The Endless Forest (59 page)

The students had been talking about it among themselves for a long time, because while it could be great fun, it was never easy. Daniel had rules: Nobody could get hurt. No property could be destroyed, and no student held up to mockery or ridicule.

The teacher was another matter entirely; even Daniel understood that much. He had come up with pranks in his own time, some of which were still talked about. It was hard being the youngest of Nathaniel Bonner’s children.

On Sunday morning Birdie called a meeting in Curiosity’s hay barn right after breakfast and chores. Of the boys, Nathan, Henry, and Adam were there, and of the girls, Isabel, Mariah, and Amelie. The youngest three had to be distracted somehow, but fate had provided: This morning Callie and Ethan had come to spend the day. Ethan had understood
right away what was going on, and drawn the littlest of the little people into a game of hide-and-seek.

Now Birdie explained her plan, and then she explained it again.

“Wait,” Isabel said. “Whose chickens are we going to use? Who has four chickens all the same color we can borrow?”

“We don’t need four chickens,” Adam explained. “Haven’t you been listening? We need three. We number them one, three, and four, and we let them out in school.”

The boys put back their heads and laughed, so delighted were they with this plan. Birdie thought it was a good prank, maybe her best yet, and their reaction put her in a fine mood.

The girls were excited too, but they had a more practical approach to these things.

Mariah said, “Maybe Aunt Lily can make us the signs to pin to their backs.”

“I suppose we could ask her,” Birdie said. “But I’d worry about her saying something to Daniel.”

They all considered this for a moment and decided that it was true; they couldn’t really tell any grown-up about this before the fact. They talked too much among themselves and anyway, Daniel would be on the lookout for hints. He knew something would happen, and he knew Birdie would be at the middle of it.

“How hard can it be to make some signs?” Nathan said. “All we need is paper and ink. I can do that part.”

“But what if it rains,” Amelie said, “and the ink runs?”

“Never mind the ink and the rain,” Henry said. “We don’t even have chickens yet.”

“We could pay,” Mariah said. “I’ve got five pennies. We could rent them.”

Nathan held out his hands as if to offer a question. “Who ever heard of renting out chickens?”

“Biddy Ratz rents out George. I had to fetch him for Curiosity just a few days ago,” Adam said.

Isabel said, “But a goose is another matter entirely.”

“You know anybody who’s got two geese look exactly the same? And why did Curiosity rent a goose in the first place?” Nathan was getting cranky.

“Slugs,” said the others in unison.

“George is mighty fond of slugs and they’ve been a plague in the garden, that’s what Curiosity says,” said Henry. “And she don’t much like geese so she just borrows Biddy’s now and then.”

Birdie already knew where she would get the hens, but the discussion had run away and she couldn’t see a way to reel it back in. And besides, it made her laugh.

“What about Missy and Ma’am and Mimi?” Isabel said.

Finally, Birdie thought.

“Curiosity would skin us alive,” said Henry.

“She likes those chickens better than she likes us.” Mariah wrinkled her nose.

It was an exaggeration, but not much of one. Curiosity had a flock of eight hens and one rooster that she wouldn’t let anybody else care for. In the evening she went herself to make sure they were snug in the henhouse before full dark, and if she heard them fussing in the night she’d go out with a stave in case she needed to beat back a sassy wolf or a wolverine looking for a way in.

Of all the hens, her favorites were the three oldest, glossy black, called Missy and Ma’am and Mimi. Curiosity talked to them as though they were her sisters, and they seemed to talk right back.

“We won’t hurt them,” Adam said. “We’ll just take them … for a walk.”

“We’ll scare the eggs right out of them,” Henry said, but in a resigned voice. Anybody could see that they had already settled on this plan.

Birdie was more than satisfied. When they let the hens out, there would be a lot of squawking and screeching while grown-ups and students chased them back and forth. If things went well, Birdie thought, they could take bets on how long people would go on searching for the number two chicken that didn’t exist at all.

With the plan mostly in place, the girls went back to Curiosity’s kitchen to help with dinner, but the boys stood in a semicircle giving one another sharp looks. Birdie knew those looks too well.

