by Alyson Hagy
“There ain’t much to explain,” he said, interrupting. “She talked to me without halt, even when I asked her to slow down or stop because I could see the toll it took on you. And I figured some things on my own. I found your escape tunnel the night before last when I was doing patrols, before … before I killed that boy. I found where the tunnel comes out above the creek. So I know we can get you across the river. Which is what we need to do.”
She felt like an icy-skinned observer as she reached out and touched first the clay bowl, then the hard, knobbed bones of his wrist. He felt real enough. More than she did.
“They might have emptied your springhouse,” he continued. “But you been laying up provisions in a proper way. I found them in the cellar. She—the one who says she’s your sister—give me all manner of directions about filling your sack and what you need to carry.”
“I don’t … I don’t understand,” she said.
“Me neither,” he said. “Not all of it. The voice that come from inside you is a good and practical voice. She told me how to poultice my wound, though she admitted she weren’t as good at making poultices as you. She told me what to swallow to keep my pain down and my spirits up, however long that lasts. She claimed she spent part of the time you was asleep copying the pages of my letter into your head. She says she can’t keep you safe no more, only you can do that, but she has got you prepared.” He shifted the clay bowl to his other hand and lowered himself next to her with a sharp sigh. Moving his leg was excruciating for him. Yet he’d done it. For her. There was a wet cloth in the bowl. And the buttons on her shirt were partly unbuttoned. So he had touched her body. The thought unnerved her.
“S-Ss …” She could not form the name with her lips. “My s-sister has been talking to you?”
“Without pause,” he said. “She’s as flighty as you once she gets going.”
“I d-don’t believe—”
“You don’t got to believe,” he said, placing a careful hand on her shoulder. She took note of the soothing shades within his voice. “Just test yourself on the letter. See if you remember it. When you’re ready.”
She didn’t need the test. The first time he mentioned it, she had known—somehow—that his letter was within her forever, sheathed in her skin, inscribed in her blood pulse.
“You need to cross the river,” Hendricks told her. “No arguing about it. You got a chance to be safe, to survive this. I’ll stay a day or two, hold them off with my share of smoke and noise by pretending we’re both in here. Your sister don’t make guarantees, but she said I should follow you as soon as my damned leg is ready.”
“And if I don’t leave? If we don’t?”
“She hinted at a outcome we won’t like. The destruction of this house, I guess. Or that camp you like so much. She don’t seem to be much for compromise.”
“She’s not,” she said, hearing again the hateful chirr of locusts, thousands of summer locusts, in her ears.
“She also claimed …” Hendricks hesitated. “She claimed she’d see me killed if you don’t leave here soon. I don’t want to bring myself into it. The two of us ain’t got a formal bond. My risks is my own. But your sister, she aims to be persuasive.”
And she knows me too well. She knows what it will take to make me complete this trade. She looked down at her blue-veined wrists as if she expected to see finely forged shackles locked around them. Why couldn’t her sister let her be? They both knew she wasn’t worth saving. All she’d ever accomplished in her life was betrayal. And why did Hendricks have to be made part of it? That wasn’t fair, how her sister was using him—a man she barely knew—to force her to act. “I don’t want to do it. I don’t. But I guess I have no choice.” She dropped her chin so he couldn’t see the angry, shameful tears burning in her eyes.
“Then we’re agreed,” he said, clearly relieved, setting the clay bowl on the hearth. “You’ll take that cellar tunnel after dark. Them Altices won’t even know you’re gone.”
“Mr. Hendricks.” She bit at the unhelpful softness of her lip. “Why didn’t she just leave us to the ending we earned here?”
He looked at her a long time then, searching. He seemed troubled by her question, as if the strange voice that had come from within her had asked more of him than he could deliver. Before he spoke, he reached over and touched her face, just at the corner of one damp eye, with the ends of his fingers. “I can’t say,” he answered, lowering his gaze to the floor so she could no longer see any sign of the struggle that seemed to be occurring behind his rainstorm eyes. “That’s one part she didn’t spell out for me.”
She told him the story of the tunnel, as much as she knew of it. The foundation of the house had been built from river rock many, many years before. There were two cellars, one accessible from inside, one from out. Sometime during the furbishing of the house, when the stairs were being raised, someone had framed a small hidey-hole between the two cellars. Later, someone else had made it possible to crawl from that hole to the entrance of a crude, rock-lined tunnel.
“I don’t know if it was masters or slaves or both,” she told him. “I don’t know if the traffic through there was driven by good or evil. Once we were born, my father sealed the whole thing off, against rodents and the like. My sister and I opened it up, although I don’t know what we thought we’d use it for. Maybe we thought it would help during the quarantines. But the things that finally rained down on us couldn’t be helped by a tunnel.”
“And now it’s there and waiting,” he said. He was wiping his wood-handled pistol with his shirttail, weighing it once more in his restless hands. He’d told her he had ten reliable bullets. He didn’t intend to waste a single one. “You can use it to get out of here.”
“Maybe so,” she said, once again feeling weak and useless at the knees.
