by John Hart
Take the gun, she wanted to say.
Kill that bitch.
* * *
Johnny knew exactly how deep the foreman was buried. That meant he knew when the pickax would be a problem. “Hand me the shovel.” Leon did as Johnny asked. “You might want to climb out now.”
“You sure?”
“Trust me on this.”
Johnny offered a boost, and Leon crawled from the hole, leaving Johnny alone at the bottom. He tossed out the pick, and took a moment for Verdine. He couldn’t read her, but knew what the old woman wanted. Life! The stone! It was written in every gesture and glance. She was leaning out over the grave, her eyes like black holes pricked with light. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.
“Are you?”
Her lips twisted in the kind of challenge Johnny hoped never to see again. He went back to the dig, and when he struck the foreman’s remains, he felt the same revulsion as everyone else. The coffin was little more than a stain in the earth, the bones jumbled in the same slick soil. Johnny saw teeth and bone and bits of hair.
“Ha. I told you. We checked that coffin when I was young.”
“You opened it?”
“What was left of it, yes.”
“Did you look underneath?” She drew in a hard, sharp breath, and Johnny straightened. “I want to know what it is.” He made a gesture at his neck. “The stone.”
“You saw it?”
“In the dream,” he said—a half truth. He was pretty sure he’d seen it in the forest, too. “I’m not digging another inch until you tell me everything.”
“Leon…”
She gestured into the hole, but Johnny hefted the shovel like an ax. “You heard her before, Leon. A deal’s a deal. She said she’d answer my questions.”
“Leon, get him out of my fucking hole.”
“The stone,” Johnny said. “What is it?”
“Leon!” The old woman barked, but Leon lifted his hands and stepped away. Verdine stared as if looks alone might kill him. “It’s not a stone,” she finally said.
“You’re lying.”
“It’s hollow and ancient and more than a stone.”
“Go on.”
Her lips drew back, but Leon was unmoving; so was Johnny. “In the old language, it’s called a fengi. My mother called it a soul-stone.”
“What does it do?”
“Exactly what it says it does, you stupid boy. It holds a soul.”
“Whose?”
“The first of us.”
“The first of your family?”
“The first woman. Massassi. It’s been with the women of my family for a thousand lives, mother to daughter, an unbroken line.”
“It came with Aina?”
“Don’t speak her name as if you know her.”
It seemed impossible, but Johnny imagined it.
Mother to daughter.
A thousand lives …
“The stone’s not here,” he said. “You won’t find it.”
He thought that truth would break her, but was wrong. He saw it in the twist of her smile, the malicious glint. “Just dig her up,” she said. “Dig her up, and we’ll ignore your unbearable ignorance.”
Johnny looked at Jack, then turned to the hole and dug slowly, carefully. Verdine loomed above him as he removed the foreman’s bones and teeth, then focused on the dirt beneath. After another ten inches, he tossed out the shovel and used his hands. The soil coated his skin, and he remembered the dream: the taste of it and the pressure—how it felt to be buried alive.
“Well, boy?”
But Johnny was in a dark place, body and soul. He dragged soil against his knees, went deeper, and touched something.
“Jesus.” He rocked back.
“What is it?”
“It’s warm.”
“It’s her! Get her out!”
But Johnny couldn’t move. He saw a knuckle joint, a twist of broken nail.
Verdine said, “Leon.”
But Johnny raised a hand. “No, don’t. You might crush her.”
“Is she alive?”
Johnny looked at Cree, who was on her knees, clutching her stomach. She felt it, same as him: suffocation, panic, the horror. He held her eyes a second more.
In the dirt, a finger moved.
* * *
For Cree, it was too much. How many times had she lived the dirt in her throat, and this man’s face, this man and this abysmal hole? The finger moved again, and Cree knew that it was Aina, alive.
So many years …
She turned, and threw up in the grass. Anger. Intimacy. The slick, red earth. “This is real. How can this be real?”
It was a whisper, but no one was watching. No one cared. On her hands and knees, Cree risked another glance.
The fingernail was broken.
Every nail was broken.
* * *
For Johnny, it was hard to tell where the body ended and the dirt began.
The body …
That’s how he thought of it, a scarecrow of a body. The clothing had rotted off. The hair was a matted, tangled mess, a root ball choked with mud and red clay. Johnny worked the soil as a potter might, using the tips of his fingers to cull it away from an elbow, a shoulder blade, the turn of an ear. She lay on her side, and he kept his touch soft because the skin tore easily. She was wasted beyond belief, so far gone that skin and bones would be a generous description.
“Well, come on! Get her out!”
But Johnny kept it slow and gentle. He found a leg, and followed it until it crossed the second, which was bent beneath it. Working along her back, he felt the pearls of her spine. When the lower arm was exhumed, he found her hand clutched around a root from the hanging tree.
“What’s she holding?”
Johnny ignored the question. Working with care, he removed one finger, then the next. When the last one came free, he sensed the change before he understood it.
One of her eyes was open.
