by Неизвестный
Bichet reaches out and grabs the top of the container, twisting it around with his nimble surgeon’s hand. Olympe crouches down until her chin rests on the tabletop, as though she were five again. The waves of blackened hair make way for a face, bruised and contorted. The eyes are clouded over, but open, and they blink, and they see Olympe. Tête vivante, someone whispers. Smears of blood stick to the lips, preserved by the fluid. Some of it is hers. A part of her will always be in that jar, trapped between the lips of something that is not dead or alive. The mouth opens in a soundless cry, and a piece of tooth floats out, disappearing in the waving hair. Olympe turns and runs from the table, stumbling across the courtyard back to the safety of the holding rooms. Behind her, loud laughter floats and tumbles and mixes with the snowy crematory ash.
Time and the day and the ashes in the air sift past Olympe in an increasing haze of detachment and low-grade pain. She hovers near the door of the holding room, watching the handlers walk to and fro with their living cargo. None of the sauvages that they take to the guillotines are ill, as far as she can tell. Men walk back and forth between the assistants, jars and dishes and bowls filling and emptying. Heads, feet, bones, blood. A farmers’ market of grotesqueries and abominations. And in the distance the fires eat away at the remains, vomiting out the bits onto their heads. She stares into the distance. Her face is somewhere else. She can’t feel her lips. Everyone in the courtyard coughs, hocks, spits. Something happened today that she should be weeping about, but she can’t remember. She holds up her bandaged hand. The nails are black as onyx. They look oddly fetching.
It’s the ash. They got it, all of them, everything in the building, from the burning dead.
Ouroboros. Disease is.
Nana is helping her into her scarf and coat. Is the day over? For some reason she refuses to take off her laboratory overcoat. Outside, the courtyard is pitch black, silent until tomorrow morning when the blades come back to life. Someone walks her through the thick double gates. His face is familiar, pretty and delicious. Outside, the world is eerily calm. She hears the roar of the furnaces now, all the machinery hidden within and without the building that keeps it alive to gobble them all up in the name of Science. The rest of rue Saint-Martin lies before her like a dried-up river, pointing a dim, insurmountable way back into Paris proper. Lights twinkle overhead in the black of night. Olympe sighs. She knows what those are. She breathes them in as she drags her feet down the raggedy sides of the road.
A lamppost or a tree trunk is at her back. The night is cold. She should feel it, but she doesn’t. She should care, but.
She is going to go far.
It was the ash.
It was the ash.
Olympe wills her numb fingers to begin a laborious creep through the layers of fabric, toward her notebook and pencil, though she cannot feel their progress or lack thereof. No matter, she must somehow write down her observations and present them to the others in the morning, before the disease spreads further. This knowledge will be the society’s salvation, it’s debridement, and her way out. Respect, at last. Olympe will be taken seriously, taken under wing. She will become a scholar, a doctor, a brilliant beacon of light, and an example to all women of France. She stares down. Her hand is a hand that is not her hand and it is all the way on the other side of Paris or perhaps even the world and she does not know what it is at all or what it holds. At the quiet end of the street, the building stands tall and funereal against scrabbly trees and darkling sky. The river of Time rushes steadily into and through her, filling her up until all she sees and feels and hears is a great slow blanket of nothingness: and stops. Disconnected images fill her mind, images of each silky shining drop of blood out there in the world, spurting and squirting from the bright flat mouths of necks, and her small callused hands and the wide bowl of her mouth to catch them all. Warm red, squirming and streaming behind the outlines of the shapes so rapidly approaching. Bright red, to push the gray of the world away.
19th Century
The Wailing Hills
L Lark
Part I.
Northwestern Oregon
1811
Margaret is thirteen when her sister dies for the fourth time. Her mother doesn’t bother to call for the settlement’s lone doctor, who has already pronounced Ruth deceased on two occasions. She burns Ruth’s death sheets in the backyard, while Margaret laments her boring and unhappy life in the darkness of the cellar, tugging at beaver pelts that hang against the wall in layers.
