Follow Me to Ground

by Sue Rainsford

  –Yes.

  He was tense now, like he was bracing against a chill.

  –I found her, and she was standing with her hands in her pockets, rubbing her feet in the dirt. Said she’d seen one of the humps, breaking up the water, and then the tail. The tail looked mad, she said. It was the tail that had made the splash.

  His eyes were on my knees. Already I felt the scratch of the gorse and grass we’d walk through.

  –And Olivia wasn’t afraid?

  He laughed, moving quickly now, opening the door and swinging his legs outside.

  –Olivia doesn’t get afraid.

  –Not even as a child? Not even of Sister Eel?

  –Olivia was never really a child.

  Turning back to wink at me.

  –Kind of the opposite to you.

  And then we were wading in the waist-high grass.

  Tabatha Sharpe

  Only time I met her was when I was born.

  Nothing wrong with me my whole life, ’less you count my red-dust-haze. I see red when it rains. When I look at any kind of water – a river or a lake or a stream:

  Red

  Red

  Red

  And when people go swimming or stand out in the rain, afterward they’re all dripping red.

  I didn’t realise water wasn’t red for everyone else ’til I was ten and Mother was reading to me from a picture book. I asked her why the rain in the book wasn’t red and she was frightened but she kept her fear on the inside like Father can never do.

  Just asked me what else was red, and I pointed at her red mouth and her red shoes, and that seemed to calm her.

  We never go swimming in the summer, though. And I’m only allowed quick showers, never a bath, and Mother pulls the curtains every time it rains.

  Like I said, I was young when Father started feeding me stories and warnings about The Ground.

  –The Ground is cruel, but with tilling and culling we can make it useful.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, flicking my tongue against the back of my teeth.

  –Why only such a small part for burial?

  –My father and I worked a long time on taming it just so, so that the ground would cushion a body and yield it again. Only a small patch can be handled at a time. It takes huge strength. When you are older, we will try rein in some more. And then, when you have a child, you’ll try for more again.

  –We don’t live here to fix Martha Jacobs?

  Miss Jacobs was the pale wisp of a Cure he had seen to that day.

  –No, Ada. Had Miss Jacobs lived in a different town, she would have gone unfixed.

  –It’s about to rain.

  A high wind came through the trees. A half mile away I could see the dust on the road shooting up a foot high. Samson said

  –We’re due a storm.

  I was sitting against a tree and he was lying on his shirt.

  –Olivia can always tell when rain was coming.

  –That right.

  Cures often believed themselves a little bit magic. It got tiresome.

  –From the smell in the air. Sometimes as far as two days away.

  –I see.

  –She used to love playing in the rain when we were little. When all the other kids would run inside.

  I looked at my feet. Looked at Samson’s calves, the left one marked by one long, thin scratch that was filled with wet-dry red. It moved through his fine blonde hair with a serpentine twist.

  –Anyway. She can tell you about that herself.

  I stretched out my own legs. Started thinking about my walk home.

  –When would I meet her?

  –She’s having a baby. Didn’t I tell you?

  I looked at his face, the side of it not hidden by his arm.

  –No. Your sister is pregnant?

  –She’ll be giving birth soon.

  He sat up then, quickly, almost knocking me aside. I pulled my dress toward me while he squatted in the shade, his buttocks made pink and crimson by the brittle twig shards on the ground.

  By now it was raining, though it barely made it through the mesh of the trees, landing every now and then on the hot ground with a careful tutting sound.

  –So she was pregnant when Harry died?

  –You can do the math as well as me.

  His elbows cut their way through his vest as he pulled it back over his head.

  I stood up and headed for the road.

  –All right, I said. See you.

  –All right. See you.

  By the time I got home the sky had a hazardous, silver sheen. I stopped on the bottom step to smell the air. It had that rubbery, skidding-wheel scent that always preceded a storm. I was wet from the rain and the cool felt good to me.

  Father was in the sitting room, staring at the angle between the ceiling and far wall, a mug held in one cupped hand. I said

  –Thick rain coming.

  This was something we always said when a strong wind came before rain.

  Already I could hear the branches tossing themselves against the house and the shutters rattling in their cases. Father would most likely need to turn up his sleeves and see to the leak in the bathroom ceiling. The paint there, flaked and yellowing, garners a slippery shine in the rain. He was a strange sight in the bathroom. It’s a low-ceilinged room, and the top of his head grazed the doorframe.

  But just now the storm was still cloud-bound and Father’s last swill of coffee was losing its grainy scent.

  We went to the kitchen. I didn’t speak. I was tired and my eyes felt large and unruly in my head. He was talking about our next Cure, Lilia Gedeo. A woman we’d often seen to who’d be coming again soon. He was moving around the countertops, setting the hob alight with its rim of fire-blue.

  –What’s wrong with her this time?

  He kept his back to me. The creases in his shirt were moving like tiny, panicked worms. He was cooking something. On the floor by the table I saw our laundry in a bucket, the linens scrubbed coarse. I sat down and pulled it toward me, started rubbing them off one another, coaxing up suds. I looked up.

  –Father?

