“I remember Mother used to say that the chickens could smell the blood, and it would make their eggs bigger.”
“Really?”
“Mother told me I would spoil butter, so I snuck to the churn once and stuck a finger in some butter. Nothing happened.”
“Speaking of butter, did you try this butter bread?”
“No, is that Ada Jacob’s? I swear her husband got lucky. Her mother said she used to hate cooking and once made bread burned to a solid rock. She’s certainly improved.”
“Well, I used to hate little children, and I certainly don’t hate mine now.”
“Children are different.”
“So is butter bread!”
Their laughter flutters upward like a flock of sparrows. Amanda looks at Denise and sees she is dreaming, somewhere else. Betty has scolded Amanda before, for having so few women friends, but this party is reminding her why she doesn’t want any. She tires quickly of talk about bodily functions, sweet foods, the smugness of women with children. Of course, talking to a man besides Andrew or Father is frowned upon, and the girls she used to run around with treat her like she’s invisible.
A few children, muddy and completely unrecognizable, streak by the window. Amanda stifles an urge to shatter the glass with her fists.
The cake feels burdensome in Amanda’s stomach, and her teeth ache from sweetness. Circling, she looks at the happy women and snoozing chaperone, and feels a sudden longing to be alone in her own house, crouching in the cool, silent root cellar.
Jane Jacob comes to stand by her. “How are you feeling, Amanda?”
Amanda stutters. “I’m—I’m fine. Just, you know. Feeling a little ill.”
Jane absently takes Amanda’s hand, and Amanda recoils from her palm. It’s soft, and damp, and sticky like the cake. Smiling and making gabbled excuses, she fetches the precious sheet of netting and begins winding it around herself, spinning like a top as she spurts forth wordy nothings about feeling tired, having had a wonderful time, the cake was marvelous, so nice to see everyone. She catches a glimpse of Mr. Balthazar staring intently at her like she is a madwoman. Hurtling out the door, she enters gratefully into the humid summer air, the scents of butter and the breath of women clinging to her skin. Inhaling deeply a few times, she immediately feels better and begins her shuffle toward home. Andrew has been pulled away for another all-night repair, and Amanda will sit in the kitchen with her head between her knees, legs splayed to allow for her stretching belly, and stare at the floor.
Near the path that leads to Amanda’s home, there is another, smaller path through the grass that leads to the seashore. Amanda thinks pensively of the echoing emptiness waiting for her at home. Hesitating, she changes direction and shambles down the increasingly sandy path until she can see, blearily, the stretch of windblown sea before her. The rising moon hangs heavy, low and swollen, the golden color of butter.
“Amanda.”
She whirls, squinting through the veils of gray across her face. A man is in front of her, clothed in netting like herself, so close to her she has to raise her head to see him. His face is a sparkling mass of points, wire pocked by moonlight, and no matter how she turns her head, she cannot see his features.
“Amanda.”
His voice is deep, and he pronounces her name slowly, like it’s an incantation. Her lips start to tremble. He advances toward her, slowly, inexorably, and she stumbles backwards. The waves hiss against the shore like hushed, fevered breathing. He says her name again and she tries to reply, but her lips are numb and clumsy with dread, and mumble shapeless sounds. Her heels creep back into damper and damper sand, until she feels salt water lick her ankles.
“Come here,” he says, but she continues walking backwards into the cold sea, step for step, staring at his glowing face as it approaches her, suspended in the darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
Vanessa
Vanessa can’t quite understand what is happening to her this summer. It’s like she has morphed from the bright, popular wanderer’s daughter into a loner, not so much down the social ladder as on a different structure completely.
Father likes to say, “Each child has his own summer, but each summer leaves a different child.” Father is always saying things that sound poetic, hoping other people will start repeating them—and to be fair, they often do. He says things about summer so often Vanessa believes that, deep down, he’s really mad he doesn’t get to have summer anymore.