It is infection this time around. One of the neighbor’s dogs had latched onto Ruth’s arm, and two days later, the wound had puckered and violet lines forged a trail map towards her heart.
The dog had been shot. Ruth’s brain had been scorched by fever. Margaret thinks the dog was the lucky one.
Now, Margaret knows, the Chinook men who come to trade with their mother will wait silently for Ruth to reemerge from the cabin, freshly resurrected. With her pale gold hair and flushed cheeks, she looks otherworldly. Ruth will touch their hands and whisper the prayer of Saint Hubert, patron of hunters and the ill. She will tuck sprigs of lavender into their thick braids.
Margaret watches out the window as they disappear back into the forest. The air is full of thick, yellow mist. It seems like any step could be the last before the edge of the world.
That evening, Ruth sniggers about the Indian’s superstitions while she and Margaret sew patches onto their father’s winter coat. It is October, but unusually cool. In the firelight, Ruth’s eyes are a dull black that remind Margaret of a newborn seal. She is eating pink apple slices from a tray, one after the other.
Ruth is three years older than her. Before her first death, she spent Sunday afternoons in the doctor’s small practice, reading the encyclopedias he’d brought with him from cities, far in the east. She would return to the cabin with words like gravitation, electricity, and atmosphere—words that Margaret cherished for their beauty and inherent danger. Ruth had learned to set rabbit traps from the Chinook boys, knew how to introduce herself in French, and often feigned bouts of homesickness for a Europe she had never visited.
She had recently begun a correspondence with a third cousin in England, who’d sent her a pamphlet of atheistic literature. Ruth had declared over breakfast that God did not exist and announced her self-initiation into the Cult of Reason.
Their mother had crossed herself and said nothing.
Margaret’s hair is black and lank. Her skin is dark like an Indian’s, and she has a long crooked nose to match. She has recently gone through a growth spurt, and though she now towers over Ruth, she is unused to the awkward new length in her limbs. When sitting, she keeps her arms and legs folded tightly, minimizing the amount of space she occupies.
Margaret has only ever read the Bible, is prone to daydreaming, and though she recognizes every herb that grows within a five-mile radius of their cabin, she only knows them by their Indian nicknames—Crow’s Foot, Deer Tail, Death’s Bell.
Still, Margaret loves her sister with an intensity that frightens her.
She wants to ask Ruth how she can dismiss the gods of the Chinook when she is so very like one herself, but is too dangerous to speak to her in that way. She is prone to sudden changes in mood, tantrums, and Margaret does not want to spend all night sewing alone in the darkness.
Their cabin is two miles from the small cluster of wooden buildings that make up an unnamed trading post along the river, where their father once bought whiskey and beaver skins. The home is balanced on the side of a tall hill that looms over the Oregon coast. In the garden, the sagebrush and horsetail grass sway like water. Margaret’s window is next to the chicken coop, and the room is filled with their gentle cooing at twilight.
From the edge of the forest, the grandiose outlines of the Cascade Mountains stretch into the north and south. Margaret hates only their immensity, but she sometimes catches Ruth staring at their silhouettes in the night, fingernails curled into her palm.
The
y have all learned to be afraid of the wilderness. In Oregon, the days are short and dark, and at night, beasts with giant teeth and claws vie for overlapping territories. The forests are deep and unexplored, and the Chinook have warned Margaret about the spirits that live in the rifts and hollows of the Wailing Hills, at the base of the mountains.
“Can you believe it?” Ruth says, without looking up. To her left is an open book, and her gaze shifts between it and the tattered elbow patch she is repairing. The corners of the pages are damp with apple juice.
“Believe what?” Margaret says, startled to be addressed by Ruth directly.
“The Indians. They say there is a giant bear in the woods. They say it’s eating all the animals. Nothing left to hunt.”
