Fierce Little Thing

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  75

  Xavier cuts the engine in front of the Main Lodge. Abraham’s cabin, and Gabby’s, and the bathing hut have fallen to pieces. But the lodge is a pile of logs built for the ages. Cornelia brings her hand to her mouth and leans toward the windshield like a tourist who’s made it to Stonehenge. Sekou unsnaps the chest strap of his car seat and kicks his feet with an elegant whine. He’s too small to release the red button between his legs, but Issy doesn’t lean over the seat to press it, not yet. I reach back and take her hand. She squeezes my fingers.

  “You going to be all right?” she says. “You want to stay in the car?”

  I forgot. For just a moment, I forgot it would be strange to simply step outside after sixteen years of not doing so, and I can’t decide if it’s a good sign or a bad one that simply being here has invited me to forget, but before I can answer, she squeezes my hand to get me to let go, and in the gesture lies her mother—efficiency, Unthingedness. She says she can’t get out of the third seat to help Sekou until I move aside.

  I get out. It’s too soon to be here but it’s also been too long. It’s the loamy earth and the stink of the lake buffeting up in drafts; it’s the frosted rim-lichen on the granite boulders and the haircap moss on the ground; it’s the growl carrying up from a motorboat speeding southward; it’s the red squirrels; it’s the skittering eastern chipmunks, and the wind roiling the grand white pines, and the hum of a hungry horsefly—genus Tabanidae; it’s the Populus tremuloides quaking in a line behind the Main Lodge, and the spiderwebs catching the light, and the Phalangium opilio suspended on its long, spindly legs over my shoe, and the Poecile atricapillus chickadee-dee-dee-deeing from above. It’s so much right and so much together at once, so much of everything to long for and hate that I might cry or I might scream. But instead we stand still, at the top of it all.

  Xavier puts his arm around Cornelia, who is crying. Issy lets Sekou out of the car seat but he howls in her arms, bucking, kicking, as she tries to move him to her back, into the carrier. I almost say to just let him run, but the set of her jaw reminds me it’s best to let the mothers mother.

  Xavier’s phone rings. It’s improbable, this sound, in this place that never knew phones. We shoot him disapproving looks. He pulls it out anyway. I glance Billy’s name on that shiny little screen. Cornelia helps Issy strap Sekou in, bribing the boy with a lollipop. Xavier silences the phone. He pockets it, a show of willpower. I think to offer solace before I remember I’m not supposed to know about the adoption gone wrong, and then I want to punish him. A ribbon of wind moves across the lake.

  The screen door of the Main Lodge cuts open. We lift our heads. A young man stands there. He is skinny and tall, the scar tissue snarled from just under his right eye, across his cheekbone, down to his mouth. He wears a faded T-shirt and army fatigue shorts. Dark black hair covers his forearms and shins, and sticks out at his neckline. We know who he is because of this hair. We forgot there was another child who grew up.

  “Tomas!” A woman’s voice cuts from the inside the lodge. “Was that a car?” She comes out. It takes a moment for her to see us, as though we are only just forming before her, but we’d know her anywhere, despite the fact that her rambunctious hair is now gray. Teresa, tall and strong. She throws up her arms. She rushes past her son. She sings “A Horse Named Bill” as she approaches. Her walk is a hobble now; something’s wrong with her hip. Sekou squeals and laughs and sings along. Cornelia looks like she might throw up.

  Teresa stops, mid-verse. “But where’s Ben?” She’s been expecting us.

  76

  Past midnight, the salty smoke of burned sage leaked from under Philip’s door. The floorboards creaked and Butterfly muffled a laugh. I couldn’t bear the squeal of the floorboards under the thin mattress, not tonight. Xavier snored below me but I managed to get by without waking him, and though Dog lifted his head, he didn’t follow me into the front room. A hot darkness filled the cabin, still and sticky, but in the free air, a breeze tussled the tops of the pines. A loon lowed somewhere south. I knew the path so well that I didn’t need the moon. I discovered a kerosene glow coming from the window of the Main Lodge.

  Gabby and Sarah sat at the kitchen end of the long tables, steaming mugs before them, and a pile of papers and receipts. Sarah was finishing a sketch. Gabby admired it. Then Sarah turned it over and started making a list. Through an open window down the line, I could hear their voices.

