The Year Without a Summer

Cora smoothed the oilcloth open on the table, and inside were a few pages, brittle and brown and close-written in a cramped old hand, and she did not pick them up right away. She rested her fingers on them lightly, the way you'd rest a hand on something sleeping, and she looked out the window at the snow on the land, and she began to tell it.

"You have to understand the year first," she said. "Eighteen sixteen. They called it the year without a summer, and the people who lived it called it eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death, and they weren't being funny. Some mountain on the other side of the world had blown itself to powder the year before, and the powder got up into the sky and stayed there, all over the world, and it turned the sun weak. There was frost every month that year, Owen. Every single month. Snow in June. Ice on the ponds in July. The corn froze in the field black and the wheat never came and the hay rotted and the animals starved and then the people started to. Up here in these hills, at the edge of everything, with the nearest full granary three hard days off — up here, that winter, people died. Whole families. They died of the cold and they died of the hunger and they died of the fever that comes when bodies are too starved to fight it. That's the world Cornelius Calder was in. I need you to see it. He wasn't a rich man doing an evil thing for more. He was a starving man with a starving wife and a sick baby, at the bottom of the world, in the worst winter anyone had ever seen. I'm not telling you that to excuse him. I'm telling you so you understand he was a man, not a devil, which is worse, because it means any of us might have it in us."

"All right," Owen said quietly. "I see it."

"Now. There were two other people in this story." Cora held up one bent finger. "There was old Eldad Pelham, who owned this land — all of it, the whole Hollow, the good bottomland and the high pasture and this very hill we're sitting on. Pelham was old and his wife was dead and his sons were dead, two of them gone for soldiers and never come back, and he had no one. He was dying that winter, slow, in his bed. And Cornelius Calder was his hired man. Worked the Pelham land for next to nothing, him and his young wife, lived in a one-room hovel down where the sawmill is now. Owned not one inch of anything."

She held up a second finger.

"And there was Esther Vane. A widow, like Pelham, but young. She was the healer. Every hard place has one and she was ours — she knew the herbs and the births and the fevers, she'd sit up three nights with a dying child and take a sack of turnips for it if that's all you had and nothing if you had nothing. People were afraid of her a little, the way people always are afraid of a woman who knows things, but when their child was dying in the night it was Esther Vane's door they beat on, every one of them. And she had one child of her own. A boy. Tobias. He was seven years old that winter, and he was, by every word written here—" Cora touched the pages, "—the whole of her heart. She'd lost her husband and three babies before him and buried every one, and Tobias was the one that lived, her only one, her firstborn and her last born both. There wasn't a thing in this world that woman wouldn't have done for that boy. Remember that. It matters at the end."

Owen's mouth had gone dry. "What did he do, Cora. What did Cornelius do."

"Two things," Cora said. "He did two things, the same terrible winter, and they're the two halves of the same crime, and they're the two halves of what we've been paying for ever since." She drew the first page toward her and tilted it to the window light and read from it, slowly, her old voice taking on the shapes of the cramped old words. "This is Cornelius himself, you understand. In his own hand. He wrote this out as an old man, near his death, a long full life later — wrote it and made his wife swear to keep it, and she did, and it's been kept and hidden by every Calder since, the way you hide a thing you can't look at and can't throw away. He confessed it. That's the one thing I'll give him. At the very end, he wanted it written down true."

She read:

"Old Pelham being near his death, and having no living heir, did purpose to leave the whole of his land to the widow Vane and her son Tobias, in payment for her long care of him and of this valley in its suffering. This he told to me himself, that the deed was as good as done, and bid me be glad for them." Cora looked up. "You understand what that means. This land — our land, the land your whole family has lived fat and safe on for two hundred years — this land was meant for Esther Vane and her boy. It was theirs. Pelham meant it for them, to thank them. It was going to be the Vane place."

"And Cornelius took it," Owen said.

"Cornelius took it." She read on. "But Pelham being weak and his hand failing, and the deed not yet set down before witnesses, I did sit with him in his last days and turn him, by little and by little, telling him the widow was provided for elsewhere and that my own wife and child must starve else, until in his weakness he set his mark to a paper leaving all to me." Cora set the page down. "He talked a dying man out of it. Sat by his bed and lied to him and worked on him until Pelham signed the land to Cornelius instead. That's the first thing. That's how we got the land. He stole it off a dying man from the woman it was meant for."

