Читать книгу Finding Faith - C. E. Edmonson - Страница 7

THE SHORT TRIP, less than a mile, took nearly twenty minutes to complete. The well-worn springs on the old pickup truck weren’t adequate to the task of negotiating the ruts and the rocks. That was obvious enough. But the road wasn’t adequate, either, and when they encountered another vehicle, a dilapidated Model A Ford, Ben was forced to pull onto an open space beneath an enormous beech tree.

The Model A was driven by a tall man whose brush-cut hair grazed the roof. He waved to Ben as he passed and Ben waved back. This little dance was apparently very common. Still, Faith Covington raised a question.

“What do you do when it’s raining and the road’s muddy?” she asked.

“Depends,” Ben replied.

“On what?”

“Well, if you’re talkin’ about a passin’ storm, folks just stay home ’til the road dries out. Winters, though, are different, what with all the snow we get. And spring, too, when the snow melts. No, winter time, we mostly leave the cars out by the main road and walk in.”

But Faith wasn’t through. Between New York City’s subways and its many buses, the city was up and running every day of the year. That was part of New York’s get-ahead attitude. You never let anything hold you back. Certainly not a narrow road. In New York, there was no such thing.

“What if there’s an emergency? What if someone has a heart attack and you have to call an ambulance? How does the ambulance get to the patient?”

“That can’t happen, honey,” Margaret said, her voice gentle, “because there’s no telephone service. The state hasn’t run the lines yet.”

No telephone? What year are they living in here? Faith wondered. She looked at the poles by the side of the road, at the wires strung between them. Well, at least there must be electricity. We won’t have to sit in the dark. Probably.

They passed a number of small houses, perhaps a dozen in all, as they made their way to the farm. The modest homes were only a couple of hundred yards apart and a number of them appeared to be abandoned. They stood in clearings, often with a garden and a few outbuildings alongside. A few had smoke rising from chimneys. In others, women toiled in the gardens. The women stood to wave as the Chevrolet pickup passed, and to scrutinize Margaret and Faith. In a small community like this, Faith realized, everyone knew everyone else. Her arrival—and her mother’s—came as no surprise.

So, what exactly was expected of Faith Covington? Because there would definitely be expectations, she knew that. It was like switching schools or moving into a new neighborhood. You had to figure out where you fit in with everyone else around you. Not that it was easy... Far from it.

Faith’s thoughts were interrupted when Ben stopped the car and pointed to a dead tree by the side of the road. The tree was still standing, though there wasn’t a speck of green on any of its limbs and its bark was sooty black. Perched on one of the tree’s highest branches, a large owl, perhaps two feet high, stared over the top of the pickup. The owl’s gray head was almost perfectly round and its oddly flattened face appeared to melt back on itself. A series of feathered circles, divided by a hooked beak, lent the bird’s face a sleepy appearance, except for the close-set yellow eyes. Those eyes were entirely awake. Awake and watching.

“The owl has secrets,” Ben said. “If she whispers her secrets in your ear, you can see the future.”

“Please, Ben,” Margaret broke in, “don’t fill her head with that nonsense.” She turned to her daughter. “The Lenape have a story for every occasion. They use stories in place of science.”

“I thought owls were nocturnal,” Faith said, drawing on her own knowledge from science class.

“Some are, but not all,” Ben said. “Some are very active during the day. And some come out when they want to tell you something.”

Margaret shook her head, but nothing more was said.

A few minutes later, they reached their destination: Eva Darkcloud Benton’s home at the end of the road. To Faith, it really was the end of the road. The end of life as she’d known it, at least.

Aunt Eva’s single-story house was bigger than most. A small chicken coop stood in one clearing. A larger building stood midway between a shed and a barn. And Aunt Eva had a garden, surrounded by a head-high fence made of chicken wire, that covered most of an acre.

A tall, stocky woman rose to her feet as they approached. She had a hammer in one hand and clasped a dozen nails in the other. Behind her, the fence had buckled and a section was almost touching the ground.

“Bear came through last night,” Ben explained. “Knocked the fence down. Don’t know why. There’s nothin’ in there to eat, not ’til the crops come in. Reckon that bear was just feelin’ ornery. Don’t like nobody messin’ with his forest.”

Margaret opened the car door. “You listen to Ben,” she said to Faith as they got out, “and you’ll think every animal in the forest is a genius. You’ll think the animals have more politics than Washington, D.C.”

Faith paid no attention to her mother. The woman marching toward them—her Aunt Eva, no doubt—was wearing overalls. Women usually didn’t wear pants. But here came Aunt Eva, gray ponytail swaying, work boots slapping, the top two buttons of her work shirt undone. No makeup, of course, and no hat, no jewelry, no purse. Aunt Eva was a big woman, taller than Faith’s mother, maybe taller even than her father, with wide shoulders and broad hips and a round belly the approximate size and shape of a small watermelon. Though her face and neck were wrinkled and she appeared to be at least in her sixties, there was nothing feeble about her long stride.

