by Various
“Good girl,” he said. “Now lean to me.”
This was the tricky part.
The stool tilted and moved under my feet. It was an old thing, and I could tell the joints were loose just by the feel of it. That movement was sickening to me, but I did like Travers said, I leaned toward him, his fingers warm against palms going cold with fear. I leaned until the rope was tight against my throat, drawing a straight line, no slack, to where it hung around the tree branch, my body taut at an angle, my toes pointed to the ground. The edge of the stool pressed into the soft space on my foot between the ball and the heel.
“Good girl,” Travers told me. “Good.”
God, it hurt. The rope cut into my throat, and I knew there would be bruises there tomorrow I’d have to cover up. But this was how we played.
I knew the words that were coming next but even so, they sounded like someone else was saying them, not Travers. “Skye Thornton,” he said, “I give you to Hangjaw, the Spearman, the Gallows’ Burden. I give you to the Father of Bears.” And he touched my left side with the hazelwand he had brought for that purpose. “Now tell me what you see.”
And so I did.
I don’t remember what I told Travers.
None of us ever knew what it was we saw, and no one was ever allowed to talk about it after the fact. Those were the rules. I remember some of the stories though.
When Signy played the hanging game she told us about how her husband in ten years’ time would die highclimbing a tall spruce spar while he was throwing the rope and getting the steel spurs in. Ninety feet from the earth it’d get hit by lightning, crazy, just like that, and he’d be fried, still strapped to the top of the thing. But the problem was she never said who that husband was gonna be, and so no one would ever go with her, no one ever took her out to the Lawford Drive-In Theatre where the rest of us went when the time came, in case she wound up pregnant by accident and the poor boy sonuva had to hitch himself to that bit of unluckiness.
That first time I wasn’t afraid so much of playing the hanging game, I was afraid of what I was going to see in Travers’s eyes after. I was afraid of what he might know about me that I didn’t know about myself.
When he took the noose off after and he had massaged the skin on my neck, made sure I was breathing right, I remember opening my eyes, thinking I was going to see it then. But Travers looked the same as ever, same Travers, same smile, same brother of mine. And I thought, well, I guess it’s not so bad, then, whatever piece of luck it is that’s coming my way.
It was stupid, of course, but we were all taken by surprise that day things went wrong. There were four of us who had gone to play the hanging game, Travers and me, Ingrid Sullivan, the daughter of the skidder man who had killed two more bears than Dad that summer, and Barth Gibbons. Ingrid was there for Travers. She’d told me so before we set out, a secret whispered behind a cupped hand when Travers was getting the rope from the shed. But it was Barth I was there for. Barth was a year or two older, a pretty impossible age gap at that time to cross, but that didn’t matter much to me. All I knew was Barth had the nicest straight-as-straw black hair I’d ever seen and wouldn’t it be a fine thing if he slipped that coil around his neck and whispered something about his future wife, some red-haired, slim-hipped woman, when I was the only red-haired girl north of Lawford. That’s what I remember thinking, anyway.
It was Travers who played Priest. Ingrid and I were there, really, just as Witnesses, because sometimes it was better if you had one or two along, just in case you were too busy handling the rope and you missed something. Old Hangjaw didn’t like that.
But as it was when Barth went up and played the hanging game he didn’t say anything about a red-haired, slim-hipped woman after all. He said something about a she-bear he was going to cut into one day at the start of a late spring, holed up asleep in one of those hollowed-out, rotten redwood trunks. And when he tried to open the wood up with a chainsaw, how the woodchips and blood were just going to come spewing forth, take him by surprise. There was kind of a sick sense of disappointment in me at that, but we marked down the blood price of the she-bear anyway so that we’d be sure to let Barth know how much it was and how he could pay it when the time came.
Then up went Ingrid, and Travers, who was still Priest, which was what Ingrid wanted, held out his hand for her. She giggled and took it. She didn’t seem the least bit afraid, her corn-yellow hair tied behind her, smiling at my brother, leaning toward him when he told her to.
Like I said, I don’t know why we had never thought of it. I mean, of course, I’d thought of it that first time I was up there, that the stool was a rickety old thing. I’d felt it moving beneath me but then that was how it was supposed to feel, I thought, that was part of it.
But then while Ingrid was leaning in, we heard this noise, all of us, this low growling noise so deep you could feel it in the pit of your stomach. Then there was the rank smell of bear piss, which is a smell we all knew, living out in bear country.
Ingrid screamed, although that was the stupidest thing to do, and she twisted on the stool. Snap. Just as quick as that it had rolled beneath her and her feet were free, tap-dancing in the air.
It was quick as all get out.
Barth had turned and was staring into the woods, looking for that damned mother of a she-bear we had all heard, and so he hadn’t seen Ingrid fall.
But I had.
She was choking bad, and her tongue had snuck out of her mouth like a thick, purple worm. Her eyes were screwed up into white gibbous moons, that yellow hair of hers twisting in the wind.
Travers had long arms even then, the biggest arms you’d ever seen, like a bear himself, and he tried to grab her, but Ingrid was still choking anyhow. I was scared of the bear, but I was more scared for Ingrid so I took the Sharpfinger knife that Travers kept on his belt for skinning, and I made to right the stool and cut her down.
