Daughters of the Wild

by Natalka Burian

  Sil tugged at her arm, and soon they were stumbling away, not quite running, but almost. She felt the Josephs’ eyes on her all the way back to Sil’s truck.

  Although it had been terrible, Joanie felt incrementally lighter. Mother Joseph didn’t want her. Never wanted to see her again. While most of her was relieved, she was still outraged. She couldn’t come back to look for the baby. She couldn’t come back to challenge Mother Joseph ever again. Which meant that her mother-in-law had disqualified her from whatever game they’d been playing and won by default. She’d disqualified Joanie because she was afraid. Amberly Joseph was afraid of her, of what she’d done at the trial.

  That Josiah was dead, though, wasn’t exactly Joanie’s fault. Joanie’s insides contracted in a dark minute, all of her muscles clenching and aching. Her body betrayed her as it flashed back to the panic she’d felt as she repeatedly pressed her palms into Josiah’s chest trying to revive him.

  She had tried to save him, she told herself, shaking away the sticking guilt. She tried to save him, which was more than Mother Joseph or anyone else in that family had done.

  Joanie slammed the door to the truck, crossing her arms and legs, folding back into herself.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Sil said as he backed the truck out of the compound’s lot and drove away. “I’m sorry, Joan-bug,” he said, wiping sweat from his upper lip with a shaking hand. “We shouldn’t have gone.”

  “Yes,” Joanie said. “We should have.” An optimistic thought, tiny as a seed in a pod, tapped out at her. If she was powerful enough to frighten Amberly Joseph, she was powerful enough to find her child.

  7

  When the truck rolled back up the lane, Cello could see the hot blush of Joanie’s face. He could see it all the way from where he stood by the abandoned water tank. There was always a pull toward her. All the siblings felt it, but Cello felt it the strongest. Cello had to force his feet still, to push back against the compulsion to go to her. His first memories were filled with that feeling, needing to stay as close to her as possible—him and Joanie, running around the garden like twins, like they shared the same heart. He could tell, from Sil’s heavy step, and Joanie’s blotchy face, that no baby had been found.

  Letta swayed out of her trailer, clutching Miracle’s hand as she descended the abbreviated, rusting stoop.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Well, nothing,” Sil answered, kicking at the whirring sound of a bug flitting between them. “So what now?”

  Letta looked over to the truck encapsulating the still-silent Joanie. “I don’t know.” Letta seemed muted, less than what she usually was.

  “Don’t you think we ought to report it, honey?”

  “Oh, Sil.” Letta turned her gaze to the cloudless sky, Miracle clutched to her front. “You know we can’t. First place they’ll come looking is here. You know we can’t have that.”

  “Well, this doesn’t feel right,” Sil said, jabbing at the air with a pointed finger. “Somebody’s got to know a baby’s gone missing.”

  “We know he’s gone. Nobody better to look for him than his own family. Isn’t that right, Miracle, honey?”

  A melting cherry Icee dripped its scarlet syrup onto Miracle’s fist, and she licked it off. Letta took it for a nod of agreement.

  “This is serious now,” Sil said. “We need help looking for him.”

  “Are you saying you’re going to call the law in on this?” Letta spat.

  “I don’t see why not. I could—I don’t know—hide what we got going on.”

  “Please. You’re embarrassing yourself, Silvanus.”

  “You know what’s embarrassing?” Sil’s voice pitched high and hysterical. “You! That is a living child out there somewhere! We got to do all we can to make sure he gets found. Can’t you do something? With the girls? I bet y’all could track him down. Maybe with a fire?”

  Letta shook her head. “You know we can’t. The Work only protects the Vine, not the people who grow it.”

  Joanie straightened her back, cool and silent as water while Sil’s and Letta’s voices pinged around the yard. To give her some room and keep himself from moving toward her, Cello walked to where Letta and Sil argued.

  “I’ll go in,” Cello said. “I’ll tell the cops about him.”

