Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  Philip leans against the trunk of a tree, a big man, made bigger by the hopes and dreams of others. He is the chosen of God, which adds a few inches to his already considerable height. He walks with the Lord: his footfalls are strong and sure and without hesitation.

  He has heard about Jessica, which is why he is here now. Jessica’s mother is nervous. She tucks her hair behind her ear and smooths down her simple cotton smock, small signs of vanity. Why doesn’t he see this? He is always talking about the evils of vanity, all the other sins of self-regard, and yet when the women primp and preen around him he seems to swell up with their attention.

  Since he is the son of God on earth who will save them all if they follow him, he must take it as inevitable.

  Jessica, however, has stopped believing.

  Philip is a man and as such he is fallible. Every time he predicts a new date for the apocalypse—every time they all walk up the mountain with their crosses—Jessica goes with them, but she does so knowing they will all soon trudge back down again. She still joins the women in the cooking and preserving, putting food away for the End Times, but now she looks at it more as storing food for winter. There will be no End Times. Not soon, anyway. Certainly not in Philip’s mortal lifetime.

  He nods, and this is a sign that Jessica should raise her gun. Philip rarely bothers himself with women’s business, but he has heard about her being a crack shot at the age of ten, and he has come to see for himself. Jessica knows she should be as nervous as her mother but, strangely, she isn’t. She raises the rifle, braces it against her shoulder. It is all about breath. Breathe out. Sight. Squeeze.

  The can leaps into the air, tumbles. The bullet will have pierced it at the centre of the label. It isn’t hard. She wonders what all the fuss is about. She feels the pulse of her blood. Even this thudding will change the direction of the bullet. The shot must be timed to the breath and to the heart. She lines up the second can, sights, breathes out, pulse, shoot. Philip nods. Jessica raises the rifle and he holds up his hand to stop her.

  The women are all lined up, waiting. They know what comes next. Her mother walks out onto the range. She replaces the next can with the bundle that she’s been hiding under her smock. When she steps away from the log, Jessica can see she has placed a kitten there. It mews, stares at her, licks its black face with a rough pink tongue.

  Another woman walks out and picks up the next can, and in its place there is a puppy. A labrador, sandy brown, velvety and wrinkled, with all its extra skin poised for a growth spurt.

  The women step back, out of the line of fire. Philip lowers his hand: she is supposed to shoot.

  They are waiting for her. She glances up towards her mother, who narrows her eyes. She wants Jessica to do this: she is angry at her for hesitating.

  Jessica shakes her head. Jessica’s mother raises her hand and there is a pistol in it. She is aiming the pistol at her daughter. Her aim has never been any good: she’s pointing the gun at Jessica’s shoulder. So, she’ll be winged. Maimed but alive, bleeding out slowly.

  Jessica raises her rifle. Philip’s eyes are on her and her neck hairs are rising up. She breathes out. (No.) She waits for the pulse. (Please, no.) The kitten is all fluff and wide eyes. (No! No! No!) She fires.

  The blood hits Jessica full-force, which is a surprise. It drips down her neck—she can taste the metallic edge of it on her lips—when it should should have sprayed back, away from the force of the bullet. This is a direct contradiction of the laws of physics and the betrayal of science feels worse, somehow, than her guilt from the kill.

  Philip nods, satisfied. He has taken the basic principles of action and reaction and bent the physics against her, presumably in his role as the son of God on earth.

  He nods to the other target, the puppy. She can’t kill a puppy. But her mother’s gun is still pointed at her, this time closer to her heart, her finger tight against the trigger. She has the puppy in her sights. It pounds its oversized paws playfully on the branch as if it wants her to throw a stick. She breathes out. Swings the rifle. She points it at her mother and her eyes widen.

  With a small shift of the shoulders, Jessica swings the weapon wide of her mother and aims at Philip. The son of God, the saviour. He stares back at her, his lips moving. He is mouthing words but she has no time to make sense of them. The time is all for the bullet, slowing as she squeezes the trigger, feels the kick against her shoulder, sees the bullet travel and hit, all of this in slow motion, the hole drilling slowly through skin and bone, the rush of blood like a tidal wave approaching.

