The Remnants

by Robert Hill

It was too early in the morning to be finding your front stoop festooned with an abundance of nature not to your liking, and whoever was the culprit or culprits to lay all these pulpits on her porch must have done so in the cool before sunrise because the petals were only just starting to curl when she opened her front vestibule door at dawn and found them. Someone creeping to her house in the wee hours—this was not good. Had she known that it was Threesie Lope, the only Lope triplet she liked, but the Lope triplet she trusted least, True would have marched across two fields to confront her friend, given her a piece of her mind and a slap. But True had no way of knowing that the jackanapes was Threesie, so the words stayed on her tongue and the sting remained on her palm.

  True Bliss was not a woman who liked to waste a good tongue-lashing. It galled her all day that she didn’t know whom to blame for the pile on her porch. It galled her when she mashed the screen door into the mound, it galled her as she kicked every last leaf down her steps, the slime on her boot galled her, the sludge on her steps galled her, the mush pile of it all galled her to such distraction that she didn’t even have the wherewithal to clear away the mess. It sat in the sun at the foot of her steps and baked the day away until it turned into a smear of slimy sludge, and the evening breeze lifted the funk of it and wafted it through her front parlor oriel and shoved it up her nose. Some people conjure up the past by biting on a cookie, but True required more substantial means to put her mind back where she had come from, and there’s nothing more substantial than a stinky odor on a hot summer night to send yourself running for cover.

  Once long ago True had expected Mawz Engersol to tap-tap-tap on the opaque glass of her front vestibule door and escort her to the New Eden Grangery for the annual summer dance. It was the last summer of summer dances, it was the last dance of all dances, though no one could have known that then, and it was the last summer that True was in the high flush of her life, at the tail end of young, and not quite into the next uncertain age. She was upstairs in her bedroom in front of the small oval looking glass on her washstand admiring in its reflection the crest of her youth, prettying herself with a pink velvet ribbon, which she carefully threaded through her braid. It was a warm night, not steaming, and she left the high collar of her blouse unbuttoned to catch what cool there was; she’d finish the fasteners when she heard Mawz tap. In those days, True hummed. Little tunes that eddied in her imagination and ruminated in the air of her throat. Mawz was due at eight, but the clock at the foot of the stairs in the front entry hall had chimed eight nine or ten minutes back, and True became aware that her feelings had a look she wasn’t too pleased with, that even this slight annoyance caused the skin around her eyes and mouth to pinch like milk skim. She tried, and succeeded, to hum the annoyance off her face and smoothed back her features to where they had lain serene; she felt a ripple of air on the pink of her neck and it was rejuvenating, and if Mawz Engersol were to arrive at this very moment he would see her now at the happiest she had ever looked in her life.

  The air downstairs had a stifle to it, and her mother was the cause. Cozy was in a snit that her daughter was in a pet, mooning over a suitor and a summer dance. Whether it mattered that he was a cousin or a suitor plain and simple was debatable to True; her mother’s foul mood didn’t need a rational reason to fuel it anymore than a witch needs a broom to make soup. Cozy was a Bliss and her departed husband was a Bliss and her daughter was a Bliss two times over for more reasons than she could count and Mawz Engersol had Bliss in his bones and all this Bliss was probably too much Bliss to go around for her mother’s liking. And then of course, there was the other thing.

  Cozy had instructed her daughter from an early age not to trust men, not to like them, and for pity’s sake not to wallow in the moonlight with them; the male of the species is a ruination to every female—if Eve hadn’t been so selfless and not shared her apple with that man, that business in Eden might never have turned the world topsy. Cozy had warned her daughter from an early age to mind her apples around just about every boy in town she knew, because every boy in town she knew was related to her in more ways than she realized and it was time the related stopped relating. Keep away from Kennesaw Belvedere and Luddy Upland and Hunko Minton, not that that would be a sacrifice, from Carnival Aspetuck (if he could keep himself away from Jubilee), and more than anyone, don’t go near Mawz Engersol, I’m warning you, Cozy said more than once.

