by Alyson Hagy
“She made a deal.”
“No, she didn’t. Because if she’d made a deal, you would have killed her for backing out of it, and that didn’t happen. You don’t tolerate trade breakers. Neither do I. My sister never lied to you. She told you she couldn’t save your wife without losing those babies, and you didn’t like what you heard.”
“Maybe I was just waiting,” Billy said, recovering himself with a series of short, sly breaths. “Maybe I knew you’d take care of her for me.”
His words hurtled past her ears like panicked birds. This was not a conversation she could afford to have. Mrs. Poindexter had been right about Billy. He was a man for whom everyone else was a stepping-stone or a pelt. He had eliminated all rivals and partners, benefiting most when influence was handed to him merely because he was the tidy, smiling man ready to receive it. Billy Kingery had never been voted into office. He’d never lowered himself to go directly to war. He let others do his hard work for him. It was all about weakness with Billy and how he waited for men and women to lay their own undoing at his feet even before he asked for it. She knew she mustn’t give in to him. But when she tried to turn away, she couldn’t. The floor felt like wet sand beneath her, inescapable sucking sand.
“Your man Hendricks has sold women and children all his life,” Billy said. “White, red, brown, black. He’ll sell anybody. Did he tell you about the liquor he soaks in and the gangs he’s led to riot? Did he tell you how he traded his most recent wife for almost nothing? That was less than a year ago.”
It was better to walk into the maw of Billy’s accusations than to run away from them. She tried her feet again. One step. Two steps toward the counter. Her staff should have been in her hands, but she couldn’t feel it. It seemed to have disappeared.
“He didn’t tell you about that, did he?” Billy said, regaining his preferred chortle. “He’s had several.”
“I’m only … I’m here for passage,” she said, failing not to gasp. Her right hand had finally reached the greasy pane of the counter. It was holding her up.
“You’ll get your passage,” Billy said. “I ain’t about to deny the girl who sucked my candy with her greedy little lips. But you’ll have to do something for me first.”
Here it was. The price that would dilute her blood to broth.
“Blankenship and me been cooking,” he said. “We been having a grand time. There’s apple butter. And squirrel gravy. And my granny’s famous chow-chow. But I also been making one of my special meals. You’ll have to sup.”
She shook her head.
“You ain’t got a choice,” Billy said, levering over the counter toward her, his teeth as bleached as gravestones. “You taste from the bowl, then you get your deal. You and that Hendricks don’t harm my men, and you don’t touch my property. You got two days to get that letter where it’s supposed to go, not a minute more. But you have to eat first.”
She shook her head again.
“You’re as stubborn as a murderer, I’ll say that. No wonder your sister found the long end of that rope. I’m halfway inclined to admire how independent you are. But somebody needs to teach you a lesson about independence. It might as well be me.”
He was gone before she could sift through her dizziness, disappearing behind thick curtains that led into another chamber she didn’t want to imagine. Somewhere beyond those curtains was the place where Billy’s kettles were said to roil day and night, sometimes filled with vegetables and meat, sometimes with things even the bargain men wouldn’t talk about. Billy made liquor too. There were stills inside his barns. And barrels of whiskey stored under guard in caves above the river. But this wouldn’t be whiskey on her lips. This would be a recipe meant to turn her inside out. It would be mischief and interference only. Maybe even poison. She had no choice. She had to taste.
“Just tell me which direction you’re headed with that precious letter,” Billy said, reappearing with a tray suspended between his downy hands. “South. East. Whatever. So I can spread my notifications. Then all you got to do is open your mouth and—” He burst into loud guffaws before he could finish.
“West,” she said, nearly choking on the bile that was already fingering its way up her throat.
“Well, of course. West. More mercenary types over that way, and lots of rovers. You’ll have to step light.” Billy lowered the tray almost daintily. The rhythm of a fiddler’s reel had returned to his conversation. She could hear the clogging in it. “No spoons, missy. I don’t abide spoons. I like to keep things simple.”