  Gabby pulled the papers over. “He’s probably at that bar in town.”

  Sarah took a long draught from her mug. “We can only change what is before us.”

  “I just want to be able to live here. And you, and Ephraim. The children.”

  “You know I can’t leave. So I tell myself, all will be well. What else can I do?”

  The screen door yawned open. Both women looked up. Teresa was in the doorway, Tomas tied to her back, his head tipped in slumber.

  Sarah patted the bench beside her. Teresa came to sit. Gabby put her hand on Teresa’s arm. Then she put pen to paper, and started adding, and Sarah went to put the kettle on.

  77

  Teresa’s hair is gray from afar, but looking into the curtain of it as she squeezes me, it’s a hundred different colors—cloud and silver and stone and slate. She smells as though she hasn’t bathed in centuries. The screen door flaps shut. I look for Tomas when I come up for air, but I can’t tell if it’s him there in the meshed pane, or a shadow.

  78

  We had grown used to the slosh of the lake, and to the perpetual midnight moans of the loons, but the rev of a motor, followed by the slamming of a car door, and then of a howl let into the cool August night, had Dog on his feet barking bloody murder.

  We pulled on our sweatshirts. We raced up the hill, Dog speeding off, Philip calling to us to wait, but we weren’t going to miss the excitement.

  We were past the chicken coop when we heard the second howl. High and raw, it carried a loneliness I’d only ever felt deep inside my self. Then I was running again. I stumbled over a rock. Xavier reached back and took my hand. We found our way to the driveway.

  Headlights interrogated the Main Lodge. This wasn’t just any car; it belonged to the police. Jim was caught in the beams. I understood, as he swayed, that he had been the one to make that unfettered sound. I understood that he had made a problem in the Thinged World.

  Abraham shook the hand of a man in uniform, who was compact and handsome, with a white, trimmed mustache and shoes so polished that they shone in the headlights. A metal star glimmered on his chest. The sheriff. I shrunk back even though I felt foolish. But it wasn’t foolish to be afraid; Sal the sheriff really could take me. Meanwhile, Homesteaders fumbled up the hill while the eyes of the law wandered the Unthinged World.

  “Didn’t mean to wake you all.” Sal tipped his hat to Sarah in her white cotton nightgown. She folded her arms over her chest as though she knew him.

  “Don’t get much traffic up here,” Abraham said.

  Butterfly came out of Abraham’s cabin. She was dressed in his linen tunic, a sheet wrapped around her legs, golden hair spread over her shoulders. At the sight of her, Philip turned and descended the hill, back into the darkness.

  “Whore,” Jim muttered.

  Abraham moved to stand between Jim and Butterfly. Ephraim stepped forward, and Amos, too, hands at the ready as though Jim was about to turn into a werewolf.

  “Same as I told you,” Jim said to the sheriff, the words slurring together, “this place is filled to the brim with liars and whores.”

  “Best,” the sheriff said to Abraham, “to get this man to bed.”

  “Jim.” Teresa had arrived. She deposited the sleepy bundle of Tomas into Sarah’s arms. “Come on now, Jim. Come on.” She pulled at his arm. He shook himself free. Tomas started to wail.

  Butterfly said, “Your wife is here.” It sounded like a curse. Jim stepped toward her but she went back into Abraham’s cabin and shut the door. Jim noticed his wife beside him. He
took her face into his hands as though it was no contradiction to long for one woman and keep another.

  The sheriff touched the brim of his hat. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  After his ruby rear lights disappeared past the curve, Abraham went to Jim’s side. Teresa had one arm slung around Jim’s middle. Abraham put his hand on the man’s other shoulder. Our eyes had adjusted. The moon had come out. From the gathered group came whispers and grumbles. But Abraham silenced the lot. “Whom among us,” he said, “has not wanted to howl at the moon?” He tipped his face away from the earth. Out of his throat came a thin call: “Owowowwwww.” Dog lifted his head to howl, too.

