A girl a little older than me rushed out of the cabin, the pockets on her tool belt slapping her thighs. I guessed she was Jemima. Maggie climbed up beside the men, and I stood next to Jemima on the ground. We waited for Maggie and the men to turn the tub on its side and inch it to the tailgate.
They lowered it down, grunting and swearing and trying to brace themselves, as Jemima and I clung to the curled lip. The weight buckled my knees, and I dug my boots into the snow, afraid if I lost my grip the thing would crush me.
We set it down gently on its feet, and all stood there panting. “This is gorgeous, Dad,” Jemima said. The tub was nicked in places and stained near the drain hole.
“Found it at a salvage yard. You said you wanted one.”
Jemima’s face shone, and my heart squeezed, seeing the look she gave her dad. It took me back to the day when I was ten, and Dad put Dusty in my arms for the first time and made me promise to brush her and play with her and hug her every day.
My heart kept squeezing, thinking I’d never see him again. You don’t know that, I tried to tell myself. You don’t know what’s going to happen.
We hauled the tub into the cabin and set it down in a corner on the rough wood floor. “We’ve got flour to drop off,” the father said, and headed for the door. The other man—Barnabas, I guessed—tipped his hat at us, and I swore that even though Maggie stood right where she was, her heart followed him back to the truck.
What’s your story, Barnabas? The shadow on his cheeks. The wrinkled shirt and stained jacket. He looked like he’d slept in those clothes and not just last night.
Maggie picked a hammer off a sawhorse table and turned it in her hand. “So this is your Build?”
“Sure is,” Jemima said. “Caleb and I should be done by May.”
Curtains hung in the windows, but pipes and electrical wires climbed the unfinished walls. The kitchen cabinets didn’t have doors or a countertop yet, but heat poured from the woodstove.
“Why’s this called a Build?” I asked.
Jemima gave a little shake of her head. “A Build’s when you build a house together so you know you’ll be good together. Don’t you do anything like that where you come from?”
“No. I wish.” I imagined Yates bracing a cabinet while I screwed it in place. I could see us someday, sweaty and covered in sawdust, collapsing beside each other on the floor when we were done. “And when you finish your Build, you get married?”
“Not always,” Maggie said under her breath. She glanced up and realized we’d heard her. “But Jemima and Caleb will.”
“This is so cool,” I said. All those hours working side by side, you’d know each other so well, and you’d have built something.
“You want to help?” Jemima said. “I’ve got doors that need sanding.”
Before I could say a word, Maggie took hold of me. “Sorry, but she’s mine for the next hour.”
“See you later,” I said.
Barnabas called to Maggie from the porch of the next house. “You left your gun bag on the gate. You planning on doing some shooting?”
“Avie and I are going out to the pasture. I’m going to teach her.”
Barnabas cocked his head at me. “That right? You want to learn how to hunt?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Everyone should know how to handle a gun,” Maggie said.
“That’s right. TEOTWAWKI,” he said.
A shudder ran through my shoulders, and I tried to shake it off. My own end of the world was lying in wait outside Salvation. Two men with guns and night-vision goggles and one big-ass reason to want me silent.
“I got a target you could use,” Barnabas added.
Maggie thanked him, and I could see her not quite smile. She was holding back, like she wasn’t sure she should allow herself to.
We waited in the road while Barnabas got the target. “Ugh, my tongue’s sticking to my teeth,” I said.
“You’re dehydrated. It’s the cold, plus the altitude.” Maggie unclipped an insulated bottle from her belt. “Here. You have to drink constantly so you don’t get sick.”
Dehydration? No, more like nerves, I thought, swigging the water.
Barnabas came back and we walked out to the pasture together. He glanced at the trees on our right. “He’s up on that slope, watching, if you want to talk to him.”
I saw Luke leaning against a pine, his arms crossed. Even the tilt of his cowboy hat felt defiant.
Maggie shook her head. “I don’t intend to force myself on him. Me showing up here is shock enough.”
