Haints Stay

by Colin Winnette

  In the mornings, Martha played her piano. Whether or not it was to wake them or to greet them as they woke, it was unclear. Bird’s strength was coming back. He thought less and less about the arm, and more and more about eating, sweating, and helping. He kept active. He was normally up before Martha began. He would hear her heels break the silence, then the shift of the key cover and her settling in. He did not know the songs she played, but he often heard John humming them throughout the day. Bird did not want to draw attention to himself by being the first one up, so he listened for John or Mary before making his presence known. It wasn’t a worry of his exactly, but something physical. He simply could not lift the blankets until the house was at least half awake.

  Sometimes, in the morning, the clouds would look like a plowed field spread across the sky. The sun would come through them and change them and Bird would watch through the small window by his bed. That time of year, there was frost in its corners each morning, like white fur.

  Martha would play them right up to breakfast, songs that paused but seemed to have no end. John cooked and served and the songs went on until the plates were loaded. Then Martha joined them. She was tight-lipped and cinched. She sat up like a board.

  “We’ll cut your hair today, Mary,” said Martha, digging into her bacon with a dull knife.

  “I like it long,” said Mary.

  “If we do not cut it, someone will mistake you for a heathen and take you away during the night.”

  “Martha,” said John.

  “Martha, none of it,” said Martha. “I’m only saying I’d like to clean my daughter up a bit and keep her nice.”

  “I am nice,” said Mary. She was tearing up and not eating her eggs.

  “Until you’re taken away and all the decency is riven from you,” said Martha.

  Martha’s own hair was spiraled up and held in a bulb at the back of her head. There was no way of knowing precisely how long it was, but Bird was sure it was fairly long, given the thickness of the bulb. She had dark hair you could get lost in. Closer to her head, Mary’s hair was like two blonde hands interlocked at the fingers.

  After breakfast, John led Mary out behind the house. He carried a small hatchet. Bird followed a few steps behind. Mary was crying and wiping her tears with the backs of her hands. She did not normally cry and Bird was curious at it. It made her appear much younger and smaller than she truly was.

  “It will grow back,” said John, stopping before a stump.

  Mary got on her knees and tilted her face away from the stump. She did not speak. John set her braids on the stump and chopped them more than halfway off with the hatchet. It happened in a single chop. Then the whole thing was over.

  John gave the hair to Mary and said she could do what she wanted with it. She wanted to bury it. She did not ask Bird to follow her and did not explain what it was she was about to do. But he followed her and saw it all anyway.

  She wandered into the dried-up orchard a few hundred feet from their home. She dug a small pit with her fingers and set the braids in there. She pulled leaves from one of the least dead trees and scattered the leaves over the braids coiled together in the hole like a handful of baby snakes. Then she put the dirt back on top and cried a little more and turned to walk home. Bird thought the funeral was nice and felt his appreciation of it as a kind of warmth throughout his entire body.

  “Did you know my name is Isabella ?” said Mary.

  She and Bird were sitting on the lip of the stonewall encircling the family well.

  “I thought it was Mary,” he said.

  “It’s Isabella,” said Mary. “John named me Mary when he found me.”

  “Where did he find you ?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “How do you know your name was Isabella ?”

  “Is Isabella,” she said.

  “How do you know your name is Isabella ?”

  “I remember that part,” she said. “It’s the part I remember.”

  “What else do you remember ?”

  It was mid-morning. The clouds were low and thick. They seemed to be gathering. Bird did not want a storm. He did not like a storm and would grow more and more afraid until it was over. He had not yet shown this family what he looked like fully afraid and he was starting to think that maybe he would like to go a little longer without showing them.

  “Not much. I had a mother who was nice, and I liked her, I think. She called me Isabella. We had a blue and white blanket that sometimes held me and sometimes held corn. I remember touching the corn. What do you remember ?”

  “From when ?”

  “From before John found you.”

  “Nothing, really,” said Bird. “I remember I was dragged behind a wagon or a cart for what felt like forever.”

  “John bandaged you and brought you through the night back to our home,” she said. “We were all asleep when you got here and I ran out to greet him and there you were. You were frightful to look at.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were screaming and moaning.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You remember that ?”

  “I remember John cutting into my shoulder.”

  “I did not see that.”

  “I could not look away, though he told me to.”

  “Then what ?”

  “Then we woke up and had biscuits.”

  “What were your real parents like ?”

  “I thought it was a dream,” said Bird. “I thought I was going to wake up in the woods again.”

  “With that thing ?”

  “Before that, I guess.”

  “Why were you in the woods ?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  “What did your parents do ?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bird.

  “What do you mean ?”

  Bird was digging at the lichen between the stones, tearing it loose and dropping the small pieces into the mouth of the well.

  “I don’t mean anything. They were farmers.”

  “It can be hard to remember,” said Mary.

  “Yes,” said Bird.

