by Lisa Hannett
Mert cleared his throat. “Best I pay our gal a visit, I suppose.”
“She’s playing us for fools,” Dirra said, glaring. As if it were his idea to lure the dryads out their groves. As if it were him what wanted a whole new brand of young’uns. “And not just Sammie, God help us. That first one flat tricked us with her pine-kid, the sneaky bitch. And the rest followed suit, pretending to y’all they was something they ain’t. Fuck ’em. Better yet, don’t. Let the whole frigid lot of ’em burn in Hell.”
“Never pegged you for a quitter, Ma,” Mert said, though he knew snarking were useless. From the stubborn clench of her jaw, Dirra’s mind were already set. “Think what you like, but I won’t abide no talk of burning, ye hear? Keep that sick shit to yerself.”
Out in the goat run, Mert peeled off layer upon layer of tension, and stood naked before his gal. Sammie needed a good hosing; curled in her own filth, the shine were all but gone from her leaves, the dirt littered with molted maple keys. At his approach, she scootched herself into a corner.
“It’s okay, darlin,” he said, lying down, pressing his backside into her coarse front. “I’m here.”
Flexing and relaxing, Mert shuddered against Sammie’s body. He jerked up and down, almost the same as when they was humping, but without it being over so damn fast. Spooning like this, he could be with her for hours, the pleasure of her skin raking his a thousand times better than blowing his load. Quietly, so’s Dirra wouldn’t come out with torch blazing, he scrubbed hisself to groaning-point, thinking, Baby, oh baby.
* * *
The fire’s roaring white, hotter and more devastating than love.
Upping-stakes, Bren and Gerta and all them cousins haul the gals one by one to the blaze. The boys is walking funny; there’s a hitch in their giddy-up from so much humping, from the day’s struggles, from fey gashes torn into their gams.
“You can’t stop nothing,” Mert says, grasping tangled twigs, failing to get a solid hold. The chain is cutting off his circulation; blue fingers throbbing, he yanks. Sammie tows him beyond the wood’s thinnest edge, their passage so far gone unnoticed only on account of the commotion pit-side.
Mert’s stomach turns as the flames catch. The aspen goes up first, whoosh!, just like that, then the lovely hazel, the spitting young pine. What a racket the dryads make, with hair and sap sizzling, when once upon a time they scarcely uttered a sound!
Mert falters, wanting--but afraid--to close his eyes. He can’t bear the thought of his Sammie on that there pyre. Amber and ruby licking all the places he’s claimed for hisself. Greed scorching her black.
In his gut, buried deep, he knows that’s the end she wants. The fire. The agony. The nothingness.
Sammie wants to be a fucking martyr.
Oh, what an almighty ruckus.
Half-shadowed, Mert looks at his gal’s profile, the beloved bumps and crags outlined with flickering gold.
“You can’t stop nothing,” he says, sobbing. “Not unless there’s a egg in that nest of yers what’s ready to hatch. A bub to call our own.”
No answer.
She’s playing us for fools, Dirra had said, and might be she’s right. Ain’t no mixed kids come from none of Kaintuck’s dryads. Last Vinesday, Clint’s pet laid one shrivelled nut, tough as a peach pit, human hair whiskering its only bone.
Only one.
That’s it, sum and total.
It weren’t enough.
“Git ’em,” Dirra had hollered--No, Mert realises, she’s hollering. His ma’s perched atop her step-stool, one eye on the burning, the other fixed on him.
“She seen us, darlin.”
Huffing, she clambers down the rungs. Sprawled on the ground, Pastor’s bawling nonsense, catching flurries of ash. Taking up a flaming brand, Dirra yells and kicks the holyman out the way so’s he don’t catch fire when she runs past.
“Won’t be but a few minutes ’til she’s here,” Mert whines. “Hoof it, love. Now.”
No chance. All sudden-like, Sammie’s got herself a bronco-rider’s expression, his cocksure posture, and more than his fare share of balls. Bracing herself against Dirra’s attack, the dryad plants her feet wide, raises her boughs. Smiles.
For a second, Mert admires his lady’s tenacity. Despite the slightness of her frame, the tonnes of weight she’s lost since they first met, Sammie still reckons she’s a heavyweight. That she’s bigger than she truly is. That she’s midsummer fireworks, set to go off.
What a mamma she’ll make.