The container on the tray was shaped like a trough. It was miniature in size but as stained and crusted and lickspittle as anything found in a hog’s pen. The steam that wafted from it was heavy and foul.
“Don’t worry,” Billy Kingery said, leaning close, snuffling near the bare skin of her neck until her toes shivered. “I promise there ain’t no little trumpet boys in there. No cracked sister bones, either. You’ll have to digest them meals all by your lonesome. I ain’t saying you’ll like what I’ve cooked for you. I’ll be honest. You won’t like it at all. If you get sick, well, maybe you can find some other man’s sweet candy to suck on.” He paused just long enough to show her the sleek, fat maggot of his tongue. “I’m within my rights to do this,” he whispered. “You know the rules same as me. You’ve asked for a favor. You’ve also become a problem. You let foreign riffraff settle on your land. You irritate Alton Altice. You ain’t keeping things quiet around that house of yours.
“I don’t suffer problems for long. You got two days passage to get where you want to be, that’s all I’m inclined to provide. I recommend you think about your lying bitch sister every step of the way. I still got a score to settle with her.” He laughed across the crown of her head one last time. “I do thank you for the visit, though. You’ve plumb brightened up my day. Uncle Billy loves to tend his store. And he just lives to dish up what a body deserves.”
Enclosure
There was a story her family had told for as long as she could remember, and the story was this:
Once, when a great war was in its darkest days, a soldier found himself riding through the countryside. The soldier was wounded or lost or had deserted his post. The tellings varied. He had nothing left to feed himself, but he stopped at a stream, needing water for his horse at the very least. He found a woman there. She was poor. The war had taken nearly everything she had.
The woman had heard the cannon for days. She wanted more than anything to avoid soldiers and what they did to one another. But she, too, needed water.
The soldier asked for help.
He said, “I am poorly, ma’am. I do not seek to trouble you in any way. But if you had bread for me, I would be grateful. A few crumbs only, to keep up my strength.”
The woman felt she had no choice. She filled her bucket and led the soldier back to her hard-used home. Her husband had been gone for many months, fighting for the other side. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead. The soldier didn’t remind her of her husband. The soldier’s accent was thick and foreign. And he was very, very young.
She had cornmeal and one last egg. She baked the soldier a johnnycake.
He said, “You have saved me with your kindness, ma’am. I want to repay you. I have few things of value left in this world. My honor and my horse are two of them. Please gather your children so I may show them a third.”
The woman was afraid. She knew soldiers. She refused to gather her children. “I want nothing from you,” she said.
The soldier insisted. He behaved as though he was in the last useful moments of his life. “Please,” he said. “I mean no harm.”
The woman’s children, large and small, came in from the fields and the barn and the places they had been hiding. Their eyes were bright with wariness. They, too, had heard the cannon.
“I was brave once,” the soldier said, weeping. “I served a great general with valor. He awarded me this gold coin. I have kept it ever since, never meaning to spend it at all.
But it seems right to spend it now.” And he slipped the coin from his waistcoat. It was delicate and flashing. Its surface was engraved with the general’s long and famous name. The woman had never seen anything so rare.
“I leave it with you,” the soldier said, getting to his feet. “There’s no more valor in me. Feed yourselves as you’ve fed this stranger.” After placing kisses upon the pale cheeks of the woman’s daughters, he rode away.
But the woman did not spend the coin for much-needed food or seed or woolen cloth or news of her missing husband. She held onto it tight. At her death it went to her oldest child, who also passed it along, unspent. So it went from family member to family member. There was no valor in any of them. They had outlasted a war where brother fought against brother, where people had to choose a side. They never forgot that. What they invested in, instead, were the hard, forged links of memory.
Alphabet
She woke on a bare patch of ground. Her sack had been tossed nearby, torn open and emptied. The beagle was asleep in the splay of her legs.
The taste of Billy’s stew hadn’t killed her. But as she took stock of the weakness in her limbs and the bone-grinding ache in her skull, she understood Billy Kingery had had his way with her—as only he could. There was no food left in her sack. No knife or sharpened awl on her belt. All that remained was Estefan’s red trumpet and a fiendish burning in her stomach that felt like it would never cool.
