Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,17
boy who never looked where he was going, the woods could be especially unkind.
“I’ll tell you if I see it again,” I said. And I meant it. I truly did. But I didn’t know where that dog would lead me. Or what it would lead me to become.
Chapter Thirteen
That night, when we gathered around my father to wish him good night, I laid my hand on his forehead and closed my eyes and told him, without a word, that I was going to bring him back.
I concentrated so hard on that thought that I could feel it pulsing in my ears, and my hand grew hot on his cool skin, as if the flame in my chest had spread.
I was startled when Esther pulled my arm away and said, “What are you doing, Ellie? Daddy doesn’t need your sweaty hand on his face.”
“Do you have a fever?” my mother said, pressing her lips against my forehead, and I closed my eyes and let myself feel that almost-kiss until she pulled back and said, “You’d better get on to bed. Your father is already sick enough.”
Later, as I tried to sleep, I touched that spot on my forehead again and again, but it was no softer than the rest of me.
I hoped it would send me quickly to sleep—perhaps even to dream of my father waking and rising and growing brawny and brown again—but instead I lay in the darkness as I always did now, jangled and jarred by a memory that kept me wakeful and sad long into the night.
* * *
—
While my mother, my sister, my brother, my father all slept, I lay, wakeful, and remembered that January day, Esther gathering kindling under the trees at the edge of the yard where the snow was thinnest, watching Samuel while my mother was inside making stew.
I remembered helping my father clear trees at the edge of the garden so in the spring we could plant more beans and peas and squash.
I remembered him showing me where to stand as he swung his ax. How to keep a safe distance in case the tree kicked back like an angry horse as it fell. How to make the cut so that the tree fell mostly where he wanted it to fall. In this case, downhill. In this case, away from him. Away from me. Where it could do no harm.
But my mother was busy with the stew. And Esther was busy with her chores. And my father was busy with his ax. And I was the one who suddenly saw Samuel running across the open ground where the snow had drifted away and the bare dirt was burned pale with cold. I was the one who saw that he was running after a rabbit, his eyes fixed on the white smudge of its tail.
The tree broke just then. Began its fall. Began its great arc toward Samuel, its branches thrashing, slowing as it snagged on the branches of other trees, spinning heavily, and I charged beneath it, grabbing Samuel as I ran, both of us shoved from behind to land hard, just out of harm’s way.
I remembered lying on the cold ground with Samuel in my arms. How he struggled to get free, yelling, “Why did you do that, Ellie?”
I remembered holding him tight as I turned to see my father lying still under the tree’s branches.
His blood on the snow.
I remembered not knowing what to think about that.
I remembered pulling Samuel away before he could see my father, dragging him toward the cabin as he tried to break loose from my hand clenched tight around his wrist, hauling him farther from the garden and the tree and my father, casting him into the snow where Esther was gathering wood, where Esther was supposed to be watching him, where Esther was unaware of any trouble until I raced into the cabin yelling for my mother, until I ran back to where my father lay, my mother with me, Esther chasing us, calling, “What’s happened?” and Samuel chasing her, all of us climbing through the chaos of branches and dirt and snow to try to lug the tree off my father, all of us pulling at it together as he lay so still beneath it that I was sure he was dead.
We couldn’t reach him through the tree’s sharp, tangled limbs, no matter how Esther yelled his name, no matter how hard my mother worked to break the smaller branches, her hands torn