Daughters of the Wild

by Natalka Burian

  What would it be like between them if she’d been there, waiting? But every minute he adjusted to the emptiness in the room, the more he believed that Joanie had truly disappeared, that this time she had run off without him, without anyone. It wasn’t so crazy to believe that he’d never see her again. The possibility did not fill him with the kind of anguish he expected, only a dull sadness.

  If he couldn’t help Joanie, he could still help Junior. Cello rolled into his clothes and started the walk back to meet Ben for another day of senging. No matter what happened with Joanie, he had to do his best for the baby. Somebody had to do their best for him. The morning was at its coolest, but parts of the road’s asphalt shoulder were soft from the heat wave the day before.

  Ben was already waiting for him in their meeting place, the ginseng plot where Cello and Marcela first discovered the stranger.

  “Hey,” Cello began. “Can you help me out? I need a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?” Ben asked.

  “Remember when I told you about Joanie’s baby who went missing?”

  Ben nodded.

  “Well, it’s about that. I need some company while I wait. For someone.”

  Ben’s forehead creased. He opened his mouth to speak, but then pressed it closed. “What do you mean?” he finally asked.

  “It’s hard to explain. I just...need a friend there,” Cello said. Even though it wasn’t exactly right he hoped at least that it was partly true.

  “Okay. Can’t say no to that.”

  They took Ben’s bike, Cello standing behind on the back bar, his hands on Ben’s shoulders. He was relieved not to have to make the walk again, concentrating only on the breeze over his face and chest, and his wild heartbeat. Cello gave directions as they sped along, leaning down closer to make his voice heard on the windy ride.

  When they reached the convenience store lot, business had picked up. There were even a few cars waiting for the pumps. Cello watched the drivers and the passengers, wondering about the mornings they’d had. A deeply tanned balding man in an orange T-shirt stared at Cello appraisingly as he filled his gas tank. Cello turned his attention away from the man’s intense gaze and squinted through the glare over the windows of the waiting cars. He wondered if any of the people inside of them lived like he did—if any of them had ever felt so outside of everything. Ben walked very close beside him, so close that their hands touched.

  “What exactly are we doing here?” Ben asked.

  “Shh, just follow me.” Cello stepped to the side and led Ben around to the Crown Light sign. Cello signaled to Ben that they should move to the space behind the defunct ice bin. It was hot even in the shade behind the scaling white-metal shell. Cello could already tell it was going to be another blistering day.

  “Uh, I think maybe it’s time for you to tell me what this all is about,” Ben said.

  “How come you lied to me about the ginseng you planted?” Cello was surprised, the question out of his mouth before he could stop it.

  “What?” Ben leaned forward, as though he’d misheard.

  “You lied to us. How come?” The question, a slash in whatever rapport they’d been building between them. Cello decided to press it. He wanted some kind of answer. He’d never pressed anyone this way and understood this was how Letta must feel all the time talking to the kids, thinking two steps ahead. “You lied. You didn’t do all that work alone.”

  Ben slid to the ground, his back to the mold-stippled brick. He put his hands up to his face and rubbed his eyes.

  “I started out senging with a couple of guys I know from Grove. It was too many people.” Ben’s voice faded and he shook his head. “They didn’t know what they were doing. Not like you all.” Cello could tell that Ben had meant for him to feel the compliment squarely, to soften his story.

  “So?”

  “So, there was all this fighting—and, I mean, we tried everything. A chore wheel, for fuck’s sake! But they couldn’t get it together. The guy we were selling to—”

  “That teacher?” Cello asked.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, looking down at his shoes, and toying with the laces. “Dr. Santo wasn’t thrilled with the results, and you know, he took me aside when he saw that I was the only one who really understood what was going on. Told me we had to remove those other guys from the situation. They were expecting to get paid, too. And they weren’t doing anything.”

  “What happened to them?” Cello suddenly felt chilled, shocked that something in Ben’s life could be so similar to something in his own. Ben must have read the look there, and his face relaxed into a smile.