“Your choice. How about you give Avie a safety lesson while I put this target up?” he said.
When Maggie took out her gun, I forgot about Luke. The gun was black steel. Not elegant or sleek, but so ugly you wouldn’t forget its job was to kill.
The safety lesson was simple. Don’t point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot. Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Keep the gun unloaded until you’re ready to use it.
I played back the night before, the loaded guns on the seat while we dodged the men chasing us. Maggie didn’t have any emotional conflict weighing her down. She would have shot to kill.
I don’t want to kill anyone. I just don’t want to die.
Maggie checked to see the clip was out. She fit the gun into my palm, and laid my index finger along the barrel. Then she curled my other fingers around the handle and set my left hand over my right. Across the pasture, the black shadow of a man flapped gently in the wind.
The black metal chilled my bare fingers and the flashback from the cemetery caught up with me, blurring my vision. No fear, I thought, pushing it away. I’m taking charge of my life. I refuse to be a victim. No fear. No fear. No fear.
I was concentrating so hard, I didn’t notice Barnabas beside me until he pushed down on my hips to shift my weight.
I got the sights lined up, and put my finger on the trigger.
“You’re too tight,” he said. “Squeeze too hard, it’ll throw your aim off. You have to be gentle. Peaceful. When that gun goes off, you should almost be surprised it fired.”
“Okay.” I shook out my muscles like Ms. A taught us to do before a track meet. No fear. No fear. I took a deep breath and squeezed. Click.
“Okay,” Barnabas said. “Now open your eyes and try again.”
A couple more tries and Barnabas shoved in the clip. “This is a nine millimeter. When you fire, the muzzle’s going to flip. Maintain the right tension, and it’ll snap up about forty-five degrees, then your hands will drop back into firing position.”
I was glad Target Guy was an outline. Glad he didn’t have a face. I got him in the sights and found a quiet place inside me. Eased the trigger back. Bam!
The shot echoed so loud I could almost see the sound.
“I think you got him,” Barnabas said.
“Really?” I couldn’t see the hole, but I felt an unexpected sense of exhilaration.
He adjusted my stance, had me fire a few more rounds, and told Maggie, “She’s all yours.”
Maggie kept me out there, until the target was tattered. Most of the shots had missed Target Guy’s vital organs, but she still said, “That’s good enough for now.”
My ears were ringing, but I felt oddly satisfied. Next time, I wouldn’t be a weak little girl with no way to defend herself. Next time, I wouldn’t be an easy target.
“Thanks for teaching me, Maggie. I know I haven’t exactly acted grateful.”
“It’s okay.” She looked off into the distance. “Sometimes we wait too long to do things we know we have to do.”
The sky had clouded over. Maggie and I tramped back toward Beattie’s as scattered snowflakes drifted down. “Pray it lets loose,” Maggie said. “The more snow, the safer we’ll be.”
71
We’d cleared the pasture when we heard someone strumming a guitar. It was hard to tell where the song was coming from, and the notes were slow, hesitant,
as if whoever was playing had almost forgotten the song. A man began to sing in a soft, gravelly voice.
I was snow blind
lost in winter
my heart as frozen as the ice on the birch
then you came along,
thawed me out,
gave me water
Your love, darlin’,
is my rebirth
The song touched the places in me that knew lonely and lost and the brand-new one that knew love. I hadn’t heard someone sing a song like this in a really long time. Not since Scarpanol broke a hundred million hearts.
The song got louder as if the singer had found the words and his fingers now remembered every chord. “That’s Barnabas, isn’t it?” I said.
Maggie quickened her pace like she wanted to get out of there. “Yeah, he builds guitars. He’s probably checking the tone on that one.”
You brought the sun
and the hours of solstice
you forced the green
and the leaf from its curl
You lifted seeds on the wind of tomorrow
Sweet summer lover
my heart’s rebirth
I trotted alongside Maggie, watching her face shift as if she was reliving a love story from the moment she’d fallen in love to when she’d lost it.
