by Alyson Hagy
Hendricks stepped from the purpled shadows of her yard. “There will be more of them,” he said.
“Yes. My guess is young Bofrane is out there now. They’ve drummed up some kind of contest against us, or against me. Their families aren’t honoring the pact. They fear the people in the river bottom more than they fear me, however. If Bofrane’s wise, he’ll try to make a deal with us before he has to tell his fermented daddy what’s befallen Cousin Tul.”
“We could hang that Tul from one of your high windows. It would be a sign to negotiate.”
She looked at the man anew, considering the silent way he had emerged from the shadows and the air of menace that had emerged with him. “I don’t war here. I never have.”
“I don’t mean hanged by the neck,” Hendricks said, a stalker’s gleam burning at the center of his eyes. “I ain’t far gone enough to kill a child. I’d only strap him into a bundle, let him serve as a clear message. But have it your way. We’ll wait for the older one to come to us. I hope he’s too softened by your unwarring nature to go running to his kin. They want trouble. And there’s more of them than there is of us.”
They waited many hours. The dogs made their own haphazard survey of the day, racing against the bowlegged dog, snapping at flies, licking their sores and soft parts before they slunk under the bushes to sleep.
“The boy’s rustling up his people,” Hendricks said.
“Could be,” she said, “but that would mean Billy Kingery is dead or has finally sold his authority across the counter of his store. Billy set the rules that keep the peace around here. We mostly abide by them. I haven’t provoked the Altices, or anyone they’re related to, not intentionally. But they want something. I need them to spell it out. My guess is young Bofrane will come to us with some kind of notion. In the meantime, will you tell me where you did your time in prison?”
Hendricks went as still as a perched hawk. “I won’t.”
“There’s no shame in it,” she said. “I served two hundred days in a place its colonel called Fishersville. I was very young.”
“I ain’t heard of Fishersville, and that’s all I’ll say on the matter. You aim to finish my letter today?”
She hesitated. She hadn’t told him about her sister’s handwriting or the visit to the council and how she had decided to cancel the contract for the letter. This was not the time to do so. It was an advantage to have someone with her, at least until the picayune raid by Tul Boitnott had been dealt with. “I believe so,” she said, carefully.
“Then let’s both think on that.”
The boy, Bofrane, came to them as he had previously, from well across the road, although he showed a bow this time and a handful of fletched arrows. She called the dogs to her and let him be.
“We didn’t mean nothing,” the taller cousin said, slump-shouldered.
“You did,” Hendricks said. “You meant pure invasion. Don’t start your filthy begging by telling lies.”
“Tul is all right,” she told him. “Or as well as he can be. Say what you’re here to say.”
“My daddy, Mr. Alton Altice, wants reparation from you and your hunter man.”
“Reparation for what? He got the cat claws he asked for.”
“My uncle took those,” the boy said. “Uncle Willem walked hisself off to Goggin’s mill to make deals of his own. He didn’t share with my daddy.”
“So lazy Alton Altice has saddled up his high horse and put you on it,” she said. “He thinks he’s deserving? He wants more from me?”
“He says them camp people get everything they ask for and he don’t get nothing. He says their men cross into his woods, stealing timber and turkey birds. He says they brung sickness to my aunt’s new baby.”
“That’s not true,” she said, taking a step toward the scabbed and dirty child, her staff tight in her hands. “There is no sickness.”
The boy recoiled, arms raised around his head.
“I reckon it’s possible you and Cousin Tul cooked up this fool stunt to avoid a beating from your daddy,” Hendricks said, intervening. “He sounds like a unstinting bastard. But you’re in thick now. You know what this lady can do to you?”
“She could kill Tul dead, I … I know that much,” Bofrane said, his blue eyes dappled with fear. “And … and she could medical the skin right off my bones. They say she’s learned the potions for that.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. No matter how accommodating she tried to be, those who lived around her never stopped accusing her of new horrors. Never. They knew what she’d done to her own sister. They knew she wasn’t afraid to cross lines. “I’m not going to kill Tul,” she said.
