The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Every one, she said in her mind, over and over. I got to reach into every one.

  Then little Peggy looked back into the northeast corner, the darkest place in the whole coop, and there sat Bloody Mary in her brood box, looking like the devil’s own bad dream, hatefulness shining out of her nasty eyes, saying Come here little girl and give me nips. I want nips of finger and nips of thumb and if you come real close and try to take my egg I’ll get a nip of eye from you.

  Most animals didn’t have much heartfire, but Bloody Mary’s was strong and made a poison smoke. Nobody else could see it, but little Peggy could. Bloody Mary dreamed of death for all folks, but most specially for a certain little girl five years old, and little Peggy had the marks on her fingers to prove it. At least one mark, anyway, and even if Papa said he couldn’t see it, little Peggy remembered how she got it and nobody could blame her none if she sometimes forgot to reach under Bloody Mary who sat there like a bushwhacker waiting to kill the first folks that just tried to come by. Nobody’d get mad if she just sometimes forgot to look there.

  I forgot forgot forgot. I looked in every brood box, every one, and if one got missed then I forgot forgot forgot.

  Everybody knew Bloody Mary was a lowdown chicken and too mean to give any eggs that wasn’t rotten anyway.

  I forgot.

  She got the egg basket inside before Mama even had the fire het, and Mama was so pleased she let little Peggy put the eggs one by one into the cold water. Then Mama put the pot on the hook and swung it right on over the fire. Boiling eggs you didn’t have to wait for the fire to slack, you could do it smoke and all.

  “Peg,” said Papa.

  That was Mama’s name, but Papa didn’t say it in his Mama voice. He said it in his little-Peggy-you’re-in-dutch voice, and little Peggy knew she was completely found out, and so she turned right around and yelled what she’d been planning to say all along.

  “I forgot, Papa!”

  Mama turned and looked at little Peggy in surprise. Papa wasn’t surprised though. He just raised an eyebrow. He was holding his hand behind his back. Little Peggy knew there was an egg in that hand. Bloody Mary’s nasty egg.

  “What did you forget, little Peggy?” asked Papa, talking soft.

  Right that minute little Peggy reckoned she was the stupidest girl ever born on the face of the earth. Here she was denying before anybody accused her of anything.

  But she wasn’t going to give up, not right off like that. She couldn’t stand to have them mad at her and she just wanted them to let her go away and live in England. So she put on her innocent face and said, “I don’t know, Papa.”

  She figgered England was the best place to go live, cause England had a Lord Protector. From the look in Papa’s eye, a Lord Protector was pretty much what she needed just now.

  “What did you forget?” Papa asked again.

  “Just say it and be done, Horace,” said Mama. “If she’s done wrong then she’s done wrong.”

  “I forgot one time, Papa,” said little Peggy. “She a mean old chicken and she hates me.”

  Papa answered soft and slow. “One time,” he said.

  Then he took his hand from behind him. Only it wasn’t no single egg he held, it was a whole basket. And that basket was filled with a clot of straw—most likely all the straw from Bloody Mary’s box—and that straw was mashed together and glued tight with dried-up raw egg and shell bits, mixed up with about three or four chewed-up baby chicken bodies.

  “Did you have to bring that in the house before breakfast, Horace?” said Mama.

  “I don’t know what makes me madder,” said Horace. “What she done wrong or her studying up to lie about it.”

  “I didn’t study and I didn’t lie!” shouted little Peggy. Or anyways she meant to shout. What came out sounded espiciously like crying even though little Peggy had decided only yesterday that she was done with crying for the rest of her life.

  “See?” said Mama. “She already feels bad.”

  “She feels bad being caught,” said Horace. “You’re too slack on her, Peg. She’s got a lying spirit. I don’t want my daughter growing up wicked. I’d rather see her dead like her baby sisters before I see her grow up wicked.”

  Little Peggy saw Mama’s heartfire flare up with memory, and in front of her eyes she could see a baby laid out pretty in a little box, and then another one only not so pretty cause it was the second baby Missy, the one what died of pox so nobody’d touch her but her own Mama, who was still so feeble from the pox herself that she couldn’t do much. Little Peggy saw that scene, and she knew Papa had made a mistake to say what he said cause Mama’s face went cold even though her heartfire was hot.

