by Robert Hill
Carnival rid himself of Luddy and Hunko and scooped up his sister in his arms, grabbed his ax and lay it over her in his arms, and with all he ever wanted in this world in his arms, he set off bounding down the hill. With him lumbering and her bouncing and the ax flashing with every jump, it was like watching a big, lit log throw off sparks as it tumbled away from a fire.
13. Frainey
You’re coming home with me and that animal can rot to Kingdom come, True told Frainey. There were tears coming out of the pillows of her eyes as she made her voice irrefutable. Frainey had not seen eyes leak emotion since the day her parents went in the ground. She had seen nothing more in those days than Chippewa’s emotionless eyes, those cold bone buttons dry as drought staring back at her every time the goat wanted, wanted, wanted. Nor had she heard words. Human. Vocal. Outside of her head. Words damp with intent and concern. True’s tears made her words swell in front of Frainey’s eyes. If True’s words had been gashed into a stone tablet by a stab of lightning they couldn’t have sounded any more almighty, and it seemed they penetrated the layers of evolution that Frainey had to claw her way back up from because her eyes flashed with the first human reaction True had seen from her all day. Moisture.
True eyed the house, then Frainey, then reason.
Do what you have to, she said.
Frainey nodded. Her tongue was still hard lodged in her mouth, a catch of sticks and leaves damming a stream, but True could see she was trying to clear a path for words, the first to minnow out in many days. It hurt to watch Frainey’s body wrench itself into a speaking state. She gurgled like a pump back-washing with air. She choked out an initial I, and swallowed hard, and paused to catch her breath, and with even more struggle forced up a dried husk of will. It took all hers to do so. She had to cull it from the very ends of her being to bring it out of a cave into the open. True softened towards her a bit—a bit. She guessed the effort to say those five letters—no peon heaving blocks of stone to raise a stepped-up temple probably ever exerted more.
Such is the way life becomes a drama. The story starts with a fever and becomes a double departing, then a hole in the ground makes an orphan and sadness turns it wild. Every story’s beginning has its own abandoned ruin buried under the jungle of what came after, and no one can say why one thing or another caused this or that, nor after a while which thing caused what. The ruins under the jungle are many, some big, some small, all telling, but there’s no telling for certain what they really tell. So we grab on to something to give blame a foundation that isn’t a hidden block of stone; instead, something over which we have the power to point away from ourselves or the random fall of fate and say you, you, you, or in this case, goat, goat, goat.
Frainey didn’t make herself a wild thing. Her parents’ passing didn’t make her a wild thing. Chippewa didn’t make her a wild thing. The fever did. But a fever is air, and if you can’t see air, how can you avenge it?
Do what you have to do, True told Frainey. Was life in New Eden ever anything other than this?
Frainey was scrubbed clean and naked to the day and closer to human than she had been since when. They were outside looking up at the porch and at the front doorway and at the goat standing in it with its back end facing out, and as they passed that single thought wordlessly between them, the goat simply flicked her tail at them and dunged.
If True hadn’t been there to witness it, if she hadn’t seen it and smelled it and heard it and buried it under the jungle of her own ruins and sprinkled about bits of it like little arrowheads, not a one would know Frainey’s lifelong bugaboo or about the day she set herself free.
True had told her to do what she needed to do and Frainey knew, she just knew. The hand was a mere step ahead of the head when she went to the barn and plucked the key off the peg on the beam and went to the back stall where her grandfather’s trunk with the lock on it sat and clunked that key into the lock and chunk went the cog and the hinges squealed like little pigs but sounds didn’t matter anymore—in that locked trunk was a handled blade that would put any sound to sleep. The blade was worn and chipped (it had cut through something that didn’t take cutting lightly), and the cutting edge was dark rust with what once must have been old red. The handle took to Frainey’s hand like a friend remembering, and the smooth worn wood of it said words to her she had never before heard but understood the meaning of like a grandfather’s kiss. There was something else in the trunk with it—two somethings, two small bird nests, honey-colored with age, and resting in one like a forgotten egg was a blood clot of dried-up gristle no bigger than a mushroom of dung, and in the other, the same thing, only much smaller.
