by Alyson Hagy
Correspondence
Sister,
Please forgive
the doll I stole
the kittens I starved
how mother loves me
how father loves me best
the dress I tore and its velvet buckles you liked so much
how I pretended you were invisible
how I wished you would disappear.
Please forgive
the nights I wouldn’t let you sleep
how I frightened you with stories.
Signature
She woke during the last hour of the day. What day? She didn’t know. She didn’t know how many nights had passed since she’d slithered from the belly of her house like a serpent driven forth by flood. Time had orphaned her. She had lost count of sun and moon. Everything had changed. The air she now breathed was thick with moisture and cool with the sympathies of twilight, and there was a careful wind whispering among the trees that leaned over her like attentive women of a certain age. The sky she could see was tasseled with reds and purples—the awning of a different, more credible world. She heard the clannish calls of geese, assembling one another in flight, rising. The questing whistle of a bobwhite yearned its way into her ears. She sensed houses too, or the remnants of houses. People had lived here once, and loved. Their desires still roamed the damp and sagging walls. For a brief moment, before her head cleared, she thought she heard the attenuated laughter of children dissipating with the daylight. The crossroads beneath the rock. She had gotten there. She had somehow made it to the place where all things intersected. Birds. Weather. The ambitions of men.
But he—the man she had traveled for—wasn’t with her. And she was glad of it.
When she tested her legs, she found she didn’t have the strength to stand. There was a needled feeling in the roof of her mouth, a flavor harsh and metallic, but she seemed to be herself again. Her body appeared to be her own—as emptied as it was. Even the familiar palsy in her left hand had returned. Physically, she was the woman she had always been before she met the man who called himself Hendricks. Except for the blood. There were pools of it beneath her, wet and warm.
She closed her eyes to rest them, and to slow the drumbeat of her pulse. This time, there was no dog to cajole or mystify her. And no boy to lead or mislead her. There were no followers gathered along a creek bank waiting for her next word. There was no final fragment of family, no shy petitioner hoping for a written letter, hat in hand. No one was waiting to construct a cairn in her memory—and that was how it should be. She didn’t deserve to be remembered. She had substituted her own salvation for acts of honest courage. She had made a habit, an ugly habit, of trading unruly human love for payments she could hold tightly in her hands. She had discovered the flaw in that arrangement, the lonely annihilation of it, so late, too late, and now her time would end as it must. She would reap the thin harvest she had sowed.
She thought of the girl who had been Hendricks’s first love, the one whose heart was so broken she had leaped from the highest rock she could find. Had the girl found peace as she took her wingless fall? Caring for the man called Hendricks was, it seemed, a cursed thing. She wondered how long it would take to complete her final plunge.
Not long, it seemed. They came quickly. And because they were not hiding themselves from anything or anyone, she could follow their approach. The orange fire of their torches flickered against the dark walls of their passage. She recognized the grinding roll of a two-wheeled cart, a large one. She wondered if they were rovers, members of the straggling bands that foraged the mountains to their own advantage. Rovers would strip her naked before she died. If they were Billy’s men, the ones with harnesses and hounds, her fate would be even worse.
The cart was drawn by some kind of pony, a plodding crossbreed imported with the hope it would survive a while. She had never seen one like it, sleek, with a coat the color of ripe peaches stirred with cream. Torchlight splashed across its rump like spilling water. It seemed to sigh with every step it took, as if its burden was constantly increasing. She didn’t recognize the pony, but she knew the men in the cart it pulled all too well. Death would have been far more welcome.
Billy Kingery sat upright at the reins wearing a topcoat as smooth and black as his hair. Hendricks was behind him in the rickety bed of the cart. Her Hendricks. The full-grown man who had plagued both her dreams and her designs. He was clad in the same patched jacket he had worn during their few days together at her house. The same smoke-tinted shirt. His body was slumped against the cart’s makeshift rails, his face swollen with drunkenness and misery. He was surrounded by several large sacks tied off with rope and string.
“Your two days is up and then some,” Billy said. He spoke loudly as if she lay a great distance from him. “It took me a good part of that time to get this far given my slow conveyance. I’m proud to say you was even slower.”
She couldn’t speak and didn’t want to. Everything observant within her had shrunk to a single burning pinpoint near her heart. Hendricks was riding with Billy Kingery? As if it hadn’t been enough to be swindled by him in boy form during the journey that was dream and not-dream, she had to see him now, when she was wrecked and dying? Not long before she had wanted to meet him at the crossroads. She had wanted it very much. But not with Billy. That wasn’t part of the arrangement. And he wasn’t trussed up as Billy’s prisoner either. Which could mean only one thing.
“Come on, talk to us, girl. We know you got things to say.” Billy halted the cart close to her feet. The pony, whose forelock covered its pony eyes, lowered its head in profound relief. “Two days passage,” Billy chortled. “I asked you not to touch my property or injure my men. You done both when you consorted with Hendricks here. You broke every rule I gave.”
