Songs for Dark Seasons

by Lisa Hannett

  Guilt gnaws at her guts.

  What if Pa’s hurt? What if he’s hacked off a finger, fallen off the cattle ramp, been trampled by a feisty bull? Chopping up bessies is a two-man operation, but Butcher’s only ever had one and a gal ... And ever since Mama’s lungs phlegmed their last breaths, he ain’t even really had that.

  Fine, Daisy thinks with a sigh, trotting over to the shed. Let Jax miss her a whiles longer. Absence makes the heart grow, right?

  The southernmost door is easiest to roll up, so Daisy cranks it to hip height and wriggles under, stepping onto a metal landing. Three open-backed stairs lead down to a catwalk running right up the middle of the rectangular space. Suspended a good metre above the floor, the walkway’s iron grating bounces and clangs underfoot, no matter how light a gal treads. But it don’t git too slippery and dries quick after regular hosings, so there ain’t no real reason to complain. A long open stall--about the width of a healthy bullock--butts up against it, the closest steel side serving as a bannister for Butch as he stomps to ’n’ fro, failing to prod or wrangle a hefty black cow inside.

  “What’s the ruckus, Pa?”

  Butcher’s rubber boots squeak as he turns. Blinking, he scowls in Daisy’s direction ’til she moves out the door’s half-light and into the naked glare of the bulb overhead. That ain’t her, says the droop in his expression, there and gone almost before Daisy sees it. Almost.

  “What happened,” he asks, pointing with the cattle-prod at her stained clothes. “Rainbow pissed on ya?”

  “Yer one to talk,” Daisy replies, though there ain’t nothing but red on Pa’s overalls, spattered on his button-up shirt. “Were you yodeling for help, or weren’t ya? Ain’t like I don’t got better places to be.”

  “That so.” Scritch-scritch-scritching at his beard, Butch looks her up ’n’ down. Eyes narrow. Nods a slow, silent a-ha. Don’t take much for Pa to cotton on when Daisy’s trying to hide things, he knows her that well. Knows, equally, that telling her to stay clear of Jax were about as useful as ordering their backwater stream to flow townwards instead of washing shit downriver.

  Still, he had told her so, hadn’t he just. Couldn’t help hisself. Don’t go gitting yerself mixed in that one’s affairs, he said, time ’n’ again, like any meddling Pa would. Fix yer sights on the stage, my girl, just like yer Ma. Or on work, the way Mags is done. Y’all gots options, he said. Don’t fritter ’em away for some good-for-nothing colourman.

  Daisy reads Pa’s wishes writ in each ’n’ every furrow in his face, but for once he don’t give ’em voice. Now weren’t the time to shame her for ignoring him.

  “Git over here, darlin,” he says instead. “This bessie’s one hell of a stubborn bitch.”

  Edging closer, Daisy instantly sees what he means. The Angus is gots her head and forelegs fully in the stall, but she’s digging them front hoofs hard into the packed dirt. Rounded flanks heaving, hindquarters thrashing, back legs pounding the ramp--the gal’s refusing to go a single step further, and she’s too stupid to go back. Rocking side to side while Butcher pushes her rump, growing wilder when he yanks the lasso round her neck. She’s bound to do herself damage before all’s said ’n’ done.

  “Move,” Butcher barks, climbing onto the stall’s steel ledge. Poised there like a possum ready to spring. Focusing on the panic-lathered bessie, searching for a pattern in her erratic motions. Looking as he must’ve, once upon a time, a clean-faced rider showing off on rodeo nights, instead of a bloodshot old wrangler what spends his days slitting cow throats for a dime.

  “Got it,” Daisy says, knowing without being told what Pa needs done. With Butch looming over her, the heifer’s started bucking something fierce, smashing her skull every which way. Ain’t likely to break nothing--the beast’s that well-padded--though the thundering of meat against steel sure is an ominous racket. Sprinting down to the opposite platform, Daisy grabs the suede belt Pa normally gots slung round his waist, the Cash Knocker snapped in its holster. Carrying it back, she tries to ignore the pounding echo of her feet, another fat cow in the stampede, and that god-awful moan knotting her innards, the high-pitched Hail Mary whining out of a dumb creature what ain’t got no hope in hell of ever really being heard.