  And then there were those men in the woods. But they were wild. Everything they had, they had with them. No one was looking for them. In fact, Brooke got the sense that they’d done some good by taking them down. Certainly, they’d done what was right for themselves. Any court would see the truth in their claims of self-defense.

  There was the scarred Southerner. Something wrong with his face that Brooke couldn’t explain. The man had friends. He was well-liked for some reason. Some men just smoothed along throughout life and never really got anyone particularly ruffled in any negative kind of way. Brooke could not remember how they had found themselves at his doorstep. But he had known why they were there. The man had given chase through the living room and out the backdoor in his pajamas. There was a pot of food in the fireplace and a candle burning at the desk. Before setting out after him, Brooke and Sugar had made sure there was nothing much to come home to. They’d done some real damage on the man’s home, and stockpiled his weapons on the backs of their horses.

  He missed those horses. They never tired before it was time to settle. They didn’t make many demands at all. They liked an apple each. His own liked corn. They were agreeable, handsome animals. He did not always get as much as he would have liked of agreeable things.

  The man was not a good runner. He was not used to moving in shadows or progressing himself with regularity. His camps were easily spotted, easily tracked, quickly abandoned, and easily destroyed. They, technically, had not killed him. They had followed him around until the corpse revealed itself. He was not a hunter. He did not seem to know the ways of tracking water. It had been Sugar’s idea to wait it out and it was a good one. They rode on behind him, kept an eye on him, but did not overtake him. For some time, he had probably assumed he was proceeding well in his evasion. There was some kind of tragedy in that.

  When it came to rounding up a hog, Bird wa
s as good a partner as John ever had. The boy was particularly skilled at motivating the pig without startling it. Something in the boy either soothed the creature or hardly registered with it. Either way, it crept along, keeping its distance from the boy but never startling, lashing out, or darting. Bird managed to provoke the pig to the door at the far edge of the pen without ever touching or even reaching out for it. When John’s hands fell upon the creature to pluck it out and hang it, the animal seemed as startled as the day it was born.

  “You spend much time with hogs ?” said John.

  “I’m worried it is going to rain,” said Bird.

  “Rain would be good,” said John. “But it won’t rain.”

  “The clouds are all bunched up and thick,” said Bird. “The air is all heavy like a sponge.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” said John.

  The drought had been going for nearly two months now. It was getting to the family, cutting into what they could produce for trade. They were scraping by on what the animals brought in. The well was keeping them in enough water to survive and keep the creatures from dying off. But the situation could not hold forever.

  “I have made that mistake,” said John, carrying the pig like a child across the yard and into the barn. “It’s only optimism. There’s no harm in it. But it does sting.”

  He bound the animal’s feet and hung them from a small hook overhead. The earth beneath them was dark and hard. He removed a knife from a metal sheet hammered into the wall and began to saw the throat of the pig. It curled its body and tried to swing from him. Or that was how it looked. Either way, it struggled and gurgled and bent against John’s grip. Then the animal lost its voice. John held the neck strong and cut deep. It sounded like a thick rope working into an oak tree. Then the sound went hollow and blood fell from John’s arms and the pig’s throat and the creature began to thrash. John stepped back and the pig spun its body round and round, extending its head as far from its feet as its body would allow, spraying blood along the walls in a circle. On the wall then, Bird noticed there was fresh blood and old blood and stains that were unrecognizable.

  Finally, the pig stopped. It centered and the corpse spun steadily on the rope. Then John took it down and carried it to a large iron table at the front of the barn.

  “If we got some rain,” he said, “things would grow. There would be nothing to be afraid of. We would have more money and more food. It’s as simple as that.”

  John slit the creature from groin to sternum with a thin curving blade. It seemed to bloom slightly, its purpled organs pushing out but not spilling. He pulled them tenderly from the cavity and set them in several buckets behind him. Bird could not recognize the various parts, but they were each glossy, with deep coloring.

  “No need to cower in the doorway,” said John. “She’s as dead as she’ll ever be.”

  Bird was still at the mouth of the barn. He had backed out during the bleeding and was hovering there since. He did not need to advance. The image was grisly and the smell was worse.

  “It smells,” he said.

  “That’s iron,” said John. “Blood. Entrails. That’s food and what makes it food. You’d be better off knowing these things and accepting them. Whether or not you stay with us or take off on your own some day, you’ll need to accept what feeds you and what it takes to stay fed.”

  Bird had not given this the slightest bit of thought. Staying or going. He knew he would not ever go back into the woods. He was suspicious of town.

  He stepped into the barn and joined John by the pig. John was working a new smaller knife beneath the skin of the animal and it was lifting away fairly easily. A few white threads like cobwebs clung to the underside and stretched between the skin and the muscle, but John was not forcing anything. It came off more or less like a snake’s skin, in several large pieces.

  Bird began to tremble. His head went warm and he collapsed. When he woke Martha was at his side. It was evening. He tried to lift each limb to determine if he was bound, but all three rose.