  For many years, True did as she was warned, kept her distance kept her composure kept herself out of moonlight shadows and other equally iniquitous environs, if she saw a boy she crossed to the opposite side of the street, she swam on the far shore, she climbed trees in a part of the forest where no boys had touched bark, and doing so Cozy was convinced her daughter was safely out of those woods. True had sense—Cozy’s side of the Bliss family was the side that had sense—so why her daughter should suddenly forsake good sense for a dance, for a man, for a man she knew was her cousin, made no sense to Cozy, it only incensed Cozy, it gave her illest humor license to sully the air in the house with a sulfuric rage. No daughter of hers was going to fall victim fall prey fall in love with an apple from the same tree, not again, if she had to poison it so be it she’d do it, the blood in town was so thin already it wouldn’t take much to slip bitter in. Upstairs a pink velvet ribbon was threading through a braid and the braid was coiling a head in a crown draping over a slender shoulder hugging a slightly sloping spine to tie its owner to a suitor who didn’t suit her who shouldn’t suit her who mustn’t suit her. Cozy never told her exactly why.

  Everyone had laughed and whispered and counted on whatever fingers they had the years it had taken for Cozy and Remedial to multiply; it was Remedial’s thirst for hard cider that threw cold water where heat needed to seep, it was Cozy’s hard shell that kept her husband from plunder, it was the cycle of the moon, it was too much chervil, it was everything a small mind in a small town can tell itself when it doesn’t want to know itself know the truth—no one knew for certain, but it was surmised that Remedial was not True’s father, it was surmised that True’s real father was Remedial’s best friend, Remedial’s best friend as everyone knew was Bull Engersol, and Bull Engersol was Mawz Engersol’s father, and if the rumor that had always run through town like a stink of sulfur was true, Mawz was coming to woo his own half sister and neither knew it.

  True was upstairs with a pink velvet ribbon and a misconception. A young man was coming to squire her to a dance, a young man whose nervous tic she mistook for a wink, a young man she winked back at and made all his world turn violet. She had known Mawz since he was born, she was born before he was, she was a rose already when he was but a bud, she had always sensed in him a kinship that went beyond the schoolyard, it was barnyard from an early age, though neither understood the attraction. She’d watched the change in him from boy to man, she’d seen how much stronger it made him on horseback, how his snug fit in the saddle was a sight to rein in. Their fathers had been best friends first and cousins second, they fished and horseshoed and hijinxed together, Bull gave Remedial his first slug of cider, it hooked him like a trout. If Remedial needed an extra hand to pull a stump, to roll a rock, to seed a row, Bull was always the pal he could count on to do what needed to be done if he wasn’t up to it. It was Bull who found Remedial after True was born, face down in Grunts Pond, cold as a stone, his last bender laid him flat. After that, Bull looked out for True like a father would—from a distance. No wonder. Even before their friendship, Engersols and Blisses had cut up the earth and dribbled their seedlings for as many generations as corn has kernels (what family in town hadn’t farmed the same lands together?), but a girl likes a boy because he’s a boy she likes, whosoever farmed with whom is irrelevant, he had one eye blue and one eye brown and that’s all she needed to see. She liked his eyes; they were crossed, but kind. And they liked her; she loved that. She was Cozy’s daughter, sensible as a dollar in most matters, but on this one point she wouldn’t make change: if she danced well with Mawz Engers
ol, she’d marry him.

  8: Jubilee

  Jubilee was good with a needle and thread, a stitch in time ticked her hours away. With her brother growing hard as iron and his seams shredding faster than worms could spin silk, it was her job to mend and patch and baste and darn the few clothes he owned and out-wore. Carnival would come home from a day of chopping, all wet and steaming from his ax on up, his shoulder caps splitting open his long johns like foals being born. She’d have him strip down outdoors on the porch, and she’d look the other way as he peeled off every last bit of the reeking tatters and dropped them by her feet. Every day that same pile, the night’s mending, and every time Carnival standing in front of his sister full fancy, not ashamed and going nowhere. It was a ritual begun as children and it matured to an adult place that neither needed to speak of, but Jubilee knew it pleased her brother when she’d turn around and look.

  She turned somersaults to return the favor. Every Tuesday, from first melt to first freeze, as a member of the Ladies’ Tumbling Club. On the small rise of pasture above Grunts Pond, every girl in town letting herself go for an hour of her life. End over end, forwards and backwards and sideways, from seated, from standing, tucking their knock-knees as their feet flew over their faces and opened the petals of their skirts. Jubilee and True and Frainey and Zebeliah, and Petie and Loma, and Onesie and Twosie and Threesie, and Knotsy—all of them, in unison, in pairs, one after another, like a cluster of pinwheels in the high summer grasses, turning turning turning. And the boys in town would watch as the petals peeled to dainties, lying on their stomachs so their pleasure wouldn’t show as the girls tumbled to them and tumbled away and their dainties fluttered and whispered, each flip a glimpse of the forbidden, and sometimes, just for Carnival’s sake, a bit more.

