Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,64
through, she covered my father with a blanket and pulled the rocking chair up close beside him.
“I’ll stay with him,” she said. “You go and finish getting supper ready.” She stroked his hair.
At the door, I turned back to see her lay her head next to his, her whole body shaking.
But then Samuel came running, shouting. “Come see! That big dog is at the door, Ellie. And he has a doll in his mouth.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
My mother wanted me to wait until morning to go see if Cate was all right.
“But that’s her doll,” I said at the cabin door, Esther and my mother on either side of me. “Captan wouldn’t have left her alone at night, and he wouldn’t have taken her doll unless something was wrong.”
“What’s an old hag doing with a doll?” Esther said. “I’ll bet it’s a poppet. For making spells. Or cursing someone.”
I thought about the blessing Larkin had taught me. The one Cate said to him whenever he left her. Saol fada agus breac-shláinte chugat.
“Shame on you,” I said.
But Esther didn’t look ashamed. “And why would her dog come to you? You’ve only known her for a little while. Why wouldn’t he have gone to Larkin?”
I didn’t know the answer to that, but I pictured him there, too. Trying to help her but needing help himself.
I said as much.
“Then I’ll go with you,” my mother said, though she sounded a little uncertain.
“You will?” I turned to stare at her.
She looked like the same mother I’d had that morning, but something was different, and I thought back to what she’d said about emptiness.
Maybe she saw—in the shape of a dog with a doll in his mouth—a chance to do something about that.
“I will,” she said. “If it’s more trouble than the two of them can handle, they’ll need both of us. Esther, you’ll take care of Samuel and your father while we’re gone.” She glanced down at her dress. “But let me do something about this first.”
I didn’t know what she intended, but then she came back wearing a pair of my father’s trousers, cinched with his belt at the waist and rolled into cuffs at the ankle.
“You’ll have to clean off those poultices in a while,” she told Esther, who looked like a child for the first time in years.
“I’ll help you, Esther,” Samuel said. “I’m good with poultices.”
His face reminded me of when he had helped Mr. Peterson with the thorn in Scotch’s hoof.
But Esther just looked hard at me and then my mother and back again before turning away toward my father’s room.
“Now what did I do?” I said softly.
“Nothing,” my mother replied. “I think she’s upset with me this time.”
“For going to Miss Cate’s with me?”
She sighed. “For both those things.”
I had said only one thing, though I now saw it was two.
I pulled on my boots while my mother fetched hers. We buttoned up our jackets, mine still damp but warm from hanging by the stove.
“Should we take something along?” my mother said.
“Me,” Samuel said. “I want to go, too.”
“No, Esther needs you to stay here,” my mother said. “To help with your father.”
“We should take some jerky,” I replied. “And a lantern.” We would need light on the trail, and quick fire when we got there.
“And bread.” She put the food in a sack while I fetched a lantern and lit it at the stove.
I felt in my pockets for my knife. My flint.
“You should wear a cap,” I told her. “So the branches on the path don’t get caught in your hair.”
She stared at me. “Is that why you cut yours off?”
I nodded. “The trees kept trying to comb it.”
My mother reached out to touch my hair for a moment. Then she put on a cap and gathered her things.
Captan was still waiting, but as soon as we joined him he dropped the doll at my feet and then loped off across the yard toward the path up.
* * *
—
It wasn’t quite dusk yet, though the woods were full of shadows and I was glad to have my mother close beside me, better than a knife in my hand.
But before we had gone very far, I heard Esther calling, “Wait, Mother! Wait!”
We stopped. Captan stopped.
Up the path Esther ran, panting.
“Let me,” she said. “Mother, if something happens and you’re not back soon . . . I don’t know . . . I won’t know what to do with Daddy and Samuel. Let me go instead.”
She looked very young standing