Demon in the Whitelands

by Nikki Z. Richard

  Atia sat up, the pencil clutched in her palm and her eyes staring coldly back into his. Her hold on the pencil made it resemble a knife. The sketchbook had fallen to the ground. Samuel held up his hands in surrender. She wasn’t going to hurt him. He knew her better than that. She wasn’t the demon everyone thought she was.

  “Wait. I’m sorry. I want to understand.”

  She flicked the pencil across the cell and hobbled to the barred window, her hair bouncing out from behind her shoulder.

  “Z. E. I.” Samuel rubbed his arms. “ZEI. Zei? Is that your name?”

  She kept staring out the window. She nodded.

  Samuel swallowed. He was dumbfounded. “Your name is Zei? I knew it! You’re so much smarter than they think you are. But … why didn’t you tell me that sooner? I want to call you by your name. Why did you let me call you something else?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “You could’ve written it or spelled it in the dirt.”

  She shook her head, her jaw clenched.

  She was telling him no. Maybe she wanted to write more but couldn’t.

  “You can’t read.”

  Samuel felt stupid. His father had taught him the alphabetical letters and the sounds corresponding to each one. It was a cleric’s responsibility to read the scriptures. Only clergy, politicians, and those wealthy enough to afford an education could read. What use did a logger or farmer have for reading? It wasn’t as if they could afford newspapers or books. Samuel’s ability to read and write was something he’d taken for granted without even realizing it.

  He picked the pencil up and set it down beside the fallen sketchbook as she lazily reached her hand out to the bars on the window as if to touch them. They were too high for her to reach.

  “I’m sorry for upsetting you,” he said. “Do you want me to call you Zei from now on? I didn’t mean to name you like … ”

  A pet, he thought.

  She waited a moment before giving a subtle nod.

  Her face remained stoic, but her eyes relaxed slightly. She was upset. He could tell. It was his fault for provoking her. He kept telling her he wanted to listen, but all he did was talk at her. Perhaps this was better. Maybe now he could stop rambling and making assumptions about her and give her the space she needed to open up. Maybe he could do something for her that she wanted.

  “Well, Zei. If you want, I can try to teach you how to read. Would you like that?”

  When Samuel closed the door to the townhouse, the sheriff immediately plopped himself down onto one of the wooden chairs by the kitchen. A half-empty bottle of liquor was already set on top of the dinner table. He uncorked the glass bottle with his teeth and took a long swig.

  Samuel went over to the window above the sink, looking at the railroad tracks. The train that had made its way up to Haid early that morning was getting ready to leave, and he could see the conductor talking to one of the loggers as men hustled to fasten the large cuts of pinewood together in the open cart. He thought about Claudette, how good it felt to touch her.

  The sheriff sucked so hard on the bottle it made a thunk.

  “Why so glum?” the sheriff grumbled.

  Samuel watched as the conductor climbed inside of the cab and yelled more things at the loggers, pulling hard on the whistle. Its scream was so loud it shook the walls. “My birthday is next week. Friday. I’ll be sixteen.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “No.”

  “Sixteen.” The sheriff leaned back into his chair, causing the first two legs to come off the ground. “You’ll be a man in the eyes of the state. Sixteen. Best years of my life. Back when I wasn’t trapped in this northern shithole. The summer months here are a complete joke. My bones can’t take much more. Several more years of saving up for retirement and I’ll be on the first cart out of here. I’m greenlands born and raised, and proud of it. Living in an icebox doesn’t make you hard or tough. It just makes you stupid. Anyway. My folks were sharecroppers for a cotton field, a hundred miles from Emur.” He eyed Samuel. “Know what a sharecropper is?”

  “Not really.”

  “It’s somebody who farms a rich politician’s fields and gets paid shit for it. My family had some food and a tiny plot of land to live on. But between them, me, and my sisters, it wasn’t enough. I was the oldest kid and the only boy. My dad always complained that he needed more men around the house. Made no sense to me either way. More siblings meant more mouths to feed.” The sheriff stretched his arms behind the chair. “But more bodies meant more hands for harvest.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  The sheriff pushed his tongue between his teeth. “What do you think this is? Story time?” The sheriff took another drink. “I guess you can make yourself useful and get me something to eat.”

