by Alyson Hagy
Mr. Joshua Gilpin. There came a time when his visits simply stopped. Even Billy Kingery didn’t seem to know the end to that story. Billy told her the dairy’s spotted cows, as ropey and old as they were, had been seized by people claiming to be from the government. “Josh couldn’t provide no more calves for his contract. Some say he started humping them cows hisself in desperation. His last bull died or lost its seed or what have you. So he milked them girls until his fingers bled, but the milk wouldn’t come no more. His only chance was to give it to them good with his own bull pole, but he still didn’t get no miracle calves. Then the government moved in. Too bad for Josh Gilpin. All he knowed how to do was run a dairy with them spotted cows.”
No, she thought, feeling not a single bloom of shame as she listened to Billy Kingery. That was a tattler’s tale. There was plenty more Mr. Joshua Gilpin knew how to do.
Hendricks would come to her bed if she asked. He dared not refuse. But it wasn’t what she wanted. Not now. Her examination of his body had brought the black serpents into her head. She lowered the telescope. The fingers of one hand were numb. They’d been tingling with familiar weakness for hours. No, now was not the time to feast on Mr. Hendricks. She would lay out fine sentences for him, instead. The ranks of syllables he had requested. The tidy brigades of words. She would write his letter for him while her palms still stank of brass.
“Is it like a sweet dream when you’re writing things down?” her sister asked. “Do you feel like you’re flying across the sky?”
She served his tea in a china cup, one that still had its companion saucer. They were the last pieces of her mother’s cherished set. When the cup and saucer finally broke, she knew she would not feel sorrow. She predicted laughter instead—the laughter of the spurned.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” she said to Hendricks. “It falls on me sometimes, the making of sentences. And it’s best if I stay close to the papers until the ink has dried.”
“It’s coming to you then,” Hendricks said, trying not to gawk at the arrangements she had made inside her house. They were in the cluttered space she treated as her kitchen. There were bundles of roots and stalks hanging from the ceiling, and frames stretched with small animal skins angled against the walls. There were beakers and crocks and jars. “The letter’s coming?”
“It is,” she said, keeping her voice oriole bright. She didn’t tell him she had taken a bath of her own, that she was—on his account—indulging herself in ways she hadn’t allowed for longer than she could remember.
“I got to tell the truth. I ain’t seen more than one or two letters of the kind you write in my whole life. There was a man at the port of Charleston who would scratch out your fortune on the leaf of a palm tree if you asked. He knew all manner of foreign alphabets. And I met a miner once who carved accounts of people’s sins into the black rock of a mine shaft where nobody else could read them. You could pay him to do that. But it’s new to me, asking something like this,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in what she saw was a clean, long-tailed shirt. “I’ll get at the wood chopping tomorrow. I reckon you have a ax.”
“There’s no need to hurry,” she said. “This isn’t a race between us.”
He had no response to that.
The tea was her concoction—sweet grasses, rose hips, mint. There was honey from one of her sister’s remaining hives, but neither of them spooned at it. She had asked him to sit in one of her square-backed chairs in front of an unlit cooking fire.
“The men from the camp are also cutting wood on my land. Sometimes they ask. Sometimes they don’t. Use care.”
“I don’t reckon they’ll mess with me if I’m working for you.”
“Probably not,” she said. “We have our agreements.”
“You don’t worry they’ll pick you clean?” he asked. “It looks like there’s more than a few of them set down in your fields.”
“I’ve already been picked clean, Mr. Hendricks. Many times. Haven’t you?”
He turned his face away from her then, his scrubbed and sun-drawn face.
“They’re respectful,” she told him, reminding herself to rest her cup on her knee so the palsy in her hand wouldn’t show. “They keep the camp neat, and they’re careful how much they hunt and fish. But they won’t use the spring water up here. They won’t even sip at it. They always boil water from the river, or the creek.”
“That’s just convenience,” he said.