  Jessica falls back as the blood crashes over her and there is nothing in the world except blood, gallons and gallons of blood; the sky is obliterated by a wall of it.

  What was it he said? Her mind clutches at the last movement of his lips, the soundless words:You’re Dead. You’re Dead. And then his head exploded.

  Jessica gasped. She had been holding her breath under all that blood. She woke and there was blood or perhaps no, not blood. Sweat. Damp on her forehead. She was panting; she was sitting up. She thought she might have screamed in her sleep. She woke to find herself alone in the bed and someone was dead.

  Matthew. Yes. Matthew was dead. The grief hit her fresh and heavy. And then, after a moment, something new. Something terrible.

  Duck Hole Walk. The sign was the normal kind, made for tourists in their thick ugly sandals and brand-new backpacks. Grade: easy. For Jessica, each step was another trudge up the mountain, barefooted bleeding, dragging a hunk of wood on a back full of splinters. Last night still a throbbing memory, dull and aching. She had slept. That was the first surprise. She had fallen into a long, disturbed slumber, waking from nightmare but falling back again into the deepest sleep. Waking to find her limbs unfamiliar, stretching them out as if this were the first day.

  She ducked under the fallen tree, remembering. She slipped on mud, but in the light of day it was just mud. No threat, no supernatural soup of shadow and sound. Everything bleached normal by sunlight.

  She was close. Here they’d paused; somewhere here. She searched the ground for some sign of her fall. Maybe here, where the leaves seemed fresh laid. Not random, dragged down the hill by a body in motion, but carefully dropped. A tracker might say: here. Something happened here and then was hidden.

  But there would be no trackers. No dogs on chains to sniff and hunt out the scent of a wild creature crouching at the edge of the path. And where did he fall? The man. Not a dog, but a human, half-starved and taken down by her weapon. Where was it, the gun? She’d dropped it. Where? She had no memory of picking the gun up or taking it home. Maybe it was still here, under the freshly turned leaves. Or maybe this wasn’t where he fell. She looked further up the path.

  Nothing seemed obvious. The more she looked, the more crime scenes she saw. The only obvious thing was that there was no body. A tourist hefting their toddler along this track would find nothing amiss: no bloodstains, no bullet ricocheted off to lodge in a tree trunk. If you were to believe the forest’s story, nothing had happened here except a storm, a few trees down.

  She searched the path, the area beside the path, she climbed down over rotted-out logs, clung to moss-covered branches and lowered herself onto the slick rocks beside the stream. Maybe they had dragged the man down here, floated him deeper into the forest for burial. Or left him to drift into the complications of the river system where he would eventually snag on something—a branch, an outcropping of rock—and slowly come apart. Chewed away over time, food for devils and fish and ants, all the creatures of the forest conspiring with the women. The whole world protecting Jessica from prosecution.

  She searched for an hour, maybe two. Her footprints were everywhere. New tracks to obliterate any sign of the old. She searched but found nothing. When she looked up it was darkening: storm coming. The changes in weather here were legendary: boats lost, bushwalkers missing. It was, unbelievably, colder still.

  Jessica turned reluctantly and dragged herself back toward
s the forestry road. When the trees parted, the sky spat cold sleety flakes at her. Not snow, something wetter and dirtier. The Inuit would have a word for this frozen sludge. She picked her way carefully to her car. His car: she had taken the four-wheel drive. Even so, she felt it skate a little towards the opening to the track, the ghost of the dead man pulling her back. The wheels skidding, then catching and spinning forward, out of his grasp.

  She made the sudden turn and pulled out onto the sealed road into the blaring horn of an oncoming truck, heavy with felled logs, angry from a long hard shift. Its tailwind buffeted her to the side, and she wrestled to keep the four-wheel drive on the road.

