Oddity

by Eli Brown

  Clover paused at a copper-green statue of a soldier clutching a rifle in the main square, a tribute to those lost in the Louisiana War. She felt the invisible web of history tightening around her. Her family, Senator Auburn, even Emperor Bonaparte were all bound together. When one tugged, the other felt it. Some of the connections were clear: the uncertain boundary between Louisiana and the US had led to the war, to this mute monument, and to Senator Auburn’s insatiable need for power. Auburn’s craving for oddity weapons had led the poachers to hunt her father down. But some connections were still invisible. What did the Seamstress want with her? How exactly had her mother died? And why was Clover odd?

  If Hannibal was right and this new war was upon them, Clover couldn’t survive such a future stumbling blindly. Every step she’d taken since the Ice Hook had resulted in calamity.

  “If I am to make the right choices,” Clover whispered to the solemn statue, “I must know.”

  Clover had to untangle her own history, see the threads that —

  “Bleakerman’s!”

  The voice turned Clover’s head. She followed it and spotted Nessa Branagan across the square, smacking her tambourine against her hip.

  “A strong taste for a strong medicine!”

  Nessa had set up in a sunny corner of the square, trying to draw a crowd. There were half a dozen tonic bottles arranged on the ground before her. She wasn’t wearing the rainbow skirt, but she’d woven a hurried crown of daisies while waiting for customers. There was no sign of the wagon and, instead of a stage, she was standing on a horse trough.

  “Liar!” Clover shouted, stomping toward the girl who had betrayed her. “Cutthroat!”

  When she saw Clover, Nessa jumped off the trough and opened her arms for a hug. “You escaped!”

  Clover ducked the hug and shoved Nessa into a trough. “Fiend!”

  Green water slopped onto the cobbles. Nessa looked pitiful. She was barefoot, one meaty arm still bandaged and the other bare and scarred where Willit’s bullet had burned her. Her skirt spread like mud in the water around her. She made no move to pull herself out.

  But Clover could not afford pity. “Those poachers killed my father, and you helped them find me!” she raged.

  “I didn’t know all that. Willit promised to leave you be.” A blush spread across Nessa’s cheeks like a tonic stain.

  Clover wanted to believe Nessa. She was angry at herself for thinking she’d made a friend, for enjoying those sweet songs. Tears threatened to quench Clover’s anger, so she shouted at people passing by. “Don’t you drink any of this poison! She will sell you to bandits the first chance she gets!” She was surprised to see a smile creeping onto Nessa’s face, as if the horse water were a soothing bath. “What are you smiling at?”

  “You’re alive!” Nessa said, almost laughing. She removed the ring of daisies from her hair and offered it to Clover. “We’re free!”

  Clover smacked the flowers to the ground, but she felt a glimmer of Nessa’s stubborn gratitude breaking through her rage. “What do you mean ‘free’?”

  “I thought it was my fate to work for Willit Rummage. I owed him. But when I saw you in that cage, I felt like I was in there with you. I said to myself, ‘Nessa Branagan, spit on fate. Fear don’t play no part in it. You have to help Clover.’”

  “I almost died escaping that cage,” Clover said. “With no help from you.”

  “I didn’t know how I was going to beat Willit’s Pistol and Matches. But Clover, I swear I was trying to find you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Smalt stole my wagon to carry his dog.” Nessa spread her hands helplessly. “He said the hound was slowing him down. A thorn in his paw or something. I offered to take his horse for a swap, but he said, ‘Smalt doesn’t swap,’ and just took everything. I know better than to pick a fight with Smalt. But I didn’t give up. I’ve been trying to sell enough tonic to buy a horse to keep looking for you.”

  Smalt’s name startled Clover back to her senses. “Is he here?”

  “Who?”

  “Smalt!”

  “He stays at the Golden Cannon — why?”

  Clover ran, leaving Nessa behind.

  The Bleakerman’s wagon was parked in front of the Golden Cannon Inn. The smell of beer, urine pots, and roasted peanuts wafted from the door of the tavern.

  A hulking barkeep gave Clover a hostile stare as she pushed her way in. His bald head was tattooed with dark script she couldn’t make out, and he wiped the sweat from his neck with a dirty rag.

