Root ripened in September. Threadbare clouds made the sky seem bluer, and the forest’s ravishing colors spread forever to the east. The temper trees shed their clothes impulsively, in tantrums, dropping every last leaf in ten or twenty minutes. Molly could see one now, all a blur in fiery red, and wished she were standing underneath it in the rush.
It was Muster Day and most of Root had gathered near the Orange, filling the grounds between the road and the tavern with vegetable carts, livestock, handicrafts, and other wares. There were watermelons big as hogs and pumpkins big as wagon wheels. Tinkers, farriers, and cobblers plied their trades; children played at hoops; citizens raced and boxed; and although Molly was working with Bess to keep the tavern drinks flowing, she had reveled in the sights and smells, the bustle and variety.
Now she stood above the road and watched Root’s militia, who assembled twice a year to practice basic drills. Tom had spent the day as captain of the troops. He had never looked more handsome than he did in his greenspun uniform, his boots cleanly oiled and his hat freshly curled. Neither had he looked more livid and explosive. Things had gone badly from the opening roll call, when a quarter of the volunteers failed to arrive on time. Many were unprepared. Others forgot their guns. Marches were disorganized, volleys were delayed and out of sync, and there was too much conversation, laughter, and mutinous grumbling. As soon as Tom corrected one shortcoming, another would emerge, and although some of the onlookers and volunteers had begun to question his ability to captain, the troops’ ineptitude struck Molly as unnaturally consistent, almost as if the problems had an organizing hand.
She was thinking of it now, suspecting Sheriff Pitt, when she recognized a man she’d met with Nicholas in Grayport.
The man was fifty paces off, short and round with widely splayed feet and a pronounced flatness to his head. It gave him the appearance of a cross-sawn trunk, and his name was Mr. Bole, which heightened the effect. He had been one of her brother’s clients—Molly had translated pages of his dreary correspondence—and had hung about the office making friendly conversation. Now he noticed her, too, and smiled in recognition. She ducked and hastened off and hoped he wouldn’t follow.
Cravens spiraled by, making Molly flinch. These were tiny black birds that traveled by the hundred, terrified of everything and huddled into swarms. They flew toward a tree but the tree scared them off, and so they whirled, dark and fluid, in a smooth gorgeous panic.
Mr. Bole was on the move, waddling toward her. Molly zigzagged quickly through the Muster Day crowd. She walked behind a row of smoking metal drums, where a dozen men and women raked coals, added fuel, and roasted mounds of gathered smoaknuts to package for the winter. She continued around the side of the tavern, hidden by the smoak-roasters’ haze and coming to a cannon that was butted against the storeroom wall. The barrel pointed out across the river to the woods. She crouched behind its wheel and hoped she hadn’t been followed.
From her vantage point overlooking the bank, she could see a mile of the sun-gilt water in either direction. In the distance to the south, on the town’s side of the Antler, black-leaved smoak trees darkened like a burn. She had visited the smoakwood to help gather nuts. There the trees stood towering and twisted and majestic, and the shade held an ancient smell of cinnamon and soot. The quiet had a past there. Birds seemed to listen. Good death, she had thought, pressing on the soil, sensing in the gloom a hint of resurrection.
But even here in town with all the colors in profusion, there was something overripe and dreadful in the glory. Deadfall was coming. People talked about it constantly: a brutal freeze that would put an end to summer overnight. Benjamin insisted it could happen any day now, earlier than usual, according to the signs. The moon’s double halo. Caterpillar hues. The suicide weeds were already strangling themselves, and many people in the town had claimed to see the Colorless Man—one of the truest indications, Nabby and Benjamin agreed, that the season of adversity would soon be upon them.
Molly heard footsteps coming up behind her. It was Ichabod, flailing like a windmill and warding her away with broad, emphatic gestures. He shoved himself between her and the cannon, putting his hand upon her shoulder as he tried to catch his breath. Molly stepped back to give him room for explanation; she had learned to read his signs as well as anyone in Root.
“This is dangerous,” he signed. “Primed and loaded, ready to fire, and look—the barrel is loose.”
Molly saw where the trunnions had nearly broken free of the carriage.
