The black walnut trees that stood nearby smelled ancient; Cello could almost feel the human lifetimes they’d passed crammed close together. He steadied himself on one of them, laying his palm on the bark the same way he’d settle an animal. Cello shuddered under another wave of guilt—how could any living creature trust him now? He wondered how permanently this transgression would change him.
The oldest plants in the clearing grew to Cello’s eye height. The sturdy central stalks were crisscrossed with yarn-fine shoots, and their blue floral crowns seemed to nod as Cello drew close. They harvested from the base of the Vine, removing only its crawling, twisting ivy-like appendages. The plants did well in the shade, and did best in this particular grove. Letta said it was because her ancestor had found the very first Vine rippling up through the forest floor in this exact spot. The Vine still leaned on and swelled against the trees, but had matured over many decades to stand on its own. Cello looked closely at the nearest plant, not sure where to make the cut. Any abrasion in the stalk would ruin it—since that was where the sap pulsed most aggressively.
Cello wondered if Franklin Lees would even know what to do with it, how to plant it, how to tend it. He took an X-Acto knife out of his back pocket and sliced off three of the youngest shoots, still spiraling loose, not yet fully tethered to anything. He untangled them, and, as gently as he’d held Joanie’s baby that morning, he wrapped them in an old T-shirt on the ground. Joanie had said to smother it, but Cello couldn’t bear to think of the Vine slowly suffocating in the summer heat, rolled up in the bone-dry fabric. He settled a few handfuls of damp earth between each fold, and carried the bundle out of the grove. He hid the soft parcel behind the deflated tire of a decaying Oldsmobile, more fossil than machine now, that Sil had parked out back years ago.
Cello snuck back into the trailer and checked on the baby to make sure he was still asleep before easing himself down onto his own cot, turning his back to the rest of his dreaming family. He wasn’t sure how much time was left before Letta came in to wake them, but he forced his limbs to quiet and his breath to even so that Letta wouldn’t be able to see the way the disgrace gripped his body. His pulse slowed as he thought of Joanie, of her relief. Imagining Joanie at peace brought him the same comfort as a cool washcloth to the back of the neck.
2
“Morning, children!” Letta crashed open the kids’ trailer door. It didn’t lock, and never fully closed, so whenever the wind was up, a constant whistling through the gap between the metal door and the frame serenaded them. Cello had always wondered if the trailer came that way, or if it had been mutilated by Letta’s brusque entrances and exits.
“Breakfast time!” she trumpeted. Letta pulled covers—and kids—off bunks. Cello could still smell the dew on the air. It was earlier than they usually woke up. His throat burned with nerves; could Letta already know what he’d done?
“Come on, come on.” She adjusted her rose sateen robe over a jutting sternum. “Miracle—out!” She banged her ring-coated fingers against the wall beside the little girl’s head. Miracle scooted out from under the blanket so that just a tiny strip of her forehead showed. They all knew she’d be punished for wetting the bed. Instead of inspecting Miracle’s bedding, though, Letta sidled up next to Joanie’s cot. She lay on her side, the baby beside her in the sheets.
“Come here, handsome,” Letta cooed at the baby, slipping Joanie’s hand from the baby’s belly. “Come with Mama Letta.” She bent over, plucked the baby away and swaggered back to the flapping, open door. “Come on, the rest of you,” she called over her shoulder. Sometimes Cello believed Letta was completely rotted away inside, but her tenderness for the most helpless things—for Joanie’s baby, specifically—it was real.
The kids fell out of their beds and wandered after Letta into the humid morning. Cello didn’t say a word, even to Joanie. He just pulled Miracle from her bunk and peeled the damp, stinking sheets from her mattress.
“Get dressed, Miracle,” Joanie said, her voice as harsh as Letta’s.
Miracle pattered to the corner where they kept all of their clothes in two piles: one clean, the other dirty. No one had their own things—they all shared and somehow it worked out. Only Joanie had clothes that were her own, mostly because she was the oldest, and because she had already been married.
