Bridget socked her stomach. Everything was wrong. Her hands clinched together, lifted, and set themselves on top of her head. “You got the dress from Thayer’s? You been at Thayer’s house? All summer?” Her hands dropped. “Pete knew?” She rocked on her heels. “Mr. Thayer bounced the bed with you?”
“I walked till I couldn’t walk no more. I got so scared—you know I can’t stand being scared, especially alone in the dark. Mr. Thayer let me in.”
“You slept in Mr. Thayer’s bed? Why didn’t Pete stop you?”
Effie’s eyes filled. She used the thumb on her good hand and scrubbed hard over her scars. “The baby’s just as likely Pete’s.”
Bridget ran down the ramp, past Wilcox and Jake, over the hot sand, and through the gap into the trees, not stopping until she slumped against Old Mag. She hated Pete and she hated Effie. Marching back and forth alongside Old Mag, she considered running on to Chief, but she couldn’t go to him. She couldn’t show her face and admit where Effie had been or what Effie had done with Mr. Thayer and Pete.
She stood and paced. Could she trust anyone? Had Chief known where Effie was? If he had, and he’d not told her, then every time they’d been together he’d been lying to her. Pretending to be her friend. She slid down off the curve of Old Mag and sat on the ground. The world was spinning and everyone spinning away from her. Parents and grandmas and Effie and now even Pete and Chief.
What to do—how to punish Effie—came in a flash. She marched back down the path, and up the ramp, stomping, trying to scare Effie into thinking Rev. Jackdaw had returned. Effie was still in the rocker, fretting it back and forth like trying to ride it away.
Bridget took a deep breath. “Skeet killed your baby sister.”
Effie looked up. The rocker stopped and for several long seconds she stared at Bridget. “What are you talking about?”
“He did it, and your parents blamed you. He drowned Baby Sally. You said she wasn’t strong enough or tall enough to pull herself up onto the tree stump.”
Effie made no sound, but Bridget imagined Effie’s brain building a tower of the facts. When the last brick was laid, everything would come crashing down.
“He did it,” Bridget said. “That’s how he knew she was in the tub when you couldn’t see her. That’s why you didn’t hear her cry or splash. He held her down just like he held all the puppies down. Then he went in and told your mum. He wanted you to be blamed.” She stopped for breath. “He killed your granny, too.”
Bridget watched it happen: Effie slowly crumbling inside, shattering down. Then the pieces falling again, splintering into even smaller bits. The clink and tingle of brokenness.
The ends of Effie’s thin white hair stirred as she turned to the tub on the wall. She managed to stand, stumble to the bed and dig into her bundle for her black cloth before falling onto the mattress. She curled into a ball, tried to hide her whole self under the funeral cloth. Her bare feet poked out. The cloth shook.
Bridget felt better.
Then she felt worse.
In the morning, Bridget woke to find Effie in the rocker, staring straight ahead. Her eyes were heavy and red as if she hadn’t slept.
“I wish I was dead,” Effie mumbled. “All this time. Them letting me think it was my fault. Letting me believe I murdered my baby sister.”
“Maybe they didn’t know,” Bridget said.
“I been thinking about it all night. You figured it out. They knew. I knew. That’s why Pa put the bar across Skeet’s door. To keep Johnny and the others safe while they slept.” She took a shallow breath. “Even Ma let me carry the blame.”
Bridget crossed the floor, yanking down combs and spoons and their strings. Why had she told?
“I dreamed it again,” Effie said. “My nightmare, but now I know why.”
“I shouldn’t have told you, but you bounced the bed with Pete.”
“It’s always the same. It’s what’s made me afraid of sleep ever since.”
“Your granny’s story?”
“It’s not a story. Not just a nightmare. It happened. Pa carried me to the barn. I was screaming, fighting him, and him yelling at me.” Effie’s hands grasped the rocker arms. “He shoved me into the pitch-blackness of the cement grain room. Once, for only a moment, I was accidently shut in. He knew the place terrified me. This time, I heard the door slamming, the latch dropping. I screamed, ‘Papa.’ Then my fear doubled over me. Just screaming. Terrible screams. A thousand monsters’ hands touching my skin, pulling at me, clawing at me.