  “Dude, nothing bad.” Ben scratched at his temple. “Dr. Santo knows some guys—I guess the people who help him sell the product.” Ben shrugged and dropped his hand down where it smacked against his folded legs. “They straightened out the people I was planting with and that was it.”

  “What do you mean ‘straightened out’?” Cello asked, glancing back and forth from Ben’s face to the stained Crown Light sign.

  “Talked to them. Settled on some money, I guess, to get them to let me work in peace.”

  Cello felt a rush of relief. Whoever these people were doing business with Dr. Santo and Ben, they couldn’t be anything like the Josephs. A Joseph “straightening out” was very different from what Ben described. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Cello said.

  “No, of course not.” Ben half laughed.

  “So, why’d you lie about it?” Cello asked.

  “I don’t know. I was surprised. You guys literally came out of nowhere. And it’s a complicated story.”

  “It’s not that complicated,” Cello said, nudging Ben’s foot with his own.

  “It’s less complicated than what you’ve got going on with your whole not-family and their magic soil operation.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to talk about that,” Cello said, leaning back to get a better look at the drop spot behind the convenience store.

  Ben stood and stretched, taking a step closer to Cello. “Why not?”

  Cello shook his head, trying to keep an eye on what he had come to guard, but watched Ben’s approach instead. He put his hands on either side of Cello’s face, and again Cello was stunned by how foreign the gentle, affectionate touch was to him.

  “Dude, you’re so jumpy. Just take a deep breath, and at least tell me what we’re doing here.”

  “We’re waiting for someone to stop right there.” Cello pointed out the drop spot. “And dig for something.”

  “Um. Dig for something?”

  “Yes.” Cello twisted his hands together and looked down at the cracked pavement. “The person is a bad person. A very bad person.”

  “Should I be scared?” Ben smiled a little.

  Cello looked him in the eye as he answered, “Yes.”

  “Maybe I can help.”

  “You’re helping now,” Cello said, ducking his head away, feeling suddenly disloyal to Joanie, to Sil, to Marcela and Sabina and the rest of them.

  “What about your parents? Can’t they help?”

  Cello shook his head, trying to keep an eye on the Crown Light sign, but watching the other boy instead. The dip at Ben’s throat, just between the collarbones, was a cool dark shadow. Cello wondered what it would be like to put his mouth on that spot.

  “I don’t have any parents. I think they’re probably dead.” It was difficult to speak, flooded by Ben’s nearness.

  “You don’t know?” Ben skimmed a hand across the top of his head and squinted at a rustling from the tangled, dense branches surrounding them.

  “I never met them.” A familiar current of shame flowed through Cello as he admitted it. He didn’t like to think about who his parents had been; he couldn’t stop himself from assuming the very worst.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Cello nodded, gra
teful for the thin shade of hair over his face.

  “It must’ve been hard, growing up not knowing them.”

  Cello didn’t speak at first, feeling the empty places in his mind where the answers to such a question would exist in any other person. Here was Ben, though, so close that Cello could barely move without touching him. He wondered what it would be like to want him all the time, the same way he had wanted Joanie. For so long, Cello thought that he could only love one person, and that his one person was Joanie. Cello could feel the difference between them, between Joanie and Ben. He couldn’t understand how he could lean into two such different people, but he knew, now, that he wanted Ben. He wanted his reassurance. Ben, who existed outside of the garden, and the loss within it. Cello craved the calm of that otherness. He felt magnetized to the other boy, wanted in. He watched closely as Ben smoothed a pile of dirt with his foot, and felt himself opening in a way he never could at the garden, telling the truth.

  “I don’t know,” Cello finally said. “I guess it was hard. Actually, a lot of times it was.”

  Ben looked up. “Oh, no, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t trying to upset you. I’m a total asshole.” Cello winced away the tears that stubbornly clung to the corners of his eyes. He hadn’t really noticed, but as he’d been thinking, Cello drifted closer and closer to Ben, until it was nothing, barely a step, for Ben to close the space between them. Cello felt his arms around the other boy, and felt arms around his own body. He sank into the embrace, rolling into it, like a clean blanket.

