Thin Places

by Kay Chronister

  “I know already what you are coming to ask me,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable.

  Marigold stepped down off the last step, making it squeak. “What will you say?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “You’re not much of a mother so far, with your hat on straight and only two children in the ground. You don’t deserve my child.”

  “And how many children do you have in the ground?” said Marigold.

  “Two thousand, four hundred, and eighty-one,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “Some were twins,” she added.

  “None lived?” Marigold said.

  “None,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, with a touch of pride.

  “Then I don’t think I want one of your children,” said Marigold.

  “I don’t think you do,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “I shall give you one.”

  ◊

  The woman who made her bed in the first gable no longer made her bed there. She holed up in the cellar with a block of brie and a feather-stuffed duvet, and she emerged only to wash her wine glass or collect the lukewarm cup of Earl Grey that the woman who made her bed in the third gable left out for her each afternoon.

  The women did not like to interfere in each other’s creative processes, so none of them peeked down into the cellar. The woman who made her bed in the cellar did not care to discuss the child she was fermenting, though if she had, she would have told them that he was fashioned from the heart of a white rabbit, four dollars at the pet shop around the corner, and twice embalmed in myrrh and soda ash.

  He had to grow in his mother’s womb, so she washed out the pie pan that Marigold had brought and sealed it with a glass cover.

  Inside his tin womb, the child soaked and swelled and slowly became animate.

  Inside her duvet, the woman who made her bed in the cellar dreamt of all the children she had lost inside her wombs.

  The child reached such a size that he no longer fit inside the pie pan, then such a size that he no longer fit in a three-gallon pickle jar. The woman who made her bed in the cellar was stubborn, she wanted to see Marigold mourn, so she dug a hole, four feet deep, in the cellar’s dirt floor. When she was finished, she padded the floor with rock salt and lowered the child into the hole. February was halfway over, the temperatures were still low, and the cold and the salt would preserve the child for a few days more—long enough to make the girl believe, long enough to make her miserable when he rotted.

  The woman who made her bed in the cellar did not always produce beautiful children, but this one was exquisite, a wet blood-colored salamander-like creature whose arteries worked like legs and whose eyes could see even in the depths of the cellar. In the womb of the earth he grew to three feet in length before he cried for release.

  The woman who made her bed in the cellar telephoned Marigold to announce the child’s birth, knowing at half-past five her husband would be home, knowing that Marigold herself would be away at one of a dozen equally useless ladies’ society meetings and thus unable to intercept the call.

  “Your son is crying for you,” said the woman who made her bed in the cellar, when a man answered.

  She laid the phone down, waiting to feel satisfied, instead feeling hungry.

  ◊

  Before they had been women who lived in the four-gabled house, they had been:

  A maiden aunt.

  A minister’s wife.

  A washed-up stage actress.

  A nurse.

  They did not resemble themselves anymore.

  ◊

  When Marigold came to the cellar, the woman who made her bed there had already left. The feather-stuffed duvet and frozen block of brie were gone; fourteen cups with shallow pools of Earl Gray in their bottoms remained. Marigold looked at each of the teacups, listened for her child’s cries, and felt reluctant to walk any closer to the dark end of the cellar.

  Upstairs, the women who made their beds in the four-gabled house were making dinner.

  Damp, rich sounds came from the dark end of the cellar and echoed off the brick walls until Marigold could not hear the banging of pots and pans upstairs, nor the record spinning on the player, nor even the sounds of the women’s voices.

  She was afraid, but she would not leave the cellar without a son. She took up the iron bar propped up against the wall—she did not think, someone might have put this bar there; she thought very little—and walked forward until her child leapt up from the grave where he was born, four feet tall, hungry, hissing wetly at his mother.

  Marigold swung the iron bar and struck the child in his moist, blood-colored forehead, then struck him again. She flew at him in such a fury that she did not stop to wonder what or who he was until he was already dead.

  “Bury him yourself,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable when she heard. “Didn’t I already dig a suitable grave?”

  “Won’t you have some shepherd’s pie before you go back down there, dear?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

  Buttered baguette slices, tin cups of milk, heaping cuts of pie: a good meal by ration standards, a good meal even by pre-war standards, and they had ruined it for her. The women smiled proudly at their visitor.

  “I suppose I might have a little,” Marigold said, polite in her fashionable hat, black blood drying on her hands.

  When all five plates were empty, the other women retired to their gables. The woman who made her bed in the third gable washed each plate, carefully, methodically, while her guest waited at the table.

  Then she said, “It hurt to lose that one, didn’t it, dear?”

  “Yes,” Marigold whispered. “It was my fault, this time.”

  “You’re ready now,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable, “for the sort of child I could give you.”

  “I don’t know if I can bear the pain of another child,” said Marigold.

  “I know,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. She dried the final plate and wiped her hands clean on her apron, then made for the staircase. “Come along now, dear.”

