“He died, and I thought, So be it. Let it go. Nothing to prove here, nothing to investigate. I kept my promise; it’s over. But then there was the girl in the woods.” He turns and looks at me. “And you had to be the one to find her. Out of all people you come back and find a body in the woods.”
“But Bordeaux Sr. is long dead. Does it have anything to do with the Lark? Is that why you watch it?”
“I have been watching it ever since you found the girl in the woods. Bordeaux has always been off, always on edge, since we were kids. And then you started working there.”
My feet tingle and I imagine termites under the slats scooting about. I feel the pockmarked floor beneath my feet, pitted as if it is about to turn into dust. I stand in silence, the only sound the creaking of the wooden floor beneath me. I don’t want to think what I’m thinking.
“Like father, like son,” Bobby says.
Part Three
There can be no covenants
Between men and lions.
—ACHILLES
Thirty-one
DAHLIA AND QUINN
I approach the shed, but I don’t enter. I stand motionless by the door and shine the beam of my flashlight inside.
I take one more step forward. Now I smell the air. It hasn’t moved in years; it festers like a stagnant overgrown pond. The only movement I can make out is the dust I have dislodged by standing on the threshold. The beam powers through the darkness: the amount of Mason jars in crates is staggering, and there are additional boxes stacked in the corner. Aside from an unruly shaft of light that bursts through a crack in the boarded-up window and the beam of my flashlight, the shed remains in complete darkness.
Something tells me not to enter. It’s not so much that I’m afraid but I feel as if I have no right to be here just yet. I remember my mother’s face back when we arrived at the farm and she spotted the shed—Don’t go in there it seemed to say—but now her demeanor takes the shape of something entirely different. Her story has rules of its own, a decorum I must abide by. I can’t forge ahead but must wait for her to tell the rest of the story.
I shut the door and turn off the flashlight.
Later, I ask my mother about the cricket jar in the window—the same jar she kept under her sink at her house. As she lights a cigarette, she says, “It’s a killing jar.” She blows smoke from her nostrils and mouth simultaneously. “You put a chemical in it and bugs and they die.”
“But why would you keep crickets in those?” I am perplexed, not understanding what this all means.
“Quinn collected them,” she says.
I can’t help but think that she’s being jangled by invisible strings from above, some awkward puppeteer unable to stay on point.
A long pause turns into a breathless torrent. “Quinn had to prove something. She had to prove it, to herself. There was no other—”
“Prove something?” I ask. “Like what?”
She doesn’t answer at first, but then she straightens her back and scoots forward in her chair.
“She wanted to prove that she could be strong. See, some men are cruel beyond what your mind can conceive. One must be resilient.”
—
Her time in the shed made Quinn realize that she had to become tough, had to harden as to not lose her mind altogether. There’s nothing to fear, she kept telling herself as she stared straight ahead. The meadow seemed peaceful from afar—nothing but a shallow basin surrounded by the tallest of pine trees, where the grass grew long and lush in the rich soil—and she gauged the distance after she passed the fence; she came up with about a half mile or so. Behind that, there were the woods and the creek—she had seen the land survey on parchment paper; legend, they called it—and she was prepared and determined to forge ahead on her own accord.
As she crossed the meadow, the grass made her legs itch, and she breathed a sigh of relief when she recognized a walking trail at its edge. She watched her steps along the furrowed path with its dips and holes dug by chipmunks. The grass rustled gently in the breeze as Quinn made her way across toward the narrow brook, which she expected to be merely a gentle trickle this time of year. But one never knew, there might have been rain up north and it might have carried rainwater with it. When she reached the brook, she found a slow but steady stream of water. It was choked with weeds but there were spots where dozens of forget-me-nots grew at the edge.
She stood in the woods, trees towering around her, the scent of rich soil choking the air right out of her lungs. She waited for nausea or a pounding heart to overtake her body but none of that happened. The peaceful trickling of the brook was nothing like the creek in the woods of Beaumont where a hunter had stood in her path, not allowing her to pass.
Quinn took off her sandals and sat by the edge, dipping her feet into the water. She had come here to become a warrior. She would not suffer for one more day. For the first time she was going to willingly conjure up the men, their voices, their smells, their hands on her body. She knew if it became unbearable, all she had to imagine was the baby she’d held at the beach in Galveston and everything would be wiped away like condensation off a mirror.
She steadied herself, rocked to the left, and the images appeared immediately:
Bony Fingers had crudely washed blood and evil rudiments off her, then dragged her out of the water onto the spongy forest floor. “Your turn,” he had called out to the others.
The men had screamed and shouted, tossing more bottles. The pain was all-encompassing, yet with every man it multiplied; every time she thought it was over, it got worse. Then all went quiet and Quinn stepped beside herself, managed to summon an otherworldly body, one that couldn’t be touched, an apparition of herself, standing by, watching, a ghost who’d report back to her at a later point in time, if ever she so desired.
Her body, the one that was shaking and cold, was thrown onto its stomach.