Johnny fell back in the mud, staring at the wild, dark pupil, the yellowed whites. He didn’t know if she was blind or not, aware or not. Half her face was still down in the dirt; so was most of her left side. Above him, Jack said, “Dear Lord, God Almighty.” But Johnny ignored him. Bloodshot and dripping, the eye had settled on his face. Stripping off his shirt, Johnny cleared mud from around her mouth, then excavated the rest of her body and covered her as best he could. “Leon, let’s get her out.”
The big man knelt at the edge of the grave, and Johnny handed her up.
She weighed nothing at all.
A sack of twigs.
* * *
Luana watched it from the sunken place in her mind: the wretched figure, Johnny clawing up from the earth. They put Aina on the ground, and Luana saw the black tongue, the stumps of teeth. Women of the Hush had sought Aina for almost two centuries, and Luana had thought them old fools lost in a ridiculous belief.
But not now.
Now the fingers were moving. The yellow eye rolled. It locked on Luana, and she felt a flood of hate and madness so strong, it overwhelmed her. She hated men and life, the world that had abandoned her to eternity in the dirt. It came off her in waves, pounded like a spike into Luana’s mind. How could such hatred exist without consuming itself? How could Aina be alive? Luana heard the answer in her grandmother’s voice. Because she carried the stone for years: around her neck and in her hand and hidden in a place only a woman could hide it. Luana saw it like a flash. She’d drawn on the stone, and on the tree, on all the life in the soil around her. She’d sucked the world dry, and for what? The loathing? The madness? What terrible strength allowed such a life for so long? Or had she wanted to die all along? Had she craved that ending but been unable to achieve it?
The creature’s eye rolled to Cree, and Luana knew that Cree felt it, too. She was on her hands and knees but twitched and moaned as if the same spike had split her skull. “No,” she muttered. “No.” And Luana knew that what remained of Aina’s mi
nd was a dangerous thing to those who’d descended from her. Luana. Cree. They were reeling, the both of them. Luana was screaming inside, but knew a deeper truth, too: that Verdine wanted Aina to die.
It’s why they’d come.
Why they’d dug her up.
Luana watched as if through a broken window. Verdine was coiled like a spring, but no one else noticed. She leaned on Leon, but her hand was at his belt, then on the gun. She didn’t want to save Aina, didn’t want to ease her suffering or fulfill the quest undertaken by so many women for so many years. The old woman wanted the stone, and had only one way to find it. The line of women needed to end. That meant Aina had to die, and then Luana and Cree. Verdine, then, would be the only one left, the last branch on the only tree that mattered. The stone would come to her. So would time and life and power.
But only if the others were dead.
Cree …
She was flat on the ground now, hands at her temples as if to keep out the hate. Luana reached for her daughter, and a single finger twitched. “Run,” she said, but no one heard her, and the gun was moving. It squared on Aina’s face, then barked and jumped, and Aina died as she’d been buried, quick and brutal and helpless. Her head came apart; the dark blood pooled.
Massassi …
The connection was immediate and overwhelming.
The first woman.
The first mother.
Luana opened like a flower. She was next in the unbroken line, and felt Massassi’s soul far out in the night. The connection was immediate and overwhelming, and in the wake of it, she saw the line of those who’d gone before, a great awakening of women. Luana was all of them at once, a thousand lives.
“I am Massassi.…”
And for that moment, she was. She was Massassi and her grandmother, and women who’d been no more than names to an unhappy child. Luana knew how it felt to stand beneath the stars in Africa, to be with men she’d never met, to bathe in foreign seas. So much life and knowledge and time! Luana was more than she’d dreamed a woman could be. She was large and small; she was selfless and still, the kind of mother she’d never been. Taking her daughter’s hand, she rose from all those lives to say the only word that mattered.
“Run,” she said.
Then Verdine shot her in the chest.
Luana dropped from the knees, but kept her eyes on her child.
Run, she thought, and smiled as her daughter did. She was a good runner, Cree, and always had been: along the sidewalks and through the courtyards, the city, the life she was not supposed to have. She could outrun the boys and the drugs, the weakness that until this moment had defined her mother.
Verdine was yelling her name, firing shots into the forest.… Creola! Creola, goddamn it!
But Cree had listened to her mother.
She was running.
Sprinting.
At the far wall, she slipped into the mist, and Luana turned, at last, to the stars above. She’d looked at them through so many eyes and on so many nights.
Massassi …
She felt the stone, far out in the night, and smiled because Cree would feel it, too. Not yet, she thought, but soon. Verdine was returning, and Luana heard the words she muttered in that cold and bitter voice.
You bitch, you damn bitch …
There was so much anger and hate and want, but not for Luana. She was light on the blood-soaked grass. She felt her life ending, but felt her daughter, too, so fast in the darkness, so light on the balls of her feet. Luana knew her daughter’s fear, but that was okay. There was strength in the line of women, and the strength would be Cree’s.
Soon, child …
Just run.…
She touched her daughter a final time; then Verdine was on her knees in the grass beside her. She smelled of sweat and earth and wet cotton. Hunger made the voice shake. “Where is it?” she demanded. “Which way?”
Luana smiled as her body cooled. “Cree is next after me,” she said. “She will find Massassi.”
“Cree will die, and the stone will be mine.”
“Not if I die first.”
