Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Tessa banged on the VW fender with her cane, which must have brought Evan upright in his grave.

  “Gather,” she commanded in her sea-lion voice, and Poppy snorted back a laugh. Heather poked her, glad somebody could laugh. They circled on the rocky lip of the cliff: Tessa in one of the bulky-knit outfits she wore so constantly that Heather couldn’t imagine her even in a nightgown; Dawn chewing gum maniacally, wearing a skirt as short as Lydia’s and high-tops with red lips on them; Laura, fragile and calm, wearing her Sunday suit and pearls; Sarah in a denim skirt and a windbreaker, looking like she was trying to remember what was on her grocery list; Rachel, dyspeptic in sensible polyester; Poppy, her hand under Heather’s arm; Lydia in red lipstick; Georgie in jeans; and Grace, who looked like she just might live after all, her hair blown wild in the wind and livid as the twilight fog.

  Storm’s children revealed what they had brought.

  Lydia fanned the assortment in her hand and passed around the circle, giving them to everyone but Heather.

  “I don’t know what this is,” Dawn whispered nervously, holding up what looked to be a size J.

  “It’s a crochet hook.”

  “But I don’t know how.”

  “It’ll come,” Lydia said briskly, handing Laura the daintiest. Poppy was looking dubiously at hers. Tessa gave one of her foghorn snorts but said nothing. Lydia surveyed the circle, smiling. “Are we all armed? Granny, you’re empty-handed. Georgie, give her your fishing pole.”

  “I can’t cast in this wind,” Heather said anxiously. “It’s only got one little bitty weight on it. And the water’s way over there. And it’s too dark to see—”

  “Oh, hush, Heather,” Tessa growled. “Nobody came here to fish. You know that.”

  “Granny did,” Lydia said sweetly. Her green hair and scarlet lips glowed in the dusk like Grace’s hair; so did Georgie’s hands, paler than the rest of her, moving like magician’s gloves through the air. The sky was misty, bruised purple-black now, starless, moonless. They could still see something of each other—an eye gleam, a gesture—from the lights in the motel parking lot. “Granny’s going fishing. It’s Georgie’s favorite pole, so whatever you catch, don’t let go of it. You just keep reeling in. We’ll take care of the rest. Ready, Grace?”

  Grace held a bone between her hands.

  It was some animal, Heather thought uneasily. Cow or sheep shank, some such, big, pearly-white as Grace’s hair, thick as her wrist. Thick as it was, Grace broke it in two like a twig.

  She held both pieces out toward the rock. Her eyes closed; she crooned something like a nursery song. Heather felt her back hairs rise, as if some charged hand had stroked the nape of her neck. The bone dripped glitterings as hard and darkly red as garnet.

  Dawn bit down on her crochet hook. Poppy held hers upright like a candle; her other hand gripped Heather as if she thought Heather might take to the air in the sudden wind that pounced over the cliff. Heather heard it howl a moment, like a catfight, before it hit. It smashed them like a high wave. Heather wanted to clutch at the sparse hair she had left, but Poppy held one arm, and she had the pole in her other hand. She tried to say something to Poppy, but the wind tore her words away and then her breath.

  Heather, the dark said, a mad wind crooning in Grace’s voice. Heather, it said again, a wave now, rolling faster and faster in the path of the wind. Heather, it said, sniffing for her like a dog, and she froze on the cliff while it stalked her, knowing she had no true claims to life or time, nothing holding her on earth, even her bones were wearing down, disappearing little by little inside her while she breathed. The circle of shadowy faces couldn’t hold her; Poppy’s hand couldn’t protect her; she was a lone, withered thing, and if this dark didn’t get her, the other would soon enough, so what difference was there between them?

  “Granny?” Lydia didn’t even have to shout. Her voice came as clear and light as if her red neon lips were at Heather’s ear. “You can cast anytime, now.”

  She could feel Poppy’s hand again, hear Grace’s meaningless singsong. But Poppy’s hand felt a thousand miles away; she was just clinging to skin and bone, she could never reach deep enough to hang on to anything that mattered. She couldn’t anchor onto breath or thought or time.

  “Granny?”

