“Thump Milton?”
“You’re goin’ to have to go up the hill’n hope he’ll talk with you—he generally won’t.”
“Oh, no, no. No. That man, he scares me way more’n the rest.”
“Well, scared’s not a bad way to be about him, neither, hon. He’s my own granpaw, been around him all my life, but I still try’n make damn sure I don’t ever piss him off none. I’ve seen what happens. Be real careful you don’t say I sent you, but he’s the one who could know an answer for you. Thump’s the one who could.”
Megan’s eyes were suddenly stuffed with water, a bulging of tears, or maybe she needed to sneeze mighty hard, sniffle. They walked on along the Hawkfall road, steps sinking into white, and Megan would not look up again until they reached her house and halted. She put an arm across Ree’s shoulder, raised her other hand to point beyond the meadow of old fallen walls, up the hill to a clenched house of dun stones circled by bare trees. She said, “It’s been this way with our people forever, goddam it. For-fuckin’-ever. You go see Thump. Go up there’n knock gentle on his door, and wait.”
Chapter 11
CLOUDS LOOKED to be splitting on distant peaks, dark rolling bolts torn around the mountaintops to patch the blue sky with grim. Frosty wet began to fall, not as flakes nor rain but as tiny white wads that burst as drops landing and froze a sudden glaze atop the snow. The bringing wind rattled the forest, shook limb against limb, and a wild tapping noise carried all about. Now and then a shaking limb gave up and split from the trunk to land below with a sound like a final grunt.
Ree crossed the meadow of old fallen walls, climbed uphill to Thump Milton’s, but did not need to knock. A woman waited for her as she came into the yard. The woman stood on her doorstep wearing an apron over a print dress with short sleeves, rubbing her hands together, watching Ree draw near. The woman was past the middle of her years but looked pink in her cheeks, robust, with white hair brushed high into an airy poof and sprayed to stay there. She was burly, stout-boned, and flesh rolled when she moved. She said, “You’ve got the wrong place, I expect. Who might you be?”
Chickens were making a racket in a long low building across the yard. There was a light on inside the coop and footsteps had crushed the snow flat between there and the back door of the house. The house had been made without any frivolous stones of lighthearted colors, but was entirely deep-hued and sober. A short roof covered the woman in the doorway.
“I’m a Dolly.” Ree’s green hood was growing heavy from the wet and molding to her skull while the wind chased her skirt around her chapping legs and her eyes squinted against the spattering weather. “My dad’s Jessup Dolly. I’m Ree.”
“Which Jessup would that be?”
“From Rathlin Valley. Teardrop’s brother. I mean Haslam’s. Teardrop was born a Haslam.”
“I believe I know who Teardrop is. That’d make your Jessup the man who married the pretty Bromont girl.”
“That’s right—Mom used to be Connie Bromont.”
“Jack’s littlest sister. I knew Jack.” The woman gestured for Ree to come up onto the steps, under the roof. She pulled the hood away from Ree’s head, looked into her face. “You ain’t here for trouble, are you? ’Cause one of my nephews is Buster Leroy, and didn’t he shoot your daddy one time?”
“Yes’m, but that ain’t got nothin’ to do with me. They settled all that theirselves, I think.”
“Shootin’ him likely settled it. What is it you want?”
“Ma’am, I got a real bad need to talk with Thump Milton.”
“Ach! Ach! Get away, girl. Away!”
“I need to, I really, really, need to, ma’am. Please—I am a Dolly! Some of our blood at least is the same. That’s s’posed to mean somethin’—ain’t that what is always said?”
The woman stalled at the mention of shared blood, sighed, crossed her arms and pressed her lips together. She reached to touch Ree’s hair, appreciated the cool dampness through her fingertips, then laid the back of her hand to Ree’s winter-blushed cheek. She said, “Ain’t you got no men could do this?”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“Well, he don’t ever talk no more’n he has to, you understand that? He don’t talk too direct when he does talk, neither. He says things so you ought to know what he means, but if you don’t, he’ll just leave it that way. And even when he does talk, he won’t talk much to women.”
“You could say I’m still a girl.”
The woman smiled sadly, touched Ree’s face again.
“I expect I won’t. He’ll see you for himself. You go wait in the yard somewheres by that coop and I’ll tell him you’re here.”