  Then thought: why?

  She could stop fighting the wheel. She could let the vehicle have its way and she would hit the trees at speed and it would be sudden and over. The relief of it being over.

  She closed her eyes but the truck was past her now. She had the whole of the road and she exhaled into it. She was still here and she would have to live with herself and her actions. She felt a sudden urge to confess.

  Philip used to demand confessions, each of them lined up on a Sunday to spend an hour with him in a room alone. It was this cloistered horror that was the final deciding factor. She remembered the day, waiting her turn, her heart beating faster as one after another of them was whittled from the front of the queue. Almost her turn and then only one girl left and that girl about to stand and disappear into his room. She remembered standing, turning, walking and continuing to walk. Frightened, for the longest time, that they would come after her and drag her back. But she had just turned eighteen and she was free to make her own decisions and she walked till her feet burned with blisters and the sole of her left shoe was flapping. Standing in the town. All the people trying not to stare at the way she was dressed. Not knowing what to do next but the policeman approaching and that first terrorised response: fight or flight?

  The police. Her confession to him back then, and his kind voice. ‘Do you have any other relatives?’

  Does she? If they gave her one phone call now who would it be to? Certainly not her mother. Not his mother either.

  William? She would call William. It surprised her, but it was true.

  She found herself home and could not remember getting there. She would make her confession later. Now she needed sleep. She locked the door behind her and collapsed in sudden finality on the bed.

  Maude was leaning over her. Jessica woke, and she was there. She scrambled back but there was a wall behind her. She was in her own house. She had locked the door and yet here was the woman, Maude, looming as if to strangle her.

  Then Jessica noticed the cup in her hand and knew that she had made tea and was reaching over to place it at the side of the bed.

  Jessica had locked the door. She remembered locking it. Maude had broken in somehow.

  ‘Where’s my gun?’

  Maude’s harmless-old-lady smile seemed to dissolve. ‘You shouldn’t be thinking about that.’

  It was late afternoon. Jessica knew this because the light was leaning towards the bedroom door, shining directly onto the old woman.

  ‘We’ve taken care of it.’

  ‘It’s my gun.’

  ‘Sure. But we’ll get you another. Just wait. This one is tainted now.’ As if the gun itself was responsible: a weapon in disgrace.

  ‘I brought you tea.’

  Jessica looked at the cup but left it sitting there, cooling on the bedside table.

  ‘I’m going to the police.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about?’

  The woman sat at the foot of her bed, the weight causing Jessica to roll uncomfortably towards her. Jessica shuffled away.

  ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘You left the door open.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘I came to check on you. For the group.’

  ‘The group.’

  ‘Crystal said to send her love.’

  Last time she had seen Crystal she’d been clinging to her murdered husband, wailing.

  ‘She’s all right now. She just needed to grieve.’

  ‘Because I killed her husband?’

  ‘No. Her husband was dead months ago. You rescued him, if anything. Returned him to his loved ones. To the human world.’

  Jessica shuffled towards the edge of the bed furthest away from Maude. She tried to swing her legs free of the covers but Maude reached out and gripped her knee.

  ‘You won’t go to the police,’ Maude said. It was not a question; not even a gentle suggestion.

  ‘What’s stopping me?’

  ‘Nothing, I suppose. They’ll probably just send you home. Woman. Gone mad with grief. Imagining things, confessing to the death of a phantom.’

  ‘There’s a body.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘There was a body. It’ll be somewhere. They’ll find the blood.’

  ‘Will they?’ Maude indicated the window and Jessica looked out to a world covered in a thick layer of snow. Snow right down to the waterline. Magical.

  ‘There wasn’t anything to be found anyway, but they certainly won’t find anything after this.’

  ‘I killed a man. I shot him.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘Give me back my gun.’

  ‘You should drink your tea. Tea’s good for shock.’

  ‘I’m going to the police.’

