“Why would he have a place up there when he could have made them right close by where you lived?”

“He tried that, but his luthing got all mixed up with everything else. And he liked the idea of a place that was for nothing but one thing.” He smiled sadly. “Plus, my mother hated the smell of the hide glue. Even when it was hot, though it wasn’t so bad then. I think she hated the thought that it was made from deer. She loved deer coming through the trees below the cabin.”

“So he made his mandolins on the mountaintop?” I loved that. The very thought of it.

Larkin nodded. “The cabin was left over from when my grandma lived up there, when she was a little girl. Before her people built something better.”

He turned and started to climb again.

“I used to love spending time with my father in that little cabin. Watching him work. He would let me help when little fingers worked better than big ones.”

“And that’s where Cate went, after your father died?”

He nodded. “After we buried him. I went looking for her. And I found her sitting among his tools. Just sitting there. The hide glue had rotted and the place stank. But she just sat there in that stink, crying like a baby.”

I tried to imagine that. Then I tried not to.

“I asked her to come back. But she said she’d be fine, and I think she really did want to be alone.” He was silent for a while. “No, my mother has never gone back in that cabin since my father died. I took all my grandma’s books and other things up there, one box at a time.” He paused again. “And Captan chose her, so she had him, too.”

We made the rest of the climb in silence.

Captan met us in Cate’s yard.

He didn’t make a sound, either.

“How is she?” I asked him.

At which he turned and led us to the cabin so we could see for ourselves.

Chapter Sixty-One

She was worse.

“What took you so long?” Esther said the moment we walked through the door.

She was sitting next to the bed, holding Cate’s hand.

“We had to go to a lot of places for the honey,” I said. “And we stopped at home on the way back, to see Daddy.” I wasn’t going to lie about that. “But we’re here now and we have enough for her leg.”

Esther stood up. “I cleaned it out with the old bandages.” She swallowed hard. “And then I burned them.”

Which explained the smell in the cabin. Part good hot fire. Part corruption.

I thought of those bandages, which had once been sleeves my father had made and, before that, bolted muslin, and, before that, cotton on a loom, from a plant known to draw blood from the hands that picked it.