In Mert’s grip, the chain is gone slack, the tug-o-war with his gal nearly over. With no other option, he fossicks through the ferns and thistles until he finds a stone with just the right heft, just the right jag, then clobbers his gal good and hard. A swift, sure blow to the burled skull.
Crackling farewells follow as Mert drags his withered gal into the deep, safe dark of the woods. Huffing, cursing. Minding he don’t trample Sammie’s twigs.
Shouting louder than the dryad’s sisters, brandishing death, Dirra trails after the retreating pair--but she’s too late to catch us, Mert tells hisself. Too slow.
Fallen, Sammie’s limp body whispers through the scrub, roots sighing along the ground behind ’em, nibbled by pigs.
The Wail in Them Woods
Proper flitting takes practice, the roadhouse madams used to tell Sperritt, back when she was a starling-voiced up-and-comer. There’s a particular rhythm to working a crowd before a performance, they’d explain. A knack not everyone masters. (But you will, they’d promised. Yer timing is hell-good.) Treat it like square-dancing without a caller, a hoedown without fiddles. Keep a light tempo. On the balls of yer feet, get out there and promenade from one cluster of folks to the next, dosado around couples, chain down the line without ever scuffing yer soles. Whisk yer skirts round those slender thighs God gave you. Show off the pretty cut of yer calves, the prettier cut of yer smile. Make yer presence known, but not lamented. Chit-chat only, y’hear? Talk small. Don’t over-linger in any one place, no matter how tempting: remember yer a warbler, girl, not a conversationalist. Save the knock-em-dead lyrics for later, when it’s just you in the spotlight, belting out songs you adore. And even then, only give so much and not a speck more. An impression’s always strongest if it’s short, a wow instead of a wail.
Flit, girl.
After yer name’s called on stage, go on up and sing yerself breathless--but then make yerself scarce before the final note dies. An echo’s ever more haunting than the voice what first shaped it. The more you hold back, the old madams insisted, the more folk’ll want from you. Remember that, if nothing else.
Nowadays, the lure of a different deep-country wailing yanks at Sperritt; it snags her, right down to the core. She can’t resist the slightest whine of it, much less its full-throated holler. Whenever and wherever she hears that particular kind of cry, loud and lonely and screeched, it seems, just for her, Sperritt can’t help but chase it.
Nowadays, she’s got that flit down cold.
* * *
Paper birch, Wil decided weeks ago, is far too short-lived a lumber for the piece of carpentry he’s got in mind. Sure, he’ll admit, it’s workable stuff. The boughs are pliable enough for rungs and curves, the pale planks patterned with delicate grain--and birch sure is available. These groves tangling the Kaintuck county line is fair wild with it. Wouldn’t take much grunt to hack a whole barrowful, he reckons, swinging a hatchet in one callused hand. Even less effort to wheel that load home before the dew lifts.
A few short steps away from the highway’s gravel shoulder, he’s plunged in shifting shadow, surrounded by ghostly trunks. Rank after skinny rank of birch trees traipse off into the forest’s own twilight, their tattered white skins fluttering like grave-lace, whispering secrets in the cold wind. Stopping to listen, Wil hears mostly taunts in that breeze. Words half-spoken, melodies half-formed. Verses and choruses shaped by leaves he can’t and won’t never understand.
Maple and spruce are the wood-songs W
il knows best, willow tunes coming a close third. Sturdy, reliable fiddles get born from them timbers; gorgeous things with bodies strong as they are hollow. No doubt about it: what instruments Wil crafts from them will long survive their maker. Hundreds of years from now, he reckons, some other man’s son will tune pegs he hisself carved, guide horsehairs over f-holes he hisself jigsawed, play reels for grandkids Wil hisself can’t and won’t never know. Imagine the wails all them everlasting bodies will produce! All them beaut Southern cries drawling across ages! Angelic notes fit to make a soul weep.
Hitching his axe through a denim belt loop, Wil ploughs through the undergrowth, aiming for a distant stand of trees. Today he ain’t after young, teasing birch. No, he can’t--won’t--rely on nothing so flimsy, so washed-out, so fickle, not for this last keepsake. Only his trusty-faithfuls will do this time. Maple. Spruce. Pine. Familiar voices humming ballads just for him, singing lullabies he knows by heart.