Travers, I think, was shaking his head, but I couldn’t see him from behind Ingrid, whose limbs were now flailing, not like she was hanging, but like she was being electrocuted. It was Barth who stopped me. He was thinking clearer than I was.
“The wand,” he said, “do it first, Skye. You have to.”
And so I took the hazelwand, which Travers had dropped when he grabbed hold of Ingrid, and I smacked her in the side so hard that she almost swung out of Travers’ arms. I tried to remember what Travers had said for me, but all I could come up with was Hangjaw’s name. Then Travers had her good, and I was able to get on the stool and saw the blade through the highrigging rope just above the knot. She tumbled like a scarecrow and hit the ground badly, her and Travers going down together in a heap.
I looked over at Barth, absurdly still wanting him to see how good I’d been, to get her with the wand and then cut her down, but Barth, because he was still thinking of the she-bear, wasn’t paying a whit’s worth of attention to me.
So I looked at Ingrid instead. Her face kind of bright red with the eyes still rolled back into her skull, body shaking and dancing even though she was on the ground. Travers had gotten out from under her, and now he was putting his ear next to her. At first I thought he was trying to tell if she was still breathing, but of course, he wasn’t, he was listening. He was listening to make sure he caught every word she said.
It could have only been a few seconds, that whispery grating voice I couldn’t quite catch. But still it scared me even worse than seeing that stool run out underneath her feet, the sound of Ingrid’s truth saying. I don’t know what she said, but Travers’s face went white, and when she was done her body stopped its shakes.
“Travers,” I said. Even though I was scared, I wanted to be Witness still, it was my job, and so I wanted him to tell me. “Just whisper it,” I told him then. “Go on.”
“No use,” Travers answered, and I couldn’t tell quite what he was talking about but then it became clear to me. Travers let go of her head. I realized how he’d been holding it steady so he could hear, but then the neck lolled at
a strange, unnatural angle, and I knew it had snapped like a wet branch during the fall.
“Old Hangjaw wanted her to pay her daddy’s blood price,” he said.
That frightened me something fierce. Not just that Ingrid had died, well, I’d seen death before, but the way I had seen her mouth moving even though her neck had been snapped clean through. We never played the hanging game after that. Some of the men from the camp brought down that ash tree and burned all the wood away from town where no one would breathe the smoke of it.
And so we all grew up. Those of us that could, that is.
A couple of years down the line Travers won a scholarship and followed it south past Lawford and out of bear country. I was lonely, but I never could blame him. Dad did, though, and they never spoke much after that. And me, well, I married Barth Gibbons, even though he never whispered about a red-haired, slim-hipped woman. I guess we can all make our own luck. That’s what I did that day when I was seventeen, and I went with Barth out to the Lawford Drive-In Theatre. I didn’t know at the time how easy it was for something to take root in you, but several months later after I’d been retching for a week, convinced I had a helluva stomach flu, Momma told me she reckoned I must be pregnant.
She was right, of course. Dad was pissed for a while but after Barth proposed and we got properly married then he was okay. The baby, though, didn’t come the way we expected it to. She came two months too early, in a slick of blood that sure as hell smelled to me like bear piss though no one else will say so. I lost the next one that way too, and the next, just so many until I wouldn’t let Barth touch me because I didn’t want to see all those tiny, broken bodies laid out in the blood pooling at my legs.
Then one day, after the spring Barth bit into that she-bear and I had to knock him in the side with the hazelwand until he bled just to keep old Hangjaw happy, Travers called me up. I’d just lost another, a little boy who I had already started trying out names for even though the doctor told me that was a godawful bad idea to do so. And Travers said to me, “Okay, Skye, I know we can’t talk about it, I know we’re not supposed to, but I’m going to say anyway. You just keep going, okay, Skye? You’re almost paid up.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I couldn’t do it anymore, I’d seen all of the little bodies that I could and all I could smell was bear piss. But I loved Travers, I always had, and I remembered what it was like to hold his hand out there by the tree. I remembered the hanging game.
And so that night, though he was tired of it too and his eyes were bright and shiny and he said he couldn’t face another stillbirth either, still, I kissed Barth on the mouth. Nine months later out came little Astrid, as clean and sweet smelling as any a little baby was.
So now I’m cradling that body of hers close to mine, her little thatch of black hair fluffed up like a goose and the rest of her so tightly swaddled there’s nothing but a squalling face. I’m looking at her and I love this child of mine so much, more than I can rightly say. “Shh,” I’m saying to her. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t be afraid now, girl.”
But I can’t stop thinking about that hill Dad left covered in bear bones that one summer way back when. Can’t stop thinking about the nine little bodies I had to bury in the dirt before this little child of mine came along. As I’m holding her in my arms, feeling the warmth of her tucked tight against me, that thing which feels like the best thing in the world, I’m also wondering if she’ll ever go out one fine afternoon to play the hanging game, and I’m wondering about the things our parents leave us, the good and the bad, and whether a thing is ever truly over.