The ghost she’d created wept for her. With a gaping mouth and soundless screams it warped into a shadow, stood a distance away, beholding her, regarding her as if she was a dead branch on the forest floor, disconnected from everything that was lush and green and alive.
When Ponytail and Beard held her down, when the pain and the burning became unbearable, that’s when the ghost refused to partake any longer. It stopped weeping for her. Ghost was no longer under her control, just turned away, hid behind a tree, unwilling to watch them tugging on her and pinching her breasts. But before ghost averted its eyes and turned, ghost told her to be strong. Then ghost took off and disappeared into the woods, left her, split in body and mind. As if she had left her body, stepped outside for a gallon of milk, and then returned to someone else entirely, another woman was created that day, but not by name; no, that came years later.
The men’s savagery went on and on and on. Pain licked up inside of her, past her back and down her legs, and it burned so deep she imagined being tied to a stake like a witch, flames licking at her thighs. Quinn lay on the forest floor, staring up at the long and narrow tree trunks with their parallel lines. They seemed to converge, almost leaning inward, and she rolled up into a ball. The woods around her were quiet, not as much as a squirrel dashing up a nearby tree. Quinn imagined God had hit some sort of switch, making the wind die to keep the leaves from rustling.
The pain was deep within her, almost as if she were smoldering from the inside out. In the far distance, she thought she heard the men laughing but she knew they were long gone. She remembered a story about a river separating the world of the living from the world of the dead. She didn’t care for Greek mythology, for all their gods and heroes, their origins and trials and tribulations, and their significance remained elusive to her, but she remembered the River Styx, the boundary between this world and the Underworld, and how her mind had cracked and left her on the other side of that river.
A hooting call sounded in the close distance. Deep and soft ho
ots with a stuttering rhythm: hoo-h’HOO-hoo-hoo. An owl perched in a tree right above her, watching her with soulful brown eyes. It startled and flew noiselessly through the dense canopy. Quinn wasn’t sure if she was imagining this, because mere seconds later, the brown-and-white owl snoozed on a tree limb to the right.
Quinn got up, stumbled toward the stream, blood and fluids running down her legs, converging into a pink tributary by the time it reached her feet. She wanted to crawl beneath the waters and take the pain with her, her body bloody raw and discarded. They had left her behind after they were done with her, the message clear enough: she was worth less than a deer’s carcass.
Standing by the edge of the raging stream, a torrent fed by lashing rains miles up north, Quinn aimed for a rock—her foot slipped, almost skidded off, but she willed it to remain—then for a boulder. Her eyes gauged the depth of the creek, and she continued on atop the stones and rocks and boulders, making her way downstream. When she thought she’d reached the deepest spot the creek had to offer, she stepped off the rocks and into the rushing waters.
She immersed herself into the hastening torrent, didn’t leave a single inch of her body above the surface. Like Achilles, she yearned to be invulnerable from here on out. Yet the Texas stream was no River Styx and she was no warrior.
She emerged from the waters, her clothes clinging to her body. Yet there was no armor, no protection for future battles. Like Achilles, she would remain vulnerable.
—
Quinn reminded herself that this was just a memory, something that had happened many years ago. She anchored herself in reality and clung to the sound of the creek and the rustling of the leaves above her; the scent of dark soil; the feeling of moss beneath her hands, plush and velvety.
The time had come and nothing and no one was to hold her hostage any longer. Not a pregnancy, not Nolan, not this property, not this town. Suddenly she recognized how so many things lately had lost their power over her; how she had collected more crickets in the jar—even though she still didn’t quite dare pick them up with her bare hand but merely scooped them into the jar—and how it sat on the windowsill in the kitchen as a constant reminder that she could overcome.
She wished Tain was with her but she again had disappeared and it became clearer with each passing day that Tain was simpleminded. If she had been wild in the beginning, unable to clean herself and change her soiled clothes after she ate, lately she seemed to retreat into a world of her own. She hummed strange melodies and collected branches, tied them into bushels and stacked them in the corner of her room. Poor Tain, offering to have a child for Quinn. She clearly didn’t understand what it meant to give birth and then give away that child. How had Tain even come up with such a notion?
Quinn pulled her feet from the creek and allowed them to dry before she slipped on her sandals. She made her way back across the meadow, and as she got closer to the farm, she scanned her surroundings. She still didn’t see any sign of Tain. The shed sat silent and nothing about it gave away the fact that someone could spend days on end there, tinkering with bugs and chemicals. Even ten or so feet away, she could smell the chemicals, stronger with every step she took.
The shed door was propped open with a large rock and she approached the door slowly as not to startle Nolan. The first thing she saw when she stepped into the shed was an open box atop the table, a wad of tissue paper gently moving in the breeze. The box was from a department store in town.
Quinn heard a noise from behind the shed, the way wooden slabs rub together or as if a stack of firewood was about to tumble, right before the chopped logs collapse. There was also a chiming sound as if fork tines reverberated rhythmically. Maybe a wind chime somewhere, Quinn thought, but the next farm was a mile or so away and she couldn’t imagine any sound traveling all the way to Creel Hollow Farm.
