Follow Me to Ground

by Sue Rainsford

  But I was well forgotten by now.

  I don’t know if Father ever realised how this story spread in the town. Cures couldn’t grasp that a baby could leave its mother without being birthed, could wind up so far away and be discovered by me. As though plucked out of the air. It made more sense to them that I’d killed the Sharpe baby and given her parents a changeling – a strange little creature like myself, who would someday do my bidding.

  For years, I wondered if it was my dream of a cradle that called her to me. This was better than thinking that Sister Eel Lake was simply where too-soon babies go.

  Always when we met he’d have some quick greeting ready. The third time we saw one another, the day after we put Miss Lennox to ground, he said

  –You get on better with the heat.

  It was the first time I’d gotten into the front of the truck. The edges of the passenger seat were stained a deep brown. He had Cure music playing and it seemed to gather speed as he turned corners and cast backward glances at the road by way of the little mirror between us. The bottom of the window had the usual hillside pattern of dust thrown up by wheels and missed by wipers.

  We came to Sister Eel Lake and he looked at me.

  –Keep driving.

  I was surprised he’d been willing to stop there. Almost everyone was cautious of the lake and believed the story of the cannibal serpents. Those giant, gorging eels grown during the war to kill enemy soldiers who stopped to bathe and swim. It was well known how they’d gone hungry some weeks into peace-time, and so began to swallow one another whole.

  When only Sister and Brother Eel remained they watched one another until the brother fell asleep, and it was his fear that shook me, his fear upon waking. Thrashing in the tight dark that was his sister, engulfed even as he stirred from sleep.

  It was Sister Eel who had years ago eaten most of Christopher Plume, a slim and freckled child, when he was nine. Father worked on him a great deal, out of courtesy to the family.

  –Are you afraid of your father seeing us?

  Driving under a willow tree whose branches snagged around the windows.

  –Father doesn’t really leave the house.

  This was part of a lie we kept afloat. Cures would scare easy at Father’s animal tendencies, blame him for livestock gone missing, though he never hunted anything that wasn’t wild.

  We kept going and came to wider, more unkempt corners.

  –I heard that. I didn’t think it was true.

  –He doesn’t feel the need.

  We came through a brief density of trees and the road straightened.

  –But you do.

  –I like the change in air.

  His thighs clenched inside of his trousers. I looked out the window, said

  –There’s always a lot of smells in our house.

  He was swallowing from thirst. I stopped talking. We came to the river.

  –How about here?

  He left the truck parked by a high bush grown up straight and thick like a wall. We’d arrived by the main road, not the back paths I usually walked down. The trees on the river’s far side were maybe fifty feet tall and the branches reached out to criss and cross with their neighbours to make a cool, echo-filled chamber high up in the air. I got out of the truck and shook out my dress, walked toward the reeds. I heard him following me, making the long grass crackle. I said

  –I like the river.

  –I’ve never seen you here.

  –Father doesn’t like me to be seen outside the house.

  –Why’s that?

  –I suppose it’s not so important now. It was more for when I was a child and Cures weren’t sure what to make of me.

  –Cures? he laughed. That’s what you call us?

  He was walking alongside me now and I watched his vest catch at the top of his trousers, twisting and releasing with his long high strides. We reached the shade and it felt like stepping through a wall of water. I felt him looking at me. My smock, hanging free of one shoulder, was clinging to my stomach and the short prickling hair on my groin.

  –Were you really so strange?

  –There were certain things about me.

  By which I meant my girlhood, constant and unceasing.

  A Cure could live their whole lifespan and never notice a change in me, and so, to them, I seemed a girl of sorts forever.

  Later we rested beside one another in the grass. I kept looking up at the knotted branches and the thin slivers of blue where they let through the sky. I touched his head, his too-soft curls. He was tired, half-dreaming.

  –I was a long time in the desert.

  And then he laughed at himself. But I knew what he meant.

  It was late at night two days later when we went out to fetch Miss Lennox. When the air hit her she turned hummingbird: finger-tap, tremble-knee. Father carried her into the kitchen and we laid her out again. It took time enough to open her, with her being stilled so long in The Ground. The skin was all stiff and cold.

  –She’ll scar, I said, and Father nodded.

  I went to fetch the lungs. They rocked and swished slowly inside of the bowl, their mucus sticking to my fingers and wrists. It sometimes happened that the halted stillness worked into a Cure and their parts coloured the air around them. It generally went unnoticed by Cures themselves, but it was possible to see on occasion a slight slowing of time – a wound appearing in some soft flesh but not colouring with blood. This was why the skein off Miss Lennox’s lungs took its time in rising and its time in falling. Where it touched me it left behind a cringing, grizzly sensation.

  The night was cool but Father’s chest was shining with sweat. Lungs were always tricky.

  Her insides were filling the room with a sound of water. A lake lapping against its edges and shifting the pebble and grit.

  I handed Father the first lung and after he’d placed it inside her I did the detail work – the work his hands were too big for, stoppering and making seamless frayed holes and cords. Undoing as best I could all the strangeness her thin body had seen.