  “Where are we going?” said Marigold.

  “The fifth gable,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable of the four-gabled house. “We’ll need privacy.”

  Marigold’s husband waited at home for the arrival of their adopted son. Marigold could not leave empty-handed. Marigold was unaccustomed to wanting something that once lost could not be regained. She followed the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

  The fifth gable was smaller than the others, drafty, the walls windowless. A vase of dying gardenias rested on a small end table in the corner. The gardenias had been wilting for longer than Marigold had been alive, which comforted the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

  “Sit down,” the woman said, motioning to the armchair in the middle of the room. A thin layer of dust covered its seat and arms and high, narrow back. Marigold settled into the chair and held her crumpled hat in her lap like it was a small and ill-behaved dog.

  “Do you expect you’ll have to be tied down for this bit?” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable.

  “What are you going to do?” said Marigold.

  “Oh, I do very little, dear,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “You said you wanted a child, any child, isn’t that right?”

  “Ye-es,” said Marigold, in a lilting voice that sounded more like no.

  The woman who made her bed in the third gable got to her knees and rested her clasped hands in Marigold’s lap, as if comforting, as if pleading. “Whatever else you do, dear, remember to blame yourself.”

  She rose to her feet and turned and left, locking the door from the outside.

  Inside the fifth gable of the four-gabled house, dampness became cold and dimness became darkness, and Marigold’s skin felt like wax beneath her fingers when she
tried to rub her gooseflesh off.

  ◊

  The women who lived in the four-gabled house buried Marigold’s cellar child together, all but the woman who made her bed in the first gable, because she could not make herself look at the mangled body of the child she had made.

  “We should sing a hymn,” said the woman who made her bed in the second gable.

  “Why?” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable.

  “It’s conventional. She’d like that.”

  The women contemplated the idea of being conventional for a while. Their eyes lost focus as they studied the raised mound of earth with the cellar child inside.

  “He was such a fine boy,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “But I’m glad she hurt him, I must admit.”

  The woman who made her bed in the third gable could only bear children in the womb of another woman’s suffering.

  ◊

  Marigold came from the fifth gable of the four-gabled house looking smaller, with hair like straw. The women had a luxurious breakfast prepared for her, butter on the toast and sugar for the coffee. Marigold stirred cream into her coffee with one hand and supported her squalling, red-faced child in the other.

  “A hideous creature,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable, after Marigold and the child had gone. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “He wasn’t really mine. None of them have been.”

  “If you made me one, he would be different,” said the woman who made her bed in the first gable. “My hurt would be the furthest thing from hers, and the child who came from it would be strong and strange and proud.”

  “Perhaps in a few years,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable. “You haven’t felt enough yet. I couldn’t be sure of the outcome if you hadn’t felt enough yet.”

  And the woman who made her bed in the first gable knew this to be true, having seen many dozens of the small dead fish-like things that came from half-felt suffering. She could not rush suffering, so she returned to her cellar and shut her door and set to work on her next child. This time, she thought, perhaps she would love them enough. Perhaps they would hurt her so deeply that she could at last ascend to the fifth gable and bear a child that would live.

  White Throat Holler

  Bodies didn’t always stay buried in Pryor. Sometimes they ended up a spit-polished pile of bones on the side of the road, cozied up with a week’s worth of roadkill. Sometimes they hung from willow trees with branches wrapped like nooses around their necks. The woods were thick and they weren’t liable to be found by anyone not looking, but being that I was the preacher’s daughter and a sensible girl, I got into the habit of looking.

  I hunted the demons with a stolen flask for courage and a crucifix for protection, but my daddy’s shotgun is what got the work done. When I cut my wrist to seal the blood oath I made with Emmalyn and Martha Blanchard, I thought I was doing something proud and ancient. But it turned out that hunting the beasts was like hunting anything else: hours of hard work, sweat in your eyes and ticks on your clothes. At last, screaming exhilaration. They never went down without a fight. I crawled home at dawn with bloodstains on my nightgown.

  The Blanchard sisters and I grew up on the same ice cream socials and spelling bees; when the beasts took our mothers, we went to the same funerals. Then Emmalyn got a hole clawed in her belly, and all of a sudden we were strangers from each other and everyone else. Emmalyn was thirteen, golden-haired and innocent as a picture in a storybook Bible. Everyone loved her, and they didn’t stop when her body got dragged out of the river. Pryor has a real knack for pretending that murders aren’t murders, but even our piss-poor excuse for a sheriff won’t overlook the desiccated corpse of his favorite daughter.

  When I saw the story printed in the paper, I was wriggling out of my Sunday shoes and hoping my daddy would say anything besides what he’d said when we got home, which was: “Esther Grace, I hope you learned something.” He preached a strange, frightening sermon at Emmalyn’s funeral that morning, banged his fists on the pulpit so hard that bruises were already forming on his knuckles. I’d been scared, a little. He never got angry at funerals. He never got angry at anything.

