South

by Frank Owen

  ‘We got about half a day on them, I’m thinking.’

  ‘That changes the picture a little.’

  ‘It’s a take-it-or-leave-it type situation.’

  Vida watched them maneuver back into the cave, pushing each other, scrabbling for their bags. God, they were like kindergartners.

  Still, there wasn’t a whole lot of deciding.

  The three began the trek back to her place in silence, walking Indian-style, fast and single-file, Garrett leading because he had the most to lose.

  They kept the pace up where they could, slowing over rocky sections and when the buckthorn thickened up. It was the end of tick season, but there were still the last red hangers-on clinging to the tops of the grasses. Dyce figured he knew how they felt, empty, despised, desperate for nourishment. Never the other way around, never on the attack. Still, he didn’t like them enough to pick up any blood-sucking hitchhikers.

  Garrett stopped at the crest of an outcrop, and the other two hung back in the fescue. He looked back along the track for the Callahans. If he didn’t know them better he’d have been optimistic about escape. But they were out there, close behind, his smell in their nostrils, making them quiver. Not seeing them was worse. Nightmarish, people used to say, and it was true: they were being chased to their deaths. They could never run fast enough.

  Vida set her pack down and grappled with a flask of water. She wiped the rusted neck and offered it to Dyce, who shook his head. Not yet. He didn’t want to have to piss along the track and leave their scent out in the open. That was just plain stupid.

  He held out his hand. ‘Allerdyce. And he’s Garrett.’

  Vida nodded, not touching him just yet. She caught his eyes, ice-blue like a husky dog’s, their flesh rimmed with sweat-speckled dirt. Diamonds in the rough, she thought, the song starting in her head. She blinked. ‘Vida. What you do to get yourselves hunted?’

  ‘Not yourselves.’ Dyce nodded at his brother. Garrett still stood above them, scanning the horizon. ‘Hisself. Callahans got no problem with me.’

  ‘What’d he do?’

  ‘Got a Callahan killed.’

  ‘Ay.’ Vida shook her head. A death sentence. ‘One of the twins? Or the other boys?’

  ‘Bethlehem.’

  ‘Jesus H. Christ! He killed the Callahan girl?’

  Garrett was watching her now, his face cold. As if he didn’t know how bad it was! The only natural-born daughter in more than a decade. And the baby she was carrying – My baby, Garrett told himself. Mine, mine, mine – also a little girl. It must have been. A miracle baby, made up of the scraps of the two of them into something better, made to rocket forward into the future when her parents were gone, their histories and wishes and hopes laid down safely in her bones.

  He’d watched from the long grass as the older women delivered Bethie of her terrible burden. Garrett saw her body twisting up against the hands that held her down, an animal shrieking in the trap. He knew he ought to run, but he needed to see the baby – even if it was still-born, the way everyone knew it would be, coming this early. After the long hours they had wrenched a silent, bloody thing from between Beth’s thighs, the bag bluish around its face. The tiny body had lain in the dust like an old-time squirrel squashed on the highway while the women clustered around the mother, her eyes rolled back in her head. The sudden hard silence pressed against Garrett’s eardrums, so that he thought the plates in his head would shift. There had been so much blood!

  Now Dyce shrugged.

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Done is done.’

  ‘And where you gonna go to escape the marshals? They’re everywhere! It’s their job!’

  ‘Garrett wants to find a boat. Head out over the sea.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You ever hear those stories about the places the sicknesses can’t reach?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t forget Bugs Bunny. And the Tooth Fairy. And heaven.’

  ‘Well, Garrett believes.’

  ‘Do you?’

  Before Dyce could answer, Garrett hopped down onto the dirt.

  ‘What you girls talking about?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘And where’s this house with the gun?’

  ‘Almost there, right, Vida?’

  ‘Sure. Almost there.’

  6

  The house was ancient wood, more falling apart than hanging together. The shingles were cracked. They’d fallen like teeth and left black holes that reminded Dyce of Jay Loram’s shattered mouth. The windows were boarded up, the glass long gone save for the pair of sliding doors that led onto the porch. There were still shards in the rims of the frames, sharp as gleaming fangs in the morning sun. The blocked-out upstairs windows looked down. The eyes of the place, thought Dyce. And they’re watching us.

