Free The Island of Doves by Kelly O'Connor McNees

pulling so hard toward the gangway that he nearly wrenched his father off his feet.
    The woman barked at her son,
“Eine minute!”
then turned to her husband with a pleading glance.
    “Ja, ja,”
he said, counting the coins in his hand. He hoisted his daughter up on his hip. The little girl’s hair was the color of corn silk, her eyes a pale green. In her hand she held the end of a dirty rope tied to the neck of a goat. They moved toward the line of people and the eager boy was suddenly frightened, clinging to his mother’s hand.
    Susannah felt frozen in place. Here it was, her chance to be rid of this town once and for all, and she could not move. She looked back at Buffalo rising up from the water’s edge, her eye following the tops of the buildings. She could count at least six that Edward himself had coaxed up where there had been nothing before.
    A basket slammed into Susannah’s shoulder and she heard a clatter. A woman in faded homespun barked impatient words in a language Susannah did not recognize, swinging her basket of dishes to the side to get by.
    The
Thomas Jefferson
blew her whistle, long and low, and Susannah found herself moving with the stream of people, stepping onto the deck of the boat. A man in uniform took her ticket and examined it a moment before pointing toward a narrow set of stairs that led down into the hold of the boat. “Steerage,” he said.
    The only other time she’d been on the water, it was on a vessel half this size, a ferry that ran along Long Island Sound and north toward Boston. She had been just a girl, traveling with her parents to see a cousin of her father’s. They had a cabin to themselves with velvet drapes on the window and they took their tea in the stateroom. She remembered that the teaspoons had been edged in gold.
    The deckhand pushed her roughly toward the stairs. “Get on—we got a whole line of people here.”
    Susannah nodded and moved with the people wearing layers of clothing, patched jackets and shawls. She saw a man carrying a dining chair with a broken seat over his shoulder, a woman with a washtub containing a folded quilt, a pair of steel shears looping out of her apron. When she noticed Susannah looking at them, she shoved them deeper into her pocket.
    “Belonged to my mother,” she said, staring Susannah hard in the eye. “Try to take them, and I’ll show you the wrong end, if you get my meaning.”
    Susannah blinked at the woman, took in the dirt and sorrow that lined her face, and nodded. The engines clanked and thundered as they cranked up, and she plunged into the darkness, her hands empty.

Chapter Five
    Mackinac Island, Michigan Territory
1835
    M agdelaine Fonteneau dipped her paddle in Lake Huron, the net of writhing whitefish cold at her feet, as her canoe skimmed through the icy water back toward Mackinac Island. Behind a long smudge of clouds in the western sky, the sun cast a pale glow across the strait and the two peninsulas, Upper and Lower Michigan, that widened like mirror images to the north and south. Beyond them, the big lake opened its maw.
    Four weeks earlier, before the thaw, she had tied her canoe to her sled dog Ani’s harness and walked alongside him as he dragged it over the still-frozen stretch of lake to nearby Bois Blanc Island, where Magdelaine kept a large maple sugar camp. She claimed to be checking the progress of the syrup, but this was only the most recent in a list of excuses for making herself scarce all winter long.
    Magdelaine was avoiding her son and trying with all her might to avoid, finally, going to see the house that he had built for her on Mackinac’s southeastern shore, overlooking the harbor she had been paddling in and out of her entire life. Jean-Henri, his chest puffed with pride, had announced that he would build the house for his mother as a gift. She should have a place to rest, he said, though at forty-six she was hardly an old woman. He wanted her to live in comfort and enjoy the fruits of