Thin Places

by Kay Chronister

  ◊

  The vinyl chair in Sheriff Blanchard’s office stuck to my bare thighs, so I tugged my knees up to my chest and steadied myself by digging the muddy heels of my boots into the seat underneath me.

  “This is just a formality, I promise,” Sheriff Blanchard said, and smiled that tired, coffee-stained smile which used to be more convincing before I knew how bad he beat Martha. Not that he was any threat to me; no one wants to believe a murder confession from a preacher’s daughter, especially when homecoming is around the corner and someone’s got to hang streamers. But when I limped into the office, I laid my daddy’s shotgun on the counter and said, “I’m not sorry,” so they couldn’t exactly tell me to go home.

  When I didn’t say anything, he prompted, “Just tell the story slowly, now.” I knew then that he was still banking on being able to slap my wrist and pretend nothing happened. Or maybe he was even hopeful enough to think I’d say that I was not guilty at all, but a victim to the same thing that got Emmalyn and that I knew where to find it. Peculiar thing about the fathers of dead little girls, they tend to want revenge.

  But he would never get revenge on the thing that really murdered Emmalyn, so I folded my hands in my lap and looked at him with stinging eyes.

  “I killed Emmalyn. It was an accident. We were playing around by the river. Drinking, we were drinking. She fell into the water. And she drowned. And the purewater man found out. He was going to tell, so I killed him too.”

  I don’t know what I guessed he’d do when I made that confession. I thought he’d do something. Instead he only sat there, his shoulders shaking a little, and pressed his pencil down hard into his pad of paper.

  After a minute, he said, “Where is his body?”

  “I buried it.”

  Long as I could remember, people in Pryor dealt with any sort of unpleasantness by hightailing it back to where they felt comfortable—they’d mention the weather, weddings, Christmas or Independence Day, whichever was closest. Folks are good at staying ignorant to whatever they don’t want to know. And it turns out they mostly don’t want to know that a few schoolgirls are the only thing standing between their town and the beasts of Hell. But I’d managed to hit the sheriff where it hurt.

  Next thing he said bewildered me: “You know why the purewater man comes here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Pryor is a holy town, purified by the mouth of Hell itself. You break the seal, you put everything in danger—not just Pryor, everything.”

  Far as I knew, the sheriff wasn’t supposed to have any notion of the burnt line in White Throat Holler or the corruption that rose up and fed and slumbered inside our very own town. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat. “A line, sir?”

  “Don’t you smirk at me!” He shook his head. “You didn’t just threaten yourself when you killed him, you threatened everything.”

  “You’re not mad about Emmalyn?”

  “Ain’t nothing could be done about Emmalyn,” he said, and I saw how it destroyed him, how this loss was the only intolerable loss he could have imagined even in a town of three hundred wives and daughters.

  “If I didn’t kill him, he’d have killed me.”

  “Your daddy’s gonna be so disappointed in you,” he told me, like I hadn’t said anything.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You couldn’t at least have blamed it on Martha? You still could—” How much he must have hated her to even think those words.

  “Not Martha,” I said. “Just me. Just me and Emmalyn in the woods.”

  ◊

  Apart from my daddy, Martha Blanchard was the only one to come see me in jail. I snuck a letter to her that was full of all the secrets we weren’t supposed to know, and at the end I told her not to visit me, so of course that’s precisely what she did. When my cell door creaked open, I rolled over on the century-old cot and knew already who was there before I opened my eyes.

  “Your little murder confession left a casserole-shaped hole in the last church potluck,” Martha said.

  “Sorry.”

  She sat down on the end of the cot and blew her bangs out of her face so she could aim a skeptical look at me. “What good does it do, you being in here?”

  “I’m supposed to be an explanation. Of Emmalyn’s murder. Of the purewater man’s too. So no one goes looking for what really killed the purewater man. I didn’t want them to know what he was really for. Or about the demons.”

  “But?”

  “Well, they already know. At least, Sheriff Blanchard already knows.”

