The Remnants

by Robert Hill

  A bit of blood could always feed him, but more than a bit made him queasy. On the night when she stuck herself and the stick struck a gusher, and the blood seeped down the needle and flushed across the fabric she was mending, she dropped both needle and mendable with a moan and shoved the finger under her buckteeth and deep in her mouth and sucked the blood as though there’d be no more of it if she didn’t. She watched her brother watch her suck her life back into herself, and when she heard his heavy breathing catch and shift from animal to anxious she knew that what had ruptured could never be repaired. The sight of all that thick rich blood spilled on his pant split—spilled for him—drew the air from his lungs and the blood from his head. He had to sit fast and rest when it happened. It was the first time he made his sister bleed this way. She felt the pain, but he was the one who cried.

  In another town with another man, Jubilee wouldn’t have sewn so openly. She would have kept her needles and bobbins latched in a box in a room with a door with a lock. She’d have moved her chair from the corner to a place where shadows couldn’t flicker, where the day outside and the night within had no opportunity for such a sultry intersect. She’d have chosen a mendable at random and a thread color by chance and thimbled up no matter what. In another town with another man she would have been a seamstress by day and, if night, out of sight if sewing. Her sweating, heaving struggles with needles through double-darts would have been her most private moments, never shared with any, and if she drew blood, she’d have the sense to seek comfort in a bandage, or barring that, suck her own life in private, in a room with a door with a lock, never in the flickers, never before her brother. There’s such a thing as carrying a point too far.

  Once her skin bore his wounds, there would be no other town, no other man, not that there would have been otherwise, but still. She still tended the occasional mending for Kennesaw, whose fuss had nothing to do with her flesh, and Hunko, whose interest in flesh was not about drawing blood from it. Other girls in town could sew well enough, mend a shoulder, fix a split, but none had ever effectuated a darn that elicited from any man such a hot damn. Jubilee looked different, walked different, sewed like she was sewing not for herself, not even for her brother, but sewing for something that might outlast them both; it was not that long after their parents went into the ground, and she was flush with whatever it was. It was in her cheeks, it was in her ankles, and by the next full moon it was in the seams of her clothes that slowly started to burst.

  A dog who’s done wrong will hug the ground around you as he dares to come closer with the hope you’ll forgive him. Carnival returned each night from his daily hewing and splitting and stripped off his mendables as he always had before, and stood before his sister full fancy as he always had before, but unlike he always had before, he no longer swelled with pride in her presence, because, unlike she always had before, Jubilee no longer looked. The nightly dress down, which had been Carnival’s earthiest pleasure of the day, was now a stray dog at his sister’s back door, and where she had once indulged him with succor she now closed the door on him and left the hound dog hanging.

  But a rebuff is no redress when the dog has already been fed. She could turn her back on Carnival, avert her eyes, leave a room when he entered, wake before him and go to sleep after, but it would not alter the face of the facts. Sister had allowed brother what brother had been drooling for for a dog’s age. He had hungered for it and it had happened, and the very thing wagging tongues had warned about had happened, too. Embarrassed before each other, they could sidestep what was growing; she could scold him with her silence and he could whimper in penance, and in each one’s lone remove from the truth they could tell themselves any lie they wanted. But there was a town to encounter. A town that had not seen a lump bigger than a day’s loaf of bread rise in any home since the last of their parents had delivered the last of their friends.

  Among them Jubilee would have the harder time explaining things. By the second full moon her seams were starting to burst in ways she could not mend with a simple stitch and a self-effacement. (Was she indulging in too many fritters? Fat chance.) There’d be quizzical titters, and titters would become tuts, and tuts would yield snorts, and snorts would step behind barns and cluster in snickers and then gang up in sneers. It would be thought: cousins had cousined and look around at the peculiarities that had wrought. It would be said: surely this kind of close encounter would bring to bear something even a dog would turn away from. It would be certain, Jubilee felt in her gut, that the derision would be all but unlivable. She circled around a conclusion like it was a bowl of unfamiliar scraps and finally dug her nose in and chewed and swallowed the only foreseeable way to sidestep the trouble. She and Carnival would have to go. They’d have to leave New Eden.

