The Endless Forest (53 page)

“I’ll be within calling distance,” he had reminded her. It seemed that idea didn’t provide her with much comfort, because she only nodded nervously.

He said, “You think she might walk into the classroom to confront you.”

“Yes,” Martha had said. And then: “What are you thinking?”

“Not much. We can lock the doors once I sound the last bell.”

She looked surprised, and then thoughtful. “You think it will be so easy?”

He shrugged. “If we let it be.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

Now the children pushed every other thought and worry out of her head. All fourteen of the littler ones gathered around her and vied for her attention. Six of them were Martha’s newly acquired nieces and nephews, which would require a bit of diplomacy. Luckily all of them seemed to be on their best behavior. No doubt they had been closely
tutored about what was expected of relatives in the classroom. Birdie would take great pains with that, and Daniel had said a word to the older ones himself the evening before.

Birdie caught Daniel’s eye. She stood near the door, her hands folded in front of her and looking so much like their mother trying to hold on to her patience that Daniel almost laughed.

To Martha he said, “Can you cope?”

She shooed him away like a buzzing fly.

When she had her students assembled in the classroom, Martha found that her mind had gone blank; all the plans she had discussed with Daniel were simply gone.

Then Henry raised his hand and asked with perfect manners if she would like help calling the roll, a hint that she accepted thankfully. She found the sheet of paper in the top drawer of the desk and saw immediately that there were twenty-two names.

“Is Alois Cunningham here?”

Lottie Mayfair popped up from her seat. “Friend Martha,” she began, “Alois hasn’t been here since January and he’s not about to come back. Wouldst thou care to hear the particulars?”

Martha would, and so the longer story was told with contributions from all the children; it involved a complicated incident with a plow, a pig, and Alois’s grandfather Jed. Martha let them tell her whatever they seemed to think was important about all the names on the roll without children to claim them, an exercise that grew into a longer discussion of the flood and the aftermath of the flood. The conversation was informative, amusing, and best of all, it ate up some of the time she had to fill until recess.

From the next room came the murmuring of voices, Daniel’s chief among them.

“Children,” Martha said, her voice catching. “If you’ll take out your readers—”

The door, warped by water and ill-fitting, creaked when it opened, a sound that sounded to Martha like a rifle shot and just as welcome. Daniel had forgot to lock the door as he had planned, and when she turned, her mother would be standing there.

An African woman stood in the doorway, neatly dressed, her expression neutral. She held a boy by the hand. He was about nine, and he
looked to be fit and strong as any child his age. He was supposed to be her half brother, but as far as she could see he had none of his mother’s features, or of his father’s. Which might mean nothing, or everything.

The African woman said, “My mistress say, this is where Master Nicholas must be, in school. I leave him with you now. He will make his own way back come dinnertime.”

Before Martha could think to ask her name, the woman was gone. The boy was looking at her with a guileless and open expression, perfectly calm and even eager to please, as if he had never known anything but kindness and could not perceive of any other treatment. Behind her Martha felt the children stirring, uneasy with her silence and with the boy.

He said, “That was Elfie. Elfie didn’t want to bring me. Lorena wanted to bring me but Ma said Lorena coddles me and she’d let me run off and play, but I don’t mind coming to school. I wouldn’t have run off.”

Martha said, “Nicholas, we are glad you’ve come to join us. There are a number of empty desks. Please pick one and sit down.”

Younger children, her new mother-in-law had told her, needed movement and distraction and if she could provide those, she would have more success turning their minds to arithmetic and reading and geography. Elizabeth had only given this advice when Martha took her aside to ask her about the best way to approach the class she was supposed to take on the very next morning.

It was the little people revolving around Martha like a carousel during the wedding supper that reminded her what was ahead, and how unprepared she was to walk into a classroom.

Elizabeth’s advice made sense to Martha and no doubt it would have been the key to success, but for the unanticipated distraction of a new student who had come to the village and brought so much excitement with him. If Martha’s attention was drawn to the boy again and again, despite her earnest intention to treat him just as she did the others, then who could expect any more of the children?

The son of a farmer or a cobbler would have been a matter of great interest—any new child in the village was a momentous event for these children—and still they would have waited until recess to satisfy their curiosity. But Nicholas Wilde was Jemima’s son, and even the littlest of
Paradise’s young had heard stories of Jemima. Sooner or later Nicholas would find himself at the center of a crowd of children bent on interrogation. He would be overwhelmed by questions he had no way to answer, and rumors that would make no sense to him.

Some children stood up to such treatment and maintained their dignity by stalwart silence; a few tried to fight their way to the respect of their classmates. In any case, Martha could not raise the subject without intensifying the effect. She would keep an eye on him during recess, but children could be both sly and cruel, and it would be impossible to defend him against all comers. Martha had grown up in Paradise as Jemima’s daughter, and those memories were very close to the surface as she went about her business. While she bent over water-buckled primers, passed out slates and chalk, she watched Nicholas from the corner of her eye and wondered how he would cope. Each time this thought crossed her mind, she reminded herself that because some of her own classmates had been cruel and mean-spirited, that didn’t mean that Nicholas would necessarily receive the same treatment.

When she had set all the other schoolchildren work and it could no longer be avoided, Martha called Nicholas to her desk.

He stood before her, a likely young boy with a head of wavy brown hair and mild eyes the color of caramel. His smile was shy and trusting both.

She said, “Nicholas, how far along are you in your primer?”

He seemed confused by the question, and so she tried again. “Did you learn from a primer like this one with your last teacher?”

