It dawned on me that blacksmith’s shop in Ione meant my house. The anvil below this property was the anvil upon which these weddings had been performed.
Beneath some of the contracts, there were other items. I found a pocketwatch with a locket containing a delicate portrait in watercolor, a beautiful woman whose face reminded me of Lischen’s, the entirety of the image no larger than my fingerprint. All of the contracts had locks of hair, braided together, presumably from the married couple.
They’d all taken place on the first of November. Beginning in America, some of the contracts had additional clauses.
Robert March is wedded to Annika Miller, this first of November, in the year of our lord eighteen hundred and three. Witnessed by the blacksmith priest, Marvel Weyland, here in the blacksmith’s shop at Ione, in the Oregon Territory, over the wedding anvil belonging to this shop. The anvil is rung by the blacksmith priest, and these two are handfasted, promised by their fingers and by their blood to one another, and to their witness, who shall watch over them, and in deeds, repay them their gifts.
For Annika Miller: a hand that may bring fruit to the trees here in this desert.
For Robert March: a diviner’s hand, water called to his fingertips when the wells run dry and the rains do not come.
With this hammer and this anvil, with this promise, I take your hands to mine:
Dusha Chuchonnyhoof
The promises in writing, impossible promises. My mind was ringing with the words I’d heard from Dusha. If you do as I tell you to do, he will return when I do.
For Malcolm Mays: the return of Rowan Mays, his son, thought dead.
Except that he asked you to be the smith, I thought, and the smith performs the weddings. He didn’t ask you to marry over the anvil. You’re not a young lover. You’re not young and there’s no one for you in Ione. Was I meant to perform all the functions? The smith and the lovers both? Surely not. It wasn’t possible. That was what Olivia had tried to do.
There was no mention of payment to the smith in these contracts. Just in the first one, the mention of the brother-in-law, Dusha married to the sister of the blacksmith Joseph Weyland. Now bereaved.
Former trapper and New World traveler, it said, too, next to Weyland’s name, and I looked at the date again, thought about what someone with those credentials might have been doing in the middle of the 1700s. A blurry Lewis and Clark memory, and of the people who’d come decades before them, the wandering trappers who’d brought home furs. Homestead, Dusha called this. Maybe he’d come from here to begin with, traveled to Scotland with the trapper, and then returned.
I looked around wildly. There was no original set of shoes, nor anything else that might mark that first wedding. The first anvil wedding, it must be, that of Dusha Chuchonnyhoof to a woman named Weyland. Who was she? Did he grieve her?
What was she?
“Who was she?” I said aloud, asking the house. “Who did he love?”
A gust of cold wind under the rattling windowframe, and with that wind, a stinging ice. I turned and looked into the bedroom. On the floor, a word written in hailstones.
ABIGAYL
Into the room fluttered a small pamphlet. The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths, it said, in crabbed script. A roster of smiths, for the year 1725. It went on to say that the company contained sixty-four brethren, and two sistren. I ran my finger down the list until I found her. Abigayl Weyland.
Chuchonnyhoof’s wife, a blacksmith, a Weyland. Now bereaved.
A vision again, a tent in the winter, hooves outside, a trapper inside it, trying to sleep. A case of hides. Hooves and howling wolves. Pitch black in the tent. Sleeping. Hooves and howls.
I watched the trapper wake to a set of blue eyes staring at him from the dark. I watched a wedding, a woman in a blacksmith’s apron, and this man, this Joseph Weyland, performing a ceremony for his sister and the thing he’d brought back from the Americas.
She’d died. Something had happened that sent Chuchonnyhoof in desperate search of shoes. Maybe she’d kept him shod, but with what? What was she? Only a blacksmith or more than that? Nearly a hundred and fifty years had passed after her death, with Chuchonnyhoof still living, before the crime he’d been jailed for.
What had happened with Lischen March and Michael Miller? What had gone wrong?
