by Rita Woods
Winter sighed. “Come.”
As they walked, she was sharply aware of Margot stumbling clumsily along behind her. Every few yards or so, she paused to glance over her shoulder and study the girl in her charge.
Margot was tall, a café-au-lait Negress—cream-colored with just a drop of coffee. Her eyes were green … or brown, Winter couldn’t decide, her long curly hair a matted mess. Her face was long, too angular to be pretty, her mouth a bit too wide. Nonetheless, she was striking, a bad thing for a slave trying to disappear. Margot tripped over a tree root, but Winter bit her lip and pretended not to notice.
There were a million questions roiling in her head, but Winter remained uncharacteristically silent. Everything about this girl set her teeth on edge: the flashes of anger, the burst of wild laughter back at the shelter.
Runaways had appeared in Remembrance since Winter could remember, more men than women, almost always young. When they arrived, they were nearly always at the end of their endurance, so beat down by exhaustion or the whip or fear that they could barely speak their names. And they’d all, almost to a man, woman, and child, lost someone, been forced to leave someone behind. What they all had in common was an overwhelming gratitude for their freedom. Even those who believed that Mother Abigail must be some kind of witch. The other emotions—despair for those left behind, the thirst for vengeance, the fear for what the future held—those came later. Sometimes days. Sometimes weeks. But this girl was different. Her darkness rode right at the surface. And if she was grateful, she was hiding it well.
The memory of Margot standing still as death in the moonlight, refusing to move despite the dogs, flashed through Winter’s mind. She shot another glance at the girl who was still picking her way along the trail.
At the creek’s edge, a heavy pot sat in a shallow pit, surrounded by smoldering coals.
“You can wash yourself up there,” said Winter. “Washday was yesterday, so there’s clean clothes on that dry line over there. Should be something there that fits you.” She eyed the tall girl doubtfully.
Margot stared at the steaming pot but made no move toward it, and Winter felt a flicker of pity for the girl. “Wash. Don’t wash. But Mother Abigail wants to see you, and I got to tell you, you’re a little ripe.” She grinned, trying to elicit a smile. When there was no response, Winter touched her wrist.
“Ne me touche pas,” Margot hissed, whirling on her, teeth bared.
“Christ on a horse!” Winter cried, stumbling backward. Shock quickly gave way to anger. “Are you touched in the head?”
Margot stared at her, unblinking, for a long moment, then bowed her head. “I beg your pardon,” she said. She was trembling badly. “I am feeling a bit … unsettled.”
“A bit unsettled?” Winter eyed her uneasily. She looked around. They were alone. She took a deep breath. “Well … why’n’t you just go on ahead and wash up.”
She went to sit on a rocky mound a few feet away. She turned her back to give the other girl privacy but watched her from the corner of her eye, wary. She dug a bare toe in the ground and fidgeted. Since the rescue, the priestess had been like a ghost. Winter hadn’t caught even a glimpse of her. She hadn’t even come herself to tell Winter to get the new girl settled in. Instead she’d sent the message by Belle, a young mother of twin girls, who’d come to Remembrance more than five years before.
Once again, the image of the dogs flashed in her mind. She shivered. There’d been a moment standing in that clearing, a very brief moment when the Easter Egger had sparked in her head and she’d had the bizarre thought that she could do to the dogs what she’d done to Mother Abigail’s chicken. And then the thought was gone. There hadn’t been any spaces between things, only the braying of the dogs and the roaring of blood in her ears.
And then Mother Abigail had been there. Had been there all along. She had done the thing only she knew how to do. Bent space, folding the Edge up around them, making the dogs … vanish.
Winter gave a grunt of resentment. Why had she even sent her out on her own to get the girl in the first place? Had she known about the dogs? Was this another one of her tests? Everything seemed to be a test with her lately. And she seemed to be failing them all.
She shot a cross look over her shoulder. Margot was bent over the pot of water, splashing her face, pulling her fingers through her hair, trying to work out the tangles.