The boy rocked back on his heels with some relief. He was clad in a man’s boots, cracked and big. “Then … then I request a honor swap. I want to take his place,” he said.
“No need for it,” Hendricks said, studying the black-haired boy with his hard gray eyes. “You tell your daddy he’ll get no work from me, and he’ll earn nothing but trouble if he keeps spreading talk of sickness and robbery. He needs to stop messing in business that ain’t his. And if he beats on you for carrying my message, you tell him I’ll hear it from down here, and I’ll come for his pelt like I did with that mountain cat. Can you say that?”
“Yes, sir.” The boy put a shape to his mouth that seemed both pleased and appalled.
“Then turn and walk yourself back across the road. I’ll send your cousin out shortly. He thinks he’s waiting for a tribunal from them you call the camp people. He’ll be happy to see you.”
The boy gulped. “You would have tribuned Tul?”
“We’ll do what it takes to keep the Altice family from breeding criminals,” Hendricks said. “You stay clear of this place.”
“Yes, sir.”
They watched as young Bofrane tried to retreat in his clumsy boots with some measure of dignity. The spotted beagle accompanied him for several nagging paces.
“It ain’t over,” Hendricks said.
“No, it’s not.”
“We got to finish our business right now. Can you write the rest of it while I stand guard?”
She hesitated once more. Hendricks had remained close to her the entire day. He had revealed a fine and patient way with the local troublemakers, and his skills might be useful to her again. He was also fiercely fixated on his letter. She was impressed by that. Perhaps she could produce some passable version of what she owed him. Quickly.
“Yes,” she said. “I can.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Only one thing,” she said.
He looked at her from beneath the much-handled brim of his hat, preparing himself for another of her outrageous requests.
“Is Tul the one who makes music?” she asked.
“He is. He’s fair good with a cut-down mandolin. He played while his cousin and me scraped the cat pelt.”
“Then you’ll want to be careful,” she said. “The boy’s fingers. Will you cut one off for me? At the knuckle?”
Hendricks continued to measure her without apparent judgment. His breathing was as steady as his gaze.
“I don’t see how you can blame me,” she said, looking into a sky bricked over with clouds. “We all have our wants.”
She ate what she had: preserved tomatoes, unleavened bread, a handful of jerked meat. Then she stripped the upper half of her body, stood over her kitchen’s cold cistern of water, and washed. Her hands felt strong and flagrant. There were no signs of palsy, not on this day. She wrapped herself in a tunic of retailored flannel. The letter. She knew just how she would make it sound. It would be longer this time, but more appealing, more flavored with the complexities of the man. It would be more like the Hendricks she had just witnessed.
Despite her plans to finish quickly, the writing went on into the night—and she felt no one’s presence but her own. Nothing interfered with the work. She did not fret about the Altices or the council or her sister. She heard the patter of r
ain and the stony rumble of thunder. She smelled air-burned hints of lightning. But she paid little attention to the fitfulness of the atmosphere. She wrote so swiftly she used two full bottles of her richest ink and had to grind and mix powder for a third. Despite her haste, her brushes remained true, especially those tipped with human hair. She wrote without lamplight. She rarely paused. She thought she heard Hendricks circling the house on his patrols, sometimes castigating the dogs, sometimes singing his own guardian tunes, but she couldn’t be sure. The declarations in her skull had become far more real than any connivance featuring Mr. Hendricks.
At some point she ascended the stairs and moved her sister’s telescope to the northernmost window of the house. She put her eye to the crystal lenses and sought the notations of the midnight stars. In the one place the sky was clear, to the west, she looked for a brightness or a wheeling she might use within the letter. But she didn’t go near her sister’s dusty charts. She wanted no kind of conversation with her sibling.
When her hand began to cramp around the telescope’s eyepiece, she beat the cramp flat against the knobs of her knees. And returned to writing.
