by Alyson Hagy
The procession, although it silenced the morning songbirds with its trompings and bleatings, ended quickly. The children and their animals soon dispersed, separating amid bouts of laughter. The Uninvited preferred to keep their celebrations brief. Her sister, had she been alive, would never have approved of such homage, not even something as genuine as a parade staged by children. After she began caring for the sick and the dying, the children stricken by wave after wave of fevers no one could cure, her sister had become pure humility. She deflected all attempts at honor and praise. She believed in only one thing: compassion. On a morning like this, had she lived to see it, she would have chided the children for even singing out her name.
She didn’t see Hendricks for three full days. When he returned, it was with a bloody sling knotted across his back. He dropped the sling at her feet. It landed with a squelching sound.
“I done it,” he said. It was just past dawn. The doves that nested above the springhouse had begun their mournful duet. She had been on the top floor of the house, with the last of the telescopes, continuing her sister’s charts as well as she could. She noticed that only the ragged-ear rat catcher trailed Mr. Hendricks. It did so with a sly cast to its eyes.
“It weren’t my best hunt,” Hendricks continued, staring at her. “Not by a long shot. I prefer bear, which I know how to track. But you didn’t ask for bear. What I got here is the creature’s head and heart. The carcass is too big to bring in all at once.”
She examined him as closely as she dared. The tendons in his neck stood out like stems. His fingers made crawling motions at the ends of his blackened hands. “You’re well?”
“Except for my pride. It weren’t the clean kill I hoped for. I had to scarper across them bluffs a lot longer than I wanted. And it gutted one of your dogs, the dirt-colored one, when it was cornered, so I hope you don’t have no feelings about that. I need to drag out the rest before it tempts your neighbors.”
“You saw them?” she asked. “You saw Altices?”
“I seen more sign of them than I wanted. They been watching me close. But I got your cat.”
Her cat. A creature she had never even seen. She had only heard about it, how it had stolen goats from the Uninvited, how it had stalked Billy Kingery’s bargain men while the bargain men were stalking deer. “I’ll help you,” she said.
“No, ma’am, you will not. That ain’t in the contract.” He turned on her with the flint spark of irritation in his eyes. She was glad to see it. Fractiousness was good. Quarreling was good. He couldn’t be allowed to like her. “I’ll ask if you got a skinning blade. It would make doing what I got to do easier.”
“Did you use a pit?”
“I ain’t inclined to discuss my methods,” Hendricks said. “I’m gonna work on the pelt, if that’s all right. You said you’d commence the letter writing once I brung in the creature’s head. You promised.”
“I did.”
“Then a good morning to you.”
She watched him descend the porch steps toward where he’d made a pilgrim’s camp under a poplar tree. He was tired beyond tired. She could see it in the way he walked. Limping. Canted to the left. Hunting mountain cats was not a task for a single man. The animals were swift and intelligent and wary. Their hides were precious. She had always wanted a cat hide for a rug or a coat leather. Now she had one. Mr. Hendricks, she had to admit, had proved himself more than equal to his desire for a letter. At least for now.
She turned away from her visitor and took in the dregs of the autumn sky. She would miss the fawn bitch. It had been a brave, if undisciplined, companion. Gutted on the hunt—that was a worthy epitaph, one she had to admire. She hoped the bitch hadn’t felt more pain than it deserved.
She drank the last of the cow’s milk while she stood in the cool stone hutch of the springhouse. The milk had been brought to her two days before by the peddler Mr. Lyle Laprade, he of the green eyes and rattling handcart and uncertain schedule. She had traded undyed yarn and a small packet of sleeping leaves for the milk, and she had allowed herself only a few sips at a time, for she didn’t know when or if she would see Lyle Laprade again. She let the final drops melt like goose grease across her tongue.
