by Alyson Hagy
Estefan’s body—the one she had draped in silk—would be burned on a pyre before dawn, mourned and sung into smoke by people who now despised her. She should be there. An honorable woman would attend the boy’s funeral.
But she was not an honorable woman. She never had been. As she reached out to touch the trumpet, she sensed the cold fog of the nearby river, its wallowing disinterest. She was alone once again, the state she preferred because it meant she could disappoint only herself. Yet maybe it would be right to take the boy’s trumpet with her. Perhaps the council would bless her journey if she chose to bear a bright token of her responsibility. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps blessings no longer existed. But what harm could come from carrying a memento from the boy? He had never failed her, or anyone. You must prepare for what comes next, the council had said. She felt as though she was prepared for nothing, nothing that could matter, but she placed the trumpet in the cloth sack she wore slung across her shoulders and left the accusatory stones where they lay, every one.
You must prepare.
She stood, uncertain and unshepherded, as memory of the council’s words grappled with the tangled shadows of the night. The truth was, the Uninvited had been right in one way. She was going to make a journey, just as they had predicted.
She knew the way to Billy Kingery’s store as well as she knew the lines on her own face. She would go there first. She could cross the river and head west. That’s what Hendricks had recommended—and it’s what he believed she had agreed to do. But Hendricks was a habitual evader in ways she was not. It was folly, always folly, to sidestep Billy, especially if you’d torn a hole in his local spiderweb. He was the only remaining arbiter for miles and miles, the agreed-upon proprietor of peace. Even if the peace, such as it was, was quickly unraveling, it was necessary to pay tribute to Billy. After her sister’s death, Billy chose to ignore her as long as she gave beans or corn to his bargain men whenever they asked. He appeared to take no interest in her letter writing. But she knew how treacherous he could be. She needed to make a deal with him. Otherwise, she would not be allowed to proceed.
The moon cast a weary watchman’s light across the slanted roof of her house. A faltering wind nagged the grasses at her feet. She imagined Hendricks whispering to her, telling her to stay alert. She imagined his moist lips moving close to her waiting ear, nearly touching her. He had asked her to take care of herself. He wanted her to be safe. She could hear his rusty, unlatched voice waylaying her with his hopes. He had expressed them more than once.
Why couldn’t she believe him? Why did his caring words rinse her in distrust even as they made her heart twist?
She shook her head to clear it, to gain some distance from the seductions of Mr. Hendricks, then eased her way toward a familiar tree line. She knew the terrain so well she needed only the soles of her feet to lead her across the tapestries of fallen leaves that lay upon the floor of the forest, yard upon yard of them washed silver by the parsimonious stars. From salty white oak to sweet mountain laurel to stinking stands of sumac, she worked herself toward the ragged border of what had once been her father’s uppermost field. There were deer bedded in the shelter of the hickories. She sipped their ruffled scent. And wary hares, she felt them halt and quiver as she passed.
The surveyor’s line at Mr. Poindexter’s was still visible to someone who knew where to look for it. And a few apple trees remained in the Poindexters’ orchard, although they had been thoroughly stripped by Altices and Billy Kingery’s enterprising bargain men. The shapes of those trees were a welcome sight to her, nonetheless, open-armed as they were, as white-hemmed as acolytes. Mrs. Poindexter had died long ago. Mr. Poindexter, who had been a staunch widower, was highly valued for his ability to graft the branches of fruit trees one to another and to understand the trees’ sulky moods. He had been among the last of the old farmers to lose his holdings to Billy Kingery before the uproar of the quarantines, primarily because he had no children and hadn’t been able to bring himself to purchase an heir from someone else. That was how it went. You took care of your land or Billy took it from you. Your tenants disappeared or became loyal to some other farmer who had tillage to offer. Peddlers suddenly avoided your door. Your larder began to empty, leaving you with nothing but pride and crusts and scraps for your meals. Billy Kingery outmaneuvered.
