Songs for Dark Seasons

by Lisa Hannett

  How else you gointa learn? Gran use to say, ever the philosopher. Besides, ain’t nothing worth doing what can’t be done wrong a few times.

  Except, Mag knows--and she seen this truth clear as Gran’s wrinkles, every crease and line a final boundary between before and after--when it come to life or death. Ain’t no magicks in Butchers Holler can undo the kinds of mistakes what lead from one state to the other.

  Not that Gran ain’t never tried.

  Drawing on every bit of lore, every spell, every herb and tisane and bone, every last bit of hand-me-down hexcraft she owned, Gran begged and bullied and bartered with gods and fates to undo what Mag done. All while Ma and Pa was staggering in the house-shaped inferno. While they was half-dragged, half-carried in Gran’s skinny embrace, dropped onto the grit Ma once shoveled on the path to keep folk from slipping in winter. While their moans was choked with coughs, then their coughs was smoke-throttled. While they wheezed ’til they didn’t make no sound at all. While their eyes rolled, searching for but never spying the culprit what killed them. While little Mag crawled out the house after them, ember-freckled and hair aflame, afraid of the whupping she’d git for singing that hearth-song, for snapping along, for starting that blaze.

  Gran tried and tried and tried to revive ’em, but the effort were more’n enough to mark her limits. Seemed there weren’t no hauling ’em back when folk slipped, accident or otherwise, into death. Not really. Not fully. Even when they was unknowingly pushed.

  Still, she tried.

  By the time she were finished, Gran were crinkled like newsprint thrown on coals, shrivelled to a third of her height. Precious life sapped from her own body--years, decades--transferred to Ma ’n’ Pa by touch and by glance. A forty-something witch suddenly turned ancient crone. Crook-backed and gap-toothed, soon suffering tremors. Weeping over two perfectly unchanged, perfectly unchangeable corpses.

  An accident, the Sheriffs called it. No sign of foul play.

  But it were foul, Mag reckons. Fouler’n hot trash. A stupid, irreversible mistake.

  * * *

  “Knock knock,” Daisy calls, racing across Mag’s stoop. Hardly pausing at the cabin’s threshold, she grips the doorknob and twists. Unlocked. Good. Shoulders straight, chin up, chest out, she throws the door wide. Deep breath. Dimples. She barges in, aiming for the far end of the room, since she gots a knowing that Jax ’n’ that traitor’ll be over there. Flirting by the fireplace--yeah, that’s it for sure--guzzling corn whiskey beside the hearth, gazing at each other over the cups’ rims. Gitting all hot ’n’ bothered from the booze and the blaze ...

  Five or six steps in, she stops at the foot of Miss Maggie’s single bed. Pa’s on the other side, face screwed up like he just trod barefoot in a cow-flop, mouth open, shut, open. No words coming out. At least, none what Daisy can hear. All of a sudden, it’s like she’s bobbing for apples. Head plunged in a barrel, frigid water whoosh-whoosh-whooshing as she dunks in and out, splashing so loud ain’t no other sound can compete. Hard little surprises punch her right in the face. Chill drips down her neck, shoulders, soaking her chest and belly. Her eyes well-blinded with water.

  The whole time she’s shivering but also can’t feel nothing. Nothing at all. Tangled on top the quilt--the rutting boors ain’t even had the decency to git under the blankets--their shirtless arms is all akimbo, bare legs rubbing cricket-like, flesh sleek and shining but also straining, jiggling. Jax’s pale arse is wagging, his bollocks on view. Below him, a glimpse of breast, full and feminine despite Mag’s tomboy clothes. Abs that would rock the swimsuit round. Wild red hair fanned across the mattress. Lying there flushed and hood-eyed, the pinmaker looks proper womanly. She looks gorgeous.

  Daisy bends and snatches the kindling axe Miss Maggie trots out for her daily walks. The handle’s dangling over the bed’s footboard, the half-moon blade snagged on the patchwork coverlet. Tool’s an easy fit in her small grip, with a good solid heft to the business end. Don’t take much grunt to raise it high, nor to bring its sharp edge down, hard, on bare back and shoulders, harder still on the corded neck.

  She gits in three solid whacks before Pa launches one of his own, sends the weapon clanking to the blood-spattered floor. Daisy ain’t long in following it down. When she sees the red mess, her fury drains fast as it first boiled, taking her gumption with it. Every one of her blows was off, her sights skewed. The axe were powerful, no doubt about it, but flat missed her target. She missed. Oh Lord, she missed.