There was just the one shoe left alone on the shelf. It was half the size of the rest, and with it there was no contract, no lock of braided hair. Beneath it, only a small note written on a scrap of cloth. November, 1900, and a name, or a word, I didn’t know which. Hew.
I went to the set of horseshoes before the last, solitary one. I picked up the contract beneath it, and found what I’d glimpsed earlier. This contract was dated 1876, between Elkanah March and Lischen Wildshoe.
A daguerreotype of a couple. I looked at their faces, not smiling, but looking straight at the camera, the way those old photos always were, posed and stiff. The girl seemed to be Native American, but dressed in the clothing of a white woman. She had brown skin, black eyes, a high lace collar fastened with a cameo, black hair tightly parted in the center, and a familiar face, one corner of her mouth bent upward like a hairpin. I looked closer. The man was white, and older than his bride, close-cropped hair, a beard, a string tie.
Each of them had a bracelet tightly fastened around their left wrist. A silver bracelet in the shape of clasped hands. I knew those bracelets. I’d seen one worn.
Dusha’s promises on that contract:
For Lischen Wildshoe: a hand to tame all horses.
For Elkanah March: a hand to tame all horses.
I looked again at the solitary shoe and saw what was different about it. The fingers weren’t right. They were tiny, and they were strange, too smooth, without fingerprints. These fingers weren’t human, or not entirely.
17.
Rain spat its way into the room. I froze, my hands on the warped wood of the windowframe, my nerves flaming like arrows shot over a wall.
There was a horse at the end of my property, out by Lischen’s truck. Black.
I thought it might be the same horse Ralph had with him in the trailer, though I couldn’t see the eyes at this distance.
The horse tossed its head up, and then it rippled, collapsing on itself and stretching at the same time. I stared.
Not a horse. A woman. Naked, in the rain and hail, and like a fool, I thought that she must be cold, that I should bring her a blanket. I grabbed one from my bed, and ran down the stairs.
At the door stood Lischen, feet bare and mud-splotched, black hair dripping onto the rain-soaked red dress she wore. She took the blanket from my hands and wrapped it around her hair. She pushed past me into the hall.
“What did you do to my truck, Malcolm?”
I looked through the open door. No horse. No woman. “The tire blew. I don’t know why.”
“I do. This place doesn’t like me, and the feeling is mutual. Come back inside, Malcolm, and stop looking for what’s dripping in your hallway.”
“You’re a horse.” Not as strange as I would have thought it before I came to Ione, to this house. I glanced at her feet.
“Only sometimes. And no. I’m not the thing that needs shoeing.” The bracelet, clasped hands in sliver, was tight against her wrist.
“Is the bracelet a family design?”
She smiled, and the hair on the back of my neck stood. “Now, why would you ask a question like that? Did the door open, Malcolm? Did you find the shoes?” She walked to the bottom of the stairs. “It’s up here, isn’t it?”
Upstairs, a door slammed.
“I told you. The place doesn’t like me. You go first—it’ll let you in. You live here.” She unwrapped the blanket from her hair, and draped it over the banister. A long black hair clung to the fabric.
I wasn’t sure I wanted Lischen anywhere the house and its ghosts didn’t want her. “That’s a strange thing to say, that the place doesn’t like you.”
“Oh, I know a bit
about this house. I’ve been here a few times, and again, after the last of the Weylands was gone, looking for what was mine. It’s not the first time that dirt lane has grown disappearing rocks that last just long enough to pop my tires. I know there are doors that won’t open without keys. I told you I had a history, Malcolm. It’s here, and I want it back. He doesn’t get to have that too.”
I thought I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “Who?”
“The end of the sentence is almost here, and he’ll be back, in his new pair of shoes. The monster who killed my son.”
She walked up the first couple of steps, then looked back. “Don’t just stand there gaping like a landed fish. Show me the door and show me the shoes. I want what’s mine.” She kicked the wall as she passed it, and the kick rang out like she’d hit it with iron.
“Your son?” I said. That was all I could say. I felt a knot in my chest like a swallowed apple.
“The door,” she said.
