Fierce Little Thing

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  “I don’t recognize a thing,” Xavier says.

  “Take this road the other way,” I say, “and you end up on Marta’s favorite mountain.”

  In her front seat throne, Cornelia harrumphs. “It’s a game to her,” she mutters. “Everything is a game.” Then anger overtakes her. She wheels around. “I don’t care about Marta’s favorite mountain or who Ben’s screwing. I care about shutting up whoever’s up at Home. And I’m not going to forget that you’re the reason he isn’t in this car when whoever’s up there tells us to go fuck ourselves because he didn’t come along.”

  “We’re adults,” says Issy. “Can we act like it?”

  “I’m not,” says Sekou. We all crack up, even Cornelia, who offers an apology for swearing. Issy tells her to fuck off, and we all pretend, for a moment, that we believe everything is going to be okay.

  Tap tap. There’s a tap tap on my arm—five of the boy’s little toes lined up in a neat, sweet row. His foot is warm. I let my eyes close so I can feel only it. Then I’m less afraid of the hurtling. I don’t tell them what I know, that Ben was never going to come along. Ben takes time. You have to let him feel. The sooner you encourage him to fume, storm, rage, the sooner he’ll do what you want. Well, thank you very much, I got him there.

  72

  Thwack.

  Butterfly sat with Philip as he painted, cross-legged, eyes closed in a shaft of morning light. He stroked azure paint onto a large canvas. The lake lapped. All around, wildness flourished: the clattering of the battling eastern chipmunks—Tamias striatus; the exuberance of the black-capped chickadees—Poecile atricapillus; and the occasional zipping of a ruby-throated hummingbird’s wings—Archilochus colubris.

  Thwack.

  I was watching from the shadow of the lakeside woods—eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), whose new growth can be steeped to make a tea rich in vitamin C; eastern white pines (Pinus strobus), which can grow to be the tallest of any trees in the Northeast. Butterfly and Philip did not notice me in the thick of the trees as I perfected my hatchet throwing. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Really, I was missing my target, then stumbling over the rooty ground to dislodge the tool Abraham had said was built like me. It sometimes found its home in the trunk of a snag, but more often bounced off of the red needles on the forest floor.

  Thwack.

  Really, I was hiding from both Sarah—who had said that now that I was on my way to mastering sourdough, it was time to learn how to cook—and Marta—who had come to expect my company on foraging hikes, which were really oral exams on species, genuses, and taxonomies.

  Thwack.

  Really, I was annoyed, and also, pretending not to be annoyed—lest the dead read thoughts—because I had been back at Home for more than a month and you had not thrown any special signs my way. I would have taken anything as a sign by then: a crow’s feather in my path, or a funny-colored pebble on the lakeshore. I’d left offerings: slices of sourdough, a hard-boiled egg. I wandered the woods, calling your name. But no birds sang out your syllables. No footprints were to be discovered in the red crunch of pine needles. If you were at Home, you were punishing me.

  Thwack.

  I was getting better at hitting the trees, but the blade never sunk into my target—in this case, a burl six feet up, twenty feet away. Marta had made it look easy, hopeful. Maybe that was my problem; hope felt like a distant country, growing more out of reach with each passing day. What did it mean to be built to destroy? I had no idea, yet I’d been abandoned to it. Issy refused to discuss the prophecy. Only this morning, she and Cornelia had sung “A Horse Named Bill” at the breakfast table and then skipped off to tend the chickens.

  Thwack.

  Meanwhile, Ben and Xavier were closer than ever. They ate dinner with the men and stayed out at the bonfires. Of course I wanted Xavier to have a friend; I even admired Ben for this acceptance in the face of his father’s disapproval. But surely Xavier had noticed Ben give me the cold shoulder. I pictured Ben’s face on that burl.

  Thwack.

  I’d thought for sure that after Abraham singled me out, he would fold me closer. But he was still out in the Thinged World somewhere. He’d left me to this loneliness, and to Dog, who bathed my hand in slobber.

  Thwack.