She wanted Hendricks to look at her. She seemed to be propped against some sort of stone wall, stashed there like an abandoned bedroll. The torches lashed to the corners of the cart cast a blue, obscuring smoke. And the light of day continued to fade. Yet she needed Hendricks to see her—to acknowledge her—no matter what he’d done or not done, no matter what he knew or didn’t know about Billy Kingery and the ghost boy version of himself who had led her here. She wouldn’t allow him to pretend she didn’t matter. She tried to draw herself into a sturdier posture, but failed. Her spine wasn’t working right. And there was a dangerous, thudding ache between her legs.
“Don’t say you didn’t hurt nobody,” Billy continued, filling in her side of the conversation since she wasn’t playing her part. “Because you did. You brung on injury when this one took a arrow in your defense.” He gestured a gloved hand at Hendricks. “He’s been in my pocket more than a year, ever since he failed to pay the debt he owed on his most recent wife. He is mine. I tried to tell you how unreliable he was when you come ministrating into my store. I mentioned the wife he sold. She’s one of several he’s had—not that you was counting. But you didn’t take the hint. You thought you was on a mission that mattered. The fact is, nothing matters unless I say it does. I’m the one who makes the plans. You’ve damaged my property. You broke my rules. Ask him yourself.”
She raised her head again to Hendricks. He sagged like a man who was terminally inebriated. Soused with it. “I owed,” he said, not lifting his eyes. “It weren’t no more than that.”
The worst of it was how she would now have to cross the final span utterly alone. She wasn’t afraid of dying, or fighting to her death if she could find some way to do it. She would love to cost Billy Kingery a pound of flesh before she left this world. But, despite her self-imposed solitude, she had always hoped there would be someone—a tender member of the Uninvited, a substitute sister, maybe even a wandering fellow like Hendricks—willing to take note of her final hour. “Is the house all right?” she asked, trying to keep her voice dignified and smooth.
“The house is mine,” Billy said. “Just like I been planning. I told Alton Altice he can have it, but that arrangement won’t last any longer
than Alton does. His end will come soon. Then I can put somebody in there who will run things right. Or maybe I’ll let those scallywag boys of Alton’s piss all through the place, then light the match.”
“It won’t burn,” she said, coughing. The searing taste in her mouth had become stronger. It was as if there were coals glowing somewhere near the roots of her teeth, and Billy’s words were howling right across those coals. She wished she had a knife to throw. Or a sharp stone.
“It’ll burn if I say it needs to burn,” Billy said. “Same with that camp of vagrants or whatever you call them. There’ll be real fine entertainment in that field when the time comes to clean them out. A regular military display.”
“You said you’d give … you’re giving them people to me,” Hendricks blurted, stirring himself amid the crowd of sacks. “You said I’d get my pick. I need sales. They got children in that camp. Children bring a good price. I got more debts to pay.”
Billy eyeballed his woeful companion. “I said a lot of things. Some is truer than others. We’ll get you sorted when the time comes, don’t you worry.”
“But you promised—”
Billy slapped Hendricks so quickly she didn’t even see it. She could hear it, however, the crack of a gloved hand across an unready face. She heard it several times.
“I promised you’d be free when we was done. That’s all. Free and clear. Anything else you claim is part of some tale you been telling inside your pitiful drunkard’s head. Did you ever explain to this woman what put you in prison the first time? With all that sweet lover’s time to talk, all that confessing and manliness you acted out in front of her so you could get her to trust you—did you ever tell her how you got your start?”
She saw Hendricks paw at his face. The letter she’d written for him had accounted for many crimes. But he hadn’t spoken of his time in prison. There were parts of himself he hadn’t shared, not even with her. She had been bewitched by him, nonetheless. Worse yet, she had failed to peg him as a servant—a spy—of Billy Kingery. As bad as he was, she hadn’t believed he was capable of that.
“I want you to know why this is happening,” Billy said, facing her again. “I want you to appreciate my plan. It’s a fact I covet your house and land. And I’ll take revenge on your dead sister any way I can. She cost me a wife and two boy babies, the most pitiful innocents I ever seen. But this is mostly about how things have got to go in this country, to make things work right again. Gathering and organizing. Barter and trade. This is about showing people how they got to live—together.”
“It was debt,” Hendricks mumbled from between his swelling lips. He was without his hat, his head looking more narrow and carved-on than ever. She saw that Billy allowed him to keep a jug close at hand. It seemed to be his only ally. “I owed.”
“We all owe,” she said.
“Some more than others,” Billy said, laughing out of one side of his white-toothed mouth. “You was harder to pry out of that house than your sister was, I’ll give you that. But I found my bait when I needed it. A letter. You gave it all away for this man’s goddamned letter.”
Hendricks stopped his swaying, if only for an instant. He was a wretch and as good a liar as she’d ever met, but he wasn’t immune to mockery. She could see that.
“Maybe it was worth it,” she said.
“Ain’t nothing worth bleeding in the road like a butchered hog,” Billy said, peering down at her. “Look at you. I’ve seen saggy-tit sows die with less mess. You don’t got much time left.”