“What?” Birdie said. “Tell me.”

“If we hurry,” Adam whispered, “we could go to the beaver dams and be back in time for dinner.”

It was one of those times when she knew exactly what she was supposed to do: Remind these three that they had been forbidden to go to the far end of the lake because of the flood damage. She was the aunt,
and she was the oldest, and for the last few days she had thought about little else but doing just what the boys were suggesting.

She cast a glance at the house, and made herself a promise. She would count to ten, and if no grown-up showed themselves in the meantime, they would go.

“What’s she doing?” Nathan whispered, and Henry hushed him with an upraised hand.

She counted to fifteen for good measure.

“Maybe we should tell somebody,” Adam suggested.

“No,” Birdie shook her head. “It will be easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Let’s go.”

They only got as far as the Johnstown road, where a small crowd had stopped in front of the Red Dog. The Focht’s big carriage stood right in front with all four horses hitched up and ready to go. The servants were busy strapping luggage to the roof.

“They’re leaving?” Birdie said to no one in particular. “Just like that? Going away?”

“Just the mister and missus,” Pete LeBlanc answered.

“The boy stays here,” said Missy O’Brien, sniffing her disapproval. “With two servants. Those blacks there, I don’t know their names.”

“Lorena and Harper,” said Henry.

“But why won’t Jemima take Nicholas?” Nathan asked.

“Business,” said Missy, her small mouth pursing. “That’s the claim. Though if I was a betting woman, which I am not, I would wager my good right arm that they won’t come back at all.” Missy said this as though the idea met with her approval. She was always one to anticipate other people’s misfortune.

Pete’s wife, Georgia, was working herself into a temper as well. “They’ll just leave the boy here with Callie. That’s what Jemima does; she dumps her burdens off here and goes on about amusing herself.”

Henry said, “You had best not be talking about our aunt like that.” Henry had a temper, though it didn’t often come to the surface.

“She wasn’t talking about Callie,” Pete said, pulling his wife away. “And don’t you tell anybody otherwise. We got enough trouble without getting on the wrong side of your granddaddy.”

Georgia looked like she wanted to argue the point, but just then
Jemima and Mr. Focht came out of the inn. Jemima didn’t look at anybody at all; she just went to the carriage and went up the stairs, holding up her skirts with one hand and taking a servant’s arm in the other.

“Off for a ride, Mima?” called Jed MacGarrity in his warbling old man’s voice. He had arrested Jemima once, according to the stories, and so maybe it wasn’t a surprise that she ignored him.

When Jemima had settled in the carriage with her husband beside her Birdie said, “I wonder if Martha knows.”

“Oh, she knows,” said Missy O’Brien from the back of the crowd. “Jemima and her number three there—Focht, is that his name? A strange name if you ask me—they come down from the mountain not a half hour ago. I don’t think they were picking wildflowers. Look, they’re about to go.”

One of the servants climbed up into the carriage while two others mounted postillion.

Just then Nicholas appeared with a woman on the threshold of the Red Dog. Harper was just behind him, and neither boy seemed especially worried or concerned. Birdie decided that she needed to get to know Harper. She had seen him out walking almost every day since he arrived, all over the village and the mountain too. That last memory gave her a twinge; she hadn’t said anything to her da, and she was supposed to. They all kept an eye on anybody who wandered around Hidden Wolf.

But then again it was just a boy who liked to wander, and who had too much free time. There probably wasn’t much work for one servant, let alone for the four that Jemima had brought with her.

“Maybe that was his wet nurse,” said somebody nearby. “Maybe he won’t care about Jemima being gone as long as he’s got her.”

Henry said, “That’s Lorena. She’s his favorite.”

To Birdie the woman looked kind. She had a small but easy smile, and when she used it her teeth flashed very white. Her skin was not so black as some of the other servants; to Birdie it seemed more the color of cinnamon, rich brown tinged with red. Her face was built different from blacks Birdie knew. She had a full mouth but her nose was narrow, and her eyes weren’t exactly black or even brown.

Nicholas seemed his usual cheerful self, smiling broadly, one arm extended up and over his head so he could wave his whole body. The last Birdie saw of Jemima was her handkerchief waving in reply from the window.