  Jubilee gathered bits to make their journey as a bird builds a nest. Random things: one bobbin and two needles; a pot big enough to boil a potato; an extra pair of pants for her brother; an extra up-buster for herself. She made a rucksack of a quilt and packed their take-ables within and bound the bundle in twine; Carnival could carry it, that and his ax. She tidied the house daily; she was always good that way. She made a pantomime of her heck box and her corner chair and a stack of waiting mendables like a cardsharp’s bluff in case any uninvited should come and think them only out for a stroll but due back soon. Carnival had chopping commitments that kept him in splitting form, and they’d agreed that he’d rely on her to determine when they went. She did her chores—the chickens, the cow—she said her how-dos as she had to, flustered her apron over her growing swell whenever an onlooker double-took, and generally pretended that the future was a long way off.

  Inside, she wanted to tell True all. Her friend might advise her, guide her, help her, stop her. She was scared and needed firm direction from someone not the source of her confusion, but Carnival convinced her that he would chop the world to give her life firm footing, yet he could only do that if they kept their slip secret. She had trusted her brother, once, and that was all it took; now to trust him again took all she had. The only thing to escape her lips was her buckteeth, and even those she tried to keep contained lest the sight of them should cause her brother to lick his lips anew. Not a word, she promised Carnival, she wouldn’t say a thing. She folded her long fingers over her growing swell and assured him that True would never hear of it from her.

  Is it time to go yet? Carnival would ask her as he dropped his mendables before his sister each night. Not yet, Jubilee would tell him, as she looked anywhere but where all her troubles lay. Soon, she’d tell him. Not yet, but soon, she’d say. The kind of soon that doesn’t come along every day.

  One week and an apron stretch later True came to call with spring rhubarb and a reminder. The Ladies’ Tumbling Club would have its anniversary tumble on the Tuesday to come, and Jubilee most certainly would have to be there, she’d missed the past month and, come to think of it, why had she? I’ve been busy, she told True, and True’s eyes surveyed busy the way a cat waits out a mouse. Doing what? True wanted to know. But Jubilee only flustered her apron and answered with a this ‘n’ that. True took in the swell, the sewing set-up; there was a bundle on the floor by the door that wasn’t at all Jubilee tidy. We’ll walk there together, True decided, and have us a nice long talk about this ‘n’ that on the way. Jubilee—what could she do on the spot? She nodded okay.

  A-tumbling she would go.

  The swell was gaining weight daily and she could feel the drag of it in her shoulders and her back, as if her other body parts were being pulled into the eddy that was aswirl in her guts. Pulling, too, was her high bust, less high by the day, weighing down her up-buster and more drupaceous than any juicy succulent that might dangle heavy and drop. Only her legs were spared the draining maelstrom that afflicted most of her upper half; though they, too, shared in the full body effort to make Jubilee miserable by puffing to Roo Drell proportions—knock-knees to knock-ankles, hock solid. Lifting them to walk felt like walking underwater, and walking
underwater felt to her the new improbable miracle.

  Carnival was unelated by his sister’s determination to take one last tumble. He was proud of that swell, proud and scared of it, afraid to want it but afraid of losing it, too. He said to his sister no, but it wasn’t much of a bark, and she said more than words back—she took the rucksack by the door and unpacked the bobbin and the needles, the pot, the pants, the up-buster, folded the quilt that made the bundle and returned it to its trunk, then sat splay-legged in her mending chair and dared him to say no again. The stray dog in him knew to keep from scratching at that door until it was she who reopened it without prompting. After the no passed on, she hoisted herself out of her mending chair and repacked the quilt with the bobbin and the needles and the pot and the pants and the up-buster and placed the bundle on the floor by the door once more. She’d tumble, and he’d have no say.