  “You?” Letta’s voice was shrill now, matching Sil’s wavering panicked tones. “And who are you? You think anybody’s going to listen to you? You’re nothing to that baby. Why, you’d be the first suspect, I bet. Go on.” Letta waved her arms like a terrible sorceress. “Run along and report it, Good Citizen Cello. I have a feeling we won’t see you again for quite some time.” Her voice brightened with falseness. Letta wrenched the half-eaten popsicle out of Miracle’s hand and threw it at him.

  Cello ducked, but the Icee still clipped his ear. He felt a buzz of cold at the side of his head.

  “Leave it alone, Cello,” Joanie said. She leaned out of the truck’s rolled-down window, and rested her head against the door frame, closing her eyes. Cello took a few steps toward her.

  “It’s not right,” Cello said quietly, just for her. “Listen to Sil, please.”

  “I never thought I’d hear you say that,” Joanie answered, the words floating on a strange and dark current of humor.

  “Please,” Cello whispered, wanting to touch her, to squeeze the message into her palm.

  Joanie nodded. “I think Letta’s right. We can find him probably better than anyone, even if we can’t use the Work.”

  “What does that mean?” Cello asked.

  She didn’t answer. Locked away behind her unfocused eyes, Cello could see her growing something, an idea.

  Letta’s and Sil’s voices erupted in front of them. They started circling one another, with Letta looking for more objects to throw. Miracle had been pushed away, and ran into a huddle with Emil and Sabina.

  “Did you go down there?” Cello asked quietly, looking at Joanie with magnifying-glass intensity.

  Joanie nodded. “Mother Joseph said if I come back, she’ll shoot me. Sil, too,” she said, all calm.

  “Do you think the baby’s there? You want me to go back and look? I’ll be quiet—they’ll never see me, I promise.”

  “I don’t know,” Joanie answered. “I didn’t feel anything while we were there, but now that I’m home, I don’t know—it feels like I left him there. She has to have my son. Who else would take him?” She crossed her arms over the window jamb and rested her head on her soft pile of limbs.

  “I’ll go tonight,” Cello said.

  “Okay,” Joanie replied, her voice slow and mixed with strangeness, like she’d been drugged. “I’m going to stay here for a minute. You can go. I’m fine, really. I just want to think for a while.” Cello turned away, trying not to feel wounded by her dismissal. He tried not to remember what it had felt like before her time at the Josephs’, when Joanie told him everything.

  Letta and Sil had quieted down, and stood close, their whole bodies touching. Cello strained to hear their lowered voices.

  “If she knows what Cello and Joanie did the other night, this isn’t the end of it,” Sil said.

  “I know,” Letta answered, clinging to Sil as their bodies bent together.

  Sabina and the little kids were gone, disappeared either into the woods or into the kids’ trailer. Marcela smoked out in the grass. Cello walked over to her, and from there, he could see Sabina’s shadow flickering back and forth across the grease-clouded windows of the trailer.

  “Want one?” Marcela saluted him with her cigarette.

  “Sure,” he said. They stood side by side under the blaze of the midday sun. “I’m going out to the Joseph place after dark, and I really think you should come with me.”

  “Ugh, I knew you were about to say something crazy like that. Who do you think we are? Batman and Robin?”
Marcela threw her cigarette butt to the earth and stomped on it vigorously.

  “Fine, if not for the baby, aren’t you curious about what they do over there?” Cello said, letting the smoke push out and against the soft caverns of his lungs, steadying his breathing. “You’ve never been to the Josephs’ and you might end up living there.”

  Marcela hung her head, quietly examining her extinguished Grand Prix.

  “And think about if we actually find him. This may be the most important thing we ever do,” Cello said.

  “Please, if this is the most important thing I ever do, kill me.” Marcela sauntered away, and Cello thought over what he remembered about the Joseph place.

  What he knew from helping with deliveries wasn’t much. Mostly, he’d waited in or by the truck while Sil or Letta got out to negotiate with Mother Joseph. There was one night, though, when he’d seen more. When there was more to see.