Her eyes darted to a small wood building nestled up next to the barn. The door was cracked open and the music drifted from inside. Maggie slowed as we got closer, and finally, she sighed and handed me the gun bag. “I’ll meet you back at Beattie’s,” she said.
I lingered at the gate, listening to the last words of the song, and I knew Barnabas had written it.
I’ve trekked the wasteland
I know its hunger
Felt the cut of the wind
On the tundra’s white sheet
The day that you leave me
Let the wolves claim my body
There won’t be enough left
For winter to eat
It was obvious: Maggie had left and broken Barnabas’ heart. And while I didn’t have the whole story, I guessed she’d broken Luke’s, too.
I could see her doing it, she was so obsessed with saving the world, she didn’t care about what happened to either of them. I’m not like that. I will never give up on Yates and happiness to fight some battle I can never win.
I’d only taken a few more steps when I realized that maybe I already had. The moment I’d sent out that message from Sparrow, I’d joined the struggle, whether I was ready for it or not.
72
Snowflakes swirled in front of my face, and I nestled my nose in my scarf. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees now that the sun had been swallowed up by the clouds.
I’d barely passed the barn when the church door opened, and children spilled down the steps. Sarah and Jonas raced toward me, a dozen younger kids chasing after them while the older ones held back. Spying me, girls who looked twelve and thirteen crushed together with their hands over their mouths.
In about ten minutes, there wouldn’t be a single person in Salvation who didn’t know Maggie and I were here.
Jonas barreled into me, and threw me off balance. “Come meet our goats!”
“Okay,” I said.
“But first I got to get them inside. It’s gonna snow hard tonight.”
Children gathered behind Jonas, checking me out. A little boy spoke quickly in Spanish to his older brother. The brother swaggered up to me—all four feet of him. “Who are you?” He had on a camouflage jacket that looked like somebody’d cut it down to fit him.
“I’m Avie.” Maggie had told me not to say much, to let her handle people’s questions.
“You’re not from here. Where are you from?” he said.
Sarah pushed through the crowd. “Hector Flores! You’re not supposed to ask where she’s from or where she’s going. Didn’t you listen to the teacher?”
I should have guessed the children would talk about me when they saw me earlier with Beattie, but it shook me up to hear it.
Sarah tugged me toward the barn, shooting a nasty look at the crowd. “Go on, get out of here.” She wore a pink calico dress under her winter coat, but even the bigger boys stepped back.
Jonas climbed the fence and dropped into the goat pen. Droopy-eared goats almost as tall as he was surrounded him and nosed his jacket. “You want food, you got to go inside.”
Sarah shoved me into the barn and pulled the door closed. “They’re too curious for their own good.”
I unwound the scarf from my neck. The barn smelled of alfalfa and goats and disinfectant. Electric lightbulbs dangled from the rafters, and light glinted off a scythe on the back wall. There was a row of them hanging there like this was Death’s walk-in closet. And below them on the floor were contraptions with iron wheels and long spidery metal fingers that came right out of Little House on the Prairie.
“Do you have horses?” I asked.
“They’re in winter pasture,” Sarah said. “We’ll bring ’em back late spring.”
She grabbed a handful of sunflower seeds from a bin and dashed down the row of pens, tossing the seeds into the bedding. “Best get out of the way,” she said.
I climbed on a hay bale as goats bolted through the barn’s side door. Sarah and Jonas worked as a team, wrangling them into their pens.
Jonas pulled me off the hay bale over to the first pen. “This here’s Emmeline, and that’s Rosalind, and over there’s Geraldine and her baby Pluto.” He took me down the row, introducing me to thirty or forty animals.
“You’ve got a lot of goats,” I said.
“We got a lot of people to feed,” Sarah said, with a note of pride in her voice.
She moved among the goats, whipping off their quilted coats. She tossed them to me and I stacked them. They were sewn from faded scraps of clothing. Nothing was wasted here.
