Dove Keeper

by Emily Deibler

  Shackles, jewels, and eyes gleamed in the light, smirked like Herod perusing the annals of the Chapel of Holy Innocents and finding himself aroused. Eyes, devil eyes, but not. Too little, too human. As her vision blurred, the lanterns grew long, misty limbs along the cave walls.

  Closest to her were lumpy, soiled blankets. The blanket, hands, curled hands poked out, and she imagined dozens of small bodies folded together. Squashed, bloated, grubby. Could be mangled. They, the children under there, could look preserved like little angel statues, but the rancid odor said different. Rancid was too tame a word.

  Marcy was trenched in mocking light, which lingered like sun-yellow smog, trenched here with the blanketed bodies, the faces molding the black dirt. The piss, blood, and soil on her like brains on a stretcher-bearer’s elbow. Feral, crazed thoughts insisted that she flee, flee as far as she could. Need to take them, take André and the children out of here, take them. If she could move, if she wasn’t killed.

  She couldn’t bring herself to lift the blanket closest to her, that piece of fabric flung aside as if through momentary regret. The belt of time, a cancerous wick, hissed like a whip. Abyssal pockets, likely not so different from the ocean’s bottom where bulbed devilfish writhed. And Marcy, dizzy and ill, became aware of something, a kernel of the universe watching her, neither holy nor wicked, but cold as an iron tongue. It pulsed through the walls and poured down her.

  She tried to walk forward, but a heavy ache below her navel stopped her, reminded her of when she had her first menstruation. When she angrily informed God He had chosen wrong because she’d never have a child, Maman offered a rare smile. A forlorn one, since Maman’s happiness always carried a salty, bereaved air. Stewing like a bitter, steam-huffing toad, Marcy fumed as she sat half-naked on the towel-draped commode, betting Maman was too mannered, too clean to suffer like this. As she drowned in humiliation, Papa peeked in bashfully only to ask if anything new had happened, and, then and now, she wished the leaking bullet wound would kill her.

  In the middle of the cavern, a blue boy hung his head in a chair, his mouth gaping wide. “You’ll catch flies like that,” Papa would say, and Marcy swallowed her sick.

  In the mouth, Addie had said. The boy in the chair, through there. Marcy stepped forward, her legs wet, plodding planks. She stepped in front of the rotting boy. The key, she needed the key to free André, would need him to try to help the children climb out of this pit. She feared jostling the poor, poor boy would make him catapult awake.

  The silence sliced through her like an electric bell. A crucifix, silver as Judas’ palm, hung from the dead boy’s neck, burrowing into his tented throat and stained collar. Marcy inched her hand into the boy’s mouth, past his teeth. His body was as rigid as a dry board. No, more than that, as if Medusa had hardened his flesh. He couldn’t have been older than ten. She expected worms, cockroaches, maggots, yet nothing startled her, let her know it was time to scream. Only the quiet guided her. Her fingers brushed something she mistook as wet, but he was so dry and the smell—

  She thought she heard a sigh, but nothing emerged to haunt her. She gripped metal, and pulled, pulled, and then the key shone in the light. Shone like the dreams where Marcy went down a candlelit corridor with no end. No monsters, no blood, just the finger-thin fires casting bony light on the melting walls.

  Clasping the key, Marcy collapsed to the black ground and retched until she was hollow. She only dully noticed the shattered glass beneath her fingers. Even as she expelled all she had, all that belonged to her, she moved away from the blue cave and back into the winding labyrinth where the living children waited. The key dug into her palm like some unholy trinket. Her hand, her body shook in a frantic pendulum, the rhythmic twick-twack of a woodpecker, forward-back, forward-back like a nun’s habit in the autumn wind. Before she tumbled out of the dove room, the execution room, she went back to the boy and took the cross; she and André would need it.

  As if it helped this poor little soul. She swore the cross burned her palm, sensed her filth, but she only clenched her fist harder.