“Oh,” he said. “No, ma’am.”

“You may call me Miss Martha. Then what books did you learn from?”

He seemed pleased to have an answer to this question at least. “The newspaper.”

“You learned your letters from the newspaper?”

“Yes, ma’am. Every morning Mr. Focht reads the newspaper and then he passes it along to me.”

“And who taught you to read?”

A set of lines appeared on his brow, as though she had spoken to him in Japanese. “Nobody,” he said finally. “Ma showed me but mostly I learned on my own.”

With a dread sense, Martha thumbed through the primer until she found a list of vocabulary words.

“Do you recognize any of these?”

His gaze ran dutifully across each line, and then he shook his head. “Guess I haven’t got to those ones yet.”

She tried again. “And these?”

Again the solemn consideration, and then a bright smile. He pointed.

“There,” he said. “My name starts with N, and there it is, N.”

“And so it is,” Martha said. “Can you read the word that starts with N?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, his brow furled. “I’m not sure I can.”

Over the course of the next few minutes Martha discovered that young Nicholas Wilde was a biddable, pleasant child, apparently devoid of all artifice. She learned too that he had only the most rudimentary arithmetic skills, and that he could, when coaxed very patiently, recite the alphabet up to and including the letter K.

At recess Martha sent the children off and then watched from the window as they ran, full of mischief, leaping and skipping, into the warm midmorning sun. Nicholas ran with them, as frolicsome as a colt, full of movement and joy.

From behind her Daniel said, “How did it go?”

He came up and put a hand on her shoulder and she leaned into him. “It went well,” she said. “But I have a new student.”

She could almost hear him frown. His gaze shifted to the children at play and his posture straightened.

“Is that—”

“Yes,” Martha said. “That is my half brother Nicholas.”

Daniel drew in a sharp breath. “She is sly,” he said finally. “Using the boy to get places she herself can’t go.”

Martha couldn’t see his face, but she could feel a fine thrumming tension running through him.

“What do you think she means to accomplish?” Martha said finally.

“Hard to say.”

“There’s something else. He’s slow-witted.”

Daniel started and she looked over her shoulder at him.

“How do you mean?”

She said, “Do you remember Dora Cunningham’s youngest daughter? She looked perfectly healthy and normal, but there was something wrong. She always seemed far younger than she was. I remember asking Hannah about it.”

“And she said?”

“That sometimes if a birth is very difficult and prolonged, the full extent of the damage won’t be known for a year or more. The strain of the birth can injure the brain so that it doesn’t fully develop. She used more medical terms, but that’s what it was, in essence.”

“Does that seem to be the case here?”

Martha lifted a shoulder. “I really don’t know. It’s unlikely Jemima will allow Hannah to examine the boy, and possibly nothing would come of it anyway.”

They watched the younger boys who stood in a circle, heads bent together to study something one of them held in his hands. Nicholas was one of the group.

“I thought he’d have a far harder time fitting in,” Martha said. “But they’ve accepted him without a moment’s hesitation.”

“He is no challenge to them,” Daniel said. “And now what are you going to do?”

“I suppose I’ll see if I can teach him anything. He’s very eager to please.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She let out a deep sigh. “I know what you meant. What can I do? It would be wrong to simply turn the boy away.”

“Jemima is using him like a Trojan horse.”

“She means to,” Martha agreed.

“What of Callie?”

Martha said, “I sent Henry with a note. It seemed the right thing to do.”

“You realize that they may be watching for her, in the hope of getting you together in one place.”

“I don’t know,” Martha said slowly. “My sense is that they won’t try to approach Callie or me directly. They’re hoping the boy will do that work for them. But I suppose we’ll find out.”

Daniel stepped to the side, out of view of the window, and pulled her with him. There in the shadows he turned her around and held her against him. She put her cheek on his shoulder.

“This is playing with fire.”

She smelled of lavender water and chalk dust and soap, and who would have thought that such things would render a man incapable of speech? When she lifted her face to look at him, he kissed her. A slow, deep kiss that was meant to prove her point. Then he let her go.

“A good slow burn,” he said. “That’s what I was aiming for. It has its rewards down the road.”

It wasn’t until a few minutes before the end of the school day that Callie appeared at the classroom door.

The transformation that had so taken Martha by surprise on the Johnstown road was still in evidence. Callie was wearing a simple gown of dove gray linen, and instead of the usual head scarf, a small bonnet. Ethan stood just behind her, and Martha was especially glad to see him.

She went into the hall to greet them. “I didn’t know if you’d come,” she said. “I don’t even know if it’s a good idea.”

“Does he look like my father?” Callie craned her head to see into the classroom.

“I’m not sure,” Martha said. “You must decide for yourself.”

She gestured for them to go ahead, and then she followed them.

The children went very still. They darted looks at one another and then dropped their gazes only to raise them again. It occurred to Martha that most of them might not even know that Callie and Ethan had married, but there was no time to worry about that, or how to remedy it.

As it turned out Ethan was ready to handle what might have been a very awkward situation. His whole demeanor changed when he stepped
in front of the class; with the suddenness of a finger snap he was the teacher she had known.

Ethan was good with young children. He spoke in an easy tone that engaged their interest, asking questions of each of them and answering questions in turn.

Finally he said to Martha, “I see you have a new student.”

“Yes,” she said. “Nicholas Wilde joined our class this morning.”

The boy looked back and forth between them, a little uncertain.

“Nicholas,” Ethan said. “You are visiting Paradise with your parents?”

The boy stood up. “No, sir.”

“No?”