by Alyson Hagy
She had scavenged the Kirkbride house when her sister was still alive, seeking wallpaper and bits of window dressing for their own use. Others had done the same. Some had left muddy boot prints and rude coils of excrement. Some had left more direct signs of despair—scorched stairwells and fist-sized holes in the walls.
And here she was now, unsure how she’d gotten to the Kirkbride farm from the river. She levered herself upright on her elbows, muscles quaking. The dirt she lay on seemed to understand its limits better than she understood hers.
Somewhere in a rodent maze of memory she recalled that she and the man Hendricks had agreed to meet each other again. But where? Was it the place where he’d grown up as a boy? Was it a disreputable roadhouse or a bustling public square? Her recollection, it seemed, had become as unreliable as her ailing body. She remembered Hendricks urging her to believe in him—despite his history of violence and double-dealings. He would meet her. He would slip between his enemies and find her. Hadn’t he been a brigand all his life?
Two days. That was all she had. She remembered that much. The sun went upside down in her eyes when she tried to measure its implacable trajectory. Its light was fine and clean, ground sharp on the spinning grindstone of autumn, but she had no way to tell how much time had passed since she crossed the river in the wobbly canoe. She felt a fly tap at her lips with its pronged legs. It wanted to do its business in her mouth. She tried to find the strength to wave it away. She had sworn to meet the man Hendricks, but she couldn’t remember why. Billy Kingery, that criminal of commerce, had given her only two days to make the journey. Then Billy had fed her something to slow her down. He might as well have hammered a ball and chain to her ankle, damn him for his false haggling. If she didn’t find help, or a new body with stronger legs, she would never make it.
They began to bring their children, sick and not sick, to the fields below the house. They came from everywhere, even the quarantined towns.
In Hendricks’s seven-page letter she had written this, just as he asked: There is no harbor for the man who slays his kin, or next of kin. There is no fortress but the fortress of lies, which is constructed of empty breath and cannot survive true assault, for the man who puts himself above the sanctity of others.
The last chapter of their trouble began when a very small girl arose from her sickbed, laughing and singing, if only for a little while.
The beagle dog turned into a boy. Or that’s how it seemed to her. She was unsure of herself and very ill. When she tried to vomit, all that came forth was a wind that tasted of bats and their crowded caves. She found the boy napping next to the Kirkbrides’ cistern where she had crawled in search of water. His round, bare belly was exposed to the sun in a posture the beagle preferred.
“You got to come this way,” the boy said to her, gesturing. “I can take you where you need to be.” He wore woolen trousers cinched tight with rope. He had serious gray eyes.
She knew the boy was right. The Kirkbride farm, what was left of it, was close to Goggin’s mill. The mill would be cloudy with the hefting of harvested grains and corn. Billy’s bargain men lunched and gambled and traded insults at the mill. If she took the road to the mill, she’d likely get no farther.
If she headed into the mountains, she might have a chance.
Her sister said, “We can offer comfort. We can shade their eyes from the sun. And bathe their bodies while we have clean water.”
“But the children die,” she argued. “They all die, no matter what we do. I don’t know if I can bear it. We’ve been at it for weeks and weeks. I follow you. I imitate you every way I can. But I don’t have your skill for failure. We haven’t accomplished anything.”
“We’re providing care, and that’s worth more than you know. You’re helping me.”
“They’re calling it a miracle,” she said, reminding her sister of the bind they now found themselves in. “One hour of relief for one little girl, and nobody wants to leave this place. They’re saying you’re a healer, the angel they’ve been waiting for. They plant themselves along the creek like pleading stalks of wheat. And they spread the word. If they stay, we’ll be starved out. Overwhelmed. Don’t you think they should obey the quarantine?”
The two of them had discovered the uncomfortable truth that one sister possessed what the other did not: beneficence, and a tolerance for helplessness. Neither of them was afraid of death. They had sat by too many cots and pallets for that. But the older sister liked to rock the cradle of fate. That was her comfort.
“I don’t mean to trap you in what’s important to me,” she said.
But she did. That’s exactly what she meant.
Hendricks’s letter also declared: I have been made fat from the labors of others, from the kindnesses and charities of those who meant me no harm. I have often meant harm. I am carved from the rock of it.
In the dream she is lying beneath an elm tree at the crossroads Hendricks has described to her, a place she’s never seen. Her father knew it. The crossroads was a landmark during his travels, famous for its location near the headwaters of their river and for the towering pinnacle of granite that rose sharp and bare for all to see. It took more than a full day to ride there. The cattle paths and cart routes in the area were barely maintained. People didn’t care to live close to one another that far up in the hills. And there were no maps. So the crossroads became a convenient meeting place for those who chose to meet. The government, her father was told, hanged accused traitors from the rock, brutal acts the natives never forgave or forgot. Tormented lovers had also leaped from those heights. Many times. Everybody knew those tales.
