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For Kim, Kate, and Sid, with a murder ballad and hiding places
It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.
—Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
1
In the heart of the hollow, at the mouth of the Delta, the monsters were dancing. Their shadows slid over the billowing green walls of the revival tent, rolling together, flowing apart. To Aunt Sally, rocking and smoking in her favorite chair in the shadows of her pavilion tent out back, their movements seemed hypnotic, lulling, like nimbus clouds across the moon, rainwater down glass. They kept her company, the shadows did. They were all the company she had ever kept or needed. Looking past the hollow down the mossy bank, she could see the moon out for its nightly stroll down the slow-sliding surface of the Mississippi, through the clustered cattails, the swamp roses, and spider lilies. As she watched, the moon seemed to turn, as it did every night, and nod in her direction.
Howdy, neighbor. Mind if I smoke?
Almost peaceful, Aunt Sally thought.
Except that someone—one of the younger monsters—had gotten hold of the stereo in there, under the big tent, and unleashed some of that shuddering rumpus music. Thunder-and-swagger music. It didn’t last long, Caribou saw to that. Just long enough to put a big jagged crack right down the center of the evening. Break the mood. Remind Aunt Sally just how far from peaceful she’d been feeling lately. How very, terribly bored.
Probably, she thought, she should try to remember some of the younger monsters’ names, although the truth was, she couldn’t imagine what for. Had she even known their names when she’d made them? She couldn’t remember, now, but suspected she had. All she could remember with any certainty was the surprise, every time, when it did happen. When they sat up after she had finished, patting in wonder at whatever holes she’d torn in them. And she remembered her delight for them, or maybe simply for what she’d done. She’d always assumed she would understand what made it happen, someday: the transformation instead of dying, or after dying. Some of it, she knew, was simply that she’d wanted it to happen. But she never had quite figured it out. Neither had Mother, or any of the very few others who’d achieved it, accidentally or otherwise. And the fact was, Aunt Sally had stopped worrying or even wondering about it a long, long time ago.
Should she tell Caribou she had taken a secret liking to a little thunder-and-swagger music from time to time? The idea—the look of horrified disbelief, of shattered sensibility she could already envision on his gaunt, luminous sickle-moon face—made her smile, faintly. At least, she was fairly certain that she was smiling. According to Caribou, her mouth never moved, these days, except when she was Telling, doing Policy. Not even when she ate.
The music reverted to old, familiar favorites. No drums, no guitars, just a piano and a muted trumpet loping and leaning, ducking and bobbing. Victoria Spivey moaning and sighing, surrounded by snakes. That song, too, had sounded like shuddering rumpus back in its day, when Victoria Spivey had played it. Way back when Aunt Sally used to dance, too, instead of sitting out back watching the dance. When she did for herself, instead of for others. Back when she and Mother used to light out for the shacks, the little towns, the helpless husbands and sad, hungry boys, on the best, most memorable nights. The two of them twisting and spinning, in a sweatbox-cabin full of people who sweated and spun wherever she and Mother spun them.
She did miss that, sometimes. Occasionally. The doing for herself. More, she missed Mother, although that word—“miss”—wasn’t the right one. Aunt Sally did not “miss.” She simply remembered.
And because she remembered, she wondered, from time to time, exactly where Mother had gone and got to, now, with that weedy little monster she had somehow made—how had that happened? Why had that happened?—and then gotten herself addicted to. Foolish Mother. Gone these so many years. How many, now?
Aunt Sally blew smoke through her motionless mouth, the cloud of it closing over the starlight, spreading thin, dissipating. In the cattails down-hollow, frogs bleated, cicadas sawed. All the night creatures, humming their hunger. She watched the tent, the shadows on its rippling walls. Too many shadows. For the first time since … oh, when? That year the Riders came down here, created some rumpus of their own, got the whole countryside so stirred up and boiling and ripe? For the first time since then, Aunt Sally found herself musing on the world out there, just on the other side of the cane fields and pecan trees. Full of people to set spinning. Not that they’d spin any differently than the ones here did.
How many of the dancers in that tent, she wondered, watching the walls, actually were hers, were creatures she had made? Caribou, of course, but the others? Any of the others, come to think of it? Maybe she couldn’t remember their names because they weren’t hers, after all. Maybe all of hers—and there hadn’t been so very many, truly—had long since left her side. The thought jarred, even alarmed her, a little.
Was that true? It could be true.