This summer, Vanessa is happiest alone. She sways contentedly up in her tree, walks the shore with her feet in the muddy shallows, wriggles under netting and squats in herds of goats, enjoying their animal scent and the comforting rub of their rough skins. She sees other children often, and sometimes joins them in raiding a food supply, or in one of the organic games that spring up over a piece of shingle or a puddle of water. But when the game ends, instead of adhering to a group, she retreats to solitude. She wonders if it would be different if Ben were older. It might not.
This may be her last summer to spend luxuriating in freedom. She’s already thirteen. She doesn’t have some of the signs that other girls have that indicate fruition is coming: the thickening at the middle, the chest of an overfed toddler, the faint tangle of hair under the arms and between the legs. She remains neat, straight, and smooth, and wants to stay that way. At night, she even prays to the ancestors for this, even though she knows they have no interest whatsoever in her staying a child. But she persists, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
One night she joins a group spying on the summer of fruition. She sees Hannah Joseph, who used to be her friend, being mounted from behind by Allison Saul’s older brother. From the sounds she makes, Vanessa can’t tell if Hannah is having a very good time or a very bad time. It looks like it would hurt. Vanessa always feels bad for the she-goats and ewes when they have to deal with the weight and penetration, the scrabbling hooves. Staring at Hannah, Vanessa imagines herself in her place and immediately feels sick. She vacates the window for another eager spy, trying not to retch. That night she sits in the water up to her waist, half wishing a sea monster would loop a slimy tentacle around her leg and drag her underwater to her doom. She pictures the sudden breathlessness, the gaping vacuum in her lungs, the thrashing of her body slowly becoming more peaceful as water fills the empty spaces inside of her.
She can’t see the point of the repetitiveness of it all, people living to create more people and then dying when they’re useless, to make room for even more new people. She’s not sure why they keep making new people to replace themselves, except—of course—that the ancestors said to. In a year or so some man will mount and marry her, and she’ll push out two children, assuming she is fertile and doesn’t have defectives. She’ll raise them to be like her—obedient, if smarter than most—and eventually she’ll take the final draft and die. She sees her life before her like a dim pathway leading around and back into itself.
She finds herself envying the children who run and scream and play in the mud, fighting and eating and not caring one bit what will happen in autumn when the ground freezes, or even what will happen tomorrow. She watches Mary, Janey’s sister, who they say disobeys the ancestors and the wanderers and even her own father. She searches for some difference in Mary, something that sets her apart from Vanessa and the others, a sign of regret or joy at having escaped her father’s embrace. She watches her with hatred, wondering what it might be like to sleep through the whole night without her body, even in slumber, tensing for the possibility of a hand reaching under the sheets. And yet Vanessa also pities Mary. After all, Mary has never been as special to her father as Vanessa is to hers. Nobody will ever love Vanessa more than Father. Our Book says the father-daughter bond is holy. Does that mean Mary and Janey are blasphemous? Looking at Mary’s laughing, trusting face staring at Janey, her graceful jaw and sharp cheekbones the only resemblance between them, Vanessa thinks she looks happy. But it’s summer, isn’t everyone happy?
Fall
Chapter Nineteen
Caitlin
The end of summer is here.
All the children could sense it coming. The mud cooled and made them shiver in the morning. The afternoon rains had a new, potent chill. The sky collapsed into nightfall just a little bit earlier. Knowing that their summer was almost at an end, the children grew sadder and meaner. Janey and Mary, who spent the entire summer defending a wooden fort they built on the beach, gathered up some cousins and led a small army across the island. Everyone they encountered, instead of running away, lunged into the fight. Davey Adam hit his head on a rock and fell asleep for a few hours, Theresa Solomon broke her finger, which now crooks to the right, and Peter Moses was bitten in the knee by little Rita Moses, who is only four but managed to draw blood. Laughing, Janey scooped Rita up into the air and paraded her around on top of their crowd, the little girl’s glee rapidly fading to frightened sobs.