  “That’s the wickedest thing anybody ever said in my presence,” said Mama. Then she took up the basket of corruption from the table and took it outside.

  “Bloody Mary bites my hand,” said little Peggy.

  “We’ll see what bites,” said Papa. “For leaving the eggs I give you one whack, because I reckon that lunatic hen looks fearsome to a frog-size girl like you. But for telling lies I give you ten whacks.”

  Little Peggy cried in earnest at that news. Papa gave an honest count and full measure in everything, but most especially in whacks.

  Papa took the hazel rod off the high shelf. He kept it up there ever since little Peggy put the old one in the fire and burnt it right up.

  “I’d rather hear a thousand hard and bitter truths from you, Daughter, than one soft and easy lie,” said he, and then he bent over and laid on with the rod across her thighs. Whick whick whick, she counted every one, they stung her to the heart, each one of them, they were so full of anger. Worst of all she knew it was all unfair because his heartfire raged for a different cause altogether, and it always did. Papa’s hate for wickedness always came from his most secret memory. Little Peggy didn’t understand it all, because it was twisted up and confused and Papa didn’t remember it right well himself. All little Peggy ever saw plain was that it was a lady and it wasn’t Mama. Papa thought of that lady whenever something went wrong. When baby Missy died of nothing at all, and then the next baby also named Missy died of pox, and then the barn burnt down once, and a cow died, everything that went wrong made him think of that lady and he began to talk about how much he hated wickedness and at those times the hazel rod flew hard and sharp.

  I’d rather hear a thousand hard and bitter truths, that’s what he said, but little Peggy knew that there was one truth he didn’t ever want to hear, and so she kept it to herself. She’d never shout it at him, even if it made him break the hazel rod, cause whenever she thought of saying aught about that lady, she kept picturing her father dead, and that was a thing she never hoped to see for real. Besides, the lady that haunted his heartfire, she didn’t have no clothes on, and little Peggy knew that she’d be whipped for sure if she talked about people being naked.

  So she took the whacks and cried till she could taste that her nose was running. Papa left the room right away, and Mama came back to fix up breakfast for the blacksmith and the visitors and the hands, but neither one said boo to her, just as if they didn’t even notice. She cried even harder and louder for a minute, but it didn’t help. Finally she picked up her Bugy from the sewing basket and walked all stiff-legged out to Old pappy’s cabin and woke him right up.

  He listened to her story like he always did.

  “I know about Bloody Mary,” he said, “and I told your papa fifty times if I told him once, wring that chicken’s neck and be done. She’s a crazy bird. Every week or so she gets crazy and breaks all her own eggs, even the ones ready to hatch. Kills her own chicks. It’s a lunatic what kills its own.”

  “Papa like to killed me,” said little Peggy.

  “I reckon if you can walk somewhat it ain’t so bad altogether.”

  “I can’t walk much.”

  “No, I can see you’re nigh crippled forever,” said Oldpappy. “But I tell you what, the way I see it your mama and your papa’s mostly mad
at each other. So why don’t you just disappear for a couple of hours?”

  “I wish I could turn into a bird and fly.”

  “Next best thing, though,” said Pappy, “is to have a secret place where nobody knows to look for you. Do you have a place like that? No, don’t tell me—it wrecks it if you tell even a single other person. You just go to that place for a while. As long as it’s a safe place, not out in the woods where a Red might take your pretty hair, and not a high place where you might fall off, and not a tiny place where you might get stuck.”

  “It’s big and it’s low and it ain’t in the woods,” said little Peggy.

  “Then you go there, Maggie.”

  Little Peggy made the face she always made when Oldpappy called her that. And she held up Bugy and in Bugy’s squeaky high voice she said, “Her name is Peggy.”

  “You go there, Piggy, if you like that better—”

  Little Peggy slapped Bugy right across Oldpappy’s knee.

  “Someday Bugy’ll do that once too often and have a rupture and die,” said Oldpappy.

