HAND IN HAND
When the girl came barefoot to the door of the bathhouse, wearing the boatman’s shirt over Miranda’s T-shirt and jeans, only Miranda and Littlefish were outside. Iskra had gone into the cabin, grown pale and waxen, a sudden blanket of years thrown over her. Miranda ran her head beneath the pump, washed the taste of vomit from her mouth and nose, the blood from her face. She gathered her wet hair back and spat in the dirt.
The boy stood beside her, hands fluttering.
“Sorry,” she said, drying her hands on her jeans. “Again. Slower.”
Littlefish pointed to the girl peering shyly around the bathhouse door. He signed slowly: Who is she?
The only other child you’ve ever seen, Miranda thought.
She answered with her hands: Ask her.
Littlefish stared, his mind forming questions it had never formed before.
Miranda offered her hand and walked him slowly up the gentle slope, past the vegetable garden where red-winged blackbirds lit on the old scarecrow. Past the tall leaning black oak, the outhouse and its earthy stink. To where the girl clung inside the doorframe as if to a tree in a fast-rising flood. Sensing the boy falling a step or two behind, Miranda drew him alongside. “My brother,” she said to the girl, “would like to meet you.”
Shirtsleeves unbuttoned at the wrists, so the sleeves hung down over her hands, the girl stepped across the threshold into the sun.
Miranda hesitated, then reached out for the girl’s hand.
The girl drew back, put her hands behind her.
“Watch me,” Miranda said, then made a shape, three times with her hands.
Slowly, the girl made the shape herself.
“To him,” Miranda said, nodding at her brother.
Hello, the girl said to Littlefish.
The boy’s heart leaped like a fish in his chest, as it had the day Sister had first taught him to swim in the cistern of the little canyon, her hands behind his shoulders, easing him beneath the surface, the sudden pressure in his ears beneath the water, and then lifting him up, and he, coughing, sputtering, thrilled. It was like that now: the fear and joy of plunging. How many times since that day had he plunged and held his breath, his eyes open, his webbed hands sheathing the rough body of a catfish to lift it, thrashing, out of the water, the weight and struggle of it good?
The boy signed, first at the girl, then, when the girl didn’t answer, to Sister.
No, Miranda said. Slower. “It’s okay,” she said. She reached out and took his elbow. “Why don’t you show her your garden?”
The girl watched, curious.
Littlefish took a deep breath, then held out his hand. Palm up, fingers splayed, the delicate webs catching light.
Like no hand the girl had ever seen. She hesitated, long enough for the boy’s cheeks to burn red, then pushed her shirtsleeve back from her hand and touched him, lightly, with the tips of her fingers. They were soft in his palm, like minnows. He felt her warmth, and the sensation, the pleasure, was everything. The girl touched his rough skin as if she had never touched skin before, traced the webs between his fingers. Pulling away, then touching again, now the contours of his misshapen brow. She ran her palm along his pebbly cheeks.
Sudden dizziness overcame him, like being swept up in the currents of a creek. He swayed on his feet, and for an instant he saw himself as if he were inside her head, behind her eyes, looking out of her face, and what she beheld was not a mottled, gray-skinned thing, more in common with a fish than a boy, but a shimmering creature of light, every crack in his skin aglow with some inner radiance as bright as the noonday light when it sparkles in a million tiny pieces on the river.
More than that: between the tips of her fingers and his cheek, a band of golden light arcing …
She dropped her hand away, put it behind her back, her own cheeks rising red.
I dreamed of you, the boy said, released from the heady power of her touch. I drew your picture. I know you. He reached out his hand once more, and slowly, surely, like a flower unfurling from the end of a stalk, her own hand emerged from her sleeve and this time closed fully around his, and he held her tight, for to let go would somehow be like letting go of his own life, he thought, and as she relented, gave herself over to his hand, his touch, Littlefish felt, too, that she understood his thoughts, could feel them, even hear them, though he had never heard his own voice inside his head in all his life.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked.
SECRETS
Day streamed through the cabin’s windows.
