Thin Places

by Kay Chronister

  ◊

  Russula died without making a sound, but Rosemarie, being a Paley, knew what death looked like on an animal. She knelt on the floor beside the pillow that the barn cat had appropriated as her own, and released, after a moment, a stifled little sob.

  “Go out and check the snares,” was the first thing that Jane said to the older children, who stood in the doorway watching Rosemary look at the cat.

  “There’s nothing,” Ainsley said, scowling. “We looked when we got home from school.”

  “Look again.”

  Ainsley sighed a disgusted pre-teenage sigh and went out, Devon following. Jane mentally tallied up the children’s absences. One last month, two in March—the school district would make trouble if they missed too much. But tomorrow would have to be another sick day, because Rosemarie was swaddling the dead cat in her tattered old blanket, sniffling, saying, “Can we have the wake now?”

  “We can do that,” Jane said. “Of course. But don’t you want to keep your blanket?”

  Rosemarie looked down at the cat, then shook her head.

  “All right,” Jane said, fighting a ridiculous attachment to the ratty piece of cloth. None of her children had ever successfully attached to a stuffed animal or security blanket, but Jane mourned even the deaths of their second-tier toys. “Let me get him ready.” They would need a coffin, and a grave dug. She went out to the garage and scratched the old label—Devon’s toys—from a cardboard box so she could write the name Russula, her marker hanging in the air above a birthdate that she didn’t know and couldn’t write, because no one had cared about the barn cats back then. She took some small comfort in being able to note the date of death.

  In the ferns at the back of the house, Jane dug a hole three feet deep, a foot across, eyeing the box periodically to check the size. She hadn’t buried an animal before. After Ainsley and Devon finished, there was never enough left. The scraps went into the compost, and the rest she scrubbed out of the cheap dishes that she’d bought just for nourishing. Jane was still digging, listening to the children’s footsteps loud and rough in the undergrowth as they returned from the snares, when a truck came rolling up the road. Jane didn’t recognize the car, but she knew the man who got out.

  “Henry,” she said, dropping the shovel and wiping her muddy hands on her pants so that her husband’s cousin could shake her hand. She had not seen him in perhaps ten years. She had not even been certain she had his name right until he nodded.

  “I was sorry to hear,” he said. “Real sorry.”

  The children emerged from the trees like deer, big-eyed and faltering, and stood there until Jane made all the introductions. “You heard?” she asked, once each of the children had said their shy hellos. “Who told you?” Her children knew no other Paleys, although sometimes Ainsley or Devon would ask after cousins or grandparents, the family members that their schoolmates must mention. Jane could map out the Paley family tree from memory and she still had the addresses of the other family properties from an old book of Walter’s, but she couldn’t say for sure who was still alive. Only now there was Henry, and he was standing in her backyard in a funeral suit.

  “The children wrote to us up north. After Loretta, I’m the last one there, you know.” Henry knelt down and addressed Rosemarie now, as if she couldn’t hear him from an upright position: “I’m glad you wrote. I should have been here for Walter.”

  Walter would have been a sore point between Jane and the Paleys, if only any of them were near enough to be sore at. After he died she had written to them, she had even gone into town and found a payphone, emptying a roll of quarters into a string of calls that no one answered. Paleys knew how to disappear. And precious few of them had landlines. Paley rules dictated that no one besides family set foot on Paley property, and that included workers from the phone company.

  “Well. You’re here now,” Jane observed, waiting for an explanation.

  “Do you mind my being here?” Henry said, but his tone indicated that of course she didn’t. He had been a child here, set up secret forts in the same patch of woods where Ainsley had her plywood hideout and eaten breakfast at the table where Devon dawdled in the mornings. Jane wondered if he wanted the house back, now that Walter was gone. She almost wished that he would take it back, turn them out, force her into the clean safe un-Paley world, but only almost. She knew what losing the farm would do to the children. Besides, Henry could have taken the house four years ago, if he’d wanted it, and he hadn’t.