  One of the first lessons their father had taught them was that if something didn’t feel right, you walked away. Always. Don’t wait for the thing you sensed to come get you. Just clear out. Leave it and move on.

  Ha! There wouldn’t be anywhere to go if Dyce obeyed the voice in his head. Every minute of every day didn’t feel right. Where would he clear out to?

  He hadn’t felt this strongly about a place in a while, not since they’d discovered those bodies in the Fairview Orphanage. He knew by the time they were on the path up to the front door. Vida’s place felt bad. Alive bad. Dyce wanted to say something, but he knew better. He’d never hear the end of it.

  He glanced over at Vida but her face was blank.

  ‘We make this quick,’ said Garrett. ‘Can’t waste time. We see the grave, you get us the gun and we’re gone.’

  ‘Aye-aye, cap’n.’

  Vida led them around the side of the house first, through the shadow of the upstairs story, especially cold on their shoulders. The grass and dirt were still damp where the sun didn’t get, greasy underfoot as the ground tilted up and away from them.

  And there on the hillside beside the house was a mound of dirt covered over with stones. At the head of the grave was a cross – two sticks tied with string, a kid’s work.

  A kid, or someone in a hurry to get gone.

  A bunch of long-dead globemallows was weighed down by a rock, and Dyce imagined the weight of that stone, of the sand and gravel and moisture, and even those delicate flowers, all resting on the body below it. A crushing weight. The weight of dying.

  He nudged Garrett with his shoulder.

  ‘Happy?’

  For Dyce, the sight of the grave was proof enough, but Garrett went closer. He rested a boot on the mound and inspected the dirt between the rocks.

  Don’t do that, Dyce wanted to say. That’s disrespect. She’s gonna rise up and throttle the life out of you with her dead hands.

  ‘How long you say she’s been dead?’

  ‘A week, give or take.’

  ‘Snake got her?’

  ‘Yeah, I told you. Rattler out from under the porch back there. Killed it myself.’

  Garrett leant in and tweezered a pale-green shoot from the dirt with his fingers. He held it up to the light then laid it in his palm and examined it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, eventually. ‘Looks like a week’s growth, given the weather. No coyotes come digging?’

  ‘First few days they came but I was watching. Tried to snare one as a lesson to the rest but it got free. They stopped coming the night before last. Figure they know Ma’s for the bugs now.’ Even coyotes had standards, Dyce wanted to say. He saw that Vida’s face was bright with sweat. But they all were, weren’t they? He wiped his forehead. Get on with it.

  But Garrett’s eyes were glassy as he stared down at the grave, the labor of love it so clearly was. In his mind he was somewhere else, doing the things he’d known were coming, things he’d never got to do. He was digging Beth’s grave, rolling her in and laying her out at the bottom of the hole, face up with her stick-thin arms folded across her chest. Covering her over with leaves before backfilling the soil, all
the while keeping the dirt off her face. He was collecting rocks and layering them over the top, armoring her body against the night scavengers. He was making a cross out of wood, just like this one – not because it stood for any belief, but because it’s what right-thinking people did. It would be a marker and a sign and for once he would be doing what was right by Beth. Last, the flowers his girl had always liked: fireweeds and fairy trumpets, columbines and penstemons, yarrows and mouse ears.

  ‘Garrett.’

  ‘How’s that gun coming along?’ he asked.

  Vida led them back to the porch, showing them which planks were rotted through and where to step if you wanted to keep your leg. She grabbed the sliding door with two hands, one high and one low, and eased it open. Fine paint chips rained down till the gap was just wide enough to squeeze through. She stepped first into the darkness and Garrett followed.

  The house was musty and damp, like paper wet through with urine, the smoke of old fires. Dyce came last, fighting his urge to stand guard outside. Garrett wouldn’t buy it, he knew.

  The boys stood on the frayed rug waiting for their eyes to adjust. Dyce noticed Garrett had his hand on his hip, cupped ready over his knife. Maybe he felt it too. Maybe it was just how he stood now that the Callahans were chasing him.