It hadn’t been the bedroom door that slammed shut, but the painted one. The key had fallen out, and was almost hidden beneath the bed.
“I know there’s a door there, right in the wall. I’m the one who painted it open,” Lischen said. “I came back and visited it the other night, but even with you here, tucked in your bed and me smelling of your sheets, the house wouldn’t let me in.”
The key stuck, and part of me hoped it wouldn’t turn. But the tumblers turned over and I felt the lock open. The door cracked. I could refuse. Lock it back up, and not open it until I had my answers. The house would help.
But, her child. If there was even a piece of truth in that. I thought of my own son, my Row, in dress and crown.
I opened the door.
Her eyes came to rest on the solitary shoe. She made a sound I couldn’t identify, a gasping choke. “There,” she said. “There. He made a shoe, after all. I knew it. He couldn’t let it go. He couldn’t let him go. The monster. I trusted him, and he—”
She looked at me, her eyes liquid around golden pupils.
“I trusted him,” Lischen said. “But trust is nothing, Malcolm.” She reached out a fingertip and grazed it over the solitary shoe, then yanked her hand away as if it was red hot.
I could smell her now, cedar, forest, and tarnished silver, and wondered at how I’d been unable to identify it. Of course she was the one who’d been in my room.
“The bracelet,” I stammered. “There’s a picture of a couple, with that set of shoes, there, and they’re wearing the same ones. The woman’s named Lischen, so I was wondering if it had some meaning.”
“You really should have spent more time in the library, Malcolm. You are what you are, and I am too. You have your own stories, and I don’t know them.” She looked at me, and corrected herself. “I don’t know them all.”
I felt transparent. What did she know of me?
“When the Weylands came to Ione, they brought their anvil with them. They made their living as blacksmiths. They brought the tradition of the anvil marriage with them, too. A smith could pronounce a couple married and have it be just as binding as the words said by a minister. They brought one more thing. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof was part of their family. He came from the mountains here to begin with, called by another name back then, by the people who’d been here thousands of years. He’d vowed himself to a Weyland, way back, and married that man’s sister, and now he was bound to them.
“There were promises made. The Weylands would give him their hands, and he would give them what they needed.”
“Their actual hands,” I said.
“Don’t ask questions you already know the answers to. It was a trade. And when the marriage was solemnized over the anvil, new hands were struck on. The Weylands were no longer the materials. The shoes were made of volunteers. Like me.” She held up her left hand, so that the bracelet gleamed.
“My parents made the bargain. That’s them in the picture. My Mom became a whitesmith, and she taught me her craft. My Dad was a trader—Ralph’s used to be his general store.”
She stopped at that, and looked at me. Her eyes were very golden now.
“Nine months after their anvil marriage, Elkanah March and Lischen Wildshoe had a child. My inheritance came from her family. It had made them powerful in their tribe, and then, later, when the world changed, become a terrible secret. My mother was afraid that when she had a child, the child might inherit it, even though she had not, and so my parents gave their hands to Dusha, and he gave them, you’ve read it—”
“The power to tame horses,” I said.
“Good student, for all you’re slow,” said Lischen. “Every night I knelt beside my bed to pray, and every night my parents took my hands in theirs. Their touch kept me human. I didn’t know what I was until I was three and twenty.”
She took the portrait of her parents from the shelf and shoved it at me.
“Look at them. They bargained with a beast. There are punishments for that. Sometimes punishments are slow.”
The composure she’d had for a moment was gone. Her eyes were nothing human. In the dark of the not-closet, they glowed. I had a wild thought, instructions from childhood, from my grandparents, whose land lay beside a tangle of trees. ‘Stand still, Malcolm. Don’t run from a predator,’ and though Lischen was neither panther nor bear, I had to force myself to remain standing. I thought of something from one of those old stories, a horse that led you into the woods, and then left your bones. The people in those stories had gone willingly.
“What happened?” I said.