  The high-beamed drinking hall was thick with chatter and pipe smoke. Raucous revelers crowded around small tables, arguing about the rumors of burning settlements.

  When her eyes adjusted to the gloom, Clover noted an ancient cannon mounted in one corner, another monument to the Louisiana War. By some local custom it had been covered with gold foil. One red-faced patron sat atop the cannon, delivering a lecture to no one in particular, occasionally patting the cannon as if it were a favorite donkey. “And who will lead us to a proper victory against the scoundrels at our borders? Why, Pres’dent Auburn, who else?”

  Every few minutes a newspaper boy entered to announce, “No sign of the senator yet!” The barkeep rewarded the messenger with pinches of the greasy ham that hung on a string over the fire.

  But for all the noise and commotion, one part of the hall was strangely still. A stairway led to an open mezzanine with three tables and plenty of empty chairs. There, a single figure sat hunched over a carafe of cloudy liquid, like a spider in the rafters.

  Clover took a deep breath to gather her courage. Then she shouted, “Smalt!” and started toward the stairs.

  The barkeep grabbed her arm. “Best not to meddle with that one, little thing.” His grip was strong, but his voice was gentle.

  “I have business with that man,” Clover said.

  “That ain’t a man,” the barkeep whispered. “That is Smalt. He never eats. He only drinks vinegar. Nothing good ever came from messing with Smalt. You just leave him be.”

  “I have business.”

  The barkeep gave her a pitying look. “Whatever he took from you, you must let it go.” He turned back to his work.

  Clover’s mouth had gone dry. She couldn’t lie to herself anymore. She wasn’t here to recover what Smalt had taken from her. She was here for what he had taken from someone else, anyone who knew about her family. Did it matter where such secrets came from? Her history belonged to her. Clover shook her arm free and marched up the stairs.

  “Don’t look in the Hat,” she whispered to herself. “Do not look.”

  Clover felt her father’s ghost behind her, pushing her up the stairs. With every step, the hall grew quieter. By the time she could see Smalt’s boots, the crowd below was watching her. Smalt, though, took no notice. He peered into the dusty shadows and slurped his vinegar through his loose teeth. His wig sat crooked on his head, its edges crusted with old makeup.

  In the silence, she heard a hiss coming from the diabolical Hat on the table. It bubbled and whispered as if the secrets were simmering inside it. Clover spotted her father’s bag under the table; the slobbering hound was using it as a pillow. A rag had been tied hurriedly around the beast’s front paw; Willit’s bullet had found its mark.

  Smalt still believed the bag contained a powerful oddity. Clover had carried it like a bomb about to detonate, but the only power it held was her father’s memory. In the past few days, Clover had been battered by infernal forces. But what power did she herself contain? She’d told Hannibal that she was no weapon. But every oddity was dangerous — there was no denying that now.

  She had no idea how she was going to get what she wanted, but she forced herself to take the last step. Smalt regarded her with disgust. Clover started to speak, but a brittle sound made her stop. A rattle. Near the mezzanine railing, almost invisible in the shadows, Nessa’s Sweetwater viper lay coiled in its jar. Smalt had taken a new pet.

  The hound growled in
its sleep, a dollop of drool sliding down the medical bag. Clover didn’t have a plan for this moment. Now that she had found Smalt, she had no idea what to do next.

  “Mr. Smalt,” she said, “I have come —”

  “Mister Smalt?” He sucked the liquid from his teeth and turned to Clover. “Why not call me ‘Your Excellency’? ‘Your Majesty’? ‘Vaunted, Inestimable Potentate’? If you must use a title, pest, put some effort into it.”

  “I have come for my father’s bag.” Clover’s voice shook. “For the oddity inside and for the secrets you took from me.”

  Smalt leaned out of the shadows. His sunken eyes were like caves carved in the sallow plaster of his face. “I liked you better wearing a cage.”

  “Or” — Clover lowered her voice — “you can keep them in exchange for what you know about Miniver Elkin.”

  Fear and shame painted Clover’s cheeks. She was lying about the bag, about her secrets, and at the same time she was confessing her deepest desire. She was trying to strike a deal with a devil.