Quinn followed the sound and stepped behind the shed.
The first thing she’d later remember was the dress. Blue, sky blue, almost turquois. The shade was utterly out of place with its surroundings. The fabric was silky and glossy, almost like a nightgown. Quinn’s next thought was how the bright blue looked beautiful against Tain’s olive skin. Then her brain kicked in, able to interpret the scene in front of her; Tain on top of the stack of firewood, a black tarp underneath her. Nolan, his pants undone, gathering around his feet. Tain’s spiderlike legs around his waist. Nolan’s belt buckle rhythmically clinging against the stacked wood, his hand over Tain’s mouth. Quinn knew what was in front of her yet the first thing she felt compelled to do was shout, Don’t ruin your pretty dress.
Leaves scudded over the ground, hurriedly taking flight up into the air as if the scene created some sort of energy. Tree branches overhead swayed like ghostly arms, daring Quinn to step closer. Quinn’s body shook and her brain caught up and she let out a scream.
Nolan turned, his face red, his eyes wide, pulling up his pants, confused, unable to buckle his belt, hands unable to follow his commands. He took off, holding on to his belt. He stumbled once but caught himself.
For a split second Tain lay exposed, her legs spread ballerina-like, and she slid off the tarp and stood bare just before she pulled down the dress. Quinn caught a glimpse of her wiry body, her thin limbs, her sharp collarbone, her tiny breasts, but there was something else. And it rendered everything else nonexistent.
Quinn and Tain stood and stared at each other. Tain jerked forward suddenly, throwing her spindly arms around Quinn’s neck, screaming and crying and carrying on. Quinn smelled the sin on her, the wickedness of her body, her pores fecund with the scent of transgression. Yet there was something about Tain, this gangly girl and her desperation, her inability to get out a coherent sentence when she got worked up. Those desperate little cries escaping her mouth and arms that didn’t want to let go of Quinn, despite how desperately she attempted to loosen her grip. Tain held on, maintained the embrace, and every time Quinn managed to undo one arm, the other one held on even tighter, and eventually she just gave up and stood there with Tain wrapped around her, allowing her to sob and spasm and cling to her.
Around them, the wind carried the fragrance of the woodland, the essence of betrayal, and something that would change everything.
Tain’s stomach. There was a roundness to it, a gentle outward slope that hadn’t been there before. Tain was with child.
Thirty-two
AELLA
Q. was different. Aella could tell, by the feverish look in her eyes, the way she stared at the tree line leading into the forest, the way she never held her gaze for any longer than necessary. She knew Q. pretended to want a reading because the cards told otherwise. Eventually she caved.
—
“I want a child,” Q. said, matter-of-factly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
Aella thought she had heard it all, had helped many women conceive, but never had she met a woman asking for a life as if such things just materialized, like morning dew on grass. Q. couldn’t conceive, but she wanted a child, and the only way to get one was to take it from another woman. Aella cautioned her against it, but she wouldn’t listen. And then she mentioned her husband was a Creel.
Aella knew about the Creels: all the men were off somehow, lived in the clouds, and the women they picked weren’t any better. The Creels used to own hundreds of acres, half of the county to be exact, but year after year—taking up painting and gambling, and one even growing orchids—they sold off parcels, and eventually Q.’s husband, the last Creel, ended up with barely fifty acres, a mere watering hole compared to what the family used to own.
Aella was all but indifferent after she made Q. aware of what was at stake.
“I will tell you what I need. No shortcuts, no excuses. I won’t know if you lie, but they will,” Aella told her. Just who they were she never clarified but Q. knew because she was well acquainted with them since she’d come undone.
To Aella, Q. l
ooked like a woman who had seen beyond, had seen spirits, and maybe even conjured them to join her. It was in her eyes, her movements, her demeanor; but she had a man who took care of her, a house, a property, and Aella couldn’t help thinking what she’d become if she was left to her own devices. How far she’d go to get what she wanted.
They had a talk. Scorned lovers and unfaithful husbands don’t require that kind of talk, but Q. wanted a baby and so Aella made it clear.
“Asking for a life demands a price be paid. A child is born. It sounds so easy—the head emerging, pushing its way outward to join the world—but there are powers involved and those powers remain on this earth. A void is left behind, one void for the woman who gives the baby—and I’m using give here loosely—and another void, a void much more costly if ignored: that space the baby occupied before, in the other world, before it was born. That space comes forth with the baby, and it enters life, enters this world. The void on the other side remains, and it demands to be filled.”
Q. just nodded.
“Imagine,” Aella told Q., “imagine you build a house. Let’s say you use local stones, let’s say sandstones. There’s a literal hole in the ground where you excavated the stones. And you also took stones from the unseen world so they can be seen in this world. We are not talking about a house here. You are not asking for a house—you demand a life. A life.”
Q. stared at her, and she wasn’t sure if she had understood her.
“The holes you leave behind by taking something, they must be filled. Do you understand?”
Q. just nodded again.
“Gratitude demands you fill those holes. You must repay for what you’ve gained.”
The Good Daughter Page 28