Owen sat with that. It was ugly, it was theft, but it was a human ugliness, the kind of thing desperate men did. "You said two things."

"I said two things." And now something changed in Cora's face, and her voice dropped, and Owen understood they had come to the real thing, the thing under the thing. "The land was the lesser crime, Owen. You can give land back. The other thing he did, you can never give back." She drew the second page toward her, and her shaking hand was shaking worse now. "That same winter, the fever came through. The bad one. It went for the children and the weak ones first, the way it does. And it came for two children the same nights, in the same week. It came for Cornelius's own child — his firstborn son, the baby, not a year old. And it came for Tobias Vane."

The fire ticked. Owen did not move.

"Now Esther Vane was the healer, and Esther Vane had one thing left," Cora said. "There was a medicine — the writing here calls it her physic, a thing she made, and that starving year the makings of it were all gone, there was no more to be had anywhere in the valley, and she had exactly one dose of it left in the world. One. And one dose, given on the crisis night, when the fever breaks one way or the other — one dose could carry a child through. Without it, a child that sick would die. With it, a child might live. And she had one. And there were two dying children. And one of them was her own son. Her only son. The whole of her heart." Cora's black eyes were wet now, the first time, two hundred years of it standing in them. "You know what she did with it. Of course you know. There was never any question what she'd do with it. She kept it for Tobias. She sat up with her own dying boy on the crisis night with the last dose in the world in her hand, to save him, because that is what a mother does, that is what anyone does, there is no curse on earth for that."

"Cornelius stole it," Owen said. He could barely say it. "He stole the medicine off the dying boy."

Cora read, and her voice broke on it, and she let it. "I went in the dark to the Vane house, and the widow gone out but a moment to the well, and the boy alone and senseless with the fever, and the physic by his bed in a cup. And I took it. God forgive me, I took the cup from beside that sleeping child and I carried it home through the snow and I gave every drop of it to my own son. And my son took the fever's turn that night and lived, and is a man grown now with sons of his own. And the Vane boy, Tobias, having nothing, died before the morning, with his mother holding him, not knowing what had been taken or by whom."

The room was very quiet. Outside the snow lay on the Calder land — Esther Vane's land — under the weak old sun.

"He killed her boy," Owen said. His voice didn't sound like his own. "He killed her firstborn to save his firstborn. And he stole the land that was meant for them. And his son lived, and his son had sons, and that's— that's us. That's all of us. We're here because of that. Everything we have."

"Everything we have," Cora said. "Every meal any Calder ever ate off this land. Your father. You. The baby coming in October. All of it grew up out of the morning a seven-year-old boy died in his mother's arms for the want of the medicine that the man who took it used to make us." She folded the brittle pages closed with great gentleness. "Now you understand why we owe. Now you understand it isn't bad luck and it isn't a heart that runs in the blood. It's a debt, and it's the most honest debt there ever was, because the price of it is exactly the thing that was taken. A firstborn for a firstborn. We have been paying Tobias Vane's price, one of us a generation, for two hundred years."

"What happened to her," Owen said. "To Esther. After."

"She found out," Cora said. "Of course she found out, eventually — small valley, and a guilty man can't keep a thing like that off his own face forever, and there were those who'd seen him on the road that night. She found out that the medicine that could have saved her son had been stolen from his bedside to save the child of the man who'd already robbed them of their land. She found out she'd been holding an empty cup. And she came up here, to this house Cornelius had built on Pelham's stolen ground, and she stood in the yard, and Cornelius and his wife and his living, breathing, fever-spared son were inside." Cora's hand closed flat over the oilcloth bundle. "And she said the words. They're written here too — Cornelius set them down word for word, he never forgot one of them, he carried them to his grave. The last thing she ever did before she walked off into that winter and was never seen alive again." She looked up at Owen, and the hope and the dread were both in her old face at once. "Do you want to hear what she said, the woman whose son we killed? Because her words are the curse, Owen. Every word of it came true, and it's still coming true, and the way out is hidden inside the very same words. She told us, two hundred years ago, exactly how to undo it. We just were never brave enough to do what she said."