  Jim’s white teeth glinted. He issued forth a low, mournful sound. Then we were all doing it, every Homesteader gathered there, lifting our voices to the sky, a swirl of salt on black velvet. It was vast, the sound of us, all the way up to the Milky Way. Our cry grew to high harmony.

  Abraham’s hand wandered from Jim’s shoulder to the base of the other man’s neck. It reminded me of the jaws of the Rottweiler we’d seen in the city, who plucked a Chihuahua from the sidewalk and shook it to its rag doll death. It’s easy to kill a little thing when it makes itself available.

  79

  “So, what are you and Tomas doing up here?” Xavier keeps the tone light, as though the four of us just happened to run into Teresa on a street corner. “Thought this place was abandoned.”

  Teresa lets out an earthy belch. “We live here.” She scratches at Sekou’s foot with her marled nails. “For now.” I can feel the lightness of her touch without her touching me, a scrabbling tickle I haven’t thought about in years. Sekou pulls his foot back of his own volition. A pair of crows—Corvus brachyrhynchos—crosses over us in a noisy gale. Laughter rides Teresa’s voice. “You coming in?”

  “We want to know what’s going on first.” Cornelia crosses her arms. Her toned biceps are tight, taut, like they might snap.

  “Feel free to explore—see what Home is like Unthinged of us. I guess we shouldn’t call it Home anymore.” The wind presses my eyeballs as I try to name that smell—strident, sweet, bigger than any words I have. Teresa watches me remember. “Fucking crazy, right?”

  “Is Abraham here?”

  Teresa tilts her head to the side like Cornelia is an adorable child. I suppose we are all adorable children in her eyes—Issy, rooted like an oak; Cornelia, pushing for answers; Xavier, determined to be good. And me? What does Teresa see?

  “Is Abraham alive?” That’s Issy.

  Teresa divides her hair into three lengths. “What do you think?”

  “Come on, Teresa,” Xavier says.

  “You should have brought Ben.”

  “You don’t think we tried?” Cornelia crosses the driveway to Abraham’s cabin. It is dark in there, dusty. She rattles the doorknob. The door does not open. Cornelia aims one foot at the door. We’re talking full suburban mom kickboxing shit. The door judders and jiggles, but it does not break. Then Xavier approaches, and holds out his hand for her to stop, and slams his shoulder against it. Cornelia is furious now, to be set aside, to be helped, to be met with a locked door, furious at Xavier for bringing us here in the first place. The wood shudders under Xavier’s lurching weight. The flimsy lock gives way and Xavier stumbles in.

  The chilly familiarity of the cabin would be like a shawl on my shoulders: the fireplace before me, Abraham’s armchair to my left, the woven tapestry on the wall, hung from a driftwood branch. I want to know everything that was left behind. I want to know if you are in there, waiting. But I pretend to be Issy. I keep myself still. They return with empty hands, Xavier rubbing his shoulder.

  “There’s no one on this land but Tomas and me,” Teresa says. “Should have said that, I guess.”

  “She’s lying,” Cornelia says.

  But Teresa’s smile drops. “On my son’s life.”

  Issy draws herself up to her full height. It seems an impossibility that there was room to grow, but there is space above her and she fills it. She towers over Teresa’s formidable frame, even her hair electric with power. When she speaks, it’s with a practiced calm. “I agree with Cornelia. I think it’s best you tell us what the hell is going on.”

  80

  It was dark again when I knocked on the door to Gabby’s cabin, uphill from the Main Lodge. Issy slept there, too, but we never called it anything but Gabby’s. When she opened the door, I spied her collection of paperbacks balanced on a board above the small woodstove, and Issy sprawled on a cot, arm draped over her eyes.

  Gabby came out into the clear night. “Everything all right?”

  I took the check from my sweatshirt pocket. “I know about the prophecy,” I said. “I know that’s why you told me that Ben asked about me, when I was back in New York. Because you wanted me to come back. Because you want the prophecy to be true.”

  “He did ask about you.”

  “I’m not going to marry Ben.”

  Gabby smiled. “I never said you were.”

  I unfolded the check. I handed it over. “I don’t think this place needs a prophecy to be worth fighting for.”

  “This is a lot of money.”

  “You all could have a big fight,” I said. “Or you could just deposit it, and we could stay.” Then I stepped back down onto the path, and made my way toward bed.