  “There’s something unholy in this town,” he said now. He sounded like a preacher but didn’t look like one with the sleeves of his linen funeral suit shoved up to his elbows and his fingers wrapped around the neck of a bottle.

  Seeing how worried he was, I folded the paper up so he couldn’t see the front page. There was a nasty color picture of Emmalyn’s body covered with swamp muck, the hole in her belly jammed full of rotten leaves. I said, “There’s always been something unholy in this town.”

  “Not like this. It’s never been like this before.” He stood, a little shaky. “But not for long. I got us someone.”

  What that was supposed to mean, I didn’t rightly know. But the purewater man showed up a day later with a flannel shirt draped over his bony arm and a flask of holy water hanging around his neck. I had to surrender my bedroom to him, but Daddy promised he would just be staying a little while. Long enough to find out who murdered Emmalyn Blanchard.

  ◊

  The purewater man had eyes like pieces of glass buried at the bottom of a creek. I always felt strange around him, like something was crawling up my spine into my skull, but I figured as the preacher’s daughter I was supposed to be able to make small talk with anyone. And mostly he obliged me, overlooking Emmalyn’s murder to ask if I liked school, why the chicken coop in our backyard was padlocked, how it was that he’d been invited to a PTA luncheon. In case you were wondering: my classes were about as dull as watching our little town get used up and dried out and abandoned, we’d already lost two hens to demons this year, and PTA luncheons were prime opportunities for sussing newcomers out.

  I told him he should go to the luncheon, not for any good reason besides that I wanted him and his glittering eyes out of the house for a few hours. When he came home, he said, “I see that Pryor’s population of mothers is dwindling.”

  His spiny northern accent made me want to laugh sometimes, but not then. He sounded solemn and looked older than his thick black crop of hair suggested, and I was inclined to think he really cared that our meek little species was dying off. “Pryor hasn’t been well,” I said.

  “Do you have any idea why that is?”

  I felt like he could see right through me, bones and organs and all. I folded my arms in front of my chest and said I didn’t know.

  I wanted to tell him. It’s just that the secret didn’t belong entirely to me. Emmalyn was dead, but her sister wasn’t. And Martha Blanchard didn’t trust anyone. I doubt she’d ever have told me about the monsters if Emmalyn hadn’t thought my hereditary holiness might be of some use to them. It wasn’t, but I’m a decent shot and the monsters hate that even more than memorized psalms or holy water.

  When I told Martha that I wanted to consult the purewater man, she was sitting in her bedroom windowsill with the screen yanked out of the frame and laying in her lap. Standing below in the Blanchards’ yard, letting dead grass scratch my ankles, I was already halfway to irritable even before she said, “Are you out of your head? You wanna get burned at the stake?”

  “Hush. He’ll wake up.” In the downstairs bedroom, hidden from view by a bundle of blue lace curtains, Sheriff Blanchard slept in sheets he reportedly hadn’t changed since his wife was still alive. I wasn’t more than ten paces from his window, and I couldn’t count on Martha to make excuses for me if he heard us.

  “I don’t care what he thinks,” Martha said, letting the screen fall to her bedroom floor with a pronounced thud. She climbed out the window and shimmied down the drainpipes, using the empty flower boxes on the windows as footholds. When she reached the porch bannister, she wrapped her arms around it and slid the rest of the way down. Bitterly, she told me, “He blames me for what I didn’t do, anyway, so I may a
s well do what I want.”

  She could have been talking about a hundred different things, but she meant Emmalyn dying. Sheriff Blanchard knew Martha and Emmalyn had both snuck out of the house on the night that Emmalyn died, and he’d beaten Martha bloody trying to get an explanation out of her that she flat-out refused to give.

  “If the purewater man deals with the monsters, proves they’re real and responsible for all this,” I told her, “you can tell your daddy the truth.”

  “And if the purewater man lies and tells him that I’m some sort of witch, I’ll get bruises that I can’t hide so easy.” Martha tugged aside the collar of her dress to show me the blue-yellow flush that covered her neck. The polite thing to do would have been to look away; I didn’t. She wanted to make me feel sorry for her so I’d forget the purewater man. I did feel sorry for her, sorrier than I wanted to admit, but we weren’t really friends.

  “He wouldn’t lie,” I said. “He’s ordained. He’d do something about them. Cast them out like Christ did with the demons and the pigs.”

  “He’ll tell everyone, that’s what he’ll do. And they’ll finish us.” Martha blew her bangs out of her eyes. “You really are as stupid as you look, aren’t you? Beneath all that hair, there’s nothing but a few Bible verses and a casserole recipe.”

  There was no use reasoning with Martha when she was determined to be disagreeable. I changed tack entirely. “You haven’t come hunting in three days.”