Apex Magazine - January 2017

by Apex Publications

  “Should we feed him?”

  “He hasn’t yelled,” said Susan, and that was that.

  We had vegetable soup. There were handfuls of millet in it. Millet was about the only grain we could grow, other than corn. There was a swampy patch not far from the house that Susan said we should try growing rice in, but we did not have any rice.

  All that we knew about growing food came from a dog-eared volume called The Responsible Farmer’s Book of Lists. Ruth had taught us to read from it. Susan read better than I did. I didn’t see too much use to it—we all had the book memorized anyway, and what was the point in learning about things like snow peas if we didn’t have any seeds to grow them from? So I just recited the book when she pointed to a line, rather than try to puzzle out each letter, one by one.

  Ruth said there were other books in the world, but that seemed like an extraordinary amount of effort. Writing my name took me whole minutes. Writing a word like “responsible” would take forever. When the author had finished writing each word in The Responsible Farmer’s Book of Lists, he had probably died of exhaustion.

  (There was the family Bible, of course, but people didn’t write Bibles. God had written it, and God was presumably an excellent speller and had all eternity to get all the words in the right order.)

  Ruth had not seen any other books. Lily had, and told her. She had told us all the stories of Lily, handing them down like gospels. Lily had said there were houses with dozens of books in them. Lily said there was an ocean and cities bigger than the town.

  Lily was gone now, perhaps back to that very same town.

  Mother went, perhaps once a year. She wouldn’t take us, and she came back in a foul mood after, but sometimes she had new seeds. We’d gotten the marvelous spotted beans the last time she went.

  Even now, splitting open the pods and seeing the rows of spotted beans made me feel rich.

  She hadn’t gone to town this year. Possibly that’s why we believed for so long that Ruth might have gone instead.

  §

  “Ruth isn’t back yet,” said Susan, the next morning.

  “She isn’t coming back,” said Mother. She scowled down at the baby. “You be Ruth now.”

  Susan stared at her. Her face was blank. She clearly didn’t understand, and when she didn’t understand things, she tended to get angry.

  “What?”

  “Go make some tea, Ruth.”

  “Mother, that’s Susan,” I said hurriedly, trying to get into the middle of it.

  “No, you’re Susan,” Mother said. “And this is the baby.”

  Susan turned her head back and forth, not a shake exactly—more like she was trying to find a way to look at this that would make sense of it all.

  “Mother, I’m Baby,” I said.

  “You’re Susan now,” she said. “This is Baby. That’s how it works. Quit mewling and get me some soup.”

  I took Susan’s arm—or Ruth’s now, I suppose—and tugged her away before she could explode into rage. It did no good to rage at Mother. She would ignore you until she didn’t, and then she would clout you in the ear and nothing would change.

  There was a scraping, rattling noise from the basement. Mother glared at us over the top of the baby’s head. “Go feed him.”

  We went down the stairs together. “It’s your turn,” I said. Susan—Ruth—would have argued with me, I think, but she was thinking hard. A line had formed between her eyebrows.

  She went out the back door to the turnip barrel and took out an armload. They were the last of the ones at the bottom, starting to turn mushy. We’d have more soon from the garden.

  The trapdoor rattled when she pulled it open, and she grumbled. I ran and held it for her while she descended the ladder, one arm full of beets.

  The rattling grew worse for a moment, then stopped. I heard a growl, too deep to make out, and then my sister saying “Not a chance. You won’t have me that easily,” and the sounds of beets crunching as he ate.

  She was always brave.

  When she came back up the ladder, looking tired, I felt guilty for making her feed Father.

  We went out to the garden. My sister sat on the fence and swung her feet, not carelessly, but in an angry, jittery motion. The line between her eyebrows was like a scar.

  I took a stick and wrote S-U-S-A-N in the dirt. It took me a little while. I could never remember whether the slash in the middle of the N started at the top or the bottom, and I had to erase it with my hand several times.

  “She can’t just make us change our names! I’m not Ruth!”

  I stared at the name in the dirt and thought, somewhat annoyed, that I had spent a great deal of time learning to write B-A-B-Y and now it was all wasted. And S-U-S-A-N was much harder. The S’s slithered like snakes and I was never sure which direction they wanted to slither.

  I could write B-A-B-Y like that. I hardly even had to think about it. And now my name had changed.

  “Maybe that’s just how it is,” I said finally. “Maybe everybody changes their names. I mean…Mother couldn’t always have been Mother, could she? She had to be something else before she had us. And I’m not a baby anymore, so maybe I can’t be Baby. It’s probably normal.”

  My sister grunted.

  The flock called from the woods, one after another, oh-die-will, oh-die-will.

  “What do you think Ruth—I mean, the old Ruth—is going to be called now?” I asked, hoping to lighten her mood.

  She didn’t speak for a long time. Her hands clenched on the split rail wooden fence, and I saw splinters dig into the callused tips of her fingers.

  “I don’t think it matters,” she said quietly. “I don’t think she’s going to be called anything at all.”

  §

  Here is another story from the Gospel of Lily. In that old green land, there were stones, bigger than the millstone that stuck up in the yard. “Taller than Mother,” said Ruth.