“Margaret, welcome,” she said. “And you, too, Faith.”

“Thank you for having us,” Faith said, standing alongside her mother. “I’m pleased to be here.”

“Somehow, I doubt that. But here you are anyway.” Aunt Eva looked Faith over. “Tell me, do you do well in school? Are you smart?”

Faith gave the questions a moment’s thought. In fact, she did very well in school and she did consider herself to be smart. She just couldn’t say it out loud.

“Bragging isn’t polite,” she said.

“Not polite? Indians brag about everything. And why not? Nobody’s gonna brag for you. But I can tell right away that you’re smart and that you know it, too. So listen carefully to what I’m gonna tell you. You’re up here in the middle of nowhere on this rundown Indian farm and you maybe feel like your whole life has fallen apart. But what you need to do is make the best of the situation. You don’t learn from doing the same things over and over again. All you do is get yourself in a rut. But now you have an opportunity to learn, a real opportunity. So, listen close and don’t be too quick to judge.”

Margaret rolled her eyes. “Same old Aunt Eva,” she said. “You might have saved the speech for dinner.”

“Same old Margaret,” Aunt Eva returned. She met Margaret’s eyes momentarily then returned to Faith. “The few summers she spent here, your momma couldn’t wait to get away. Personally, I don’t blame her. Life up here is about hard work and little reward. And I don’t expect you to become an Indian, either. I met your papa once and I know him to be a good man. He’ll find his way before long. He’ll find his way and you’ll be leavin’ soon enough. I’m hopin’ you’ll take what you learn here with you.”

Faith tried to frame some sort of response, something besides, “Yes, ma’am.” But she had no idea what she was supposed to learn and she was still too shocked by Aunt Eva’s general appearance to concentrate on her advice. One thing, though, did strike her. Woman or not, Aunt Eva was in charge.

“I’ll try,” she finally said.

“Good, good. Now you take the rest of the afternoon to settle in. You can work tomorrow. Today, you can explore a bit, but you don’t want to be wanderin’ into the forest. If you’re not friends with the forest, you can get lost real easy. Every year some fool tourist dies in those woods.”

Though Aunt Eva’s last warning rattled her a bit, Faith shook it off. In fact, she felt relieved to discover that the house included running water, a real bathroom, and a kitchen sink. But there was no living room, only a large kitchen with a table and chairs, a refrigerator, and a huge, wood-burning stove.

“Lands, I did grow to hate this stove,” Margaret said. “At first, everything came out either burnt or raw. I couldn’t maintain a constant temperature in the oven.”

“But you learned,” Ben said.

Margaret wasn’t consoled.

“You remember how that thing works?” Aunt Eva asked with a grin.

“I think so. Is the firewood still in the same place?”

“Yep.”

Margaret and Ben led Faith to a small bedroom on the opposite side of the house. There were two narrow beds with iron headboards in the room, a dresser that looked as if it might disintegrate if somebody sneezed too hard, and a single lamp on a small table. Home sweet home.

“You ladies gonna be okay?” Ben asked as he set the luggage down. “’Cause I get to get up on the roof, fix a leak around the chimney. If I don’t get it done ’fore dark, there’ll be grief to pay.”

“We’re fine, Ben,” Margaret said. “You’ve been a dear, as always. Anyway, I’ve got to get the stove going if I’m to help make dinner.”

Faith followed her mother into the kitchen—it seemed all she did was follow—and opened one of the kitchen cabinets. The dishes inside were plain white and many were cracked at the edges, but they were clean and neatly stacked.

“Is this your job?” she asked her mother. “Are you the housekeeper?”

Margaret laughed. “Don’t look so unhappy. We’re not guests here. We’re family. That’s why we’re expected to work. In Indian families, except for the very young and the very old, everyone contributes. Personally, I’d rather take over the cooking and cleaning than work in the garden. I don’t especially care for dirt and digging. Now, you go outside and explore a bit. Aunt Eva was right when she said there was plenty to learn.”

Faith passed the remainder of the afternoon in a daze, her attention wandering from one unfamiliar object to another. Her mind was still jammed with questions, but she didn’t want to bother Aunt Eva or Ben. Aunt Eva was in the garden, turning the earth with a spade. Ben was up on the roof, spreading tar at the junction of the roof and the metal chimney pipe. Margaret gathered wood from a pile heaped against the side of the house.

Faith watched as her mother sliced off small bits of kindling with a hatchet and slid the kindling into a paper bag. Watching her mother cut down the entire tree herself with a pair of sewing scissors wouldn’t have been much weirder. The bag, along with a few larger chunks of wood, went into a wicker basket that Margaret carried to the house.