You go through one door and the world changes you; you go through another door and you change it back. Frainey came out of the barn a naked warrior, blood-lusted and sword on high, everything about her girded, and, as True later recalled, even her eensie-teensies seemed perked for battle. She passed by True in the yard with eyes fixed on the house and the front doorway and the squirming atrocity within. She didn’t look at True, didn’t try to cough out any words, she went in the house and shut the door behind her. The deed was on. She was doing what she had to do.
True didn’t see what actually happened, she heard it, or turned what she heard into a version of what happened. The scuffle of hoof as it skidded on wet dung and slopped straw across a wood plank floor. Snapping sounds, crackings, chairs maybe, or tables, definitely crockery shattering, lots of it. There were thuds big enough against walls that they must have been bodies, Frainey’s or Chippewa’s, or both, and the whole house shook with each hard slam, windows rattled and whatever panes hadn’t been bashed out now fell out. Then one goat moan. Only one, low and done. Then silence.
June riffed in the leaves and a few bird beaks knocked wood off a ways, but beyond that all was summer peaceful, out and in.
True might have entered the house after a pass but the stench exhaling from it suddenly grew stenchier. Something in the dung pungency and the blast of splattered urine and filth had an added odor, something fresher was in it now, a gush of something intestinal, bloody, vile, a stink born of life coming to an end. True, for one of the few times in her life, was scared now for her friend, truly scared. Frainey? she called into the dark stench, Frainey? But Frainey didn’t answer. True was ready to steel her lungs and stomach and enter. Frainey? she called one last time, but Frainey didn’t answer again, so True put one foot on the porch step to start her climb to who-knows-what, and before she placed both feet on that mission Frainey’s voice met her halfway. She called back out, Mama? Mama? It was a shock. The voice. The words. The words were wrong, but at least the sounds came. Right? That’s what True’s always said. At least the sounds came. There are worse things in this world than being wrongly called Mama.
The front door opened and Frainey emerged into the end of the day, bloodied but not bleeding, bruised but not blackened, smeared but not caked, spent but not broken, numb but not lifeless, moist-eyed but not crying, untamed but not wild, human but not entirely. She had the handled blade in one hand, with so much blood on it and herself that True couldn’t tell which one was bleeding. She was clutching a glob of something with her other hand and it too, hand and glob, was blood on blood confused. She passed True, didn’t look at her, didn’t say another word, didn’t even look to True like she had mistakenly called her Mama, didn’t even matter anyway, Frainey was headed back to the barn and the stall in the back and the trunk that had been her grandfather’s and she would get there like a mist gets where it’s going.
True crept after her silent as fog herself and watched Frainey lift the trunk lid and listened to the hinge pigs squeal, and saw her place the bloodied blade back inside the box. And the other thing, too. First she moved the smaller of the two pieces of gristle that looked like dung mushrooms into the nest with the bigger one—now they looked like mother and child gristle sleeping as one. Then into the empty nest she placed the bloodied glob. It was fat and fatty; tubes off it were cho
p cut and dripping. It didn’t look to True like anything she had ever seen, but then it did, and when it did, something in her seized—the same thing that seized in Frainey at the sight of the key. It was a heart. It was Chippewa’s heart. It too would shrink to gristle one day resembling something it once was. Frainey shut the lid and looped the lock and clunked it closed and hooked the key on its peg on the beam and what little came of her life from that moment on was hung there, too.