  Martha didn’t seem surprised that her father was privy to all the host of monsters that we sheltered in Pryor. “You should break out of here,” she said.

  “I break out, and I can guarantee you’ll be in by this time tomorrow.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Your daddy told me himself.”

  Silence for a minute, while she absorbed that. “So why let me go free?”

  “You’re the better hunter.”

  When I said that, she nodded. We were thinking the same thing. If Martha stayed out and I stayed in, maybe the demons wouldn’t get so many free suppers. Or the undertaker wouldn’t have a full house of slaughtered mothers. We might stop finding our dogs’ desiccated bodies in our yards. And I could say for sure there wouldn’t be another girl dead in the river.

  We sat without speaking for a while. She exhaled through her mouth and eased back against the wall. I would never have told her, but she looked the spitting image of Emmalyn then. Yellow hair curling at the ends from sweat and rain. Face tilted upwards, letting stubbornness run down the slope of her nose like raindrops. The Blanchard sisters spent their whole lives trying to die for each other.

  “You know,” Martha said, “you’re still giving up, locking yourself in here. Sure as if you’d let the purewater man feed you to a demon.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “I knew what I was doing.”

  “So what?”

  “You should know.” I looked at her, saw how she was hollow-eyed and shivering and gripping her demon tooth necklace with white-knuckled fingers. Martha clung hard to something that night, and I’ll always believe it was the will to go on living when she had nothing left besides the hateful town that her little sister died defending. “It’s a sacrifice. Someone’s gotta get burnt. I’m pure and willing. Let it be me.”

  Russula’s Wake

  They hadn’t been naming the barn cats, now that Ainsley and Devon were old enough to know the difference between taking care of and caring for something. In the afternoons, when the school bus doors opened to release them, the children hurried through all the feeding and mucking and cracking and cutting, then closed up the barn and left the animal world to manage itself until morning. By then, the table would be set for dinner: cheap mauve plates for the two older children, blue porcelain for Jane and the baby.

  For herself and little Rosemarie, Jane made roasts and casseroles, sometimes quiche. But the older children followed Paley family rules, and the substance of their meal was always the same. While they nourished, Rosemarie would pick at her food until getting up the courage to ask after the barn cats: had they been good, had the new kittens been born yet, was there still any milk in the dish she’d left? Ainsley and Devon would smirk, they would giggle; sometimes, if they thought Jane wasn’t listening, they would whisper false stories of dead cats hung from rafters. From across the kitchen, scrubbing pots and pans, Jane would let herself glance only momentarily at the faces that Ainsley and Devon hid from their teachers and schoolmates. Later, tucking them into bed, she would have to avert her eyes. When her lips brushed their foreheads, she would try not to flinch.

  She always said goodnight to Rosemarie last. Mothers did not have favorites, certainly Jane did not have a favorite, but Rosemarie wouldn’t still be Rosemarie by the end of the year, and that made her precious. A Paley woman would doubtless have said that Rosemarie was thin-skinned, fragile to a fault, but Jane was
not a Paley by birth and she had always secretly felt that Rosemarie was not really a Paley either. Ainsley and Devon, on the other hand, were Paleys, true Paleys, and Jane was afraid that in the end maybe there wasn’t much difference between a cruel child and a Paley child.

  ◊

  The less Ainsley and Devon cared for the animals, the more desperately Rosemarie loved them. In the mornings, while the older children collected their belongings and hurried out to the waiting school bus, Rosemarie stood solemnly at the window facing the barn, her chin propped on her hands, a field guide to edible mushrooms splayed open on the windowsill in front of her. When the bus doors closed, she climbed down from her perch and slipped into her rubber boots and waited for Jane to open the barn. Jane could not remember when exactly she had begun allowing this, only that it had been a while ago and yet she still felt a sort of secondhand embarrassment at seeing Rosemarie on the floor with the feral cats that lived in the hayloft. Rosemarie didn’t know yet, not to get attached. But that was only because Jane had neglected to tell her.