When Joanie’s husband died, it was sudden and complicated. She had lived away from the garden for a little while with her new husband, but came back with the baby in her belly once he was gone. Letta had set up the marriage, of course. Joanie never would have picked Josiah Joseph—sixteen-year-old Joanie wouldn’t have picked anyone.
Cello watched her put new sheets on Miracle’s bed, the way her body stretched and moved. He could see the old marks on her back from her time at the Josephs’ between the straps of her camisole. The evidence of that harm eased his guilt a little—his betrayal was a fair price to keep her away from Mother Joseph, to keep her safe.
Cello followed Miracle outside where the others were already eating in the grass, a row of faces spooning cereal into their mouths. The dense constellation of freckles across Emil’s nose and cheeks was indistinguishable from beneath a layer of the garden’s grime.
“Y’all are filthy,” Cello said, shaking his head.
“Cello, why don’t you take the kids for a swim while Joanie and I have some girl talk.” Letta bounced Joanie’s baby in the shade of an old beech tree. “You kids listen to Cello. Don’t want any running off.” Letta didn’t look at the others as she said it—only at him. “Lots to do today.”
“Yes, Letta,” Sabina and Miracle chorused.
Letta carried the baby back into her and Sil’s trailer. When Cello and the others left for the creek, Joanie still hadn’t come out of the kids’ trailer.
* * *
The water that morning was muddy, and Cello guessed it must have rained sometime overnight. Usually he wouldn’t miss a thing like that, the sound of rain pouring over the trailer, pouring over the ground. Cello liked to know everything that happened to the soil, and he was surprised that he hadn’t noticed something as significant as a rainfall. Maybe Joanie’s plans had dulled him. Maybe secretly slicing away the shoots of the Vine had changed something, melted away at his connection to the garden.
“Hey, Cello!” Miracle splashed at him from the shallows of the creek.
“Careful, don’t fall,” he called back. “Try to keep the mud off you.”
The kids were noisy, unfolding into regular children away from Letta’s gaze. Emil chased Sabina through the shallows with a handful of mud, and she squealed away, ducking behind Miracle.
“Are you in trouble, Cello?” Marcela flounced over to where he slouched on the bank. “You look like you’re in trouble.”
Cello was quiet, squinting against the strengthening sun.
“You did something you weren’t supposed to, I can tell.”
“Shut your mouth, Marcela. You’ll get in trouble yourself if you go around accusing people.”
“Well, did you?” she asked. Her dark eyes narrowed as she examined him. She was trying to read something there, Cello thought. Something she had no business reading.
“Course not,” he said as he rearranged his feet in the sticking mud.
Marcela looked almost disappointed.
The little kids were naked, but Marcela and Sabina were too old for that. They swam in their clothes, the way Letta had shown them. Still, Cello could see their bodies, no longer the bodies of children, beneath the sodden cloth. He knew just by growing, the girls were in danger; women always had to do terrible things at the garden.
He turned away, thinking it would propel Marcela back to the water. Instead, she moved closer.
“What was it?” She was quiet, like she knew the other kids shouldn’t hear her ask.
“Enough,” Cello said, careful to keep his voice even. “It’s none of your business
. Swim or go back. I have to watch the little kids.”
Marcela just shook her head, drops of creek water from her hair splattering Cello’s shoulder. She stared down at Cello’s slouched figure. “You look so guilty.” Her voice was grating, unpleasant, like she was trying not to cry. “Whatever you did better not get me or Sabina in trouble.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Cello muttered.
“Nothing like that, but it is something. If you did something dumb, leave the rest of us out of it.” Marcela was louder now, her voice raspy and furious. Marcela walked off toward the creek, her hair a dark spill of ink against her mottled-gray-T-shirt-covered back.