“I don’t think so. They’re somewhat afraid of me. No matter what I say or do.”
“I’d guess everybody around here is somewhat afraid of you,” he said, putting some volume into his voice. “I know I am.”
She pretended she hadn’t heard him. “They think if they drink from my spring water I’ll steal from them,” she continued. “And it’s not their children I’ll take, or their food, or their no-good metal money. It’s their language. They think I’ll thieve the survivors’ talk right out of their mouths.”
Hendricks sat dumbly before her, the small china cup nearly covered by his hands. One of his boots tapped against the floor at a jittery pace.
“They think my water will wash away the languages they share,” she repeated.
“Will it?” he asked, his question sounding a little bleached.
“No,” she said, irked. “Of course not. Unless I’m more of a demon than I admit, and I admit plenty.”
Hendricks ran a nervous hand along the unshaved edges of his jaw. “Would you take it rude if I asked permission to step outside?”
She laughed, her teeth feeling wet against her lips. “You’re not rude, Mr. Hendricks. I like your directness.” She stood, preparing to escort him to more neutral ground. She could barely believe she’d considered taking him to bed. He wasn’t worthy. “Please forgive me. I’ve forgotten how to be a proper hostess. My house and I haven’t been lived in for a long time.”
Outside, the air was layered with the scents of cooling bark and leaves. The sun flared behind the hill where the Hopkins house lay in ruins, nothing left to scratch at the sky but its four stout chimneys. Persimmons. The sunset was the color of persimmons. She reminded herself that she needed to walk to where the last of the tenant cabins still stood to see how the trees were bearing and if their late-season fruit was finally ripe.
“I’d like to say what I think.” Hendricks had positioned himself at the very edge of her porch. He stood there no taller than she was. She could hear at least two of the dogs breathing beneath the boxwoods, waiting.
“Please,” she said. “I’ve brought some of your tobacco. Let me hear you speak your mind.”
He swung his shoulders in her direction, chin lifted. She held out a pipe, one she’d filled with a nest of cured leaves after she’d taken her bath. A surprise for Mr. Hendricks.
“Go ahead,” she said, gesturing toward the pipe. “It was my father’s.”
He took it from her swiftly, as if it were already hot. He lit it with a flint from one of his pockets. She did the same with her own pipe. The new smoke felt dark in her mouth, unburied and dark.
He said, “I like seeing night fall among them people out there, the ones you call the Uninvited. That ain’t a feeling I’ve had for a while.”
“Is it the children?” she asked.
“Maybe. But that ain’t the only thing that speaks to me. It’s more the resting, the communing and the resting. I know there’s bad people amongst them. There always is. But it don’t matter, not when I can hear them settling. It’s like they’re building up for what might come next.”
“They don’t take more than they should,” she said.
“That’s only right,” he said, clamping his teeth around the pipe stem. She wondered if he would leave marks with those teeth, just for her.
“My sister felt the need to care for people in the early camps,” she said. “She tried to treat the fevers that somehow always caught up with everyone, no matter how far they ran.”
“Is that what killed her, se
rving amongst the sick?”
“I’m not sure we have a proper name for what killed my sister, Mr. Hendricks. I haven’t found one.” She had become good at saying such things, at not admitting her own role in the matter.
He was silent for a time, sucking on the ghost ribbon of the tobacco. Then he said, “I been told she could raise the dead.” He spoke in a tentative voice, as if he’d been afflicted by shyness. “That’s what they say at Snow Creek.”
“Then there are liars at Snow Creek,” she said, “and I’m sorry you’ve met them.”
“It ain’t true?”
“You didn’t come here for me to tell you what’s true and not true, Mr. Hendricks. You came for a letter.”
“Aye,” he said, moving down the steps until he found room to sit by himself in the gathering gloom. “And I don’t aim to cause trouble getting it. I apologize.”
She said nothing. It was the tobacco, she thought. It never brought clarity to her thinking. Tobacco, even the finest of it, muffled her head.