  81

  “Two months ago, we were in Iowa.” Teresa lowers herself into the chair at the end of the long table in the dimly lit Main Lodge. She groans as she goes down, like an old dog. She rubs at her hip. “A commune, guess you’d call it.”

  Tomas steps through a makeshift plywood door that cordons off the kitchen. He’s even taller than he looked in the doorway, a head above where Jim measured, in memory. The scar has knuckled ugly. He catches me looking. He raises his chin into the light seeping in from a dusty window, and comes to stand at his mother’s right arm, laying out a package of Wonder Bread, an unopened tub of Jif, and a wooden paint stick.

  “Tomas, can that really be you?” Issy speaks as she would to Sekou. “You went and grew up without me.” I do the math—he’s thirty, give or take. It’s hard to tell whether the impulse to treat him like a child comes from us or him.

  Two sleeping bags lie on the bare benches before the fireplace, where a dirty cooking pot hangs, heavy as a bowling ball. Greasy clothes are piled on a metal folding chair, each dent familiar. There’s a hole in the roof, and a bucket underneath it. Grimm is gone. The kitchen is barricaded, Teresa explains, due to an unfortunate incident with a porcupine who’d taken up residence.

  I want to ask about this incident—Erethizon dorsatum is infamously territorial—but Xavier pushes the conversation forward. “So why’d you leave Iowa?”

  Teresa’s fingertips whisper across the table. “We should have built Home in Iowa.” She waves her hand in the direction of the old garden. “The midwestern soil doesn’t fight crops. It embraces them.” Xavier turns his face toward the window, and I see, then, that he is as restless as I am to know how the land has changed in the absence of our care; that if it was just us two, we would have already covered it all: the chicken coop, our cabin, the dock, and every step in between. But instead, we endure the hard benches while Teresa chatters on about Iowa, where they lived for fifteen years and farmed with two other families and four cows and a hundred or so chickens. They grew so much produce that they started selling it at the farmer’s market. Something happened there that Teresa isn’t telling us. Her voice skitters over one of the men’s names as though it’s a bruise.

  “Tomas learned animal husbandry.” Pride bursts from between the lines of her browning teeth. Tomas unscrews the peanut butter and twists open the plastic bag of bread, then stabs the paint stick into the slick of oil to mix it. Little Sekou has fallen asleep. Good. He’d want some.

  It’s too personal to ask where they were before Iowa and after Florida, even now, even when we want to pin Teresa to the wall. It was a humiliation to be scattered from Home. The last time
I saw her, she was drenched in a terror and despair I couldn’t understand, some of it at my hand. I feel, momentarily, like burying her in another hug.

  But Cornelia’s patience is gone. “Why’d you come here, Teresa?”

  “We got letters.”

  Cornelia sits upright. She would not make a very good spy.

  Xavier leans forward. “Letters?” On the other hand, he sounds convincingly confused. “We don’t know what that means.”

  Teresa is put off balance for a split second. “The letters. Isn’t that why you…?” Suddenly, she isn’t sure of herself—this is interesting, and almost enough to make me believe that someone set her up. The possibility of Abraham flares. Tomas extracts the peanut butter with a glop and slaps it onto a slice of Wonder Bread. Something about this gesture brings his mother back to her power. She lifts her finger and wags it. “I’m not saying anything. Not until it’s all five of you.”

  “Please, Teresa,” Xavier says. “You know Ben. Really shitty stuff happened to his family up here. He’s stubborn. But the rest of us came. From New York, Connecticut, North Carolina, Ohio. We all came a long way.”

  “Really shitty stuff happened to all of us here.” Tomas speaks with the reedy voice of a new adolescent, despite his man’s body. His peanut butter project has turned into a smearing, stabbing affair.

  “What I think Xavier means,” Cornelia says, her face a mask of a smile, “is that we are so glad you’re here. Both of you. We had no idea what was waiting for us up here, and it’s just wonderful to see some friendly faces. Personally, getting those letters was an absolute nightmare, and—”

  “Don’t tell her about the letters,” Issy says, exasperated. It’s too much for Cornelia—she bursts into tears again.