Iskra sat Miranda at the table, as she had when she was little, always some task before her: peeling potatoes, chopping onions, slicing apples. Now, cheeks red and bloody from the bannik’s claws, her only task was to sit. Be tended. But the old woman had lost vitality in the ritual, her strength sapped by magic. She moved slowly, a hitch in her step that had not been there before. From the mantel above the stove, she reached down a black leather Bible and thumped it on the table. She opened the Bible to the Psalms, where the pages were hollowed out in the shape of a bottle. The bottle itself was unlabeled and stoppered, three-quarters full of something clear.
“I had to hide it,” Iskra said, “when the boy got old enough to snoop. He got into it once. Never told you, did he. Made him sick as a dog.” She put one corner of her apron over the bottle, sloshed it, then touched the damp fabric to Miranda’s cheek. Her hand trembled.
Miranda hissed.
“Your father used to bring it to me. To rub on the goat’s ass for worms.”
Miranda smiled. Winced at the burn in her cheek.
Iskra fetched two jelly jars from the kitchen, plunked them down on the table, and poured from the bottle. She sat in the cane-bottomed chair opposite Miranda and pushed one glass across the table.
Miranda sniffed it. Took a sip. It lit her throat on fire, made her eyes water.
Iskra held up her own glass and spoke words in her native tongue, then swallowed half. “My mother used to say: never tell secrets without a drink. A woman of great secrets, my mother.”
Iskra drank the rest of her liquor and poured herself another and drank again. She sat straighter in her chair, clenched her jaw, and stared up at the ceiling. Her chin jutted like a bald rock. Her eyes wandered the edges of the room, the pipe of the stove and the stones of the hearth.
Suddenly all good humor seemed to flee the little cabin, and Miranda felt a gulf between them open up, yawn wide, a chasm set to swallow them.
“Now, Myshka,” the old woman finally said. “I will tell you the truth. Let my voice bury my words deep inside you. Before the sun sets, I will tell you secrets you have longed to know. For I was a girl once, too, and like you, I have known sorrows so great there are no words to account for them.”
“Baba—”
Iskra shushed her. The old woman’s gaze settled on the bread bowl. For a very long time.
“This place, it frightened your father,” she told Miranda. “Too many things he could not understand here. A spirit in the walls. A demon in the shadows. Things a body cannot take stock of. Things you cannot bait a hook to catch. Things beyond the land he knew.”
Outside, a cloud passed over the sun. Inside, the cabin darkened.
“The song the girl sang,” Iskra said. “I used to sing songs like that, when I was young. I sang them for money at funerals. This was before I came here. A long way from this place. In miles, in years.”
She poured a third time, stoppered the bottle, sipped from her glass. A more measured drink, Miranda thought. The liquor was working now. The words were coming.
“My father, like yours, did not trust magic. But unlike the boatman, he was a cruel, faithless man. He died in the winter of my tenth year. His coffin we brought up to the church on a buckboard. I remember how the ground was frozen so, it had to be broken with pickaxes. Mother and I watched the men of the town lower him into the earth. I did not sing for Yuri Krupin that day.”
Iskra spat on th
e floor.
Miranda started at the sound of it: harsh, final.
“That night, Mother and I sat round the table. The house was cold. We spoke and I could see her breath. I remember, to this day, her exact words. She said: ‘Eight months past, I put my hands over your father’s stomach while he slept and whispered, “To the death-bringer who dwells in all of us, I, Hana Krupin, do now take this man upon my back and ascend the Great Tree to stand upon the threshold, where I pitch his bones down among the roots of his eternal home, where the white snake coils, where the white bees hive, where sickness dwells forever. Let this man die. This is my command.”’ She made a motion then, Myshka, with her hands, I have never forgotten.”
Iskra spread her hands wide, very gently, and rested her palms on the table. As if this simple, silent motion were all there was to a man’s death.
She took her hands from the table and they whispered in her lap. Her coffin-shaped snuff box appeared from the folds of her apron and she pushed a pinch of tobacco from it into her lip.
