by Alyson Hagy
“He knows the names of birds,” the boy said.
“Birds? Maybe he does. He knows how to pay attention in the world. I saw that. But, with me, he cared only about his letter.”
“Letter?” The boy acted as though the very word was new to him.
“Yes,” she said, rubbing her fingers together almost fondly, despite the blood stippled between them. “I used to write letters. Just the way people wanted.”
“They didn’t write them on their own? To save theirselves time?”
“They didn’t,” she said. “They don’t. It’s not really about saving time. It’s more about laying out the language of all you’ve done or failed to do, all you’ve said or failed to say, in front of another person. For a long time, I was that other person.”
“And what are you now?”
“Tired,” she said. “Finished. I feel very finished.”
“Your man will be sad to hear that.”
“Do you think so? Do you think a man like that can be sad? He got what he wanted. He has his letter. Or I have it, somewhere inside of me. I’m supposed to deliver it to a crossroads beneath a great rock where he wants to meet me. He knew someone there years ago. That person needs to hear his words, and I promised to speak them for him. I’m not sure why I’m doing it.”
“Does it feel terrible or wrong?” the boy asked. “What you’re doing?”
“I can’t tell,” she said. “It feels like it’s the only choice I have.”
The boy smiled one of his pondering smiles. “Maybe your man will fix you up when we get to him. There’s been a lot of hurt to you after … after going through that log. More than I reckoned.”
“Nobody needs to fix me up,” she said, giving her own kind of smile. “I thank you for your concern.”
“But you want to get to him, right? Maybe I was supposed to ask you that. Because it seems like he’s mostly a good man. You like him. My mama used to say it’s hard to be a good man. She said you had to work hard to stay ahead of the devil. Is that why you need to see your man? To stay ahead of the devil?”
“I can’t … say.” She felt something chilly and intricate, something like a fisherman’s net, draw tight around her heart. “I’m walking in this direction because you told me to. That’s all I can recall.”
“Do you love him?” the boy asked.
“I … I don’t know. If this is love, it doesn’t feel like enough.”
The boy rambled ahead, suddenly distracted, one hand over his brow to shade it from the setting sun. “I reckon we’re close,” he said, speaking as if he hadn’t heard her at all. “He could be over that next hill.”
“Don’t let me stop,” she said, calibrating the doomed numbness in her legs. “I’m getting weaker. Don’t let me stop for anything. Please.”
“I could carry your sack for you,” he said, bright-eyed.
“You could,” she said, gasping once more. “It’s not heavy. I’ve only got this one thing inside it, a … a present … from a friend.”
“What present?” the boy asked.
She barely noticed the slow, frigid caress that ribboned along the back of her neck. She was tired. So tired. “Just this,” she said, shedding the frayed and dirty sack she’d carried from the start. “Look. You can see.”
She was surprised how quickly the boy reached for the red trumpet, at his uncharacteristic greed.
It is almost the oldest story in the book: two children with the same parents, the older talented at one thing, the younger talented at another. The scale of good fortune should accommodate such a balance. Except siblings aren’t weights on a scale. They are levers for envy. Thus, Cain murdered Abel and spent the rest of his days wandering a wilderness of his own making.
There was also the incident with Billy Kingery’s youngest wife. There were many Kingery wives at the time. And their children had been strangely spared by the sicknesses. Some said the Kingerys were protected by their upright natures. Others said it was their secret diet. Nevertheless, the newest wife, a Redford girl brought all the way from Tidewater, requested a midwife for her lying-in. She was carrying twins. And although much of the news regarding the fevers was kept from her, she sensed the long-fingered possibility of trouble. She’d been raised with many superstitions in Tidewater.
By that time, children were dying in the womb. Her sister hadn’t delivered a living baby in weeks. And it was best if the womb was encouraged to expel the dead child before true labor began. Otherwise, the mother fell prey to fever too.
