Finding Faith. C. E. Edmonson

followed her mother into the kitchen—it seemed all she did was follow—and opened one of the kitchen cabinets. The dishes inside were plain white and many were cracked at the edges, but they were clean and neatly stacked.

      “Is this your job?” she asked her mother. “Are you the housekeeper?”

      Margaret laughed. “Don’t look so unhappy. We’re not guests here. We’re family. That’s why we’re expected to work. In Indian families, except for the very young and the very old, everyone contributes. Personally, I’d rather take over the cooking and cleaning than work in the garden. I don’t especially care for dirt and digging. Now, you go outside and explore a bit. Aunt Eva was right when she said there was plenty to learn.”

      Faith passed the remainder of the afternoon in a daze, her attention wandering from one unfamiliar object to another. Her mind was still jammed with questions, but she didn’t want to bother Aunt Eva or Ben. Aunt Eva was in the garden, turning the earth with a spade. Ben was up on the roof, spreading tar at the junction of the roof and the metal chimney pipe. Margaret gathered wood from a pile heaped against the side of the house.

      Faith watched as her mother sliced off small bits of kindling with a hatchet and slid the kindling into a paper bag. Watching her mother cut down the entire tree herself with a pair of sewing scissors wouldn’t have been much weirder. The bag, along with a few larger chunks of wood, went into a wicker basket that Margaret carried to the house.

      For a time, Faith settled herself on the stump of a tree felled long ago. She tried counting the growth rings, as Miss Tredway had taught her, but lost count after twenty. She considered fetching a book from her suitcase in the bedroom. Reading is what she usually did when she was alone with time to fill—reading or listening to the radio. But there was no radio here and no comfortable chair to curl up in.

      Faith leaned forward, dropped her elbows to her knees, and cupped her chin with her hands. Before her, a dozen chickens prowled the hard-packed yard, scratching at the ground, always on the move. To Faith, their activity seemed random at first, but then she happened to be looking when a red hen snatched an insect from a clump of grass. The hen swallowed the insect in an instant, and then went back to work trying to find another one.

      In fact, Faith realized, all the hens were working. What had seemed random to her at first was intensely purposeful. What’s more, the birds remained vigilant throughout, raising and twisting their heads, always on the lookout for danger. Their feathers were a deep red-orange, their small tails a blue so dark that in the shadows they appeared black. A rooster, his much larger tail held proudly aloft, watched over the hens, only occasionally showing any interest in the ground.

      As Faith continued to watch, Ben climbed down the ladder. He crossed the yard to a hand pump over a well and washed his hands.

      “Aren’t you afraid the chickens will wander away?” Faith asked him.

      “You mean wander into the forest?”

      “Yes, that they’ll want to become wild again.”

      “Miss Faith, every living thing in these parts that eats chickens lives in that forest. And them chickens, they know it.”

      “How could they know if they’ve never been in the forest?”

      Ben sighed. “Now, see, right there? If I answer that question, I’ll be crossing your momma. She never did care for loose talk about Indian spirits. So, I’m just gonna say that we never had a chicken go wild. They know what they gotta do to survive. Come sundown, when it’s feedin’ time, they’ll go back in the coop on their own.”

      Ben retreated to the small barn, carrying the bucket of tar with him. Faith rose from her seat a moment later. With nothing special in mind, except to see what was there, she circled the house. She found a path in the back, well-trodden, that curled between long-needled pine trees in the shadow of a small grove. She took a dozen steps on the path then stopped to look over her shoulder, only to discover that she could no longer see the house. Her first thought was to make like a chicken and dash back the way she’d come, but then, suddenly, her troubles closed in around her.

      So much was gone, vanished, as Aunt Eva’s little house had vanished. All her friends, including her best friend, Emma Thornton, were lost to her, almost as if they’d never existed in the first place. Schuyler Academy was the only school she had ever known, a refuge from the teeming public schools. She would never return there, she knew that—even if her father managed to find a job. Her home, too, would be repossessed in a few days, repossessed and sold to someone else. Faith had explored every inch of its three stories, had made a nest—a reading nook—for herself in the attic, had overcome her fear of the dark in its windowless basement.

      All her life, Faith had felt safe and protected. One day ran into another and the months and years built upon themselves, forming a clear, clean path from baby to adult. She’d never dreamed, not in her worst nightmare, that her safety could suddenly be taken from her. And now what? Would she spend the rest of her life digging around in the dirt? Aunt Eva’s so-called farm was no more than a grubby homestead hacked out of a dark, impenetrable forest. What was it Ben said? Everything that eats chickens lives out in those woods? And Aunt Eva, too. Every year, she’d claimed, some tourist got lost in the forest and didn’t come back.

      Faith thought about retracing her steps. But there was nothing behind her that she wanted to see. Maybe she’d be better off wandering into the woods, just another foolhardy tourist. Hesitantly at first, then faster, she continued along the well-worn path, thinking she was headed into the forest. But then, just a few seconds later, she found herself on the edge of the expanse of Wildwood Lake.

      Faith scanned the shoreline, but couldn’t find a single house. The only sign of human life was a canoe pulled up between some rocks. The life of the lake, on the other hand, was obvious at a glance. Six little turtles had arranged themselves in a line on what remained of a tree that had fallen into the water. A small island, thirty feet from where she stood, supported a mound of dried mud from which dozens of tree branches protruded. Faith recognized the mound for what it was, another legacy from Miss Tredway’s natural sciences class. She was looking at a beaver lodge.

      Most of all, there were the waterfowl, including the familiar geese, and mallards, too, with their iridescent, blue-green necks and chestnut wings. Faith had seen mallards on the lake in Central Park many times. But there were other species swimming on this lake. The first to catch her attention was a cluster of small birds with starkly divided black and white heads. Then she turned to a group of four birds with long, orange crests. Each of them swam alongside smaller birds with dark blue heads and white bodies. Mated pairs, Faith assumed, going about their business.

      But that’s what all the birds were doing. Though some appeared to be resting while others dove beneath the water in search of food, every single one of them was going about the business of survival. Were they at the end of a long migration from some warm southern state? or did they have further to go, maybe all the way to Canada, perhaps even above the Arctic Circle? And what had they endured? How many times had they flown through heavy storms, or fought high winds, or been shot at by hunters, or attacked by hawks? They couldn’t complain, of course, or even imagine that things might be different.

      They could only accept the hardships that came their way and carry on.