For a time, Faith settled herself on the stump of a tree felled long ago. She tried counting the growth rings, as Miss Tredway had taught her, but lost count after twenty. She considered fetching a book from her suitcase in the bedroom. Reading is what she usually did when she was alone with time to fill—reading or listening to the radio. But there was no radio here and no comfortable chair to curl up in.

Faith leaned forward, dropped her elbows to her knees, and cupped her chin with her hands. Before her, a dozen chickens prowled the hard-packed yard, scratching at the ground, always on the move. To Faith, their activity seemed random at first, but then she happened to be looking when a red hen snatched an insect from a clump of grass. The hen swallowed the insect in an instant, and then went back to work trying to find another one.

In fact, Faith realized, all the hens were working. What had seemed random to her at first was intensely purposeful. What’s more, the birds remained vigilant throughout, raising and twisting their heads, always on the lookout for danger. Their feathers were a deep red-orange, their small tails a blue so dark that in the shadows they appeared black. A rooster, his much larger tail held proudly aloft, watched over the hens, only occasionally showing any interest in the ground.

As Faith continued to watch, Ben climbed down the ladder. He crossed the yard to a hand pump over a well and washed his hands.

“Aren’t you afraid the chickens will wander away?” Faith asked him.

“You mean wander into the forest?”

“Yes, that they’ll want to become wild again.”

“Miss Faith, every living thing in these parts that eats chickens lives in that forest. And them chickens, they know it.”

“How could they know if they’ve never been in the forest?”

Ben sighed. “Now, see, right there? If I answer that question, I’ll be crossing your momma. She never did care for loose talk about Indian spirits. So, I’m just gonna say that we never had a chicken go wild. They know what they gotta do to survive. Come sundown, when it’s feedin’ time, they’ll go back in the coop on their own.”

Ben retreated to the small barn, carrying the bucket of tar with him. Faith rose from her seat a moment later. With nothing special in mind, except to see what was there, she circled the house. She found a path in the back, well-trodden, that curled between long-needled pine trees in the shadow of a small grove. She took a dozen steps on the path then stopped to look over her shoulder, only to discover that she could no longer see the house. Her first thought was to make like a chicken and dash back the way she’d come, but then, suddenly, her troubles closed in around her.

So much was gone, vanished, as Aunt Eva’s little house had vanished. All her friends, including her best friend, Emma Thornton, were lost to her, almost as if they’d never existed in the first place. Schuyler Academy was the only school she had ever known, a refuge from the teeming public schools. She would never return there, she knew that—even if her father managed to find a job. Her home, too, would be repossessed in a few days, repossessed and sold to someone else. Faith had explored every inch of its three stories, had made a nest—a reading nook—for herself in the attic, had overcome her fear of the dark in its windowless basement.

All her life, Faith had felt safe and protected. One day ran into another and the months and years built upon themselves, forming a clear, clean path from baby to adult. She’d never dreamed, not in her worst nightmare, that her safety could suddenly be taken from her. And now what? Would she spend the rest of her life digging around in the dirt? Aunt Eva’s so-called farm was no more than a grubby homestead hacked out of a dark, impenetrable forest. What was it Ben said? Everything that eats chickens lives out in those woods? And Aunt Eva, too. Every year, she’d claimed, some tourist got lost in the forest and didn’t come back.

Faith thought about retracing her steps. But there was nothing behind her that she wanted to see. Maybe she’d be better off wandering into the woods, just another foolhardy tourist. Hesitantly at first, then faster, she continued along the well-worn path, thinking she was headed into the forest. But then, just a few seconds later, she found herself on the edge of the expanse of Wildwood Lake.

Faith scanned the shoreline, but couldn’t find a single house. The only sign of human life was a canoe pulled up between some rocks. The life of the lake, on the other hand, was obvious at a glance. Six little turtles had arranged themselves in a line on what remained of a tree that had fallen into the water. A small island, thirty feet from where she stood, supported a mound of dried mud from which dozens of tree branches protruded. Faith recognized the mound for what it was, another legacy from Miss Tredway’s natural sciences class. She was looking at a beaver lodge.

Most of all, there were the waterfowl, including the familiar geese, and mallards, too, with their iridescent, blue-green necks and chestnut wings. Faith had seen mallards on the lake in Central Park many times. But there were other species swimming on this lake. The first to catch her attention was a cluster of small birds with starkly divided black and white heads. Then she turned to a group of four birds with long, orange crests. Each of them swam alongside smaller birds with dark blue heads and white bodies. Mated pairs, Faith assumed, going about their business.

But that’s what all the birds were doing. Though some appeared to be resting while others dove beneath the water in search of food, every single one of them was going about the business of survival. Were they at the end of a long migration from some warm southern state? or did they have further to go, maybe all the way to Canada, perhaps even above the Arctic Circle? And what had they endured? How many times had they flown through heavy storms, or fought high winds, or been shot at by hunters, or attacked by hawks? They couldn’t complain, of course, or even imagine that things might be different.

They could only accept the hardships that came their way and carry on.