“It don’t seem right,” said Henry.

“Should we take him with us?” Nathan asked. “Bring him home for dinner?”

“Maybe not today,” Birdie said.

“I just don’t understand it,” said Henry again. “Why would they go off without him?”

It was a question that occupied them all that Sunday at dinner and for the entire school week. Of all of them, Adam was having the hardest time understanding why Nicholas had been left behind.

Birdie had heard him asking Jennet and Luke about it after dinner that very day, and by the end of the week he had asked every grown-up in the family, as well as Curiosity and all Curiosity’s extended family.

Adam was worried, but Nicholas didn’t seem to mind that his mother and stepfather had gone away. If anything Birdie thought he was happier, mostly because he didn’t have to go straight back to the Red Dog after school, and he had more freedom to explore.

“Those boys move,” Curiosity said, watching them from her kitchen window. “Put me in mind of Daniel and Blue-Jay when they was that size.”

It was clear that Adam had appointed himself Nicholas’s guardian, and the two of them showed up everywhere, very often with Harper in tow. At first Birdie wondered if the other boys might take offense, but it was summer and there was no lack of things to do. They formed themselves into loose tribes that shifted day by day, rotating from Curiosity’s kitchen to their fort on the mountain to Lake in the Clouds to the apple orchard.

Once Birdie had followed them to the orchard after school, out of pure curiosity. Levi put her straight to work, as she knew he would. It was time to thin the apples on the branch, a tedious job. Only one in four or five apples could be left to grow, and the extras had to be carefully snapped off. The only thing that made it bearable was that everybody sang, following Levi’s lead.

Birdie had never seen Nicholas shirk any task, no matter how hard or dirty, but he had never seemed particularly interested either. Now she couldn’t tell if he liked working in the orchards, or if it was Callie who drew him back. She spent a lot of time showing him how to do things, explaining the why and how of it all. Some of it seemed to stick with
him, but mostly he just gave her the same smile he gave everybody. She didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t grasping things, or maybe she didn’t care. It was odd, and Birdie didn’t know how to explain it to herself.

“That Nicholas, he ain’t nothing like his ma,” Missy O’Brien had taken to announcing whenever she caught sight of him.

Ruth Mayfair was Quaker through and through and she never argued, but she made an exception and came as close as she ever would to calling Missy O’Brien rude.

“He is indeed a bright light in the world,” she said with a solemn look that Missy O’Brien didn’t care to notice.

“Must be Lorena’s influence,” Missy said. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders, does Lorena.”

There was another odd thing: Even people who were determined to dislike anything and everything having to do with Jemima took a liking to Lorena.

“The boy a little slow,” Curiosity said of him. “But pure of heart. Most of all, they ain’t the littlest bit of self-pity in him. He just take things as they come. That he did learn from Lorena.”

The only person who seemed to have any doubts was Levi. Levi could be standoffish, because, as Ma had told Birdie once, he had lost everybody he loved—his little brother to a terrible accident at the mill, his ma drowning, and Ezekiel gone too, and within two days of falling sick with the measles. He could be standoffish, but he loved the orchard and could be won over by anybody who showed any real interest. If Nicholas was going to make a friend out of Levi it would be by means of his help in the orchard.

If you took the time to visit with him, Levi opened up. He knew hundreds of songs and stories and he was generous with all of them. Once in a while he would play the fiddle at a party, and then he looked like a different person altogether, happy with himself and the world.

And Levi listened. He listened close, even when other grown-ups didn’t seem to take things seriously.

Birdie asked her ma about Levi and Nicholas, and from the look on her face she knew she had hit on something that troubled her.

“You know the stories about his mother’s death.”

“Cookie?”

“Yes. She died in a violent way, and some people believe Jemima was responsible.”

“I know that, Ma,” Birdie said. “Everybody knows that. When Cookie and Levi and his brothers were still slaves Jemima treated them awful. And then they got their papers—”

“Manumission papers,” Ma reminded her gently.

It meant something when Ma interrupted. A new question occurred to Birdie.

“Where did Cookie get the money to buy herself and her boys free?”