I can feel his little heart beating.
If they lost Gertie, Martin knew it would ruin his wife.
She saw him and ran over, eyes enormous, hopeful. “Any sign?”
He shook his head. She stared at him a minute in disbelief.
He thought of the fox with its golden-rimmed eyes, how it had looked at him, through him, before he shot it.
“Martin, there isn’t much daylight left. Get the horse and ride to town. Tell Lucius and Sheriff Daye what’s happened. Gather people to help us look. Have them bring lanterns. Stop and see if the Bemises might have seen Gertie. She’s been over to play with their girl Shirley.”
“I’ll go right now,” he promised, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You go inside. Get warmed up. I’ll come back with help.”
He was so hungry, so thirsty. But to stop now, to go back to the house for even a cup of water, would be wrong. Not when his little girl was out there, lost in the storm. He’d stop at the creek on the way into town. He’d hunker down and drink like an animal.
“Martin,” Sara said, taking his hands. “Pray with me. Please.”
Martin had never been a praying man. Sara and Gertie prayed each night before bed, but he never joined them. He went to church every Sunday with them, listened to Reverend Ayers read from the Bible. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God, just that Martin never believed that God might listen to him. With the millions of people who must be praying to him each day, why should God pay attention to Martin Shea in West Hall, Vermont? But now, desperate and running out of hope, he nodded, removed his hat, and bowed his head, standing in the snow outside the barn, Sara’s hands with their bloody fingers gripping tightly to his own.
“Please, God,” Sara said, voice hoarse. Martin sneaked a look at her; her eyes were clamped shut, her face was blotchy, nose running. “Watch over our Gertie. Bring her back to us. She’s a good girl. She’s all we have. Keep her safe. Please bring her back. If she’s gone, I …” Sara’s voice broke.
“Amen,” Martin said, ending the prayer.
Sara let go of Martin and walked off toward the house, head still bent down, lips moving, as if she was continuing her own private conversation with God, bargaining, begging.
Sliding open the door to the barn, Martin heard the animals letting him know he’d never fed them. The cow hadn’t been milked. She gave a mournful wail as he walked by her pen, but she would have to wait. He grabbed the saddle and was lugging it to the horse stalls when something caught his eye, stopped him in his tracks. His heart pounded in his ears; the saddle was heavy and awkward in his hands, now slick with sweat.
The fox pelt was gone.
Hours ago, he’d nailed it up against the north wall of the barn to dry. Then he’d stood back and admired his handiwork, imagined the hat Sara might make for Gertie.
He squinted at the empty wall.
Only it wasn’t empty.
No, something else hung there by a nail. Something that glinted in the little bit of light coming in through the window. His breath caught in his throat as he stepped forward to see. The saddle fell from his hands.
There, nailed to the rough wooden boards, was a hank of blond hair.
Gertie’s hair.
His stomach cramped up, and he leaned over, retching.
His head felt as if it were being pounded between a hammer and an anvil. He gripped it in both hands, fingertips pressing into his temples.
He looked down, saw the blood on his clothing from skinning the fox.
“Martin?”
He swallowed hard and turned to see Sara in the doorway. She was walking toward him slowly. He jumped up, stood so that he’d block her view of the hair.
“What are you doing?”
“I was … getting the saddle.”
For the second time that afternoon, he prayed: Please, God, don’t let her see the hair.
He could not allow Sara to see the hair; it would destroy her. He had to hide it—throw it into the stream, where it would be carried away.
“Hurry,” Sara said. “It’ll be dark soon.” Mercifully, she left the barn.
Martin turned, hands shaking as he reached for the thick rope of blond hair. He pulled it loose from the rusty nail and shoved it into his pocket.
When he had saddled the horse, he led her out of the barn, into the deep snow. It would be slow going, and he hoped they’d rolled the main roads by now.
It was possible, Martin told himself, that an animal had come into the barn and torn down the fox pelt. A coyote or a stray dog. But then he reached into his pocket, felt the thick hank of hair. He could come up with no explanation for Gertie’s hair being on that nail.
