The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(32)

“No, Mommy. It was Tinkerbell. And we gotta go get her.”

I stood up from the bed, rattled to the core. I wasn’t going up on that mountain. And certainly not to hunt for a dog I knew full well I’d never find.

“Time to go to sleep now,” I said.

“But, Mommy . . .”

I stooped for a quick kiss to her cheek, then switched off the table lamp.

“Good night.”





Bee in a Thunderstorm





Not long after Laurel told me about Tinkerbell, Jessie said a few ladies from town would arrive the next morning—they were holding a bee to finish up a wedding quilt for the local schoolteacher. She invited me to join them, and pressed till I felt no choice but to accept. She looked pleased when I did.

“It’ll be fine weather for it,” she said. “These old bones know.”

Olin was behind her at the dining room table playing dominoes with Laurel. He looked up at me and winked.


*

Early the next morning came a menacing rumble. I glanced out my bedroom window to see heavy clouds crowding in from the east. A gust of wind lashed the bedroom curtains. You could smell the storm brewing.

Wooden deck chairs already sat under the oak tree, arranged in a tight circle that Olin had set up the night before at Jessie’s instruction. But it seemed the ladies were about to get rained out.

Then I noticed Jessie in the vegetable garden below, standing between rows of tomato plants. Her hands were on her hips and she was glaring. She raised the skirt of her apron and waved it, the way she does to chase off a stray hen.

“Shoo, now! Shoo!”

But there was no hen in sight, and Jessie wasn’t looking down, but up—up at the storm clouds.

Another rumble, a louder volley than before. She shook her head and retreated back inside.

We didn’t eat breakfast at the outside trestle table, but at the little oak one in the kitchen—all but Olin, who said he had business in the fields.

He’d been outside all morning, but had been vague about where or why. Earlier, I’d spotted him off in the distance—as still and straight as a soldier at inspection, far outside his fieldstone fence. He had faced east, too, just like Jessie.

I almost called out to him then, but something stopped me. Somehow it felt like an intrusion. Now here he was again, running off.

Another battery of thunder; the storm was drawing nigh.

“A pity about your bee,” I told Jessie. “You could always bring it inside.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “We always have it outside. Never you mind.”

The ladies arrived soon after breakfast. Liz LaGow was dark and sturdy—not tall, but vigorous. She was carrying a thick bundle wrapped in cloth and trussed with twine. Her dark, probing eyes took me in from ponytail to sandals. I knew she and her husband owned the general store. She arrived with her sister, Molly Knox, who was taller than Liz, and slimmer, with finer features. She had a coil of brunette braid at the crown of her head and eyes that were less penetrating than her sister’s. Molly owned the hotel in town.

Like Jessie, the sisters wore simple belted dresses hemmed a prim distance below the knee. I couldn’t get a handle on how old they might be—they seemed ageless, but had the same bold energy as Jessie. For some reason, I could clearly picture the three of them marching hundreds of miles alongside Conestoga wagons, raising children on hardscrabble farms on the frontier.

The teacher, though, was altogether different. Bree Wythe was younger than I—petite and lively in jeans and a sleeveless blouse of coral silk. She wore a string of small turquoise nuggets around her neck. Her hair was ash blond, styled to her shoulders. Her smile was warm as she took my hand.

“I’m so happy to meet you,” she said in a voice with slight Southern notes. She linked her arm through mine as we followed the others through the house toward the back door. “Thanks for helping on the quilt—I don’t know about you, but I’ve never finished a stitch in my life.”

We stopped just inside the kitchen, where Jessie and the sisters stood at the open doorway to the backyard, staring at a bank of black clouds that now nearly eclipsed the sky. Wind whipped the branches of the old oak. Lightning crackled; thunder growled.

The three women exchanged grim looks, then without a word forged ahead into the yard. The wind smacked their long skirts about their legs and tore at their hair, pulling it loose from buns and braids.