Winter tugged nervously at a tangle of her own hair, twisting a strand round and round her finger. Would Mother Abigail even acknowledge her when she showed up with Margot? Would she be angry? The priestess hadn’t seemed angry about her chicken. She hadn’t even seemed angry about the rescue. More … disappointed. Winter cringed. She wasn’t sure what it was she had done to disappoint Mother Abigail this time. How could she have known about the dogs? What could she have done differently? She couldn’t do what the priestess could do. How many hours had she been forced to stand in the woods, in the cold and the heat, Mother Abigail’s exhortation to “focus” ringing in her ears?
“Merci. Thank you.”
Winter started. Lost in thought, she hadn’t heard the other girl walk up behind her. She turned. Margot had washed and put on the new clothes. The gray shift and heavy blue overskirt were far too short, but they were clean. Margot’s old ragged clothes lay in a pile at the creek’s edge. The runaway glanced at them, then away.
“Thank you,” said Margot again, and for the first time she gave a true smile.
Winter squinted at the newly scrubbed girl and tugged self-consciously at her own matted hair. “Well, don’t you look fresh as a peach,” she said, nodding her approval.
Margot replied with a tight smile. Winter turned and began the trek back toward the Central Fire.
“You were speaking … French?” Winter asked, after they’d been walking awhile.
“Pardon?”
“French?” Winter turned to study Margot. “When you woke up. You were calling for someone and speaking French. It was French, wasn’t it?”
The other girl’s face darkened and Winter tensed, preparing for another outburst.
But Margot simply nodded and said, “Oui. French. Do you speak it?”
“Me? No!” snorted Winter. “But Mother Abigail does. Some. Mostly bad words, I think.”
Margot’s lips twitched upward. “Your Mother Abigail speaks French?”
Winter nodded. “And Creole. Which is kind of like French I guess, but different.”
“Where did she learn French?”
Winter shrugged. “No one in Remembrance has to talk about the before time … unless they want to. Including her,” she said. “But before Remembrance, she lived in a place called New Orleans.…”
Margot made a strangled sound in her throat and Winter stopped to look at her.
“What?” she asked.
The other girl shook her head.
“Mother Abigail says lots of folks speak French there,” she went on, watching the girl through narrowed eyes, wary. When Margot said nothing to this, either, Winter sighed and resumed walking back toward the settlement.
“Mother Abigail left New Orleans after a bad fever there.” The girl’s silence was beginning to spook her. “I mean I think that’s why she left. Because people were always dying of fevers there. She told me stories about how people would just sit down in the streets and die, blood leaking from their eyes and ears. Said there were graves filled with the dead and people piled one on top of the other like firewood. She said the fools, that’s what she called them, the fools would fire off cannons night and day, trying to scare off the sickness. But mostly it just scared the sick to death.”
She glanced back at Margot. The other girl was bent forward, as if walking against a headwind, head down, fists clenched, the muscles working in her jaw.
“When the rains came, all those bodies popped right back out of the ground and floated down the streets,” Winter went on. “Can you even imagine that? It’s no wonder she left.”
“Oui,�
� murmured Margot. “I can imagine that.”
Winter cut her eyes at the girl. “Are you … are you alright?”
“Oui.”
Winter waited for the girl to say more, but the silence stretched out between them.
“Mother Abigail was living outside the city when the worst fever anyone ever saw came. She left. To come here with Josiah,” said Winter.
“Josiah?”
“He’s…” She hesitated.
The thought of Josiah started an uneasy fluttering in Winter’s chest. If Mother Abigail had secrets that filled the skies, then the old man was a mystery as big as the world. No matter that his eyes looked like snot, Winter knew that he still saw. She was certain of it. And lately, she felt those opaque, wet eyes following her wherever she went. Judging. Disapproving.
“He’s … Mother Abigail’s friend,” she said, finally. “Since the fever time, back then. Since forever.”
“And what happened to les chiens? The dogs?”