14. Mawz
Mawz had picked so many jack-in-the-pulpits for her it was years before they grew back, and they never did grow back as plentiful. In some spots they never grew back at all. Mawz was the only jack-in-the-pulpit True would ever allow herself in life, and it became a bare spot on her heart. It wilted on the front porch that night and withered at the root and never bloomed again in her for her mother or Mawz, or any other potential mate in town, or any other person at all, really, except maybe Frainey Swampscott, but that was purely from animal instinct. There had been no explanation from Cozy, the night was a tornado with no warning—it hovered high high for the moment to tail and touch down and destroy, and whistled back up into thin air as swiftly as a splinter.
True had good cause to pound her Drell fist on her Minton palm, to stomp her Buckett feet and wail a Lope cry, but she did none of that that night or ever. On her face she fastened a smile as taut as barbed wire and from that night on it was the only expression she allowed her mother to see; and for Mawz she didn’t even bother to fasten the wire to fenceposts, she’d give him the whole spooled bale. From that night on if she saw Mawz approaching 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 he never touched bark, and doing so convinced her mother that she was safely out of those woods. Cozy never told her the truth and True never asked to know, and deep in that gulch of unknowing is where mothers and daughters perish.
Bull Engersol’s passing was a hushed ordeal. It was the following summer on the very day that the annual dance at the Grangery would have fallen, had the annual dance not been canceled, had the last summer’s dance not been the last summer dance, the last dance of any dances. It was Mawz who told Luddy Upland that Bull had gone riding out beyond the ridge above Grunts Pond, that he had been startled by a snake by a bear by a snapping limb by a funnel cloud by a gunshot, he wasn’t sure, but the horse spooked and the saddle straps snapped and Bull’s hitting a rock headfirst spelled doom. Mawz said he took a guess as to where his father had ridden and followed his trail like a good little Indian and found poor Papa on the ground with his brains spilling. Mawz said Bull didn’t have his best friend Remedial Bliss there to roll that rock out of the way so his head wouldn’t hit it. Mawz said, Luddy said, that Bull had always said he’d meet a no-good end for reasons he’d rather not say, and so he did, and Luddy said Mawz said ‘nuff said.
Bull’s passing was a snake a bear a snapping limb a funnel cloud a gunshot, and following it not too many cold winds after was the lowering of Cozy’s pine box in the ground to an eternal destination unknown. True slung her barbed-wire smile around the gulch in the ground where the box was placed. Jubilee held her hand and Threesie Lope kicked the first clod of dirt in for her. Kennesaw was there, Hunko, too, Frainey, Zebeliah, Carnival had dug the hole, the Soyle sisters stood around it with Onesie and Twosie, Knotsy felt faint and collapsed into the arms of Elementary Hurlbutt, he was still vertical then, or was it Luddy Upland, one of them in any case, they kept an eye peeled for any movement behind any distant tree, the quickest swish of a horse tail that might be Mawz, but as far as they knew he never showed.
How two people could keep their distance in a small town is a big mystery with few clues to follow. True never once stood face to face with Mawz again from the day he asked her to a dance to the day he took his last step, it was thirty years or more, that’s a lot of trees to hide behind. True’s youth crested in fewer years than it takes an apple sapling to bear its first fruit, and the skin around her eyes and mouth was as tight as her resolve to make a life for herself free of pink velvet ribbons and foot warmings and foolish dreams. She threw off her girlhood like a pair of dancing slippers and took up the thick woolen socks of practical contentment, tending her own garden, seeding her own rows, and partaking of social interaction only when there was the remotest hope of delivering a good tongue lashing.
It was in those years of growing old fast and growing cold faster that True started her tradition of serving tea to Kennesaw Belvedere on his birthday, of admonishing Jubilee Aspetuck to stay a minimum of two family portraits away from her brother lest they become the picture of ruin, of giving Hunko Minton what-for for whatever reason on a daily basis, and of staying one suspicion ahead of Threesie Lope at all times.