  But Bugy just danced right in his face and insisted, “Not piggy, Peggy!”

  “That’s right, Puggy, you go to that secret place and if anybody says, We got to go find that girl, I’ll say, I know where she is and she’ll come back when she’s good and ready.”

  Little Peggy ran for the cabin door and then stopped and turned. “Oldpappy, you’re the nicest grown-up in the whole world.”

  “Your papa has a different view of me, but that’s all tied up with another hazel rod that I laid hand on much too often. Now run along.”

  She stopped again right before she closed the door. “You’re the only nice grown-up!” She shouted it real loud, halfway hoping that they could hear it clear inside the house. Then she was gone, right across the garden, out past the cow pasture, up the hill into the woods, and along the path to the spring house.

  * * *

  They had one good wagon, these folks did, and two good horses pulling it. One might even suppose they was prosperous, considering they had six big boys, from mansize on down to twins that had wrestled each other into being a good deal stronger than their dozen years. Not to mention one big daughter and a whole passel of little girls. A big family. Right prosperous if you didn’t know that not even a year ago they had owned a mill and lived in a big house on a streambank in west New Hampshire. Come down far in the world, they had, and this wagon was all they had left of everything. But they were hopeful, trekking west along the roads that crossed the Hio, heading for open land that was free for the taking. If you were a family with plenty of strong backs and clever hands, it’d be good land, too, as long as the weather was with them and the Reds didn’t raid them and all the lawyers and bankers stayed in New England.

  The father was a big man, a little run to fat, which was no surprise since millers mostly stood around all day. That softness in the belly wouldn’t last a year on a deepwoods homestead. He didn’t care much about that, anyway—he had no fear of hard work. What worried him today was his wife, Faith. It was her time for that baby, he knew it. Not that she’d ever talk about it direct. Women just don’t speak about things like that with men. But he knew how big she was and how many months it had been. Besides, at the noon stop she murmured to him, “Alvin Miller, if there’s a road house along this way, or even a little broke-down cabin, I reckon I could use a bit of rest.” A man didn’t have to be a philosopher to understand her. And after six sons and six daughters, he’d have to have the brains of a brick not to get the drift of how things stood with her.

  So he sent the oldest boy, Vigor, to run ahead on the road and see the lay of the land.

  You could tell they were from New England, ’cause the boy didn’t take no gun. If there’d been a bushwhacker the young man never would’ve made it back, and the fact he came back with all his hair was proof no Red had spotted him—the French up Detroit way were paying for English scalps with liquor and if a Red saw a white man alone in the woods with no rifle he’d own that white man’s scalp. So maybe a man could think that luck was with the family at last. But since these Yankees had no notion that the road wasn’t safe, Alvin Miller didn’t think for a minute of his good luck.

  Vigor’s word was of a road house three miles on. That was good news, except that between them and that road house was a river. Kind of a scrawny river, and the ford was shallow, but Alvin Miller had learned never to trust water. No matter how peaceful it looks, it’ll reach and try to take you. He was halfway minded to tell Faith that they’d spend the night this side of the river, but she gave just the tiniest groan and at that moment he knew that there was no chance of that. Faith had borne him a dozen living children, but it was four years since the last one and a lot of women took it bad, having a baby so late. A lot of women died. A good road house meant women to help with the birthing, so they’d have to chance the river.

  And Vigor did say the river wasn’t much.

  * * *

  The air in the spring house was cool and heavy, dark and wet. Sometimes when little Peggy caught a nap here, she woke up gasping like as if the whole place was under water. She had dreams of water even when she wasn’t here—that was one of the things that made some folks say she was a seeper instead of a torch. But when she dreamed outside, she always knew she was dreaming. Here the water was real.

  Real in the drips that formed like sweat on the milkjars setting in the stream. Real in the cold damp clay of the spring house floor. Real in the swallowing sound of the stream as it hurried through the middle of the house.

  Keeping it cool all summer long, cold water spilling right out of the hill and into this place, shaded all the way by trees so old the moon made a point of passing through their branches just to hear some good old tales. That was what little Peggy always came here for, even when Papa didn’t hate her. Not the wetness of the air, she could do just fine without that. It was the way the fire went right out of her and she didn’t have to be a torch. Didn’t have to see into all the dark places where folks hid theirselfs.