In the dream there is no fire, although she wants one. The roots of her teeth are cold. And there is no Hendricks, either, despite her plans and expectations. She is strangely hungry and can’t help thinking of salt. The elm provides a huge bower, firm shelter from wind and rain. Somewhere within the amphitheater of her mind she knows elms are gone from the world. Toppled by fungus and blister, elms survive in the mountains no longer. But there is one here, bowing over her, also waiting.
The dream requires a strange propriety. Girls come to her in a line, one after another, in their crisp white dresses or peony-layered skirts. It is a kind of receiving line, without greetings or festivity. Without capering promise. The girls come and come. Their oval faces are stitched with solemnity, eyes closed like masks, mouths held bloodless and straight. Only one girl carries a letter. Its pages are clasped tight in her milky fingers. She looks like all of the other girls. It is up to her, the intruder resting in the importunate shadow of the elm, to take the letter.
She knows the letter is from Hendricks.
She reaches for it greedily.
When she opens it, the paper begins to burn.
“The government will come for us,” she told her sister, peering through the shutters at the trammeled road that continued to present them with responsibility and turmoil. Families arrived day and night. They didn’t ask for much. They believed their children could ward off fever by merely laying eyes on the humble, ministering saint who lived in the brick house. But they remained in the fields, hundreds of them. The younger sister had become so anxious her face was splotched with a rash. There were large, weeping sores on her arms. “They’ll take us away because they haven’t been able to save a single child. They can’t allow even a hint of success to survive alongside their incompetence. People are leaving their homes. The government needs control.”
She couldn’t say what she wanted to say. That she was suffocating within the selfless atmosphere of her sister. That she had become afraid of who she would become if she was arrested and locked away again. Or even if she wasn’t.
She woke in a hollow log. Thirsty. Encased. Sticky-tongued. A coffin, she thought, as panic clotted her lungs. Billy Kingery has tucked me alive in a coffin just like the colonel threatened to do when I sassed him. Her pulse began to clang like a bronze bell between her ears. Only the fingering of a breeze at her ankles
kept her from shrieking out loud.
Maybe it wasn’t a coffin after all.
With effort, she wriggled out feet first. She had no idea how she’d gotten inside the log. The last thing she remembered was walking a rocky path with the gray-eyed boy. Now it was dark. And there was no boy. No dog. The ache in her head had subsided into a dry, rattling sensation without rhythm or reward. Her belly, however, protruded heavily before her. Whatever was inside her remained hotter-than-blood hot. And it was growing.
No boy. No dog. A frigid light cloaked the trees that swiped at the sky above her. The moon was bruised with the tracks of animals she couldn’t name. She guessed she was somewhere in the blue hills west of where she’d been born. How much time had passed? She didn’t know. She recalled she was supposed to be in a hurry to get somewhere, somewhere the man known as Billy Kingery didn’t want her to go, but she couldn’t remember why. Where was she now? Where should she be headed? It seemed that everyone, perhaps even Billy Kingery, had left her to fend for herself.
She squatted close to the nut-ripe loam beneath her feet, wrapping her belly with her hands, feeling it throb. She listened carefully to the sounds that coasted along the perturbed currents of the night. Then she heard them, the slow notes of a mountaineer’s midnight hunt, the mournful hallooing of a pack of hounds on the scent. True hounds. These would not be the cast-off animals she’d learned to feed and curse and muster during her years alone at the brick house. These would be the canine servants of Billy’s wastrel bargain men, creatures trained to be slavering and direct. Surely, they were searching for her.
“So that’s it,” she said aloud, somewhat uplifted by the sound of her own voice. “The time Billy Kingery gave me must be gone.” Even in her woozy state, she didn’t have to wonder why Billy’s men were tracking her. She hadn’t met the terms of her deal with Billy. That was the first fact. But a life, as Billy claimed, was also consequence deserved. And she was about to reap her consequences, every one. She couldn’t deny that she had betrayed her very own sister, the person whom she was supposed to cherish and protect above all others, and she’d done it to save herself. Betrayals had to be accounted for on the almighty ledger. As did failed promises. Working her way to her feet, she sensed the larval shape of an additional regret wriggle deep within her body. What if she didn’t get wherever she had been going? What if someone was waiting for her, someone who needed her? “I guess it’s best to give the hounds a good run no matter what,” she said, hefting the belly she knew would slow her down. “There’s no reason to make it easy.” She remembered a story she’d heard once, about a dog bitch that leaped gallantly, and fearlessly, to its death after it cornered a mountain cat. She would die like that bitch had.
“Are you watching me, sister?” she asked, raising her chin toward the unlidded sky. “Do you want it to end this way?”
“You’re right,” her sister said, rubbing her sunken eyes. “The government will come for us even though we haven’t done anything wrong. The camp council says someone has reported us. Someone has told the government I’m calling myself a prophet. You know that’s something I would never do.”
Prophets become martyrs, she said to herself, even when they don’t choose to.
“Don’t stop them from taking me if it comes to that,” her sister said, pacing their cluttered parlor. “You need to keep working if you can. You know what to do. It’s the children who matter.”