“But why were you afraid?” she asked, studying the cannon. It was old, without a flintlock hammer to ignite it. “I couldn’t have set it off unless I had a light.”
She had, in recent days alone, disturbed a waterwasp hive, accidentally burned a patron’s ear, fallen from the hayloft, and ruptured a keg of beer.
Ichabod led her away from the gun.
“I’m not a fuse,” she said.
They stood together where the crowd was visible again. The militia’s drills had ended and the volunteers trooped with added vim toward the tavern, seeking drink and conversation and reprieve, earned or not, from Captain Tom Orange’s cantankerous command. Molly spotted Bess, pink and pretty in her calico dress beneath the sycamore, filling up tankards from a kilderkin of cider. Mr. Bole was there, too, asking Bess questions.
“I have to go,” Molly told Ichabod.
She cut across the lawn and yanked her friend’s arm.
“There you are,” Bess said, refusing to be budged. “You should’ve joined the ranks if you wanted to stare at the captain all day.”
Before Molly could lead her away, Mr. Bole asserted himself and said, “Mrs. Smith!”
He was middle-aged. His wig was triply curled on either side. He was nervously delighted, like a child with a present, and he shook her hand emphatically and spoke for all to hear.
“How wonderful to see you! I haven’t returned to Grayport in more than a year. I’ve only come to Root to buy a bag of smoak—a yearly sojourn, a pleasurable trip before the cold. I moved to Liberty, remember. But of course you do!” he said, his face a summer day of bonhomie and wealth. “My venture has been utterly successful,” he continued, loading “venture” up with meaning she could scarcely comprehend. “Utterly, euphorically successful, through and through. I owe your husband a marvelous debt, one I am delighted to—”
“I have no husband,” Molly said, aware of some attention from the crowd, including Bess. “I’m sorry, you’re mistaken. I’m afraid we haven’t met.”
“Oh, I see. Perfect strangers, then,” Mr. Bole replied, giving her a wink that made his crow’s feet smile. “But what are you doing here in Root?”
The militia thronged up around the table full of tankards, and the demand was so great that Bess continued pouring, even as she listened in with breathy fascination.
“I told you, you’re mistaken,” Molly said to Mr. Bole.
He turned sly and put a finger to his nose. “Please forgive me. I mistook you for a woman I knew in Grayport.”
She frowned at him and whispered in his ear, “Go away.”
Mr. Bole appeared wounded and surprised but then retreated, shuffling off to buy his sack of fresh-roasted smoak.
“Who was that?” Bess asked.
“No one. Just a traveler,” Molly said. “Someone drunk.”
“He didn’t seem—”
“Ruddy fucking hell,” Tom said behind them, raspy from a day’s worth of hollering commands. His rifle’s bayonet jabbed above his shoulder, and the muscles in his neck looked firm enough to strum. “I ain’t paying you to talk,” he said, walking to the table.
“What are you paying ’em for?” asked a farmer with a grin.
“I’m pouring quick as I can,” Bess told Tom. “I won’t pour quicker just because you’re scowling.”
“I ain’t scowling.”
“You are,” Bess said. “It makes you special handsome. Ain’t my cousin handsome?”
A militiawoman clapped Tom’s back. “He’s a keeper.”
“Lousy captain, though,” someone else mumbled in the crowd. “No wonder we were told to show up late.”
Whoever said it didn’t show himself but hurried out of sight. Several troops drinking cider traded shifty looks, as if they knew a bit more and didn’t want to say.
Molly watched Tom. He seemed, as he considered what he’d heard and what it meant, to reenact the whole disastrous muster in his mind. He upended his rifle and stabbed the bayonet into the ground. Then he removed his hat and coat and hung them on the stock, and laid his ammo bag, powder horn, and knife at Molly’s feet. Divested of his uniform and weapon, he seemed less a captain, more an ordinary man. Her nerves began to settle until he smiled at her and said, “I’m going to beat the sheriff to a red bubbling mash.”
He laughed as if he’d bottled one laugh for many years and all the waiting had fermented it into something black and poisonous.
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t. Come inside and have a drink.”
Tom began to walk, heedless of her plea.
“I won’t let you do this,” she said, and blocked his way.
“I’ve told you more than once,” Tom said. “Learn your place.”