The question caught Winter off guard. She eyed the girl. How to explain Remembrance to someone already so skittish, so ready to bolt?
“Maybe they remembered a prior engagement,” she said smiling. A joke. Margot stared at her blankly.
She sighed. Usually, it was left to Mother Abigail to explain Remembrance to the new arrivals, but nothing about this was usual, and Margot had been her rescue … mostly. Slowly, and as simply as she could, she tried to explain the mystery of Remembrance to her. When she was done, Margot stared at her, disbelief and disgust twisting her features.
“So you believe that your Mother Abigail has created a … a world, where no white people may enter?”
“Yes. We’re standing in it.”
“And you believe that with a wave of her hand, the old woman sent a pack of dogs to … where? A prior engagement?” Margot gave a bitter, hard-edged laugh. “Then you are either a liar or a fool. Or you must think I am.”
Winter bristled but didn’t respond. There was no point in defending Remembrance. The girl would see soon enough. She turned on her heel and resumed walking, not looking back to see if Margot followed. She walked without stopping until she reached the top of the hill that marked the edge of the main settlement.
“This Mother Abigail must be truly powerful to have survived such a fever and the swamps,” said Margot coming up behind her. Winter said nothing.
“I am sorry,” Margot went on. “I am sure this … Remembrance … must seem a magical place to you. But a world between worlds? Invisible to the outside? A conte de fée, oui? A fairy story?”
Winter sucked her teeth and moved off down the hill.
“I know those fevers. Have seen them. They destroy everything in their path. Even if you do not die from the inside out, you still die. I was born in New Orleans.”
Winter turned, surprised. A single tear ran down the older girl’s face.
“They take everything,” she hissed. “They take it and destroy it.”
“They?” asked Winter.
Margot made a noise in the back of her throat, a swallowed sob, and without another word began to walk down the hill. Winter watched her go, glad she hadn’t told the girl all of it. Glad she hadn’t told her that whenever Mother Abigail told that story, whenever she described the sight of the dead, rats feeding on rotting flesh as they rode the corpses through the streets like life rafts in the smoky sunlight, the priestess would throw back her head and laugh and laugh until tears ran down her face.
22
Mother Abigail
From her perch on the low stool in front of her cabin, she watched the two girls approach. The new girl was fair of skin, closer to white than Negro, with curly, honey-colored hair pulled back from her face, her sharp features oddly put together. From where she sat, the priestess could see the tightness in her jaw, the tension in her movements.
There was a painful thrumming in Abigail’s head. It was almost always there now. She closed her eyes, and fatigue fell over her like a blanket, threatening to suffocate her. Not for the first time, she questioned the wisdom of having confided in Josiah, even the bit that she had. She felt him watching her all the time now, measuring her steps, her words, waiting for a show of weakness, even now, when he was elsewhere in the settlement. Bondye, she was tired.
She pushed a hand into the pocket of her overskirt and felt for Hercule’s disk, rubbing it between her fingers. It was worn almost to nothing. Like her.
Opening her eyes again, she studied her girl. Barely reaching Margot’s shoulders, Winter was short and wiry. As usual, her headdress had come loose and hung carelessly about her shoulders, leaving her dark hair a wild tangle in the breeze. The girl was a muss-and-fuss bundle of messy energy. Mother Abigail shook her head. She remembered Josiah’s description of her as feral, and in spite of herself, she smiled. He wasn’t wrong.
Winter bounced up the trail in front of Margot, kicking at stones, leaping to slap at a low-hanging branch. The old woman watched as they met a heavily pregnant woman making her way down from the highlands. Winter ran to her and threw her arms around her, nearly knocking the woman off her feet.
The old woman shook her head. The girl was all emotion, her moods, like her energy, tumbling and twisting: light, dark, light. Many years before, long before Remembrance, Mother Abigail had saved the daughter of a spice merchant, and after, along with her silver payment, the grateful father had gifted her with a kaleidoscope. She’d kept it in her shack, deep in the bayou, fascinated by the changing colors, the lights. Winter reminded her of that old long-lost kaleidoscope: bright and random, changing with the whisper of the wind.