  And time was the difference between this dark and death. This thing had all the time in the world.

  Heather.

  “Granny?”

  “Honey, it’s just no use—” She heard her own cracked, wavery voice more inside her head than out, with the wind shredding everything she said. “I can’t cast against this—”

  “Granny Heather, you get that line out there, or I’ll let this wind snatch you bald.”

  Heather unlatched the reel, caught line under her thumb, and flung a hook and a weight that wouldn’t have damaged a passing goldfinch into the eye of the dark.

  The line unreeled forever. It took on the same eerie glow as Lydia’s lips, Georgie’s hands, and it stretched taut and kept unwinding as if something had caught it and run with it, then swam, then flew, farther and farther toward the edge of the world. It stopped so fast she toppled back out of Poppy’s hold; Poppy grabbed her again, pulled her upright.

  What she had caught turned to her.

  She felt it as she had felt it looking out of the moon’s eye. She went small, deep inside her, a little animal scurrying to find a hiding place. But there was no place; there was no world, even, just her, standing in a motionless, soundless dark with a ghostly fishing pole in her hands, its puny hook swallowed by something vast as fog and night, with the line dangling out of it like a piece of spaghetti. Lightning cracked in the distance; fine sand or dust blew into her face. The wind’s voice took on a whine like storms that happened in places with exotic names, where trees snapped like bones and houses flung their rafters into the air. The line tightened again; Heather’s arms jerked straight. She felt something fly out of her; the end of her voice, her last breath. She heard Georgie say, “Don’t lose my pole, Granny. Grandpa gave it to me.”

  Evan’s old green pole he caught bluegill with, this storm aimed to swallow, along with her and the cliff and most of Crane Harbor. It sucked again; she tottered, feeling her arm sockets giving. Poppy, crochet hook between her teeth, was hanging on with both hands, dragged along with her.

  “Heather!” It was Tessa, bellowing like a cargo ship. “Quit fooling around. You’ve been fishing for seventy years—bring it in!”

  She was breathless, her heart bouncing around inside her like a golf ball, smacking her ribs, her side. The line tightened again. This time it would send her flying out of Poppy’s hold, over the cliff, and all she could do was hang on, she didn’t have the strength to tug against it, she had no more strength, she just didn’t—

  “Remember, Granny,” Lydia said, “not long after Storm was born, when you walked out into the fields with her to give Grandpa his lunch, and halfway back, all the fields lifted off the ground and started blowing straight at you? You couldn’t see, you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t move against the wind, but you had to get Storm in, you had to find the house, nothing—not wind or dirt or heat—was going to get its hands on Storm. You pushed wind aside to save her, you saw through earth. And then, when you got to the house, the wind shoved against the screen door so hard you couldn’t pull it open. You didn’t have any more strength, not even for a screen door. You couldn’t pull. You couldn’t pull against that wind. But you did pull. You pulled. You pulled. You pulled your heart out for Storm. And the door opened and flew away and you were inside with Storm safe.”

  “I pulled,” Heather said, and pulled the door open again, for Storm’s children.

  It gave so fast Poppy had to catch her. Line snaked through the air, traced a pale, phosphorescent tangle all over the ground. For a second Heather thought she had lost it. Then she saw the end of the line, hung in the air at the cliff edge just above them. She sagged on the ground, her mouth dry as a dust storm, her blood
crackling like lightning behind her eyes. She felt the wind change suddenly, as if the world were going backward, and startled, she looked up to see Lydia’s blood-bright, reckless smile.

  “Georgie?”

  Georgie reached behind her to Poppy’s station wagon and pulled open the back end. Half the garbage in the Junket dump whirled out, a flood of debris that swooped in the wind and tumbled and soared and snagged, piece by piece, against the thing at the cliff edge. Old milk cartons, bread wrappers, toilet paper rolls, styrofoam containers, orange peels, frozen dinner trays, used Kleenex, coffee grounds, torn envelopes, wadded paper, magazines, melon rinds skimmed over their heads and stuck to the dark, making a mask of garbage over the shape that Heather had hooked. She saw a wide, lipless, garbage mouth move, still chewing at the line, and she closed her eyes. Dimly, she heard Lydia say, “Tessa will now give us a demonstration of the basic chain stitch.”