The Poindexter place was nothing but a foundation now, a stone-toothed mouth yawning into a scattered sky. The house had been burned to the ground. When they were young, her sister had been fascinated by the Poindexters’ piano instrument. She had desperately wanted to learn to play it. But Mrs. Poindexter died, and Mr. Poindexter smashed the piano to splinters in his grief.
Making her way past the ruins, she remembered as if from a forgotten dream the first words she had ever heard about Billy Kingery. She and her sister were buying red apples from the Poindexters, back when coins and scrip were exchanged among people as easily as greetings. “That man,” Mrs. Poindexter said, “is no better than the talking donkey in that story my granny used to tell. The donkey arrived at the rich man’s barn from nowhere, and the rich man thought he would prosper from such a wondrous thing, but only woe came to the rich man and his entire family despite the donkey’s ability to speak words and brag about its supposed powers. Billy Kingery is a donkey promise.”
Beyond the Poindexter place was a strip of overgrown forest. Its ownership was in dispute, which meant Billy’s bargain men used it however they wished. Then came the empty house that had witnessed the perverse starvation of the Willards, a family unwilling to sell to Billy. Beyond the Willards’ place lay Billy’s neatly tended roadside and province, for as far as the eye could see. She’d been told people had begun to fight with one another for the privilege of living close to Billy. They kept their houses whitewashed and repaired for him. They kept their livestock fat and available.
As she crossed onto Billy’s side of the ridge, the castigations of a hoot owl rose from the Willards’ broken roofline, and she heard prolonged animal scratching from the ditch alongside her. Fox prowl, she supposed. Or the idle scavenge of a pot-bellied raccoon. There were clouds west of the moon now, white-bottomed and smooth and unsullied. The clouds seemed to herald cleaner hours ahead. The very idea made her laugh.
The circle of queer barns Billy had built around the squat fortress of his store came into sight. The barns reminded her of the stumps of giant trees, sturdy and wide at the bottom, strangely aslant across the top. They had once been considered structures of promise and organization, storehouses for dried corn and beans, all manner of seeds and grains that people had agreed to share before the chaos of the quarantines. Now, the barns were admonitions of failure—unless you wore the shirtsleeves of a Kingery.
The scratching noise came from the ditch again, clumsy and salivating. She turned to face it, her staff held high in her hands. She also carried a bone-handled butcher’s knife and a sharpened awl, and she reminded herself of that. Hendricks had armed her well.
But it was only the wandering beagle dog scrabbling onto the path. Mournful, tick mottled, so pleased to see her.
“I don’t know what to say about a world that spares you and not the others,” she said to the dog, both irritated and relieved. She nudged its muddy, hopeful ears away from her ankles. There was no reason to keep her voice down. Billy would already know she was nearby. “Did the council send you, too?” she asked. “Have you come to remind me of some other duty I don’t understand? Because I’m not offering to protect you. If the man in that store wants to fry you for his breakfast, he can. He can fry me also. You need to understand that.”
The dog panted, its tongue scalloped and lolling. The late lamented fawn bitch was the kind of companion she preferred. That speed. That consequential attitude. But the fawn bitch was dead. And here was its uninspiring substitute. Keeping the bitch’s murderous jaw firmly in mind, she turned from the beagle and squared herself to face Billy’s store.
There had been a brief time in her life w
hen the walk to Kingery’s Store was a reward. The very afternoons seemed to taste of confection as she skipped up the road on some errand for her father. Rock candy on a string. Black licorice that stained the tongue. Peanut brittle that galled the mouth with sweetness. She had never been afraid, or shy in any way. Other children had been. They didn’t like the store. Mr. Kingery had a bad smell about him, her sister said. When their father reminded them it was poor manners to criticize a person’s upkeep, her sister said the smell had nothing to do with upkeep. It came from deep inside.
Billy Kingery. He never seemed to age. There was never any change to the shape of his body, neither fat nor wasting away. His hair remained as smooth and lacquered as the lid of a snuffbox all the day long. He bought and sold every item you could imagine from within the confines of his store. He distributed homemade foodstuffs, celebrating the local sustenances as evidence of a history he announced as important and shared. It was why he ran a store in the first place, he said. To provide. To feed people just what they needed.