She planted her hands on either side of her body and propped herself up as straight as she could manage. “Then it’s good … it’s a good thing I finished what I started,” she said. “The letter was delivered.”
Billy scratched at his shiny head with a glove. “Hush up. You ain’t had time to deliver nothing but your own self right here. The girl he loved killed herself. Her bones is with the worms. You got nobody to give a letter to. A paper like that ain’t got no power, anyhow. I’ve took everything you own. That’s the only score I’m keeping.”
She let him talk. Men who were used to getting what they wanted yammered. They believed people needed to hear all the words they chose to say. The colonel at Fishersville had been a yammerer. And it had finally cost him. A flat-chested ten-year-old had stabbed him in the black hole of his ear with a needle while he was delivering one of his bare-assed monologues. Billy Kingery could speechify all he wanted, but Hendricks, perched on the cart, was listening only to her. She knew it.
“I can’t … I won’t share the details of another man’s deal.” She tried not to cough between her words. “It’s not allowed. But the letter was memorized and … and delivered. Ask him. He knows it. He believes me.”
“Frog shit,” Billy said. “I ought to get down from here and shovel you into your grave right now.”
“Please do,” she said, closing her eyes again. “I’d consider it a favor.”
“What are you saying?” Hendricks asked, half-standing in the cart.
“I think I understand it now.” She tried, once more, to pull herself upright. Once more, she failed. The blood beneath her had spread as wide as a bridal skirt. “I was supposed to … to hurry to this place. But you knew I wouldn’t find anybody, even if … if I got here.”
“Her family’s been gone a long time. Mine, too,” Hendricks said, his voice fading.
“I might be getting tired of this,” Billy said, pantomiming a yawn. “I might be ready to end this and get back home.”
“There ain’t … none of them left,” Hendricks said, lowering himself and his jug to the floor of the cart. His eyes looked like bore holes in his head. “I’m the last one on this earth.”
“I met a boy on the road,” she said. “I think you’d know him.”
“That trumpet boy is dead,” Billy said, impatient. “My man Hendricks here killed him in a blink. No mercy. No thinking. Which is how it has to be.”
“Lots of boys are dead,” she said as loudly as she could. “But not this one. You … you know who I’m talking about, Hendricks. Tell him. Tell Billy Kingery who heard me recite your letter.”
“I never told her about us,” Hendricks said to Billy, standing again. The cart jolted under his movement. The sacks inside seemed to lean toward him, jostling him with their weight and contents, but the pony, as weary as it was, held fast. “I never told her nothing about our deal. She didn’t suspect a thing. I swear.”
“It don’t matter,” Billy said, rolling his eyes. “Get down off there and end this. It’s getting late.”
“It does matter,” Hendricks shouted. “You make like you’re the collector of all the debts in the world, but I didn’t trade you this one. I got to settle with her. It’s my right.”
“Hell and high water, I am up to my neck in sanctity and indignation.” Billy sighed. “I’ll say it one more time, man. Get down off there and slit her throat. You won’t like the price I’ll charge if I have to do it myself. Not one bit.”
She spoke softly, for that’s all she had the strength to do. “I met him,” she said. “I traveled with the boy you used to be. He’s a kind child at the bottom of his heart. He took care of me.”
Hendricks appeared confused, barely able to maintain his balance in the back of the cart. “I … I don’t know what—”
“Come … come down here,” she said. “Come down where we can talk.”
And he did. He vaulted over the side of the cart with the quick strength she remembered. He landed hard on both feet, wincing because of his wounded leg, but close enough that she knew she would smell him soon, his warm musk, and all of his betrayals.
“You’ll need my knife, “Billy said.
“I won’t need a damn thing,” he replied. He squatted next to her, the toes of his boots not quite touching the dark hem of her blood. “Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore. The cold is coming. It’s … it’s up past my knees. Can I say it’s good to see you?”
“No,�
�� he said. “Don’t lie to me.”
“It’s not a lie. You … you’ve sold everything you ever loved. I know that. You’ve sold me too. But you gave me … the chance to do what I was meant to do. That boy—the one who’s like some untouched part of you—he listened to what we wrote together. He learned the story of who he would become. I … I don’t know what that means, exactly. I can’t see the end of it. I don’t know if the boy can change himself, if you can be changed. Maybe it was a waste of time. Or … or maybe what he heard will make a difference in what you do or say, how you settle things with Billy. I … don’t know what will happen. Tell me. Please. In … in the past two days did you ever hear my voice?”
“I ain’t nothing but a criminal.” She saw that he’d begun to weep. She tried to raise her hand to him, up toward his dampened face, but couldn’t. “A criminal made worse by every crime. That man up yonder, and others like him, has showed me paths more scathing than death, and I’ve took them every time. I come to your house under false pretense, with the worst intentions of all. I come to help him take all that you had. And you treated me decent. You … you …” He couldn’t go on. “When Billy gives that knife, you should gut me with it.”