The Redford girl wasn’t given a choice. Nor was her midwife. Billy Kingery let it be known they must deliver the babies alive. The girl was courage itself, but the twins never took a single breath in the misery that was their mother’s world. Billy Kingery, it was said, remained outside the girl’s chamber until the last of her dying wails faded into the dawn.
She taught herself how to make new paper—bleached and clean—from what had been used by others. Grocer’s accounts. Ledgers of animal husbandry. The bewildered scraps of clerks and guarantors. Her father’s obscure books of surgery. She pulped the old pages and laid the new ones out to dry, like monstrous petals, on screens she framed with her own hands. She devised inks and traded for parchments. No one tried to stop her. She was home from Fishersville. The crime of her imprisonment was an embarrassment to them all.
Schooled in foreign languages. Tutored in depravities.
Everyone for miles, especially the scholarly types who introduced themselves to her father with the hope they could study her, marveled at how quickly she appeared to recover from her ordeal. They admired her handwriting and her silence. Curious and implicated, they began, one by one, to request surreptitious samples of her work.
My Love,
Your beauty is destined to outlast us all, as it will outlast the diamond parade of the stars. Sine qua non. Coeur de mon coeur. Do me the favor of meeting me …
Dear Sir:
All I request of you is calm. There is no better cure for arrogance than stillness. Please collect yourself, and consider. The wagons of grain you sent east are safe with me as long as we are able to reach a refreshed agreement …
Our Mother—
We miss you.
Please return home to us. You misunderstand.
We didn’t mean the words we said. You mustn’t believe our cousin’s lies …
They folded their papers, and slipped them into private pockets, and thought to themselves: she writes as well as a judge. Or better.
They came sooner than she expected. And there were only two of them—one man, one woman—both cloaked against the night. The constant chirr of locusts slipped through the doorway with them, that heartless anthem of insect breeding, that bitter reminder of the insensate business required to keep a species alive. Her predictions had come true. The government had decided to stop them. But what the government truly sought was procedure, not confrontation. It hoped to put a halt to gatherings like the one in their fields so families would resign themselves to the official camps, the sanctioned ones, where fortitude, rather than purported miracles, would maintain the legitimacy of those who pretended to be in charge.
“My sister hasn’t purported anything,” she said to the largest agent, a woman who stood wide-legged and pie-faced before them as though she’d been elected to her task.
The man said, “You wrote to say she calls herself a prophet, a savior. Remember? Remember your letter to us? You don’t need to say more. Changing your claims might lead to your own arrest, and you don’t want to go to prison again, do you? That’s what you told us. You requested seclusion and control of your days alone—which we’ve promised—in exchange for your testimony. We’ve brought the supplies you asked for, the pigments and the parchments and the nibs.”
“You are,” the woman added, “an infamous criminal. Everyone will understand why you’ve done what you’ve done. It’s to be expected.”
But her sister didn’t understand. She stood surrounded by those who
had come to fetch her and the one who had bargained her away—she stood there in her frayed gown and exhausted modesty, and her eyes began to blaze with tears.
“What are you doing? What have you done? All we need with the children is more time. There will be a cure. There has to be.”
“You told me not to stop them.”
“And so you summoned them instead, as if they’re a harmless summer tune? Have you forgotten what you mean to me, how you’re all I have in my life? You’re ending our work before it’s finished.”
“I … I …” For once, she could not find the words.
“Please,” her sister said, dropping to her knees so she could embrace her traitor’s rigid ankles. “Please take back what you’ve told them, what you’ve written. We can sort this out. I’m not ready for this to end. Give us—give me—more time.”
But she didn’t retract one syllable. In fact, she couldn’t speak at all. Standing above her sister, she found she was able to measure the sharing and not sharing between the two of them more perfectly than ever. She could calibrate the jambs and lintels of unfairness and character and impulse that separated them, and would separate them forever. And she knew it would be useless to cry out that her sister was being taken away, that someone was arresting the only person who had healed anything at all.
