Scribe

by Alyson Hagy

  “If Blankenship’s the skinny one with the viper eyes, I do know. I killed him myself. All three of them is dead and gone. I spared the dogs.”

  Billy tried to pretend he wasn’t shocked by the news. He began an immediate assault upon Hendricks, lifting his whip high into the air and unleashing it toward the man’s unprotected face. But the whip had acquired a mind of its own. It curled and laced and luffed more like silk ribbon than braided leather as it made its way downward. Its lash finally rested upon Hendricks’s shoulder as softly as a mother’s caress.

  “Well, I’ll be double damned,” Billy cursed, staring at the recalcitrant whip as though it had stung him. “This is nonsense. I got to get serious.” He dropped the whip and reached to unbutton his long black coat. As he did so, the invisible trumpet sounded once more.

  It was this second chorus that roused her from her stupor. She knew that horn. She knew those notes—although they sounded more glorious to her now than ever before. Estefan, her Estefan. His summoning tones seemed to resonate everywhere, spreading outward from where she lay until the very rim of twilight became pure, harmonious quiver. There was a sense of profound, continuing disturbance within and around her. She felt it hum through her defeated body. It was something like a sea wind, but not. Like a thousand million insects vibrating in the hot summer trees, but not. Like the quiet, castaway murmurs of the dead, but not quite.

  She was able to pull herself to her feet with a new strength, and she suddenly understood what she must do. For not only had Billy Kingery’s whip become useless to him, he was now in the process of discovering he was no longer able to unfasten the large black buttons on his coat. The buttons would not let themselves be undone. So he could not get to his other weapons save the small knife he’d offered to Hendricks and that knife had somehow become glued to the black glove on Billy’s hand. Billy’s feet had become tightly fused to the floorboards of the pony cart as well, and she could see exactly what needed to happen next. It was perfect. A parade. The occasion called for a parade. And she knew just how the procession should go. The pony, also instilled with fresh vigor, seemed more than ready to serve as her companion. It began to step forward as soon as she reached its side.

  Above her, Billy Kingery stopped tearing at his coat buttons just long enough to offer a prince-like entreaty. “Hendricks,” he hollered. “Come here, man. We ain’t settled our business yet. I’ll pay whatever you ask. We can forget about Blankenship and them. We can call it square. I just need you to come to me.”

  She could not see Hendricks or anything beyond Billy and the rolling cart. The pony had somehow found the energy to jog, squaring its pony shoulders as though it was being coaxed along by additional handlers who were invisible to her. She felt the infusion of a new communion within her blood and heart. She was no longer alone. Our parade, she told herself. It was time to create for Billy Kingery his own kind of ceremony. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see the other participants. She knew they were there. She could sense them all around her, a happy throng, its many feet moving in shared rhythm, its joyous momentum echoed by the unseen rollicking of goats and dogs. A parade. One she had finally been invited to join.

  Billy Kingery, however, was not about to suffer his voyage in silence.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he shouted at Hendricks and at her, leaning from one side of the cart to the other as if he were trying to see who or what, besides the two of them, had taken control of the situation. “You ain’t obeying the rules. I don’t know who you’re working for, or who’s put you up to this, but you can’t make private pandemonium like this. It ain’t allowed. My men are coming. They will take you down—all of you. You can’t ignore the rules.”

  Yet the more he beseeched, the more nimbly the pony advanced and the more the great sacks stored in the bed of the cart began to shift toward him, their ropes and strings loosening and falling away as though they were being untied by invisible hands. Whatever was in those sacks seemed to be escaping from them. Freely.

  Hendricks stood rooted in place, frozen with confusion and awe. He and the boy Tul had traveled hard and fast. They had caught sight of Billy and his loaded cart in time for Hendricks to slink his way into Billy’s good graces. But it seemed that neither Billy’s fate nor Tul’s was his to influence. He could only watch as the pony trotted onward with the woman’s pale hand gripping its harness, its pony head lifted as if to mimic a general’s fearsome stallion. High in a defiant elm tree that bowered across the neglected road, Hendricks saw a winking flash, a miniature star of light like that which might be produced by a small fragment of mirror. He knew that light, oh he did. It meant Tul Boitnott was up in that elm—waiting for his chance. All Hendricks could do was watch as the truculent shape of a hand-fashioned noose appeared below the branches of the tree. Which meant the speechless cousin of the late Bofrane Altice was ready to take his revenge, no hatchet needed. Which meant there would be no escape for Billy Kingery.