Three months previous, their mother had saved the lives of two Chinook youngsters with cholera, and they have co-existed amicably ever since, trading small European luxuries from the ships for meats and honey. As a result of this, the other families at the trading post have ostracized Margaret’s mother.
Margaret does not understand this. The Chinook have taught her which plants and mushrooms can feed them and which can clean their wounds. A boy with cheekbones like oyster shells had given Ruth a carved bone pendant in the shape of a raven.
“A bear,” Ruth repeats flatly, staring into the fire.
Margaret has seen a bear once, high on the side of a cliff, and three summers ago, only half of the Prestons’ boy had been found in the woods. Margaret had not seen the body, but she has imagined it many times, scattered across the field like he had been shattered by the wind.
“Maybe there is one,” she says.
“Oh, stop it with that nonsense,” Ruth says, and they return to their comfortable agreement of silence.
That night, Margaret cracks her windows and listens for the huffing and pounding of a bear pushing its way through the trees, but hears nothing.
Margaret has only been present for Ruth’s third and fourth deaths. During the second, cholera, a priest had ushered Margaret out of the room once Ruth’s pulse had begun to falter.
Ruth was alone for the first. Margaret has envisioned the sequence of events many times, but has never had the courage to ask Ruth what really happened the morning two Chinook fisherman found her dead at the bottom of Dogwood Gorge.
She’d left the cabin the afternoon before to pick huckleberries at the end of an old trapper trail, and their mother had waited all night by the window for her to return, saying the prayers of Saint Anthony, patron of lost things. In the morning, their cabin smelled like herbs the Indians burned to keep away mosquitoes, and Margaret woke to find her mother in the front yard, staring beyond the tree line.
Two Chinook men carried Ruth’s body on a plank between them, a cloak draped over her face. One of them, Chanko, was the father of one of the children their mother had nursed back to health. He had a kind face, and deep blue veins in his forearms.
Margaret had seen Chanko dipping in and out of the shadows on their property at night, and often he brought their mother gifts of fur and lovely beaded necklaces that sat at the base of her throat. He’d once had a wife who died of an illness he would not speak of; when Margaret has asked her name, he had refused to answer, but touched the long scars that bleached his skin from throat to chest.
There was a deep bite on Ruth’s left shoulder, violet and bruised in the places where her blouse was torn. Margaret could not look directly at it. The sight of blood and Ruth’s stiff wrists and ankles made her lightheaded. She kept her eyes trained on the laundry blowing back and forth above the garden, and Ruth’s favorite black gown filling with air.
In Margaret’s peripheral vision, her mother sank to her knees as the men lowered the plank to the ground. The fir trees heaved and whined in the Pacific winds. When her mother began to wail, it reminded Margaret too much of Ruth slaughtering wild hares in the winter.
Then it was over, and the next time Margaret looked back, Ruth was sitting up with the cloak pushed back on her shoulders. There was a bruise the color of seawater on her left cheekbone, and she was breathing hard into her cupped hands.
Ruth was covered in bits of the forest—sheets of birch bark, violently yellow pollen, a dragonfly’s wing on her left knee—as if it had blanketed her completely while she slept. No one said anything. No one helped Ruth up from the ground.
Eventually, she stood by herself, shaking the leaves from her hair. She seemed dazed, but otherwise unharmed.
“I-I lost my footing and fell,” she said, even though no one had yet spoken about her miraculous resurrection or cruel practical joke.
For a long moment, Margaret hated her sister with such intensity her vision went white. But Ruth was aloof, and stubborn, and ignored Margaret whenever convenient, but Ruth was not cruel.
One of the men who’d carried her reached out to touch her wrist, as if to confirm he wasn’t dreaming. Ruth only looked confused when their mother began to sob into her hair. She touched Ruth’s eyelashes, her jawline, tangled her fingers into Ruth’s ponytail. The men stepped back, uncomfortable to be witnessing such a private moment.
Margaret did not entirely understand their expressions. It was the same look she’d once seen in her father’s eyes, when a pack of wolves wandered too close to their cabin in the winter, and he’d sat all night by the window with his musket, eyes locked on the tree line.