She rolled to her knees, too dizzy to do more. When she looked at the sky, it undulated above her, striped and wavy, as fragile as a mussel shell. Where was she? How long had she been there? Was there any chance she’d been left plundered in Altice territory, served up by Billy for that family’s revenge?
There was every chance.
“Now would be a good time to offer me a magic carpet ride,” she said to the dog.
Once she could stand, she stumbled ahead like a three-legged fly on the only road she could find. The beagle sometimes followed her, sometimes led. It seemed to know the way.
They saw no one. She knew that shouldn’t be possible. The neat gates lining both sides of the road were latched. The fence boards were taut and tended. She thought she could hear, somewhere beyond arm’s length, the solemn breathing of a burro. Families lived here. There should be laundering and the banging of pots. There should be calls and sighs and the tuneless whistling of those left to churn the butter. But the food Billy had fed to her—whatever it was—had somehow erased, or veiled, great parts of the living world. She could tell cattle had recently been driven along the route she followed. And the dog was insistent in its examination of a set of iron-sheathed wheel marks. The dog smelled settlement. They were passing through a village of wants and needs, but she’d been made blind to it. There was no one she could ask for help even though she was desperate for a swallow of water. When a trio of brown sparrows became brave enough to flutter into her path, she fought the urge to join them as they pecked invisible seeds from the dust.
The river couldn’t come soon enough. The dog left her when its careening waters were finally in sight.
Yet the river was all wrong, too. It wasn’t the river she recalled. There were no twig-chewing bargain men at the toll shed. No jostling herds of animals. No purveyors of dried fish or corn. No registered whores. Everything Billy Kingery made possible for his compliant community had disappeared.
The route across the river was open, however. The narrow wooden footbridge was swaying from its ropes. And the wayfaring beagle, tricolored and streaming, waited for her on the other side.
But the beagle hadn’t used the footbridge.
You got two days passage. Don’t hurt my men, don’t touch my property. She could hear Billy’s voice hissing like hot steam in her ears.
Hendricks, if he were present, would tell her to stride across the bridge as if she owned it, then reap the consequences. The voice of her sister would undoubtedly suggest she fly.
“I’m coming,” she said to the dripping dog. She meant to shout the words, but they came out in a flensed whisper. The bridge wasn’t a safe option. She’d have to remember how to swim.
She was unlacing her boots, hands hurried and fearful, when she heard the sound of a trumpet. Its uneven music came to her as a series of honks followed by a happy sputter.
“Estefan?” she said, tottering to her feet. “Has Billy Kingery killed me so well I don’t even know it yet? Is my death prize that I get to hear you play again?” She was sure the sounds were coming from the murdered boy even though his red trumpet remained in the sack that lay beside her in the grass.
She peered across the minatory water, expecting to see the child on the other side. But it was only the mendicant dog. Squealing its impatient tune. Tossing its flop-eared head. The beagle was sending her a beagle message. Leaning over the current as far as she dared, she tried to see what it wanted her to see. And then she did. The half-hidden shape of a wooden canoe just downstream from where she stood, wrapped in shrubs and shadows. A canoe to carry her across.
“A boat’s as good as a carpet,” she said, still whispering. “Thank you, whoever you are.”
She said to her sister, “Do you think we will become good mothers?”
Her sister said it depended on whether they nurtured the souls of falcons or of ants.
She toppled out of the canoe when it struck land and drank river water until her belly swelled. But nothing inside her cooled, not one degree. She knelt in the slick, oozing mud trying not to moan or keen. There was sweet watercress within reach. And spindly parsley root. But she didn’t touch them. Billy Kingery had stolen her appetite along with her pride. Drinking from the river was all she could manage.
Her diligent, underspoken father had maintained a code when he journeyed for his work. He claimed that late arrival was often the test of a medical man—too late to help with the birth of a child, too late to halt the snake venom or the deadly bleeding caused by an ax. Yet her father never faltered. He tended to his patients even if it meant tending to their deaths. Care, he said, was a greater test than duty.