There was no good sheltering spot beside the coop. A twin-trunked mimosa grew near the wall to raise a spot of windbreak and Ree crouched to the dry side of the double trunk. She crouched with her skirt dropped to ground, making a squat tent with herself as the pole. Chickens fussed inside the heated coop and melt grew an outline of ice low along the walls. The mimosa blocked direct wind, but swirls hit Ree from both sides and the bursting white wads of weather cast a mist over her that soon froze.
After most of an hour she saw a different face at the window. The woman had looked at her a few times but now the curtain eased open on a long-jawed man’s face with an iron-shaded spade beard and careful fingers on the curtain. The curtain closed so subtly Ree questioned whether it had truly been open or had she wished it open and sold the wish to her eyes.
Rime of frost thickened where breath fell onto her chest.
Sleet crackled down, laid a cold sheen across everything. The afternoon sky dimmed and lights from the house carried into the yard as gleamings stretched by skidding across the ice. Tree limbs fattened with gathered silver and drooped. Dogs went home to crawl under porches.
The woman came back outside wearing a black overcoat and hat, and walked in loose harrumphing galoshes. She came into the yard but not near. She said, “He ain’t likely to have time for you, child.”
“I’ve got to talk to him.”
“Nope. Talkin’ just causes witnesses, and he don’t want for any of those.”
“I’ll wait.”
“You need to get yourself on home.”
“I’ll make that man weary of me out here waitin’. I’ve just got to talk to him.”
The woman started to say something, then shook her head and returned to the house.
Ree sat chilled inside her squat tent. To occupy her mind, she decided to name all the Miltons: Thump, Blond, Catfish, Spider, Whoop, Rooster, Scrap… Lefty, Dog, Punch, Pinkeye, Momsy… Cotton, Hog-jaw, Ten Penny, Peashot… enough. Enough Miltons. To have but a few male names in use was a tactic held over from the olden knacker ways, the ways that had been set aside during the time of Haslam, Fruit of Belief, but returned to heartily after the great bitterness erupted and the sacred walls tumbled to nothing. Let any sheriff or similar nabob try to keep official accounts on the Dolly men when so many were named Milton, Haslam, Arthur or Jessup. The Arthurs and Jessups were the fewest, not more than five apiece, probably, and the Haslams amounted to double the Arthurs or Jessups. But the great name of the Dollys was Milton, and at least two dozen Miltons moved about in Ree’s world. If you named a son Milton it was a decision that attempted to chart the life he’d live before he even stepped into it, for among Dollys the name carried expectations and history. Some names could rise to walk many paths in many directions, but Jessups, Arthurs, Haslams and Miltons were born to walk only the beaten Dolly path to the shadowed place, live and die in keeping with those bloodline customs fiercest held.
Ree and Mom both had shouted and shouted and shouted against Harold becoming a Milton, since Sonny was already a Jessup. They had shouted and won and Ree’d a thousand times wished she’d fought longer for Sonny, shouted him into an Adam or Leotis or Eugene, shouted until he was named to expect choices.
Her teeth chattered and she tried to put a tempo to the chattering, to control the shivers into a sor
t of chomping song. She parted her lips and snapped her teeth in step with that happy silly old song they sang in grade school about the submarine that was yellow and had everybody living in it. She snapped her teeth in time and wagged her head as though joyful even inside a shrouding of ice. The hood creaked when she moved her head, and cracked when she stood.
The woman was again in the yard. She carried a wide cup of something steaming, handed it to Ree. She said, “Soup, you crazy girl. I brung you some soup. Drink it down and be on your way.”
Ree raised the cup and drank long, chewed, drank on to empty.
“Thanks.”
Weather burst on the woman’s hat and shoulders, wet spray jumping. She touched Ree’s hood, rapped knuckles against the ice to break it fine, and swiped the pieces away.
“He knows you were in the valley, child. With Megan. And at Little Arthur’s. He knows what you want to ask and he don’t want to hear it.”
“You mean he ain’t goin’ to come out’n say one word to me? Nothin’?”
The woman took the empty cup.
“If you’re listenin’, child, you got your answer. Now, go, get on away from here… and don’t come back’n try’n ask him twice. Just don’t.”