  “Taller than Father?” asked Susan skeptically.

  Ruth hesitated. None of us knew how tall Father would be if he ever came out of the cellar, but these were Lily’s stones, and thus exceptional. “Taller,” she said finally. “Much taller. As tall as trees. And no one would ever knock one down or dig one up, because little people lived in them.”

  Lily had gone away from the land of stones and taken a boat across the sea.

  The sea was in the Bible, too, and the Responsible Farmer’s Book of Lists recommended seaweed as a top dressing in places where it was available, though it must be washed well to remove the salt. All three of our Gospels thus confirmed one another, and I think only Susan was troubled that none of us had any idea what the sea looked like, except that it was salt.

  §

  I’ve made it sound as if we never saw any other people. That isn’t true. You can’t live in the middle of the countryside and never see anyone. Hunters came through at all seasons, whether they were hunting game or mushrooms. Farmers with pigs would turn them out to get fatted on acorns, then drive them back to their farms in autumn. There were tinkers who came to mend the pots and we paid them in food because it was all that we had to pay with.

  And there were always do-gooders, of course. They came around particularly at Christmas, with coats and mended blankets and an orange for each of us, and told us that it was the birthday of Jesus. Ruth was best at talking to them. Susan asked questions that made the do-gooders stay longer. Ruth could be properly grateful, which they liked.

  There was a trader that came twice a year. Mother went out to meet with him. He had been coming for a long time. Most of the people, though, we dealt with. Mother could not come out, we said to the do-gooders and the tinkers and the hobos asking to do chores. She was frail.

  I was nearly grown before I learned that frail meant delicate and weak. Mother was neither. She was probably about nine feet tall at that point, though some of that was recent.

  “Gracious!” said the trader when he came next. “You’ve grown!”

 
; “It happens,” she said, and the trader reached up and slapped her flank like a horse and laughed.

  “Have you seen Ruth?” asked Susan, standing in the doorway of the shed.

  The trader glanced over at her, distracted. “Eh?”

  “Shut up, Ruth,” said Mother. She took the trader’s hand and led him into the house.

  §

  The Gospel of Lily said that she came here on a boat bigger than a house.

  “Was it the Ark?” I asked.

  “Bigger,” said Ruth. “The Ark only had two of the animals.”

  “And seven of some of them,” said Susan.

  “Fine, and seven.” Ruth rolled her eyes at this interruption. The boat had hundreds of people on it, maybe thousands, coming from the green land to this one. Many of them were sick on the boat and it was caught in a storm and went up and down and up and down until Lily did not know which way was up and which was down any longer.

  “And a woman took care of her,” said Ruth. “An old woman with white hair. She held her hand for three days and Lily got better.”

  “And on the third day?” said Susan sharply.

  “They came and took the woman away,” said Ruth. “She’d died sitting up, holding Lily’s hand. They wrapped her in a sheet and threw her into the sea.”

  “Was she a saint?” I asked.

  “Probably,” said Ruth, the first time I asked. “Yes.”

  Forever after, in the Gospel of Lily, the old woman was a saint who healed Lily and was martyred for it, wrapped in sheets and thrown down to feed the hunger of the sea.

  §

  The house was dark when we crept back to it. Mother was sitting in front of the fire. The chairs no longer fit her. She looked tired and her hair was matted with grease. She had eaten all of the soup.

  “Mother?” said Susan.

  Mother glanced up at her. “Oh,” she said. “Susan. It’s you.”

  Susan went oddly still. I could see the muscles of her back go tense. “Where’s the baby?”

  “The baby died,” said Mother. “Go fetch some firewood. The fire’s nearly gone.”

  It took a long time to fetch enough firewood, and by then it was too late for soup. I was not hungry. It was my turn to go down and throw mangels to Father. I took two armloads down the ladder and tossed them into the dark.

  He was easy enough to feed. You just didn’t get too close. Mother had explained that he couldn’t see well and he’d snap our arms off without thinking about it. I don’t know if that was true or not. I could hear him chewing with his great grinding teeth. I wanted to tell him that the baby was dead, but maybe Mother had told him already. Maybe it wasn’t my place.

  Susan and I laid on the roof that night, close enough to the chimney to get warm. We did not talk. There was nothing to say. I cried a little, but I don’t know what I was crying for.

  In the small hours, I woke.

  Susan had her hand over my mouth. I could see her face in the moonlight. She held a finger to her lips for silence.

  I nodded, although I don’t know why it mattered. The dark birds were calling so loudly that I doubt anyone could hear either of us speaking, and the whippoorwills and the chuck-widow-wills were calling alongside them, a great cacophony of will…will…will…!

  She gestured to me to follow. We crept to the edge of the roof, in the shadow of the chimney, and when Susan looked down, so did I.

  There was a dark shape scratching at the dirt behind the house.

  It was Mother.

  I put my lips next to Susan’s ear. “What’s she doing?”

  “Digging.”

  Mother paused, looking around. There was something furtive about her movements, as if she was trying not to be caught. Who could she be hiding from?