  Vida was gone into the house. They could hear her opening doors and shuffling around upstairs. The creaking of her weight ran right through the structure, making it mutter from its dark corners.

  Vida knew that the boys would take some time to find their bearings, which bought her a minute to check on Ma. She filled a glass from the pot of stream water in the kitchen and took it up to the loft, where the old lady lay nestled under her layers of blankets.

  ‘Ma,’ she whispered. She heard the woman turn over. She was conscious. Hallelujah! ‘Ma, I’ve got some travelers.’

  ‘You going to try for Fieldstone?’ The voice in the dimness was quavering.

  ‘I’ll get meds and I’ll come back as soon as I can. I’m leaving water for you. Feel for it on the table.’

  Coughing. Vida was glad the red-blind eyes were hidden.

  ‘Did they see my grave?’

  ‘They thought it was real pretty, Ma.’ She adjusted the blankets. She knew better than to open them.

  ‘I’ll pray for you.’

  ‘To who, Ma?’

  ‘Anyone who’ll listen.’

  The Jesus days were long gone, but some things are habit – praying and cursing, both. Vida took her mother’s empty glass from the table and made it back down the stairs.

  Her travel bag was in the passage where she had left it, undisturbed. Vida felt for the hard edges of the swollen remedy book. It was there, hidden deep under the dried locusts and the dented canteen, her torn lumberjack shirt. The brown envelope pasted in the back flap was still intact. Her ma’s old seeds always traveled with them. Some she’d brought over from South Africa like a dowry when she’d moved to America; the rest she’d collected on the slow route from far North to deep South, her own Trail of Tears. Everywhere she went Ruth sowed a garden first thing – not grass or flowers the way other people did, but a medicine garden. Not only for the teas and poultices she cooked up, thought Vida, but because of the immigrant’s disease: homesickness. Now Vida stopped and ran her finger over the tiny seeds through the pocket of the back page. They had settled into the paper, pressed into pimples under the weight of the book, dormant until they were called into service. It had been Ruth’s, and now it was hers: the history of her family in biology and Braille. The book was the only thing they would never be able to replace.

  Vida went on to the guest room with less care now. She found the gun hidden in the piano, lying on the rusted wires of the thing’s insides, its busted tendons and collapsed veins.

  When she came down, Dyce was inspecting a picture on the wall and Garrett was searching the sideboard. There was nothing in it, Vida knew. Whatever could burn had been burnt already; whatever could be of use was being used. Didn’t they know that?

  ‘You got water here?’ asked Dyce when he saw the glass in Vida’s hand. He approached her, forgetting his reservations about the house, and took it before she could protest. He was walking through to the kitchen and calling back, ‘Is it this, in this pot?’

  She wanted to shout, ‘Don’t drink from that glass!’ She wanted to think of some clever way of pausing the moment, stopping Dyce in his tracks. But every thought she had ended with the boys finding out about her ma, almost dead upstairs. Even if they could see past the lying, they’d never travel with someone exposed to sickness.

  Vida just stood, and Garrett came over and took the gun from her. An old break-top Webley. He felt its weight and looked down the barrel, then cracked it open and eyed Vida through the chamber.

  ‘What’s got you so spooked?’

  7

  They’d cleaned Bethie up some. Wiped the dirt streaks that had run down from her hairline and collected in the creases beside her eyes, and scrubbed the scabs from her legs. Her dull cotton blouse, smeared with blood on the hem and patterned with specks of yellow phlegm, was soaking in a boiling billycan. They’d dressed her instead in a floral shirt and stuffed it with grass to hide her sunken ribs and her meatless breasts and also, thank God, that hollow gut. The swan pendant had gone to one of them too, taken and tucked wordlessly into a pocket.

  An aunt had worked dirt into a paste and rubbed it into her paper cheeks to give back the glow she’d lost all those months back, long before the baby and the sickness. Colorado, she’d thought over and over again while she’d painted the red mud onto Beth’s skin with a finger. Her hair, thin and brittle, had been braided and dotted with tiny white flowers, and when the women were done and had laid her out, arms folded, in the room at the back of the church, she looked more alive than she ever had. Certainly since anyone could remember.