  When the letter came from the school in March, Jane knew she had waited too long. The interval of time between the now and the then had shrunk down almost to nothing. The day the letter arrived, she stood with the mailbox hanging open like a black unhungry mouth, and looked at the letter, and looked at her daughter, who was kneeling in the mud with one of the cats. Russula was a saggy-bellied calico with a missing eye, who had been named, for reasons apparent only to Rosemarie, after a rare red mushroom that grew only in deep seclusion. She was the most hideous of all the barn cats, and Rosemarie loved her more than anything else.

  “Someone sent you a letter,” Rosemarie observed, seeing Jane look into the mailbox.

  “Yes,” Jane said.

  She was afraid Rosemarie would ask who or why. They received mail so rarely. But Rosemarie only frowned, screwing up the corners of her mouth, and asked, “Could we send letters?”

  “If we wanted to,” Jane said. “Who would you write to?”

  “I don’t know,” Rosemarie admitted, as if the possibility of an addressee had only now occurred to her. She looked at Russula, seeming to hope the cat might provide inspiration. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t live here.”

  Jane knelt and slowly trailed her fingers down Russula’s spine—not because petting the cat’s matted fur remotely appealed to her, but so she would have some reason to stay beside Rosemarie, to leave the letter in the open mailbox, to suspend the moment into a year. “Is that all right with you?” she said. “That you don’t know anyone. Are you lonely?”

  “No,” Rosemarie said, but she paused a moment first, to decide.

  “Let’s go inside,” Jane said.

  “Can Russula come?”

  “You know the cats don’t come in the house,” Jane said, but already she knew she could not refuse Rosemarie anything then. Rosy-cheeked from the warmth of the barn, her breath sweet from eating pancakes instead of nourishing as her brother and sister did in the mornings, she was impossibly good; she was perfect. Nothing as wonderful as her could remain.

  Jane made a fire in the hearth, though the morning was warm, and then tore open the letter and read the entire thing twice, holding the paper at a distance. Rosemarie was six years old, nearly seven, the letter said, as if her own mother wouldn’t know that. Federal regulations require that children aged seven to seventeen be enrolled. Jane had dreaded this letter when it came for Ainsley and again when it came for Devon, but she had known already that she would send the older children to school. She had not been tempted by the empty checkbox at the bottom of the page, with its promise of reprieve from the devouring school bus doors: I will be homeschooling my child. Now she covered the checkbox with her fingers. She made herself look at Rosemarie, who was sitting cross-legged on the rug with a pencil and a sheet of lined paper. Russula lay nearby, resplendent across the back of an armchair, batting halfheartedly at a sunspot. Rosemarie was drawing a picture of her, Jane saw. Already she’d copied down the cat’s name from her field guide to edible mushrooms, writing in broad crooked letters that looked like runes or carvings.

  Jane folded the letter and tucked it back inside the envelope and told herself: you have a month, and only a month, and then you will tell her. And she did not throw the letter into the fire, even though she wanted to. But she tucked it inside a drawer, which was almost the same, and she let Russula stay indoors for good even though Devon and Ainsley protested. She wasn’t catching mice anymore, Ainsley pointed out. She slept on Rosemarie’s bed, Devon reported. She had fleas. She was dirty. They wanted to hurt Rosemarie with those words. Sometimes they succeeded. Jane did not intervene, but she also did not send the cat back to the barn.

  If Rosemarie’s father were alive, a barn cat couldn’t have come near the house, much less into a bedroom. But the painted letters spelling PALEY on the mailbox were fading into illegible scratches, and the homework that Ainsley and Devon carted back from school promised them things that no Paley child used to desire. Walter Paley had died four years back, an epoch in the lifetime of a child. With no other Paleys around, sometimes Jane could make herself forget that the Paley rules were rules for a reason, that they were supposed to protect the people who followed them.

