Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,85

his arms.

“What’s that she said?” Samuel whispered.

“That was Gaelic,” I said, my throat tight. “It means ‘Good health to you and every blessing.’”

“Come along now,” my mother said, herding everyone toward the door. “Let’s let her work.”

When I turned to follow, Cate said, “Not you,” and we all turned back.

She beckoned to me. “Not you,” she said. “You stay.”

Chapter Sixty-Four

When everyone else had left, Cate and I looked at each other for a long time without saying a word.

From beyond the bedroom door, I could hear Samuel yammering away, my mother answering him softly.

Then, from the near distance, came a long, lingering howl.

It was as mournful and wild as any coyote I’d ever heard, but I recognized the voice. And I imagined little Quiet nearby in the woodshed, hearing his father for the first time.

“Oh Captan, my Captan,” Cate whispered.

Then a second howl, longer and louder than the first.

I listened to it with every kind of ear I had. “What does that mean?”

“My boy is calling me,” she said, her tears starting again.

But I knew what the howl meant. “His name, I meant. Captan. Without an i. What does that mean?”

“Ah,” she said. “I was wondering when you’d ask that. It means ‘song.’ In the old language of my family, it means song.”

An apt name for the dog of a luthier with Gaelic blood in his veins.

“But you know, Ellie . . . and I haven’t thought of this in a long time . . . there’s a book up in my cabin, something called Girls Who Became Famous . . . about, among others, a girl named Florence Nightingale. Do you know who she was?”

“I don’t.” And I didn’t see what that had to do with Captan’s name, either.

“She was a nurse. Maybe the most famous nurse, though there aren’t that many famous nurses.” She closed one eye. “Can’t think of a second one, to tell you the truth, and I should know.” She opened her eye again. “Her first patient was a sheepdog whose master meant to hang him, over a broken leg.” At the look on my face, she said, “Oh, not because he was mean. The thought of hanging that dog brought him to his knees. But because the dog was in such misery, you see.”

And I did see that. I saw it clearly. Though I was still waiting to see what any of this had to do with Captan.

“Miss Florence Nightingale, who was not yet a nurse . . . or didn’t yet know she was a nurse . . . loved animals so much that she decided the dog mustn’t hang. And, in the end, he didn’t. Because she brought in a doctor, and the broken leg turned out to be a bruised leg, nothing more, which healed rather quickly when Florence dressed it with warm compresses.”

Cate looked at me expectantly.

“That’s a nice story,” I said.

“Isn’t it, though?”

She waited.

“But what does it have to do with Captan and his name?”

At which Cate smiled, though she was weary and worn and feverish and hurt. “His name was Cap. The sheepdog. His name was Cap, too, though I learned it long after I’d named Captan.”

I smiled, too. “I like that.”

She nodded. “Sometimes things seem to happen out of order, or in an order of their own, but they make perfect sense if you don’t worry too much about how they ought to line up.”

We both spent a moment pondering that.

“And why do you always say ‘Oh Captan, my Captan’?”

Cate sighed sadly. “It’s from a poem about a great man dying. Only in that case it was Captain. With an i.”

I thought about that. “Do you think you’ll ever feel better?”

Cate wiped the tears off her face. “Ever,” she said. “Such a word.”

But I didn’t want to think about what she was saying. That ever, for her, might not be a long time, even if she got well.

Thinking about that would do me no good.

Do her no good.

Wouldn’t help my father at all.

“Not your leg,” I said. “I mean you.”

She sighed. “I know what you mean.”

“I’m sorry,” my mother said, opening the door. “But he wouldn’t go with Larkin, and—”

“Oh, there he is,” Cate said as Captan barged into the room and went immediately to lay his head in her lap. “There’s my good boy.”

She sounded like I did. “Can Quiet come in, too?” I asked my mother.

“Well, I don’t know if—”

“Captan won’t hurt him,” Cate said. “I can promise you that.”

So my mother sent Samuel, who