Then she walked to the road bridge. The camp of the Uninvited lay quilted across the river bottom. They had come earlier this year, and grown larger. She thought she had heard raised voices coming from the tattered lean-tos the night before, a bad sign. The Uninvited prided themselves on their cohesion. She placed her right hand on the intricate column of her sister’s cairn, which was now almost as tall as she was. Its stones were jeweled with the prying wink of mica and perfumed in the yeasty scent of the late-season flowers left behind by the faithful. The cairn’s design had, in recent years, become as formidable as the beliefs it anchored. She gripped the stones with her fingers and tried to pray for a better self. She asked her sister, as she often did, for the forgiveness that could never come.
It was a request she made each time she began a letter for a stranger. She wanted her sister to know she was trying, in her own reduced way, to help another person—despite how things had ended between them. Her sister would have welcomed someone like Mr. Hendricks to the brick house with open arms. Her sister had been the better person in all ways imaginable. She, on the other hand, was riven with hesitations. The letter she had promised to write for Mr. Hendricks was already weighing upon her. She hadn’t truly believed he would kill a mountain cat. She’d been certain he wouldn’t earn the right to her services. Now she was honor-bound to complete her end of the bargain, and the prospect disturbed her greatly. Something was not quite right about Mr. Hendricks. Despite his common, placid face, he was too competent, too able to glide his way into her world without a misstep. She didn’t believe he was who he said he was. Yet so long as he kept his word, she had to keep hers.
She repeated the vow aloud, hoping to stiffen her resolve: “I will aid any man who is not false toward me.” As she spoke, the crows that roosted among the sour branches of the walnut trees took flight against the sun, their black wings flapping like rags.
By the time Hendricks returned with the pelt of the mountain cat, she had stirred and thickened her inks. Hendricks had crafted a crude sled from wood and rope, and he had strapped his shoulders into a clever contraption of harness. There were three dogs with him now—the dubious rat catcher, the brindle sight hound that had long played second fiddle to the dead fawn bitch, and a new one, a lugging beagle mix of the kind Billy Kingery claimed to serve in his Sunday stews.
“I peeled it where it fell,” Hendricks said to her, sweating into his words. “I don’t know how y’all do around here, how you stake your claims. I seen two boys in the woods, watching me. You’d have to reckon they’s thieves.”
She nodded. “Altices,” she said. “Or Boitnotts. One or the other. They tend to be brave in the short run.”
“I don’t got ammunition to waste on boys.”
“You won’t need weapons,” she said. “They’ll come with a proposition. Mr. Billy Kingery has taught them that much.”
Hendricks leaned into the wet straps of his harness as if he counted on them to hold him upright. His hat had been pushed clear of his brow. “I was lucky. The hide come free of a piece. I’ll thank you for the knife.”
“I’m about to start your letter,” she said, turning her gaze to the vagabond beagle, pinning it with her eyes. She had decided she wouldn’t allow Mr. Hendricks to witness any sign of her doubt or uneasiness. “I just need to select the paper. You’re certain about the start of it?”
He nodded his narrow head, his eyes wrinkled and closed. “I am.”
“Can you tell it to me again, the first part?
He repeated his invocation, slowly, sonorously—with all the bitter syllables mortised into place. What a great mansion it is, she thought. What a stout and foolish mansion is the human heart.
“It’d please me to know you’re writing it while I’m clearing my sign from them wood
s,” he said.
“Agreed.”
“You’ll let me know when I can see it?”
“I will.”
“Then I’m gonna spread this pelt in your springhouse to keep it cool, and I’m gonna go back up them steep hills. Am I to salvage the entrails? I done what I could to bucket the blood.”
“Leave whatever you like for the neighbors,” she said. “Or keep it for yourself. You’ve earned it.”
He looked at her with his scraped gray stare. “I want to thank you for that offer, but I’m coming to believe you don’t put much stock in gratitude. You ain’t what I’d call a grateful person.”