  Out in the sun, Philip said something quiet. Butterfly opened her eyes. She was golden in the light, cheekbones high, hair sparkling. It had only taken that one mention of Philip’s interest, up on the ridge, to bring them together, and now he was happy and she was happy. She probably didn’t even remember she had me to thank. Abraham would come back from the Thinged World and see that she and Philip were together, and either he’d be sensible, forgetting he’d shown any interest; or he’d be angry and turn Butterfly out, Cornelia with her—which might not be the worst thing.

  Thwack.

  Each of Philip’s canvases, which had begun to line our hallway, held a slice of Butterfly’s body—the pelt of her armpit, a constellation of moles on her shoulder; her smallest toe—juxtaposed over a colored landscape (the mawkish green of the lake on a gray morning, or the sunlight streaming in over the tops of the pines). Unlike the body parts in The Lewdnesses, these bits of Butterfly weren’t performing the trick of pretending to be something they were not; these were honest, hungry expressions, humming with desire. The day before, Xavier had kicked a hole in a larger-than-life frosting of Butterfly’s eyelashes blocking our door, then staged the scene of the crime to look like a chair had toppled into it.

  Thwack.

  “Your stance needs help.” Jim moved toward me from the far end of the property. He could have been watching Butterfly and Philip for hours.

  Thwack. The hatchet caught its mark. “I think I’m doing pretty well.”

  Dog sprang up as Jim neared, lavishing the man’s hairy hand in licks. Jim was kind with his scratches behind the ears. I felt for him the way you might for a child forced to share his favorite toy; he already had a wife, and a decent one at that. But he might answer questions. I turned my head to the side in the sympathetic way Mother would when courting one of Daddy’s good moods. “How long have you lived here, Jim?”

  “Let’s see, we came in … eighty-seven? Eighty-eight? Got married here, on the land. Hand-fasted. Teresa gave birth in the Main Lodge. Sarah caught Tomas while I paced the porch.”

  “Must have been scary, having a baby way out here.”

  “Well, I didn’t have to do the hard work.” He was finally looking at me, and not Butterfly. “I said we should go to the hospital but Teresa says, ‘Jim,’ she says, ‘women been doing it this way for thousands of years. You think some rich asshole in latex gloves is going to do a better job?’” A smile gathered him into the memory.

  “I don’t know much about the beginning of Home. Issy said there was some kind of prophecy…?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Hard to keep a secret here.” My heart pounded. But I risked losing him; talk of secrets had him glancing back to Butterfly. “She said it’s why Ben doesn’t like me.”

  “You got the hots for Ben?”

  I shook my head, but my tongue had grown dry. “No, I don’t like when people don’t like me.”

  Jim leaned against the nearest pine. “Well, I wouldn’t take it personal. He probably doesn’t want anyone telling him who to marry.”

  “The prophecy says I’m supposed to marry Ben?”

  Jim knew, then, that I didn’t know a thing. But we were in this far. He lowered his voice. “Back before we come up here, back before even Ben’s family came here, when it was just Gabby and Issy and Abraham, Abraham had some kind of dream. Now, I don’t know the details, I don’t know why this dream was the special one but … used to be I absolutely one hundred percent believed it. Mostly because Gabby swore by it.” He laughs, rubs the back of his neck. “I’ll put my money on Gabby most days. So this dream … it’s about Home. This was when Home was still run-down. Just three people, broke and crazy. But in the dream Abraham has that ni
ght, Home looks pretty much exactly like this.” His arms swept the air. “It’s buzzing with believers, folks who want to Unthing, who farm and cook and fix shit. Abraham and Gabby are running the place. Issy’s nearly grown.”

  “This is the prophecy?”

  “I’m getting there. Abraham sits down and he writes down the dream, every detail he can remember. He gives it to Gabby and hits the page and says, ‘I saw it, Gabby. I saw the future.’ She’s like ‘Dude, this isn’t a prophecy, this is a wish list,’ ’cause she can smell bullshit a mile away. They strike a deal: if he’s right about five things, the first five things in the dream, in the exact order he wrote them down, she’ll let him call it a prophecy.”

  “And he was right about the first five things?”

  Jim’s hairy thumb popped into the air. “First, a family will come with a firstborn son. They’ll be escaping a terrible past.” He waits for me to figure it out. “Ephraim, Sarah, Ben.”