  “Dip in your hook,” Tessa said grimly. “Twist a loop, catch a strand on the hook and pull it through the loop. Catch a strand. Pull. Catch. Pull.”

  “Funny,” Heather said after a while. Lydia, green hair and lips floating in the dark, knelt down beside her.

  “What’s funny, Granny?”

  “I never knew crocheting was so much like fishing.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “You catch, then you pull.” She paused. She couldn’t see Lydia’s eyes, but she guessed at them. “How’d you know about that dust storm? About how the screen door wouldn’t open? I never remembered that part. You weren’t even born. Your mama was barely two months old.”

  “She remembered,” Lydia said. “She told us.”

  “Oh.” She thought that over and opened her mouth again. Lydia’s red floating lips smiled. Might as well ask how she could do that trick, Heather thought, and asked something else instead.

  “What’s going to happen to it?”

  “Georgie’ll clean it up.”

  “She going to put it back inside the rock?”

  “I think she has in mind taking it to the dump with the rest of the garbage. It’ll take some time to untangle itself and put the pieces back together.”

  “Will it?”

  “What, Granny?”

  “Put the pieces back together?”

  Lydia patted her hand, showing half a mouth; she was looking at the huge clown face that was loosing bits of garbage as the flashing hooks parted and knotted the dark behind it. She didn’t answer. Poppy, at the cliff edge, drawing out a chain of dark from between a frozen orange juice can, an ice-cream container, and a fish head, looked over at Heather.

  “You all right, honey?”

  “I think so.” Beside Poppy, Laura was making a long fine chain, her silver needle flashing like a minnow. Waiting for nine years for her husband to open his eyes gave her a lot of time on her hands, and she could crochet time faster than any of them. Sarah, with a hook as fat as a finger, was making a chain wide enough to hold an anchor. Dawn did a little dance with her high-tops whenever she missed a beat with her hook. Rachel, of all people, broke into a tuneless whistle now and then; Heather didn’t know she could even pucker up her lips.

  “Nice fishing,” Tessa boomed. “Good work, Heather.”

  “I had help,” Heather said. “I had my granddaughters.”

  Georgie lifted her head, gave Heather one of her burning smiles, like spring wind blowing across a snowbank. Grace had gone to sleep against Georgie’s knees, looking, with her hair over her face, like a little ghostly haystack. Heather leaned back against Lydia’s arm. She closed her eyes, listened to her heart beat. It wouldn’t win any races, but it was steady again, and it would do for a while, until something better came along.

  Star-Crossed

  FIRST WATCH: Sovereign, here lies the County Paris slain;

  And Romeo dead; and Juliet, dead before,

  Warm and new-kill’d.

  PRINCE: Search, seek, and know how this foul murder comes.

  Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, V, 3

  There were four bodies. The Prince did not count Tybalt, who had been buried with Juliet, but who, unlike Juliet, had stayed dead. The graveyard seemed frozen after the Prince spoke, in one of those midnight moments when the owls are silent, and the moon itself stops moving. The grass, and the Prince’s chain-mail shirt, and the leaves in the great trees around us caught light the color of bone. The vault yawned fire from the torches; everything else shaped shadows alive and coiled to spring. In the torchlight, the dead seemed to move, gesturing and trying to speak, tell. But I couldn’t hear them. The Prince was still looking at me. An owl spoke, and then so did I, the only thing I could say, “Yes, my lord.”

  “There they all were,” I told Beatrice later, next to her in the rumpled sheets. “Dead. So young, all of them. Juliet—a child. With a knife through her heart. And the Prince’s kinsman, Paris, who was to have married her. Blood still wet from the wound in his belly. And Romeo, not a mark on him, but lifeless, with Juliet crumpled on top of him. And Tybalt. At least he was lying there quietly, without any mystery about him except death. And we know how he died. Romeo killed him, and the Prince banished Romeo. He should have been in exile in Mantua, not killing people in a vault in Verona. Especially people already dead.”

