by Неизвестный
Ruth disappears into the woods for half the day and returns with dead rabbits, which she carries in bunches by the foot. She roasts them in olive oil, pacing by the oven with her arms crossed, silent. After dinner, she eats great chunks of bread pudding, chewing with her mouth open. Margaret hears her sneaking out of her room to visit the kitchen in the middle of the night.
November becomes December. Their father does not return. The rain arrives and stays, turning the sky the color of tin. Ruth eats and eats, and the Chinook cease to visit, except for when Margaret catches sight of them in her peripheral vision, moving in silhouette through the trees with their bows drawn. As the days become short and dark, Margaret cannot help but feel that there are eyes in the forest, narrowed and focused on her.
Ruth dies once that month, breaking her neck on a tumble from a wild apple tree. Margaret is not there when it happens, but arrives a moment before Ruth returns to life. In a moment of furious courage, Margaret reaches out to touch Ruth’s hand and finds it cold and oily, like beeswax.
The crows arrive before Ruth awakens, circling in the updraft. Margaret hates the crows. In the winter, they look like ink stains against the white sky, and they draw bears and coyotes out from the wilderness. Margaret carries her father’s musket strapped to her back, but she has never shot at anything aside from empty mason jars he let her use as targets.
She waves the birds off, until Ruth reawakens in spasms, hollow-eyed and pale.
Margaret cannot entirely process what happens next.
The motions are quick and dreamlike. Ruth reaches out and snatches one of the crows that has wandered close. A moment later, Margaret can see blood on Ruth’s face through the curtain of feathers, and there is a sound like fabric being ripped apart. The birds all take to the air at once, and Margaret stumbles back, falling elbow-first onto the rocks behind her.
The butt of the gun collides painfully with her shoulder and her vision blurs. It hurts, but she is too afraid to look away from the flurry of wings and limbs in front of her. Margaret lurches to her feet, raising her arms to swat at the birds, but the crows are gone by the time she nears Ruth, who is still slumped forward on the ground.
“Ruth?” Margaret whispers, although she can barely hear the word over the panicked screams of the birds in the air above them.
Ruth doesn’t answer. There is dirt beneath her fingers, and her torso is swaying rhythmically, like she’s been sampling the whiskey their mother distills through the summer.
“Ruth?”
Ruth finally looks up. The skin around her eyes is pale blue and damp, and there is down stuck to the drying blood around her mouth. She does not look afraid, or even remotely startled by what has just happened. She is encircled by what remains of three dead birds, and a fourth whose left wing twitches, until Ruth snatches it up and takes a bite from its midsection.
Margaret cannot tell if the strange, guttural noise that follows comes from Ruth or the crow. She turns and vomits in to the ferns, feeling her stomach acids burn a path up to her throat.
In her peripheral vision, she sees Ruth amble to her feet.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry” Ruth calls, “I didn’t mean to do that. I’m hungry.”
Margaret takes a step back, and then another. From this distance, Ruth’s cheeks are rosebud pink, but her eyes look opaque and white. Margaret tries not the think about the stories the Indians tell about ghosts with unquenchable appetites, who must eat and eat and eat.
Margaret is too afraid to answer her. She runs.
Ruth does not chase her. Margaret makes it halfway home before she has to stop and bend over to breathe through her mouth. The rain has started up again, falling heavily on her neck and shoulders. She tries to listen through the storm, for the pop of a breaking twig or the huff of a predator sniffing in interest, but the pine trees are roaring in the wind.
When she can flex her hands again, Margaret grips the musket and places her index finger gingerly over the trigger. She does not actually know what she will do if Ruth appears, but the gun feels good in her hands—like strength and potential energy.
Their cabin can’t be more than a mile away, but the earth seems to dip beneath her heels. Margaret nearly sinks her boot into a raccoon carcass slowly being swallowed by the mud. Its fur is dark, but the chunks of flesh missing from its throat and stomach are obvious. As is the bone crow pendent, tangled in the animal’s ribcage.
Margaret says a word that she’s glad her mother is not around to hear, and stumbles forward.