  He shook the pan. A smell of rust and lilac filled the room.

  –Where do you go, when you go out during the day?

  My dress was sticking to me now.

  –Since when does it matter?

  –Are you meeting a boy? A man?

  –Do I ask you what you do in the woods?

  –Ask whatever you like.

  –I’d rather do the courteous thing and leave you be.

  –I know you meet someone.

  My hands quickly turning raw and pink.

  I dropped the linens in the water and went outside, out back and onto The Burial Patch, where the weather would stop me hearing him. Before I closed the patio door behind me he called

  –You’ve a Cure tomorrow. Olivia Claudette.

  Arson Belle

  No one was quite sure what they could and couldn’t do – a lot of people thought they could read minds, others thought they could see the future. All that kind of thing. I just went there and asked them to put me straight out. Always said Do whatever you need to and tell me about it later.

  Once though, he gave me a look like he knew something. After I’d done something I wasn’t supposed to. I can say it now, it happened so long ago. I was a young man, didn’t know better – and we didn’t have many ways to pass the time … but a few days later I went to get fixed and he looked at me so long and hard I thought he might hit me. Usually the two of them saw to me, but that time he told Ada to go play. Told her it was too nice a day to be stuck inside.

  That night Father went out hunting.

  In the kitchen, come evening, he started stirring inside of his clothes.

  Things were tense between us but I said

  –You go on, I can finish here.

  His features suddenly soft with relief, rolling his shirt off his back like it was burning him. The extra length and bend that came into his an
kles and wrists always looked like it would pain him.

  The arch in his hips.

  His shoulders broadening apart.

  If it did, he didn’t say.

  When he came back in the morning he’d a cut down the length of his back. Once he straightened upright again he asked me to dab it with salt. He was too sore to sit down so I had to stand on a chair to reach the top of him.

  –Good hunt?

  –Yes.

  –Deer?

  –Yes.

  I was out back when I heard Olivia come into the drive. Right away Father was calling to me.

  I was standing on The Burial Patch, looking at The Ground. The rain had kept up overnight and the lawn was all grumble and churn. Things were still stiff between Father and I so we didn’t speak when I walked through the kitchen. The both of us had tracked in soil and the tiles were marked with swirls of brown.

  She was in the sitting room, looking out the window. I followed her gaze and saw she’d come in Samson’s truck. I made a noise and she turned to me.

  Tall, slim woman. Dark hair and pale skin. Her muscles tight and smooth inside her limbs. From the side of her face I could tell her mouth was set in a hard line but when I said her name and she turned to look at me she melted. Let her shoulders move down her back. Cocked her hip and smiled. This was something I never forgot about her. All tilts, all smiles, but in a practiced kind of way.

  –Hello Mrs Claudette.

  –Oh! Call me Olivia.

  –You want me to look at your baby?

  A hand on the bottom of her stomach, bearing the weight.

  –I’ve had a pain and some bleeding.

  –Heavy or light?

  –Heavy at first but now mostly light.

  –Why don’t you lie back on the couch.

  She sat down and made to swing up her legs. I held her beneath the knees and she laughed at the effort it took between us.

  –People keep telling me that laughing is bad for the baby, probably because I laugh so hard.

  I took off her sandals and placed them near the wall, their barely worn toes nosed into the skirting. She was dark where Samson was light, though they’d the same fine features, the same dusty shimmer in their eyes.

  –Not the case.

  She laughed again and I knelt down beside her. Her scent was like Samson’s, but sharper.

  Her stomach was a high, hard mound. A slim-hipped woman who’d be a long time in birth. I started rolling up her dress and saw her thighs tauten, but someone must have told her what to expect because she lifted her hips and wriggled the dress up to her chest. The panties she had on were bright white, and the slim cloth bridge that covered her lips was only a little sodden and clinging. She must have bathed that morning, and been only a short while in her clothes.

  There was indeed a bruise.

  It started at the left hip and sprawled on her bump’s underside. I put a hand over it and my ears filled with a tearing sound. I reached across and slipped my other hand beneath her back where I heard only a dull whistle. A good sign.

  I knew by now she’d be expecting me to speak.

  –I’m sorry to hear about your husband, Mrs Claudette.

  –Oh, thank you.

  A glance at my hands as they moved around her. And then,

  –I’m fine.

  The weight of the milk-brew in her breasts made them pull t’ward her face, framing her chin with their topmost bit of bulk.

  –I’m going to have a look at the baby now.

  Though I only said this to avoid details that might worry her and keep her from sleeping, as I could tell already the baby was fine.

  I put a hand over her face. The sweat of her nose and her little mouth, gathered unto itself like a stuffed pouch, left dewy marks on my palm. Without any struggle she was asleep. I ran a finger down the length of her stomach, and the skin was so pliant and young it needed only the gentlest pulling apart.

  Her viscera, I could tell, were on a better day all chime.

  They’d gotten a shock and the tissue surrounding her womb had grown crimson and tightly wound – but no, it wasn’t tissue. Running my fingers over the rivulet mounds I found it was a layer of tightly packed blood, deeply clotted and in some places already turning to dust.