  The second lung took quicker, squirming from Father’s hand and filling the space it had left behind. We closed her then, and bathed the blood away, and Father woke her.

  Her mother arrived to collect her at a quarter past three in the morning as she’d been told. Father walked Miss Lennox out to the car and I stood in the door, letting the night-time cool settle ’round me.

  They drove off. The car was an old one and sputtered, coughed. The headlamps were covered with dust from the road and only gave off a little light.

  Father was walking his slow gait. From the middle of the drive he said

  –Time for bed now, Ada.

  –Might sleep late in the morning.

  And then he walked past me, his arm grazing mine. I kept on looking out at the night. The moonshine was making silver the top of a tree that kept rustling, on and off, with the red-tailed hawk that nested there.

  There are some technical terms around curing:

  declension

  auscultate

  Father made me learn them but we never used them, not even to one another. I think teaching them to me was just another way to fill up the days.

  He wrote poems for me, which worked better – small, simple verses to help me understand the work we did.

  lest you tumble, slip,

  or trip!

  Hold firm, not tight, and

  lift with both hands, however light!

  I’d murmur them aloud while pulling weeds from The Ground or scrubbing strips of linen, but it took me a long time to fathom the long line of ailments ahead of me.

  Chafed skin and chalky bones.

  Too-thin veins and too-large hearts.

  Every now and then Samson would talk about his sister, the recently widowed Olivia, how they’d grown up in a small room in their aunt’s house. How Olivia hated what she called ‘the poverty’, hated the whole town.

  –When we were little she thought the only way she�
��d escape was the circus, but then she started meeting men. And then she met Harry. But then, Harry’s house was so big; I don’t think she knew what to do with all the different rooms.

  He was sitting under a tree, shirtless in the shade, watching me wade in the river. For something to say, I said

  –Harry was much older than her.

  I’d cured him, one time, for a bitter bile in his stomach.

  –She wanted to get married quick, before she had to work. She wouldn’t last a day in the fields.

  –And what does she do with the rooms, now that he’s died?

  He made a noise in his throat.

  –His parents kicked her out, so she’s living with me again.

  Which was their aunt’s house, the house they’d grown up in and which their aunt had left to Samson when she died.

  I knelt in the water. It came up my shoulders, slipped under my hair.

  –Do you have the space?

  –Hardly. We’re back sharing a bed, like when we were children. See?

  And he turned around, showed me where her knees had left bruises down his back.

  Sometimes we didn’t go to the river but into the woods, deep into its middle where the branches gathered in knots and hid us from the hot blue sky. It needed constant tending: Samson’s skin the sun might set to singing, Samson’s want of shelter, Samson’s want of cool.

  Often, when it came time to lie down together, he’d already be pink and dazed – weighted down by the sun. I caught myself at such times, thinking how little it’d take to open him, to be inside him and see how compact, how snug and how sound the mechanisms therein.

  A warm sweep across my pelvic floor. A long exhale down my spine.

  A heat kept just off the boil.

  Lilia Gedeo

  I’ve stomach problems, you see.

  That and a tightness in the chest come springtime – the pollen! Yes, the pollen. It seems to stick to my throat.

  So I was always up there, when I was young. Can’t count how many times I was put to ground. All that soil – and it was a different kind of soil. It never quite came out in the wash.

  But I didn’t mind. Of course I didn’t mind.

  I was just happy to have been made well!

  Whether it was my stomach or my lungs. Or one of my headaches. I get desperate headaches, too.

  We’ve a man now that comes around the houses, since Miss Ada stopped curing. He comes around with his bag of tricks and oh, it just isn’t the same.

  When Mr Kault came to see us his neck was all bruised. Father said he must have been kneading himself, trying to loosen the knot at the base of his skull from his cerebellum growing twisted and hard.

  Cerebellum.

  Sarah-balloon.

  Sear-bloom.

  Edible-sounding, the name itself full of swell. Apparently supple when healthy.

  We put him to sleep in the sitting room and then rolled him face down on the couch. I held his thumb in my hand.

  He was the only man I’d ever seen of similar size to Father, though even as he lay still in the afternoon light I could see him shedding flake after flake of skin while all Father ever parted with was the mark of his mouth on his mug, maybe the fleeting indent of his hand on a Cure.

  We’d opened him just enough to spy the withered, partial organ.

  –There’s not that much to be done. This hard grind of muscle, we can bring that down. But the problem is deeper. Something we can’t fix.

  –Why can’t we fix it?

  –Because sick is sick, and it has to go somewhere, and some sicknesses are dangerous when taken out of a body.

  By which he meant madness and perversion. Seeing as he let Mr Kault in the house I assumed it was madness. Maybe the glitching memory or the many-voices kind.

  –And sometimes, even though it’s harmful, if a sickness has been deep-set too long a body doesn’t think to expel it.

  –How d’you mean?

  –It takes a toll on the flesh it’s leaving.

  I looked at him blank though it irked him when I didn’t catch his meaning right away. He looked from me back to Mr Kault’s sore neck and said

  –I mean if it’s left untended too long the body can’t live without it.