Somewhere from the east, she thinks she hears someone calling her name, but she is too afraid to stop running. By the time the lights of the cabin appear, Margaret feels like she did last winter, when she’d slipped beneath the ice of a frozen lake and her heart had seized with cold.
Her mother is standing with a flintlock trade gun at their door. The veins in her forearms are thick and swollen, as she pulls Margaret through the doorway and into the cabin with a deep grunt.
“Ruth,” she gasps, crumpling into her mother’s arms. The cabin is dry but cold, and their guns are silver-blue in the diffuse light. There is a sound in Margaret’s ears, like the world spinning and spinning on its axis. Her mother drops a hand unto her shoulder, heavy and solid.
“I heard you screaming,” her mother says.
“It was Ruth,” Margaret finally gasps, “She ate the birds—”
Her mother shushes her.
“She’ll be fine. She’s just sick. She’s just hungry,” she says, which is not what Margaret expected to hear.
Part II.
Ruth does return that night, but they don’t know it until the chickens begin to scream. Before it happens, both Margaret and her mother are sitting by the fireplace, guns cocked against the wall. The fire hisses and rattles like a snake. It does not seem to help the cold that soaks in through the porous wood of their cabin.
Her mother’s eyes don’t stray from the front window.
“Shouldn’t we go look for her?” Margaret asks. It is late, but she knows she cannot sleep. There is adrenaline rushing through her, and her veins feel scraped out and raw. Margaret thinks the fear she feels has nothing to do with Ruth, wandering outside in the darkness. She is afraid of the winter, and the empty storehouse, and the dead animals in the forest.
“No,” her mother says, and Margaret does not think she has ever heard her voice so resolute. “She’ll be fine on her own. She’s just hungry.”
“Did she eat all the—”
“Hush. I don’t want her to hear us through the walls.”
It is only a moment later that the chickens begin to wail and beat their wings against the walls of their coop. Her mother reaches out and clutches her wrist so hard, Margaret is sure it will be bruised in the morning.
She twists her arm out of her mother’s grip, and snatches her musket up. Margaret runs before her mother has the chance to scream after her, rushing unprepared into the cold. It hits her with the force of a blow, and Margaret nearly drops the gun, fingers twitching uncontrollably.
She sees Ruth’s silhouette bent into the chicken coop, and calls out, “Stop!”
Ruth does not. She reaches in and pulls a hen out by the neck, snapping it with an audible pop. Margaret is glad the bird is dead when Ruth takes a bite from its torso, feathers in a whirlwind around her.
“Ruth,” she repeats, “I’m going to shoot you.”
It is a lie. Margaret does not think she could kill her sister, no matter how impermanent it might be. Still, she raises her musket into the air and sends off a shot, whose echo bounces back and forth between the hills.
Ruth drops, but it is not a bullet that hits her, it is an arrow. Margaret does not see it immediately. Ruth’s body jerks twice before stilling, in a way that reminds Margaret of waking from dreams where she falls and falls. The arrow is lodged in between Ruth’s ribs, and the stiff red leaves dangling from its end tells Margaret that it is a Chinook weapon.
She squints out into the forest,
and sees Chanko at the edge of the tree line, flanked by two large men in bearskin cloaks. They approach Ruth’s body with their bows drawn, walking in long silent strides.
“How long until she wakes?” one of them grunts, aiming his arrow at the soft pulp behind Ruth’s left ear. She looks pale blue in the light that slips through the fir trees, too still to be asleep.
“Four minutes, five at most,” Margaret says, sensing her mother approach from behind and freeze mid-motion, the barrel of her gun lost in the billowing fabric of her skirts.
“Let’s get her inside,” Chanko tells them, with such authority in his voice that it is impossible to disobey.
They lock Ruth in her mother’s bedroom closet, jamming a chair against the door. Her mother does not cry; her eyes seem sad and angry all at once, but she does not cry, even when Chanko unceremoniously drops Ruth’s body on a pile of ancient blankets.
“What’s wrong with her?” Margaret asks, once the door has been secured. Even the spiders have crawled out from the gaps in the walls, looking jolly and interested, a myriad of eyes twinkling in the candlelight.