“Martin?”
There was Sara again, waiting outside, just to the left of the open door, rocking back and forth, picking at the skin around her nails. Her eyes were wild and frantic. “You need to go inside, Sara. You’re not dressed to be out in weather like this.”
She nodded, turned toward the house, stopped. “Martin?”
“Yes?” A lump formed in his throat. Had she seen the hair?
“It’s because of the ring.”
“What?”
She was looking not at him but down into the snow at her feet. “The ring you found in the field. The one you tried to give me for Christmas. I know you still have it.”
She’d known all along that he’d held on to the ring. That he’d been too selfish to bury it as she’d asked. Now here he was, caught in his lie. He didn’t speak.
Sara’s breath came out in white puffs of steam. Her skin was pale; her lips were blue with cold. “You were wrong to take it. I warned you never to keep anything you unearth there. You must get rid of it, Martin. You must give it back.”
“Give it back?”
“Take it back out to the field and bury it. That’s the only way we’ll get our Gertie back.”
He stared down at her, blinking. Surely she couldn’t be serious. But her face told him she was. Sara had always been so strange about the field and woods, warning him to be careful out there, not to plow too close to the rocks, never to keep anything he unearthed. He’d thought it was old family superstitions, passed down. But this idea that Gertie was missing because he kept a ring he found out there—it was preposterous. Mad, even.
“Go do it now, before you go into town. Please, Martin.”
He remembered what Lucius had told him back when Sara had her spell after the death of little Charles: “You must never argue with a person experiencing an episode of madness. It will only serve to make matters worse.”
Martin nodded at Sara, clicked his tongue, turned his horse in the direction of the fields.
He rode out to the place where he’d found the ring—in the back corner of the far field, right up against the tree line. He dismounted, turned, and looked back toward the house, where Sara stood, watching, just a tiny shadow.
He took off his soaked mittens and reached into the right front pocket of his trousers. The ring wasn’t there. His fingers searched frantically. He patted his left pocket. Nothing. His left coat pocket held only a few shotgun shells. Then, in the right coat pocket, his fingers brushed against the coil of hair. He shuddered with revulsion.
The ring had to be there! He’d put it in his pocket this morning. He remembered checking it when he was out hunting the fox. It had been in his pocket then, he was sure of it.
Sara was still watching, arms crossed over her chest. She swayed slightly in the wind, like a piece of tall, dried-out grass.
Sweat coated Martin’s forehead in spite of the cold.
He reached back into the right pocket of his wool overcoat, felt the hank of hair curled like a soft snake.
Getting down on his knees, he started to dig with his fingers. He went as deep as he could with his numb fingers, until he hit a layer of crusted ice that he couldn’t break through. He kicked at the ice with the toe of his boot, kept digging. When he could go no deeper, he dropped the hair inside, refilled the hole wi
th snow. Wiping his frozen hands on his trousers, he walked back to the trembling horse. She fixed him with a pitiful gaze.
“Did you do it?” Sara asked, when he rode by her on his way into town.
He nodded, but couldn’t look her in the eye. “Go inside and get warmed up. I’ll come back with help.”
Visitors from the Other Side
The Secret Diary of Sara Harrison Shea
January 13, 1908
It was Clarence Bemis who found her, early this morning, nearly twenty-four hours since she crept out of bed to follow her papa.
When the three men—Clarence, Martin, and Lucius—came into the house, tracking in snow, at ten past eight this morning, I knew from their faces. I wanted to send them away. Bolt the door. Tell them there must be a mistake—they had to keep looking, they could not come back until they brought me my little girl, alive and well.
I hated all three men just then: Clarence in his overalls, his hair too long and shaggy and the stink of whiskey on him; Lucius with his earnest face, good shoes, and carefully trimmed mustache; Martin, who limped in, shoulders slumped, looking pathetic and ruined.
Go away, I longed to say. Get out of my house.
