The Weight of Blood

by Laura McHugh

  Dad felled three oaks and set to work slicing off the limbs and cutting the branches into manageable pieces. I dragged all the useless parts to the brush pile while he sectioned up the tree. When I was done with the brush, I would start loading wood into the truck to haul it home, following this pattern over and over until we were too worn out to continue.

  The humidity was in full bloom, my entire body sticky with sweat. I sat down on a log and took off my thick leather gloves, hating the musty smell they left on my hands. I wiped sawdust off my face and drank melt water from the jug. The buzz of the chain saw lulled me into a drowsy state, and I wanted to curl up in the cab of the truck and fall asleep, forgetting everything that was going on. The chain saw stopped abruptly, and the sudden silence was unsettling. Dad set the saw down on the tailgate and got out his sharpening kit. “I could use a hand,” he said. When he worked on the chain saw at home, he clamped the bar to his workbench with a vise, but out in the woods, he needed me to hold it steady. He drew a file through the chain’s teeth until the edges shone sharp. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something,” he said. “I thought about it last year when you … you know, with the pastor’s boy. But when I saw that boyfriend of yours the other day—”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Well, Daniel, whatever he is, he cares about you, and he’s older, and … You know I’ve taught you to keep your pants on, and I haven’t changed my mind about that. I hope you realize he’s over eighteen and you’re not, and if I found out anything happened, I could have him prosecuted.”

  “Dad! We’re not even— He’s … “I didn’t know how to explain my relationship with Daniel, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway.

  He kept filing. The grating of metal on metal vibrated through my bones. “What I’m saying is I tried to raise you right. But I don’t know how good a job I did. People make mistakes. I don’t want you fooling around with that boy, but more than that, I don’t want you getting pregnant and ruining your life. You need to go to college, get yourself some fancy degree, and make a decent living. I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

  I thought carefully about what I wanted to say to him. “Did it ruin Mom’s life when she had me?”

  Heat reddened his ears, stained his throat. “She was coming from a completely different place. She wanted you more than anything.”

  I’d heard that before. “Didn’t she want to go to school?”

  Dad slid the file back into its plastic sheath. “If her life had gone differently, if it hadn’t got thrown off the tracks, she’d have been in school somewhere. She never would’ve met me or had you. But things happened. And she told me she wouldn’t have changed any of it; she wouldn’t have given you up for anything. All the good parts missing from her life, she wanted those for you. She said there was plenty of time for her to go back to school when you were older.”

  Except there hadn’t been time. “So she had plans. She wanted to raise me and go back to school … What happened? What changed all that?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said. “She was depressed about something, but she wouldn’t talk about it. And then she was gone.” He gassed up the saw and pulled his gloves on. “Back to work,” he said.

  “Speaking of work,” I said, “I’m scheduled to go in tomorrow. Will I still be under house arrest?”

  “I seem to remember, when you took that job, you promised to follow some basic rules. Which you broke. From here on out, you work for me.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. I was late one time! You can’t take away everything just for breaking curfew.”

  He yanked the cord, and the saw grumbled fitfully. Dad’s expression dared me to keep arguing, and when I didn’t, he turned his back and resumed deconstructing the tree.

  After three days of hauling wood and splitting last year’s logs, I was worn out and getting cabin fever. I hadn’t been able to talk to Bess, and I hadn’t heard anything from Ray. I’d practically given up hope of Daniel calling. I didn’t know if Dad had given him the sex talk, too, but whatever he’d said surely hadn’t helped. I was still angry about my overblown punishment, though secretly, I was relieved not to have to go to work. Just thinking about Crete made my stomach hurt.

  It was Dad’s last night before heading back to work in Springfield, and he was drinking, like he usually did after talking about Mom. It wasn’t the best time to ask him a question, but I couldn’t wait any longer for the answer.

  “Hey,” I said, poking my head into the living room, where he was listening to an old bluegrass album. “I need to ask you something.” He looked up, his expression blank. “You know how I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Cheri. Would you tell me something if you knew? I can keep quiet just like you. You know I can. It’s important to me to know the truth. You might not realize how important.”

  He got up and crossed the room to the stereo, where he flipped clumsily through a stack of records. “Sure, I know something. She was killed and chopped to bits. End of story.”

  “Dad.” I waited until he turned to look at me. “Somebody thinks you had something to do with it. I don’t believe it … I know you didn’t kill anybody … but she was my friend, and I—”

  He dropped the record he was holding and moved toward me, unsteady on his feet. I had pricked a nerve. “Somebody? I can guess who that might be. What else did somebody tell you about me? Huh?”

  I took a step back. He’d scared me a few times when he was drinking, and I’d seen him plenty angry, but rarely had he ever directed such anger at me.

  “He tell you I killed somebody?” His whiskey breath soured the air.

  “I didn’t believe him,” I said quietly.

  “You’re wrong,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I killed a man once.” He clamped his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back against the doorframe. “It was an accident that haunts me every day of my life. Somebody convinced me to keep it quiet, took care of things for me. So I owed him a favor. When he needed my help, I came running.” I squirmed, but he didn’t seem to realize how tight he was gripping me. “He’s my brother, and he needed my help, so I helped him. I’m the gravedigger in the family, and it was just another job. Except when I got there and saw … it was her.”