  The day came to go and True was crack o’ dawn punctual. There was a dog in the yard but its teeth were soft as corn kernels and if there was any bite in them it was mash. Not even the ax blade it was honing was menacing enough to panic a bumblebee. When True stepped around it she heard a mute growl, or maybe she only imagined it, and so she did what the cur couldn’t, she grit her teeth at it and grrr-ed. The house again was tidy, the pantomime artfully disheveled, the bundle by the door looked a bit different to True but a bundle nonetheless and un-Jubilee all the same. And un-Jubilee all the same was Jubilee herself, who looked to True about as full of this ‘n’ that as any soul who had ever come and gone. As they went to go, there was no need to further chasten the dog in the yard; it was drool-eyed and belly down and had neither bark nor wag. True and Jubilee stared it down as they passed, and once past, Jubilee stared back at it to keep it down, and that was all the no it needed. They were down the road and beyond the blind of the bend when the dog found its bark and took to the woods with its ax.

  Heavy legs, heavy hearts, it was so slow going, going to tumbling. True wanted to talk about this ‘n’ that—how things had come to this, and how this had led to that. Jubilee was swollen, yes, but torn. She’d promised Carnival she wouldn’t say a word, yet wanted for all the world to confide her troubles to True before she and her brother ventured off into the great unknown. The silence between them was slow as a slow step, drawn out and waiting, waiting for the next silence, waiting for the next step. You’d think in a small world words would be safe things to take on a walk, to fill the time between where you start and where you’ll end. Two close friends passing through trees and knee-high grasses with only bugs to hear them should not feel constrained by any earthly ties to keep from each other the things that need to be said now and then about this ‘n’ that. Walking, you’d think, through a landscape made what it is by any number of improbable episodes—lightning strikes, magmatic upthrusts, flowers and trees that need bees to be seeded—such odd and natural examples of what goes into making the world spin round would give even the most impacted words on the most profane subjects all the laxative they need to ease out and be free. But Jubilee, true to her word, kept it all in, making the air and the hours between them swell with the bloat of awkwardness. Several times True would be on the verge of a word like jumping off a cliff, only to have Jubilee look downcast and away as if to say she was not ready for such a leap, so True would step back, and they’d walk on, waiting for the next silence, waiting for the next step. It made for slow going, going to tumbling all the slower, and the swollenness between them all the heavier, all the way they walked.

  It was quite the bumptious spring gathering for an anniversary tumble. Threesie Lope was already high on the rise and throwing her arms in a cartwheel like a tree buckling in a storm. Tucked in a tuck like the tuck she took to at home was Loma Soyle, giving the day a what-the-hell whirl as she, too, rolled down the ridge in a path for her sister to follow; Petie’d feel it with her shoulders and her knees, or so it was hoped. Frainey Swampscott was a sideways stinkbug picking up speed through knee-high pussytoes on her downslope rollaway, and had Knotsy O’ums not been so triple jointed in her flimsy put-together she might not have undulated out of Frainey’s way in time to avoid being splattered. Onesie waved hello from a one-armed handspring, and Twosie yelled it as soon as she regained the wind her unsuccessful somersault took away. There was a fluttering fanfare a bit removed from the rest—it was Zebeliah Hackensack, on a hillock higher with a pitch to it south of the rest. She was inexplicably decked out in hip waders and a saddle blanket cinched at the waist with a strop and latched in place with an ice hook, and dangerous as her getup appeared, it was thought best that she tumble a bit farther afield from the others. Should she get hurt, she’d yell, or so that was hoped, too.

  True was in full glee. She smacked her hands in a clap you could hear cross-county. What fun! she announced to the air and the grasses as she took in the girls in the air and the grasses. A small cluster of audience called out encouragements from the fringe. Once more unto the breach! Kennesaw bellowed, and every time he did, a wearied tumbler would regain the hill to start her downfall anew. Hunko offered his huzzahs, mostly cackles and catcalls, and Luddy chimed in with a cattleman’s whistle, yet between them their airy adulations did not add up to the solid admiration that Carnival always brought to the proceedings, and for the briefest moment, Jubilee missed her brother’s presence, his ax and his devotion, the sweating swell of him beating in the grass like a one-man band.