  That night, it was understood that there might be violence. Letta sent them off, just Sil and Cello alone. Her face was tight, all the other kids asleep in their beds. They’d heard from Mother Joseph earlier in the day—a single, brief phone call. Letta winced into the phone, just nodding, and then, “Okay.”

  “Josiah’s dead,” Letta told them once she’d hung up the phone.

  “Big Josiah?” Sil had asked, eyebrows arched against his bald pate.

  “No.” One word, but that’s all it took to make Sil grimace and Cello soar. With her husband gone, Joanie would come back to them, back to Cello.

  “How’d it happen?” Sil asked.

  “I don’t really know. Amberly’s upset—said Joanie probably did it.”

  “What do you mean, did it?” Sil asked, agitated. “You mean she killed him?”

  “That’s what I said,” Letta replied evenly. “Amberly put on a trial. For Joanie.”

  She and Sil looked at each other, and Cello could barely keep still. He wanted to run, to find Joanie, to haul her back.

  “You boys’ll go get her tonight.”

  “Is she alright?” Cello asked.

  “It doesn’t sound like it, honey. Like I said, there was a trial. You go get her, now—quick, before Amberly changes her mind.”

  A single nod, and they were on their way. Cello knew that dangerous people swarmed the compound, and that most of the wild Joseph cousins were grown men. He knew that if they wanted to fight, they could kill all three of them—him, Sil and Joanie. Cello was never foolish about the things that bodies could do.

  The truck’s headlights bobbed in the dark like two pale fish, swimming ahead. Sil drove, and Cello tapped his foot.

  “Jesus, son, quit it! You’ll drive us both crazy with that wiggling and waggling.”

  The lights from the Joseph place were bright smudges in the evening fog. Sil pulled up slowly, and parked in their usual spot—the place they parked when they stopped for trade. Cello got out and felt the sting of the cold night air, and the frozen mud under his feet. It was almost spring, but the nights still felt like true winter. Cello let Sil go ahead, slinking behind and hunching his shoulders in his oversize sweatshirt.

  All of the Josephs appeared to be in for the night—strange for a group in mourning. Any death in their network of families meant drinking and fighting, or wailing and laughter. Before a body was burned or buried, it was surrounded with surges of emotional excess. The only burning Cello had ever seen was Sil and Letta’s grown daughter’s. It had happened when he was small, and all he remembered was the noise—all that wailing, and crying, and singing, and commotion over the body. He’d hidden at the edge of the garden until it was all over, and when Sil finally returned from the compound exhausted and limping, they’d just gone back to work like it had never happened.

  This evening was different. Josiah must have been dead for a while. Maybe he was already buried. Sil knocked on the main house front door, respectful. They knew Mother Joseph would be inside.

  A thin little boy opened the door, and Cello’s heart beat hard. Long, tangled hair hung around his gaunt face. He was one of the tenants’ kids. Cello stared at the boy, trying to imagine Emil in his place. It wasn’t the first time he wondered if being separated from your parents could be a good thing. Amberly Joseph’s overwhelming bulk suddenly filled the door. Her face was pasty and made-up, a strata of smeared eyeliner and mascara ringing her eyes.

  “Sorry for your loss, Mother Joseph. We just came for Joanie, and we’ll be out of your hair.”

  “I’m not the keeper of that trash anymore. So don’t come up here asking after her,” she coughed out at them into the night, horrible and phlegm-flinging.

  “Now, now,” Sil gentled. “I know you’re grieving, but you sure wouldn’t have called Letta and had us come all the way out here if Joanie was, well, if she had gone anywhere.”

  “You’re a real genius, aren’t you? You heard that?” Mother Joseph called into the belly of the house. “Einstein came to pay his respects.”

  A tall man, almost as wide as his sister—for there was no mistaking their relationship—met them at the door: Big Josiah. His face was contorted and half-frozen, like a stroke victim on the TV hospital shows.

  “What? They came for the widow?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” Sil answered.

  “She’s out in the shed,” said the man. “Grab her quick. Can’t vouch that she’s still alive. Y’all should’ve come sooner.”