  “Hold tight,” she says to Pa, hopping down into the emptier end of the stall. While Butch ropes the cow’s head still as he can, Daisy edges close, closer, ’til she’s face to face with it. Dodging its sorry gaze. Sucking in its sour-grass breath.

  Now, Daisy may be scrawny--hell, she may only be just shy of thirteen--but she’s Butcher’s own and only real daughter. She’s swung ball-peens and sledgehammers. She’s worked cleavers and cimeters, breaking and boning knives, sabre saws and coping saws and even chainsaws when the bones is real tough. She’s roped ’n’ bolted more bulls and bessies than most rodeo clowns. When needs must, she gots the know-how to stagger an unruly beast.

  The thing ain’t gots a prayer, so she whispers one for it.

  Gripping tight, she presses the bolt-gun against the flat black swirl of hair between its huge eyes. “Shhhh,” she says, and frees the gal from her misery. “Yer alright now. Yer good.”

  -- 6 --

  “How come you ain’t never put yer name in for Harvest Belle?”

  Mag snorts. Gripping Daisy’s dainty hips, she turns her this way and that on a rickety footstool, trying to git a better angle on the corset she were decorating. “Please,” she says round the pins clenched ’tween her lips. Already it’s half past two. Ain’t no chance she’ll make it to Jax’s this side of three. “Get real.”

  Arms outstretched, Daisy’s holding a saucer of sequins, another of short pins. She tilts one dish after the other, faster’n Mag can snick ’em onto the stiff velvet panels. Make that more like four.

  “Ain’t no-one ever told ya how striking you is, Miss Maggie?”

  Mag pauses. Were that a dig? Striking, like, flint ’n’ striker, like makings of a fire ... ? Daisy offers another thin aluminum disc, not yet noticing the pinning is stopped. Playing bashful, the girl flushes like a robin. “Reckon I wouldn’t stand a chance against ya,” she says quietly. “Yer smokin hot.”

  Now that were a dig. In certain lights, Mag’s freckles glint like crumbs of lakeside mica. In others, they’s coals seething against her toasted brown skin. And with that hair of hers--red-tipped, yellow at the roots, middles orange as a devil’s paintbrush--she’s vibrant, all right. And with them magicks she gots burning inside ...

  Striking.

  Smokin hot ...

  “Hush now,” she says, focusing on the waist-cincher. Yanking on the laces, rougher than need be. “Yer yapping the lines all outta shape.”

  Daisy’s trap clamps shut. Ain’t no way a willow switch like her could skew the corset’s stiff dips and curves, not when Mag’s fitted the ribs to perfect measure, but the girl ain’t got the spirit to argue.

  Dull little mouse, Mag almost snaps, but can’t talk for jealousy. Even if she does say it, or worse, Daisy won’t do nothing. All on account of one disappointing fact: striking gals gits away with things what no-one else can. Lying, cheating, stealing, blackmail, fraud. Don’t matter who knows, who sees, who suffers. If the culprit’s sufficient pretty, she could murder her own parents--just for example--and ain’t a soul would punish her for it.

  No matter how much she deserves it.

  “Stop yer gawking,” Mag murmurs, pinching another pin and jabbing it through a hundredth sequin. Cheeks hot, she don’t bother looking up at Daisy’s empty gaze, emptier head, nor the spoilt neck it sits on. The girl ain’t got a single trouble in that melon o’ hers, nor a second thought. Ain’t never had to git away with nothing. Ain’t never had to avoid a sideways glance. Ain’t no-one cared in a long, long while to waste no gossip on Butcher’s daughter.

  More lucky, her.

  * * *

  Must be ’cause she ain’t yet gots her bloods, Daisy thinks, that she ain’t gots no real magicks like Miss Maggie. Not that old Gerta ever explained it
so. No, Daisy’s figured that fact out her own self.

  Weren’t so long ago--six years, maybe seven--when Mag were the young one standing up here on the footstool, trying not to git stuck with her Gran’s pins. The cabin just as stuffy then as it is now. Shutters and door latched tight to hide the goings-on inside. Birch logs popping in the woodstove, fragrant turf smoking in the hearth. Enough candles to fill a parish church melting onto pottery dishes and enamel tins, balanced on any surface Gerta wanted brightened. The workbench, the kitchen table, the mantel and bedhead. The witch lit all them fires to spite fickle fate-weavers, or so Pa once explained--without explaining nothing so far as Daisy knows--and to rub their divine noses in her own earth-bound powers. To taunt ’em with her lack of fear.