  Smalt cocked his head, intrigued, his ear like the wormhole in a rotten apple. He swished a mouthful of vinegar and spat it, cloudy, back into his glass. “No,” Smalt finally sighed. “Smalt will keep the trinkets. I have a buyer in mind. Senator Auburn will do almost anything for an oddity these days. It can’t hurt to have the future president in my debt.”

  He scratched under his wig with a long gloved finger. “But the wait is ever so dreary. They say he’s been just around the corner for days now.”

  “You must give me one or the other,” Clover said.

  “I must? Is the pest telling Smalt what he must and must not do?”

  Snickers came from the hall below, where the crowd was waiting on every word like a theater audience.

  “Just tell me how she died or —”

  “Oh dear, this is getting dull.” Smalt snapped his fingers, and the barkeep stomped up the stairs to grab Clover by the collar. As the patrons hooted and cheered, the man dragged Clover halfway down the stairs.

  Clover shouted over her shoulder, “I challenge you, Mr. Smalt!”

  The hall went quiet again, and the barkeep stopped.

  “Challenge Smalt to what, exactly?” Smalt asked.

  “I can find a secret as well as you can,” Clover said. “And I don’t need a raggedy old Hat to do it.”

  “The poor girl is cracked!” someone in the crowd shouted.

  “Let her try,” someone else said.

  Smalt said, “All right, pest, show me your little trick.”

  “If I can do it, you must tell me what I want to know and give my father’s bag back.”

  Smalt cackled, a dry sound like acorns rolling down a shake roof. “The pest wants to play my game?” Smalt leaned over the railing and pointed to a hairy man in crowd. “That man there. Milo Talbot —”

  “I beg you,” the man named Milo quavered. “Please —”

  “You see, pest? Milo is already begging. Milo’s secret isn’t worth much money, but he would do just about anything to keep Smalt from telling his sister, wouldn’t you, Milo? Do you think Milo would eat his shirt? Let’s see if he would.”

  Milo was very still.

  Smalt said, “Well? Get to it.”

  Suddenly Milo pulled off his shirt and tore it into shreds, wadding them up and stuffing them into his mouth. He poured beer into his mouth, trying to wash the wads of cotton down his throat.

  “Stop it!” Clover shouted.

  “Put some heart into it, man.” Smalt lifted his glass to the effort.

  Milo ate faster, gagging and choking. He had a sleeve halfway down his throat when he turned blue and fell over. The others nearby managed to pull the shirt out and pounded his back until he was breathing again.

  Smalt grinned at Clover. “Can you make a man eat his own shirt?”

  Clover was speechless.

  “Secrets run deeper than blood,” Smalt purred. “Secrets are power. Go home, pest, before you get hurt.”

  “I am not cruel,” Clover said. “But I can find secrets all the same. Do you accept my challenge?”

  “Let her try!” someone said again.

  “Fine.” Smalt flicked his wrist. “Find me something juicy.”

  “If I can do it,” she insisted, “you’ll give me what I want?”

  “Yes, yes. Shall we draw up a contract before a judge? Get on with it.”

  Clover took slow steps through the crowd, scanning the drunken faces. Poor Milo sobbed quietly in a corner. Clover tried to calm herself and see these people with a doctor’s eye. Most of them lived and worked here in Brackenweed. She focused on the smallest details: the calluses on their index fingers from leather-working tools, the soot behind their ears from stoking fires, the rashes on their forearms from caustic tanning liquids.

  One man was different, though. The scars were on his knuckles. He had a cauliflower ear and a nose like a flattened fig.

  “This man spent his youth as a pugilist,” Clover announced.

  “That ain’t no secret,” the man replied. “I was the toughest fighter in the state!”

  The crowd muttered with disappointment. Clover had to do better. She noticed that one man’s breath smelled like wet feathers.

  “This man,” she announced, “went to bed with a headache last night and woke up with joints so stiff he had to waddle like a duck until he warmed up.”

  “It’s true,” the man said. “How do you know that?”

  Only those with rubella smelled that way, but Clover didn’t say so. She moved on, looking for more secrets.

