Fire Along the Sky Read Online Free PDF

ledger in which he had logged his daily work: treatments, patients seen, raw materials ordered from Albany and New-York City and beyond, experiments he had undertaken and the results they had produced. All neat, well ordered and full of Richard's dry observations.

    June 4 1808. Set right tibula on the youngest Ratz boy. Subject healthy if dull-witted ten-year-old; clean break; no tearing to the muscle or ligaments; prognosis good if he can be kept out of trees.

    Curiosity had come along to keep Hannah company while she read. She sat near the door in the light from the single window, snapping beans in a bowl in her lap.
    “Richard has been away a long time,” Hannah noted; the last entry in the daybook was six months old.
    “Wouldn't care if he never did come home,” Curiosity said, her temper flaring again. “If it weren't for missing Ethan. I wish he'd leave the boy here with me. He won't ever make no doctor and everybody know it. Richard best of all.”
    “Ethan is hardly a boy anymore,” Hannah pointed out. “He's nineteen.”
    “Of course he a boy.” Curiosity poked into the bowl, fished an earwig out with two long fingers to crush it under her heel. “He tender at heart like a boy, our Ethan, and he always will be. I'm hoping that now that you come home they'll listen to reason, the two of them.”
    Hannah looked up from a copy of a letter Richard had written to a chemical warehouse in London, requesting a list of things that were unfamiliar to her. A strange prickling on the back of her neck: interest in things she thought she had left behind, curiosity, irritation that those impulses she thought dead could twitch to life without warning or bidding.
    Curiosity was watching her, eyes narrowed. Hannah cleared her mind and closed the daybook.
    She said, “Curiosity, what makes you think Richard will listen to me? He never did before.”
    For a good while there was no sound but the rapid-fire crack-crack-crack of bean pods while Hannah studied Curiosity and waited for an answer.
    Of all the things Hannah had feared about coming home she had been most worried that she would find Curiosity gone. She should be, at almost eighty with a hard life behind her. But Curiosity was as steady and constant as the river itself, if bowed a little by the years. There were new sorrows etched into her face: she had lost her good husband to a stroke, a grandson to a brain fever, a daughter and granddaughter on the same day to a runaway horse and sleigh; and her only son was someplace in the west, fighting a battle that could not be won.
    If he was alive at all.
    But Curiosity's spirit was undaunted and her energy undiminished; the very nearness of her was a comfort.
    Hannah had been home for weeks now, and while all the others were growing less and less able to keep their questions to themselves, Curiosity seemed content to wait until Hannah was ready to talk, if it took a year or ten years or never came at all.
    Somewhere in the pines that ringed the clearing a kinglet was calling in a thin high
seet-seet-seet;
she heard kestrels and blackbirds and the soft, gentle song of a hermit thrush as sweet as the lullabies her grandmother Cora had sung to her as a child. In another month the birds would be gone south; they would pull the summer light along behind them like a bridal train. In two months the trees where they built their nests would be gravid with snow. Half-Moon Lake and the lake under the falls would freeze and beneath the ice, water without color would pulse and throb.
    A sound bubbled up from deep in her throat and she swallowed it back down again.
    How can you fear anything at all after the battle of Kettippecannunk?
    In her mind Hannah could hear her husband's voice as clearly as the kestrel's. If she answered Strikes-the-Sky, if she reacted to his tone—calm and teasing all at once—he would be with her for the rest of the day. He would argue with her for hours and take great pleasure in it, if she let him. The