Free Lake in the Clouds by Sara Donati

at the judge’s old place, the way we planned. The thing was, Almanzo told Selah to look for a black woman at the old homestead once it got to be full dark. And if she didn’t see that woman where she was meant to be, why then she was supposed to go hide herself away from the village and try again the next night. That would be tonight, except Miz Elizabeth and Miz Hannah come across her this morning.”
    “Thank the Lord you did,” said Curiosity. “Otherwise I expect we would have lost her. Hawkeye, spit out whatever it is that’s bothering you. I can see it sitting in your jaw plain as a plug of tobacco.”
    Hawkeye had been listening bent forward with his forearms resting on his knees, but he sat up straight to answer Curiosity. “You’re right, something don’t make sense to me. I can see how she could get to Albany—the men who sail those ships up from the city have got smuggling in their blood, after all. But I cain’t see how she would find her way to Paradise from there. Either that young woman is a natural-born pathfinder, or she had a guide.”
    “She had a guide,” said Curiosity. “Of sorts.”
    Hannah took some folded material out of the basket beside her chair to hold up for them to see: a quilted shift made of scraps laboriously pieced together. It looked like nothing more than the undergarment of a poor woman who couldn’t afford muslin.
    “A map,” Nathaniel said. “She sewed herself a map.”
    And then Elizabeth saw it too—a narrow strip of blue came up from the hem to branch into a Y. By squinting she could see it: the Mohawk flowing into the Hudson, and a small patch of brown on the spot that must be Albany. Blue thread had been used to trace the Sacandaga River from the Hudson to Paradise, passing through a muddy brown patch that might have been the marsh at Barktown. All along the rivers was a pattern of straight stitches in groups of two.
    “It is not out of proportion?” Elizabeth asked.
    “It’s like a Kahnyen’kehàka map,” said Hannah. “It doesn’t show distance in miles, it shows how long it takes to walk. You see, two marks for a half-day’s walking. You see how the ferry is marked.”
    “No white man would recognize that for what it is,” saidHawkeye approvingly. “But I have to say, it don’t quite seem enough.”
    “She got the directions memorized too,” Curiosity said. “Almost tree by tree.”
    Galileo nodded. “Ask her to tell them to you when she’s well again. Between the map and a good memory, she got herself here.”
    Hannah looked at Galileo and then Curiosity. “You say that there’s people to look after her where she’s going?”
    “They’ll take good care of her, or I wouldn’t let her go,” said Curiosity.
    Galileo put a hand on his wife’s arm. “Getting her there is the problem.” He looked directly at Hannah. “We ain’t talked about Liam yet.”
    “Maybe Liam isn’t looking for her.” She said this lightly, but the tilt of her head when she met Curiosity’s gaze gave away her anxiety.
    “I’d like to believe that, I truly would,” Curiosity said in her kindest tone. “But it don’t feel right to me, him showing up today. So I got something else to say, something I maybe would keep to myself if it weren’t Liam Kirby out there in shouting distance.”
    She put her hands down on her lap, palms up, and studied them for a moment. “On the day me and Galileo got our papers, we walked away from the Paxton farm with bloody backs. The overseer called that whipping a ‘going-away present,’ and he put some muscle into it. The last my mother ever saw of me I was sitting on Elizabeth’s granddaddy’s wagon seat, dripping blood, laughing and crying all at once. And on that day Galileo and me, we swore to each other that no child, no grandchild, of ours would ever know what it was to live the life we was born to. Ain’t that so, husband?”
    “It is,” said Galileo.
    “Now you know that both our girls married free men.