“At Snow Creek, they’d think you was unusual for allowing them people to put down a camp,” he said. “Folks worry the fevers will come back. I seen people make their own kin clear out at the first sign of sickness. At Snow Creek, they’d say you was brave.”
“Then they are fools as well as liars,” she replied. “Nothing I do qualifies as brave.”
“There’s a story they tell down there,” he said. “It’s one you might like, except for the end part of it.”
“Are you a storyteller, Mr. Hendricks?”
“You know I ain’t. You been writing out my letter. You, more than anybody, know just how pitiful I truly am.”
“Tell it anyway,” she said, sitting down in the best of the porch swings. “A story is a strong bridge across the night. And night is right in front of us.” She knocked the wispy ash from her pipe bowl. The sound brought an urgent yelp from one of the dogs that had circled itself into sleep beneath the bushes. Guarding, she thought. Her dogs were always guarding things they didn’t need or understand.
“It happened many years ago,” he began. “Back when towns and settlements was even more isolated than they is now. A boy was born into a big family, a farming family that raised livestock and crops but made most of its living off tobacco of the kind we’s smoking right here. He was a normal boy, or normal enough for his mama and his daddy. He growed up like he was supposed to, right to the age of seven or eight. He went to school part of the year, as did his many brothers and sisters, but the teacher made no remarks about him one way or the other. He didn’t rise above.
“This was a churchgoing family. Or that’s how it was told to me. But the preacher or deacon or whoever, he didn’t have nothing to say about the boy neither. The child bore no kind of mark.
“It’s said that one night the boy had a dream. When he woke from that dream, he rose from his pallet, made his way to the barn, and carved hisself a flute with his daddy’s tools. And he commenced to playing an unknown music on that flute. He couldn’t explain how it happened. He just all of a sudden took to making music, something he couldn’t do before the dream.”
“And no one said he’d been inhabited by a demon?”
“They must have. They knew of demons and those who claim to cast them out. But the boy didn’t seem much different. He worked hard on the farm alongside the others. He weren’t altered in any other way.”
“Then he was a lucky boy,” she said.
“Maybe he was, for a while,” Hendricks replied. “But things changed. A man who’d been away from that place returned to it. The man was a sailor. He’d sailed on ships all over the world. Not long after he come back, there was some celebration or another—it must have been a wedding, that’s how it was told to me—and there was liquor drinking and boasting and when a older brother asked the boy to play on his flute, he did so. Only this time, there was somebody who could sing to his music.”
“The sailor could play also?”
“The sailor knowed enough to recognize the notes and put words to them. He said he’d heard the music before, on a small island far out in the sea. At Snow Creek, they tell that the sailor fell down on his knees in front of the boy in full surprise even though he weren’t that drunk.”
“It was a joke,” she said. “A prank of some kind.”
“It weren’t,” Hendricks said. “The boy and the sailor went at it. They made their music. They sang what they claimed were war songs, and love songs, and praiseful songs to other gods. Them who were present felt the full power of it. The hair stood up against their collars. Some who had been drinking even joined in.”
“But that wasn’t the end of it, was it?”
“No, ma’am. The next day was a Sunday, but many who’d been at the wedding stayed away from church and not just because they’d been laid low by whiskey. They wanted to be close to the boy, to hear what odd music he might play and to learn what the sailor might tell about it. Them people stayed all day and into the next night. The boy was bothered by the attention, he hadn’t been seeking it, but he kept playing on that flute. He never sweat or got sullen or unskilled. By the time the sun set on the second day, some citizens was laying gifts at his feet.”
“You’re going to tell me the bad of it now, aren’t you?” she said.
“I don’t have to.”
“You should finish. The finish is the point of such a story.”