She held a hand toward the bedraggled rat catcher. The dog sidled forward and wiped its muzzle against her fingers. “I’m careful, Mr. Hendricks,” she said. “Perhaps even more careful than you are. You came to me for relief. Maybe I seek the same thing. But relief is the pearl without price in this place. Just wishing for it becomes a curse all its own.”
The inks were ready. The pens were sharp. She had selected a mottled paper, two large sheets. The paper was imported, acquired some years before by methods she preferred not to recall. It remained spicy with the resins of foreign trees, redolent of lands she would never be able to visit. Her instruments were gathered in the parlor where the plastered walls bristled with the hair of long-dead plow horses. It seemed appropriate to compose Hendricks’s letter in a room that was commiserating and congregational and old.
But she couldn’t help herself. She returned to the second floor of the house, up the warped and squealing stairs, and looked for Hendricks through the beseeching lenses of the telescope. There. Heaving himself clear of the scratching cedars, leaning into the knotted straps of his imperfect harness. He was clearly a strong man—willful and efficient. The dogs were like planets to his sun. And beyond them, just close enough to suggest the kind of mockery she expected, were two other figures. Boys.
She watched until they crossed the road that was now so rarely traveled, even by vagrants. Her mother’s mother had stood by that road and watched lines of wagons roll west to Kentucky and Tennessee, when there seemed to be no limit to the riches the world might provide even to those who lived far from the sea. Land—every man, woman, and child on those wagons believed their heart’s delight could be found on a black-treed square of land. Now, no one trusted dreams of good fortune. That naïveté had ended. And a harder law prevailed: take or be taken. When she met Hendricks and the boys near the loose plaits of her vegetable garden, the boys shaped their faces into marketplace masks meant to hide their nervousness and hunger. They carried walking sticks and small bundles on their backs. She knew the tallest. He was an Altice by birth. She had heard him called Bofrane. She didn’t recognize the smaller one.
“I left portions behind,” Hendricks said, gasping into the heat created by his own body. “What we talked about. But I have drawed in some company.”
“It’s all right,” she said, looking at the forked muscle and bone that was trussed onto Hendricks’s makeshift sled. “I’ll talk to them. That’s a good-sized cat you have there. It’s bigger than I imagined it would be. Longer-legged. But it’s not the murderous female they tell stories about, is it? The one that births kittens the size of stoats? What you’ve got there seems to be a male.”
“I don’t want to hear about no female,” Hendricks said. “I done what was asked without committing foul trespass. I followed all your rules. You said to me you would write and deliver my letter if I brought you the skin of a mountain cat.”
She turned away from him, reminding herself of her manners. “We should hang the meat. The camp people will want to smoke it.”
“I don’t need your help on that,” he said. “You got … there’s other things you promised to do.”
“I’ve started the letter, Mr. Hendricks. It won’t fade away.”
“That ain’t how it feels to me, if you’ll beg my pardon. All things pass quick in this world. They go away quick. I seen everything I value go to fade. This is a last chance for me. You might need to hear me say that.”
She nodded, feeling the smooth weight of her staff in her hands. “I know why you’re whipping at me, Mr. Hendricks. You’ve met your end of the bargain, and haste is something you value. But I need to deal with our hill merchants first.” She looked witch-eyed at the boys until the taller one raised his dirty hand to her, palm open and clear.
“We come for … trade,” the boy said. His hair was curly and black, though not as black as the bodies of the flies that had begun to swarm the nearby carcass. His eyes were a motley blue.
“Tell me your names,” she said.
“Mr. Bofrane Altice,” the tall one said. “With me is Tul. He’s a Boitnott on his daddy’s side and my cousin.”
“You’re not making a claim on Mr. Hendricks’s kill, are you?”
“No, ma’am. My daddy, Mr. Alton Altice, who’s laid up sick in bed, wanted me to stand for that. He ain’t never had a mountain cat. He says we’re owed. But my uncle sees it different. Uncle Willem sent us down here to thank you for the blood and whatnot your man left for us near the line.”