  At this point she took in a few short breaths, which was normal. The lungs raised and steadied but the breath stayed inside her.

  Now that she was open the room had filled up with the tearing sound, and the clotting was giving off a smell of blueberries left too long on the stove. I started humming, feeling my way toward the pitch of her hurt. The baby was sleeping; I could see its little shoulders through the curtain of her womb when I lifted the bladder aside.

  Once the humming and the tearing blended, I slipped my hand around the clotted blood and clucked at it until it shrank and slid away. It turned from crimson to purple in the shadow of my hand, and left her.

  Quiet now, aside from the rain. I listened hard: I’d left a bowl under the couch, just in case, but hadn’t heard it land there.

  I brought the skin back together, smoothing away any puckering with the flat of my hand. It pinkened some, once re-joined, and I waited for the rosiness to fade before waking her. I looked at the clock over the fireplace. It was two in the afternoon.

  A very accommodating Cure.

  Before coming to her elbows she stared a moment at her stomach in the usual dazed way, mute and uncomprehending, and I helped her roll her dress back down.

  –You tore up some tissue, and it bled. You must have fallen or stretched your hip out too far.

  She nodded, her mouth a little ways open.

  Way, way too far, I thought, and noticed that in tugging on her dress I’d marked it with rusty stains. I wiped my hands on my legs when I hunkered down to pick up her shoes.

  –Your baby is working fine. It’ll have big green eyes.

  I looked her in the face before sliding her sandals back on, feeling the thin bones of her ankles working to flatten her feet. She had thick charcoal lashes and her eyes were the muddied floor of a summertime wood.

  –Like its daddy.

  She put her hands in mine and pulled, coming to stand. Her face had a hardness to it, all of a sudden. Like she’d had when I first came into the room. It stopped her looking like Samson. She said

  –Harry didn’t have green eyes.

  I dropped my hands from hers and opened the door to the hall, calling to Father. Mrs Claudette didn’t move, just stood where I’d left her, perfectly shapen and tall. She was so polished looking. As though her whole life she’d been tended to like a plant that must at all costs flower. And then she was lit up again, a candle flaring behind her eyes, her lips moved by a breathy smile.

  –Oh Miss Ada, I know you know what it’s like when a woman’s told to earn her keep.

  –Well, we all have to work.

  –Harry’s seed may as well have been water out of the kettle.

  She was speaking, rather than whispering, which struck me as strange. I could tell the look she gave me was a rehearsed one, that I was meant to find it hard to look away.

  –Mrs Claudette, who do you think I’m going to tell?

  Once they start talking heart and mind, you ask to be paid. So Father always said of Cures who thought us akin to their priests and in the habit of undoing such things as guilt and unseemly longing.

  Her face softened and her mouth started moving with quick, unthinking laughter.

  –Oh I know, I know! I’m all worked up – my brother says my hair will fall out if I keep doing the thinking for everyone around me.

  –Will your brother be helping you with the baby?

  Her eyes darting around my face.

  –With your husband gone? Will your brother help you with the baby?

  –Oh yes – yes yes. He has always taken the best care of me.

  I made the shape of a smile. Wondered when she’d leave.

  –He came here not so long ago. You’ve a very close scen
t. Usually takes twinning for siblings to have a scent so close.

  But this was too much for her, as allusions to our strangeness often were. She was moving away from me now – carefully, like she’d just seen a spider, or something hungry peering at her from the woods. In my head I saw her hand as she’d have liked to hold it: sheltering her stomach with the fingers flared wide and the skin around the knuckles whitening. She spoke again in a tight little whisper:

  –I can’t remember a time when we were apart.

  By now I was weary of her moods, hopping on the left foot and then back to the right. Father had come out of the kitchen. He looked at me and I nodded and Olivia started asking how we wanted to be paid.

  I went outside. A heavy rain had started. I held my elbows and looked out toward the woods from the porch. The rain was coming in straight lines over the edge of the roof and the smell of it soothed me. I could taste the wet bark, the sodden loam.

  After a few minutes she came outside, walked down the steps, said some more nonsense I didn’t take heed of, turned one more time to wave. She eased herself into the truck, her belly high behind the steering wheel. I watched her drive away, feeling tired and squirmy.

  When she was gone I stepped out from under the porch – just enough to feel the water – soft as milk – run down my neck.

  In the pantry, picking out leaves to make tea, I found the clot on the third shelf. Shrunken into itself like a kicked cat. Had I been less distracted I’d have buried it properly, rather than taking it outside and simply dropping it on the grass.

  Something for The Ground to gnaw on, I said to myself, watching it disappear into the hungry soil.

  The next time we lay down together, Samson was not quite himself. His vest hung wide around his shoulders in a way that made me think he’d slept inside it. The sprawling hair of his armpits was snaky and wet, and his insides were all scented with liquor. I could taste it in the damp of his neck.

  He was heavy on top of me, begging me turn over and put my belly in the dirt. He said he wanted to lick my back and I let him, my eyes on the thick bristle-brush.

  When he started to sober I could tell his thoughts were full of Olivia, of her thin wrists and her pursing mouth. I said