  And she hit.

  -- 10 --

  Folk round here don’t go more’n a day or two without encountering some form of dying. On the roads. In the fields. Bodies is brung low all the time. Animals and people alike. One and the same in the grim reaper’s eyes. Anyone could be croaked in an instant. Obliterated. Flesh and bone and spirit turned from something being into something gone. Just like that.

  Weren’t nothing out of the ordinary.

  Daisy seen her own Mama pass, hadn’t she. Curled on the bed beside her. She’d held Ma’s chapped hand. Waited for the wheeze in her sunken chest to subside. She’d propped herself on one elbow, after. Kissed her powdered cheek. Plucked the cigarette from her dead mouth. Wrapped her own lips round the filter, and shared Ma’s last smoky breath.

  Weren’t nothing special about it.

  Folk die every day, don’t they just.

  But this.

  Daisy knows she couldn’t of saved Mama. She weren’t no doc. She weren’t no hexwoman, neither. She ain’t gots her bloods, ain’t gots no true magick. Even old Gerta ain’t had the know-how to keep Mama fully alive--so what more could Daisy do? She were just a young kid, then. Weren’t she.

  But this.

  This were different.

  “Wake up,” she cries, but nobody’s listening. “Please wake up.”

  This were the ugliest nightmare Daisy ever conjured.

  Face-down on the bed, Jax is already stopped twitching.

  For a minute there, she thought maybe, just maybe, the damage weren’t so bad as it looked. Like that time Pa got gored by one of Maberry’s bulls. The Charolais’ horn had tore clear through him. Gouged an awful chunk out his side before the beast were tranqued. Daisy ain’t never seen so much blood as what pulsed out her Pa that day, but he survived. And he were way worse off than Jax. Weren’t he.

  For a minute there, she thought the wild in her swings might of stole some of their force. That the wounds bled all out of proportion to any actual harm done. Like fingers nicked while dicing onions. Toes slashed on sharp river rocks. Tiny slices pretending they was amputations.

  “Sweet Jesus, wake up.”

  For a minute there, she almost believed she weren’t a killer.

  Cross-legged under the worktable, Daisy pinches and pinches and pinches herself. Upper arms and ribs and thighs. Feels nothing.

  “Undo it,” she begs, garbled with snot and tears. “Pin him back together.”

  But Miss Maggie’s walking across the room empty-handed. No pins, no potions, no cure-alls. Leaving Jax sprawled, she untucks the quilt from her bed, neatly swaddles his body. Pulls the blanket over his head. Covers his face.

  “No,” Daisy cries. “Yer smothering him.”

  She knows it’s crazy. There ain’t no movement under that cloth. No breath. No life. If Miss Maggie had the skill to undead someone, she would of done it already. She would of saved Gerta, right? When the old witch kicked the bucket. Decades too young for the end, despite the hundred-year-old mug she were cursed with wearing. With a bit of makeup, she could of looked her age--forty-five? Fifty? She could of lived that many years again if Mag knew the right pin-patterns. The right chants. The right spells to revive her.

  She would of saved her parents, too.

  So, no. There weren’t no undoing this, not by charm nor by prayer.

  “Wake up,” Daisy repeats, over and over. Talking only to herself.

  * * *

  “Burn him,” Butcher says, tossing a fresh log on the fire. It ain�
��t but busy-work for his hands; the flames is already roaring so hot, there ain’t much air left in the cabin for breathing. Dark patches is soaked clean through Butch’s jacket, a deep vee spilling under his beard, half-moons pooling under each thick arm. Sweat beads on Mag’s temples, collects on her upper lip, slides down her spine, in her cleavage. It trickles like piss on her inner thighs.

  Droplets scatter as she shakes her head, shakes it hard.

  “Please.” Hard to talk round the wad of ash in her throat. There’s a pain under her ribcage, panic batting its wings. “I can’t.”

  “That so.”

  Butcher ain’t a vicious man, Mag knows that full well. Only, he’s protective. He’s a problem-solver. He keeps a tidy slaughterhouse, no matter where that turns out to be.

  Even so, he ain’t never burnt no bodies before.

  Beheading, dismembering, rendering, deboning--ain’t none of that a problem for a man in his trade. But when it comes to fire, when it comes to setting human beings alight, he don’t know how much wreckage gits left over, how very much remains. How much of that shit he’ll have to live with afterwards, nor for how long.

  He don’t have the slightest clue.

