Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,7

them to feel warm, though they did.

The carving of me looked calmly back into my eyes, and for a moment I wanted to be that little girl with her solemn face and her steady gaze.

“They’re pretty ugly,” Samuel whispered.

I turned to look down at him kneeling by the birthing nest. “So were you when you were born.” I stepped off the stool and pushed it back against the wall. “Much uglier.”

“Was not.” He peered at the puppies more closely but leaned away again when Maisie raised her head. “What made you dunk the dead one?”

To that, I replied by leading him out of the woodshed, leaving the door open so Maisie could come and go.

“I just did.”

Samuel huffed. “No, you just didn’t, Ellie. Nobody just dunks a dead puppy for no reason.”

Which was true, but I wasn’t sure how to explain what had happened without getting it wrong.

So I said, “I remembered how it feels when you stuff snow down my neck.” Something he did too often but which maybe had led to some secondhand good. “I guess I wanted him to gasp.”

Samuel nodded grudgingly. “The second time you’ve been right. Probably the last time.”

Which deserved no answer.

Instead, I listened to that voice, that flame in my chest as it suddenly rose again, bright and wordless as the sun, as it had that morning when I helped Quiet find his way back to life.

This time, it spoke to me about my father.

Chapter Seven

“How’s our Maisie?” my mother asked as we went back into the cabin and found her still in the kitchen, grinding dried corn into meal. We’d have johnnycakes for lunch and maybe the last of the eggs.

“She’s tired,” I said. “But the puppies are all fine.”

Samuel took off his boots. “They’re ugly as bugs.”

“Not for long.” My mother had to raise her voice over the grumble of the mill. “In a week or so they’ll open their eyes and fluff up.”

My back to them both, I worked the pump until I had a pitcher brimming with cold well water.

My mother didn’t pay me any mind as I carried the pitcher past her, out of the kitchen toward the little room where we kept our basins and soap and the big metal tub we used for weekly baths. The floor had a drain to wash it all down the hill when we were done, though sometimes it let a snake come up . . . until Esther’s screaming would chase it back down again.

But I went on past that washroom and carried the pitcher to a door beyond it, closed as always.

Inside, I found my father not asleep but something deeper. More constant. As he had been for months now.

There was a terrible pink scar on the top of his head where the tree had felled him as he had felled it.

After the accident, Mr. Peterson had gone straightaway to fetch a doctor, though it had taken a whole day before he arrived on horseback, Mr. Peterson leading the way.

The doctor was as clean as any man I’d ever seen. Tidy, even after the rough trip from town. In a black suit and hat. His face as round and shiny as a dinner plate. He went straight to the bed where my father lay and examined him carefully, pricking his feet with a needle, listening to his chest. Holding smelling salts beneath his nose.

Then, “Coma,” he said. Which wasn’t a word we knew. “He might wake up tomorrow or never again. Can’t tell if he’ll be all right. Can’t tell much of anything except he’s hurt and his body has decided that rest is what he needs most. So rest he’ll have, until he either gets better or doesn’t.”

My mother and we children had stood in a huddle listening.

I remember trying to think of a question that wouldn’t have a frightening answer.

I remember failing.

I remember watching as my mother picked up the mandolin my father had bought for her as a wedding gift. I remember how she cradled it in her arms as if it were a fourth child. And then she put it aside, took her mother’s silver locket from around her neck, and handed it to the doctor as payment for what he had not done.

After he went away, I remember trying to find a way to explain what it had been like when that tree fell, what my father and I had tried to do.

I remember failing.

And so I had held my tongue.

* * *

—

We had