Joanie had asked this favor of him; it was his decision alone to help her, and the consequences were his, too. He looked out to where the rest of the kids splashed.
“Time to get out!” he called, heading down to the stone-studded shore.
* * *
They walked back to the trailers and the kids dried off in the sun. Cello hadn’t swum, since he was just going to get dirty again.
That morning, the garden would need every pair of hands. They had planted too much. Letta was always greedy, always pushing. There was already more work than they could do, but still she wanted another plot cleared. The family worked every day in the summer, from just after breakfast until the sun began to set. They moved in an endless rotation, starting with the plot that had been tended last. Weeds grew swiftly around the Vine, as though they, too, wanted to be near it. The kids all had to work five times as hard as they would have had to work if they were growing corn or grain, or any other crop, to keep the space open for the Vine to grow.
When they got to the first field of the day, Letta was already there; Joanie and the baby were not.
“Come on!” she shouted, pulling Emil in by the arm as they approached. “Look sharp, especially in these first ten rows—there are already more weeds than I like to see. Y’all were slacking last time we came down here. All of the planting’ll be wasted if the weeds drink up all of our water and work.” The sun-warmed plot roiled with the twisting, newly growing Vine of Heaven. The Vine fenced away the earth, and the gaps between the finger-thick twists of plants were just wide enough for the children’s hands.
The little kids knew which shoots of green were worth money, and which were the weeds. It was the first thing they were taught. Sil understood that the greatest value in their youth was the delicate size of their hands. Emil and Miracle drew the unwanted plants out gently, and didn’t disturb the soil around the precious, striving, thread-thin roots the way a grown person’s pulling would. It was the reason Letta and Sil took in so many kids at the garden. Sil said there were roots moving through the ground that couldn’t be seen by the naked eye, that’s how tender and new they were.
Miracle and Emil knew, thanks to Letta’s snap of the switch, which plants to leave alone. They were smart, especially Miracle. She always knew what should get pulled and what should stay.
“Marcela,” Letta continued. “I want you to follow Cello. He’s setting up a new plot—help him.”
“What?” Marcela whined. “Why can’t Joanie do it? Can’t I just weed with the little kids?”
“You’re not a little kid anymore. There needs to be a woman at every new planting. You’re a young lady now. You need to learn—this is your job in the family. Joanie and I can’t do it forever,” Letta snapped.
“Can I go with her?” Sabina asked quietly.
“Fine.” Letta rolled her eyes. “Just get a move on before I start to get upset.” Cello searched for any sign of suspicion in Letta’s face or hands—when she was saving up a punishment, she flicked her fingernails against one another, like she was counting up how may minutes of suffering you were going to get.
Cello and the sisters hiked to a spill of land that Sil had chosen for the new plot. Marcela fell onto the grass and rested an arm across her eyes. Sabina waited, halfway between Cello’s searching, tensed form and Marcela’s collapsed one.
“Over here,” Cello spoke, waving toward a line of trees. “We’ll start here, and I’ll mark it off. Sabina, go get the mower and drive it up to that hill.” It was true, what Letta had said about each new planting needing a woman to turn the soil. If it wasn’t done, the Vine wouldn’t grow.
Sabina nodded, and nudged Marcela with her foot. “Are you alright?”
“Go ahead,” Marcela said, her arm still over her face. “I just need a minute.”
“Are you crying? Why?”
“I’m not crying. I just need a minute, I said.”
“Alright.” Sabina had always been the quiet one, the patient and obedient one; she saw and understood everything. Cello knew what Sabina saw—that Marcela’s mind swelled with anger and worry. Letta hadn’t given her this responsibility before, and Cello couldn’t imagine what it would do to her. He was relieved not to know.
“It’s okay, Mar. Rest a little—and don’t worry, Cello won’t mind that you’re being lazy,” Sabina said, giving Cello a soft, apologetic glance.