When they were young, she and her sister traveled to the sea. She was transfixed by the water, struck dumb by its variable textures. To her, it looked like a living fabric, like a child’s swirling skirt or a widow’s long, dark veil. Her sister, however, was more haunted by the sky. “Do you see it?” her sister said, staring. “It’s like its own continent up there. Mountains and islands, big blue canyons that never end. Do you see them? We could live in a place like that when we grow up, a country without people or a flag. We could stay there, just you and me.”
“It’s not like flying,” she told her sister. “Taking their words from them is like diving. Writing for them is like diving into water, fast and blind and free.”
She finished before sunrise. It was a good letter. She felt that in the burning of her palms. Yet writing it was only the start. She was famished but knew she wouldn’t be able to swallow even a sip of stale water until she had read the letter aloud to Hendricks. He might reject it. They sometimes did. He might try to beat on her as if she were some false rag of a wife. She had borne beatings in the past. They were part of her price. And they changed nothing in the end. Not a single word.
She left the great sheets of paper, seven in all, laid out on the cherry desk, and she went to find him. Her legs were not as steady as she would have liked, so she breathed hard through her nostrils in an attempt to disperse the serpents still in her head, the long writhing alphabet of them. He had told her his transgressions, and she had recorded them to the best of her ability. But it wasn’t safe or simple to take on the burdens of another person’s history, all those sins and vacancies. The burdens sometimes stayed with her even after they were lifted from those who had earned them. They accumulated. So it must be. Translating human misdeeds was all she knew how to do. Her sister had been a healer and a meddler. She, herself, had nothing to offer the world except the recording of its failures.
There were signs Hendricks had been keeping vigil on her porch, but he wasn’t there now. A torn square of tarpaulin lay crumpled near the doorstep. And she could smell the acrid spirit of burned tobacco. But except for the dripping of rain from the eaves of the house into the dark bowls of the boxwoods, she heard nothing.
He wouldn’t be far. He had promised to watch over her.
She found him propped against the satiny trunk of a silver maple tree that stood near the road bridge. He held a naked knife blade in his right hand, and his head was pressed against the tree in such a way that his unshaven throat was treacherously exposed to the coming light of dawn. Her father’s pipe was clenched between his teeth. She couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive.
Her first instinct was to crouch low, to make a small target of herself. Her second was to speak to him, though only in a soldier’s whisper. “Mr. Hendricks,” she asked, “can you hear me?”
The implacable gray eyes, now filmed over with pain, opened. “I been hit good,” he said.
She looked at his outstretched legs. The inconvenient sun was rising and lightening the sky, whether she wanted it to or not. She could see a shining tide of blood flowing from his left thigh into his lap.
“Arrow,” he said, lips keyholed around the stem of the pipe. “Afraid I’d bleed out if I moved. But … I got the boy. At the garden.”
“Bofrane?” she asked, crouching lower.
He tried to wag his head and failed. No. It was not Bofrane.
Tul Boitnott, she thought. Damn Tul Boitnott, as wicked as he was small. “We’ve got to get you inside,” she said to Hendricks. “I’m going to lift you up.”
Hendricks crabbed at her sleeve with the hand that didn’t hold the knife. “Is it finished?” he asked.
“Your letter?” she said, trying to heft his weight upward. “Yes. But it doesn’t matter right now.”
“It’s all … all that matters,” he coughed, the pipe tumbling from his teeth. “I praise you for …”
“On your feet,” she ordered, troubled by the quantity of blood that sluiced from the folds of his britches as she lifted him. “I’m not hauling you for praise.”
He complied weakly, unsteadily, but with the kind of fixed spirit she had come to expect. Hendricks would be a hard man to kill, she thought. She knew from listening to him that he was skilled at saving himself. It was no wonder he’d come to her for an absolving letter. He needed all the absolution he could get. As they hobbled up her steps, she was relieved not to hear any shouts or sounds of pursuit. The morning was thick with the moisture of the night’s storm, yet the air remained strangely silent except for the constant rill of creek water over rock. Even the uncovered kitchens of the Uninvited were silent. No crowing from the roosters. No hungry bleating from the goats. It wasn’t until she’d dragged Hendricks into the hallway of her misbegotten home that she thought to ask herself what had become of the dogs.