  Cello felt grateful for this unexpected comfort. He wondered, stunned, if this was what everyone was like outside of the garden. Cello’s eyes were closed, his head and cheek against the other boy’s pollen-dusted shoulder, letting the soothing feeling wash over him—and he missed it.

  Cello rarely missed anything, and had never missed Sil’s heavy step through a sheet of drying brush. At least, he’d never missed the sound before. It wasn’t the sound of Sil that startled him next; it was another pair of hands on his body. Cello felt his head beat back against the brick wall of the convenience store, the burst of blood from the side of his head and its hot, liquid track down into the collar of his shirt. Ben was gone, and Cello discovered that he was on the ground. That he’d been thrown there. He lifted his head a little and forced his eyes open.

  “I told you I saw him,” said a voice. But the voice wasn’t Sil’s.

  “Well, Mr. Lees, I sure do appreciate you calling us. These children have been missing for the last few days, and we didn’t know what to make of it. But I can take it from here.” From Sil, Cello was sure of it.

  “It sure don’t look that way,” said the other voice. “Hey! Where’d that other one go? Y’all got another boy working at your place? Here, hold this one, and I’ll track down the other.”

  Cello shook his head, trying to piece together a complete thought through the throbbing in his head and now his elbow. The man, or men, began to strike out at Cello on the ground. It seemed like some octopus creature with extra bodies affixed to itself kept shoving him.

  “Franklin, this isn’t your place.” Sil’s voice was careful, but Cello could tell he was desperate. “It’s up to Letta to punish the boy. Or even Mother Joseph, come to that. He’s hers to judge.”

  “If this is how Letta’s raising them, this don’t bode well for y’all,” said the same, slurred voice. Cello caught a flash of orange before he lost consciousness.

  25

  The space beneath the bridge was damp. Layers of sediment and sludge clung to the old stone struts. Joanie sketched into the muck. She copied one of Helen’s simplest patterns for worship—a scrawl of scaly loops—onto the muddy wall. She stepped away, squinting, identifying gaps in the pattern that she could fill, searching out places to embellish. She concentrated on the warmth of her baby in her arms, drawing in the sweet feeling like cold soda through a straw. She pushed into the pattern, and the sensation of having him with her ran through her hands.

  She etched the pattern into the sopping riverbank, too, strengthening it with the repetition. Then Joanie emptied the cotton sack of ashes and mixed them into the creek with her own bare feet. She’d mix up the recipe here, in the running stream—the one she’d seen in her vision. With every stamp, she layered on her intentions for the worship, holding on to the image of her son’s body glowing like the blinking eye of a lighthouse.

  As Joanie worked, a dark figure interrupted her work, cooling her, and slowing her down; it was the looming shadow of her mother-in-law, the woman who had stolen her son. The Vine sang to her from where she had tucked it in her back pocket. It called a promise down through their bond, a promise to eliminate Mother Joseph’s sinister presence.

  * * *

  As she drew Helen’s patterns under the bridge, Joanie held on to the imaginary swell of the baby, pulling him toward her and away from that shadow of Mother Joseph. She cleaned her palms, smearing the soil residue down the fronts of her thighs, and pulled the last cutting from her pocket. The green coil arched into her touch, like a cat’s back. Joanie lifted it to her teeth and broke the skin of the Vine one last time. She drank deeply, draining the entire emerald loop. The cicadas were loud, echoing through the night. She climbed up the slope from beneath the bridge and waited in the grass for her Work to catch.

