Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,98

to stay, at least for a while, that she’d made some promises and vowed to keep them.

“When I told her I was going to try to make mandolins like my daddy did, she started to cry,” he said as we made up Cate’s bed in clean sheets.

I didn’t blame her one bit for that. “Maybe now she won’t mind you learning to read or how to make a poultice.”

“I just hope I remember enough from watching my father,” he said as he scooped cold ashes from the hearth. “Otherwise, there’s no one to teach me how to make a mandolin.”

“You’ll remember,” I said. “And you’ll learn as you go.”

“You sound like Cate,” he said.

“And my father.”

“And mine, too,” Larkin said, while his father’s tools watched us, their heavy, black hearts beating a little more quickly at the idea that they would soon be put to use again.

Chapter Seventy-Three

As I helped my mother grind corn the next day, she said, “I’ve changed my mind, Ellie.”

I thought she was talking about making corn bread instead of corn cakes, or when it would be best to help Cate move back up-mountain, or almost anything except what she said next.

She gave me a small, sad smile. “Quiet can stay.”

I let out a breath I’d been holding for a long time. Since even before Quiet had been born. “And the others?”

She turned back to her work. “We’ll see.”

And I knew what she meant. If my father got well enough, fast enough, to manage a passel of dogs. To do without Mr. Anderson’s milk cow.

We couldn’t know any of those things. Not yet.

But there were some things I did know.

That Quiet was mine. And I was his. And there, right there grinding cornmeal, close enough so I could touch her, was the mother I had missed. Who’d been coming back to me, bit by bit, over these past few difficult, wonderful days. And was all that much closer, now, because I’d met her halfway.

* * *

—

When we finished with the corn and cleaned up the mess, my mother said, “Cate’s not ready to go home yet, but I think we can move her now.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “To your bed, perhaps?” I’d continued to sleep in the shed with Maisie and the puppies while my mother gave her own place to Cate, and I hadn’t minded one bit. So I nodded, smiling at the thought of Cate and Samuel and Esther all sharing a room, telling stories by lantern light.

It was easy to move Cate from one room to another, carefully, slowly, with Captan dancing alongside and Samuel in the lead, chattering about a dog army in which Captan was a captain and Quiet was a general and Maisie was a lieutenant, until we all told him to hush and get out of the way.

I was the one to go back for Cate’s pillow. So I was alone with my father for the first time since he’d woken up.

“Ellie,” he said, as I turned toward the door with the pillow in my arms.

When I looked back, ready to fetch him something, to give him some water . . . whatever it was he wanted . . . he gave me something that I wanted, instead.

“Ellie,” he said, softly. “I do remember.”

I went to stand close to him. “What do you remember?”

He took my hand. “That day. The day the tree fell.”

At first, I thought he meant that the memory had finally surfaced. And I said so.

“No,” he replied. “I always remembered. As soon as I woke up all the way, I remembered all of it.”

And I remembered how Esther had told him about the accident and how he had looked at me—straight at me—and said, “Not Ellie.” How I had heard, in those two words, everything I needed to hear.

“I wish you could have been with me these past weeks,” I whispered. “To watch what happened.” Though much of it would have been different, had he been well.

My father smiled at me, his eyes full of sun in the shadowy room. “I see it all very clearly,” he said. “I see it in every bit of the girl you’ve become.”

* * *

—

Quiet was waiting for me when I went out into the sunshine later that day.

He had managed to find his way into the yard while Maisie was busy with the other pups, their eyes open now, too.

I found him watching an ant make its way up a blade of grass.

When he felt my shadow, he turned toward me, his little tail wagging, his tongue like the tip of a pink ribbon.

“Oh, what a fine present you are,” I said, scooping him up and rubbing his nose with mine. “What a boy. What a good little Quiet you are.”

And I realized, then, that Quiet wasn’t the first person I had saved.

Or the last.

Captan, coming up the path from below, stopped at the sight of us and then came on again, more quickly.

He had taken to spending most of his time near the cabin door, no longer welcome inside, but patient about that.

No more howling. Still, though, the occasional bark and a certain amount of singing, as if he had something to say. To which I always listened.

And I did now, as he came to me and crooned for Quiet.

Some father dogs could be unkind to their pups, but not Captan.

When I put Quiet on the ground, Captan licked him with his big, rough tongue. To clean him, yes, but to kiss him, too.

And I knew again that doing one thing was doing everything.

* * *

—

I knew the same thing, all over again, later that day, when we led my father and Cate out to sit in the afternoon sun and take another step toward well.

They had become friends as they’d healed, side by side, and even better friends when they both grew strong enough to do small chores together at the kitchen table, and to help us with our lessons, all the while talking about their lives on Echo Mountain.

“You’re lucky to have a girl like Ellie,” Cate said as I settled them in the chairs we’d brought out to the yard, one facing down-mountain, one facing up, so they faced each other.

“We are,” he said, smiling at me.

And I was lucky, too, when I left them to their conversation and went into the woodshed to lay fresh straw for the puppies, only to find the stool not where I had left it but just there, by the high shelf where I kept my small treasures.

And I was lucky when I stepped up on the stool and found not ten carvings waiting where I’d left them, but eleven now.

A new one, right next to the one that looked like me.

This one was of a boy. Tall. Lean. With hair like a bear’s fur, and a face with so much music in it that I laughed out loud.

And climbed down from the stool.

And went out into the trees to find him.

And did.