“Or what? You’ll send me off?”
He put his hands around her ribs and said, “I’ll chuck you back in the river.” Then he picked her up, turned, and set her to the side.
“Oh!” Molly said, mad enough to spit.
She let him go and briefly hoped he’d get himself arrested. An evening in the stocks was just what he deserved—she’d be first in line to bounce a rotten apple off his head. Then she thought about the tavern license Pitt could try to revoke. Molly tiptoed high to look around the crowd for Benjamin—only he could possibly defuse Tom’s temper—but she didn’t see either of the Knoxes on the grounds.
She was forced toward the tavern by the last swell of troops, a dusty brown gang of younger, rowdier men who laughed and pushed and looked prepared to tap their own keg. Benjamin wasn’t in the taproom. Molly hurried through to the kitchen, where Nabby denied seeing him and upbraided her for gallivanting around instead of working.
“It’s urgent,” Molly said.
“Is someone dying?”
“No, but Tom—”
“The rabble wants drinks, and who is helping Ichabod? You’ve left him on his own,” Nabby said, “to your shame.”
She tried corralling Molly with a whisk of seasoned hazelrod, but Molly escaped to the yard and ran to the side of the tavern, racing around the storeroom and past the broken cannon, where she squinted through the smoak-roast haze and scanned the crowd again.
Pitt’s scarlet coat finally caught her eye. He was thirty paces off near the tavern’s front door and looking down toward the road with a concentrated smirk. Molly followed his gaze. There was Tom, marching up. He was headed straight for Pitt and undeterred by the bustle. Nothing but a miracle would halt him in his course.
Molly found tongs among the smoak-roast tools. She stooped and took a small burning coal from the pit, holding back her skirts so they wouldn’t catch fire. The smoke stung her eyes but kept her well concealed, and she returned to the cannon at a sprint, double-checked that nobody had seen her, and verified the slightly upward angle of the barrel. The shot would clear the river and continue to the forest. No one would be hurt—although she worried about the deer—and so she stood beside the cannon, as far away as she could get, and held the tongs above the touch hole. The coal lit the fuse.
A thundercloud of smoke, stabbing fire, and an earthquake. She fell and clutched her heart, deaf and badly dazed, and thought the barrel had exploded. It was gone, completely gone. All that stood before her was the empty, fractured carriage. How was she alive?
She saw the wall and understood.
* * *
Tom heaved another pail of water onto the cannon barrel and touched the iron with his palm, relieved to find it cool but still not trusting it completely. The blast had thrown it backward off its carriage into the storeroom; there had been no fire, but even so the damage was shocking. The hole was a maw of jagged clapboards, and one of the studs had fractured and been thrown in lethal pieces twenty feet back against the room’s inner wall. The barrel had shattered several crates and lay at an angle amid the pulverized jars of pickled pigs’ feet and snouts. Ichabod entered with another full pail and poured it into the barrel. Something sizzled deep inside. Tom stepped back and looked toward the hole. It afforded a view of the river, radiant and pure, which made the gloomy, acrid wreckage look all the more severe.
Now that they had driven away the gawkers and the Muster Day crowd was starting to disperse, Tom had left Bess in the taproom with a handful of trustworthy militiamen—hard to come by today—to mind the tavern while he, Nabby, and Ichabod surveyed the damage. Molly, God damn her, was conspicuously missing.
Tom heard a scraping from the corner. He dragged a crate aside and Scratch leapt out, growling, with a pig snout clamped in his jaws. A splinter from the blast protruded from his flank. He was damp with blood and vinegar and rippling with emotion. Tom reached toward him, hoping to pull the splinter. Scratch jumped away, giving Ichabod a fright when he darted outside with his hard-won snout.
Tom shook his head. “Ruddy fucking devil.”
Pitt crunched in, seemingly on cue. Benjamin and Abigail followed close behind. They stood inside the door just off the kitchen, looking at the cannon barrel lying in the rubble.
“These were in the grass beside the carriage,” Pitt said.
He held up a pair of wrought-iron tongs.
“Who would do such a thing and promptly disappear?” Abigail asked, sounding as if the answer were a foregone conclusion. She stepped beside Pitt, leaving little room for Benjamin, who tilted his head to see above her shoulder and offered Tom an apologetic look.