“Like I give two shits about what Cello thinks.” Marcela rolled onto her stomach, hiding her face. “Why doesn’t Letta make Joanie do it? She took care of all of the plots before the baby.”
“You know the baby takes a lot out of her. It’ll be okay. It’s only one plot, and you’re so strong. I’ll be right back.” Sabina gave Marcela another playful tap with her foot, and ran out into the warming day to collect Sil’s mower.
Cello walked the edge of the field, pressing the long grass down in a footprint-wide path as he moved. He studied the hollows in the ground, and the way the wind moved around the earth there. Everything Cello knew about planting he’d learned from Sil—Sil, who could make anything grow. He could coax life out of places teeming with mold and rot.
The garden was a constellation of plots—some tiny, half the size of the kids’ trailer, some large; the largest was almost three acres. Most fell somewhere in between, and it was Cello’s job to mind the middling ones. The largest plot and the smallest were Sil’s, the small plots were filled entirely with his experiments.
Sil taught all of the kids different things, but it was Cello who received the most instruction, because it was Cello who was most like Sil. Cello could also make things grow. He knew certain things, just by picking up a handful of earth—whether the plants were healthy, and thriving, or if they were not. Sil taught him how to smell the soil for elements that were missing, and showed Cello how to add those things back.
“In farming, people will tell you to leave the topsoil alone,” Sil had explained. “But there’re ways around it. You can’t till the topsoil the way you’d need to for most crops, but for what we’re doing now, you can. You just have to plant around the contours. You need to strategize.” Sil tapped at his forehead with a dirt-caked finger.
Cello couldn’t remember his life before working in the garden with Sil, just that he was smaller than Emil, and had learned which plants were valuable the same way. All of their harvests were delivered straight to the Josephs. In exchange for the truck beds full of cuttings they drove to the Joseph compound, Letta took home envelopes fat with cash. He and Joanie had been the only kids then, but as the Vine kept growing, and as Letta kept planting, their ragtag family—and Letta’s envelopes—grew, too.
Cello didn’t fully understand the arrangement until Joanie finally explained it one night, after she came back from living on the compound. It was late in the kids’ trailer, the littlest ones were in that stone-heavy sleep that only people who were recently babies could reproduce. They hadn’t had enough food that winter; nobody was ever full.
“She’s just cheap,” Joanie told them—Cello, Marcela and Sabina were the only ones awake.
“What do you mean? It’s not like they have jobs.” Marcela flipped onto her side—her voice sounded clear in the tinny dark of the trailer.
“God,
you’re such idiots,” Joanie said, her voice muffled against her pillow. “What do you think the Josephs put in those envelopes they give Letta? Stickers?”
“How would I know?” Marcela said. Cello could feel her flash of irritation ripple in the air.
“The little kids are sleeping, you guys,” Sabina whispered.
“Who cares about that?” Marcela said. “They sleep plenty. I want to know how much money the Josephs could be paying for a bunch of flowers and weeds, is all.”
“Yeah, what are they? Florists?” Cello had said, half joking, but still unsure. He had no idea how much money florists made. Could be millions.
“I can’t believe I share a room with you idiots,” Joanie said.
“News flash,” Marcela shot back. “This is nothing close to a room. Just tell us what you know, if you’re so smart.”
“What do people pay that kind of money for?” Joanie asked. She let the question float there in the dark.
Cello turned to face the peeling laminate paneling on the wall. He breathed in the smell of lacquer and stale sweat from his unwashed sheets. Perhaps he had known all along that there was something dangerous about the Vine, how often they were warned not to break its skin or release its sap. But until Joanie’s prompting he’d never linked the Vine to Marcela and Sabina’s disintegrating mother. He’d never made the connection from the work they did in the garden to the empty-eyed tenants who waited by the Joseph compound gate. A tremor of panic glanced through him as he began to understand he knew very little about what the Vine could do—could there really be such dark, addictive power in it, such shadowy value?
Daughters of the Wild Page 2