  Back then, Gerta’s rafters was strung thick with bushels of dill and rosemary, twined clusters of shiver-tree branches, dusty bunches of nettles, tansy, mistletoe. Garlic chains dangled from home-crafted nails, spider-bead necklaces hung beneath, a huge wreath of feather and bone capping the lintel. Garlands of fluffy rabbits-paws was looped from the beams waiting for the old lady to fix their luck to strips of leather. It were all so cluttered, so dingy and close. As though Mag’s Gran were intent on burying them in monsters and weeds.

  But even with the weight of Gerta’s collection pressing down from above, even with shadows ever-creeping in from the cabin’s corners, even with the tiers of apple crates looming so--even barricaded as she often were behind a wall of mismatched chairs, tethered to the front leg of an immovable hutch, its shelves stuffed with glass vials and books and liquid-filled jars--even then, five or six-year-old Daisy reckoned the place were more open, somehow, when the shawled old woman were there. Far more honest than things was now, anyways, without her.

  Back then, Daisy ain’t never felt this squeeze in her chest--a squeezing that ain’t got nothing to do with being corseted, and everything to do with being ignored. Shut out.

  Daisy reckons she seen how things was, then and now.

  She pays attention.

  For one, she knows it weren’t no accident, Pa sending her daily to the hexwoman’s house. Too small yet to turn a lathe, much less wield a chisel and file, Daisy trucked through the woods and over the little crick to Gerta’s soon as her morning eggs was eaten. Not to make pins--she wouldn’t spin a bone ’til she were nine, the old woman long gone, and Miss Maggie in desperate need of an apprentice--but to make her scarce while Mama lay dying. Fat lot of good that done. After seeing Butch put so many bessies out their misery, swift and gentle as he could, Daisy coped alright when it finally come time to kiss Mama farewell. All the same, she wouldn’t of minded being spared the ending itself. The spirit leaving with the last crackle ’n’ hiss of red breath. The botched returning.

  Old Gerta ain’t never failed to glam pageant gals, to magick ’em onto so many winners’ wagons, but when it came to sticking dead spirits back into cold fleshsuits, well, the witch’s pins sat much better on silk sashes then ever they did winding sheets. They worked wonders on tiaras, not so much on shrouds. They wasn’t great as hinge-pins on coffins.

  Don’t mean folk didn’t ask her to try.

  Not if they was sufficient desperate.

  Not if they was, say, a dear neighbour suddenly short a wife. A lover. A chop-house helpmeet.

  For two, Gerta may well have been discreet with her charms and spells, but she weren’t one to keep no secrets. Not from her gals, anyways. Ask about anything--are mer-ladies really real, what’s that grunting in Pa’s room at night, can foxes sniff out ghosts, why all the fuss about resurrection--and Gran would come up with an answer. Groaning and creaking, she’d pull up the very stool Daisy’s now standing on. Roll a couple smokes, dole ’em out, then gab ’til the cherries burnt their fingertips. Weren’t no conversation off limits with old Gerta.

  For three, Daisy figures Mag herself must of been going on thirteen--her own age, practically a woman grown--when Gerta started saying how special she were. How there ain’t no-one else like her, not a single gal. Weren’t a day passed when Gran didn’t show Mag she were appreciated, even loved, but this new kind of flattering were different. It came with whispered lessons, ointments, incantations. It came with rags. It were serious as bloods, moon cycles, all the responsibility of the tides.

  And Daisy seen how it spooked Miss Maggie, Gerta’s praise, how it clammed her right up. Weren’t nothing magick about the other girl before then, were there? Before she’d grown hot like that. Before she’d spilled red. Peering down at Mag’s expert pin-pushing through velvet and thread, watching firelight twinkle off hair Daisy’d kill to grow her own self, she shakes her head. Nope, she thinks. Not in her recollection.

  As a child, Daisy thinks, Maggie were duller’n baseball.

  Weren’t she just.

  But once Mag were blooded? Now that’s what changed her, Daisy knows, that’s what let her wield magick so powerful. So permanent. So painful.

  Daisy learnt that first-hand.