She nudged the building’s wide, ill-fitting door open with a toe. She didn’t have to stop the beagle. The dog didn’t want to follow her. It settled onto its waddler’s hips, prepared to wait. She had to admire its faith. It assumed she would emerge from the store the same way she went in.
The stale spices of indolence crept up her nose even before she crossed the threshold. Bread crumbs and dust. Empty bottles. Waxed paper stained with grease. The sated breath of a man who is comfortable, content even, to wait like a dragon in its den.
“Well, I’ll be,” a voice said from its beetle-winged gloom. “It’s the doctor’s girl, the little woman from down the road who keeps to her pens and papers. I ain’t seen you in forever. How you been?”
“I think you know how I’ve been, Billy,” she said, trying to suss out the shadows, hoping there wasn’t a smoke-shriveled bargain man in every corner. She didn’t care for bargain men.
“I reckon I’ve heard a thing or two. Alton Altice is screaming banshee about the many ignominies he’s witnessed from the throne of his drunkard’s bed. He’s charged you with too many crimes to count. He’s claiming a long list of reparations. But I’d be paupered nine times over if I listened to squawkers like Alton Altice. Why don’t you tell me what I need to know?”
“May I come in?” she asked.
“You’re in,” he said, laughing. “I only entertain them who choose to step inside.”
She could see the parchment page of his white shirt and the filmy gleam of the counter he stood behind, its unctuous surface. “I have a man at my place.”
“Well, lord a mercy, it’s about time. Josh Gilpin won’t come this way again.”
“Not that kind of man,” she said.
“Ain’t no other kind,” Billy said, blustering from behind a set of teeth she knew were as blanched and precise as his shirt. “You and me need to be straight on that. Josh Gilpin and you had a very friendly wraparound. You ever wonder why he departed from the neighborhood?”
She didn’t take the bait. “This man came for a letter. Nothing more.”
“You still in that business?” he said. “It’s a waste of time if you ask me. My man Cundiff says you been swapping dyes and papers like a bank clerk when you feel like it. He says you put up a powerful garden, too—and sent me a proper share. You don’t need to write out the words of some sad fool to earn your keep. I’ll take them vellums you make any time. I can get a high price for them downriver. I’ll trade you some nice things, too, things you’ll like, just to keep you honest. And you won’t have to scratch out the decorations of the alphabet neither.”
“I’m as honest as I want to be,” she said, assuming an upright posture meant to look more assertive than she felt. “The man came to me for a letter. I didn’t turn him away, and it’s not your business why or wherefore. We got crosswise with Alton when some of his young ones tried their hands at robbery.”
“And damn Willem wasn’t there to stop them,” Billy said, his words suddenly guttural and low. “So I heard.” She had gotten close enough to the counter to see Billy’s hands. They were finely furred with short black hair, the gold ring on his right pinkie gleaming like an eagle’s eye. “Damn Willem,” Billy repeated, laughing again, but in an entirely different way. “I told him he needs to stick closer to home. Them boys is out of control. He needs to strangle that brother of his, or just take over, or both. I don’t care which.”
“My man killed one of the camp people living in my fields, a child,” she said, carefully. “It was a mistake. Things got mixed up after that. I’m afraid rampage is what we’re in for.”
“We?”
“You know what I mean, Billy. Nobody’s bringing this to your door. Whatever happens won’t go beyond my lines. I’ll sort it out.”
“But you’re in my door, darling. You’re here. And I ain’t seen you up this way in a very long time. That tells me something. Remember how you used to gambol in this direction when you still wore ribbons and skirts? You recall how trusting you was back then, all sunshine and desiring of sweets?”
She didn’t answer. She wondered how Billy managed to make it seem as though the air in his store was wood-smoked, even stupefying, when there was no fire to be seen or heard.
“They’re gonna kill your man, ain’t they? One side or the other? And you want to save him.”