  “And this man,” she said, smelling the squashed-pear scent of sugar sickness, “has tingling toes and wishes, right at this moment, that there was a piss pot nearby.”

  “Are you a witch?” the man asked.

  Several people clapped and cheered. Clover looked up, but Smalt only rolled his eyes. “Petty ailments?” he said. “These are not real secrets.”

  The crowd was still murmuring. Everyone hated Smalt, and they were excited about this strange girl brave enough to challenge him.

  “Do it again!” someone shouted, and the crowd quieted as Clover climbed onto a table to get a better look. This was her only chance to salvage something of her family: some truth about her mother or at least the memento of her father’s tools. If she failed she would have nothing left.

  She peered into the faces of the inn patrons, listened to their breathing, noted how they shifted and scratched in anticipation. It was no good to find things that they would tell just anyone. She had to uncover things that they wanted to keep hidden.

  She saw the worn shoe of a clubfoot, the broken mustache of a cleft lip. She saw the yellow skin of a failing liver and the squint of the nearsighted. She saw bodies shaped by misery and accident that went on as best they could, no different than the patients in Rose Rock or the Sawtooth Prairie. Clover saw a room full of stories. The chisels of life had whittled these bodies into their current shapes. The quills of hope and chance had left their faint calligraphy, if only she could read it.

  In the expectant hush, the Sweetwater rattlesnake twitched its tail once, striking the jar like a glass bell. The sound sent a chill down Clover’s spine. Finally, Clover pointed to three men, one after the other, and made her pronouncements.

  The first had the sagging lip and hand tremor of an old soldier who had been poisoned by bad rations. “This man celebrated the end of the Louisiana War from a sickbed.” The second wore a thin silver bracelet with a pigeon-shaped bangle that Clover’s father had told her about. “This man married an Okikwa woman.” At last she pointed to a man whose head sat atop his stiff neck in a way she had seen only once before.

  “And this man . . .” She paused. She was not sure, but this was her only chance. “Was a criminal. Hanged from a gallows. A long time ago . . . but the rope did not kill him.”

  “She’s true, Smalt!” the first two men shouted.

  All eyes went to the last man, who stared so cold
ly at her that she realized she was right. She also realized she had said too much. In her eagerness to win, she had done the same thing Smalt did, dug too greedily into another’s life, exposed something that should have stayed buried.

  “I’m wrong about him,” she shouted, trying to undo what she had done. “I made a mista —”

  “No!” the hanged man said. “It is no mistake. If someone must tell my secret, let it be this strange girl. She can do what you do, Smalt. Without the Hat. She has won the bet!”

  “She has done nothing special,” Smalt grumbled.

  “She won!” the crowd shouted. “Give her what she’s due!” The hall filled with cheers in Clover’s favor.

  Smalt rose to his feet, leaning his long blue frame over the banister, and roared, “Rabble! Do you dare?”

  The room went quiet. A mist of vinegar and spittle rained down as Smalt hollered. “Why was Jonah hanged? Isn’t that the real secret? Why did those villagers drag him to the hanging tree? Does the girl know? Do any of you? Smalt knows. Why does the baker’s wife wash her hands in the middle of the night? What poison began the Louisiana War? Why does Willit Rummage wear the rabbit ears? In what warren are the vermin wrought? Only Smalt knows. In the blooming field there is a body buried under every flower. Who knows their names? Smalt!”

  He turned to Clover and said, “The ocean of secrets crashes against your little world, wanting in. Do you want the flood? I owe you nothing. Shut your mouth and go.”

  The crowd clucked and hissed, but there were no more shouts. The barkeep shook his head. It was no use; Clover had failed. But she could not just walk away. She made her way back up the stairs, her knees trembling.

  “I don’t know about all that horribleness,” she said. “But I know a bully, Mr. Smalt. A deal is a deal. You owe me more than just the bag you stole. I will have what’s mine.”

  “No, pest,” Smalt said, pushing the viper’s jar to the staircase with the tip of his boot. “You won’t.” The jar wobbled precariously on the edge of the topmost stair.

  Then it fell, tumbling over the first two stairs and bouncing high. Time seemed to slow as everyone watched the pale serpent floating in its glass bubble.