She was provisioned and properly dressed. She had allowed herself to go upstairs one last time to see the crumbling, leak-pronged rooms where she and her sister had once slept in canopied beds like the undisturbed dolls they wanted to be. She laid a hand on the smeared brass of the telescope, no longer needing its lenses to measure the siege that surrounded them. The Altices had begun to run small, rowdy patrols along the far side of the road, sometimes lighting feeble, uncontained fires in the wet brush, sometimes not. Always, they shot a gun or two into the air, cursing as they did so. The men and women of the Uninvited weren’t so careless. Estefan’s body had been carried away, and guards had been stationed along the creek and the upper reaches of the road. The camp was battened down. Its occupants weren’t interested in being on display.
Together, she and Hendricks had burned the seven pages of his letter, handling each sheet as if it were a billowing sail. She had pocketed her father’s waggling compass. She told Hendricks she would use the roads she knew and take to the higher hills if she got into trouble. She had also, against all better judgment, promised to deliver his letter to its destination. It was the only chance she would have to see him again. She wanted that—to see him. He claimed he would follow her in no more than two days, although to what end neither of them knew. They didn’t speak of a future.
“I owe a winter’s worth of hardwood,” he said, hobbling around the kitchen space they were using as their protected quarters. A broken-off hoe handle served as his cane. “I ain’t forgot that.”
“Neither have I,” she said, feeling something grievously akin to laughter swell into her lungs. “You’re in my debt.”
Her statement seemed to draw the confidence right out of his lungs, to deflate him—and the invisible burdens he now appeared to carry so gingerly within him—to the point of actual pain. “I got many debts,” he said, grimly. “I’m beholden to people who only care for theirselves. I want a chance to square things up with you when this is over. I swear.”
“We’re both survivors, Mr. Hendricks.” She spoke gently, but with ballooning uneasiness. As much as she had come to like him, something was wrong between them. She could sense it in the rigid an
gles of his body. “You said so yourself.”
“This time I mean to be more than a survivor. Can I hope my debt to you will shrink somewhat if I escape the local hooligans to find you? To be with you again?”
His words rifled between them, loud and true.
“Please,” she said, moving away. She found she was having great difficulty standing close to him.
“Please what?”
“No more promises from you, or pantomimes. I can’t bear it.” She hadn’t forgotten how his fingers felt against her face, how they moth-winged there.
He limped to her side more quickly than she was prepared for. He grasped her arm firmly in his hand and drew her against him. The weight and shape of his chest felt familiar to her in a way they should not have. They had only touched, after all, within her dreams. “I ain’t miming. I want you to know how I feel and what I truly stand for before you hear things about me. Before you learn—”
“Stop,” she said, shaking him off and facing her kitchen’s battered wall. “We can’t go down this path. You don’t know what it was like for me during my two hundred days at Fishersville, in that prison. It’s something you need to understand.”
He exhaled in frustration, leaning on his makeshift cane. She knew he didn’t want to hear any premonitions of capture or death. They had avoided talking about Estefan, about the curse of that mistake. For Hendricks, worry was a waste of time. But she could not let him declare any kind of feeling for her. It wasn’t allowed.
She said, “I think it could give you an inkling … a kind of knowledge about me, before … before we say too much.”
She turned in time to see his eyes drop toward the weapons, those precious weapons, that dangled from his belt. She felt a pang when his gaze left hers. His roving, changeable eyes had begun to remind her of the great sea that had once stolen her heart.
“I was young at the time,” she said, “younger than you might imagine, and I was at the weekly market with my father. My mother died when we were very small. It was not a thing we talked about, but it became our father’s habit to take one of us, my sister or me, with him to market when he went. It was my sister’s turn, but for some reason … some poor excuse … she decided not to go. We used a simple oxcart to get to town. You’ll remember. Horses and mules were rare enough after the war. They became even more rare later, done in by their diseases.
“I wandered the stalls while my father visited the apothecary and other suppliers. I greeted the vendors and pretended to test their wares. It’s what I always did. The market was considered safe for those with the right heritage or connections. I wasn’t beautiful, but on this one day, I must have stood out in some way. It’s all I can figure, that I called attention to myself and, therefore, was seized. It may not have been true where you’re from, but here the towns rotted from the inside. Men began to take what they wanted, anything they wanted, and call it law. My father never knew who his enemy was, but someone gave the nod that led to my arrest. Thievery was the first charge. I was wearing some jewelry at the time, small silver bangles I’d inherited from my mother. Whoring was the second charge. And that one was impossible to slip.
“The plan may have been to keep me in town, to have me serve as a hostage to some kind of politicking my father needed to understand. There would have been sense in that. My father was a medical man. He was useful, especially to those with power. But soon, whatever plans had been made for me were changed. I was carted off to an establishment that called itself Fishersville. A school for girls. A place for moral education.
“I’ve seen your scars, Mr. Hendricks. So I know you know the truth. I was shaved and branded, though with girls the brands are hidden in tender places. They didn’t cut my hair because the colonel preferred his tresses.”
She kept her eyes on him, testing. He would either flinch. Or he wouldn’t.