He cultivated the same attitude toward the vine rust that destroyed his blackberries and the years of drought that stopped the mayapple from blooming in the shade of his woods. He taught himself to withstand failure. Endurance has to be more than dignity, he told his daughters. You must have reasons to be strong.
But what were her reasons to be strong? Had she ever had any? With her sister turned spirit and Hendricks fading like the cry of a migrating flock in her ears, she’d been reduced to what? A lonely scribbler sustaining herself on the scraps of others’ pain? Billy Kingery’s slattern pawn? She told herself she had to keep moving. She couldn’t allow Billy to thwart her so easily—even if she was unsure of her capabilities. She would deliver Hendricks’s letter to the crossroads. That could be her goal and her revenge. If she earned any luck at all, she’d see the man Hendricks again, although what she would feel when she saw him she couldn’t say. Billy’s lies and bragging had confused her about many things, had turned her inside out in more ways than she could measure. Hendricks might fail her. Still, it felt right to go on.
Committed to putting one foot ahead of the other, she plunged her face into the water and drank again. When she felt what she assumed was a river pebble on her unhappy tongue, she spat into her hand and found a tooth in the middle of her palm instead. A child’s tooth, hollow and ivory.
Her sister hadn’t always been so serious. She had been engaged to a boy whose family dealt in tanned hides. The boy smelled of shoveled lime and, on some days, rinds of offal, yet he spoke very little and was willing to let her sister do as she pleased with the parts of himself he tucked into his britches.
But the boy died from a cough contracted during a rainy harvest. Her sister was stricken with grief. Their father also took the news poorly. He tried, but failed, to participate in the mournful funeral cortege with his usual poise. Friends described him as distracted and muttering and thin. He was, his daughters
soon discovered, managing himself through his own final days.
Her sister brooded long and hard on both losses. She took up the private intricacies of their father’s telescopes. She tended the most dominant of the hens. But she neglected everything else, especially her fragile, paroled sibling. This was new to the two of them: a spiritual rather than a physical separation. It did not go well. Before he closed his eyes for the last time, their father spoke severely, and incompletely, about what they owed to one another. It was terrible enough that his wife had succumbed to tumorous growths when the girls were small. Now he was leaving them too. He asked them to never relinquish sight of one another, not ever.
But the older sister crafted a private, iron-ribbed space that admitted no other person. She didn’t attend to her sibling—or even acknowledge her bewilderment and pain. This self-willed exile lasted until the day one of the Saunders men, black-bearded and long-striding, arrived from beyond the surveyor’s line at Bleak Hill to fetch medicine for an infant who was suffering from the fits. He didn’t know the doctor of the house had passed away. The older sister answered the door with her usual pitying vacancy. Moments later, she donned an overcoat and gaiters and a large felt hat, ready to follow the Saunders man high into the hills to a cabin whose low-pitched roof was already laden with snow, their father’s instrument bag gripped tight between her hands.
She woke in the shade of what had once been a barn. The sound in her head was not the sound of Mrs. Poindexter playing piano notes, not at all. It was the buzzing of flies, arrogant in their waistcoats of blue and green.
Her stomach felt as though it had become the pan for a clutch of roasting eggs. And something about Billy Kingery’s trickery had caused her left eye to leak. Its stray salts runneled into the stagnant pond of her ear. Nevertheless, she believed she knew where she was. The walls of the nearby house were familiar. She recognized their height and pattern. The Kirkbrides, adherents to their own strict religion, bonneted, buttoned, awash in offspring, had lived there for many years. Admirable farmers, they had occasionally come to her father for advice, although only for the minor ailments their faith allowed someone other than their god to treat. They paid her father with quilted cloth and watch chains woven from their own hair. They sent sprigs of dried lavender to the women in his household. The Kirkbrides had been among the first to leave the region, before the fevers began their relentless spread across the hills and valleys. They somehow gleaned, through their own codes of prayer, that the sickness carrying off their horses and mules might soon begin to carry them.