  “They were fleeing a terrible past?”

  “You’re not getting that story out of me.” Jim lifts his pointer to match his thumb. “Second, the mother of that family will nourish everyone she meets, turning bounty and harvest out of what others consider to be garbage.”

  “Sarah.”

  “Third, the land, though difficult to till, will come around with love and coaxing, and yield a bounty if we work it with gentle hands—”

  “That doesn’t sound so much like a prophecy as how farming works.”

  “I’m not done!” He was smiling, though. He’d forgotten Butterfly. He waved the fourth finger into the air. “A man will come to tend that land, a man with a beard of white, who knows the ways of the earth, and he will teach us how to require it to bear us fruit.”

  “Amos?”

  “Amos. These were the first four things in that dream. And they showed up in exactly that order in real life.”

  “What was the fifth?”

  “The fifth was a wise woman who would keep the Homesteaders in balance. Then Marta showed up.”

  “But none of those have to do with Ben marrying me.”

  “I knew you liked him! I’m kidding, chill out. You want to hear me tell it? Yeah? Okay, then. Remember, Gabby had said that if there were five things that came true, then she’d let Abraham call it a prophecy. Don’t figure she ever thought they would. Not sure if she was happy or afraid to discover he was right on the money. Anyway, once she let him call it a prophecy, well, I suppose the other things in that dream were suddenly, well, supposed to come true.”

  He answered my question before I asked it. “Like how a girl would come to Home. A girl from the city. She would have flaxen hair and long limbs. The world would have hurt her. But this girl, she would be fiercer than she looked, fierce like fire. She would, in fact, be built to destroy.” His voice had turned grim. “That girl would be the one to save us. She would be brave in the face of our weakness. She would know what to do when no one else did. The firstborn son of the first family would love her. She would love him back. They would marry. They would defend Home, side by side, when the Thinged World turned against it. When the Thinged World came to hurt us, she would use her talents to destroy what needed destroying.”

  He knew what it was, for me to hear these words. “To be fair, there was one part of the prophecy that didn’t come true. Once the girl came, she was never supposed to leave. But you left. You went back to New York.”

  “I came back, though.”

  “After Gabby went and got you. All’s I’m saying is take the whole thing with a grain of salt.”

  It explained Ben’s coldness from the moment Sarah introduced me, using the same words Jim had. It explained why he had suddenly become nice to me the very day he learned I was leaving, as though he could let down his guard, and why he had cooled off that day on the lake, when Abraham said I was built to destroy.

  “Do you believe that I’m that girl?”

  Jim coaxed Dog close. “I think what matters more than anything else is whether you believe it.”

  73

  JimBob’s is still there, a spiffy sign its only change—those dark windows, gas pumps, the tire gauge hung under the word “Air.” Bushrow Road remains a long, graveled horse trail leading up a hill. Ben’s house is in the country, but this is rural, open land, with few eyes on it. Xavier slows the car after the first dip in the road. Then we climb.

  The driveway into Home is no longer obscured. Maybe if I didn’t know what lies at the end of it, I wouldn’t notice the gap in the underbrush. Everything Home once was rears up. I’m convinced we’ll be talking to Abraham any second. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have these thoughts because as we turn onto the drive, Cornelia chokes out a cry and Xavier’s fingers grip the wheel, and Issy’s breath grows quiet.

  “It’s just some empty land the bank owns.” Which one of us says this out loud? Maybe it’s inside my mind. Probably it’s illegal for us to be on this land now, and yet here we find ourselves, slipping down its throat.

  74

  “Oh I once had a horse and his name was Bill…”

  Abraham returned to us on a sun-spangled July afternoon, his baritone skirting down the driveway. He was flanked by a couple of scrawny boys and a girl with a flannel shirt tied around her waist. The Thinged World would have called them adults, but they were newborns at Home. Dog dashed out the screen door, Nora and Tomas at his heels. Dog leapt at Abraham and the new arrivals. Abraham told him to sit, but getting attention only made the animal more frenzied. He leapt at the new girl, nipping her ponytail. She squealed and laughed, but that was politeness hiding terror; I could see in the way she turned away with her hand over her face. Then Nora and Tomas were swarming Abraham, too. Dog turned at the quickness of Nora’s hand. He nipped.

