Thirteenth Child

CHAPTER 19

WORD ABOUT THE MAMMOTH GOT HOME BEFORE I DID THAT DAY. Mama was waiting for me on the front porch, and she swept me up in a big hug as soon as I came within reach. My heart sank. I could tell she’d been scared bad by what she’d heard. When she let loose of the hug enough to take a good look at me, and saw all the mud on my coat from where I’d fallen off the fence, she wouldn’t listen to a thing I said, but made me go in and lie down.

Papa wasn’t near so put out as Mama was. He’d heard the whole story from Professor Jeffries, and he said that the professor had commended my presence of mind and was quite happy to have William and me and Miss Ochiba continue our visits. Papa also said that if Miss Ochiba could teach me to stop a charging mammoth, he’d be more pleased than not, and in any case the incident showed that I was a sight safer with her than running around the college on my own. He got Mama soothed down enough to see that I wasn’t hurt, and asked what I thought of the matter. Of course I said that I wanted to keep on with my lessons.

That wasn’t the end of it, though. Seeing all the mud on my coat gave Mama the notion that working with the menagerie animals was a hard and wearying job, like mucking out stables, and she said she didn’t want me tiring myself out. It was no good pointing out that hauling the wet laundry every Monday was harder work than doing spells at the menagerie. She’d been used to thinking of me as delicate, ever since the rheumatic fever, and that was that. She didn’t put a stop to my lessons, but she fretted over them until it drove me to distraction.

Still, I loved the animals at the menagerie too much to let them go. After the incident with the mammoth, Professor Jeffries kept his classes outside the fence, and I snuck close enough to listen as often as I could. When he saw that I was interested in the animals, and not just in Miss Ochiba’s lessons, he let me help with feeding and tending them sometimes. I didn’t mention any of it to Mama.

In February, right after his eighteenth birthday, Jack announced that he’d gone down to the North Plains Territory Homestead Claim and Settlement Office and signed up for a homestead claim. Mama was almost as upset by that as she’d been over the mammoth, and Papa wasn’t any too pleased, either, but there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. The law said that at the age of eighteen any citizen who had a sound body and the will to work a claim could put in for a settlement allotment, and Jack had gone and done it.

Papa wasn’t much for yelling, even when he wasn’t happy about something the boys had done, but he came awfully near it with Jack that time. He couldn’t see why Jack would want to go out to the settlements at all, and if he had to go, Papa thought he should put in a few more years at school and become a settlement magician. It was a bit safer than homesteading, and it was an easier and better living, because the Settlement Office chipped in with the homesteaders to pay settlement magicians. Also, Papa was aggrieved that Jack hadn’t said anything before he went down to the Settlement Office, like he thought Papa would forbid him from doing it.

Jack heard Papa out with more patience than I’d ever thought he had. Then he rolled his eyes and said that he’d told Papa time and again that he didn’t want more schooling, and that he wanted to go out and do something real. It wasn’t his fault if Papa hadn’t believed him.

Mama just looked sad and said she didn’t want the Far West swallowing another of her children. Jack told her that he wasn’t getting swallowed up and he wasn’t sneaking off the way Rennie had, either. Also, it wasn’t like he was leaving right away. He’d have to wait for a place in a settlement group, because the Settlement Office hadn’t let anyone go out alone since the very first year, when over a hundred farms were overrun by wildlife because the magicians were stretched too thin. It might take two or three years for a group to have an opening for a single man. Meantime, Jack meant to hire out to one of the farmers on the far side of the river, to get some practical experience in an established settlement.

Once they saw that Jack was determined, Mama and Papa quit arguing, but it took a couple of weeks. I think Papa was impressed by the way Jack had worked out his plans, though he wouldn’t say so straight to Jack’s face.

Jack found himself a position and moved across the river in April, just in time for spring planting. He promised he’d come home every Sunday, since it wasn’t far, but the first week he was so tired that Mama told him he wasn’t to ruin his health for her peace of mind, and once a month after planting finished would be plenty. She and Papa still grumbled when Jack was gone, though.