  Sitting back on my ankles I imagined a small lamb come into the room and trying to suckle on me, moving its rough tongue from left to right. At first I didn’t know why, but then I remembered: Mr Kault’s cousin, Lorraine Languid. Some fifteen or so years before. It was the only time Father and I had together left the house, to the farm where Mr Languid lived with his wife and sons. Lorraine Languid was a young woman still and I was slowly finishing being a child. Father had made the rare exception to tend to a Cure in his own home and to distract herself Lorraine took me to the barn. The lambs were there, and the hay was all slick with their pursing mouths. I remember Lorraine tried to hold my hand, and I’d made it into a fist and tried to shake the feel of her holding it away. That curing had been a strong one. It gave Mr Languid another five years (at which point his heart would again make that smacking sound but he’d be far away, and not found until the bonnet of his truck had cooled). Father was at his strongest, then. Even his mildest touch did a lot of good.

  We kneaded and kneaded Mr Kault and then we hummed and sang. When we opened him fully and lifted out the cerebellum it made a harsh, coughing sound. His mouth had leaked its moisture into the sitting room couch, bringing the old pink cushion up in a soft, mauve bruise.

  –If we were to try and fix the deep-down sickness, what might we do?

  Father shrugged.

  –Bleed him. And keep him hidden from the moon. But when a sickness like that leaves the body there’s no telling where it will go.

  He was quiet a moment, looking at this large man that couldn’t be saved.

  –If we were risk-takers we might put him to ground – The Ground. But there’s no way to know for sure what it would do.

  –It might cure him?

  –Not quite. The Ground flips things around. Either way, he wouldn’t be a Cure anymore.

  –He’d be more like us?

  –He couldn’t heal, but he’d be different. On the inside.

  We put Mr Kault in The Ground, to the left and farthest corner from the house. We knew he would kick and kick he did. His thighs were broad. A horse’s hind leg. Back in the house I listened for the sound of his grave breaking, but it didn’t come.

  I went to bed, thinking hard on Samson and hoping to sew the seeds of a dream: his stomach coming undone, a wide mouth tasting the air, a sliver spreading up the centre of his almond-shell chest.

  I wanted to dream of his heart, its beat sullen and low.

  His heart that was a crimson heart, not the pastel shades of other Cures.

  Snug in my hand, his quadrant muscle.

  Feeling it beat against my palm.

  But when I closed my eyes, all I could think of was the lambs.

  The look of the lambs and their mouths.

  The smell of the barn. Lorraine Languid, leaning in the doorway. Putting something in her mouth: a cigarette. Though I didn’t know what it was at the time. I thought the smoke was coming from her. I thought her mouth was on fire.

  The next morning I went to meet Samson. When I got there he was tanning in the back of his truck, his shirt off and his jeans hanging unevenly around his hips from where he’d pulled the hot buckle away from his skin. I whistled to wake him and climbed into the truck. He scrunched his eyes at me and said

  –Must really be summer if you’re starting to freckle.

  We got into the front, started driving toward the river. He coughed. Looked at my thighs.

  –You know I’ve been hearing ’bout you since I was a boy.

  A small insect was scaling the window as we drove. On my side of the glass I followed its trail with my finger, clucking at the thinness of its legs.

  –There was a lot of fuss at the time, over Tabatha Sharpe.

  Why the Sharpes ever to
ld anyone about how Tabatha came into the world I could never fathom.

  –That girl hasn’t had the easiest time of it. She was stripped down once, kids looking for teeth marks from Sister Eel.

  He waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he said

  –Anyway. She was never quite right.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this kind of talk about Tabatha. Could be I found her too late. Could be too much of the lake was already inside her.

  The insect, stripped of its grip as Samson took a corner too sharply, was gone from the window. He kept talking.

  –You ever see her?

  –Tabatha Sharpe?

  –No, Sister Eel.

  –No.

  Running my hand up the back of my neck, sliding it into my hair. Then, remembering myself,

  –Have you?

  –No.

  Adjusting himself in the seat, trying to lessen contact with the sweating leather,

  –But Olivia and I, we used to play a game, if we were ever near the lake.

  Which was when their parents were in the fields, before their parents died. Before they went to live with their aunt and slept together in the small creaking bed.

  We’d come to the river. Samson turned the keys to make the engine hush and then hunched toward the steering wheel. His vest had left a glistening copy of itself behind so that his skin was shining where the droplets sat on his body, thick as tears.

  –We’d pretend that we were Brother and Sister Eel and Olivia would chase me, trying to eat me.

  His eyes closed. I looked at the cloth of my dress, sticking to me. I lifted it and watched it fall, landing again with a twirl.

  –One day we ended up on opposite sides of the lake. Olivia was jumping up and down and saying I’m gonna catch you and I’m gonna eat you!

  He swallowed and it made a loud, clicking sound. He closed his eyes tighter and the skin of his brow bunched toward his eyes.

  –I was ducked down in the rushes, and I heard a splash and thought Olivia had fallen in. I saw the spray of water from the ground.

  He laughed to himself, said

  –Some of it landed in my mouth. I thought I’d die.

  Opening his eyes, moving again in his seat.

  –So you went looking for Olivia?