“The details aren’t important,” she continued. “There were many girls at the school, some younger than I was. It might surprise you to know how rival it got, how tribal. But I doubt it. It’s enough to say that rather than count the days, I gave myself over to climbing to the top of any heap of girls I could identify. If it could be traded, I traded it. If it could be sold, I sold it. And you must know that we had very … very little to make up our economy. Mostly only our bodies, and what we could do with them. It wasn’t long before I was summoned by the colonel.
“You would know this man, Mr. Hendricks. He was large and boisterous around the mouth. Perfumed. He was unworthy of rank of any kind except among the far-flung and the craven. And he was a taster of children, of course. He had nothing but appetite for us, appetite and lies.”
Hendricks had taken the weight off his leg by leaning against one of her heavy tables, and he was staring at her, nearly through her. He wasn’t shocked. Nothing could shock a man with his history. But she could practically smell his sympathy.
“It was an … excessive performance,” she told him, trying to keep the bravado in her voice. “Excessive in its aims and actions. Because I troubled the colonel in ways he hadn’t expected. I knew how to read, which was a skill he admired, so he let me wander among his books. I was willing to mouth other languages to him, words I pried from those books, and that … that talent aroused the man. I couldn’t sing, not well. And I was a failure at the naked dancing he was used to. But he fed me regularly and allowed me to clean myself, and I slept in a nook of my own when he had no use for me. There were other girls, many others. On occasion we were made to lie with him in pairs and triples. But that wasn’t his greatest desire. His greatest desire was to have us one by one, to taste us until we tasted no more.
“I can’t say why it happened, why the colonel lost himself the way he did. But he couldn’t satisfy himself with me, not in any way. He tried. Hands, mouth, carved ivory, polished wood, open flame, every false wonder he knew. He tried cruelty and cooing. He struck me bloody. I did the same to him. But he couldn’t scratch the itch. It was worse for the others, worse for the ones he called to him when he had failed with me. I covered my ears and felt pity for those girls more than I’d felt anything in my life.”
“Stop,” Hendricks whispered. “Stop what you’re telling. I’ve heard all I need to hear.”
She thought of what she was about to do, of the risky journey she was about to attempt, how ill-fated it felt, and how she was attempting it for only one reason that made sense to her—because he had asked her to.
“I’m sure you have,” she said. “But there’s no such thing as enough for some people. The colonel. My sister. Me. Some of us always overreach.”
“That ain’t the way it has to be,” he said, drawing close again, standing over her with his assertive shadow, but not daring to touch her. He had become fierce again, as fierce and desperate as when she had first met him and he had begged her for a letter. “You just need to say the words I say. That your bad self is finished and done. That you made it through the terrible times, and the person you was is gone forever. That there’s a future where you’ll do better.”
“I’ve tried,” she said, speaking so carefully she could feel the sharp edges of her teeth. “Pretending forward doesn’t seem to work so well for me. You mustn’t think well of me, Mr. Hendricks. Please remember what I’m saying in case we … we should ever meet again. You mustn’t care for me, or trust me. You can’t. Whether I can trust you is another matter, one I’ll have to cope with myself. I’ll carry your letter to the crossroads you’ve described, and I’ll speak it aloud, and maybe I’ll wait for you. But I can’t carry your goodwill. I was talented at frustrating the colonel. I stimulated him, he craved me, and I made a life out of my hellish gifts—at least for a while. The point is: for someone like me, someone who will do whatever she has to do, two hundred days in a place like Fishersville isn’t very long. For me, you might say, two hundred days was only the beginning.”
Body
Her sister said, “Do you remember the game we played against each other when we were s
mall?”
She did not remember.
Their father taught them how to hunt ground moles with the bright tines of a pitchfork. He impaled the blind creatures as they dug their tunnels, watching the dirt pucker above the eager, toiling bodies before he struck, leaving the bloody, pink-nosed corpses underground as a warning to other moles. Although he was a man of few words, their father was decisive when he needed to be. Both sisters felt protected by him. Until the protection failed. She never blamed her father for what happened at the market, but he bore the weight of that failure for the rest of his life. When she was released from Fishersville, he welcomed her back into his home without hesitation, and she had hardly left it since. Now, here she was, paddling like a ground mole away from the house her family had pretended was a safe haven. At least no one was hunting her with a pitchfork. Not yet. All she had to survive was darkness and catacomb stink.
The tunnel that led from the house was long and damp and narrow. She wondered how Hendricks would manage it when the time came. He was thicker and bonier than she was; it would be a tight fit. Yet Hendricks seemed capable of every bold deed she could imagine. Invisible stones cut into her elbows as she thought about the strange, uneasy man she’d left behind. Who was he, really? And why had she dreamed about him so? Creatures she couldn’t see stung her wrists as she crawled forward inch by inch, foot by foot. She mouthed her way past the probing roots of trees. She inhaled dry spores of rot. But she didn’t slow down or stop. When she finally bellied free, gulping fresh air, there was no respite. She hadn’t even gotten to her feet before she saw the terrible gift someone had left for her at the weed-covered entrance. Estefan’s red trumpet. It was lying right there, surrounded by a circle of white stones pilfered from her sister’s cairn.
You are not alone in this, the trumpet seemed to say. You can’t escape what you’ve done.