  “Let me get the body,” Jane said, the last word under her breath as if Rosemarie wouldn’t still hear. Rosemarie was standing between her siblings like they would protect her, the fingers of one hand curled around Ainsley’s wrist, the thumb of her other hand stuck in her mouth. Another habit, like naming livestock, that she’d have to kick before kindergarten.

  When Jane came out of the house with the cat, she knew already that there had been some misunderstanding. Henry stood with his arms crossed while Ainsley talked and made indignant faces at him. The conversation died before Jane got there, but she kept her eyes on Henry’s face as she lowered the cat down into the makeshift coffin. The embarrassment she always felt when Rosemarie teased the cats into tameness had swollen into something that heated her cheeks and shortened her temper. If Henry said anything, if the older children made any remark, Jane already knew she would come back harsher and meaner than they deserved.

  Henry said nothing, and neither did Ainsley or Devon. After the wake, they went into the house and the children sat down at the table while Jane made dinner. Henry ate the meal she served, but when he’d cleared his plate, he stood and said, “I’d better get myself something before I drive back.”

  “There’s nothing,” Devon said sourly. His unfinished book report, pointless now that he wouldn’t be in school tomorrow, still lay across his place at the table.

  “In that woods? There’s a whole host of things. But I don’t know why you didn’t just—”

  “That was a pet,” Jane said before he could finish. Rosemarie might already have guessed that the cat would have worked for Ainsley and Devon the same way that sheep and goats and rabbits did, but Jane thought there was a chance that she didn’t know, and she didn’t want Rosemarie to see Russula’s one-eyed scowl every time she had to nourish. Kindergarten was only a handful of months away.

  “Who does the hunting, if you don’t use the farm animals?”

  “We don’t hunt,” Ainsley said with pride. “That’s savage.”

  Henry looked at Jane, and she nodded. “Sometimes the farm animals die of natural causes, and then we use them. Other times, we find animals in the woods.”

  “We have a bread snare, and a trap snare, and a whole bunch of others,” Ainsley said.

  “Snares? How many animals do you go through?” Henry frowned.

  “Ten a week, that’s all,” Jane said. The number sounded worse like that, too countable: ten times four, forty animals a month. And how many per year? She could see Henry adding.

  “Ten a week? What are they doing, going off the property so much?”

  “School,” Jane said, turning her back, scrubbing dishes that didn’t need any scrubbing. “They need school if they’re going to make something of themselves when they get older.”

  “Paleys have always been schooled at home.”

  “What they need for real life, I can’t teach them here.”

  “You think third grade is worth this? You think a cat funeral is worth this? You know what it’s like, digging human features out of an animal?”

  “That’s enough,” Jane said. She didn’t worry that Ainsley and Devon would believe anything that Henry said, but Rosemarie didn’t know for herself yet. Rosemarie was fragile, grieving for an animal that should have nourished someone tonight. “This is what Walter would have wanted for his children.”

  “What Walter would have wanted?” Henry said, incredulous, then stopped himself and turned to the children. “Ainsley, Devon, why don�
�t you show me those snares?”

  Jane was reluctant to let them go, but she sensed that anything she said now would only give Henry sway over the children. She could too easily see Ainsley and Devon living in that word savage, styling themselves as apex predators, butchering calves and wringing the necks of rabbits. “Don’t let them hunt,” she said instead. “No killing.”

  Henry couldn’t understand because he had grown up a Paley, but having the snares wasn’t the same as hunting—not in the way that mattered. Ainsley and Devon didn’t see the animals suffer or die, they didn’t choose their marks, they didn’t deal out death. Really, they weren’t killing; they were only using dead materials to make the mammalian faces that the school day demanded.

  ◊

  They said goodbye to Henry on the porch, sometime after midnight. Afterwards they stood watching his truck roar dustily away until he crossed the property line. “Bedtime,” Jane said, but the children didn’t move except to shift closer, nudging into her side, and Jane would not push them away.

