“Yes. Now go find your papa and see if he needs help feeding the animals. Bring in the eggs, too. We’ll need them for the cookies. And, Gertie?” she says, turning my face so that I’m looking right at her. Her eyes are bright and sparkly, like fish in a stream. “Don’t mention your dream to him. Or anything about the winter people. He wouldn’t understand.”
I nod real big and leap to the floor. Today I’m a jungle animal. A lion or a tiger. Something with sharp teeth and claws that lives in a place far across the ocean where it’s hot all the time. Miss Delilah showed us a picture book of all the animals Noah took with him on the ark: horses and oxen, giraffes and elephants. My favorites were the big cats. I bet they can walk real quiet, sneak around at night, just like me.
“Grrr,” I snarl, pawing my way out of the room. “Look out, Papa. Here comes the biggest cat in the jungle. Big enough to eat you up, bones and all.”
Martin
January 12, 1908
Martin had known Sara all his life. Her people came from the farm on the outskirts of town, out by the ridge. The Devil’s Hand, people called it, the ledge of rock that stuck up out of the ground like a giant hand, fingers rising from the earth. Haunted land, people said. A place where monsters dwelled. The soil was no good, all clay and rocks, but the Harrisons eked out a living, trading the few things they could coax out of the ground—potatoes, turnips—for flour and sugar in town. The Harrisons were thin, almost skeletal, with dark eyes and hair, but Sara was different somehow—her hair auburn when the sun hit it; her coppery eyes danced with light rather than shadow. She seemed otherworldly to Martin, a siren or a selkie—a creature he’d read about in storybooks but never imagined might be real.
Sara’s mother had died when she was born. It was just old Joseph Harrison caring for Sara and her older brother and sister, alone. But folks said he once had a woman who came around. She’d done the laundry, cooked the meals, nursed the children. People even said she’d bedded down with Joseph Harrison, lived with him for a time like a wife. She was an Indian woman who rarely spoke and wore clothes made from animal skins—that’s what people said. Some said that she was half animal herself: that she had the power to transform into a bear or a deer. Martin remembered hearing about her from his own father; he said she used to live in a cabin up beyond the Devil’s Hand, and people from town would go to see her when someone took sick. “When the doctor couldn’t help, you went to her.”
Something had happened to her—an accident? a drowning? Something had happened around the time Sara’s brother died. Martin couldn’t recall the details, and when he asked Sara about it after they were married, she shook her head, told him he must be mistaken.
“The stories you heard, they’re just stories. People in town love their stories, you know that as well as I do. It was just Father, Constance, Jacob, and I. There was no woman in the woods.”
Back in grammar school, Martin had been shooting marbles with a group of boys in the schoolyard. His older brother, Lucius, was there, furious because Martin had just won his favorite marble after knocking it out of the ring: a beautiful orange aggie that Lucius had named Jupiter. Martin was holding up his prize, thinking about the orbits of planets, when Sara Harrison came sauntering over, her bright eyes glittering and catching the light much like his new marble. She looked so startlingly beautiful to him then that he did the only thing he could think of—he handed her the marble.
“No!” Lucius shrieked, but it was too late. Sara tightened her fingers around it and smiled.
“Martin Shea, you are the one I shall marry,” she said.
Lucius snorted with laughter. “You’re mad, Sara Harrison.”
But Sara had said the words with such sureness, such conviction, that Martin never doubted the truth of them, even though he’d laughed at the time, surrounded by his friends and his brother, as if she’d told a joke. And it did feel like a joke, that a girl as pretty as she would choose Martin.
He’d been an odd boy—arms too long for his sleeves, face always stuck in a book like The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He longed for adventure and believed he had the heart of a hero. Unfortunately, there were no pirates to battle in West Hall, no shipwrecks to survive. Only the endless monotony of chores on the family farm: cows that needed milking, hay that needed to be cut. One day, he promised himself, he’d leave it all behind—he was destined for bigger things than being a farmer. Until then, he was just biding his time. He did poorly in school, daydreaming when he should have been studying, while his brother, Lucius, got top marks in the class. Lucius was stronger, faster, braver, even better-looking. Lucius was the one all the girls dreamed of marrying one day. So what, then, did Sara Harrison see in Martin?