The woman turned her back on Ree, stepped slowly toward the house. Ree watched her broad black back going away and said, “So, come the nut-cuttin’, blood don’t truly mean shit to him. Am I understandin’ right? Blood don’t truly count for diddly to the big man? Well, you can tell the big man for me I hope he has him a long, long life full of nothin’ but hiccups’n the runs, hear? You tell him Ree Dolly said that.”
The woman spun, glowering beneath the hat brim, and hurled the soup cup at Ree’s head but missed close and the cup skipped across the glazed snow, banged into the coop. She pointed a finger and repeated, “Just don’t.”
Chapter 12
SHE BECAME ice as she walked. White wads broke on her head and dripped to her shoulders to freeze and thicken. The green hood had become an ice hat and her shoulders a cold hard yoke. The scraped road had been so well iced as to be impassable, no headlights at all in the distance or near, so she walked hunched through the winter fields toward the railroad tracks. Her boots crushed the ice topping and broke into the underlying snow for traction. As long as she stomped each step she could break her way, and when she came to the sheer slope above the tracks she sat on her ass and whooshed toward the rails.
On the tracks she could walk without looking. She kept her face turned to ground, avoiding the mist from drops breaking. Her long legs flew ahead and her boots landed heavily enough. The sleet made flourish upon flourish of small popping sounds. The sleet popped small and her boots crunched through and all else was quiet.
She’d passed the meadow of old fallen walls leaving Hawkfall, and as she considered those furiously tossed stones olden Dollys rushed to mind loud and fractious, bellowing and shaking fists. She knew few details of the old bitter reckoning that erupted inside those once holy walls, but suddenly understood to her marrow how such angers between blood could come about and last forever. Like most fights that never finished it had to’ve started with a lie. A big man and a lie.
The big man and prophet who’d found messages from the Fist of Gods written on the entrails of a sparkling golden fish lured with prayer from a black river way east near the sea was Haslam, Fruit of Belief. The sparkling fish had revealed signs unto him and him alone, and he’d followed the map etched tiny on the golden guts and led them all across thousands of testing miles until he hailed these lonely rugged hollows of tired rocky soil as a perfect garden spot, paradise as ordained by the map of guts sent to his eyes from the Fist of Gods.
Ree left the tracks and crossed a level field to reach the slope of caves. Weeds and grasses were made stiff by a bark of ice, shimmering and fragile, and shattered underfoot. The shimmering grasses tinkled to nothing as she kicked her feet. The caves were easy to see from below but difficult to reach. Ree snatched onto saplings to pull herself through the beating weather and up the steepness toward the slant gaping cave she knew best, the cave with a wall of stones standing in the mouth.
Haslam had been born from a god’s water spit on knacker seed, shaped for manhood by a fugitive faith and sent among the Walking People to rally them and all like tinker flesh and to make a new people he’d guide to that garden place chosen by the Fist, mapped inside the sparkling fish, where they could rest their feet after six thousand years of roaming and become settled people.
The wall of stones stood across half the cave mouth and made a stout shield against the wind. Burnt remnants from many fires were strewn about the dusty cave floor. Ree bent and quickly drew together a mess of fire leavings. Log ends not consumed, charred stubs. Well back inside the cave she found a short stacking of small logs. The logs had been there a long dry while and came apart like hair clumps in her hands. Still, the logs would catch flame, and she collected the shreds.
There had been a map to this paradise, but something happened to Walking People settled with settled gods, and after but thirty years the roof of the new ways fell, walls tumbled and flew, old ways returned ravenous after the decades of slighting, and the Fist of Gods took seats in the clouds to sulk and reconsider. Ree did not know much about the religion or the ruining. The prophecies of Haslam, Fruit of Belief, reached her down the generations as hoarse godly mutterings of a big man spinning a braggish lie that made little sense and had no conclusion. The cause of the old bitter reckoning was not clear, either, and there might’ve been living Dollys who knew the truth but nobody ever said it where she could hear. All they ever said was there’d been a woman.