I wanted to turn back time, keep Gertie wrapped up in my arms, soft and warm under the covers.
Martin took me by the hand, asked me to sit down.
“We found her,” he said, and I covered my mouth, thinking I would scream, but no sound came.
All three men stood frozen, hats in their hands, six sad eyes all on me.
There is an old well at the far-eastern edge of the Bemises’ property, something that ran dry years ago. I remember Auntie and I went there once, when I was a girl not much older than Gertie, to drop stones down and listen for the sound of them hitting bottom. I leaned against the rough circle of stones and tried to see the bottom, but it was too dark. There was a dank smell coming out of it, and I could almost imagine feeling a cool breeze.
“How far down do you think it goes?” I asked Auntie.
Auntie smiled. “Maybe all the way through to the other side of the world.”
“That’s impossible,” I told her.
“Or maybe,” she said, tossing another pebble down, “it leads to another world altogether.”
I leaned farther down, desperate to see, and Auntie grabbed the back of my dress and pulled me upright. “Be careful, Sara. Wherever it goes, I don’t think it’s anywhere you want to be.”
Clarence said Gertie was curled up at its bottom so sweetly, as if she’d just fallen asleep.
“She didn’t suffer,” Lucius said, his voice low and calm as he put his hand on top of mine. His hand was soft and powdery, not a callus or a scar on it. He was there when they hauled my Gertie out, and this seemed all wrong to me, that Lucius was there when they pulled her out, and not me. They sent Jeremiah Bemis down by rope, and he tied it round her waist. I closed my eyes. Tried not to imagine her small body swinging, banging against the curved wall of the well, as they hoisted her up out of the darkness.
“She died instantly,” Lucius said, as if it would be a comfort.
But it is no comfort. Because, over and over, I think of those stones I once dropped, and how long it took for them to reach the bottom.
I imagine what it must have been like, falling.
Surrounded by a circle of stone, falling, falling into the darkness.
Ruthie
The snowflakes were spinning, drifting, doing their own drunken pirouettes, illuminated by the headlights of Buzz’s truck. The studded tires bit into the snow, but he took the corners fast enough that they fishtailed dangerously close to the high snowbanks that lined the single-lane dirt roads.
“Turn off the lights,” Ruthie said, because they were close now, and she didn’t want her mother knowing she was out past curfew again. She was nineteen years old. Who did her mom think she was anyway, giving Ruthie a goddamn curfew?
Ruthie reached down, grabbed the bottle of peppermint schnapps that Buzz held between his thighs, and took a good slug of it. She rummaged through the pockets of her parka and pulled out the Visine, tilted back her head, and put three drops in each eye.
They’d been out partying at Tracer’s barn, finishing up the keg left over from the big New Year’s Eve bash. Emily had brought pot, and they’d huddled around the kerosene heater, talking about how much winter sucked and how everything was going to change in the spring. They’d all graduated the June before, and here they were, still stuck in West Freaking Hall, Vermont, the black hole in the center of the universe. All their friends had gone on to college, or moved to big cities in warm places: Miami, Santa Cruz.
It wasn’t that Ruthie hadn’t tried. She’d applied to schools in California and New Mexico, places with good business-administration programs, but her mother said that it wouldn’t work right now, that they just didn’t have the money.
They’d always lived pretty close to the bone, making ends meet by selling vegetables and eggs at the farmers’ market. Her mom sold hand-knit socks and hats there, too, and at craft shops and shows around the state. Her mother was big into bartering. They never bought anything new, and when something broke, they fixed it rather than replacing it. Ruthie had learned at a young age not to beg for stuff they couldn’t afford. Asking for a certain kind of sneaker or jacket just because all the other kids in her class had it earned her serious looks of disapproval and disappointment from her parents, who would remind her that she had perfectly nice things (even if they had come from the thrift store and had some other kid’s name written inside).