  ‘If you need to be punished, then go. They’ll lock you up, but not in a jail. They don’t put mad women in jail. If you need to be punished, to make your peace with your God, then let them lock you up. Take the meds and let them convince you that you’ve gone insane if you don’t want to listen to us. But we are doing this for your own good. We’re protecting you. We’ll keep you safe. You’ll see. You’re angry now, but you’ll come round. If not, go tell them that you shot a tiger and it turned into a man. Go tell them that.’

  ‘I shot a man.’

  ‘You saw the tiger?’

  ‘There was no tiger. It was the man. He was crouched down. It was dark.’

  ‘You tell yourself what you need to. You say whatever you like.’

  ‘Why did you think you could let yourself into my house?’

  ‘We were worried about you.’

  ‘I think you should go.’

  Jessica waited as Maude reluctantly eased herself off her bed.

  ‘I’m sad you feel that way, but you might feel differently in the morning. We’re meeting tomorrow night. To talk. You’re welcome to join us.’

  Jessica didn’t answer.

  ‘Good luck with the cops.’ A smile playing at the edge of her mouth before she disappeared around the door. Jessica listened to Maude’s heavy boots on the floorboards, creaking and groaning on her way to the front door.

  Which she knew she had locked.

  Jessica heard the door close behind Maude, the sound of the engine coughing to life. She watched her drive through the snow. Snow down to sea level. This was the first time in all the years they had lived here that the snow had come down this far. Plenty of it in the mountains, but never right down to the ocean. It was oddly mild, as if the snow was insulation against the cold. She got out of bed, and she felt rested and warm. For the first time in weeks she was not even close to shivering.

  Paranoia. No one was watching her. No one knew yet. But all eyes were on her, the fresh widow. She was no longer the anonymous figure that ghosted through the shop a few times a week, picking up her mail, buying bread and butter and rice.

  She reached for a rye loaf, heavy and already stale. Country life. Everything old before it reached her. A blonde woman, her hair dark at the roots, was pretending to read the ingredients on a packet of corn chips. She had tied her T-shirt in front so that it pulled tight across her breasts.

  She was scowling at Jessica. Was she? For a terrible moment Jessica thought this woman knew. But of course she couldn’t. Still, Jessica took the loaf and hurried
to the checkout. The blonde woman moved to stand behind her, too close. She could smell the woman’s perfume, oddly familiar. She had smelled this before, what was it? Jasmine? Sickly sweet. Where had she smelled this before?

  The girl at the till took her money and she pulled her hood up and hurried outside. She stopped suddenly. A police car. She saw it next to her…to Matthew’s car and it meant so many things at once. She forced herself forward. To hesitate would be a sign of guilt, but she was, of course, guilty. This was the opportunity for confession. All she had to do was walk up to the officer and tell him.

  Crazy woman, lunatic, confessing to crimes that had never happened, murdering a man who had been dead for months. She walked towards him and he turned. He half-smiled. It was the same one, the man who had brought Matthew’s car home. His young, slightly pudgy face, his smile was his own admission of guilt.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. He looked embarrassed.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry we didn’t find him.’ For a moment she thought he was referring to the dead man, the father of Crystal’s child. ‘That forest is so dense. There are only so many tracks and—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I saw his car, your car, and I just wanted to—’

  ‘Yeah. No worries.’

  ‘Well, my wife has been meaning to drop some food down. It’s hard, you know, to know what’s right.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He retreated into his car. Window open. She could lean in: I’m sorry too. I’m sorry I just killed a man. I am a monster. Arrest me. But she smiled and nodded and he pulled out of the carpark, and now she was withholding information. Obstructing police. Now she was committing one crime to cover up another. Digging in deep enough to bury herself.

  She opened the passenger door by accident, as if Matthew was about to get in and drive his own car, Jessica riding shotgun.

  Shotgun.

  She walked back around to the driver’s side, heart pounding. Hauled herself into the cab and sat, trying to calm herself. The blonde woman was standing outside the shop, just standing there, holding a single packet of corn chips and staring at her.