  “So you think Romeo killed Juliet?” Beatrice asked sleepily. Her eyes, dark as moon-shadow and as mysterious, had that distant, luminous look about them she got when she had us both at both ends of the night: Antonio with the nightingale, and me with the lark. I couldn’t begrudge him: he was her husband. I could only begrudge myself for knowing. He rose with the dawn for the day watch, and left that hair like beaten brass, those eyes you could crawl into and hide, those breasts the color of cream and scented with almonds. He left all that treasure alone, for anyone to plunder. For the likes of me, grimy and red-eyed from the night, to stagger home into her bed. I gave up asking how she could, why both of us, who did she love best—those things. She only ever laughed.

  I could tell she wasn’t listening carefully, but I had to speak anyway, to tell, so that the ghosts would rest in my own head, dwindle back into their deaths.

  “He must have come back to dishonor the bodies,” I said, puzzled because it was most reasonable and most unlikely. “Maddened by his exile. He stabs Juliet’s body and is discovered by Paris, who has come in sorrow to visit her grave. They fight; Romeo slays Paris. And then—” I stopped, because I could not see beyond. “Romeo dies. But how? Why?”

  “I would think he would have attacked Tybalt’s body first, since Tybalt was the cause of his exile.”

  “Romeo was young and could be fierce, but he was at heart a gentle man. I spoke with him, once or twice, when he roamed the streets and orchards at night, plagued to the heart by love of some fair Rosaline. I can’t see him stabbing any woman, Capulet or no, dead or alive. But it was his knife.”

  “Maybe she tried to kill him, in grief for her cousin Tybalt’s death—”

  “But she was already dead!”

  “Apparently,” my mistress said with her charming laugh that was the clink of two gold coins, “not dead enough.”

  So it was, with what the Prince said to me, that day turned into night, and night to day. I had to catch sleep where I could, since I could hardly search and seek during my watch. After a too-brief morning in my mistress’s arms, I went out and ate, and then met daylight head-on, bright and painful after such a night. I went to see the friar whose business it had been to bury Juliet and Tybalt in the Capulet’s vault. He might remember a flickered eyelid, a sigh without a cause, that would tell us Juliet had not been entirely dead. She had not been, of course; she had bled when she was stabbed. So they had buried her alive, only for her to wake in that terrible vault to find the death she had eluded coming at her yet again, and this time no escape.

  But I could not find the friar. He was not in his cell reading, nor in his chapel shriving, nor in his garden with his weeds and wildflowers he calls medicine. His door was latched; so was hi
s gate. The sacristan I finally found in the chapel knew only that the friar had left for Mantua, the day before, but he did not know where or why.

  So I went to the palace of the Capulets.

  It was noon by then, and hot as a lion’s breath. I saw my mistress’s husband Antonio, still on watch and scowling like a bear. He caught my arm, but it was not what I thought. “Stephano,” he said. “Come with me—there’s a fight between servants on Weavers Street.”

  What we need, I thought wearily. More dead. “Montague and Capulet?” I guessed, as we began to run.

  “Who else? They claim the very air that they both breathe. They blame one another for last night. The lordlings keep apart, only eyeing one another, waiting to pick their time. This quarrel shows which way the wind blows.” He was panting as we rounded a corner. He was shorter than I, older, rounder, brown, and furry beside my lanky bones and sun-whitened hair. I caught myself imagining him with her, snorting and huffing between her breasts, and I wondered in my own blank fury how she could? How? In my mind, she looked at me over his back and lifted a finger to her lips and smiled.

  Antonio gripped my arm again. “There.” Still running, we watched two men chasing a third into an alehouse. Another pair grappled on the ground, their livery, the red of one House, the blue of the other, slick with dust and muck tossed out the windows. Even as we came at them, someone emptied a pot from the second story onto their heads. They sputtered, but never noticed much until we dragged them apart. Others of the day-watch had come to help; a couple, swords drawn, vanished into the alehouse after the rest of the brawlers. Holding my dirty, bleeding catch by hair and arm, I yielded him to Antonio and his men.

  “Thanks,” Antonio said. “I’m glad I found you awake.”

  “I have to be,” I explained. “I’m the one the Prince’s eye fell on first, last night. Find out who did this, he said. So I’m up at noon, trying to make some sense out of a brawl among the dead in a burial vault.”