Caitlin stays away from summer violence. Now she is staying away from the inevitable return home. She walks on the frosted-over mud near the shore, swinging her knees high with every step as the freezing muck stings and sparks her feet. Soon her toes will turn blue and she really will have to go back home. They’ve all heard the stories of the children who lost their toes, or their feet, and Caitlin wants her feet attached to her. But she also wants to stay outside and walk just a little longer.
The first frost means that summer is over. She can’t deny that the frost exists; it’s lacy and glistening and has draped a breathtaking veil over every field, rock, and tree. But still, just a little longer.
Most of the crops have been harvested and are lying in barns and cellars. The extra puppies and kittens have been drowned in buckets of water and used as fertilizer. The lambs and kids will soon be sheep and goats, ready to be slaughtered, shorn, or milked. The netting is being taken down from paddocks. A delicate, sparkling layer of dead mosquitoes carpets the ground like an infestation of minuscule golden flowers.
At Caitlin’s house, Mother will be waiting, in an old dress that she doesn’t mind getting dirty. First Caitlin will stand out in front of the house while Mother digs her fingers into cracks in the mud covering her, peeling it away section by section like she is stripping the shell off a beetle. Then she’ll dump buckets of water over Caitlin’s head, until she is pink and naked and shivering. Only then will Mother wipe her with a towel and drop a dress over her head. Combing out Caitlin’s limp brown hair will take a few hours of wincing and grimacing from both of them. Then Caitlin will once again be bare and shiny, like she has been burned. At dinner, Father will be drunk and Mother and Caitlin will be careful. That night, she will lie awake in bed, half dreaming of muddy races and bare legs in the sand. When Father comes in and lays his hands on her, she will get up and walk over to the other side of the room. Crouching there, she’ll watch the girl on the bed and feel sorry for her. It’s always so hard for her to breathe, and she bruises so easily. When he’s done, Caitlin will fall asleep against the wall, and in the morning she will wake up back in bed. All the marks she’s watched him paint on another body will be on her own. She will go to school and try to hide the stains on her skin without success. He’s had a whole summer without her.
All the other children have given up, headed back home to be cleaned and dressed and put back in their place. Mother must be wondering where Caitlin is. But she can’t stop walking on the icy ground. Away from home, near the trees, around the shore.
Rounding a bend, Caitlin sees a group of men. She quickly darts behind a bush, its muddy branches camouflaging her easily. Caitlin’s body becomes colder as she squats still, her breath smoking in the chilly air. Peering through a spray of mud-caked leaves, she sees the wanderers, a cluster of them, all wearing dark clothes. Two are in the water, pulling something to shore. They killed a sea monster, thinks Caitlin, and now they’re going to butcher the body.
A gathering of wanderers all together, rising from the sea. Like tall, dripping crows, they shift in a rough circle. Faint masculine voices, voices of command, carry in the wind. She can’t understand why, but of all the things Caitlin has ever seen in her life, this is the most terrifying.
Creeping closer, shivering, she squints to see what they’ve found. They’ve pulled the thing onto shore now, their circle tightening around it.
Two dark-clad bodies part, and through the brush, Caitlin sees a blue-white, limp hand and arm. A fall of dirty hair. Blue lips and blue fingers. One of the men presses down, and the indigo lips part to eject a gush of dirty water. The eyes stare, dead and white like pebbles. One of the wanderers—Mr. Joseph?—kneels down and pushes the hair back, gently closes the eyes with his fingertips. Another one kicks the sand and throws his long arms out, his terse volley of words jumbling into nonsense on the wind.
They put their heads together again, their arms on one another’s backs, muttering. Then two stride off away from her while two others kneel at the body’s ankles and shoulders. Hoisting it, struggling under its sodden weight, they follow the men who left. Five wanderers stand on the beach, looking at each other, looking down, making comments. One seems to be delineating something to the others. A stray wanderer, a little back from the rest, raises his head and, Caitlin is sure, looks right at her.