* * *
Night after night, Sperritt barefoots it in and out of the bedroom without waking Wil. She flits without so much as creaking the floorboards. Silently, her blue terry-cloth robe slips off the bathroom hook and onto her flimsy shoulders, snugs in tight round her frill-edged nightie. Faded cotton floats above the carpet as she flutters across the living room; her shape now moon-silvered, now shadow-blurred. On her way through, Sperritt pauses here and there as if to straighten the couch cushions, fuss with the curtains, adjust photos in their dusty frames like she used to. Her gaze slides over dozens of small, stoic faces. In the flesh, Wil’s kin are scattered from one side of Kaintuck to the other, but right here there’s dozens of ’em hung on the walls, propped on the pianola, cluttering up the liquor cabinet and side tables. Seven older siblings and three younger all captured in Kodachrome, plus the ever-growing brood of cousins, nieces, nephews, step-sisters, second uncles once-removed. Generations of solid, small, shiny-paper kin. Every last one of ’em sprung from Wil’s family tree.
In her own lifetime, Sperritt never really had no-one worth saving like that, pressing ’em flat between glass like precious wildflowers, no-one’s memory to preserve. All she really wanted in life was what she’d had, for a while. Just her and Wil. Just them two.
Flit, girl.
At the end of the hall, she hesitates outside Wil’s workshop. The door’s ajar, but she doesn’t go in. Brushing fingertips across the varnished frame, she closes her eyes. Imagines him in there, whittling and hammering with the radio on. Tapping his boot to Emmylou Harris. Linda Ronstadt. Tammy Wynette. Cranking Stand by Your Man over and over. Filing and lathing and steaming planks into shape, conjuring up a heady fog of pine-dust and furniture glue. Heading into the forest, axe in hand, whenever the wood was too knotty, the grain too dark or too light, the timber not perfectly perfect. Determined to finish every goddamned job he started, no matter how long it took. No matter how useless. No matter how overdue.
Wil ever did build fiddles better’n he played ’em, she thinks. He had a fine eye for detail. A pitch-perfect ear. Only his timing was forever off.
Outside, Sperritt skims over the parched grass round their little house--and it is a house, mind. It’s never had nor been towed on wheels. It stays put. Grey brick and weatherboard, it’s more than twice her and Wil’s ages combined, at least sixty years if not seventy, and draughtier than a barn door to boot, but it was theirs.
Further on down the road, the few nasal notes what had drawn her outside keep whining out of a double-wide parked near the dried crick bed. The pain in that sound is one she knows well, one she can’t help but follow. Canting her head to better catch it, Sperritt dashes from yard to yard in the near-darkness, whisking over gravel driveways and cement paving, steering clear of porch lights and motion sensors and dogs. Hidden crickets scree-scree-screeeek for their mates, high-pitched and incessant, hounding her all the way to the trailer’s corrugated side. In polite company, shrill is how the old roadhouse ladies would’ve described them creekers. A god-awful racket they’d have whispered for Sperritt’s ears alone.
After so many years in the honkytonk--hobnobbing and two-stepping to old-time bluegrass; shouting over banjos, hee-haws, steel guitars; voice straining for Patsy Cline octaves (Heavenly, agreed them sequined know-it-alls, but well outta yer range, girlie)--Sperritt has lately changed her tune. Lately, she’s stopped her singing and become a powerful listener. She ain’t adding to the din no more--at least, not when nobody else is around. Now she’s quiet as a black hole. Now she listens. Now she listens and hears more than ever she did before. Poor, unhappy little wailers, crying their hearts out all across town. Ain’t no-one but her need to hear such misery, Sperritt reckons. Now she’s compelled to do everything she can to soothe. To bring folk a bit of peace and quiet. A few precious hours of hush.
* * *
Wil never could stand the quiet.
Far back as he can remember, the passing of time was marked with hammers, chisels, band saws. His daddy’s baritone forever underscored the rat-tat-tat of tools, his catalog of Chippewa field-hollers expanding along with the family cabin, always trying, ever failing, to keep up with the latest swell in Mama’s waistline. When he weren’t breeding or building or baling hay for the winter, Waylon was teaching hisself the six-string. Then penny-whistle and mouth-harp. Ukulele and mandolin. Got so good over the years, them big-shot honkytonk folk roped him into playing at regular gigs there. Hoedowns and square dances, Vinesday hootenannies--Waylon even sat in, once, when the Grizzly Mountain Boys brung their famous bluegrass set to town.
