Tsuga's Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

moving. He looked, and was shocked to see that the old woman stared brightly into his eyes.
    She was speaking to him! Her arm was raised, her hand limp at the end of her wrist, limply falling. Her hand reminded him of something, of the picture of a hand. Yes! He remembered that on the cover of one of the boxes was a hand delicately poised like that. He found the box with the hand on it and took it to the old woman.
    She nodded, her polished, cracked old face unmoving but her eyes bright. She raised her arms and her hands began to move quickly, up and down, back and forth, her crippled old fingers moving too. He couldn’t understand anything of what she was trying to say, and he felt hopeless again. But a strange thing happened, little by little. He would never know how it happened, but he began to understand everything; her gestures that a minute before were nothing but the meaningless twitches of an old woman’s arms and hands suddenly began to mean water, box, powder, cup. Other movements suddenly meant open, pour, heat, stir, and finally all the different kinds of words—words for things and words for doing—came together almost as easily as the words he had spoken all his life.
    When the old woman stopped speaking she nodded three times and he nodded three times back, then began his preparations. Jen and Eugenia watched in wonderment as he put just so much of the brown powder from the box with the hand on it into a large cup. He added hot water from the water pot that hung over the fire, added a pinch of kinnikinic and a pinch of glasswort and stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon. He got down from the shelf the two kinds of mushrooms they hadn’t dared to eat before—the yellow ones and the red ones. They were dried out, now, and he put them together in the mortar and with the pestle ground them into a fine powder.
    “But what are you going to do with those things, Arn?” Eugenia asked. “They may be dangerous!”
    “I’m making medicine for Dad,” Arn said, pouring the ground mushrooms into the steaming cup.
    “No!” Eugenia said. “It might be poison! We don’t know what those things are!”
    “Are you sure, Arn?” Jen said.
    “No, I’m not exactly sure,” Arn said, “but I feel this is the right thing to do.” Eugenia, who knew that her husband was getting worse and worse, that he might die, finally saw that though it was a desperate thing to try what was unknown to them, they had to do it.
    When the cup had been prepared according to the old woman’s directions, Arn propped his father’s head up in his arm and held the strange steaming broth to his lips. The steam was orange-yellow, almost as thick as liquid; Arn could see it entering his father’s nose when he took his short breaths. Soon the breaths became longer, as more of the steam entered his father’s body, longer and more easy. He could feel his father’s neck begin to loosen and relax against his arm. Some color came back, little by little, into his father’s face.
    Finally Tim Hemlock’s eyes half opened. Arn held the cup to his lips and he drank the brownish broth. When he had drunk it all his eyes closed again and he slept deeply—far too deeply for their voices to follow him. But it was at least a sleep of longer breaths.
    They turned to thank the old woman as best they could. All winter she had been there in her place on the wooden bench. Every day the brown, silent presence was there.
    But now she was gone.
    They couldn’t believe it. They looked again, blinking their eyes. But she was gone, all except for a pair of neat, short deerskin moccasins that sat side by side where her feet had been.
    “But she couldn’t go out in this cold without her moccasins,” Jen cried. She went to the door, but all she saw was the blue ice, the air so cold it made her nostrils close when she tried to breathe. The ice was lower in the path to the barn, but everywhere it was rolling, slippery, blue-white ice, with not a sign of the old