“I relay the end as it was told to me,” he said, pausing to draw a great heave of smoke into his mouth. “Sometime on the second night, a person crept up on the sailor while he slept and killed him dead. Split his head with a rock. The boy was found dead, too. Strangled. The oldest of the boy’s brothers admitted to the strangling. He was sentenced to hang for murder, but they couldn’t find a hangman who would rope him up given the strangeness of the situation. And the brother denied any attack upon the sailor. He claimed he had nothing to do with it. He was pure fierce about that.”
“And the flute?”
“Never seen again,” he said.
“What do you make of such a story, Mr. Hendricks?” she asked, tasting the cavernous sour left in her mouth by the tobacco. “Why do your wife’s people tell it?”
“I ain’t sure what to make of it. I wonder where that flute got to. And I wonder why no man or woman admitted to killing the sailor. A decent person owns up to what he says and does. Why do my wife’s people tell it? They tell it out of fear,” he said, his voice becoming as thin as the evening air. “Fear’s the reason behind most uproars in a small place. Them people could stand a odd thing that looked like a spell or a holiness as long as it was their odd thing, something birthed right before their eyes. But when it threatened to roam beyond them, when it looked like it might roll forward on independent wheels, then it become a danger. It had to be stopped.”
He looked out into the gathered darkness, as if he hoped to see the edge of it. “Some people,” he said, “them who connive the best, they know how to work that kind of fear. They like the strength you get from using it. And they like how it lets you do away with weak folks any time you want. Fear is a mighty tool for them that grip its handle.” He paused once more, although he seemed to have finished the tobacco in his pipe. She realized, with welling discomfort, that she could no longer clearly distinguish the features of his face. The voice had become the man. And the man had more to say. “A fact like that ain’t news to you,” he continued. “You’ve paid a high price to survive in this world. I can see it on you. You’re as thick-skinned and done-up and alone as anybody I ever met. You’ve learned to protect yourself from everything there is. I’m inclined to bet every word I said, all that I told about fear and the mastering of it, is a truth you grabbed hold of long ago.”
She was angry. Sleepless. Throttled by her own bedsheets. How dare Hendricks speak to her that way. How dare he insinuate she was a manipulator of fear. He had no right to tell tales and wrap her in the meaning of those tales and expect her to finish his letter as i
f she hadn’t recognized the wicked insult hidden among his words. No right at all.
After she had tossed and turned for more hours than she cared to count, she arose and climbed the protesting stairs of the house. The air in the second-floor rooms smelled of leaf mold and mice. Her sister’s charts were more curled and stained and intimidating than ever. Ignoring them, she adjusted the telescope on its spindly stand with agitated impatience, but there were clouds over the moon she sought—fortresses and peninsulas of cloud—and she could see nothing. When she aimed the lenses toward the poplar tree where Hendricks was camped, she could see no sign of him either. Had he left? Was he sleeping without a fire? Was he heating himself with the cruel fancy he’d chosen to tell her? He had been baiting her with the story of the flute player and the sailor, she was sure of it. He had suspicions. He suspected the truth of what had happened to her sister, and he wanted to goad her into admitting what she had done. She wouldn’t stand for it. Despite the deal they had struck with each other, she would order him off her land in the morning.
But when she returned downstairs to boil water for tea, something she hoped would calm her nerves, she was astonished to find one of her mother’s ornamental lamps burning in the parlor. Its short, steady flame was no larger than her thumb, yet it cast an unstinting midday light across the entire room. Her nostrils, even from a distance, began to tingle from the peppery scent of her best ink. She looked down at her hands, afraid. But, no, her fingers were unstiff and unstained. She hadn’t touched her pens or her inks since she had taken a bath earlier in the evening. She hadn’t been near them. Still, the second sheet of paper she had chosen for Hendricks’s letter was lying flat on the cherrywood table that served as her desk. It lay next to the sheet she had written on earlier in the day. The new paper was covered with fresh writing. Hendricks’s material. Hendricks’s confession. She could see that. She could read it for herself. Yet the letters linked across the page were as perfectly shaped as a schoolmarm’s. The hand that had composed them was not hers.