  In Marcy’s stories, men died all the time. In the Great War, men died all the time. That’s what she read. Black on white, the crisp, bloodless newspaper accounts of the trenches, sulfur, and melted faces. Cold numbers like letters, letters like bodies blackened to ash. All the letters were just pieces of a dismembered word, right? Write, letter, letter, let her, let her. Let her, let her, let her. What did those words mean? She couldn’t stop; she had to focus on them and nothing else. But no, her thoughts hindered her escape. They were like medicine, a cure and a poison.

  What would Papa say when he saw the taint of this place on his daughter? On Maman? Marcy was marked by a filth that she’d never wash away. When she found the children again, staying in a single spot like Jonah hovering before the whale’s gullet, Marcy said, “Don’t look, don’t look back there, please. Tell me all of you didn’t see what was in there.”

  “He already made us see,” Addie replied.

  “Who? Who made you see?”

  The girl said, “The blue man and his friends.” One of the boys pointed to his own torn tunic. Marcy’s heart plummeted to her shoes. If the servants were all on his side, then Jehanne was alone with him.

  Marcy thought of Papa and the Widow again, but no, she couldn’t. She shouldn’t. She couldn’t think of Papa badly here, of all places, when he could be the one thing of unabashed good in the world.

  Rais and all the guilty servants will go to the courts, and Papa will have them. Even the women. I don’t think Papa has ever killed a woman before. Rais, that evil man from Là-Bas, that devil, the knight who took children like Bluebeard took wives. He spun sweet blankets of lies to net children away from desperate parents. Each man kills the thing he loves. The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword. If anyone deserved death, it was him, and that sent a shock down her spine.

  The rest of that day, the day she watched Papa kill a man, flooded her. Marcy didn’t realize they were home until the vehicle sputtered and lurched to a stop. When she and Papa entered the house, they had barely crossed the threshold before Maman launched off the couch and straightened, prim and tight-lipped like a lady in a painting. Her dress was a faded burgundy. André coughed in his room, but it was only the three of them. Maman never slapped her, even for discipline, but Marcy hunched her shoulders anyhow.

  “I . . .” Papa swallowed, removing his hat and squeezing the rim with both hands. “It was my mistake.”

  Marcy stepped forward. “No, it wasn’t. I sneaked into the back of the auto and saw.” Papa, the one who planted roses and sang, killed a man. Killed men. Marcy knew of his profession. Maman and Papa had told her, and she would sneak a look at the postcards with gray, illegal pictures from an execution, but she didn’t truly know until she saw. She saw that the blood Papa spilled had lived with her all along. Lived at her feet, lived in her head, lived in her sheets. She expected a small, formal crowd in front of the guillotine, a filmy image in her head, but instead everyone had packed around her like starving wolves.

  Maman spoke to Papa, her words leaking out at a furious pace like a dead man’s neck. “Did anybody take her picture? Did they see you with her?”

  Papa said, a bit uncertainly, “I don’t believe so. I wasn’t aware of her for a long while.”

  Maman pursed her lips. “What did that man do?” What an odd shift. Papa leaned and whispered the answer to Maman, as if he hadn’t already tainted Marcy with his knowledge, as if he could preserve it after that.

  Maman pursed her lips again. “Good, then.” She became somber again. “Did she see? Truly?”

  Marcy stepped forward. “I did.” The rope and the Widow and the mouse-woman, and the man, the man was dead.

  Maman rubbed her temple, mouth quivering. What had once been solid as stone was fractured, and it startled Marcy. “Why did you sneak out? What did you hope would happen? What did you think you’d see? Why, Marcy, why?” God, would Mama
n cry? “We tell you about these things so you never have to see them. Of all things, why sneak out to see that? That?”

  Marcy stepped back, she couldn’t answer. From the exhaustion etched deep in Maman’s face, Marcy saw she had aged her considerably in that new, sherbet-colored morning. For an instant, she wondered if Maman had ever seen death, but she knew she had.

  Gently, Maman said, “Marcy.” Papa was there between them, hands reaching toward them both. His left hand toward Marcy, the rope hand.

  “Sorry.” Marcy repeated the same word. Maman bowed in the armchair with her head in her hands; that seared Marcy’s memory. And she fled to her room; she was thankfully left alone until supper. Her family, all four of them, ate and never again acknowledged what happened, and so much as broaching the subject would’ve been like cursing in a church.