  Russet and Circe were themselves no strangers to the attractions of familiar flesh, but the heat they saw rising between their son and his sister was unsettling even for first cousins. Circe insisted that Jubilee offer her sewing skills to the other families in town, to cousins first, second, any—to stitch her time among more suitable suitors. Someone too smart or not smart enough, someone related but not too related, a shallow pool, yes, but too shallow? (It seemed to be.) On the side too smart there was Kennesaw Belvedere in a crown of laurels and a toga edged in gold, standing on a Corinthian plinth and glowing alabaster. He was the suitor every family sought and his indifference to all who sought him made him all the more attractive, and the more attractive he was the more indifferent he’d become. Kennesaw was exacting with his hems and inseams; he liked his pockets darted and his buttonholes bound. Jubilee’s work was tidy, but her loose whip stitches on Carnival’s ever-busting britches showed a lack of finesse that fell short, and Kennesaw was not above pointing out that had she taken the care to feather-stitch, the tighter zigzag would keep her brother in his pants, you’d think she’d want that. Still, Kennesaw had mending and Jubilee had skills and Russet and Circe had hopes for this more fitting union. The alternative suitor, on the end not smart enough but appropriate enough, was the Minton with the biggest sniffer of all, Hinkley’s son Hunko. Hunko didn’t know a featherstitch from a fishhook and didn’t care if his seams split or his hems frayed, but he knew enough to demand that Jubilee do for him what she did for Kennesaw because what mattered to Kennesaw mattered to Hunko. Circe instructed Jubilee to ply her needle through Hunko’s clothes, too, in case too smart proved too difficult to land, so Jubilee not too happily got out her tools and her spools and whipped up some hems for him, too, darn it. Surely, all this sewing would lead to sowing more seemly and a suitor more suited to their daughter than their son.

  But Carnival would have none of it.

  He swung his ax for practice as he did for production, it was his labor and his leisure, he kept it with him always and he kept the edge blood sharp, and the closer anyone got to his sister, the sharper that edge sheared. It lay in the grass beside him on the Tuesdays the ladies tumbled, flashing sunlight like a warning beacon as his sister bared her bloomers his way and the other boys knew to keep their distance; it cleaned his fingernails as he watched Hunko watch Kennesaw watch Jubilee tend her mending on their hems and cuffs and inseams especially; it came to the dinner table with him and it made his parents mind their manners when he ate off his sister’s plate. Jubilee tumbled and Carnival menaced, she threaded and he dared, she fed his devotion and no one could stop them.

  Circe fell to consumption in the winter of the big freeze and, only a few hours after, Russet was ready to be planted in the earth, too. Carnival broke the hard ground himself with a pickax and a mattock, bursting a new section of seam with every swing, and telling himself the stinging in his eyes was sweat and not tears. Six by six he dug the hole to lay his parents side by side. Hunko built a casket for two and Jubilee featherstitched a sock for four to warm their feet forever. Those who attended the small ceremony at Nedewen Field stood shoulder to shoulder in the cold winter air, all eyes on the Aspetucks who would return to a parentless home. Everyone assumed that it was just a matter of time before sister and brother became mother and father.

  It was True Bliss who looked around at all the double-joints and wall-eyes and cousin-upon-cousin couplings standing graveside and realized enough; who tried to sniff out the air between family genes and when she found little breathing room left anywhere thought don’t; who took stock of every family trait present in just about every family’s offspring of her generation staring into the pit where Russet and Circe lay cousin to cousin and pounded her Drell fist on her Minton palm and said, Stop, this has to stop, this stops with us!

  True was first born of us all and laid down the law mother may I, and who was to argue when Bliss eyes looked back at Bliss eyes even though your name was Aspetuck or Buckett or O’ums? It was an argument as old as the original drop of water. Whether you believe in miracles or monkeys, we’re all cousins first and foremost, diving into the great tide as it goes out to the vast ocean of human expansion. But better that tide going out and dispersing the bloodlines was True’s point than riding the one coming in and funneling through a narrow inlet to our secluded pool where every amoeba you meet is divisible by you. Jubilee was certain in her heart that True’s theory had as much sense to it as crop rotations, and as she observed her brother and the growing split in his seat as he shoveled the last clods of dirt on the box where the last two cousins to couple lay together she knew enough to nod back at True in silent agreement.