“You got to keep going.” The gray-eyed boy was suddenly at her elbow again, smaller than before but very assured. He was dressed in country linens no more substantial than the mountain mist that had begun to rise from the damp and blackened ground. His face bore the same pallor as the moon’s. “You left a good man in danger at your house,” the boy said. “He needs your help. Don’t you remember him?”
“Go on,” she said, deciding the boy was a figment of her ruined, hopeful mind. She was keeping her ears tuned to the song of the hunting hounds. They were still at least one ridgeline away. “There’s no reason for you to be here. I don’t even recall how I know you or how I got here in the first place. All I know is my time is done.”
“He needs you.”
She turned to the child, exasperated. “Nobody needs me. I’m nothing more than live bait for Billy Kingery’s bargain men. You might want to step clear. I have fast hounds to sport with.”
“The log,” the boy said with his colorless lips.
She looked at him again.
“The log. Get back in the log. Crawl up as far as you can go. And don’t stop.”
“Who are you?” she asked, feeling something spin like a wooden top inside her bulging belly.
“I don’t know how to answer,” he said, shrugging. “I would if I could. I like you.”
“Into the log? Like a mouse into a snake hole? Look at me. I’m as swollen as a cow’s udder, getting bigger by the minute thanks to Billy Kingery’s foul magic. I won’t fit.”
The boy shook his shaggy head. “You got to keep going. It’ll … there will be some hurt to it. Maybe blood. But there ain’t no other way.”
She stared at him as if he held the butcher’s blade himself.
“Lean down here,” the boy said, miming what he wanted her to do. “I know you want to quit. Your strength is dwindled. You think there ain’t nothing to live for. But you got to trust me. There’s a thing you promised to do, and you got to do it. Put your ear down here. Listen. I ain’t fooling, I swear. The man you care about is calling your name.”
At the prison called Fishersville, she was fed twice a day. Her morning meal was doled out by bull-shouldered women who spoke not a word as they boiled and flayed and hashed. There was sawdust in the porridge. Purse leather was fried as meat. Her evening meal, on the other hand, was personally scripted by the colonel who wrote it out in pen and ink on a fresh sheet of paper every day. He said he wanted her to appreciate preparation. He wanted her to know the pleasures of forethought and control.
It was a secret he shared only with her.
The high mountains were right before them, layered like purple leaves against a flattened, fading sky. They continued to work their way west, the direction she somehow understood she was supposed to travel even though she could not measure how quickly they were moving, nor how far they had to go. But she knew the slippery red clay of the fields that had once flourished under the care of the Kirkbrides and the Poindexters and the few Altices who had given themselves over to the plow had fallen far behind. She thought she could sense the icy headwaters of a familiar river. Perhaps her true destination did lie ahead. If so, it was a man’s plaintive face that served as her guide, the brushing promise of its mouth, the way its gray eyes gazed into hers despite their many doubts.
The boy in the country linens was talkative. He said he’d been born in Carolina and hoped to return there someday. He was a good walker, far better than she was on the stony foothill paths given her condition. She remembered very little about how she’d gotten from the hollow log to here—wherever here might be—except the pain. The pain had been merciless. There wasn’t enough left of her afterward to serve as any kind of compass. Only the boy kept her going. He chattered, and he took her arm when the trail was muddy or slant, and he didn’t comment on the smells of blood and organ that wafted from her. He was learning to read, he told her. He wanted to memorize the names of the birds he found in his books. It seemed like information a man could use, all those names—and he intended to travel the whole wide world someday, he did. His mama had taught him how to tell the difference between a bluebird and a bunting. Did she know such a thing?
“My mother loved buntings,” she said to him. “She thought their color was better than any bit of sky.”
The boy said he was learning his roots and herbs and berries, too. He was studying on them all. The red raspberries were better in Carolina, he told her. But the blackberries were sweeter in this country, if you knew where to find them.
“I can bring you some, if you want,
” he said. “It’s past the season, but that won’t stop me.”
She shook her head. She still had no appetite. Her transformed body wasn’t destined to eat ever again, although she didn’t want to say that to the boy.
He prattled on, telling her a story about a fort in the swamplands that had been built from timber cut and nailed by women. He’d been told a fort like that could never fall.
“How … how far do we have … to go?” she asked, wishing she’d traveled more so the valleys and peaks of the mountains might be familiar to her.
“I ain’t sure,” he said. “The sun’s ahead of us, so I know our direction’s right. It can’t be too hard to find the valley that river’s in. The man we’re looking for could be on the other side of the next hill.”
“I don’t really know the man you’re talking about. Do you understand that? I have no arrangement with him.” She paused again, sipping at the air, wondering how much more blood was likely to leak out of her, from between her sticky thighs. With her belly empty as it now was, it should have been easier to walk, but it wasn’t. “I heard someone calling my name from that log like you said I would, or I think I did, but there isn’t much that binds that man and me, maybe because I said so … so little to him, even when I had the chance.”