Eventually, their mother accepted that Ruth had slipped and knocked herself out on the tumble down the gorge. She spoke with the Indians in hushed voices for a long time, and then sent the men away with half a pound of tea, a dozen sewing needles, and several satchels of gunpowder.
Both Ruth and her mother seemed oblivious to Margaret’s presence, even though she followed them into the house, hovering silently like a ghost.
When Margaret asked about the bite, neither one of them answered her. Her mother shushed her and fussed with Ruth’s bruised eye. Ruth stared into the fireplace, blowing on the surface of her tea. The white raven pendant at her throat was still caked in dried blood.
“Be more careful next time,” their mother said, pressing a wet rag against Ruth’s cheekbone. “I couldn’t stand to lose you too.”
And then Ruth didn’t die again. And again.
It isn’t until after Ruth’s fourth death that Margaret realizes the store of canned fruits, grain, and dried meat they have been stockpiling for the winter is only half what it used to be. Without their father’s hunting, they’ve had to rely on trading for meat, but visits from the Chinook have become less frequent. Ruth brags that they are wary of her, that they think she is some kind of demigod, but Margaret cannot help but remember what they said.
“They say there is giant bear in the woods. They say it’s eating all the animals.”
Two nights ago, Margaret heard something huffing and gurgling outside of her window. She’d lay curled on her side, clutching the iron knife she’d snuck out of the kitchen, and the sound had come perilously close to her window before passing.
Margaret did not sleep that night. She’d bitten the tips off all her fingernails before morning, and over breakfast, her hands ached as she gripped her spoon.
She has to confront her mother about the missing food that afternoon. Margaret finds her on all fours in the garden, yanking weeds up by the root, soil trapped in the pitted skin of her knees and elbows. In the sunlight, her hair mother’s hair looks almost white.
Margaret has ruddy, dark hair like her father. It dries out and cracks in the heat of summer, and then again in the cold of winter.
“There’s something you need to see,” Margaret says.
Her mother looks up, squinting.
When Margaret leads her to the storage shed out back, her mother says nothing at all. She covers her mouth with her hand, and presses her back against the wall as if she has been struck with a sudden exhaustion. Margaret can see sweat pooling in her collarbones.
“What are we going to do?” Margaret asks, feeling her heart struggle agains
t her breastbone. She tries not to think of winter, rolling in from the east, and the low grey skies beneath which nothing grows.
“Don’t tell Ruth about this,” her mother says.
Margaret doesn’t understand why.
The next morning, Margaret wakes to find a dead elk at the edge of their property. She has stumbled upon dead animals in the forest before—raccoons and opossums with moss growing in their ears and armpits—but never before has she seen a corpse so unrecognizable. If it were not for the great set of antlers jutting out of the ground like tree branches, the mass of meat and tendon could belong to anything.
There are small teeth marks on the bits of exposed bone, like scavengers have gnawed at the carcass. She buries what remains with wet leaves and branches, but takes a tooth to keep in her pocket, for protection.
Margaret tries to distract herself with work. She scrubs the mold gathering around the windows. She tends to the chickens, and picks berries in the forest, and spends her evenings knitting large pairs of gloves and socks for her father’s return.
“He’ll be home soon,” their mother assures them, weaving a rosary between her fingers. He’d left in June to hunt beaver in the north, expecting to be back by early August. It is nearly November now, but their mother insists he will be home before Ruth’s birthday, on the first day of winter.
Margaret stopped believing this some time ago, but she would never voice this to Ruth or her mother. She knows how important it is for them to keep her ignorant. So she mends her father’s clothes, and stores food enough for four, and smiles politely when others in the settlement inquire about her family.
She also notices that Ruth can’t stop eating.
Strawberries by the dozen, entire loaves of bread, strip after strip of dried salmon. Margaret catches her eating leaves of wild sorrel, until all that’s left is a white pulp of roots and fiber, poking out of the soil.