  “Cheri? Crete killed her?” I felt a rush of anticipation. I was so close to the answer.

  Dad shook his head. “He didn’t kill her, and he didn’t tell me who did. He just called me to clean up the mess. He said the whole thing started out as an accident, but it happened on his property, and he didn’t want to get messed up in it. She was already dead, no point calling the law.”

  He let go, and my shoulders ached where he’d clutched me. “But you didn’t bury her.”

  “No. I tried, but I couldn’t. She didn’t deserve to disappear like that.”

  “You … you put her in the tree?”

  “Right across from Dane’s,” he said. “Crete is family, and I’d never turn him in, but I wanted him to know it wasn’t okay. I won’t go around burying murdered little girls, no matter what he has on me.”

  “How do you know he didn’t kill her?”

  “He’s never been afraid to tell me the truth. He don’t hide who he is, not from me.”

  That didn’t mean Crete wouldn’t mislead him. He had known the truth about Cheri all along, yet he’d tried to make me think Dad was the guilty one. He’d twisted the truth about my mother, about how she came to be here. He wouldn’t have shown Dad the papers I’d seen in her folder. Wouldn’t have admitted that he’d handpicked Lila as his own. And I didn’t believe that Crete would tell my dad if he’d had something to do with her disappearance.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “We’re gonna keep quiet. There’s no bringing Cheri back. Crete got my message loud and clear, I’m not doing him any more favors. School’s about
to start. Your job is to stay out of trouble and graduate, and you don’t need to worry about anything else. You can let Crete think you believe him … hell, he didn’t really even lie to you. No doubt I’d get thrown in jail right along with him if any of this came out.”

  “Do you think he did something to Mom?”

  “In the sixteen years she’s been gone, I’ve thought through every imaginable possibility. So I thought about it, yeah. I even asked him once, straight up, did he have anything to do with her leaving. I asked everybody the same thing. I don’t believe he did. I know him better than anybody. His idea of right and wrong might not be the same as yours or mine, but he stands by his family. I took a risk when I laid Cheri out like that. He was pissed. He could’ve taken away everything we have in a heartbeat, but he didn’t. He won’t. He was disappointed when I told him you wouldn’t be working for him anymore, but he didn’t argue.” Dad sank into his recliner. “Everything’s gonna be fine now. You can focus on school, and you’ll be safe and sound at Birdie’s while I’m gone.”

  “I thought I was safe and sound here,” I said. He unscrewed the lid on the Southern Comfort and took a swig straight from the bottle. “How long’s this punishment going to last?”

  He looked tired, dazed. The lamplight sallowed his skin, aged him with unflattering shadows. “Everything’s gonna be fine,” he repeated. Fine got swallowed up in the bottle as he took another drink.

  He was worried. My missed curfew might have scared him, but it wasn’t the only reason I was headed to Birdie’s. He wanted to protect me, to lock me back in a box I no longer fit inside, though he knew as well as anyone that it wasn’t possible to move in reverse; no matter how hard we fought against it, time flowed in only one direction.

  Chapter 34

  Crete

  Crete had been on his way to St. Louis when Sorrel called. Sorrel called only when he needed to make an appointment, and since he was supposed to be at an appointment at that very moment, Crete knew the call was no good.

  Sorrel was a kinky bastard. Crete had seen that right away when he showed up with props. Most guys did their business and got out. One, he knew, didn’t even touch the girl; he just liked to look at her while he jerked off. But Sorrel would spend hours in the trailer, doing things Crete didn’t care to hear about.

  Sorrel was blubbering on the phone. His story came in gurgling spurts, taking longer than Crete had patience for. From what he could make out, Sorrel had hooked the girl up to some electrical device and given her a few little shocks, and he may have also held her head underwater—none of this intended to truly hurt her, all this shit just turned him on, and he needed it to get hard enough to fuck her. Well, the girl started jerking around and collapsed like she was in cardiac arrest, and Sorrel didn’t think she was breathing. He panicked and grabbed the biggest kitchen knife he could find, thinking he’d cut her up and carry her out in a suitcase and everything would be fine. He started with her leg, hacking away at the hip joint, but somewhere short of bone, the girl came to, puked, and started dragging herself across the room. She was bleeding real bad by this point, and before Sorrel could figure out what to do, she ran out of blood and breath and collapsed in a swamp of her own fluids. He went back to work cutting off pieces, but the knife was poorly suited to the job, and the realization of what he was doing caught up to him.

  Fear made his voice shrill. He was scared not just of what he’d done but of what Crete might do to him. You owe me, Crete told him. He hung up and called Carl.

  He gave his brother an abbreviated, partly true rundown of the situation: A whore had been operating out of a trailer on his property, and the whore was now dead. Possibly very messily dead. The whole thing was an accident, he said. Like with you and Sump. Which rankled Carl, who didn’t agree that killing a hooker was anything like what had happened between him and Joe Bill Sump. Carl was getting worked up on the phone, and Crete knew he was pushing his brother dangerously close to the line where he could no longer keep his mouth shut and look the other way. It would be worse when Carl got to the trailer. But Crete trusted him, and there was nothing to be done for the girl at that point, no reason to tangle with the law. I’d clean it up myself if I was there, he said. But it can’t wait. If you take care of it, we’ll call things even on Joe Bill. I’ll throw out that wallet and license plate of his and be done with it.