Copyright © 2013 by Helen Marshall
Art copyright © 2013 by Chris Buzelli
All rights reserved.
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e-ISBN 9781466839250
First eBook Edition: March 2013
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When he was a child, he was stranger than many children, but not as strange as some. What he lacked in normalcy he more than made up for in passion, sense of wonder and acquisitiveness—the virtues that make any collector (or hunter) great. By the age of ten he had collected more than two thousand seashells, providing each, as any good scientist would, with its own neatly labeled card that listed its Latin and common names, where it had been collected and when and by whom, and the temperature that day. If he or his parents had purchased the seashell or it had been given to him by someone who did not have such information, that was all right; the card would at least bear its names. What mattered most was the beauty of the bivalve or univalve, the clam or snail, its personality, its character, and its role in the larger scheme of things, which the boy saw clearly.
He kept his seashells in the drawers of two nice oak dressers in his room and, as well, in the drawers of the ten junkier dressers his father had with affection purchased for him at yard sales and Salvation Army outlets and made room for in every garage or basement or attic they had, moving them carefully with their other furniture each time the family relocated from one coast or country to another.
How the boy’s collection had come into being was not as strange as the boy himself, even if the size of it was: his father, a Navy enlisted officer, moved his family often because the Navy ordered him to, and often, because it was the Navy he served, they lived on or near military bases by the sea; and the boy, when he was old enough to crawl, had discovered that the one thing he could truly make his own and take with him from one place to the next was the seashells of that place—whether they lay dead and clean on the sand of nearby beaches, lived on the mud below in shallow water, hid under seaweed at tide pools, were gifts from kind people, or were purchased by the boy, when he or his parents had the money, in local shops. He could not take the people with him, friends he made at school, or the old women who walked the beaches in palm-frond hats, or the fisherman from the jetties. He could not take the houses his family lived in with him. He could not always even take the pets, which were sometimes lost in the moves and which, like all pets, sometimes died because pets rarely lived as long as their keepers.
He even felt that he could not take himself because what he was at each of his father’s “stations” was different. But he could always—with his parents’ encouragement because they knew he needed to take something with him or he would forget who he was—take the seashells of each place. They understood what moving meant, and they understood what could be lost. His father had fled a small town in Virginia to join the Navy and make a life for himself, and his mother was one-quarter Chickasaw Indian and, though quite educated, knew what it felt like not to know who you were.
Though it seemed odd when it began, his parents encouraged his playing with his seashells, too—the way other boys played with soldiers and toy boats and cars. His wanting to play with them as all children play with something did not, in fact, seem as strange to them as the cards with their scientific names and other information, which felt so adult and made them worry, lost in books as he often was, that he would never be a child. It made him—this playing—seem more normal to them; and so they watched and smiled when their ten-year-old son took the large, pink-lipped Queen Conch (Strombus gigas) which a shrimp fisherman in Key West, Florida, had given the boy (one his mother, without complaint, had boiled and cleaned so that it would not smell, as seashells sometimes tended to do), put it for the thousandth time on the rug in his bedroom, placed ar
ound it the fifteen tiny but feisty Strombus alatus—Fighting Conchs (shells he had also collected in Florida at his father’s previous station)—and, as he liked to put it, played “Kingdom of the Ancient Sea” with them. After all, the Queen needed protection, he explained, looking up, and the Fighting Conchs, loyal as they were, would protect her. In actuality, Fighting Conchs could drill through the armor of other seashells and kill them, so why not here, in his fantasy, in the boy’s very own kingdom, make them “the Queen’s guards”?
The big, elegant Horse Conch (Pleuroploca gigantea)—whose knobby shell was covered with a periostracum as dark as his heart—was even then approaching the Queen, whose reign (the boy explained at dinner that night) the Horse Conch wished to overthrow with his own forces, his own battalions of Fighting Conchs and his company of poisonous Cone shells, Conus gloriamaris (two specimens of which his parents had bought for him in Australia when he was six).
Because of the Conus gloriamaris, the Horse Conch would certainly have been able to defeat the Queen, who was much older and vulnerable to flattery from handsome suitors and a little tired from her centuries of reign over the Kingdom of the Ancient Sea, had it not been (the boy explained four nights later) for the ingenuity of the Queen’s Carrier Shells. These shells, disguised by the broken shells and coral they had glued to themselves (as Carrier Shells do) with a calcium paste, were able after only two attempts, and in the darkest of ocean’s night, to penetrate the Horse Conch’s perimeter of Fighting Conchs and by their gifts of persuasion (namely, the promise of more Venus clams than any Cone shell could dream of) turn one of the dreaded Cones against the Horse Conch itself. The Horse Conch, not suspecting treachery in its own ranks, had left its naked body exposed the following night as it slept and, pierced by the Cone’s radula, had succumbed to the poison. The Fighting-Conch guards, upon discovering the horror the next morning, had, fast and nimble as they were, dispatched the traitorous Conus gloriamaris with ease, but the Horse Conch was dead and even the spectacle of a hundred species of the most refined and colorful Murexes in the funereal procession that followed could not restore him to this world.