I was more on Jack’s side than not. Jack had always hated school and loved adventure, and he’d had a hankering for the Far West since the day he heard we were moving to Mill City. And with so many of our school friends moving out to the settlements every year, it felt like a natural thing to do. I thought Robbie might mean to go the same way, if he didn’t find himself a town girl, but I surely wasn’t telling any of that to Mama and Papa.

What with all the grumbling at home, I took to spending more of my free time at the menagerie all through April and May. Which was how I happened to be there when Washington Morris turned up in mid-May, looking for Professor Jeffries.

“I’ll fetch him for you, Mr. Morris,” I told him.

He looked at me in considerable surprise, for he hadn’t given his name. Then he smiled that wide, white smile and said, “You’ll be one of Miss Maryann’s students. I thought I told you all to call me Wash.”

“You’d have been a sight more taken aback if I had,” I pointed out. “You jumped when I called you Mr. Morris.”

“I never,” he said. “I was merely looking behind me for the Mr. Morris person you were addressing. But it strikes me that you have me at a disadvantage, when it comes to names.”

“I’m Eff,” I said. “Eff Rothmer.”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Rothmer,” Wash said gravely, raising his hat.

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Morris,” I said, and gave him my best curtsy.

“Wash,” he corrected sternly.

“Wash, then,” I said, and went off to find Professor Jeffries. He was out by the mammoth field, fiddling with the fencing spells. I told him that a Mr. Morris was waiting for him over at the classroom building. Then I followed him back, because I was curious what business Washington Morris would have with our college wildlife professor.

“You’re the circuit-rider Miss Ochiba spoke of?” Professor Jeffries asked when Wash introduced himself. “Has she told you what I’m looking for?”

“Just that you’ve a job that’s suited to a circuit-riding magician,” Wash said in his deep drawl. “Miss Maryann is a great one for letting folks see for themselves.”

“I see.” Professor Jeffries frowned. “I need someone to collect information on wildlife behavior in their natural habitat. It’s all very well to study these creatures in captivity, but to expect me to predict something like the Batterson fiasco with nothing to go on but this…Well, I’m sure you see the difficulty.”

Wash nodded soberly. The Batterson settlement had been half destroyed the previous summer when a flock of cinder-dwellers had flown in and burned most of its crops, two barns, and at least one homestead. The settlement’s one magician had been keeping off cinder-dwellers in ones and twos for a good six years, but a flock of sixty birds had been too much for him. Everybody had heard about it, and everybody wanted to know why a flock that size had suddenly showed up after so long. All the nearby settlements had been jumpy for months, not knowing if another big flock would turn up before they finished harvesting.

“I can see why you’d want better information,” Wash told Professor Jeffries. “But you have to understand that when I’m out in the borderlands, a lot of other things have to come first.” He smiled. “I can’t rightly see myself stopping to make observations when a bear’s after my supply cache, for instance.”

“Your notes won’t do me any good if you’re not alive to bring them back,” Professor Jeffries said with a small smile of his own. “And, frankly, whatever you provide will be more than what I’m getting now, which is nothing.”

“I’ll see what I can do for you,” Wash said. “Always provided you don’t mind an uncertain schedule. I go where there’s trouble and stay as long as I’m needed, which doesn’t lend itself to a regular correspondence. I wouldn’t be in town now if I hadn’t wanted the sawbones to look over a bit of an infection I picked up last winter that was slow clearing up.”

“You can mail me your notes whenever it’s convenient,” Professor Jeffries assured him.

A month later, a tatty-looking packet arrived for Professor Jeffries, containing ten pages that looked like they’d been crumpled up, sat on, and maybe used to strain coffee. Every one was covered, both sides, with tiny, meticulous notes that drove the professor from ecstasy to despair and back. When we came for our next Aphrikan magic class, he told Miss Ochiba that the bits he could make out were exactly what he wanted, but it would take him months to figure out what the rest of it said.

Miss Ochiba glanced at the page he held out and nodded. “I apologize for not warning you.”

“No, no, I’m very grateful to you for putting me in touch with Mr. Morris,” Professor Jeffries said. “But I wish he were a tad less inclined to abbreviation. What, for instance, can he mean by ‘J3,8m/n fr Klein set.’?”

“June third, eight miles north from Klein settlement?” I suggested after a minute, when Miss Ochiba didn’t answer.