“I’m not here to save anyone,” she said with some effort. She couldn’t afford to think of Hendricks, not even within the snail shell of her imagination. Billy would know. He would capitalize.
“You sure?” Billy angled the tip of his weaselish nose. He seemed to be jaunting behind his countertop, as if he were considering the first steps of a dance.
She nodded. “I’m not here about the families who are living in my fields either. I’m not asking your permission for that. Those people can stay as long as they like—and they can return whenever they want. I’ve made my decision.”
She thought she saw his confidence narrow, just a hair. “So you ain’t here for my protection? You’re not looking for a loan of any kind? How about we play a hand of cards just to test your luck? Some of us would like to wager on that house you live in and that ripe bottomland you lend to begging wanderers.”
She shook her head. She knew what happened to those who played cards with Billy.
“Then what the hell are you here for?” he asked, flat-footed again. “Buying something? Selling? Please tell me you’ve come to make good use of my … what would you call it … my judgment. Don’t tell me you’re thinking of leaving Billy Kingery out of your plans?”
He was sparring with her, singing some kind of caged bird tune because he wanted to. Nobody left Billy out. It wasn’t possible.
“Passage,” she said. “I just want passage, the same way I used to get it. The man’s letter needs to be delivered.”
There was a pause then. She’d become fairly certain there were no bargain men in the store. Yet she felt surrounded. The shelves that laddered all four walls loomed over her, some full, some empty. Several of the large, misshapen bundles on those shelves appeared, from the corners of her eyes, to be moving. She also smelled the predatory tang of feral cats—the smaller kind.
“Blankenship,” Billy shouted. “Get out here. Show yourself.”
A tall man, as thin and notched as fence wire, emerged from some pocket of gloom. He wore overalls that were soft and white at the knees, and he moved without a sound. His face appeared not to feature the muscles of expression.
“What do we charge for passage nowadays?”
The man said nothing. But she could feel the fingers of his appraisal, all ten of them, probing every crevice of her body. He had the eyes of a timber rattler, unlidded and empty. When he was done, he gave his boss what appeared to be a dismissive shrug.
“Hell yes, you can go back to sieving the mash or what have you,” Billy said. “I know you got better things to do. So do I. I just wanted to share this thigh-slapper with som
ebody. You used to have a sense of humor.” They watched Blankenship leave the store, as boneless as cold wind. Then Billy turned back to her, bemused. “That letter you’re delivering is the last song from a dead man, if you ask me. Things has gone cattywampus at your place, and you’re leaving? I didn’t think you had the gumption to travel no more. This fella must’ve wormed his way in deep if he talked you into going on the road. He sweet on you?”
She tried not to blink. “I made a deal.”
“Understood.” Billy kept an eye on her as he lifted what looked like a crystal thimble to his lips. He spent a moment nuzzling the thimble, although he didn’t sip from it. She couldn’t say how the thimble had gotten into his fingers in the first place. “I made those rules. I know you got to honor the deal. But you don’t know who you’re working with, sunshine. You got no idea.”
“His name is Hendricks. That’s all I care to say.”
“I know what his name is. I know everything about him. He showed up and laid out all his woes to you, didn’t he? Confessed to many a crime? He’s the kind of man I could put to good use, don’t you think?”
She said nothing. She could not drag Hendricks into the negotiation. Billy would either provide passage or he wouldn’t. There was no use arguing.
“I bet he didn’t tell you he’d been in these parts before. Back when I was getting started. Before your sister done me wrong.”
“My sister never—”
“Hush up,” he hissed, and she knew she’d begun to sail into the kind of dangerous waters she’d hoped to avoid. Billy Kingery never showed a temper. He claimed he didn’t have one. “You shut your mouth. That sister of yours made me a promise. She said she’d midwife those twin babies of mine, and she didn’t. She lied.”
“My sister couldn’t help your babies,” she said, trying to reel her head back onto her shoulders, damn Billy Kingery for fogging up the atmosphere like he did. “Once she saw what was happening, once she understood that your wife—”