Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 41

Louisa Boddy sank down in her chair by the window for a moment, just long enough to catch her breath. She watched the goose swing around in a half circle out over the lake, dropping down toward the water’s edge until it just let go and settled. Once it hit the water, it folded its wings tidily onto its back.

“You’re late!” she announced, thinking of the storm of last week.

“What’s that you said?” Her daughter looked up from her mending.

“Nothing,” she said. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Who then?” Kate asked, smiling at her mother’s absentmindedness.

“That goose out there. She shouldn’t be here! At least not so late. She’s going to be left behind for the winter if she doesn’t hurry up!” The freezing had just commenced in their northeastern bay of lakewater, and the bird could still negotiate its way between fingers of ice that reached out here and there from the shore.

Her daughter didn’t respond but turned back to her work, not bothering to stop smiling. Louisa Boddy knew what she was thinking: that being out here alone had gotten to her. Now she would even talk to a goose.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Mrs. Boddy said. “Not until the goose starts answering back.

She turned in her chair and looked out the north-facing window, leaving the goose to solve its own problems. She was welcome to stay here and freeze with them, get trapped in the ice if she wanted. The woman was relieved that her husband and son-in-law and the boys were not yet in sight. They must still be up in the woods working. It would take them twenty minutes or more to get back down the track to the house, and she would be able to see them coming the whole time. Soon enough then to set the dinner on the table. But for now, there was no sign of them.

They should all fly south, she supposed, but she didn’t want to mention it. No point in reminding her daughter that she would soon want to be off with her Nicholas, setting up things for themselves. Maybe if nothing got said about their going the youngsters would see their way clear to stay here, get their names on the land-lists for something nearby. Maybe over by Henry Miller’s.

It was more than she would let herself hope for. Another disappointment to face if it didn’t come true, which it wouldn’t. Things did tend to be like that, didn’t they? Well, then, that was all right, too. Not much point wishing for the children to sink roots here when she couldn’t be sure how long William would stay put, couldn’t tell when that burr under his saddle would start him kicking to be loose again.

She had thought the rising lake waters might have floated him free, but they hadn’t. He had just salvaged what he could of their original cabin and relocated to higher ground and set up again. The new window -- real glass, not just oilskin -- was his way of saying it wasn’t time yet. They would still hang on here a while. It was as if the rising lake waters trying to drive him on again had just bowed his neck, made him stubborn.

It was far from Australia. Between here and there, she had reason to know, was this lake, then more mountains than she would care to traverse again, then the coastal schooner to San Francisco, then the wide, wide sea stretching over the horizon past Hawaii, beyond all reckoning of time and distance to home. To once-home, but no longer. She figured she could never find her way back there again.

She had prayed a long while for the heat in William’s head to burn itself out so they could finally stop roaming. What a strange way to answer prayers, to have it happen here, in this wild and beautiful and god-forsaken place with so few about, no real neighbors to speak of, only women enough to use up a hand’s worth of fingers, should she count them. She regarded the red and swollen knuckles as her hands cradled one another in her lap. She had prayed for William to stop, and he had done it. Now, when she was tempted to pray to keep her daughter near her, she was afraid to let herself do it, for fear she would be answered without knowing the consequences again.

The goose, which had steered itself out of sight, came back into view, gliding out from the tules and down toward the point, dabbling its beak in the water as it went, avoiding the ice, in no particular hurry to go anywhere.

“Well, Mrs. Schirra,” Louisa Boddy said to her daughter, shaking off her thoughts and pushing herself onto her feet, “Look at me sitting here and dreaming! They’ll be coming. And there’s dinner to think on, isn’t there?”