  Samuel went to the counter and started gathering supplies for a pot of soup. He grabbed some carrots and potatoes from one of the pantries and decided to use some of the lamb’s meat he’d bought a week back. Even inside the cooler, the meat was going bad. He could smell the stink of it.

  “I hated farming,” the sheriff said as he toyed with his bottle.

  Samuel lit the fire.

  “My old man. He wasn’t the easiest guy to work with. He’d go on and on about things being done a certain way and would lose his mind if one of us didn’t work fast enough. It was stupid because we were all faster than he was. I was stronger than him, and he knew it, so he’d always try and show me up by getting in my face and barking orders like he was some hardnosed solider.”

  The train outside began its slow climb up the tracks, the whistle blowing and the iron wheels squeaking. Samuel hated the noise the train made. It made him miss the quietness of the cabin. He rinsed his hunting knife and started chopping up the ingredients.

  “And then came the day,” the sheriff continued. “I was about your age. It was October, and the weather was dropping so fast everybody was worried the crops would die if we didn’t harvest them fast enough. My old man knew a bad return meant less pay, and he wasn’t going to have it. My little sister, Elaine, she was about six at the time. She was supposed to be out in the fields working, but she’d skipped out to play in the house for a bit. I saw her go in, but I didn’t care. The kid was never really all there, in her head, if you know what I mean. A sweet girl, but not much in the way of productivity. Still, I never wanted her to be anything other than what she was. She was family. You take care of your own. That means something to me.”

  Samuel sliced the meat into inch-sized chunks before tossing them into the pot.

  The sheriff’s words were slurring more. “It’s nearing the afternoon. I was working near the toolshed. I watched my father go inside the house, and then I heard screaming. I should have minded my own business, I know that now. But I was soft and young and stupid, and I thought I was a man. I went inside. He was beating Elaine with his belt. I mean, we got whipped all the time, but he was … laying into her. I guess all my rage at him, all the years of his grinding and bitching came up to the surface, and I couldn’t take another minute of it. I came up behind him.” The sheriff made a fist and punched the air. He then picked up the bottle and took another sip. “Knocked him out cold. One hit.”

  Samuel brought the water to a boil and mixed in the tomato broth. There were many times when he’d wished his father had been anyone else, but he knew his father wasn’t a cruel person. He was indifferent and tough, but not mean. Minus the religious zeal, perhaps he could’ve really liked him. Perhaps that’s why the spot on his chest where his father had struck him still felt so heavy.

  “Did you run away?”

  The sheriff arched his back forward and let his front chair legs hit the floor.

  “No. I left. I was an adult. I packed my bag and left. My mother cried. She tried talking me into staying. ‘You two can work this out,’ she kept saying. She didn’t know how much I hated him. Kissed my mom and my siblings goodbye: Jessie, Jaeliene,
Melanie, and little Elaine. And I left.” He pointed to the window. “Hopped on a train and hitched it all the way up to this stupid town.”

  “You paid for a ride?” Samuel asked as he tossed in the vegetables and the meat, stirring everything with his spoon. “Where’d you get the money?”

  The sheriff laughed.

  “I broke into one of the closed carts and hid behind this cow that kept shitting every couple of hours. When the train stopped, I snuck out and found the loggers working on the woods right outside the mayor’s estate. I asked for a job, and thought I’d get one because I knew I was strong enough. But the old sheriff, Benson, was patrolling the area and stopped me in my tracks. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked. ‘Eugene Black,’ I said. ‘Came here for a job.’ That old man looked like he’d lived longer than anyone should in this frozen piece of land. He studied me over up and down and said, ‘I’m getting too old to be out here all the damn time. Work for me, and I’ll give you a place to crash and money enough to live. But you better do your job well, or I’ll throw your greenlands hide out onto the streets as quick as I hired you.’” The sheriff waved his hands up. “Rest is history.”

  Samuel poured them each a bowl of soup and sat down opposite the sheriff. He gave a soft blow on his first spoonful before taking a bite, wondering why the sheriff was being so civil. He wasn’t sure if it was the sheriff’s way of apologizing for threatening to get him killed.