  “It’s not a school night,” Ainsley said, her voice muffled in Jane’s shoulder.

  “We don’t even have to go to school, ever,” Devon reflected with something between wonder and horror. “How come we go?”

  “Henry doesn’t know what he missed,” Jane said. “Your father’s family goes years without leaving their farm. Avoiding the world. But you can’t grow up that way.”

  Jane felt sorry for Henry: never-married, childless, farming his patch of land alone, emerging from his hideaway for what he’d thought was the special occasion of a niece’s funeral and getting instead a barn cat’s wake. A Paley who flinched from nourishing—and nearly all of them did, and she couldn’t comprehend why—could never be anything but Paley, the hermit with the property encircled in birches, the eccentric who conducted all his business at home, the ancestral landowner whose yields shrank every year until they were too meager even to sustain him. Jane could see where the Paleys were headed, and her children weren’t going there.

  She could see nothing Paley in Rosemarie at that moment, so bright and sharp and awake standing barefoot on the porch, asking earnestly, “When do I get to go to kindergarten?”

  “You’re still a baby,” Ainsley said.

  “Don’t say that,” Jane said. “Soon, Rosie. Next year. After you start nourishing.”

  “I could nourish now. Next year is too long.”

  “It’ll go quick.” Jane could see the cat’s makeshift tombstone from here. Summer would end as soon as it began. Another generation of barn kittens in Rosemarie’s lap, another generation of barn cats on the older children’s plates. And then on Rosemarie’s, too.

  She sent Devon and Rosemarie to bed after a while, but held Ainsley back. That hungry look was on her daughter’s face again, snarling and ruthless and twisted. Ainsley hadn’t nourished since morning, and the school day mask had receded, ending at her hairline and the hollow of her throat. She was fully Paley now, and Jane was frightened by the loathing that she felt when she looked at her daughter.

  “How could you let her send that letter?” she said.

  “I told you,” Ainsley said. “I said that she was sending letters. She made us find the addresses. She invited everyone. The whole family. It’s just that only Henry came.”

  “She’s six years old,” Jane said. “Only six. Think about that.”

  “She’s old,” Ainsley said bitterly, looking at her feet. “Older than I was when I started nourishing.”

  ◊

  The morning after the wake, Jane overslept: past sunrise, past breakfast time, well into midmorning. She opened her eyes and rolled over to look at the clock on the wall, a rare Paley concession to batteries. She was surprised no one had woken her. Even on days when they didn’t have school, Devon and Ainsley never slept past dawn. They would have been up for hours by now, their chores finished, the barn doors shut. She should hear their shouts outside, the older children’s hollering interspersed with Rosemarie’s little shrieks.

  Jane put on her bathrobe and work boots. Downstairs was still and yellow with sunshine; she was surprised to see a stack of dishes in the sink. Three plates, no silverware, no cups, blood glistening on the rim of each dish. She lifted her eyes to the window and then could only stare. The barn cat’s grave had been dug up. A pile of dirt lay mounded beside the hole, the wet mangled remains of the cardboard box on the ground nearby. Devon’s toys. She didn’t have to look to know that the grave was empty, the cat was gone. Three plates, not two, she thought.

  Her voice went hoarse screaming for Rosemarie, but Jane already knew where she’d gone. Their old clunking truck, practically unused since Walter died, would hold up long enough to reach the school, and she didn’t care about the way back.

  Jane could see into the playground from the school parking lot, but at first she didn’t see Rosemarie. The number of children at play overwhelmed her, so many small bodies wrapped in colorful new clothes. She could not remember at what point the un-Paley world had begun to feel so loud and big and chaotic to her. At last her gaze landed on Rosemarie, dressed in her too-small best dress, her hair maneuvered into lopsided ponytails. If Jane looked hard, she knew, she’d see blood on Rosemarie’s mouth, unless Ainsley had remembered to wash her sister’s face as well as her own before getting on the bus.