Miss Ochiba and Professor Jeffries both looked at me. “Yes, that would be it!” the professor said.

“What do you make of the rest of it, Miss Rothmer?” Miss Ochiba asked, plucking the page from Professor Jeffries’s hand and giving it to me.

I studied the page for a minute. It didn’t seem much worse than the hen-scratch that some of my brothers called writing. The abbreviations were harder, but when I thought of Wash’s deep voice saying the parts I could see right away, all the other parts came clear. I started reading it out slowly.

“June third, eight miles north from Klein settlement. Red fox and three kits at watering hole. Deer mice tracks. Iceweed at water’s edge; haven’t seen this far south before. Looks spindly.”

Right about there, Professor Jeffries stopped me. “Remarkable!” he said. “It took me hours to get that far.”

“Young eyes, plus experience,” Miss Ochiba said drily, and I remembered that she’d taught three of my brothers, including Jack, whose penmanship was the most hen-scratchy of them all. Plus it was pretty clear that she’d known Wash a good while. Her eyes glinted with amusement as if she knew what I was thinking, and she added, “Perhaps you would be willing to make a fair copy for the professor, Miss Rothmer?”

I agreed at once. The professor thanked me several times, but truth to tell I was as grateful to him as he was to me. I’d been dying of curiosity ever since I found out that the first set of notes had arrived, and now I was going to be the first to find out what they said!

For the rest of that summer, whenever one of Wash’s letters arrived, I’d spend a day or two copying it out for Professor Jeffries. At first, he used my copy as a sort of crib sheet to help him read Wash’s notes for himself. After a while, when he saw that I was careful about copying exactly what was there, he only referred to the notes once in a while.

I found Wash’s letters even more fascinating than the actual wildlife in the menagerie. He wrote about things I’d only ever seen in sketches in books—greatwolves and Columbian sphinxes, curly-horned deer and heatherfish, sil-vergrass and flower moths. Mostly, he wrote where and when he’d seen the creatures. Once in a while, he added a comment on what they’d been doing when he saw them. Jy31 by LngL e.shr—sfb.etg bkby, n/dsrt fr me was one of my favorite entries—July 31 by Long Lake, east shore—short-faced bear eating blackberries, no dessert for me.

Wash wrote about the weather, too—rain and dry spells and temperature, with a note on whether it seemed normal to him or not. Once he mentioned a strong smell of smoke on the wind, coming from the west, that lasted three days. It drove Professor Jeffries wild. He was sure it meant a big fire somewhere farther out, but it never got close enough for Wash to see even a glow on the horizon, so there was no telling whether it was fifty miles away or two hundred.

Professor Jeffries had a big map in his office, stuck with pins to show where things were. Green pins were settlements, brown ones were large wildlife like bears or mammoths, pink ones were birds, red ones were for really dangerous things like swarming weasels or saber cats, and so on. Each pin had a little paper wrapped around it, with the date and a reference code so you could look up more in the little brown book that went with the map. The professor had tried to persuade some of the settlement magicians to send him word of any wildlife that came around their areas, but only one or two had agreed, so if it hadn’t been for Wash, the map would have had almost nothing but green pins.

Mama relaxed a good bit when she heard I was spending most of my time at a table, copying letters. It made me see that all her fretting was partly my own fault, because I hadn’t shown her that I was all the way healthy again. Truth to tell, I’d been happy to keep on doing the lighter chores, right up until she’d broken her leg. And then she’d been too distracted to notice that I was working just as hard as Nan and Allie, and since then, she just hadn’t had to think on it.

From then on, I made a point of mentioning it when I helped Robbie stack firewood, or dug over a piece of the garden, or helped haul feed for the horses. Mama frowned at me the first few times, but she couldn’t rightly complain about me doing chores with the others, and gradually she got used to the idea that I really was strong enough to do them.

Much to my surprise, I liked doing some of the heavier work. It wasn’t like the housekeeping spells that still fizzled on me five times out of six; when I hauled a bucket of water to the sink, it stayed hauled. I loved working with Professor Jeffries, too, and deciphering Wash’s cramped writing.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was happy all summer long.