Sarah crouched beside a nanny and smeared something that looked like Vaseline on her udder. “They can get frostbite here and on their ears if you don’t put salve on them.”
“You know a lot about taking care of goats,” I said.
“I’m Jemima’s apprentice. I know how to milk and shear, and I’m learning how to doctor them. Jemima’s teaching me to make cheese.”
“Sounds like a big job,” I said.
“Everybody has a job here. We’re a community,” she answered.
I thought about how Mom and Ms. Alexandra would have loved seeing Sarah take charge like this. How they’d admire Jemima for building her own house.
A big, black nanny bumped Jonas in the shoulder. He threw his arm around its neck and rubbed it hard. “Goats are messy, but I like them.”
The barn door opened, silhouetting a man in a cowboy hat in grey white light.
“Luke!” Sarah called as he shut the door behind him.
“Hey, Miss Muffet!”
She ran up, arms held out. Luke grabbed her hands and spun her off her feet.
Jonas leaped off a bale of hay onto Luke’s back and sent his hat flying into a stall. He wrapped his arms around Luke’s neck, and clung to him like a monkey.
“If Emmeline eats my hat, you’re going to buy me a new one, little brother,” Luke warned.
Luke spun faster, his eyes trained on Sarah. I sauntered over to the stall and managed to snatch the hat out of Emmeline’s mouth. The whole time I was keeping an eye on Luke, Maggie’s mystery son.
A big open smile creased his tanned cheeks. His light brown hair curled around his ears. He wore a sheepskin jacket over a sweatshirt, but that wasn’t why his shoulders looked big. Luke was all muscle.
I almost laughed, hearing Dayla gush in my head. “OhmyGod, he looks like that Greek god, you know, the one with the hammer!” Day could never keep her gods straight.
Sarah had squealed with laughter, but now she cried, “Luke! Luke! Put me down. I’m dizzy.”
Luke slowed until her feet touched the ground, then he peeled Jonas off his neck. “Aren’t you going to in
troduce me?” he asked them.
“This is Avie,” Sarah said. “Aunt Maggie’s friend.”
Luke looked me up and down, his oak-brown eyes trying to figure me out. “Hello, Margaret’s friend. I’m Luke.”
I handed him his hat. “Emmeline only dented the brim.”
“Thanks.” He dusted it off on his jeans and stuck it back on his head. The way he kept his eyes on me made me think he was more of a listener than a talker—just like his mom.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “You saved my life.”
Jonas grabbed his arm. “How’d you save her life, Luke?”
“Ah, don’t listen to that. She’s making up a story,” Luke said. A bell jangled, and Sarah yanked Jonas’ sleeve. “That’s Momma’s cowbell. We gotta go.”
Luke lingered at the open door. Snow tumbled from the sky like somebody was shaking it out of a basket. Nellie stood across the road on her front porch, watching Jonas and Sarah hurtle toward home.
Luke stuffed his hands in his leather gloves. “You can tell your friend Margaret, I didn’t come to save her. I came because my pa told me to.”
“Sure, I can tell her, but she’s not exactly my friend.”
“Then what are you?” he said.
I lowered my eyes to the floor. His boots were scuffed and a deep scratch cut across both toes. “I’m not sure. We’re on the run together.”
“Yep. That’s Margaret. First sign of trouble, she runs. She’s all about saving herself.”
Maggie had done plenty of things I didn’t like, and I did not know all the history here, but I couldn’t walk away without defending her at least a little.
“Look, I’m sure you have good reasons to feel the way you do, but just so you know, she didn’t leave Vegas until she made sure that twelve other girls got away safely. She’s not all bad.”
“So you trust her?”
I snorted. “No!” I said, instantly wishing I hadn’t.
“No surprise in that,” Luke muttered.
I tried one more time. “Maggie’s complicated. She has lots of secrets—” I stopped, thinking if I said any more I’d probably make things worse. “You know, if you’ve got questions, you should ask her yourself.”
A Girl Called Fearless Page 24