  From her they hid theirselfs as if it would do some good. Whatever they didn’t like most about theirself they tried to tuck away in some dark corner but they didn’t know how all them dark places burned in little Peggy’s eyes. Even when she was so little that she spit out her corn mash ’cause she was still hoping for a suck, she knew all the stories that the folks around her kept all hid. She saw the bits of their past that they most wished they could bury, and she saw the bits of their future that they most feared.

  And that was why she took to coming up here to the spring house. Here she didn’t have to see those things. Not even the lady in Papa’s memory. There was nothing here but the heavy wet dark cool air to quench the fire and dim the light so she could be—just for a few minutes in the day—a little five-year-old girl with a straw puppet named Bugy and not even have to think about any of them grown-up secrets.

  I’m not wicked, she told herself. Again and again but it didn’t work because she knew she was.

  All right then, she said to herself, I am wicked. But I won’t be wicked anymore. I’ll tell the truth like Papa says, or I’ll say nothing at all.

  Even at five years old, little Peggy knew that if she kept that vow, she’d be better off saying nothing.

  So she said nothing, not even to herself, just lay there on a mossy damp table with Bugy clenched tight enough to strangle in her fist.

  Ching ching ching.

  Little Peggy woke up and got mad for just a minute.

  Ching ching ching.

  Made her mad because nobody said to her, Little Peggy, you don’t mind if we talk this young blacksmith feller into settling down here, do you?

  Not at all, Papa, she would’ve said if they’d asked. She knew what it meant to have a smithy. It meant your village would thrive, and folks from other places would come, and when they came there’d be trade, and when there was trade then her father’s big house could be a forest inn, and when there
was a forest inn all the roads would kind of bend a little just to pass the place, if it wasn’t too far out of the way—little Peggy knew all that, as sure as the children of farmers knew the rhythms of the farm. A road house by a smithy was a road house that would prosper. So she would’ve said, sure enough, let him stay, deed him land, brick his chimney, feed him free, let him have my bed so I have to double up with Cousin Peter who keeps trying to peek under my nightgown, I’ll put up with all that—just as long as you don’t put him near the spring house so that all the time, even when I want to be alone with the water, there’s that whack thump hiss roar, noise all the time, and a fire burning up the sky to turn it black, and the smell of charcoal burning. It was enough to make a body wish to follow the stream right back into the mountain just to get some peace.

  Of course the stream was the smart place to put the blacksmith. Except for water, he could’ve put his smithy anywhere at all. The iron came to him in the shipper’s wagon clear from New Netherland, and the charcoal—well, there were plenty of farmers willing to trade charcoal for a good shoe. But water, that’s what the smith needed that nobody’d bring him, so of course they put him right down the hill from the spring house where his ching ching ching could wake her up and put the fire back into her in the one place where she had used to be able to let it burn low and go almost to cold wet ash.

  A roar of thunder.

  She was at the door in a second. Had to see the lightning. Caught just the last shadow of the light but she knew that there’d be more. It wasn’t much after noon, surely, or had she slept all day? What with all these blackbelly clouds she couldn’t tell—it might as well be the last minutes of dusk. The air was all a-prickle with lightning just waiting to flash. She knew that feeling, knew that it meant the lightning’d hit close.

  She looked down to see if the blacksmith’s stable was still full of horses. It was. The shoeing wasn’t done, the road would turn to muck, and so the farmer with his two sons from out West Fork way was stuck here. Not a chance they’d head home in this, with lightning ready to put a fire in the woods, or knock a tree down on them, or maybe just smack them a good one and lay them all out dead in a circle like them five Quakers they still was talking about and here it happened back in ’90 when the first white folks came to settle here. People talked still about the Circle of Five and all that, some people wondering if God up and smashed them flat so as to shut the Quakers up, seeing how nothing else ever could, while other people was wondering if God took them up into heaven like the first Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell who was smote by lightning at the age of ninety-seven and just disappeared.