  It was no secret that Beth had hated the way she’d been treated in life, as more than human. The only girl-child born to a lineage of men: what an honor! Once the Callahan clan had recovered from the shock, they took her birth to be a blessing: a miracle, something to be protected and nurtured – and looked at from a distance.

  To compensate, Beth had dressed in jeans and kept her hair scruffy and insisted on doing her share around the Glenvale settlement. Garrett, when he came along, was the logical end point of her rebellion. He treated her like an ordinary woman, special only to him and valuable for who she was, not what. And sure, the boy was head-over-heels but, Lord knew, they fought a lot. Maybe that’s what Beth had liked about it, thought the aunt. The imperfections, the unpredictability, the irritations were all laid over something real, something between affection and lust.

  Now, lifeless, the Callahans claimed Beth back. With her arms folded, her hair braided into a halo, her skin painted cherub-pink, she was an angel again – and that made Garrett the Devil.

  ‘Keep her cool,’ the aunt said, fanning her. A trio of boy cousins joined in, waving their hands around her body, cooling her skin and keeping the flies from settling on the moist slits of her eyes. With Beth attended to, the woman left the room and informed her husband that the funeral could begin.

  ‘Can we hold her together just a bit longer?’ Hugh Callahan asked, staring off into the haze on the horizon. There were still Callahans arriving from distant settlements, walking in through the wooden gates of Glenvale with their hats held to their chests but their face masks on. There was only so much ceremony a man could take.

  ‘Closed casket, sure, but if you want it open . . .’ She scrunched up her nose.

  Hugh went to greet the newest arrivals.

  ‘Goddamnit!’ It was the first thing Paul Callahan said through his moist face mask. ‘I got one hand holding my hat on my chest here, but I got my quicker hand free.’

  ‘’Preciate that, Paul, but Gus and his eldest are going to find Garrett. Right now we’re here for the family. When we’re all wrapped up and that hole is done being a hole, your quick hand can do as i
t pleases.’

  ‘Course. But goddamnit!’ He pulled his mask down now and spoke quietly. ‘You know if Tye is coming?’

  ‘He’s why I’m delaying this thing.’ Hugh pointed across the lake to a stand of dead pines. At the very top sat a feathery shape. They knew the bird would have its legs tasseled, and Tye would be carrying the hood. The Callahans had always had hunting birds – not a lot, but one or two for every generation, and a man to go hunting with it. Someone sharp-eyed and keen for meat.

  ‘That’s his harrier. Been there since last night. S’pose the old man’s not as quick as he once was, ’specially now without that old horse of his. He was never more than a couple of hours behind that bird.’

  The grave had been dug beneath the old birch tree, the one you saw as you walked down the steps of the church. Hugh went to inspect it for the hundredth time.

  It was deep, the bottom so black it seemed the hole reached down indefinitely. Speckled in the strata of dirt and rocks were the bright-white circles of severed tree roots, ancient holes through which to glimpse the lights of heaven.

  Oh, little town of Bethlehem! How still we see thee lie.

  Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.

  Hugh had been singing that in his head all day and it seemed as if there was some significance to it beyond the obvious. Maybe it was just something to subdue his brain and drive out the images of his boot pressing down on Garrett’s neck. A rhyme to keep his mind hallowed.

  He hated every minute of this waiting and congregating, speaking the very words of constraint to his cousins and uncles that Beth’s father had spoken to him: words that Gus had blatantly ignored, his bulk as stubborn as his temper. Gus would not pretend that he liked Bethlehem. She’d been disrespectful of everything she’d been given since the day she was born, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to sit by and let a Callahan get killed, Bethlehem or anyone else. He’d packed his rifle and rations for the chase, left as soon as he heard that Garrett was on the run. When Hugh went to see him off, he’d repeated, Stay and let’s bury Beth. We’re here for the family. When the hole’s filled we can find Garrett. But he’d said them without passion, for the sake of doing what seemed right. The words were faithful but the message in them was very different: Go, and let us bury Garrett. Go and do it for the family. When the hole’s filled he’ll be long gone.