In his workshop, Wil turns up the radio. Don’t matter what’s on, he reckons, so long as it’s loud. Returning to the cluttered bench, he picks up a pencil. Sketches gentle curves on the maple boards he’s glued into a stiff sheet, eyeballing the angles instead of using a stencil. Formed round a pattern, the shapes looked too neat, too perfect, like they came from someone else, which Wil simply cannot abide. After all, life ain’t but a collection of mistakes, some small, some big, all eventually clumping into the greatest fault what finishes it off. Everything Wil touches comes out off-kilter, reeling to its own rhythms, stopping dead when he least expects it. This new piece he’s making shouldn’t be no different.
A table-saw blunts the wood’s sharp corners, then Wil turns to hand planes and old-fashioned elbow grease for more precise work. Sitting on a low stool, he clamps the plank between his knees. Slowly shaves off the rough edges, smooths away the excess inch by inch. Getting into the tempo, Wil grunts up a sweat. Around him, sweet maple curls onto the linoleum. Each pass of the tool stirs up primal tunes, a haze of timber-dust and memories.
The halls in Wil’s mind echo with the slide of steel guitars, the screech-laugh of gals swanning round the roadhouse, deep beer-soaked voices shouting for their sweet attention. Soon as they could stay awake past eight, Waylon dragged his young’uns to the honkytonk, introduced ’em to board-stomping, drum-thumping, head-swimming ale-songs--and the barroom gals what poured ’em.
The file stops rasping as heat rises from Wil’s belly, knots in his throat, clouds his vision. He turns to the wireless and cranks the volume. Drowns out the deadwood’s awful keening in his hands. Squashes unwanted thoughts under quick-tapping toes.
What Wil wouldn’t give to go back to them smoky roadhouse days. Pops strumming for hours on the stoop, cigarillo champed in the corner of his mouth, a twang in his nose and fingers. Mamma barking at Megs, Lucy, and the little ones, the girls too busy squealing and hopscotching and wrestling to listen. The newest bub baying for another feed. Marv pulling up the drive on soft summer evenings, honk-honking the horn on Reverend’s borrowed hearse. A tinny Glory Hallelujah piping from the car stereo.
Wil snorts at his oldest brother’s nerve. None of Waylon’s other sons ever did match the first one’s gall. Such borrowings, Wil knows, is what led Marv down a lonely road to the state pen--but in those days they were a lifeline. Marv’s gift for hot-wiring bought them all, Pops included, a few blessed hours of freedom. Away fro
m fallow fields, away from scrawny cattle, away from their cabin’s ramshackle walls and the opossums scritching within ’em. Before the horn’s blast faded, the lads all piled into that corpse-mobile, Nate and Arch and the others sounding off about who’d get first dibs on what gal, Wil punching a path to the front seat. Wielding elbows and fists--teeth if needs must--to avoid riding in back with the coffin.
What he wouldn’t give to hear them same musics now, full raucous and sweaty and blithe. Songs of togetherness and kin and belonging. Songs of hope.
When the file’s rasp changes timbre--less mosquito whine now, more bumblebee drone--Wil runs a thumb over the maple’s edge, feeling for splinters. Half an inch along the track, his skin snags.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he hisses, sucking the cut to stop it bleeding. Head shaking, shaking, at the stupidity of it all.
He’d wanted to share those good times more than relive ’em.
He’d wanted to make new songs for a new family.
Using socks for sweepers, Wil clears a space by his stool then balances the curved wood upright on the tiles. Gently, he nudges the thing with his toe. It sees and saws--once, twice--then falls over with a muffled whoomph.
Wil’s sigh catches, stifled before it can become a sob.
What he wouldn’t give for a houseful of noise.
* * *
Drifting up to an open window at the trailer’s far end, Sperritt cranes her neck to peer through the mesh. A plastic sun plugged in near the baseboard adds a soft yellow glow to the pale blue filtering through half-raised blinds. In the dim light, a skinny gal in cut-offs and a sloppy T-shirt droops on the single bed. Candy-pink hair clumped with at least a week’s grease. Formula puked down her right shoulder. Breast-pump and bottle toppled in her lap, a pair of milk-circles blooming on her chest. Leaning against the wall’s pine veneer, the gal’s head is sliding south. Jaw slack, her lower lip’s glinting dribble. Bare leg twitching every now and again, she snores while a plump baby cries in a Moses-basket at her feet.