  Crete kept Sump’s belongings locked up in a shed along with some other things he needed to hold on to but didn’t want people to see. Though he’d never planned to use his collateral against Carl, he liked having it there all the same. In truth, Crete would have disposed of a dozen bodies for his brother and not expected anything in return. Not that Carl was likely to need such a favor.

  It was unfortunate that Crete couldn’t call on Emory to clean up the mess, since he was the one to blame for it. Emory had gotten a bit too involved with methamphetamine and was starting to get sloppy. He’d had a little blond boy with him a few times, and Crete hadn’t asked whether it was Emory’s kid or if something entirely different was going on. He didn’t want to know. Crete had been furious when Emory showed up with Cheri, a girl who lived down the road from Lucy and hung out with her when they were kids. Taking a local girl was risky in the first place, but keeping her nearby was even worse. Emory promised she’d be on Crete’s property only temporarily, that he would get her set up at his own place as soon as he was able, but it hadn’t happened soon enough.

  Crete wasn’t happy with how things had played out, but his cut of the girl’s profits was a small consolation, and now he no longer had to worry about keeping Cheri hidden. There were plenty of other things to hide, so many secrets burrowing down into the dark like roots knotted deep in the earth.

  Chapter 35

  Lila

  Sometimes Crete didn’t even stop the truck. He just drove by slowly, eyeing the house. Making me nervous. Other times he brought things for Lucy, little toys and gifts. If Carl was home, I had to let Crete in. I made excuses to feed Lucy, put her down for a nap. Watching him hold her cramped my stomach. I told myself the novelty would wear off. That he had no real interest in my baby. That he was doing this to scare me, and if I didn’t act scared, he’d stop.

  No matter how I acted or what I said, he kept coming around. And he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Lucy. He was gentle with her, soft-spoken, and she smiled at him the same sweet way she smiled at me. That was the most painful part. She wasn’t old enough for me to explain the danger he represented. I was failing her. I stood there, helpless, as he impressed himself in her life.

  I’d been practicing my shooting, as Ray had suggested, and had grown comfortable with Carl’s guns. I felt prepared to protect myself and my baby if anything should happen, but Crete had yet to break into the house or threaten me in a way that justified self-defense. In fact, he hadn’t made any threats since the day he came to warn me that I couldn’t keep him away from Lucy. The worst thing he’d done was get close to her. As much as I wanted to be rid of him, I couldn’t just shoot him as he walked into the house for a visit.

  Freezing rain struck right before Lucy’s first birthday, and the power was out for two days. The world glittered, every surface smoothed and rounded, encased in a half inch of ice. I’d never seen anything like it. Carl and I dressed Lucy in her snowsuit and slid around the glassy yard with her, her eyes wide with wonder. At the moment she turned one year old, the three of us were snuggled on the couch, basking in the heat of the stove by candlelight. Carl and I sang “Happy Birthday” to Lucy as she dozed in my lap.

  When Lucy was born, I thought maybe I’d finally found the direction I’d been missing. Here was something I was good at, something I could devote my life to: being her mother. The first year of her life had been the best year I could remember. The love I felt for her dwarfed everything else, even Crete. Life was not perfect, but it was better than I’d dared to hope. I had friends, a devoted husband, and a he
althy child. I wavered between utter joy and the fear that it could all be taken away.

  The temperature crept above freezing the day of Lucy’s party, and sheaths of ice fell from the trees, the hills echoing with the sound of breaking glass. Birdie came, and Gabby and Bess, and Ray brought his wife. Crete was there, too, with a rocking horse for Lucy that wasn’t safe for a child her age. Everyone was eating cake when I remembered the ice cream and went to fetch it from the freezer. Crete followed under the pretense of helping and cornered me on the back porch.

  “There’s a way,” he said, “to see who her father is. A test you take. I wanna know.”

  “What does it matter?” I sputtered. “She’s mine. She’s Carl’s. You get to see her, what more do you want?”

  “It matters,” he growled. “I got rights.”

  “You don’t want Carl to know what you did to me. Why would you want to do something like this?”

  He chuckled. “You haven’t had any trouble keeping that secret. I think you don’t want Carl to know. Maybe he’ll think you cheated on him. Or be mad at you for lying. Maybe he’ll be mad enough to kick you out, send you back where you came from, and keep Lucy here with us. I already know he’ll forgive me—are you sure he’ll forgive you?”

  “What if I won’t do the test?” I hissed.

  “Oh, I don’t really need you,” he said. “I just need Lucy.”

  My skeleton tingled inside my skin. If he was her father, I never wanted her to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. “Please,” I said. “Don’t do this. Don’t.”

  “You can’t stop me,” he said.

  The ice cream was numbing my fingers. I wanted to get back to Lucy. “I can’t even talk about this right now. This is her birthday party.”