The Endless Forest Read Free

loops inside the cuffs of each moccasin, another, larger and double-sided, in a sheath on his left hip. Two short-handled hatchets, one he inherited from his grandfather and the other made to his specifications, he tucks under the wide belt to lie along his spine.
    Today or tomorrow or the day after, his sister will come home. His twin, who has been gone very long, who he has missed every day. She is coming with her husband, but not quite soon enough. The hundred-year rain has beat them home.

3

    W hen the clock in the hall struck seven, Birdie roused herself out of bed, dressed in the dark very quietly so as not to wake her nieces, and went downstairs to Curiosity Freeman’s kitchen. She might have slept another half hour but for excitement: by Birdie’s calculations, her parents and sister Lily and good-brother Simon should have been back from the city three days ago. They would surely be home today.
    She paused in the doorway and waited for her eyes to adjust to the brightness of firelight reflecting off polished copper and pewter. “Little girl. Come on over here.” Curiosity was sitting at the long table, a tray of breakfast biscuits just out of the oven in front of her. When she smiled there was nothing halfway about it. At almost ninety she was proud to still have every one of her teeth, strong and white. Between the bleached linen of her head wrap and her smile, Curiosity’s skin was as wrinkled and dark as an apple left to dry out to a sweet smelling husk.
    “Bring me that plate of ham while you at it, would you?”
    She was tying up a napkin of biscuits, which meant somebody couldn’t wait for breakfast but would have to eat when time permitted,someplace out in the weather. Most likely it would be Birdie’s oldest sister.
    “Hannah?”
    Curiosity nodded. “Missus Rountree in travail.”
    “Who brought word?”
    “Why, your brother Daniel. The teacher his very own self.”
    This idea was so odd that for a moment Birdie couldn’t make sense of it. Right now Daniel should be on his way from his little house on Hidden Wolf to the school, where he always arrived by quarter past seven at the very latest. But Daniel was running errands and bringing messages.
    Curiosity was saying, “Missus Rountree got a good set of hips on her, I doubt she’ll have much trouble though it is her first.”
    Birdie found herself staring out the window at the rain, and feeling suddenly sleepy again. The kitchen smelled of brewing tea and ham and fresh bread and it was warm, as familiar and comfortable as Birdie’s mother’s own kitchen. As she buttered biscuits and stacked them, she let herself be lulled by the familiar noises: Anje humming under her breath, the crackle of the fire, the soft creak that the cradle made as Curiosity rocked it with her foot. Birdie glanced down at the round face of her youngest nephew and saw that he was watching her too, content for the moment with the sound of their voices. Simon’s eyes were the startling green-blue of spring lichen, a gift Ben Savard had settled on all three boys but neither of his daughters, whose eyes were hazel.
    Nature ain’t got no interest in playing fair
. Another of Curiosity’s many sayings that were true but shouldn’t be.
    Outsiders saw the household as odd, and in fact it had a reputation that reached to Albany and down the Hudson in one direction and to Quebec in the other. Once in a while a stranger came through and knocked on the door out of pure nosiness and bad manners, wanting to see the old black woman who had started her life as a slave and ended up with land and property of her own. And was it true she had a half-Mohawk woman who claimed to be a trained doctor living with her in the house, and a dozen children with skin the color of deep red clay? The rumor said that the only white faces in the household belonged to the maidservants. And if that wasn’t a backwards picture, Birdie had heard a tinker say to his horse, then what was?
    It
was
an