“That’s not all your uncle wants, though, is it?”
The young Altice, who had the toadstool complexion of the undernourished, shook his shaggy head. “He remanded us to ask for a cat claw or two, if you was willing. He …. he …”
“He’s heard I don’t truck in that kind of charm,” she said, completing his request for him.
Both boys nodded. The smaller, silent one, Tul, couldn’t keep the gleam of salivation off his scabbed lips.
“The decision is Mr. Hendricks’s,” she said. “He’s a stranger here. A guest. And he killed the cat. The ruling will be his.”
Hendricks looked at her. He’d pulled the sled while wearing one of his smoke-colored shirts. The harness had stained its X shape across the shirt’s rough fabric. “Is that how it is here?” Hendricks asked. “At Collins-Pruitt, we—”
“At most places, the boss man measures out punishment and reward,” she said. “But not here. Here, the decision belongs to him who’s earned it most.”
The boys dropped their eyes as the adults struck bargain. Billy Kingery had taught them well.
“Then I say these young ones can have the claws from one forepaw to take to their uncle or whoever. I ask only for some help scraping and salting the hide.”
“Yes, sir,” black-headed Bofrane said, clearly relieved. “And Tul will make you a song, too. He brung his instrument. He don’t talk much, but he can play.”
Hendricks smiled through the sweat on his flushed face, the first smile she had seen. “That’s a fair offer in any part of the land,” he said. “No thieving?”
“No thieving toward your person, sir,” Bofrane said.
“And none toward this woman?”
The boy paused. Both he and his cousin drew themselves up into a posture. They held their walking sticks like muskets in their hands. “No thieving toward this house, sir. It ain’t to be done. Everybody on the river knows that.”
She watched him make his ablutions from her observation post on the second floor of the house. As he stripped to the waist, he uncovered ribs that circled as tight as new wagon springs. Stripped naked, he glowed with the pallor of a man who habitually shielded himself from the sun. The telescope magnified few surprises. His shoulders and thighs were signatured with tattoos. Prison time, indeed. But he hadn’t been mutilated. Both of his balls nested with apple ripeness against the muscles of his thighs.
He would dry himself and dress in fresh clothes. He would stand at the foot of her garden and wait for her to call to him. And he would give his clean body to her if she asked because that was the way of it, the snare she could trigger, by right, at any time. It was an unwritten clause in their agreement. She recalled the smell of the animal he had killed for her: spoiled currant berries crushed with bone.
Mr. Gilpin, the dairy man, had never waited for her to call. He arrived with h
is cheeses and took her with the kind of rude, panting wrestle she came to enjoy. In the doorway of the house. On the hard slab of the kitchen hearth. Against the soil of her summer garden, both of them on their dirtied knees, moaning like curs. It had been midyear, the days dusty with pollen. Sultry. She could feel Mr. Gilpin’s hands even now, callused, stained from hay stems, stinking of the silage he stored for the few spotted cows he retained. “I need at your woman’s teats,” he’d say, grinning around his well-kept teeth, and she’d lift the damp husk of her shirt to oblige. He could be gentle, lifting her breasts like hen’s eggs, or he could be rough, twisting at her nipples, taunting her with the urgency of their mutual need. This was after the fraught, confused death of her sister. When it felt merciful to lie beneath a mere farmer, especially one who took such happy pride in his manhood. “I aim for us to feel good together,” he’d say. “That’s all it ever is.” He came to the house as often as he could manage, never claiming to be a bachelor or a widower or uttering any type of lie he didn’t believe. He wasn’t stymied by the mysterious reputation of her sister or the strange faith that clung to her memory. “If other folks don’t think the two of us are worth saving, then we’re doing what we’re made to do,” he’d say, plunging thick inside her, causing her eyelids to feel as though they were rooted in flame.
He brought her molded cheeses and small pots of cream. She searched for his thumbprints in the cheese and licked at them with a kitten’s greedy tongue.