Ruthie’s mom decided it would be best if Ruthie stayed in West Hall and went to community college for a year; she even offered to pay Ruthie to help with the egg business. It was now her job to keep the books, feed the hens each day, gather the eggs, keep the coop clean.
“You want to study business, isn’t this a much more practical way to learn?” her mother had asked.
“Selling a few dozen eggs at the farmers’ market isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
“Well, it’s a start. And with your father gone, I could use the extra help,” her mother had said. “Next year,” her mother promised, “you can reapply anywhere you’d like. I’ll help pay.”
Ruthie argued, said there were student loans, grants, and scholarships she might qualify for, but her mother wouldn’t fill out the paperwork, because it was just another way Big Brother was watching. The feds were not to be trusted, even when they were loaning money to college students. They’d get you caught up in the system, the very system her mother and father had worked so hard to stay free from.
“Things would be different if your father were still here,” her mother said. And Ruthie knew it was true, though she found it unsettling that whenever her mother spoke of him she made it sound as if he’d gone off on a trip, up and left them on purpose, not dropped dead from a heart attack two years ago. If her father were still alive, she’d be off at college. Her father understood her as no one else had, knew how much she’d wanted to get away. He would have found a way to make it happen.
“Is it so bad?” her mother had asked, smoothing Ruthie’s unruly dark hair. “Staying home one more year?”
Yes, Ruthie had wanted to say. Yes! Yes! Yes!
But then she thought of Buzz, who hadn’t even applied to college and was working for his uncle at the scrap-metal yard. It was shit work, but Buzz always had money and found lots of cool pieces for his sculptures—these amazing monsters, aliens, and robots made from welded-together car parts and broken farm machinery. His uncle’s front lot was full of Buzz’s creations. He’d even made a little money selling a couple to tourists.
She and Buzz had met senior year at a keg party over at Cranberry Meadow. It was early October, and going to the party had been Emily’s idea—she had a huge crush on a boy named Adam who’d graduated the year before, and Emily had heard he’d be there. It turned out Adam had come to the party with his cousin Buzz, and, somehow or other, the four
of them ended up drifting away from the bonfire by the pond and going up to the cemetery. Adam and Emily were making out under a granite cross while Ruthie made awkward small talk with Buzz, annoyed at Emily for getting her into this. Buzz said his dad and uncle lived in West Hall, but he was living with his mom in Barre and going to school there. He was enrolled in the Barre Technical Center, in the automotive program.
“Cars are okay,” he’d told her with a shrug while they sipped cheap beer out of plastic cups. “I guess I’m pretty good at fixing stuff. I’m on the pit crew for my cousin Adam—he races out at Thunder Road. You ever go out to Thunder Road?”
Ruthie shook her head and started stepping away, thinking she’d leave Emily and go back down to the bonfire. She had no interest in a redneck gearhead, no matter how cute he might be.
“Nah,” Buzz said. “Didn’t think so. How about the Devil’s Hand? You ever been up there?”
This stopped her.
“I live right next to it,” she said.
“No shit? It’s a damn strange place. It’s almost like the rocks were put there by someone, right?” Buzz leaned against a lichen-covered headstone.
Ruthie shrugged. She’d never really thought about it that way before.
“You believe in aliens?” he asked.
“You mean, like, from outer space? Um … no.”
Buzz looked down into his cup of beer. “Well, personally, that’s my theory for how the rocks got there. I go up there all the time. I’m actually making a sculpture of it in my uncle’s shop. You should come check it out.”
“A sculpture?” she asked, stepping closer again. They spent the rest of the night talking about art, UFOs, the pros and cons of getting a business degree, movies they’d seen, how they both felt they were stuck in families where they were totally misunderstood. They wandered around the cemetery, checking out the names and dates on the stones, trying to imagine what kinds of lives these people might have had, how they’d died.
“Look at this one,” Buzz had said, running his fingers over letters on a plain granite marker. “Hester Jameson. She was only nine when she died. Just a kid. Pretty sad, huh?”
The Winter People Page 4