  “You can’t do this,” Billy screeched, gloved hands gripping and tearing at his polished hair. “I rule it all. I’m the rule.”

  The trumpet sounded for a third time, more forlorn but no less convincing. Its final notes seemed to resound from earth to sky, wrapping even the great pinnacle of stone that rose above them in its tune. The clarion call drove the woman to her knees. She fell away from the insistent, trotting pony. The cart and its unspeakable baggage rolled forward without her, all the way to the end of its inexplicable route. Hendricks saw the cart bounce into the knuckled shadows of the elm until it was directly beneath the noose. He saw the dandling shape of the rope blend with the waggling shape of Billy’s head. He listened as Billy’s final curses were transformed into an unholy thrashing until he could listen no more. Tul Boitnott did not fail.

  Then, for him, the one who had long ago adopted the name Hendricks when he required the convenience of a new start, there remained only the woman. Billy Kingery had been taken beyond them. All that separated the two of them now were their private wounds and reluctances. They could still hope for redemption, could they not? He ran to her even as a kind of wintry fog began to granulate the air around them. He could not locate its source as he ran. It seemed to rise from the trampled crust of the ground, and it bore within its gathering whiteness the promise of a tender, early snow. He felt its insistent cold in contrast to the fiery pounding of his heart. He had arrived at the crossroads too late—too late—and he despised himself for it.

  The woman, lying in the muddy, wheel-scored path made by the pony cart, did not seem to notice him when he reached her. She appeared to be talking to someone else, settling something with words so soft he could not hear them at all. He could see she was nearly gone, her blanched hands lying flat across her sunken chest, her breath as shallow as a sparrow’s. Yet there was a bewildered contentment in the curve of her cheeks he had never seen before. He bent and lifted her from the cradle of her own fresh blood.

  “Who’s talking?” he asked. “You need to save your strength.”

  “You know her,” she whispered. “You’ve talked to her. We are making our peace, just the two of us. I don’t need anything else, not even my strength. She says you still owe us a haul of wood, though. We expect our pay.” And she tried to laugh.

  “You will get the last … the last honest toil of me that’s ever offered in this world,” he said. And he kissed the face he had wanted so badly to see again, the lips and nose and brow that were already too white and too cold.

  “It’s all right,” she said, her head nestling against the strong bough of his neck.

  “It ain’t,” he said, swallowing the freshet of his tears. “We worked ourselves to a new place, new to both of us. And you give up everything for me. But I got here slow. I was too slow.”

  “No. Hush. You led me to her again, my sister. And you led me into your own self. You came when I was ready.”

  He lifted her higher in his arms in response, wrapping her more tightly as he sensed
new, strange currents all around them, flowing and grasping currents he felt the urge to flee. He wanted her for himself. They deserved their time together, surely they did. Just a day, or an hour. He tried to frame a plea with his mouth even as he recognized the rime of frost that had begun to form on his boots, and hers.

  “There’s one more thing I need to find,” she said. “Will you take me to it?”

  He gazed into her eyes, those confounding portrait eyes, and he understood, although the understanding pierced him through and through. She knew what she wanted at the last. It was not what he had hoped for. All he had hoped for was a chance. Just one. And he would not get it. As the first skirl of snow began to veil them in its merciless lace, he felt the shifting ballast of her departure even as she drew herself closer within his embrace. Memory of that frail and dwindling weight would never leave him. He would carry it the rest of his life. He said to her, “I will.”