  A ripple of thought disturbed her, this asymmetrical rolling of silver water—Papa wiping a smudge off her cheek. Part of her, especially after the shock she’d endured, couldn’t accept that the courts controlled life and death, that Papa pulled the rope. As the executioner’s daughter, it was infused in her blood, the blood of hundreds of alleged criminals. Horrific, monstrous men suffering horrific, monstrous justice.

  Retribution, vengeance. That was the word, the last one. Vengeance wasn’t neutral, even legislated vengeance, yet was death a penalty when it ended pain? That thought scared Marcy, the appeal of death, but she wanted to die now. But who was a judge, a mortal, to determine if one of God’s children, one of His little words in His winding story, needed to be extinguished?

  Did Papa doubt himself? Was Papa afraid to go to Heaven because he might meet an innocent man he killed? But she couldn’t go to Heaven if he wasn’t there. She didn’t care how perfect Paradise was if she didn’t have him.

  To calm herself as she and the children made their way back to André, Marcy tried to recall that old folk song Maman taught her, the one about the woman who loved another woman but lost that affection because she didn’t give her lover a rosebud.

  Under the oak, I lay and died. Couldn’t remember, the words like snow on her lips, already gone. The ground was too cold. On the driest bough, a nightingale cried. Sing, nightingale, sing. Your heart’s to laugh, mine to die. I lost my friend to a rosebud I kept from her. That song, even with its comfort, hurt Marcy because of how it showed love for what it was: yet another chance for grief. That austere, lonely, thankless sort of love when Maman would chide Marcy for walking around with her gown undone because she could catch a cold, and she’d bend down to tie the sash of Marcy’s gown twice.

  Maman would then fret over every sneeze with a furrowed brow and twitching fingers, and, huffing, Marcy said during one of her little colds, “You know, this’d go away quicker if you gave me the right dose.” Despite all her past pain, Maman risked loving again, and Marcy never understood despite knowing what Maman had gone through. She had understood the way one knows how something works without thinking of why. She’d seen the pain of Maman went through like scraping a knee, not losing a limb. She had thought Maman not talking much about those she lost meant she had moved on.

  Now, Marcy blinked back tears, and more followed. She was a foolish girl. Even in reaching for freedom, she was giving in. She would marry her cousin because only executioners and their relatives could legally intermix with first cousins. Nobody else would want them; nobody else would want her. In her attempts to be free, she’d be a bird in a cage again, a cage her mother, with all her flaws, had tried to keep away from her.

  She had to get home so those chances wouldn’t be in vain. After years of resenting the walls and clean floors, she needed to go home the most when she might never see the house or Maman or Papa or Jolie again. She was as doomed as a hungry Irish Catholic in an English factory. She’d die here, and maybe she wanted to if it meant her suffering would end, if it meant she wouldn’t see little eyes in the corners of her room as she tried to sleep.

  When the children led her back to André, she couldn’t meet his eyes, and he looked as if he wanted to speak, but his eyes were hollow in the lanterns’ glow. With sweat-slick hands, Marcy freed him, and, with a pained grunt, he slid to the black ground. She joined him, so that only the children stood and stared with the lanterns.

  Marcy ripped off a piece of her dress skirt and held out the makeshift bandage. She teased, more than a little forced, “Help me do this, big army man.”

  André’s face crumpled. “I don’t think I can go on.”

  “What do you mean? As in ‘walk’?”

  He rubbed his hands over his temples, wrists marked where the shackles had bitten into flesh. “Live. Not after what happened.”

  Marcy didn’t want to press André about what Rais had done to him or made him do while he was in this pit, especially if it would hurt him.

  “If you need to speak about it, me and Maman and Papa’ll listen. Or give you sweets, whatever works best.”

  Abruptly, André said, “I have a daughter.”

  Marcy didn’t know how that was pertinent, but she didn’t want to stymie André. “Yeah.” That was the most she could offer as she swallowed the taste of residual vomit.

  His attention snapped to her, and it burned her. Too many eyes here, too many in the light. “You knew?”