For who would hear her cries above the ceaseless gnashing of the locusts that clung to the grasses and the trees? No one in the camp across the creek believed in her. They believed only in her sister. She was merely the woman who stooped next to her candles at night, recording, revising. Although she had bowed her head while parents groaned and wept, although she had cradled hundreds of listless children, they knew she wasn’t truly one of them. While she harrowed the alphabet with her inks, they formed themselves in lines near the road bridge in order to touch the hem of her sister’s garments as she passed. They burned the bodies of their children under the unblinking phases of the moon. They burned and burned and burned. Their faces were smeared with the terrible ash. Their tongues were sour with it.
“So it will be,” her sister said, finally wiping her eyes and filling the curdled hush between them. “I accept this. It’s … soon. I thought we had more time. I wanted you to care about them as much as I do. But I was selfish. I didn’t take into account what happened to you in that place they called a school, the way you’ve learned to … distance things. Please don’t second-guess your choice. When your conscience allows it, remember that I loved you.”
And they departed. The body was not returned to the brick house above the creek, although the end was rumored to have been mercifully swift. A silken noose. A solemn drop.
She, herself, sat alone for a long time in the upper rooms of the house with the flinty eye of the family telescope trained directly upon her face.
Days later, an infant, child of those who would eventually caravan as the Uninvited, survived his fever.
From the letter she sometimes wrote to herself: There is no weakness in understanding you are weak. Count the days that have been taken from you. Count them again. Then let them fly as birds unto the rocky shore.
“Carolina boy, give it back to me, that trumpet. I’m not as final as I thought.” She spoke through a fresh, surging pain in her belly.
“I don’t think so,” he said, swinging her sack as if it were nothing more than knot and thread. “That’s not the plan.”
“The plan is to walk to the crossroads in the mountains,” she said. “We’ve agreed on that. You’re leading me there.”
“Plans change,” he said.
“Who are you?” she asked, trying to steady herself on legs that were weaker by the moment. Her head was beginning to feel irreparably loose on her neck. “What’s your name?”
“You learn slow,” he said, looking at her with eyes as perforated as beads. “I know you’re hurt, so I been trying to explain. I laid down the story as clear as skunk scent, but you still keep losing track. Maybe I should’ve talked about my family more. That might’ve helped. I could’ve said my mama was a fine woman who was handy with pie crusts. I could’ve said everybody cherished the way she sang a lullaby. Maybe you would’ve recognized me if I’d said all that, because you know about my mama. I told you about her when we first met at your house—how she couldn’t stop the weeds that took root in her children, especially her oldest boy. How he left home early, that boy did, and when he come back after wandering up and down the country, he was much changed.” The boy took a deep breath, then winked one of his disturbing eyes. She was most confused by his voice. It had begun to sound older to her. And familiar.
He continued. “The boy weren’t entirely welcome when he come back to his family. His daddy wouldn’t have nothing to do with him. The boy was said to drink and gamble. He was also known to be generous in his way, bringing silks to his sisters and a whale-tooth comb to his mama who was celebrated far and wide for the luster of her hair. But his mama never used that comb. She give it to her favorite preacher who ground it to dust under his heel instead. And his sisters burned the silks, which had taken him many months to earn, in a fire stoked by cow dung gathered by his daddy.
“The boy stayed near home for a while, a prisoner of the ties that bind. He began to make a name for hisself with dice and cards and his handsome manners. It weren’t long before he was the beau of the prettiest girl around.
“But he carried pure destruction in his soul, the boy did, or that’s what folks began to say about him. He took to gambling in bigger towns for higher stakes, sometimes losing but winning often enough to keep hisself in good clothes and liquor. He even took to wagering the woman he loved, unbeknownst to her. It was a terrible risk. He knew that. He felt the terror. But the lure of piled gold was greater than any fear. He lost the woman once or twice but he always won her back—her and more—before the night was through.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“Because you know what a boy, a man, like that does next,” he said. “You wrote it in your letter. A man like that wagers the woman he loves and falls asleep drunk and wakes up to find his house empty and his woman gone, collected by another. He knows he’s supposed to rage wild with grief and revenge, but he don’t. Grief ain’t at the heart of him.”