“Pa outside the door, called through every few minutes. ‘It was an accident. Say it’.” Effie choked with sobs. “I couldn’t breathe. I threw up gagging, and sucking the bile back into my throat. I was ten years old. Locked in a black terror, dying, and Pa had put me there. I don’t know how long before I fainted. An eternity.
“Pa was picking me up off the floor. I could see light coming in through the open door. He’d saved me. I clung to him. ‘It was an accident,’ I repeated his words. I said them over and over so he’d never push me back into the blackness. ‘It was an accident!’ I was begging him to believe me. ‘It was an accident.’ I couldn’t ever go back into that darkness.”
“Like nighttime?”
“He carried me back to the house and set me down in a kitchen chair. I must not have been able to quit sobbing. He kept scolding me. ‘Be still. Be still.’ I believed he’d put me back in the room if I moved.” She scrubbed her eyes, the hand plaited with scars. “The story, Bridget. There’s your story.”
Bridget let the spoons and combs dangle from her hands. She’d done this, made Effie sick, just to get revenge. She couldn’t take back her words, couldn’t unsay the truth she’d already told.
Dropping her hand to her belly, Effie closed her eyes. “I haven’t got a single thing to give a child. And Rev. Jackdaw won’t let me keep it. He’ll take my baby and lock me in an asylum. A place full of the same hell as the grain room. I can’t go to such a place.”
“He can’t. You’re not crazy.”
“Those places are full of women men don’t want. Murder a wife or lock her up, either works. If Rev. Jackdaw says so, after I ran away and come back like this, the sheriff ’ll take me in handcuffs. I won’t ever see my baby. Rev. Jackdaw will raise her ruined.”
Bridget dropped her things. She needed to think and figure out what to do.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said. “I just need to go out and pee.”
Bridget couldn’t go as far as Old Mag this time. What if Effie needed her? She stood at the river’s edge and stared out over the water. Some hurts were too big to heal. She’d given Effie one of those.
“Mum,” she cried. “Grandma Teegan!”
Jake nudged her with his large head. “I can’t fix it,” she said. “I told Effie too much.”
Several minutes passed as she and Jake walked around the edge of the clearing. Tufts of wild grass waved ripe seed heads. She snapped off a few, and Jake’s big tongue, pink and long, wrapped around her offerings. She couldn’t force herself back inside to face what she’d done to Effie.
“Bring him to the shed!”
Effie was staggering down the back ramp with the rope over her shoulder. She’d taken off Mae’s dress and wore the old underslip she’d worn when baptizing herself. Her white hair blew back, and with her white shoulders and arms, she looked like an angel. “Bring him to the shed.”
Jake? Bridget hesitated. She didn’t want to obey Effie, but she was responsible for Effie’s terrible sorrow. And Effie was only asking for Jake to be brought. That was easy enough; it didn’t mean anything. “Step on.”
At the bottom of the shed steps, Effie let the rope slide off her shoulder onto the ground. She picked up the unknotted end and tied it to Jake’s leather collar. She picked up the other end, fisting the slipknot.
“Go,” she said. “Go to Chief. Send him back. You stay there.”
“No. What are you going to do?”
Effie w
asn’t crying now. She looked at the door of the shed. “Go.”
“No. I’m sorry I told you.”
“Go.” Her eyes met Bridget’s. “You don’t deserve to be here.”
Everything happening was a darkness Bridget didn’t know how to stop, and Effie’s yelling increased. “Go. Go. I don’t want you here.”
“No!”
Effie was screaming, pushing at her now. Stronger and bigger. “Do what I say.”
Chief would know what to do. He’d ridden Smoke hard when Rev. Jackdaw put Effie’s hand in the trap. And he’d fixed things. He’d fix this, too.
Bridget hesitated, but Effie yelled again, put her hands back on Bridget’s chest, pushed harder. Bridget turned and ran into the trees, but went only a few yards before stopping and peering back through branches. Effie was mounting the rickety steps, the hem of the slip swaying against her calves as she climbed.
Bridget ran again, wishing she had two pans to bang together. Reaching Old Mag, she stopped, indecision and fear making her legs leaden. She couldn’t see the shed or Jake, but she imagined hearing Effie yell, “Walk on!” Imagined she saw Jake stepping forward, his heavy footfalls striking the dry, silty ground and the rope crawling out of its coils.