It was this latter endeavor that consumed True and made her braid grow gray with care. Onesie Lope was a jumpy girl who flinched at the slightest belch or hiccup. And Twosie was endurable company until she opened her mouth and last week’s mutton got re-served. Threesie, however, was as close to True in temperament and steely coolness as if she had herself been on the blown-out end of a punctured romance and had grown tired of the whole game of mating. To True’s knowledge there had been no boy in town sniffing at the hem of any one of the three Lopes. They were in fact known among the boys as hear no evil, speak no evil, and pure evil, though no one dared utter this to them directly.
Threesie was the one of the trio who could go too far with a look, a prank, a complaint and not stop until she had covered more ground than a winter howler, and this charming attribute was what many considered to be the reason than not even a distant cousin wanted to sled down her hills. True admired this. She had, in a way, become like her own mother, taking comfort in Threesie’s disdain for the other half of the human equation. But True wasn’t entirely cozy playing Cozy; she knew too much about her own heart to trust that Threesie had come upon her abjuration of all things male in an un-prodded manner. Some boy at some time somehow pulled some stunt that sent Threesie reeling, and True would wonder all her life who the wounder was.
Threesie claimed she came upon her spinsterhood as one would a case of childhood mumps, a random contagion settled upon her with a fever and a rash and an incurable aversion to warm feet. Twosie insisted that Threesie had never been sick a day in her life, and as sure as the Lopes had tripe last Tuesday, as evidenced by what accompanied Twosie’s testimony, Threesie had, at the age of ten, convinced Mawz Engersol to pledge their friendship in a bond of saliva, and having done so, she was convinced that once their spit had spun together, he would never drool over any other girl in town again.
To Threesie’s dismay, Mawz was already dry in the mouth when it came to True Bliss. When True watched him horsing in the fields, his tongue felt stiff and heavy; when the girls went tumbling and he was watching her, there was an unexplainable bubbling in his innards, and afterwards he’d have to excuse himself and dive into Grunts Pond to cool down.
Threesie didn’t make Mawz’s juices flow. Not one of the Lope triplets had that ability. Ask Frainey Swampscott, who knew a thing or two about the strange attractability of animals, and she’d opine that it was because the Lopes were born in a litter, and anyone born in a litter had little chance of becoming anything other than a pet. Frainey used to say that it wasn’t a surprise that the Lopes shared more with the animal kingdom than the righteous one, after all, their mother, Whinnie, looked like a horse, and their father, Boyle, acted like its ass. It was hard to argue with such logic, at least as far as Whinnie Lope was concerned, for she had thick fetlocks like a mare and a face made for a feed bag, and although none had ever observed her in her birthday suit, it was not an unreasonable hunch that the mane trailing down her neck gave purchase to a tail. Whinnie Lope was also tall. Inhumanly tall. Taller in fact than the horse that threw Bull Engersol, seventeen hands tall at least and a few extra fingers thrown in. Frainey went so far as to surmise that Bull Engersol’s horse may have indeed been Whinnie Lope’s father,
and there was no denying she had its eyes and hooves.
Unfortunately, no one ever got around to proving this, and any hope of doing so ended with Bull Engersol. By the time Mawz found his father’s mount wandering riderless in a field of buttercups and black-eyed Susans, he wasn’t concerned with asking for or notifying the stallion’s next of kin, he was more eager to bury it on top of True’s true father, so whatever Whinnie’s equine link may have been remains as much of a guess as Bull’s spook. As to Boyle Lope, what can you say about a horse’s ass, except that you always have to clean up after it. Pure manure, Zebeliah would say to Frainey about her theory, but it was hard to refute the fact that the only buzz of excitement the Lope triplets ever attracted was from flies.
A person cannot undo the turnings of time anymore than a rock can throw itself. True Bliss took to wearing her braid as a lariat roping her head, grayer as the years advanced, tighter as each new season for jack-in-the-pulpits bloomed and spent. The Lope girls came to accept their unloveliness as a tree split by lightning finds the wherewithal to go on, and as long as the sap flowed through their veins they could endure the scars and gnarls that erupted on their limbs.