  “I nearly missed you, you know,” she said, pausing briefly to taste the blood that had finally made its way to her tongue. “I wasn’t ready to give anything to you … or to anybody. But I’ve sampled what might have been, and I’m being welcomed by those who care for me. I haven’t been forgotten, or judged. I’m not being left behind, and … and that matters more than you can know. You can still make a family for yourself. It’s not too late. You can give what love and trust you have to those who need it—even if it’s not to me. Will you make that promise?”

  He didn’t know how to answer. Some years later he would be presented with the opportunity to protect a red-haired woman and her bastard son, and he would seize that opportunity as if it were a golden treasure and he would not let it go. He attributed those days of fragile, but honest, happiness to the woman he met at the brick house above the creek, the one who had reluctantly, and ferociously, written the letter of his life.

  Yet even though he would dream of her each time the moon waxed fat and full, there was much about that final hour at the crossroads he would never understand. He was never entirely sure who or what had rescued the two of them from the brute ending they had likely faced at the hands of Billy Kingery, although in truth, there was no rescue—the woman he had come to love would die that day. His own life would end later, on a contentious and absurd afternoon not yet notched in the belt of the minion who would finally draw his straw. But they had not been parted without a final embrace, or a chance to revise the telling as they wished. It’s said the love between them became a force all its own in those final moments, that the great rock at the crossroads split top to bottom from that force, and the wound in the rock became a sign to all who passed of what was true in the world and what was false. She was taken from him, nonetheless.

  And with the taking came another pilgrimage, this one more solemn than the first but also with its joys and resolutions. As he bore her in his arms, he heard what seemed to be the patter of children’s feet all around them. Also the sure, wayfaring steps of mothers and fathers. The contented swishing of skirts and shoes and scarves. And the murmurs of many languages. Could it be the sister’s doing, all of it, even the haunting solos of a single beloved trumpet? He didn’t know. He knew only that he was carrying the woman as she had asked him to, that he was walking into the beseeching shadows cast by an ageless spire of stone, sensing with each step that they were being joined by others, that his strength was being shared and multiplied.

  He was momentarily afraid he would see faces alongside them that he knew, the faces of his dead and mistreated, but he did not. This was the woman’s reckoning, not his, and the scores being settled were hers alone. He felt her last breaths warm against the bare hollow of his throat. He felt her bones settle without wariness against his own. But as the sun he thought he knew extinguished itself against the old breast of the old mountains, she was taken from him, borne aloft into a weightlessness he could not fathom or follow. He was left behind as she was lifted, although not by water; as she was set free, although not in body. The silence that finally buoyed her was kinder than any silence he had ever known.

  Acknowledgments

  Connor Southard, Melchora Alexander, and Mandy Hoy were early readers and aided me immensely with their questions and insights. Gail Hochman read brilliantly as she always does and helped me untangle some tight knots. Jim Southard, Sharon Southard, John Mittelstaedt, and Patrice Noel gave me access to their lovely, quiet homes so I could write. Meade and Andrea Dominick provided time on the gorgeous 7D Ranch. Harold Bergman hosted me at the historic AMK Ranch. Beth Kephart kept the faith. The University of Wyoming granted me a delicious sabbatical. Bob Southard provided much necessary laughter, patience, and time on good rivers.

  The team at Graywolf Press is truly without parallel. It is impossible to express enough gratitude for their expertise, energy, and excellence. Fiona McCrae, Marisa Atkinson, Casey O’Neil, Susannah Sharpless, and Caroline Nitz all played critical roles in the completion of this book. As for Katie Dublinski, what can I say? This is our fifth project together, and I am beyond blessed.

  I thought of my aunt Lois Lindsay Brown many times while I was writing this book. I wondered what she would think of it and my irreverent pilfering of various sources and myths. Elements of the Jack Tales appear here, as do family legends, borrowed character names, regional histories, and narratives rooted in indigenous cultures. Lois was the keeper of our family tales. She is no longer with us, but I like to think she’s still collecting good stories somewhere.

  Alyson Hagy was raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the author of seven previous works of fiction, most recently Boleto. She lives in Laramie, Wyoming.

  The text of Scribe is set in Adobe Garamond Pro. Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.