  “Anything else, Butch. Don’t make me do that.”

  “Can’t afford a scandal, girl. We’re only just making ends meet as it is. Folk find out about this ... ” He stops, shakes his head. Starts again. “You said Penny-Jane seen you earlier. Reckon she’s onto you ’n’ Jax? Onto yer, yer--” He flaps a paw at the bed, at Mag’s mussed self. “Reckon she knows he come a-calling? Folk hear he’s gone missing, you reckon she’ll point ’em this way?”

  “Can’t say,” Mag replies. “Don’t think so.”

  “Maybe,” Daisy pipes up from the floor. Hard to separate the words from the bawling, but it sounds kinda like: “Told ... her ... me ... ’n’ Jax ... so funny ... ”

  “It weren’t yer fault, darlin,” Butch interrupts. “Ain’t that so, Mags? Call it an accident, right? Could of happened to anyone.”

  “No fire,” Mag says, crossing her arms. “Too obvious.”

  Though Butcher sighs, she notes the tension easing in his face, his shoulders unbunching, and reckons she’s won. Letting him think his own way to Plan B, she goes over to the bed. Starts shrouding the corpse. Butch can’t very well cross their yards with a naked, blood-bathed Jax slung over his back, now can he. What he can and will do, however, is lug a roll of cloth home for Daisy to stitch up nice. And on the way, he’ll drop past the chop-shed as he does every night. It’s an old habit, running the lights one last time, spinning the power-blades, giving the place a final hosing. Keeping everything in regular working order.

  Nothing strange in that.

  “Alright, Mags. Alright,” Butcher says after a minute. With another sigh, he pinches the bridge of his nose. Peers over his fingers at the gal sobbing on the floor. “I’ll do my bit, you do yers. Don’t let nothing happen to my girl, y’hear? Take good care of her.”

  Mag nods. “One thing,” she begins. Ain’t no decent way to say this, not really, so she steels her nerve and blurts it. “Before he’s disappeared ... ” She swallows. “Save me his shins. Thighs, too, if it ain’t too--”

  Too what? Too hard to separate a dead man from his limbs? Too grotesque? Mag shakes her head, but don’t take back the request. Her and Daisy was gointa need them long striders of Jax’s, weren’t they just, to help walk ’em both out this mess.

  “Bit lean,” Butcher says, wriggling an arm under the legs in question. Sliding the other under Jax’s torso, he straightens with a grunt. Shuffles to git his balance, hups the bundle off its bier. “Couldn’t of asked that before he were tucked up tight as corn in the cob?”

  “Please.” Mag’s voice quivers, but it don’t break. Not yet. As Butcher adjusts his grip on the body, she searches for the tool what brung ’em to this sorry state. It ain’t on the mattress, nor on the workbench, neither leaning up against the door-side wall where it belongs. Following the dark spattertrail drip-dropping from bed to table, she spots it sitting there on the floor. Dull, but not useless.

  “Daisy,” she says, crouching beside her. “Move yer arse.” Grief’s deafened the gal, so it seems. Hiccoughing, rambling something about a wake, she don’t respond. Arms girding her middle like they’s the only things can keep her guts from shivering out. Teeth chattering between blubs.

  Mag shoves. Tipping Daisy against the table leg, she yanks the axe out from under her. As she stands, candle and firelight reflects off the blood-smeared blade, flashes of yellow and orange amid the red. Catching sight of it only makes Butcher’s daughter cry harder.

  Holding the weapon out handle-first, Mag squares her shoulders. Glowers at the slaughterman. “Please,” she says again.

  “Fine,” he grumps. “Git the door.”

  A few moments later, a steady rhythm of grunts beats in from outside. A whump-whump-whump of steel fighting its way to the chopping block. Bass notes to counter Daisy’s high-pitched sniveling.

  “Git yerself together,” Mag says to the girl as the pace of Butch’s hacking speeds up. She goes to the fireplace and drags Gran’s favourite cast-iron cauldron over the hearth. It’s too big and heavy to haul up to the kitchen sink--balled up as she were right now, skinny Daisy could fit inside it easy, with only head and shoulders poking above the rim--so Mag scrapes it over the stones, nestles it empty in the coals. Chucks in a few handfuls of flaked soap, takes a rusted tin off the shelf and glugs in a shot of cinnamon whiskey. A vial of Gran’s special spirits goes in next, a pale amber liquid magicked to speed up the process, then another. Another.