And then she was standing there, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. “Mother Abigail.”
The old woman nodded and struggled to stand, wincing as pain shot through her knees. “Child.”
“I brought Margot.” Winter visibly relaxed at Mother Abigail’s greeting. “She’s from New Orleans,” she added, twisting a lock of hair ’round her finger, bouncing on her toes.
The priestess’s eyes widened and she felt a shift around her. Suddenly she smelled the stink of coal smoke from the ships docked in the Mississippi, saw the sun reflecting off the broken glass that topped the wall of the slave stockade. She blinked, and there was Winter, looking at her strangely. Margot stood indifferently nearby, her gaze fixed on the chickens clucking in the dooryard. Mother Abigail fixed her face into a mask of mild interest.
“Yes?” she said.
Margot did not acknowledge this; instead, she turned toward the sounds coming through the trees from the Central Fire. From Mother Abigail’s cottage, tucked deep into the hillside, it was difficult to see what was happening down by the main clearing, but every now and then they caught a glimpse of a short, round mulatto running back and forth through the trees.
“That’s the Reverend,” said Winter. “He teaches anyone who’s interested to read.” The round man bounded through the trees and partway up the hill. Seeing the three women, he stopped, gave a quick wave, then charged back toward the Central Fire. “Can’t really say for sure what it is he’s doing right this minute, though.”
Margot might have been carved from stone. Only her eyes moved in her pale face. The priestess studied her.
“Mother Abigail?”
The priestess sighed.
Winter hesitated and Mother Abigail fought the urge to roll her eyes. “What you want, Winter?”
“I…” Winter rocked from foot to foot, her eyes on the ground. “Are you…”
Mother Abigail sighed again. “Petite, go find Josiah,” she said. “Send him to me. Then I need you to go up to Louisa. Time for the next exchange time, and Quaker Mary askin’ for some special things. Outside blancs go through Louisa’s honey and liniments like they breathin’ air. All the good to us, though, yes?”
The girl hesitated and Mother Abigail touched her gently on the cheek. “When it quiet, we talk. Go. It Margot’s time now. We need us to get acquainted.”
Before Wint
er could turn away the old priestess stopped her.
“Girl, why you always look like a stray? Tell me this.” She brushed Winter’s hair behind her ears and retied her headdress.
“Mother Abigail!” protested Winter, pulling away.
“Il est fait! It’s done!” The priestess released her, waving a hand dismissively. “Go on, wild thing.”
Winter rewarded her with a quick smile, then was gone.
Once they were alone, Mother Abigail turned her attention back to the runaway, who stood quietly, listening to the buzz of activity around Remembrance.
“You didn’t run here from New Orleans,” said Mother Abigail. “D’ou sont vous?”
The French words felt slippery, putrid in her mouth. Since abandoning Louisiana she’d rarely spoken the language. Except to swear. And that felt right. To curse in the language of the chein who’d stolen so much from her. It was only with great effort that she kept from spitting in the dirt as the words left her mouth.
For a long moment, it seemed Margot might not answer. She stood motionless, erect, facing the path leading down to the Central Fire. When finally she turned toward the priestess, Mother Abigail suppressed a gasp. The girl stared at her, her amber-colored eyes cold, hard.
“Nous sommes venus d’Kentucky,” said Margot quietly.
“From many days away. Just the other side of the Ohio River,” she added in English.
“Nous?” asked Mother Abigail. Margot had said “we,” but she’d been alone when the conductor found her stumbling, starved and half mad, through the woods.
The girl didn’t respond. Mother Abigail lowered herself back to the stool, swearing as something popped painfully in her back. Margot raised an eyebrow but remained silent.
“Come,” said Mother Abigail, indicating an upturned log. “You come sit by me. We exchange stories. Yes?”
Margot made no move to sit. Mother Abigail pretended not to notice.
“You know your years, child?”