Ree shed her coat, the hooded sweatshirt, the wet skirt. They landed heavily, lumps of fabric clotted with ice. She had a fair pile of punk wood laid in the corner by the stone wall but no kindling, and once in from the weather she was loath to go back into it. It was those brute ancient ways that broke fresh over her world at every dawn and sent Dollys to let the blood drain from Dad’s heart and dump his flesh somewhere hidden from path and cloud. Her boots felt stiff as iron but she kept them on. She slid her panties down, stepped out of them, then raised her undershirt overhead and off. Bare skin but for boots she crouched to the woodpile and stuck the dry garments beneath the likeliest charred stubs and hairy clumps. She had one book of matches and half a doobie in the coat. She held her breath while striking a match, carefully touched the flame to an edge of her panties and mercifully they browned fast, then puffed into flame.
The fire seemed to have been waiting to be born for it scooted quickly from flickers to a roaring flame. The flames pulsed and brightened the cave mouth. The light met Ree and glowed on her skin and cast her shadow up. She stamped her feet and stared out from the cave onto a forest vista sunk beneath ice. Some trees sagged near to snapping, some snapped.
She peed near the entrance to let animals know she was visiting.
After the bitter reckoning many Dollys fled from Hawkfall to caves, and this slope was where they congregated to live through that first winter of exile. Her Dollys were among those Dollys. Her people had lived hunkered in these caves for a mean winter and late spring, kids breathing rattly, grannies spoiling in the dank, the men with each breath refreshing that great snarling tribal anger that Haslam had tried to preach away from their hearts and habits.
She mended the fire when it faltered with clumps and stubs and grew the flames higher than her knees. As she warmed she moved, shuffle-stepped with arms raised and tossed her hands to jab, jab, hook, overhand right, broad shadows punching against the cave wall. Flick them left jabs to open ’em up, girl, then bang the right to put ’em down.
The cave was long and had two more rooms, at least, deeper down and chill, but the space behind the wall warmed quickly. Ree shook her clothes, batted the ice away, and spread them near the fire. She lit the half doobie. Hunters and lovers had used the cave in recent years and had left their withered litter and bent empties, but there was some ancestral tra
sh made visible by the lifting flames. Parts of several fragile white plates and cup handles, a tarnished long fork with two tines, cracked blue potion bottles and tin cans thinned by time to where a finger could poke through.
They likely buried him somewhere near.
If they buried him.
Or dropped him into a bottomless black hole.
The sleet stopped after night fell. The sky spread low and milky over all that ice. Time and again Ree slipped into Mamaw’s coat and hunted wood on the slope. The milk sky and ice let her see dead wood and she dragged the wood to the fire, made the flames healthy, and hung the coat to dry. The corner by the wall became very warm and Ree sat there bare-butted and oddly comforted, knowing that so many relatives with names she never knew had hunched here in this very spot to renew themselves after a sad spinning time had dropped over their lives and whirled them raw.
Coyotes sang to her and she slept, fed the fire, heard snowplows way in the distance.
Her belly rumbled and pinged and hunger drew her into an aching curl.
Water woke her. The blessing of daylight showed a warmer world and thin rivulets trickled down the slope. The air at dawn was warmer than any day had been for a week. The landscape was softening some but not to mush. A freight passed on the tracks beyond the field and whisked the path clear.
He’d fight if he knew they were comin’ and maybe somebody else’s hurt, too.
She stood in sunlight and stretched, a great long body pale and twisting at the brink of a cave. She walked to water dripping from the rock above the cave mouth, cupped her hands to the trickle and drank and drank deeply of the falling new water.
Chapter 13
HILLSIDES KNIT with ice came apart. Ice slipped from everything, limb, twig, stump, rock, and cascaded chinking to ground. Mist lifted from the bottoms to lie over the tracks but did not lift much above her head. Mist smeared like tears squashed on her cheeks. She could see the sky but her feet were cloudy. The stout ties, moistened, released their tar smell, and she kicked from one wet tie to the next, sniffing tar in the mist and listening to ice chime in the trees or slip loose to shatter. She wiped the mist that felt like tears on her cheeks and pulled her hood tight. Larger ice shapes fell thudding. Runnels of high melt cut wee downhill gutters in the snow. Ice sounds and trickle sounds and her boots thumping. At a bridge across a frozen creek she paused to stare down. She tried to see past the pocked skin of ice to the depths of flowing water. She was strangely still and staring, still and staring on the bridge until she understood that her eyes searched for a body beneath that ice, and she crouched to her knees and cried, cried until tears ran down her chest.
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