  The sheriff shoved the bottle over to Samuel.

  “I can’t be drinking next to you,” the sheriff grumbled. “Not if you’re going to sulk like that. It’s killing my buzz.”

  Samuel hesitated, but his hand eventually took hold of the bottle. He took a sip and nearly choked. It tasted disgusting, like tree bark and acid, burning his throat like liquid fire as it went down his pipe.

  “No thanks,” he said as he scrunched his face. His lips were puckered, and he pushed the bottle back to the sheriff, who was laughing once again.

  “It gets easier,” the sheriff managed to get out as he swirled the bottle back and forth. He let out a few more cackles before taking a sip of his own. “Before you know it, you’d near sell your soul for a drop. Anything to shut the mind off. Stop all the noise.”

  They ate in silence for several minutes before the sheriff spoke up. He lowered his spoon into the bowl and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  “I’ll give you some advice, kid. If you want to make it in this life, you’ve got to be hard. You can’t be soft. If you’re soft, no one will respect you. If you’re soft, you’ll die. And no one is going to take care of you. You have to take care of yourself. It’s that simple. Learn that now, and you might actually have a future. Understand?”

  Samuel sat beside Zei in the cell, their shoulders nearly touching. He relaxed against the stone wall, watching her write all the letters of the alphabet over and over and over again. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He’d been acting as her teacher for five days, and he couldn’t have asked for a more engaged student. If he wrote a letter and asked her to copy it, she would write the letter repeatedly until he’d tell her to stop. He had to buy her a new sketchbook within two days of their lessons because she’d used up all the free pages.

  Samuel had no clue how to teach her to read and write. He was not a teacher. All he could think to do was mimic the ways his father had taught him. When Samuel turned five, his father had decided it was time for him to learn to read the scriptures. For weeks on end, Samuel did nothing but write the letters in the snow with a stick. Paper was expensive, so his father made him use what limited resources they had available to them. First, Samuel had to memorize the letter. Then, he’d have to write out the letter and say aloud its corresponding sound. Zei couldn’t speak, so he had to modify his approach a bit by saying the letter’s sound for her when she drafted each letter. By the end of the day, his throat itched something terrible, and his voice would nearly be gone. He’d never spoken aloud so much before.

  “You can take a break if you want.”

  Zei’s pencil moved furiously, her eyes sucking in the pages of her script like they were fresh meat. Samuel had tied her thick hair back so it wouldn’t keep falling over the pages. He rubbed his fingers together, thinking of ways to break up the monotony.

  “I’ve got an idea. We could play a game with the letters. Would you like that?”

  Zei paused her writing and lifted her pencil from the page.

  “Here. Do you mind, Zei?”

  Samuel brushed the shackles around her ankles to the side. He sat up on his knees, leaning over as he turned to a blank page. He liked calling her by her new name. Giving her his mother’s name was a dumb idea. Thinking about his own name, he felt that “Samuel” capsulated his identity. His mother had chosen it. He didn’t know why. But that was the name she’d chosen for him.

  Zei tapped her pencil on the blank page.

  “Right. Okay. I will make a letter sound, like ‘guh,’ and then you’ll have to write the letter that goes with it. And that way I’ll help you spell out some easy words.”

  In near calligraphic design, Zei wrote the letter G.

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  Zei realigned the point of her pencil with the paper. Samuel thought for a moment, closing his eyes.

  “Buh … ih … rr … duh.”

  When Samuel opened his eyes, he saw the word bird on her paper.

  “That’s good.” He tapped each letter with his index finger. “Buh, ih, ir, duh. But if you say the sounds fast, it makes the word bird. You get it?”

  Zei inched her nose closer to the word, almost as if she were about to sniff it. She pulled back and then sketched a snow owl perched on a pine limb. Samuel couldn’t help but smile wide.

  “I knew you could do it. You’re so smart, Zei!”

  “Who?” a voice called out.

  Samuel’s skin crawled, and his muscles spasmed. He whipped around to see if he could spot the intruder. Charles stood by the doorway, his arms tucked inside his gray peacoat. He was dressed in tan slacks, a fancy collared shirt and bowtie, and a suit jacket.