It came back to her as if she still did it every day, the melody and harmony of tending to someone who needed care. She kept rolls of boiled bandages on her shelves out of habit. And although she had sworn she would never watch over a sick child, not ever again, she wasn’t about to turn away from a wounded man. Hendricks, stubborn cuss that he was, had pulled the arrow loose from his leg before she found him. She worked to stanch the bleeding while he held himself rigid beneath the pressure of her hands. He said he wouldn’t accept any kind of tincture for the pain. They were coming, he told her. He had to remain alert. He had to make sure she was able to save herself and the letter.
“Who’s coming?” she said, gathering whatever cloth she could find to soak up the blood. “Other than those idiot Altice boys, who wants to take us on? Who would dare?”
“You got … to understand,” he said, gasping through the undulations of pain that washed over him. There was froth at the corners of his mouth. White froth. And his hands were shaking. He would vomit soon, and not for the last time.
“I understand blood loss and putrefaction,” she said. “I understand coping with Altices. It’s been done before. There’s no one else to worry about.”
“There is … another.”
She sensed the convulsion before he did. She turned his head aside as gently as she could, allowing him to spew into a wad of flannel. She wiped his face, rebalanced him against the abused plaster of the wall, kept pressure on his wound. The arrow had struck bone. Hendricks was in for a lot of discomfort, but the artery had only been nicked. Her father would not have believed it—the nursing capabilities of his younger daughter, the fastidious, inward-looking child who shrank from messes of any kind.
She had water on to boil before Hendricks could speak again.
“Boy’s dead,” he told her, croaking from behind gritted teeth. “Too much … rain. Dark. Ambush … to ambush.” She assessed the pale splotches on his cheeks and at the end of his hill country nose. Signs of heavy bleeding. The contents of his stomach were phlegm-l
ike and soured. She could smell the stink of them above the hot iron scent of his blood.
“I’ll tend to the boy,” she said, barely meaning it. “But not until I have you right.”
“S-sorry,” he said, panting against a second assault of nausea. “Sorry for what … I done. A-all of it. There’s things … going on. The b-boy weren’t part of the plan.”
He needed marrow tea. And rest. And careful cleansing. But she didn’t sense the black-winged plunge toward death. He would survive. Tul Boitnott, she thought again, what did you start? And why? Hendricks was right. If the boy Tul was dead, they were in trouble. The Altices would harangue and threaten until they worked themselves into an irreversible fury. Unless Billy Kingery intervened to offer some kind of high-priced protection, they would have to barricade themselves against the entire clan. Or slip away while they could.
“I need you to drink some hot water to replace the volume of your blood,” she told him. “Then you can witness the surgeon in me.” He didn’t even nod. She used a spoon to give him water, but it wasn’t long before he passed into a spasming unconsciousness that allowed her, finally, to smear some poppy paste onto his lathered tongue. She cut his britches away from his leg, irrigated the puncture, probed it for metal and wood, and irrigated it again. Then she sewed it closed to the best of her ability with a curved needle that once belonged to her father. Hendricks’s blood welled over her working fingers, slick and warm, until the very end.
When she had strapped the thigh with bandages, an aching relief rolled along the spindle of her neck. She grasped Hendricks’s long-bladed knife from where it had fallen from his fingers and wiped it on her sleeve. Her hands and forearms were red. There were smears on her belly and large, spreading stains around her knees. Stirring in blood. She was stirring in blood again, a thing she had avoided for years. Ever since her sister’s death, she had kept to herself—all alone. She had protected herself by bartering the only gift she had, the ability to write letters on behalf of the guilty and possessed. And, still, blood had come. It had spilled itself on her and within her house, flowing and marking, flowing and staining. Blood led to vengeance, and vengeance, as she knew all too well, was impossible to manage.