  Oh right, she wasn’t supposed to have heard about that. Marcy stared at her knees. “I eavesdropped when you spoke to Maman.”

  André kneaded his forehead, the nails furrowing deep. “Oh, God. And you heard—”

  “She said she’d rather have me dead than married to you.”

  He paused, and she hated the pity in his eyes, that pity like he knew what she’d seen, knew her sin of witness like Eve shamefully removing the palm leaf below her navel. “God, you didn’t deserve that.”

  “Yes, well, after all of this, I think that’s a little low on the list of things I’m fretting about, maybe number nine or ten.”

  “You really aren’t bothered that I had a child with a woman I met in Strasbourg? Didn’t you want to marry me?”

  She had, not that long ago, really. But now, he was convenient, yes, convenient was the word, as terrible as it sounded. Before Jehanne, André had been the only person she knew well who wasn’t Maman, Papa, or Papa’s friend, Henri. Her cousin had a rugged handsomeness to him, and he was, when that seed of infatuation sprung its spindly legs, Marcy’s only chance to create a bond and start her own life.

  Before she met Jehanne. Marcy finally answered, “I thought I did, yeah.” God, what would Jehanne do if everyone survived this and her father (father? was that even possible?) went to prison? She wouldn’t have anywhere to go. Marcy couldn’t stand for that, not for a second.

  “It was a mistake, one I can’t take back, a debt I can’t repay. Tante and Oncle would be better off without me, better with me dead, especially like this. A useless burden, the family putain d’idiot.”

  That sent a chill down Marcy’s back. “You aren’t useless. They’ll be so happy when you’re back and all right, trust me. It’d end them if you died.”

  “I doubt that, given my enviable position as the disappointing replacement.”

  “Did either Maman or Papa say you’re only a replacement for little Roger?”

  “They don’t need to. God, I’m sorry. Look at me, sitting here and doing nothing. We all need to leave.”

  “It’s all right. Take your time getting up; going too fast might hurt you more. We’ll figure everything out when this is all over.”

  André grunted, rubbing at the mucus bubbling out his left nostril. “Suppose I should attempt to stand.” He slid up a little and grimaced. “Christ.”

  “Here.” Marcy offered both hands.

  “No, no, I’ve got this.”

  Marcy urged, “Taking my hands won’t burden me. Please, if it’ll help.”

  His voice was quieter than a whisper. “Maybe I deserve to die here alone.”

  “Don’t be so dour. If you die, it won’t be alone,” Marcy
joked, her laugh nervous and faint.

  Dryly, André said, “Thanks, cousin.”

  “And I’m not leaving here without you, so get that out of your head.” He took her hand and leaned against Marcy, whose muscles were taut.

  The children surrounded them, and they, Marcy, and André supported one another like the mossy, crumbling pillars of a Roman temple. They looked and smelled awful, or at least André did. Marcy again tried to think of herself as one of the poised heroines in the movies she read about, but she assumed her hair and clothes were decidedly less dashing.

  André said, “What’s that in your hand?” When Marcy lifted the cross with her free hand, his expression broke, but he extended a hand. She dropped the cross on his palm. “I didn’t save him.”

  “Oh, but you did the best you could. You could wear it to honor him.”

  Her cousin put the cross in his shirt pocket. “This belongs to his parents.” They resumed their leaning into one another. Best to focus on the itinerary: escape.

  Marcy asked, working to fill the silence, “Do you think we can find our way back to the surface?”

  “Yes, or die on the way, I suppose. Or starve.”

  His encouragement worked as well as hers. “Great.”

  “Never fear. If anything, thirst would get us first.”

  Marcy snorted. “I’m glad we have that comfort, at least.”

  “I suppose I do have my uses, after all.”

  The children were quiet and walked funny. Every one of them, Marcy and André included, limped past the glowering lanterns. Her poor cousin shook with each step, so she was strong for the two of them.

  “Need to be with her. Need to, need to . . .” Maman.

  Jehanne’s voice came next. “I’ll need to find a ladder. There may be one in the shed outside.”

  Jehanne. The blue in Marcy’s heart brightened to yellow-white, yet she was unsure the voices were real until André tensed beside her.