Someone grabs Caitlin by the throat and jerks her backwards in time.
They are pulling a dead woman by her feet from a swath of white sheets, revealing slack legs of violet and blue flesh. Slowly they peel bleached cloth from her, layer upon layer, until she lies naked and exposed, a rotten stamen at the heart of a stripped lily, sprawled lifeless on a pile of snowy petals. Her feet are near Caitlin’s face, thick blue toenails like pieces of ceramic, delicate layers of dead skin peeling back in halos from the heels. Caitlin is not supposed to be there, and so she does not say anything, and hunches near the bed, pretending to be invisible.
She can hear sobbing, a woman, and the angry words of a man. The trickling of water into a bowl. Two female hands are washing the body. The washing woman’s swift but tender movements make a soft sound that ends with a flourish at the apex of each stroke. Caitlin is sure if she got very close to a bird unfurling its wings, it would make the same sound. The woman squeezes the cloth into the bowl and the water swirls crimson and pink. Then the sounds start again. The bird brandishes its wings over and over, never quite taking flight. Moving in little jerks, Caitlin slowly raises her head over the top of the bed and sees the dead woman’s slack breasts falling to each side, the riotous garden of bruises under her skin, the way her flesh gives like old meat in advance of the cleaning strokes.
Hands land on Caitlin’s shoulders, unfriendly hands. “What’s this brat doing here?” asks someone with incredulity.
“Learning life’s lessons,” says a woman tartly.
“No, come now, she shouldn’t see this, not yet,” another woman replies, and Caitlin is picked up and hurled outside the room, onto a dusty wooden floor.
Caitlin returns to herself with a croak, staggering, and falls to her hands and knees to gasp for breath. She puts her hands to her throat and whirls to look behind her, but nobody is there. Turning back, she freezes. The wanderers are still in sight, one raising his head to look back for the source of the strange sound. Panic floods her groin with sick heat, branching through her bones until her fingertips burn. She feels hot, salty u
rine lick her thigh. Caitlin takes off running, convinced that if they see her they will kill her. But the dead girl’s face is burned into her memory, as much as she tries to wipe it clean. The blue hand beckoning her, the head turned to the side with its eyes open. The belly humped convex, pasted with wet cloth. The dark blue mouth a scar in front of Caitlin’s eyes. The wanderers, flocked around her like hungry birds of prey, and the small smile on the girl’s face that says, You can do nothing to me. Caitlin feels something like jealousy burn deep in her gut.
Then she’s in front of her house, which is still dirty and falling down. She stands, a lone, small, muddy figure, staring at the structure rearing up before her like a nightmare. She suddenly feels the weight of Amanda’s corpse slump onto her shoulders, heavy and cold and wet, and she staggers. Dropping to her knees, she puts her head down as if in prayer and waits for someone to notice her.
Chapter Twenty
Janey
Mother is waiting with a bucket of water out front, but Janey pulls Mary past her. Giggling, they run up to their bedroom and dive into the freshly made bed, rolling around and smearing dirt on the white sheets like overexcited infants. Janey kicks her legs frantically until the sheets are in a tangle, drapes herself over Mary, and then falls into a dark and sudden sleep. She wakes up with a gasp in the morning, initially confused by the still air and the sun streaming in through the window. Mary’s dark head is pressed against her chest. Breathing in and then exhaling, Janey makes Mary’s head rise and fall. Squirming and grumbling, Mary puts a hand on Janey’s breastbone to feel the pulse beneath. Janey’s pulse is slow, beating strong and low like dragging footsteps.
The red clay from the shore has dried on the sheets, and it looks like they’ve been murdered in their bed. They’re valuable wasteland sheets, which Mother must have laid out in an ill-calculated gesture of welcome. Janey thinks of all the sheets on all the beds in the wastelands, skeletons with shreds of dried flesh curled up underneath them like dolls. Or blood, perhaps, long dried, the sheets stiff and maroon like they’ve been caked with mud.
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