Cupping her mouth with both hands, she screamed. “Chief !” Coughed and gasped and tried to catch her breath again.
There was no answer, just as Mum had never shown her selkie self, no matter how Bridget screamed. She was alone. She had to be as brave as Nera. And as smart. There wasn’t time to fetch Chief. No matter how fast he caught Smoke and rode, it would be like the day Rev. Jackdaw put Effie’s hand in the trap. Chief would enter the shed with the deed already done. If she hadn’t run for him that day, if she’d stayed and fought like the maidens in Grandma Teegan’s stories, used her fists or grabbed a knife, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. And then, maybe Effie wouldn’t have run and hid at Thayer’s.
A hundred thoughts spun around Bridget, slammed into her. Effie would hang like Nera’s skeleton: the body of bones Bridget needed to face. But before a person died, there was the death space. She’d not seen the death space around Effie’s body. “No shadow!” She turned back, ran harder, her legs stronger, faster down the uneven path. “Effie, stop, there’s no shadow!”
Leaving the trees, Bridget hit a wall of silence. The quiet, thick as stone, stopped her, threatened to push her to her knees.
Jake stood yards forward from where she’d left him. The rope, tight as wire, stretched over his back, hummed straight through the air, cut through the open door and into the dark skinning shed.
Bridget forced herself to Jake first, not hurrying now. She dropped her forehead onto his, and after a moment, tapped his knees and backed him until the rope grew slack and a large segment lay on the ground. She untied Effie’s knot and let that end drop.
“Walk on,” she said. “You don’t deserve to be here.”
The long climb up the four steps into the shed seemed like eight, then twelve. When she’d finally climbed them all, she stopped.
On the floor beside the table, Effie sat gripping the rope in her scarred hand. She stared at the old stain of her blood on the floor and the trap.
Effie found herself at the lodge table, working. She’d hated Chief ’s building and Bridget’s constant pounding, and now it was her turn. Her combs held her hair off her sweaty neck. Even with the doors open, no breeze stirred the humid air. She’d rolled up her sleeves and left the top button on her dress open. The day before, she’d walked out of the skinning shed having only narrowly escaped herself. Still, she was terrified. Could she get away, survive on her own, raise a child?
She lifted the hammer again. The scars in her palm ached with the tool’s weight, but they’d toughen. She’d get better too, at tapping in the small nails so that she didn’t splinter the wood. Bridget had sold four boxes. For money. Effie didn’t know the price of two train tickets home, but boxes might be an answer to her prayers. If four sold, why not ten? Twenty? Even more if the boxes were decorated. And there were silver spoons to sell.
Bridget wasn’t helping. The saw lay idle again. Had been since Effie announced her plan that morning. Instead, Bridget stood at the sink washing wild plums she’d spent all morning picking.
“Bridget, please. They are clean. Help me.”
“You didn’t do it.”
The words held such hope they made Effie’s stomach grip. “That doesn’t mean we can stay here.” Rev. Jackdaw would be back. She’d keep a constant vigil. If he returned before they’d boarded the train, she and Bridget would still be gone. By the time he crawled out of the buggy with his rickety back and limped down the slope, they’d be out the back and deep in the trees headed for Chief ’s. There was the shotgun, too, if need be. She’d once kept it ready for Injuns, but now it was ready for Rev. Jackdaw. Maybe a white preacher’s wife wouldn’t swing for shooting a bastard.
“But you didn’t do it,” Bridget said.
A shiver ran across Effie’s shoulders. She’d entered the shed with every intention of killing her life. “I had the rope around my neck.” She touched the scarring on her throat, feeling the roughness again. “I started choking . . . like that day he used the rope on me.”
Bridget tipped her pan, holding back the fruit and letting the water rush out between her fingers.
“My knees were rattling, but I yelled at Jake.” The rope was lifting and her heart pounding when she saw the blood on the floor and remembered Ma’s blood the night they spent in the chair. Ma telling her she was sorry. Not in words, but in the way she held her. “I almost didn’t jerk out in time. I lost my balance and landed on the floor.”