Lischen picked up the solitary shoe in her braceleted hand, wincing, balancing it carefully in the center of her palm. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know anything else from this woman I felt both moved and frightened by. The small shoe in her palm looked even stranger as I looked at it, less like human fingers made metal, more like a hoof itself, a hoof with finger nubs, its center hollowed. It was nothing like the rest of the horseshoes. It was horse, or half-horse.
Lischen shrugged, and unexpectedly laughed.
“I fell in love, Malcolm. You should have known that much. I went out walking in the dark one night, looking at the stars, and I remembered the blackberries that grew behind this old house. I thought to steal some. I didn’t think Ironhide really existed. Some story told to keep us from bothering the house, the monster who protected the boundary. This, I knew, was where Marvel Weyland lived, and my parents came here to get our horses shod. They wore their bracelets. I didn’t know what they’d done. I never saw their wrists without their cuffs. You’ll never see mine.”
She looked at me pleadingly.
“How could I have known? He was standing in the dark outside the back door when I first saw him. In those days, the mint was high around the porch and there were violets blooming year round. The tree in front of the house bore peaches, plums, nectarines and apricots, all at the same time, the project of some crazy grafter. This town was full of things to wonder about. There were farmers who harvested their crops in January, and diviners who brought water from the salt flats. Ione had people who could build houses without nails, and people who could heal cancer using their fingertips. But I came from here. Wonders were what I knew.
“I’d never seen him before, and I knew everyone. I thought about running, but there was no reason for me to run. He was my neighbor, and I was only being neighborly, though I felt shy looking at him. He was shirtless, his skin tanned. His eyes were the blue of skimmed milk. I could see them, and his smile in the dark. Once I saw those things, I knew I wouldn’t forget them.
“‘What kind of thing are you?’” he asked me.
“‘Lischen March,’” I said.
“‘No, what?’” he asked. “‘Not who. What kind of thing are you?’”
In the hidden closet, next to this woman who was telling me a story of something that had happened a hundred and seventeen years earlier, (which made her a hundred and forty, oh Malcolm, what dreams are these?) I felt it unroll in front of my eyes, a scrol
l of images. Lischen in a long white nightdress in the back yard, her lips stained with juice, her black hair, streaming to her waist, and her eyes, glowing. In the vision, there was no cuff on her wrist, and it seemed too intimate. Like looking at someone else’s bride on her wedding night. I couldn’t see Dusha. I could only see his eyes. The house felt nervous around me, the walls shaking slightly, but somehow I was being given these images, like a movie playing inside the closet.
“‘I’m Lischen. I’m a whitesmith,’ I said to the man. ‘I didn’t mean to steal your fruit. I’ll pay you in silver, if you like. I’ll pay you for your loss.’
“He laughed. ‘If you could do that, you’d be more than anyone else in the world. But even lacking that, you’re more than you think you are,’ the man said, and lay his hand on mine. It was then I felt it.
“I changed into what I’d been always, kept from it all those years by my parents. I stood in front of Dusha for the first time, what I really am. We were not the same, he and I, but we had things in common.”
Lischen looked at me, a keen, dangerous look. “Maybe you know something about that sort of thing, Malcolm Mays, or why are you here? Nobody comes here that wasn’t called, Malcolm. You got called by someone.”
Lischen walked back into the bedroom, looking around with certainty as though everything in the house was her own, the bed, the walls, the floors, the sheets, and maybe me along with them.
“I used to come here at night, after that,” she said. “I used to sleep in his bed, this bed. I counted him my husband. Maybe he loved me, and maybe he didn’t. He was known in these parts, but not for what he really was. Neither was I. People called him Ironhide for what he’d said at some point was a family illness, his blood oxidizing his body. He was rusting, but he wore the shoes, and they kept him human enough to pass. The ones my parents had given him were wearing thin by the time I met him. He needed a new set of volunteers, but he told me I was the one he’d been waiting for. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof sank when he swam, and in the rain, his skin turned red. He stayed indoors during the day, mostly, but in the dark, we gloried. We ran in the hills outside of town, he and I, and even shod, he can run like—”
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