“You see, Hana Krupin never wore a witch’s shift. She never unpinned her hair. She had no mortar and pestle to fly about in. She did not walk with a stoop or a cane or point bony fingers and scowl the Evil Eye at children. Her eyes were not black or crossed. She was not tall. She was not short. She was, in fact, very plain and ordinary looking. She did not laugh or smile. She had two deep creases here, between her eyes, where worry had drawn its plow. Her way of loving was quick and hard, the way you twist a small thing’s head off as a mercy. But it was love. When she died…”
Hand trembling, she spat into her liquor glass.
“The lament that came out of that child today,” Iskra said, “was the song I sang. The day she died.”
Tobacco ran down the inside of the jar, thick and slow, like molasses.
Miranda watched it.
“They came for her. The men. Led by the young priest of the church. Their little colony there on the prairie was not to be a backward-looking place, you see. Never mind that Mother was a healer, a deliverer. To them, she was something so much worse. A born witch. The most terrible of all. A born witch carries power in her blood. Secrets, old and eternal. Nothing like a man’s secrets, which are petty. Fleeting. My father’s secrets were not even secrets at all. The men, they knew he was cruel. That his fists fell against Hana Krupin when he drank. They knew. But men, Myshka, look after men.”
She spat again.
“They hanged her,” Iskra said. “In a field there in Prairie County. From the only tree within sight. The crows came and pecked for days before they let me cut her down and bury her. In a cheap pine coffin. Like you, child, I dug the hole myself. And there, at her grave, I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, and without knowing I was going to do it, I began to sing. A long, harsh wail. I sent my voice into the void, shot the grief from my heart. And when the song was finished, I shut my eyes and listened. I listened for a voice in the deep, dark places where the magic runs. Something to comfort me, to assure me that Hana Krupin had made her crossing. That I had brought her into the next world. I heard nothing at first, but then, the sound of wind in pines, speaking the name of a river. This river. A voice in my dreams, Myshka. Huge, ancient. Eternal.”
“The leshii?” Miranda said.
“The leshii.” Iskra took up her jar to spit. “Rybka’s mother was drawn here, too. Not cut from the same mold as a Krupin woman, no, but make no mistake, Lena Cotton was a born witch. I had only to put my hand in hers that night to feel her power. I held her hand and saw—”
Here, the old woman faltered. A shadow seemed to pass over her face and through the room, and Miranda found herself remembering the preacher’s words among the ruins of the church that morning: Lena sees.
“What?” Miranda said. “What did you see?”
Iskra looked down at her hands in her lap. Rough, dry, empty hands.
“I saw that she was broken,” Iskra said. “By a man who had sworn to love her, but loved only himself. It was a true sin, what he did to her. A sin against her power. Against the power of this place. Everything that happened that night, and everything that has happened since, right up until this very moment, all of it was set in motion by Billy Cotton’s razor.”
Miranda remembered the slit she had glimpsed in the boy’s throat that night. No trick of shadow after all. She put a hand over her mouth. “All these years, I’ve worked for him,” she said. “He did that and I’ve worked for him…”
“We have no time for regrets now, Myshka. Only truth.”
The old woman took a deep breath. Let it out. “The leshii has her plans,” she said, and spat into her jar. “The boy is part of them. Always has been. The boatman, too, played his part. As I played mine.”
One more story to tell, Miranda thought. She grew still, as if she herself were an arrow, nocked and drawn. Aware, suddenly, of every speck of dust turning, drifting in the dim cabin light.
Miranda felt it coming now, like a lever had been pulled, locking up the machinery that made her human. She took a single step outside her own body, saw herself sitting in the chair. At the table. Staring at the old witch and waiting. Like a placeholder for some horrible truth. A fist clenching in her throat. Miranda took a drink, did it again. Emptied her glass. The liquid blazing down her throat and into her gut, scalding the tears from her eyes. Had she suspected it, all along? Forced herself to never think it, because to think it was to follow a train of thought that would swallow her, drown her?