“You can’t die yet. I won’t allow it.”
“Then you should not have shot me.”
“I have as much right as you!”
“If that were true, cousin, you wouldn’t need us to die to find the stone.”
“Take me to Massassi!” Verdine slapped Luana once, then twice. “Take me, goddamn it! Take me to Massassi!”
Then she was shaking her, lifting her broken body, slamming it down. It was a temper tantrum, like any child’s. Luana laughed at the thought, and something burst inside. She felt it in her throat, the slippery burn. Verdine put the gun in Luana’s face, but there was nothing she could do. Cree was the last of her line. Massassi was for her. “You’re too late,” Luana said; and then, smiling like a child herself, she died.
* * *
Cree was curled beneath a tall, black tree the moment it happened. She felt her mother’s passing like the cry of a hawk, and such was the nature of her opening: a sudden awareness in a vast, high place, a conjoining of lives and memory and thought. She saw the world as if from a great height; she felt the movement of land and sky, the hills and streams, the spread of time and people and the Hush. She knew her mother’s regrets and loves and, at the end, her fierce, proud joy. She knew Aina’s madness and Massassi’s love; she knew the darkness of war, the wonders of peace and family, the stability of empire. Cree was herself and others, the thread that wove a thousand lives. It was too much at once, so she focused on Massassi, far out in the night. She felt the warmth of her and the readiness.
Child …
She was the word. The word was she.
Come to me.…
That’s what Cree wanted, but was dizzy. She touched the soil beneath her hands, and then the sky. She found that place high above, and sent her awareness there, thinking: silence, perspective, distance. It was quiet in those high reaches, and she opened herself slowly, seeing flickers of the past and present, so much of the world. A thousand lives, and the memories were hers. So was the knowledge, the strength. A hawk cried out, and Cree was there, too.
She was more.
She was becoming.
Cree poured herself into the hawk and felt its purity of purpose. It cried out a second time, and the sounds—for Cree—were words for her mother. They meant “acceptance” and “understanding” and “love.”
They meant “thank you for my life.”
They meant “goodbye.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
For Johnny, it was all about the run. He didn’t remember the first step or even the second, but everything else was the run. It was darkness and wind, Jack’s weight as he dragged at Johnny’s arm. “What the hell, Johnny? What’s happening?” Gunshots were loud behind them, and Jack was in the lead. He stumbled over the wall, and pulled Johnny with him. “Why’d she do that, man? Why’d she kill her?”
Johnny had nothing for him. The old creature was dead. So was Cree’s mother. They hit the mist, and another gunshot whumped somewhere behind them. Cree was running, too. “Just keep moving,” Johnny said; and for five long minutes that was the rule. Watch your feet. Don’t think. They stopped where mist ended on the other side. They spilled out into the clear night air, and Jack was still lost and hurting. “The hell, man? What the hell?”
Johnny dropped to his knees, ready to be sick. The mud on his hands was slick and wet.
A hundred and seventy-three years.
Then fresh air …
Then …
Johnny dashed sweat from his eyes, and that was slick and wet, too.
Like the old creature’s skin.
Like the inside of her skull.
“Johnny?”
“Not now, Jack.”
“J-man.”
Jesus …
Johnny opened his eyes in time to see the wall of mist collapse. It dropped from the top down, rolled out into the trees.
“What’s ha
ppening, Johnny? What do we do?”
Johnny had no answer. He thought Leon might be dead behind them, but wasn’t sure of much. Luana was dead—he felt that—but Leon was a blur, and so was Verdine. His awareness of them flickered and faded. He held on for a minute, then reached out for Cree, but couldn’t find her if he wanted to. “Cops are stirring,” he said, and felt their fears, like a red pulse. “They’re close.”
“Good. Let’s go there.”
But Johnny worried about all that fear.
“Come on, J-man. Cops. Guns. Right now those are good things.” Jack was begging with his eyes. “What are we waiting for?”
Johnny was waiting for inspiration, but that answer would not be good enough for Jack. He looked into his friend, and saw the kind of fear Jack couldn’t settle into or walk off. His world was shaken, his fundamental beliefs. “You’re right,” Johnny said. “It’s the logical choice.”
“Logic. Yes. Please, God.”
“Come on, then.” He draped an arm over Jack’s shoulders and led him toward the church. He found a path where trees leaned back to give them room. In the distance, floodlights burned. Someone had built a fire. “See. All good. A straight shot. Do you see it?”
“What do we tell them?”
“I don’t know. You’re the lawyer.”
“Lawyer, yes.”
“Call out before you walk in. Okay? You understand?”
“Wait. What?”
There was a quiver in the muscles along Jack’s spine, but the flicker of fire had given Johnny his inspiration. He nudged his friend in the right direction, then stepped off the trail and ghosted. Jack would be angry and afraid, but John Merrimon was out there somewhere, and Johnny thought he knew the place to look. It would be on the third hill in a line of hills.
It would be marked with smoke.
It would be marked with fire.
* * *
Leon stood very still as his grandmother rose from the dead woman’s side. She was small and old, but the gun was in her hand, and she looked as if she might kill Leon, too. “You let those boys go,” she said.