“It could have been anyone,” Tom said.
Pitt clipped the air with the tongs and asked, “What was a loaded cannon doing there at all?”
“We moved it out of harm’s way.”
“Evidently not.”
“I’d like to know who sabotaged the carriage in the first place.”
“Sabotage,” Pitt said. “Like the rifles, and the powder, and the general disarray from opening muster. Those are captain’s cares, Tom, not the business of a sheriff.”
Tom picked an unbroken bottle off the floor. He drew the cork and drank until the rum warmed his gut. “Unless the sheriff played a part.”
Pitt smiled as if his teeth were ready to explode. “I hope you aren’t accusing me of purposeful disruption.”
“No,” Tom lied. “You’re naturally inept.”
Benjamin edged around Abigail, crunching the debris as he moved. He adjusted his glasses more securely on his head and stood between Tom and Pitt, not quite tall enough to interrupt their stares. “There is the possibility, however unlikely,” he said, “that the cannon spontaneously fired. Certain varieties of powder, especially those that utilize the sawdust of smoak—”
“And did the tongs spontaneously tumble from the heavens?” Abigail asked. “We could theorize for hours or confine ourselves to facts. I know you think me wrong to harp upon it so,” she said to Tom, “but much of the tavern’s recent trouble has an element in common. Can anyone account for Molly at the time of the explosion?”
Ichabod clattered from the wreckage in the corner, stooping as he came so as not to bump the cheeses hanging from the rafters. Nabby raised a lantern to illuminate his gestures; his hands cast elongated shadows on the walls.
“Molly was down at the road,” Tom interpreted.
“That isn’t what he said,” Nabby corrected out of sheer orneriness. “She was with him at the cannon.”
Abigail hmph-ed with tight-clamped lips, but Ichabod persisted with another round of signs.
Nabby watched his hands and said, “She left before the shot and talked to Bess beneath the tree. After that, he doesn’t know.”
Having nothing else to add, Ichabod navigated the dangling cheeses and began shoveling rubble into a large dirty box, looking happy to have tried exonerating Molly.
“Get Bess,” Abigail told Nabby.
Nabby fixed her with a grim, sharpened eye and didn’t budge.
“I’m here,” Bess said, coming from the kitchen with her hair a sweaty ravel. She was breathless from her work and still agog at all the damage, and she wiped her palms firmly on her stained, shabby apron.
Tom put the bottle on a crate. His hand was trembling. He had drunk too fast with nothing in his stomach, and the smoke and pickled pork were giving him a headache. He needed room to think, needed room to breathe.
“You talked to Molly before the shot?”
“So did you,” Bess told him, “when you scolded us for gabbing.”
“There you have it,” Tom said, as if the cannon hadn’t fired ten minutes later. Dust motes swirled, causing him to squint.
“It concerns me,” Abigail said, “how readily and blindly you protect her.”
“You make a lot of folks’ business your concern,” Tom said. “I would hate to see you branded as a gossip and a meddler.”
Benjamin sniffed so hard his nostrils almost shut. Friend or not, Tom was very close to slandering his wife. He swelled his fragile chest, filling out his coat until it looked as if his ribs might fracture from the strain.
Abigail ignored them both and kept on with Bess. “You were with her all the time?”
“No,” Bess said. “Tom walked away, and then a funny little man … Never mind, it doesn’t matter.” She fought to hold a giggle at whatever she remembered.
“What?” Tom said.
“There was a man, swore he knew her. He was short, and squatly built, and kept making secret little gestures to his nose. Like this,” she said and showed them, smiling as she did so. “At first I thought I’d finally learn a smidgen of her past, but then he acted awful strange and said he knew her husband!”
It was as if another cannon had exploded in the distance.
“Find him,” Abigail said.
“You don’t think it’s true! But he’s gone,” Bess said. “He and a group of merchants rode away to beat the dark.”
“Which direction?” Pitt asked.
“’Cross the ferry, off to Liberty.”
Pitt looked from Bess to Abigail and Tom. A gleam lit his eyes, like a tiny pair of demons, and he marched toward the door, better than he’d marched all day during muster.