  Samuel stood up quickly. He took the sketchbook from Zei, closed it, and put it on the ground next to her.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to be in here.”

  Charles pointed his chin up.

  “Did you give that demon a name or something?”

  Samuel almost said no. It was her name, and she’d written it for him. It was best to keep that between them. At least for now. “Kind of.” The chains behind him jingled slightly. “Why are you here?”

  Charles shrugged. “Bored. I don’t know. My dad comes back tomorrow. I wanted to check up on you. See how our friend in there is doing. Summer festival is in a couple of days. You’re coming to the festival, right?”

  Samuel nearly blushed at the memory of Claudette.

  “I want to,” he said. “But I’ll have to check with the sheriff.” There was so much about being a normal citizen he still didn’t know. “Am I supposed to dress up nice for it? I … don’t really have nice clothes.”

  “Forget the sheriff. You don’t need that old drunk’s permission. And don’t worry about clothes. I can come pick you up, and we’ll get ready at my estate. You can borrow one of my suits. What the hell are you spending your salary on anyway?”

  “Stuff for her,” Samuel said as he scratched his arm. “And I’m trying to save as much as I can. In case. Maybe this job doesn’t last.”

  “How very responsible of you,” Charles said with exaggerated inflections. He pointed to the cell. “Wow. Amazing. You really are a demon whisperer. It hasn’t tried to hurt you or anything? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the demon looked like just a normal kid.”

  As if prompted by Charles’s questioning, Zei popped to her feet, moving in front of Samuel. The slack in her shackles was nearly gone. Her face was cold and ferocious, the fingers of her one hand stretched out and curv
ed like claws ready to tear apart its prey. Samuel could see the fear on Charles as he nearly stumbled back into the hallway.

  “Get away from me!” Charles yelled. “Keep it away!”

  Samuel almost reached out for Zei, but stopped. “Wait. What’s wrong?”

  Zei whipped her neck back and nearly bared her teeth at him. Samuel held his hands up in surrender.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered. “Zei. It’s okay. Trust me.”

  She turned her attention back to Charles, her nostrils flaring.

  Charles pointed a shaking finger. “Crazy demon monster!”

  “Don’t call her that,” Samuel said sternly. He lowered his arms. Zei stood as fierce as a bear. What had made her snap? He had to get her to calm down and remind her that she was safe.

  “No one’s going to hurt you. I promise. Zei. Look at me. I promise you.”

  “That thing is mad,” Charles let out in a high-pitched cry. He awkwardly scurried farther behind the hope chest. “I didn’t do anything. I did nothing to you. You hear me? Just leave me alone!”

  Samuel swore he saw Zei smirk, perhaps feeling satisfaction in watching Charles cower away. She walked backward until her hand touched the stone wall behind her. She slid down onto her butt and sat with her legs crossed. Her eyes were still fixated on Charles.

  Samuel swallowed. He knew that Zei wasn’t a demon. He just knew it. He knew her better than the sheriff or the mayor or Charles or his own father. But he also knew, in that moment, Zei would kill Charles if she could reach him.

  Samuel paced along the outside of the cell as Zei doodled in her sketchbook. He wasn’t sure if she was writing more letters or drawing a new picture. As he passed by his coat hanging by the door, he pondered if he should dig inside the pocket and get his knife for protection. It was a fleeting thought. She wouldn’t hurt him. At least, that’s what he chose to believe.

  Had his father been right about the exorcism? What if Zei needed deliverance? The thought made him smirk. She had a temper, but that didn’t mean she was under the influence of a demon. Why was everyone so set on that? Why did Charles keep calling her “it”? Couldn’t she just be a girl with violent outbursts? No. She wasn’t normal. Her lack of sexual characteristics was anything but normal. Even Samuel had to admit she wasn’t really a “she.” Zei’s androgynous body and gruesome scars and missing arm were proof of a past that was anything but ordinary. When it came to Zei, he felt like he was the only person thinking rationally about her. She was alone. Perhaps she’d always been that way. Even with his father, he knew what it was to be and feel lonely. He somehow knew Zei felt the same.