  ◊

  Ainsley condemned Rosemarie’s cat to death at the dinner table, kneeling on her chair with her homework spread out across her place setting. She gnawed on the end of her pencil, wrote the answer to a math problem, then set aside her work and proclaimed, “That one-eyed cat has tumors in its belly.”

  Jane paused with her fork halfway to her mouth and looked at Rosemarie, who was picking at a baked potato.

  “She doesn’t know what tumors is,” Devon said. “She’s a baby.”

  Rosemarie forgot the potato and glared across the table at him. “I do know.”

  “Her belly will blow up,” Ainsley said triumphantly. “Like a balloon.”

  “That’s enough,” Jane said, knowing they wouldn’t listen. Feeling, as she often did, a sort of low-grade horror in the face of her children. “The cat will be fine.”

  “No,” Devon said. “It’s really dying.”

  “I know it is,” Rosemarie said, a lump audible in her throat. “I already know.”

  “Sorry, Rosemarie.” Devon would always backpedal when the point of tears had been reached. “It’s an old cat anyway, you know.”

  “You could get a different cat,” Ainsley agreed. “Like a kitten. That won’t die soon.”

  “But they’re not Russula,” Rosemarie said.

  “You love her,” Jane said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’d like, we’ll have a funeral where you can say goodbye.”

  “Like at a church?” Ainsley said, scrunching up her face. None of the children had been to a funeral; their father, like his ancestors, had been buried on the property. “We’re taking the dead cat to a church?”

  “They won’t let us. They’ll make us get out,” Devon said.

  “A wake then. At our house,” Jane managed, before the children could go any further. Already, Rosemarie was sniffling, her eyes red-rimmed. “She’ll stay inside with us, Rosie. We’ll take good care of her. Until—”

  To Jane’s relief, neither Devon nor Ainsley finished the sentence. But later, as Jane extinguished the candle at Ainsley’s bedside, out of the dark came the words: “Do you think something else will die, the day that Russula does?”

  “You don’t have to worry about it,” Jane said, because she didn’t know.

  Ainsley reached for her hand and grabbed hard, her fingernails pressing Jane’s palm. “I know the cat will be dead, it won’t matter,” she said, “but I don’t want Rosemarie to see us nourish on Russula.”

  “Don’t use the cat’s name,” Jane said, harsher than she meant to, and winced as she felt Ainsley’s fingers slip out of hers. “If it comes to that, you’ll just miss a day of school. I’m sure your friends have stayed home sick for much sillier reasons than that.”<
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  Ainsley said nothing for a moment, then, “A wake for a cat is silly.”

  Only a Paley child would have said that, Jane thought. She had numerous memories of childhood pet burials: Labradors and tabbies committed to the earth with bunches of wildflowers and off-key hymns and a first shovelful of dirt flatly smacking the surface of a cardboard coffin, almost like how they’d buried Walter except that the Paley children hadn’t cried as much as Jane used to.

  Jane stood to go, feeling at an impasse; how could she explain grief to a child who seemed constitutionally incapable of it? Then Ainsley sat upright in bed. “Rosemarie made us send a letter for her today,” she burst out, with that tattling lilt which Jane hated. Jane could see the satisfaction on her daughter’s face, a sort of hungry frantic pleasure. “She made us. Devon found the address, and I said we shouldn’t, but Rosemarie didn’t care.”

  “That’s enough,” Jane said, moving decisively to the door. She knew already that Rosemarie had been addressing letters, dozens of them, to the chicken coop and the pasture, writing to the animals in those spiky peculiar runes which all the time grew more legible. A sign of kindergarten readiness, the district would have said. A sign that she was likely to do very well in school, that possibly she should not have been held back a year.

  At the doorway, Jane hesitated; she always forgot how the darkness blurred Ainsley’s features until they looked almost like those of an ordinary child. From here, she could love her daughter. “You’re kind to your sister, aren’t you?” Jane said. “You don’t give her a hard time when I’m not there?”

  “I love Rosemarie,” Ainsley said, in the same flat unrepentant tone which she had used to discuss the dying cat. “But she’s going to get everyone in trouble.”