Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,18

up from trying. But we all, together, finally managed to pull some of it off him, and then I bent away the thinnest branches until they bowed, taut and difficult, in my arms while my mother and Esther tugged him away inches at a time, Samuel crying “Daddy!” again and again but too small for anything else, my mother reaching through the branches, feeling my father’s neck, feeling for his pulse, finding it, and then with a mighty surge pulling him from the last of the tangle and onto open ground, to turn him over and call his name, holding his face in her hands, the blood matting his hair, his skin a shocking white, all of us calling him, my sister holding one of his hands in both of hers, Samuel tugging on the hem of his pant leg, my mother kneeling alongside him, then scrambling to her feet, looking wildly around, her hands dripping with blood, and then running for an old blanket that we made into a hammock to drag him, his poor body bumping along the frozen ground, and then slowly, horribly, up onto the cabin’s step and through its door and across the floor, into the washroom, laying him near the drain and pouring warm water over his wound to clean it, waiting for him to wake up.

I will never forget the moment when we all stopped and sat back, exhausted, and looked at each other, at him, at the pink water trailing from his head, all of us breathing hard, Samuel still crying, crawling into my mother’s lap, his face red and snotty and swollen.

“Run to the Petersons’, Ellie,” my mother said, her voice shaking. “Tell them to fetch the doctor. Tell them to hurry.”

Chapter Fourteen

It was only days later, after the doctor had come and gone, after we had had time to consider the idea of my strong, laughing father never waking again, that my mother asked how he had come to be in the path of the tree as it fell.

She looked at me, who had been with him. Esther looked at me, who had been with him.

Samuel said, “Did you see what happened, Ellie?” He turned to my mother. “Ellie knocked me down.”

And I simply could not say, I knocked you down to save your life.

I simply could not say, And the tree knocked Daddy down because of you.

I loved him too much to do that to him. And I knew my father would wake up—I knew he would—and tell everyone the truth of it. By then it wouldn’t matter that Samuel had chased a rabbit into harm’s way. My father would be well again. My mother would smile again. And everything would be all right again. I knew it would. So I said, “No, Samuel, I didn’t see what happened. One minute, Daddy was cutting the tree, and I was . . . dragging some branches into a pile. And then the tree fell. I didn’t mean to knock you down, Samuel. I was running to get help and I didn’t mean to knock you down.”

He frowned at me for a long moment, and I hoped that he wouldn’t work too hard to unravel that thread. To sort out the jumble of what had happened.

“You were in the way, weren’t you?” my sister said.

At first, I thought she was talking to Samuel, but then I realized she was looking at me. Talking to me.

Esther wasn’t a mean girl. But she never tried to be more gentle than she was. And it was clear that she needed a reason. An explanation. Someone to blame.

My mother looked at me, too, waiting for an answer. She wasn’t angry like Esther was, but it was clear that she had no extra space in her heart just then for anything except my father.

Part of me wanted to tell them that it was Samuel’s fault, if a little boy could be blamed for such a thing. But when I thought of saying the words, I felt sick and sad. When I thought of Samuel someday learning that he had drawn his father into this disaster—perhaps even into death—I felt even more terrible.

And I knew how Esther would feel—she who should have been watching Samuel.

Which was when I decided that it would be worse to pass the blame than to shoulder it.

If I’d learned anything from the mountain—and from my father—it was that I felt stronger and happier if I was able to do a hard thing