  “You fainted,” said Martha, “at the sight of a butchered pig.”

  Bits of the pig came back to him. He pictured it spinning and screaming its low scream.

  “John moves fast,” she said. She had a small book in her hands, which she closed and set on her lap.

  “What time is it ?” said Bird. “Am I safe ?”

  “Of course you’re safe, little one,” she said. “You’ve lucked out being found and brought here. There are far worse places to be brought.”

  “Is John mad ?”

  “No.”

  “Why did I faint ?”

  “Because of all you’ve been through, would be my guess,” said Martha. “When John found me, I was mute and uncivil. I cannot reenter my old way of thinking but I remember being fairly terrified of any sounds I might make and the looks they would draw.”

  “I don’t want to faint,” said Bird. “I want to be able to help and slaughter pigs.”

  “There are lots of ways to help aside from gutting animals.”

  “I want to be able to do what’s needed,” said Bird.

  “There is a variety to our need,” said Martha.

  “How long does a pig last ?”

  “For eating, they can last several months. Selling them, they go much more quickly.”

  “How long does it take to sell one ?”

  “John traded the bulk of yours this afternoon.”

  “Then we’ll butcher a new one tomorrow,” said Bird.

  “I think tomorrow you’re riding for town,” said Martha.

  “Why ? What if I don’t want to go ?”

  “There’s a doctor there who will need to see your wound. And there is trading to be done.”

  “My wound is fine.”

  “You’re striking an attitude with me, little one. There’s no reason for it.”

  “My name is Bird and I’d like to butcher a pig tomorrow.”

  “That you’re stubborn and proud is all you’ll prove by doing so. Do as we need, not just as you like.”

  She rose and patted him on the head then.

  “You are a handsome boy with an eager heart and we are grateful to have you.”

  The water had vanished beneath the sand but Brooke could still follow its coloring. The sand was a bit darker and looser where the stream ran. He could extract the water from the sand using a sock, and carry on. There was no certainty at all in the direction he had chosen. Many towns set themselves up alongside a water source, but not all, and there was no telling what the situation with this water would become. It had already begun to leave him. He was out of wood and keeping warm only by applying his clothes and coat as a poor kind of blanket. It was brutally cold at night and hot during the day. It occurred to him to follow the stream the opposite way, back in the direction from which they came, but he had walked for several days in this direction and doubling back was a hard decision to make.

  There was one man among them all who had put up a considerable, worry-worthy fight. Either an ex-soldier or a man with soldierly inclinations. It turned out that his barn was home to a historical armory of sorts, topped off with a cannon and enough balls and powder to give them lasting trouble.

  The fighting between them was extensive and this man had the upper hand. It ended, finally, when he bothered with the cannon. Brooke and Sugar were given enough time to approach the barn on horseback. Before the lengthy pause of his wheeling it and gathering the supplies, they had been hiding in the trees, moving about to avoid his rifle fire. He was a miserable shot. At first, they read his pause as their success. They imagined him gunned down and bleeding. They pictured victory. They were cautious in their approach, avoiding the door at the front of the barn and moving quickly past the windows at its sides. How he did not hear them is still a mystery to Brooke. The cannon fired on the trees where they had initially been held up. It cleared a great path, which then surprisingly snapped back into place. A few of the older trees lay strick
en, but the younger, thinner ones bent and bent back as if it were a child’s game. The barn was filled with smoke then and the noise was of a stunning kind. Ears ringing, Brooke and Sugar broke in through the front door. The man had fallen back from the cannon blow and was discovered by them on his rear in a bit of horse mud. His horses were dead around him as if stricken by a plague. A goat was in the corner, without its mind. They shot the man and butchered the goat. They lived on its meat for the following week.

  Soon, the coloring went. Brooke was without a guide or water source. He aligned himself with the sun as if to follow the same direction as before, but there was no way of knowing if the water still ran that way or ran at all. It could have just as easily curved off or died out. He imagined himself sitting on a stool in a bar. There would be some kind of plunky music playing. People laughing indiscriminately. He liked a noisy room. Liked the way a drink would settle in and everything would seem suddenly to pool there in the back of your skull. He shook away the thought when it led to the memory of a bartender they had drowned in a horse bucket just beyond the church steps. They were out of view but the man had made considerable noise. Still, no one had looked between the buildings to discover them. It had been a hasty, unthoughtful act. They had been successful, however, in killing the man and collecting their pay. Brooke realized that much of their success was luck or good fortune or poor decisions gone unpunished. Finally, he had made a poor decision he was paying for. It was no longer about trying to figure who had sent those men after them. It was more than likely the little man who’d razed Jenny’s. That was the obvious, easiest thought. It wasn’t worth dreaming up other scenarios. But it was now a kind of game he was playing with himself. Something he was interested in seeing out, interested in pursuing, at least until he was no longer in dire straits.