  * * *

  Maybe little Daisy’d been feeling a bit cooped that long-ago day, leashed in old Gerta’s kitchen again, when outside the cross-county path were calling, begging her to dance through summer-bright woods. Maybe she were bored out of her gourd, kept at arm’s length while the older gals transformed bones into gowns she had no hope, then, of ever wearing. Pinning together magicked outfits might sound exciting to folks who ain’t never conjured nothing theirselves, but truth is: no-one wants to spend hours and hours and god-forsaken hours watching such repetitive hexings take shape. Without a doubt, the finished products always dazzle. Always. Often they win first prize on stage. And even when they don’t, folk can’t help but admire the sheer cleverness what pinned them creations together.

  But hardly anyone--Daisy included--wants to while away precious days as Mag, colt-legged and bleeding, fidgets on a stool by her Gran’s hearth while the old lady pins one bone shard after another and another and another. For days.

  Exciting it sure as hell ain’t.

  So Daisy won’t never say that what happened were all Miss Maggie’s fault. Only that them tight red skin-rings on her neck is the best, most lasting proof that Mag must of got the knack for hexing along with her womanhood.

  Itching for a change of pace, Daisy had pulled her leash taut when old Gerta grabbed a roll of toilet paper off the shelf, tucked it under her bloated arm, and headed out to the privy for some post-coffee business. Soon as the door slammed behind her, Daisy turned on Mag.

  “Yer just so special, Magnolia,” she’d teased. Or something along them lines. “Come ’n’ blaze me free of these knots, if yer such a bright spark.”

  Don’t much matter exactly what were said. Might of been the annoying sing-song tone what got the older girl’s goat. Maybe it were the same boredom, the same hankering for action Daisy feels after hours playing mannequin for the pinmaker. Maybe it were the frustration of being pinned, instead of doing the pinning.

  Trust me, Gran, Mag had said, not for the first time, before Gran escaped to the outhouse. I knows what to do. I can be careful.

  “How can she trust a firecracker like you,” Daisy had started up again, and Lord how Mags’d leapt off the low stool then, flashing across the room and over the makeshift barricade. Lord how she rustled little Daisy like she were a Tunesday chicken raised for the roast-pan. Comely even then, that tanned face of Mag’s had purpled with fury. She’d threw Daisy down, straddled her scrawny chest, and started throttling. Her grip soon got so cruel, Daisy wished she’d kept her fool mouth shut. Flames writhed up her neck, hot and high between the black spots whirling in her vision. Desperate to howl, she couldn’t muster nothing but a pathetic, mewling gasp.

  Things’d gone all warm-watery and muffled when Gerta rushed back in, saving them both.

  “Don’t go wasting that fire, girl! Not on this! Not in my house.”

  Thinking back, Daisy reckons the old woman had to of magicked them apart somehow. Ain’t no other way she could of got between ’e
m so fast, wrangling that wild granddaughter of hers while also damping the blaze ’neath Daisy’s chin. Carrying the toilet roll, a faint whiff of newsprint, and a trace of lightning-shot wind, Gerta tore them apart like a hurricane. Chairs and curses flew.

  Afterwards, Mag had hunkered on her heels, sobbing, palms up like she were begging for coin. Daisy splayed on the floor, stunned quiet. Blisters weeping from jaw to collarbone. The witch fading, older and more tired-looking’n ever, as she fixed them wounds best she could.

  The corset Mag’s fashioning now don’t even cover the lowest of Daisy’s scars; it’s strapless and scooped so’s it can easily be hid under the skimpiest one-piece swimsuit. But once the boning’s in place, the laces crossed and knotted, the fretwork of pins arranged on the velvet panels just so--well, then Mag’s hex will kick in, won’t it just. From the outside, to any lookers-on, all Daisy’s flaws will seem smoothed. Split ends will fuse back together. Crooked canines will straighten, the cheroot stains on all her teeth’ll git bleached. For a spell, her rooster neck’ll turn swan.

  Of course, this pretty piece of magick ain’t hers to keep. More’s the pity, Daisy won’t never catch a glimpse of it herself: Miss Maggie gots a lifelong hatred for mirrors. So if the pin-spell’s done the trick, if Daisy’s turned beauty queen, even for a very short whiles, ain’t nothing she can do but to take the word of other folk on it. Of course, at this and every other miserable moment of her day, the only other folk round here is the witch herself.

  “Turn around,” Mag mumbles, strong hands brooking no argument. “Quit staring.”