  Soon, mustard-coloured steam is wafting up from the boiler’s dark belly, stinking like a fish market on a hot summer’s day. Mag adds a pinch of black salts and grinded fox-teeth, counts five Missapeqwas then shakes in a bit more. Each ingredient quickens the spell, but don’t do nothing to quell the reek. When blue cheese and gasoline clouds start billowing out the depths, she goes and pumps water into a copper soup-pot, and fills the boiler gallon by gallon.

  “C’mon, Daisy-gal,” Mag urges, building the fire higher and higher around the blackened pot. With the extra kick Gran’s magicks is giving the brew, won’t be long ’til it’s full-spitting. “We gots plenty to git done before mourning.”

  -- 11 --

  It weren’t a hard heart what had set Gran to fossicking her daughter’s burnt home before the wreckage ’n’ bodies had cooled. Tears had streaked the black grime on her face as she raked through the rubble; they’d dripped and dripped and dripped from her chin as she scooped ash and soot, shifted beams and joists, salvaging what she could. Iron rivets and nails was piled in a barrow, charred timbers in the back of Butcher’s truck. She’d dug up small gold-plated charms what had been buried along with the house’s corner-posts: one for good health, one for joy, one for luck, and one--largest of ’em all--to appease gods of forest and stone, to beg protection for those sheltered within this here log cabin, this insult of wood-blood and tree-bone. Them worthless scraps had got tossed in the river, hard and far as Gran’s tired hands could throw.

  True, the old woman were determined. She were driven by some force little Mag couldn’t fathom then, one she were gitting well-acquainted with now. It weren’t coldness sending Gran back, again and again, into the smoking shambles while Ma and Pa had greyed and stiffened out in the gravel yard. It were practical urgency.

  To claim survivors--of timber or spirit--hexenfolk gots to act before the shell is scorched hollow, the bones too brittle to work.

  Gran ain’t never undeaded a soul, but weren’t nothing gointa keep her from trying. Nor failing.

  But maybe she’d tried too hard. Maybe she took too long carting all that raw material home to her workroom. Maybe, come dawn, Gran herself were too shattered to put anyone else together again. Mag never asked, so she don’t rightly know. What were clear--then as now--is there ain’t bringing no-one back in the same state they was before. Not exactly. But that
don’t mean they ain’t still useful, once they’s changed. It definitely don’t mean all’s lost.

  Bent down in front of the fireplace Gran built solely from reclaimed lumber, her folks’ remains whittled ’n’ spinned and pasted on the pin-board above the mantel, Mag focuses. Channels the old witch’s grit. Tightens her grip on the carving knife and gits to separating Jax’s flesh from his bones.

  She works quickly.

  Fillets and skin goes straight into the garbage bag she’s throwed down to catch the muck. Butcher’s done her the favour of removing feet and knees before carting off what else remains, so she don’t gots to worry about cleaning all them nooks and crannies where sinews and fats likes to stay stuck, even after the bones is washed. All the same, it’s a task scraping the tendons loose, holding the shafts upright with hands what won’t stop shaking. The blade slips, more’n once, grazing knuckles and fingers. Mag wipes them on her shirt, wipes and wipes ’em again. Ain’t nothing can unslick ’em.

  Half in the flames, half on the hearth, the great cauldron is now simmering, good and steady. Don’t boil them bones, girl, Gran use to say. Nothing lasts forever, but while they’s here you want them pins strong and white, not yellowed-up and ugly with lard. Boiling cleans ’em up fast, so Mag were sore tempted to risk it--but one look at Daisy blubbering under the table firmed her against being reckless.

  If only Daisy weren’t so rash, Mag thinks. If only she’d of stopped a second, just stopped and thunk ...

  Weren’t no point finishing the thought. She shakes her head, slowly feeds Jax’s clothes to the fire. Britches first, which alight with a quiet whoomph as though they was oil-dipped. The slim-fitting tank top what still smells like the dye vats. The flannel button-up what’s soft everywhere Jax were tough, cuffs and collar frayed where they rubbed against him. Buckling for a moment, Mag presses the shirt to her face. Breathes in the chemically, too-strong aftershave. Underneath, the salt scent of him. After mopping the damp from her eyes, she straightens. Wraps the sleeves round an iron poker and jams the whole thing deep in the coals. Shame to waste such good fabric, she tells herself--urgent, practical--but ain’t no-one else could wear it. Not now. Not without raising eyebrows, nor setting town gums a-flapping. And ain’t no-one could wear it as he done.