  Nora shrieked. Gabby was already there, to grab Nora away and pick up Tomas. “Stop riling him,” she said. Nora cried and said she didn’t mean to, but Teresa didn’t mean the children. It was all done in a moment then, because it wasn’t quite a bite, and Nora wasn’t really hurt, and Abraham bent to stroke Dog, and calmed him under his hands, and everyone surrounded the new arrivals, and since the song was started, it must be finished.

  We whirled and clapped our way around the newcomers. We pitied them for how much they had to learn. They didn’t know that to sing something meaningless is to Unthing the rules you carry inside yourself.

  When we were done, Abraham made his way through us, Dog never leaving his side. Jim shook his hand with a wide grin, and Abraham clapped him on the shoulder, before turning to ruffle Xavier’s hair, then to say to Issy, “Is it possible you’ve grown taller?” To Cornelia, he said, “Your voice carried us through,” which made her smile, then take a careful glance at Ben. But Ben was busy doing Sarah’s bidding, handing out the freshly baked rolls that were meant for dinner. Abraham closed his eyes as he bit into one. Then he and Amos exchanged nods, and so it went with Ephraim, until Ephraim spat on the ground. Philip and Butterfly were late up from the water. Abraham’s eyes took stock of their togetherness, then flew back to me. “How’s that arm?” He meant the arm that threw the hatchet. I held it up in a show of muscle and everyone whooped.

  That night while everyone was at the bonfire, I curled up with a chapter about spring edibles in Marta’s copy of Foraging for the Maine Table. Dog lolled at my feet. Gabby’s voice spilled in the bunk window. She must have been on the strip of land beside the dock, where Philip spent his days. “I am your partner in this experiment. Did you forget? You can’t just invite anyone you like, Abraham, not without—”

  “But that’s the absolute point.”

  Dog went to the door and whimpered at the sound of Abraham’s voice. I called him close. I stroked him.

  “Those kids are ready. They’re ready for the Unthinged World. I spent days on that island with them. They get it. They belong here.”

  “Who’s paying?”

  “We’ll work it out. We always—”

  “I work it out.”
r />   “You need to relax, Gabby. You make yourself unhappy.”

  “While you were on your little drug vacation, I went down to the bank. They almost wouldn’t let me have access to our account, because apparently you told them only Jim could be on it?”

  “We agreed it would be better for you. You’re going to make yourself sick with—”

  “What I discovered was not a surprise, because I’ve been telling you for months, and because Jim is not, shockingly, an accounting whiz, is that we are about to go into foreclosure. I told you not to give him access to that account. I told you to let me handle things. I’ve been telling you and telling you, we need to figure out a way to save this place because We. Are. Broke. And no, keep quiet, I don’t need inspirational speeches about how you’re going to raise the money, about how I need to Unthing myself of worrying, because you, Abraham, you are the one to blame for this. Not even fucking Jim. Your precious Philip”—she lowered her voice here, and I strained above Dog’s panting—“Goddess bless him, Philip hasn’t given us a tenth of what he pledged. All those other donors you said would be banging down our door? I haven’t seen a single one. You said you’d institute a tithe, but I certainly haven’t been asked to contribute. And anyway, how will these good people, who’ve given everything in service of your vision, be able to pay? With real money, I mean, not with bread or hours spent hammering nails into rooftops. We currently have two hundred and sixteen dollars to our name. So maybe instead of waltzing off to do ayahuasca with a bunch of teenagers, you should be here, managing your fucking vision.”

  The sounds of the darkness: the chipper spring peepers—Pseudacris crucifer—and the long wails of the loons—Gavia immer. When Gabby spoke again, she was farther down the trail. I climbed to the top bunk and pressed my ear against the screen. “You are the one people listen to. So get them to listen. Get those rich kids with their brand-new Patagonia jackets to pay for their vacation from the real world. Get us some fucking money and you betcha, Abe, I’ll be a hell of a lot more relaxed.”