Out the lodge door, clouds moved, and shadow crept over the front landing. “Sitting beside my own blood stain, I knew my bad life wasn’t just what others did to me. I’d always helped put the noose around my own neck.”
“You bounced the bed with Pete.”
Effie cringed. “I never meant that to happen.” Emotion tightened her throat. “The first night, I was so thankful Mr. Thayer let me in, I cried.” She took a breath and looked through the door and up at the empty ridge. If she’d somehow survived that night outside, her mind would have been scrambled as Granny’s. She’d realized she couldn’t walk to Homeplace, and she couldn’t return to the lodge. “I was emptied out.”
Bridget watched her, wasn’t accepting only half a story.
Effie picked up a nail, rolled it between two fingers. She wouldn’t tell Bridget how Mr. Thayer went to his room first, leaving open the door on his dark bedroom only to appear in it a moment later wearing nothing but his fancy boots with the red leaves. And his want. Standing there thinking the sight of him would call her like a hen to a tom’s strutting.
“He’d taken my hand out of the trap,” Effie said. “And he let me come in. I owed him.” That wasn’t the whole truth. Mr. Thayer’s standing there had been an invitation. He’d seen her, wanted her. It didn’t matter why or for how long; he wanted her.
“What’d Pete do?”
“He’d been sulking. He made a sad-sounding, uppity noise when I went into Mr. Thayer’s room.” She hadn’t known if he was seeing her go or his ma. “One night, Mr. Thayer was drinking in town, and I got so scared I went into Pete’s room and crawled into his bed.” She’d known by his reaction that he’d never lain beside a woman. And he didn’t at first move. “I’m sorry for what I did. Maybe I was trying to punish him for the guilt I felt over not helping Mae.”
Bridget’s face looked as much empty as angry.
“I never meant to hurt you. It was me being out of my head. And me who asked them not to tell a soul I was living there. Mr. Thayer kept quiet because he wanted to keep me coming to his bed. Maybe Pete was too ashamed to talk.”
Bridget still wasn’t speaking. She left the sink, walked to a corner, and pushed at stones she’d shaped into some sort of silly spiral. “Why’d you come back?”
“I realized I was having a baby. That mo
rning, Thayer sat over his eggs and asked Pete was he fixing to call me his wife? Pete said, ‘No.’ The word quick, full of fright. ‘You fixing to do it?’ Both of them talking like I wasn’t even there. Mr. Thayer put a fist on top of the table, looked hard at Pete. ‘I ain’t took a wife yet.’”
Effie turned from Bridget, walked to the back door, and looked out on the river. “Pete jumped up, his chair scraping back, like he meant to kill the man right there. I knew he was thinking of his mama. How she’d wanted Thayer—with every baby—to make her a wife and give their child a name.” Effie felt the bump of her stomach. She’d yet to admit the hardest truth. “I’d done it. Pete’s eyes filled up. I’d taken his white goodness. Breaking him was a way of breaking me. I wanted myself dead.”
“It wasn’t my fault?” Bridget asked from behind her. “You didn’t go to the shed because I told you your parents made you take the blame for Baby Sally’s death?”
“That’s not why.” She understood better now what she hadn’t at ten: How badly a person can break. How Pa was trying to fix the broken pieces of himself when his ma returned. Then his son murdered a little sister. A baby Pa loved, too. How he must’ve blamed himself for not protecting his children. It was the thing Granny always blamed him for—not protecting the family. He couldn’t see his twelve-year-old boy hang or be drug off in chains. Nor could Ma. She couldn’t live knowing her boy was suffering in some horrid prison. They must both have blamed themselves, believed they could do better, find a way to save him. They couldn’t risk Effie knowing the truth, talking about it to others, swearing it was Skeet.
“Maybe all families,” she said, “hide horrible truths.”
The sound of footsteps racing up the front stairs and across the landing made them both jump. Effie ran for the gun hanging on the wall, but she’d only gripped the stock when Cora rushed in breathless, a basket swinging on her arm.
“Effie, you are back!” She stopped, the smile leaving her face. “Oh, I didn’t mean to scare you.” She looked from Effie to Bridget and back. “I come at the worst times. I . . . I baked you a cake.”
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