“What’s your name?” she said again. “I want to know it.”
“You know my name,” he said, his young mouth a dollop of pity. “You know who I am or, more rightly, what I’ll turn into when I’m fully growed. You put my story down on your precious paper hoping it would do me some good to have it all laid out, admission after admission, sin up against sin, wrong linked to wrong. But I can’t be changed much by what’s on a piece of paper—whether I’m young or old. I sold the first girl I loved, and she ran from me and my fat-fingered creditor both, and she threw herself off a high rock for all the world to see. She killed herself without another word between us. And you know what I done then? I come down out of these mountains and went off to the next town and gambled and sold some more until nothing could make me stop the selling. I even managed to sell you for a fair price, although we ain’t got to that part yet. You might not recognize this child’s face of mine, but you know the true shape of me. You know who I am.”
And she did. Oh, she did, this gray-eyed Carolina boy. At some point, long before she met his adult body, he’d begun to call himself Hendricks—a name that now catapulted itself forward from her disassembled memory. He’d told her the story of his life, or as much of it as he could stand to tell before its misdeeds fully weighed him down. She had written out that life and memorized its every word. For him, she had left her imperiled home in an attempt to deliver the brittle gift of absolution. For the Hendricks she knew, she had even dabbled in the unbounded economy of what some would call love. And she’d been fooled. He had schemed her.
“So it’s over and done with,” she said, feeling a queer, watery flutter in her legs. She looked sorrowfully at the trumpet, which was now quite out of reach. “Your
visit to me was never about the letter I could write for you. You lied to me, and I believed those lies. There’s no one at the crossroads who needs to hear me speak the words in your letter. You don’t even care if I get there. The girl you loved is dead. No one is waiting for you to confess a single deed. You’ve lured me out of my house, probably to destroy me.”
“You kept your promise to me,” the boy said, still pink and young in the cheeks. He seemed uneasy with her summary of things. He’d begun to pick at the knot on his trousers. “You been honorable. You tried to carry them words you wrote—and what they signify—from one place to the next. After all the walking we done together, and all the talking, I want to call it a fair swap even though you never got to fully finish your part in things. You been good to Mr. Hendricks, and good to me, too, every chance you had. But, yes ma’am, there was other trades on the offer sheet. There was other people, powerful ones, who wanted what they wanted. You had to be tricked out of your house. There was a wicked plot for it all. And now we’re nearly done.”
He took the red trumpet and placed it to his ageless lips.
“Stop,” she whispered, suddenly aware that something had begun to stir within the ruined space of her belly, something wide-feeling and warm that coiled itself upward through the defeat that had been sluicing along her bones. It was a powerful force, this coiling. It heated her throat and pressed itself against the deep root of her tongue. “Stop a minute. There’s one more thing I need to say, a piece I’ve remembered. I have some words for you. Please. These words. They go like this: At this time in the valley of the river they call the Blackwater …” And she closed her bleary eyes, hoping the boy would allow her to go on. Hoping against hope. The boy paused. He lowered the trumpet just an inch and looked squarely at her with his saltpeter eyes. This, she realized, was the true reason for her journey. The letter. Hendricks’s letter was inside her. She had it with her, every word. And it was coming forth. She was telling it. This was what the council had wanted her to be prepared for. The letter knew Hendricks’s future in ways his boy self did not. She had written it under the man’s direction, and she could recite it now, detail after detail, and pray the boy would listen and glean and act to change his future. It was all a writer could do: lay out the consequences of a person’s choices. Let him hear it all, she thought, her tongue furling with desperate eloquence. Let him listen to the story. Let him hear exactly who he is—and who he might yet become—before he decides which notes to blow.