“You’re a good teacher!”
“They go by their own rules, Daughter. Out there is an ugly machine that wants to control everyone, and now its lens is focused on you. They will make you be schooled their way, file papers for everything you do, pay taxes to the government. Buying this property and building this house was a nightmare of government machinery you can’t imagine.”
She couldn’t imagine. She didn’t want to. She wanted only to think about going to school. Was Mama really going to let her?
“Am I going to school today?”
“Not today. But you will. I can’t have the government snooping around here. I think the recent events are a warning. When the spirits took you last night, they were showing me what could happen if you don’t go to school. You must go and pretend to be a human child to protect both of us.”
Raven was too excited to sit. She got off the couch. “When will I go? Tomorrow?”
“You are very eager despite my warnings. You want school so badly?”
“Yes!”
She had a strange look in her eyes. “Sit down, Raven. I have more to say.”
Raven sat and folded her hands in her lap.
“I have made two decisions along with allowing you to go to school. The spirits have guided me in these judgments.”
Raven knew by the sharp look in her eyes that she wouldn’t like the decisions.
“First, I have decided we will spend summers away from here from now on.”
Raven’s chest felt hollow. “Where will we go?”
“My parents owned a large ranch in Montana. When they died, they left it to my sister and me. Sondra took the big house, and I have the cabin. The cabin sits far from the house in beautiful country. It’s next to a stream and looks out on mountains.”
She sat next to Raven and took one of her hands in hers. “I promise Daughter of Raven will be happy there. My mother started taking me to the cabin when I was a few years older than you. Living in the big city of Chicago made me feel sick most of the time. But I would get better at the cabin. My mother took me there every summer, and we went any time I got sick. I learned how to speak with earth spirits in that place.”
Raven doubted she would love Montana as much as she had loved her summer with the boys.
Mama let go of Raven’s hand. “The second decision has to do with a promise you will make. Will you do that?”
“What promise?”
“You will never again set foot on the land of the teacher and those boys.”
Tears stung her eyes. “Mama . . . why?”
“I will not have them influencing you, distracting you from your kinship with the earth spirits. I will not have that teacher woman digging around in our lives. No doubt she’s already asked questions about me.”
Ms. Taft had asked questions. Mostly she had wanted to know if Mama hurt her.
“Has she?” Mama demanded.
Raven nodded, tears spilling over her cheeks.
“I knew it,” Mama said in an angry voice. “You’re too young to understand why this is dangerous for you. If you go too far into your bond with those people, you’ll think you can trust them. You’ll tell them about your father.”
“I won’t!”
“I have talked to the spirits, and they have verified this danger. You will go there no longer. And when you see those boys at school, you will tell them I don’t want them on my property ever again. Tell them I have a gun.”
Raven’s tears fell faster.
Mama wiped them away with her fingers. “You’ll see them every day at school. That will have to be enough.”
Could it be enough? Raven thought of the boys piled around her on the couch, the games, the joking and laughter. But Raven would have seen them only on weekends now that school had started. If Raven went to school, she would see the boys and Ms. Taft five days a week.
“Do you want to start school tomorrow?” Mama asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll call the school now. But first, tell me you’ll never go to that house again. Do you promise?”
Raven felt tricked by her spirit kin. She would get what she had asked of them with all her soul. She would go to school. But what she would lose might make her wish she had never asked.
“Raven, speak your promise aloud,” Mama said in an angry voice.
“I promise I won’t go to the boys’ house.”
“Not one foot on their land.”
“Not one foot.”
Mama stood. “The spirits will be watching you, Daughter of Raven. They will tell me if you break this promise.”
In that moment, Raven hated her father. If she went outside and saw a raven spying on her, she would want to throw a stone at it.
Just thinking that scared her more than anything ever had.
PART THREE
DAUGHTER OF THE WILD WOOD
1
Leaving the western mountains was like leaving home. For a year and a half, Ellis had stood on their peaks, drunk water straight from their rushing rivers, bathed in waterfalls, meditated in meadows aflame with alpine flowers, spent hours and hours watching the mountains’ marmots, pikas, moose, elk, bears, jays, dippers, and hummingbirds. The western mountains were like rooms in a familiar house.
But she didn’t want a home.
Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this
dwelling, we cannot remain here . . .
The words always brought her back to the night Caleb introduced her to the “Song of the Open Road.” He had read in her lamplit tent after they bathed in the mountain river, after they made love, at first numb and dripping ice water but soon streaming with sweat and in need of another rinse, washing in Whitman’s words instead.
She’d found a used paperback of Leaves of Grass in a Montana bookshop a month after the night with Caleb. It had the