Chanko is silent for a long time. Margaret hears her mother give a half-sob, a soft whine like a dog’s, but she catches herself before he answers.
“She has the hunger sickness. There is nothing we can do for her now.”
Before Margaret can answer, Ruth’s fists are beating on the other side of the door.
“Margaret,” she calls, “Maggie. Please. Let me out.”
“There is nothing more we can do for you,” Chanko repeats, shouldering his bow and giving a vague gesture to the two men behind him. His voice is difficult to hear over Ruth’s pounding, and the sound of her violent exhalations. “There will never be enough for her to eat. It would not be wise to let her out again. Ever.”
They leave without another word, but Chanko places his hand heavily on Margaret’s shoulder. For a moment, their gazes meet, and Margaret feels fuzzy and disoriented. He tips forward to kiss her forehead, and his shadow looks crooked and enormous against the walls of the cabin.
“I don’t understand. What do we do?” Margaret says.
Chanko only shakes his head.
Ruth never stops pounding.
That evening, neither Margaret nor her mother sleep. It is impossible, with the sound of Ruth’s voice wailing incoherently, like she is in pain or deep religious ecstasy. Margaret imagines Ruth’s hands turning purple and bruised, but her voice does not falter once through the night. She begs for food and water, but Margaret is too afraid to open the door, remembering the blood around Ruth’s mouth, and the birds entombed in their own feathers. It is the blood, more than anything, that Margaret cannot get out of her mind—blood on Ruth’s gown, blood on the moss growing in the crooks of the trees, a trail of blood that winds through their house like a dry creek in the summer.
Her mother seems catatonic, staring out the window as the sun rises behind clouds in the east. Margaret waits by the closet door through the evening with her musket mounted against her shoulder, unsure of whether or not she will be able to shoot Ruth, if that moment should ever come.
It does in three days time.
By then, Margaret feels woozy from lack of sleep, but her mother seems to doze off at any moment—at the breakfast table, in the rosemary bushes in the garden, in the outhouse. Margaret gathers food in the daytime, canning fruits and drying the salmon that she catches in nets by the riverside, knowing it might never be enough for three to survive the coming months of cold. She daydreams often, of her father materializing at the forest’s edge, a band of mountain men behind him. She daydreams of the elk meat, and strawberries, and roasted potatoes they will carry with them, and the enormous feast they will enjoy for his homecoming.
Occasionally, Margaret mashes oats into a thick paste she can slide beneath the closet door on a tray, but Ruth can only ever be appeased for a few moments. Afterwards, she screams and pounds and pounds, and Margaret does not sleep.
The New Year comes and goes with nothing to mark it but Ruth’s voice shouting obscenities late into the night. Margaret spends as much time out of the cabin as possible, lips and eyelids numbing from the cold as she stares at the edge of the forest, wishing for the Chinook to appear.
In retrospect, it is stupid to leave her mother alone in the house for so long, but Margaret is delirious from the lack of sleep. Shadows curl and shift at the edge of her vision. Any rustle in the grass becomes a rattlesnake, coiled and ready to spring.
She hears the screaming from the garden. For a moment, she cannot be sure if the sound is coming from the crows gathering on their rooftop, or from inside. Margaret has taken to keeping her musket at all times, and she draws it as she sprints towards the front door, her heart squirming furiously beneath her breastplate like a trapped mouse.
She kicks the door in with the heel of her boot, shell shocked by the sudden warmth. The painting of her grandmother above the fireplace seems to watch with her pupils dilated and mouth ajar.
Margaret has to resist the urge to reach into her pocket and palm the elk tooth as she pushes the door to her mother’s room open with her hip, a thousand prayers tingling in her mouth. She knows that she will kill Ruth before she has time to process the scene before her.
Her mother lies contorted on the floor, in a growing pool of her own pink blood. Ruth is curled over her like a coyote, her hair matted into thick clumps that hang over her eyes. The fingers of one hand are sunken into her mother’s torso, and the other is holding a chunk of violet matter, which Ruth takes clumsy bites from.