  True checked her coiled bun and repinned it, scalp tight, then swatted Jubilee on her buttocks and didn’t even wait for her friend to neither accede nor demur, she stepped a foot in front of a puffed leg and gave Jubilee all the push she’d ever need. As Jubilee tripped forward True got her hands smack on the girl’s swollen ankles and lunged herself airborne and beyond, and as Jubilee rolled to avoid crushing her swell, True pulled Jubilee’s ankles with her to bring the revolution full circle. Jubilee grabbed True’s ankles in an effort to jam the roll, but it only added thrust to their rotation. True! Jubilee yelled, but True wouldn’t heed her. Again, they went over, and again, and again. True, stop! Jubilee yelled, but her voice seemed to have no momentum of its own. There were hollers and whoops coming from rolling clusters across the grasses. There was a whoops-a-daisy! from Twosie, whose saults might take till summer to perfect, and the oof! that rang out from somewhere was either Petie Soyle wheezing through a cartwheel or Zebeliah Hackensack impaled on her ice hook or Knotsy O’ums oozing. Bodies in motion, round and around. The little white buds off of matted pussytoes were clinging to every head as it circled by like many little moons in a crush of galaxies.

  This! True said as she came up from her back and started a new lunge forward, will take care of that! she continued, while airborne, to the swell on its back beneath her.

  There was an oh! there was an ow! there was an uh! there was a huh?

  There was a rhythm and a precision and a poetry to pain.

  There was a no! from below coming higher, growing louder.

  There was a flash like a flare from the sun come undone.

  Hack and swing, came the flare, flashing closer, swinging wider.

  From the no! came the howl, came it primal, Jubilee!

  Bodies that had swirled in motion stopped, stilled by Carnival’s voice as if it were the hand of God and not a sound that had come out of nowhere and crushed them each and every like bugs with a smack. Jubilee was a crumpled bundle on the ground clutching at her swell and huffing with the kind of urgency it takes to keep the last few embers of a fire from snuffing out. There was no blood, no obvious bruising, no femurs poking through her flesh, some sweat, a few splits, and pussytoes galore, but absent those was Jubilee’s terror. True was on her knees by Jubilee’s side, holding up her friend’s head, holding her trembling hands firm, firm but impenitent, there, there now, she said, giving Jubilee’s frightened eyes the answer they were desperate for: that has not happened. This is not that. Not yet.

  Carnival threw down his ax a pussytoe’s width from True, and threw himself
down on both knees by Jubilee’s other side, splitting the seam of his denims as he did. True didn’t flinch from the blade so close—she’d been cut worse in life and had no fear of mere flesh wounds. Carnival threw off the hand that cradled his sister’s head and replaced it with his own, and before he did the same thing to the one that held his sister’s two hands in a single grip, he gave the gripper a shove that could fell a tree. True grabbed for the ground to break her fall before the fall broke her, but all she could grasp in the instant of felling was pussytoes in one hand and the ax blade in the other.

  Threesie shrieked, True!

  Loma screamed, Beast!

  Kennesaw yelled, Carnival!

  Jubilee cried, No!

  Hunko and Luddy went for Carnival like they were wrestling a steer for branding, as he bucked they pulled him away from his sister, away from True, away from a moment in New Eden that had no precedent. To all gathered save three, it was a rescue gone awry; Carnival’s heroic arrival in the nick of time came too rushed for reason, or so it was reasoned. He saw his sister down, and True down, too, and of the two his sister was the one his concern was for. He was a hothead where his sister was concerned, everyone knew it, a hothead who burned a little too south for his sister, everyone knew that, too, yet most dared not imagine how hot down south he burned for her, and save for the three of them, him and her and True, the three of them who knew otherwise, the contretemps was but a misunderstanding; it could happen to anyone, and it was hardly reason enough for such a miscarriage of civility between close old friends.