Iskra reached into the folds of her apron and took out the wax casing of a red shotgun shell. She set it upright on the table between them, its end charred where it had been fired, all those years ago.
Miranda stared at it.
She stared at it while Iskra told the story of it. How Hiram followed her to that place of magic, deep in the woods, where she placed the baby in the bowl at the leshii’s weird altar of mud and bone. How the ground shook and the bowl overturned and when it did, Hiram made to catch the child, though it spilled out dead. Some foolish instinct born of a parent’s breast. Dropping his shotgun, even as the leshii reared unseen from the swamp, ready to accept the old witch’s sacrifice. Staring into her lap, Iskra muttered: “The gun was there. Your father’s back was turned…”
Miranda seemed to have hardened into stone. She stared past the shotgun shell, past Iskra at the bright day beyond the windows, and waited.
“He was right not to trust me,” the witch said. “Hiram was right. My greatest secret was loneliness. For years I begged the leshii for my own blessing, for a miracle. ‘Fill my womb,’ I begged her, but she kept her silence.”
A line of juice spilled over Iskra’s chin, and she wiped it now with the back of her hand, then wiped her hand on her apron.
“Then came the boy, so many years later, hideous and strange. There was a silence that night, after the gunshots faded. So loud. All the world hushed. I took up my knife and the blood from your father’s throat filled my bowl and swallowed the child, and out of that new, warm blood your brother was reborn. I could hear the leshii’s laughter, mocking me. This thing, she had given me. My child. When I had asked her for a daughter. Someone beautiful, someone strong. Someone to share secrets with. Not to keep secrets from. The leshii gave me the boy. But I took you, Myshka.”
Tears shimmered in her eyes, but Miranda Crabtree did not move.
Iskra let the silence work. The old cabin creaking around them.
Eventually, Miranda pushed back from the table, took an arrow from her quiver, nocked it in her bow, and drew slowly on the old woman. Aligned the broadhead with the witch’s heart.
Iskra reached across the table, took Miranda’s glass, and poured herself one final drink.
SHARP
Like the bathhouse, the boy’s hut was set on a foundation of timber and dirt. It was narrow and long, the roof peaked and covered with shingles greened with moss, the outer walls thick with lichen. Inside, beneath a little window, a makeshift desk of plywood stood across t
win sawhorses, its surface scattered with tools—a hammer, a screwdriver, a garden spade. A hammock was strung between the far corners. It was here that the boy brought the girl, to show her his books and comics. They hunkered on the floor and she took up a comic and stared at the cover, where a green monster reared up from a mob of men armed with shovels and hoes and axes, a giant pitchfork thrust at the monster’s heart. But the monster was a great promontory of moss and tree and vine, a creature born out of the earth itself, and the men broke like waves against him. Behind this struggle, a woman in a white gown was tied to a tree. A fire at her feet. The monster, somehow, the only sane part of the picture, one fist upraised as if to smite, godlike, the mob entire. His eyes burned red, set deep in black hollows. The girl stared at the picture for a long time.
The boy reached out, tentatively, and turned the pages in her hand.
See, he signed.
The creature ripped the tree from the rock, tore it from the earth, and the woman was free, and she was tall and powerful and beautiful, her long black hair fanning out like wings. She conjured bolts of lightning from a blue-black sky. The men began to scream. There was a boy, her brother, and the boy and the sister were safe when the clouds had parted because the men were gone, and where the men had stood was a golden field of flowers.
It was the boy, Littlefish signed. His magic, not Sister’s. Turned the bad men into flowers. See?
The girl fixed her eyes on the monster in the final panel of the story, left to stand at the cliff’s edge and watch as the woman and the boy walked away, the monster’s face in shadow. Bond of love between brother and sister, in the end, as great a mystery as his existence.
“He’s lonely,” the girl said.
Her eyes went from the book to the boy’s hands and then to his face, then back to his hands, the webs between his fingers.
The boy did not notice. He grabbed a coonskin cap that hung from a nail on the wall beside his hammock. This he plopped onto the girl’s head. She laughed and took it off and rubbed the fur against her cheek.
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