  She’d come to the school intending to drag the children out of class. Rosemarie first, then Devon. She’d retrieve Ainsley last. She’d haul the three of them partway home, then stop on the side of the road and make them stand in a row until the mammalian features melted from their faces and in their hideous natural forms they repented, for their Paleyness, for everything.

  But Rosemarie was standing at the top of the playground, looking unbelievably human. Screaming in delight, shoving a boy down the slide: joyful, exultant, savage. Jane sat for a moment, watching her, then turned the key in the ignition and guided the truck back onto the road. She only had a few hours before the children came home, just enough time to ensure that something found its way into the snares or succumbed to age and disease. They would be needing three animals each day now. That was twenty-one per week, eighty-four per month. How many per year, Jane didn’t want to guess, but she was their mother and she would take care of them.

  The Lights We Carried Home

  From our house on stilts, I could see rice fields, swampland, and the spires of a power plant rising high into the clouds. My sister Sopha could see all that and something else. “Listen to the ap scream,” our ming would say, and Sopha would push the curtain aside so we could peek out. She’d describe how the ghost’s face was a wide white moon with a bright red mouth, how its inside-strings tangled with the mist. I could see the glow that the ap cast, but not the intestines or the liver that shone before Sopha’s eyes.

  Ming called Sopha a haunted child. The monks at the village wat looped red strings around her wrists to keep her spirit from being carried off, but we always knew she only half belonged to us. We used to burn duck meat and paper money so she wouldn’t be poor if her soul and body came apart. “We’re poor now,” I said once, scowling down on the fire that ate my hard-earned riel; across the street, they were selling candy and salted mangoes. Ming said, “If we are poor here, we eat grass roots and do without batteries for a month. If Sopha is poor there, they eat her flesh and torture her soul.”

  “Why?” said five-year-old Sopha, frowning into the flames.

  “Lay your head down,” Ming said. “Don’t let the ghosts see you disobey.” Sopha laid down. The fire burnt out and darkness congealed around us.

  We lived in Psaodung, which the news would later call the oil lamp village. Before I went to school, I thought everyone lived in a kerosene haze and listened at night to the screams of the dead. We were terrified of anything that pierced the darkness. But Sopha loved the ghosts who showed their faces for her and only her, and the spirit world was where she escaped when Psaodung became intolerable for her.

  ◊ />
  I was twenty-seven when filmmakers came to Psaodung. Where they came from, no one knew for sure. I heard they were British, then French, then American. They spoke English but not TV English, so I knew they weren’t Hollywood people. They spoke no Khmer, but their translator Kao told me they were filming a documentary on life in our village. I asked him why. He said, “The province authorities are under scrutiny now, for running power-lines right over your heads and telling everyone that you had power when you didn’t.”

  Over the roar of the foreigners’ generators, I caught that I was supposed to describe my life here. The filmmakers had already talked to our neighbors; they knew my sister was a local legend. What she left behind, what lived in her wreckage, they wanted to show the world.

  The foreigners weren’t officially paying anyone for interviews, but unofficially they’d brought sacks of rice big enough to feed a family for months. I don’t know who told them about Sopha, but whoever it was, they traded my family’s shame for their family’s stomachs. Words cost nothing, and pride has always been too precious for anyone in Psaodung to afford.

  I talked for the same reason everyone did: I knew I’d earn more from a fifteen-minute interview than I did from a month selling phone cards on the roadside. But my reluctance must have showed on camera. I couldn’t make myself look directly at the lens. The camera was an eye I didn’t want to face, too much like the ghosts who glowed when our fires died.

  “Did you realize that town just to the east of yours was fully wired?” Kao said while one man fiddled with a microphone and another shoved a bottle of mineral water into my hands. “Did you feel angry? Did you feel slighted?”

  We felt afraid, I said. We knew we lived on the shore of the spirit-world.

  The translator winced. “The producers,” he said, “want me to tell you that it’s not really that sort of film. They appreciate the local color, and they would love to hear your stories. But not during the interview.”