they struggled to find a place for themselves in the crude colonies across the sea.

Gran was truly happy only when recounting the many miserable failures of my father’s life. Unfit for any sort of honest labor, he had, she complained, worn out his welcome in at least a dozen employments in three different colonies, eventually dragging us all into the wilderness of the Pennsylvania frontier. This, he said, was where he would at last restore his fame and fortune. For my part, I ne’er stopt longing to return to Philadelphia, where my brother James remained with his wife and children. I determined to find my way back there at the first opportunity.

Throughout my childhood, I listened wistfully to Gran’s tales of the Old World—the ancient cities with stone castles, shining cathedrals, and cobblestone streets—but the only world I knew was filled with filth and toil and strife and turmoil. We siblings fought furiously o’er every scrap of food or cloth, except during those occasions when Father had a notion to school us. Then we must all sit together, boys and girls, reading as he instructed from the Bible or other books. No matter how poor we were, we always had piles of books. We soon memorized Father’s favorite passages, for if any of us made a mistake, he would deny supper to us all and drink himself to sleep, grumbling o’er our shortcomings as saliva dribbled from his lips.

If liquor made our father sloppy, endless labors and disappointments made our mother cruel. I remember not a single gentle word from her lips, and the abundance of babies with which she had been blessed merely provided her with targets for her frustrations and rage. We girls were set to work from infancy, cooking, sewing, and tending to the younger ones. If we spilt a drop of stew or dropt a stitch or allowed a child to cry in Mother’s presence, she immediately reached for her switch. Once when I let the cook-fire die, I ended up curled in a ball on the floor, blood seeping from the switch-cuts on my back and arms. Gran finally grabbed my mother’s hand and shouted, “D’ye mean to kill that child?” But e’en with that intervention, I must still wash the blood from my shift and sew it back together myself.