There is an ignored tray of bread and honey, overturned on the bedroom floor. Behind Ruth, the closet door has swung open, and Margaret can see their winter coats hanging tattered by the threads of their shoulders.
Margaret shoots. Her finger seems to take action before her brain can send the command out from its center. Ruth’s shoulder evaporates into red mist, and she slumps to the ground, a thin line of blood spilling from the corner of her mouth.
Margaret suppresses a sob, and lowers her musket. She can feel the vertebrae in her spine clanging painfully against one another. She approaches the two bodies slowly, half-surprised each time her foot settles successfully on the wooden floor. Both Ruth and her mother are still curved against each other like two parts of a shell. Neither one of them moves.
Margaret reaches down and presses two fingers against the base of her mother’s throat. She feels nothing, as she expected to, but it is impossible to handle the rush of grief that follows, especially with Ruth’s eyes, open and staring and waiting.
Ruth body is heavy and bloated with food. Margaret cannot breathe by the time she manages to drag her sister back into the closet, and wedges the door shut with furniture from the room.
Her mother’s body is different. Margaret does not know what to do about that. She hovers over it for a moment, before leaving the room and closing the door behind her, feeling sick from the smell of copper and flour and sugar.
She presses her back against the door and slides down, hair tangling in the latch. Margaret hears Ruth begin pounding in the closet before she has the chance to steady her breathing.
“Please,” Ruth cries, “Please, please, please. I’m so hungry.”
Margaret does not cry, but she does not open the door.
She knows she will never open the door again.
Chanko arrives in the morning with the two men who helped him capture Ruth in the first place. By the time they appear on the front porch, pushing through the cold fog, Ruth has been pounding at the closet door for at least seven hours. Margaret feels delirious and weightless, like she could float away with any step. When she opens the door, and sees the three men back-lit at her door, her knees nearly give out.
“Thank you,” she whispers, even though she’s certain that she will hate what is about to happen. All three of the men are armed and wearing the same elk skins the Chinook take to war. Chanko’s hands are cold when they envelope hers.
“Where is your mother?” Chanko asks, in his long vowels. “Has Ruth bitten you?”
Margaret shakes her head, and imagines she sees the same swell of grief in his eyes that she felt in hers. Margaret’s body responds in a manner she does not understand, forehead colliding with Chanko’s chest involuntarily.
“What do we do? What happened to Ruth?” she says.
Chanko draws back, backlit and enormous, like a fir tree.
“It is an old sickness from the forest. Your sister cannot die,” he says, “And she will never stop eating. We know where to take her.”
The other men enter the cabin without Margaret’s permission. Against the simple backdrop of their living space, they look like architectural marvels, all straight lines and strength. Margaret is dwarfed by their blue shadows, spreading across the floor and walls.
“I shot her,” she says to Chanko, unbidden.
“She cannot die. We have to lock her away.”
“But she’ll starve.” Margaret says.
“She cannot die,” Chanko repeats, in a way that signals Margaret to say no more.
Margaret does not cry when the men shoot through the closet door, shattering the wood to reveal Ruth slumped over dead on the other side. She does not cry when Chanko binds her mouth and arms with strips of hide and drops her body into large linen sack, stained with burgundy splotches.
Margaret is unable to shift her eyes away from Ruth’s blue fingernails, peeking out from the top of the sack.
“This has happened before,” Chanko says, the split ends of his hair brushing against the scars on his collarbone. “Come with us.”
Margaret follows, because she has no other choice, watching Ruth’s limp body bob in the sack ahead of her. They move quickly through the forest. Branches scratch against Margaret’s neck, and more than once, she feels tendrils of poison oak brush against her wrist, sending fire up the hair on her forearms.
The rain has cleared and the trees are black against sky. The air is so thick Margaret thinks flowers could grow in it, even in these darkest nights of winter. There is fresh snow on the hills around them, meaning soon there will be snow in their valley, meaning soon Margaret will have nothing to eat. Already her stomach feels as though it is made of glass, but Margaret ignores it.