Tom laughed, and yet it pained him like a rupture in his chest. “You’re riding out for this?”
Pitt smiled from the door.
“It’s almost dusk,” Tom said. “The Maimers’ll be out. On second thought, go. Although aside from your coat, I can’t think of anything they’d bother cutting off.”
Pitt ignored the insult but heeded the warning: night fell swiftly in the woods. “I’ll go at dawn,” he said.
“She hasn’t caused trouble all month,” Tom said, stumbling backward with his heels against the barrel of the cannon. “If it’s me you want to hit, aim at me direct.”
“Housing a woman in need is one thing,” Abigail said. “Housing another man’s wife…”
It was quiet outside and turning violet in the twilight, pregnant with the dark and overripe, overdue. Ichabod was still, Bess was scared to say more, and Nabby held the lantern up and kept her own counsel. Tom looked to Benjamin for sensible support. The doctor sighed as when a wound was past the power of his art.
“Tom,” Benjamin said. “It may be time we learned the truth.”
Even you, Tom thought, hardened to the marrow. He’d been fighting against the current since he caught her in the river. “People have a right to earn a fresh start.”
“Look at the ruin at your feet,” Abigail said, surprising Tom briefly with a ring of genuine pity. “She’s a firebrand. You shouldn’t have to bear—”
“Speak another ill word against a person under my roof,” he said, “I’ll pick you up and throw you out the goddamned hole.”
Abigail recoiled, mostly from the blasphemy.
“You go too far,” Benjamin declared. He sounded like a skinny man, delicately boned, whose principles and pride made him physically imposing.
“Get out,” Tom said to Pitt and both of the Knoxes. “Come back tomorrow with your hayforks and torches.”
Rather than wait for them to move, he shoved them all aside—“Easy!” Pitt said—and exited alone. He walked through the taproom, where a few straggling drinkers smartly kept their mouths shut, and stomped upstairs to look for Molly in her room.
He strode down the hall and opened her door without a knock, ready to hammer out the big and little secrets of her heart. Nobody was there. He’d sworn he wouldn’t chase her if she ever ran away again. His cousin’s dried flowers gave the room a blush of summer, sweetening the cannon-fire odor he’d been breathing. Molly’s stockings hung naked on a chair beside the bed. The ghost of her asleep and laughing and undressing made the room so empty, so Molly-less and still, he caught a glimpse of deadfall congealing in the shadows.
He gritted his eyeteeth hard enough to squeak and went to the stairs again, prepared to gallop off and find the man who said he knew her. Something made him stop: a feeling in his skin. He turned toward his own room and opened up the door.
She sat on the edge of his bed. Her hands were in her lap, furrowing her skirt. She looked at him with lowered chin and upturned eyes, and her complexion seemed softer in the dim, private light. He almost rushed her. Was it to haul her up or squeeze her in relief? Just to feel her. How or why, he couldn’t positively say.
He closed them in and said, “You’ll never guess what’s lying on the storeroom floor.”
“I did it,” Molly said.
“My God. A chip of honesty. You care to tell me why?”
“Promise you won’t be angry.”
“I’m a fair ways around that corner already.”
“You were going after Pitt,” Molly said, standing up. He raised a hand to settle her down, as if she’d stood and shown a gun. “I thought you meant to hurt him.”
“You were worrying for Pitt?”
“I was worrying for you, you bully-tempered clod! What if you’d attacked him?”
Tom approached her with a huff, lungs full of steam.
“You shot a cannon to distract me? Did you truly think I’d risk—I ain’t a clod of any fashion. You might have tried dissuading me.”
“I did.” Molly frowned. “You said you’d throw me in the river.”
Tom made fists until the boil in him cooled, and then he sat on the bed and slouched with Molly standing over him. The twilit blue coming from the window showed him half of her: a hip, the subtle veins along her wrist. He focused on her waist, imagining it full. He knew she’d given birth since Benjamin had told him, yet the news that she was married curdled in his stomach.
“Pitt’s riding out to find the man who knew your husband.”
The statement cut her legs. She sat beside him, slumping forward. For a moment he believed she would vomit on the floor.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Then tell me everything,” he said.