  She turned back and I saw her hand vanish into the earth to the wrist. She pulled out a handful of earth, then another, and then she took something in her other hand and laid it into the hole.

  “What is—”

  “I think it’s the baby.”

  I asked no more questions.

  Mother filled the grave back in with the side of her foot, three long sweeps, and then stepped on the earth to firm it up. She looked up again, her eyes searching the roof, and both Susan and I lay in the shadows, trying not to breathe.

  “Oh-die-will!” screamed the dark birds, swirling through the air around her. “Oh-die-will!”

  “Whippoorwill!” answered the nightjars from the woods.

  Mother made a noise of disgust and batted at them as if they were gnats. The flock, like clots of shadow, broke apart into the woods.

  She went back into the house. I heard her moving underneath the roof, the clomp of her feet going up the stairs, until she was just beneath us. For a moment, I had a mad feeling that she would reach her hands up through the wooden beams and grab us and pull us down to make sure we hadn’t seen.

  §

  The last Gospel of Lily was from when she lived here. She had been working in the garden and a man came to the fence, a man with dark skin and terrified eyes.

  “Hide me,” he begged her. “They’re looking.”

  “And did she?” I asked, knowing the answer, but knowing it was my job to ask.

  “She did,” said Ruth. “She hid him—”

  “In the shed!” crowed Susan.

  “And when the men he’d run from came to find him, Mother came out and scared them off,” said Ruth. “They were small compared to her. She didn’t know that he was hiding there, and she cursed them for coming around her property. And they went away again and Lily hustled him out that night and he lit out north by the stars.”

  “I’d have gone with him,” said Susan.

  “She couldn’t,” said Ruth. “He was a runaway slave and they’d kill him if they caught him. And Lily couldn’t run. She had to wait until her indenture was up, and then poof!” She spread her hands in front of her. “She went away.”

  §

  Susan waited until the next night. The moon had risen and was almost about to set when I woke and found that she was gone.

  I listened. Mother was snoring. So was Father. The whippoorwills had stopped, and only the dark birds sang. And underneath, very quietly, the sounds of something scrabbling at the earth.

  I went down the ladder one rung at a time, still listening. Then around the corner of the house, and then—

  “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “Checking something,” whispered Susan, driving the trowel into the earth.

  “But that’s where the baby is buried!”

  She looked up at me. Her gaze was cool and remote and her eyes reflected moonlight back like the dark birds.

  “I know,” she said, and struck again with the trowel.

  It was monstrous.

  It was my sister.

  “If you won’t help dig, keep watch,” she said.

  I turned my back so I wouldn’t have to look at her desecrating a grave. I stared into the dark, waiting for noises, for discovery.

  There were only the noises of a summer night. Even Father’s breathing was even and regular under our feet.

  I heard the sounds of digging change and I thought of what the trowel might have struck. My throat felt as if it were closing up.

  Oh-die-will, whispered the dark birds. Oh die will.

  The digging stopped.

  I did not dare turn around. This was sin at its darkest and deepest point. The Bible had not even conceived of such sins, or if it had, I could not remember reading about them.

  All I could remember, indeed, was the line There were giants in the earth in those days. I had always assumed that they meant men like Father, crouching in root cellars, but what if there were other giants, what if the earth was full of them?

  What if Susan reached into our sister’s grave and a hand reached back and took hers? A giant even larger and hungrier than Father?

  I realized that I could no longer hear her breathing.

  “Susan?” I
whispered. “Susan, are you still there?”

  “Of course,” she said roughly. “Where else would I be?” She let out her breath, as if she had been holding it, and I heard the sounds of digging again.

  “What are you doing?”

  She did not talk for several minutes. The dark birds called and called in the trees, and Father turned over in his sleep.

  “Burying our brother,” she said at last. She threw down the trowel and vanished into the dark.

  §

  Brother.

  It made very little sense to me. Mother had daughters. She always spoke of having daughters. There had been others before us—she had mentioned them to Lily, I think, and Ruth had passed this down as part of the gospels. But always daughters.

  “Are you sure?” I asked Susan the next day, when we went to the creek for water.

  I did not need to say for what. I had been afraid to speak of it at the house, for fear Mother would wake and hear me. It had been Susan’s sin, digging up the dead, but I had not stopped her, and that made it my sin as well.

  “Of course I’m sure,” she said crossly. “I know what’s between my own legs well enough. He was like Father, not like us.”

  I leaned against a tree. Worms had made careful trails through the bark, doubling back on themselves, like words I couldn’t read.

  “Why did she say he was a daughter, then?” I asked.

  Susan pulled on her hair. “I don’t know,” she said angrily. “Unless she didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded a brother,” I said. I had no idea how it would be different than having a sister.

  I dragged the bucket through the water. Green strands of algae floated like hair.

  After a minute I said “Well, there will be another one, right?” Mother had never made any secret that there were other girls before us, that they had gone out in the world. Like Ruth, probably. I wondered if they met up together and talked about the old days, the warm spots on the roof and the way the birds called at night.

  Susan stared at me.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. Her voice was odd and slow, as if she was only now understanding it herself. “There’s no baby to take care of. We can go .”