  Cello moved away before Sil could stop him. He hadn’t seen Joanie since she’d become a Joseph. Mother Joseph talked to Letta sometimes, for practical reasons. Once in a while she’d put Joanie on the phone, but only for a minute, and only with Letta. Cello went from knowing everything about Joanie—how she’d slept and what she ate—to knowing nothing. He was anxious to pull her back, to gather up everything he had missed.

  He paced circles around the Josephs’ outbuildings looking for a shed. He didn’t actually think Joanie would be dead, just hurt and scared. He grimaced into the night; it pained him to think of someone like Joanie being scared. She’d always been the most fearless among them. That sly bravery was what he loved first and most. It was too dark to see much, but the smells of the frigid night were powerful. The scent of cats hung in the air—their fur, their piss, their very cat-ness. Cello thought to follow the smell, since it was likely that a shed was where they slept.

  He heard Sil run up behind him—could tell it was Sil by the pattern of his breaths and the singular jangle of the keys in his pocket. Sil blew a low whistle, and Cello slowed and crouched in the grass.

  “Let’s make this quick. Mother Joseph is none too pleased with her daughter-in-law.”

  “What happened?” Cello asked.

  “Well, let’s see about that when we find Joanie. She’s the one we should be asking.”

  Cello nodded, acknowledging the truth of it. “I think the shed’s over there somewhere.” He pointed out toward a stand of sappy pines. They walked quietly, a few arm’s lengths apart, just so they’d have a better chance of spotting it.

  Sil knocked into it first, swearing and tumbling. He shook out his rolled ankle and tapped gently on the door.

  “Joanie,” he called softly. “It’s Sil.” He looked over to the boy at his left. “And Cello. We’re here to take you home, honey.”

  There was nothing but the sound of small animals breathing and shuffling around grime with their paws.

  Sil pushed against the door, but it was locked—by a looped chain welded shut on the outside. Cello heaved a shoulder against it and the door bent, almost comically, under and around his weight, like some soft cartoon barrier.

  “Jesus, Sil, help me, will you?”

  They ran at the door together and it buckled under the force. The sound of wood splitting cracked out into the night.

  “Easy does it,” Sil warned. “We don’t want no more trouble here.”


  “How else are we supposed to get her out?” Cello tried not to shout, but the swell of volume in his throat was already beyond what he could control. “What if she’s dead, Sil?” That, he whispered. He didn’t want the fullness of the idea out in the air like that, like keeping his worry quiet would make it less likely.

  A rustle from the shed’s innards turned their heads. Cello put one palm flat against the cracked wood of the door.

  “Joanie?” he whispered.

  Sil spat onto the ground. A loose metallic clank sounded as the hinges split from the frame. The door rattled and opened onto a shadow, dark even against all of the other darkness.

  “I’m not dead,” she said. Her voice was exactly the same as it had been when they’d left her with the Josephs, months ago—strong and full.

  I love you, Joanie, Cello wanted to say. Never leave me again. But he didn’t. Instead, he threaded his arm through the narrow opening and reached for her.

  “I see you,” she said.

  Cello pulled back and pried open the door the rest of the way so that Joanie could get out. Sil left his arm out there, too, in case she needed help to steady herself. When she finally had enough space to step out, both of the men had to stop themselves from scooping her up in their arms, anything to hold her up. She was so gaunt Cello thought she might need to be carried. A lurid purple blotch flowered over her shoulder, down her arm and even partway up her neck.

  “What did they do to you?” White-hot anger pooled inside of Cello’s head.

  “Son, don’t get worked up. Keep your wits together, alright? We just got to get home in one piece.”

  Joanie took a few slow steps—she was obviously weak and malnourished, probably dehydrated, too—but she moved with languor, like the pace was deliberate and enjoyable, and not painful or necessary.

  All of the anger tearing through Cello’s body melted into those familiar feelings for Joanie: pride and desire, and also shame, because she’d ended up like this and he hadn’t been able to help her.