  As Joanie lay in the dark by the old bridge, she wondered whether she would die—if death really was a consequence of pursuing Helen’s work to the end. Would the Work destroy her, or would it be turned toward someone else? Had the Vine already turned that force toward Mother Joseph? She felt Helen’s blessing as solidly as if the woman’s body had been draped over her lap. Joanie listened to the affirmation of the creatures around her, the chorus of frogs and chittering insects. She lay still until she felt like she was part of the ground, another little hill, another corpse abandoned on the field. Bugs marched through her hair where it streamed into and against the dirt. She waited for the night to fully fold over her, until the boundaries of her body disintegrated and whatever was left of her poured out onto the battlefield. She dreamed of the dead men, packed tight as roots in the earth below. She dreamed of them shifting in their graves, of turning over in the ground.

  When she sat up, it didn’t feel quite like sitting up. When she walked, it didn’t feel quite like walking. To Joanie, it seemed like she had been diffused. That she was being misted over and through the space of the battlefield. The thickness of the night pushed down onto some mysterious chord, and suddenly the world was folding back over and onto itself, lapping around decades and roads and telephone lines. The field stretched out before her exactly as it had been after the battle, steaming with fresh death.

  Bodies were scattered thickly, decaying on the ground under the stars. The dead men were all so thoroughly clothed. She marveled at the hats still affixed to oozing skulls, and at the socks still pulled up over shins that were nearly just bone. Joanie organized her mist-self into some kind of body, and felt her feet on the ground, submerged in a pile of leaves. It was autumn here, she realized, shuffling around the cluster of corpses. She looked down at the fields, at the places where the most blood had darkened the ground.

  It wasn’t hard to find the spot, so black with decay it didn’t look like soil anymore, but instead some hellish marsh. Clumps of earth and leaves, and the husks of old cornstalks rose from the murk, overlapping with the shapes of the dead men. Joanie walked among the darkened piles, and began to move them exactly as the Vine directed her.

  The path she made began as an arithmetically perfect, horizontal line. She pulled and pushed, and bound the shapes together. She was building a border, to keep all of her power in. Joanie added more and more until she had formed the outline of an arched door. A doorway to her son, she knew that. The curved cap of the door was difficult to build. She knew it must be fluid, perfect, and so she cracked and wove the empty, humanlike shapes together until she created a perfect inverted C.
Her vision of the battlefield, of all of those lives submerged in this single place, flashed over the doorway she created. Some of their faces were beautifully preserved—unblemished and young. Others were lined and bearded. Some of the faces were destroyed, with dark blurs where their features should have been. The men stared out at her, as though the bodies themselves had all been transformed into enormous, knowing eyes.

  Joanie floated to the center of the space she built and rubbed her palms together until they were glazed with heat. She pressed her hands onto the bodies, and each place she touched, a tiny fire began to burn. Joanie stamped her hands over the landscape she had built until one continuous stream of fire burned atop the ridge of dead men. All of her other worship had been practice for this one, wild accomplishment.

  She pressed her hands to her belly, to the place where her baby had grown, and waited for the blaze to take, to scrape her clean and obliterate whatever fault in her that Mother Joseph had exploited, to repair whatever had been broken. She willed the fire far, as far as it could go, to the full extent of its power, to burn clear the Joseph poison in the chromosomes of her baby, to clear an honest path to him.

  She stacked her hands, one on top of the other, over her heart. Joanie pushed into her chest, with the same force she’d slammed into Josiah’s. A miraculous combusting that illuminated as it destroyed, all plunging through the center of her chest between her breasts, a hole, a cavern, another hot mouth—all just swallowing down, cleaning, burning, lit. She let it burn until she was empty and open, merely the tool of some other power.

  Joanie was prepared to wait. Waiting, waiting, waiting, letting it all flicker to quiet. She could feel the Vine twisting out and away, winding toward the target it had promised her. When the fires were satisfied and burned out on their own, Joanie began to move the ashes. She shuffled sheets of ash down the slope of the riverbank to the blue thread of the creek. She used both hands to cast the ash in, stepping into the liquid, mixing more of it into the river. Joanie submerged herself in the water. She swam forward, directing the force of the river toward the heart of one monstrous woman who deserved to die.