  In a small town there are only so many options for love. The first families who made their way by foot and wagon to this sheltered swath of land were strangers selected at random by whatever magnetic forces pulled them here. Some came coupled already, a child or two in tow, a baby girl in swaddling, a son soon to be born, but more arrived alone with nothing but their name and an unnamed beating in their hearts of what they could make of tomorrow.

  You set sail for some new life and see ahead a distant shore and you are sure in your youthful zeal that you are the first to see it, and you can smell its earthy air beckoning to you across the waves, and in its thrall you need no sextant to guide your ship to its port. You bust up the earth there and clear a field for growing, you fell trees and hew them and build a house by hand, you want to make use of the time you have here and so you look to each other for warmth. A Bliss marries a Minton marries a Buckett marries a Drell, and as your world expands you have every expectation of new bloodlines staking their claims in neighborly fashion and new opportunities for romance and sure enough they come. Now a Swampscott for a Minton and an O’ums for a Bliss, soon a Saflutis meets a Buckett and a Drell a Belvedere. But comes a day when Engersols and Hurlbutts and Hackensack/Whiskerhoovens run out of Aspetucks and Soyles, and the new additions in town trickle to a Trousard, then an Upland, and at the very last, a Lope. One morning you wake up and there are no more new neighbors to come, and the small town of options you thought would grow and grow starts to shrink and shrink, bringing you back to a Bliss marrying a Minton marrying a Bucke
tt marrying a Drell marrying a Bliss marrying a Minton marrying a Buckett marrying a Drell. Eyes cross, joints double, wombs go barren, newborns pass. Cousins run out of cousins. And what’s left is Aspetuck on Aspetuck or nothing. No love. Cold feet forever.

  True’s admonishment was as sensible as heavy wool socks. If Jubilee knew what was good for her, she’d knit herself a pair right quick. Then again, she could go the way of Frainey Swampscott, down a path as ancient as the first dalliance, but that was a different animal altogether, from which there would be no turning back.

  9: Frainey

  Some things come natural, some you force. Growing up happens on its own, growing old, mourning, remembering. Doings most are not naturally apt at: adjusting to the unexpected, pretending it doesn’t matter, forgiving it.

  Frainey Swampscott was between a child and the early-early budding of being a woman when both her parents succumbed to the big fever the spring of the first big fever. The fever snuck into town after sunset on a day when the air was in no rush to move about and the smell of pork stew lingered long after the fat congealed on the remains, and before the moon went to sleep that next daybreak the fever settled a crowd on St. Peter’s stoop of Porcine Belvedere, Etingem Saflutis, Hephelonious Soyle, Brisket Whiskerhooven, poor kid right in his prime, that horse’s ass Boyle Lope, and Frainey’s mother and father as if they were a go-together like biscuits and butter and were taken off the table as one.

  Frainey’s mother came into this world a Buckett, her name was Salomee in honor of a woman some man lost his head over, she had Drell in her and Engersol and Bliss and Minton, too. Frainey’s granddaddy had lost his heart to a first wife who never made it through childbirth and took the child with her, and because his new wife and child almost did the same thing and the fear of losing both again scared him from wishing on the future, he made the child a remembrance of what had been and named him Wuzz. The night her parents took ill Frainey was asleep in front of an open window in the small rear room off the stairs on the upper half floor of her family’s story-and-a-half saltbox and her parents were in the room directly below with the windows closed and the door shut and not so much as a crack in the lath letting in air. The fever, which she later learned had meandered across the valley with no more purpose to its travels than a stroll on a lovely night, stopped first at the Saflutises’, then the Whiskerhoovens’, caught a current across Grunts Pond to the Lopes’, leaped over the ridge to the Soyles’, and might have followed a straight line through the woods to the edge of town with a brief how-do-you-do at the Belvederes’ before evanescing into the far-away, but it didn’t; instead, it first detoured fully around the Minton homestead and grazed the O’umses’—Knotsy came down with a mighty case of the snots—and then laid siege on the Swampscott saltbox like that had been its sole intended target all along. Frainey, maybe named after a birdcall, maybe not, slept angelically, deep in dream about an escapade with her pet goat, Chippewa. As they romped in a forever world, two kids side by side, the fever breezed through Frainey’s open window and over her sleeping body and slipped down the stairs and under the door into the sealed off bedroom where Salomee and Wuzz slumbered, and without waking either, dove head first into Salomee’s nose and Wuzz’s open mouth and went to work.