Drawing her shawl tighter on her cold, cold arms, Aunt Sally pushed her bare feet into the night-wet grass and set her chair rocking. Had Mother been her last? Sometimes, Aunt Sally forgot she had even made Mother. Certainly, she hadn’t meant to. What God There Was—which was what she had always called whatever God there is—had apparently sensed that she needed a companion, was going to die of boredom or loneliness without one. And for once, What God There Was had shown mercy, fulfilled a wish she hadn’t realized she was wishing.
Or else—more likely—He’d sat up there in His hollow, outside His own tent, watching the shadows He had made. He had gazed down the years and seen a new opportunity, a whole new sort of suffering he could inflict on His long-suffering Sally: He’d give her a companion. And then her companion would leave her.
So in the end, was any of it her doing? His?
Either way, it had happened. She had been bored, lonely, both. So bored and lonely that she could no longer imagine herself before or after boredom or loneliness. And then she had found Mother and made her.
Maybe that was what happened in those moments. Maybe the changing really was caused or catalyzed simply by need, when the need was strong enough.
Or maybe when the need was most reciprocated? Or did the process require a specific sort of need, at a specific time? Or was it chance? Luck?
Policy?
To herself, rocking in the grass, watching the moon vanish downriver, Aunt Sally snorted. Smiled. Thought she smiled.
The flap at the back of the revival tent parted, and Caribou emerged, white as moonlight, long as a river-reed, eyes round and dark and skittish as a deer’s. He stopped a moment before approaching, settled his white tails-coat on his hanger-thin shoulders, straightened his bow tie. To Aunt Sally’s surprise, he had a companion in tow. She’d seen this one before, of course, but not for a while. She thought she might have known his name, once, but hadn’t the slightest idea of it, now. What did it matter?
And what could he possibly want or wish for that Caribou would believe she might acknowledge or grant?
“Tuck your shirt in,” she heard Caribou say.
His companion—bearded, in a flannel work shirt that looked warm, to Aunt Sally, comfortable, yes, she liked that shirt—mumbled out of his drunken mouth. But he risked a single glance in Aunt Sally’s direction, caught sight of her, and did as he was told.
How long, Aunt Sally wondered, since she had even spoken to any of them but Caribou? Were they stopping coming to her? Forgetting she was out here, even? Surely not. But the nights did keep stretching out, now, spooling away down the grasslands, slow and muddy as the Mississippi, bored by their own movement, moving anyway. With a sigh, she waved a hand at Caribou, the sign to approach.
“Your stocking’s down again,” Caribou said to her as he stepped out of the moonlight, under her canopy, into her circle of shadow. And Aunt Sally sighed again, this time in something like contentment. It was Caribou’s voice, more than anything, that she enjoyed. That impeccable tone. Groomsman, servant, grandson, lover, all at the same time. Her lily-white Man of the South, who did whatever she told him.
It had bored Mother, that tone. Mother liked her lovers louder, or full of music.
“So pick it up,” she snapped.
Caribou’s mouth twitched—in delight, controlled delight, he knew she preferred his exasperation—and he started to raise one of his ridiculously long arms in protest. Then he dropped to one knee to fix her stocking. Aunt Sally smiled. Thought she smiled. She ignored Caribou completely, pretended to focus on his companion. Silly devil-goatee beard, big fat bruise on his pasty-white cheek, as though he had been fighting. Abruptly, she did remember something about this one: he had a tattoo of a wasp on his neck. There it was, when he dropped and tilted his head to keep from looking at her too directly, seemingly crawling up his throat toward his ear. Right where she had told him his dream said he should get it. Gullible, pasty goatee-moron.
“Aunt Sally,” he said, all respectful and proper, the way Caribou always told the ridiculous ones they had to be. “We’re hungry. And tired.”
Again, she sighed, feeling Caribou’s fingers crawling up under her skirt, reattaching her stocking. Lingering, not lingering? He liked her to wonder. She liked him to wonder if she did.
“So you’re speaking for all of them, child?” she purred, and whatever Caribou’s hands were or weren’t doing under her skirt, they stopped. He looked up from under his elegant, artfully gelled swoosh of blond hair, like a baby anticipating a story.
Well, Aunt Sally couldn’t resist that. Never could. She smiled—thought she smiled—at the wasp-goatee man, and patted Caribou on the top of the head, let her fingers spread along his scalp, through all that beautiful, beautiful blond.
“It has been awhile,” she said.
“Yes,” said Wasp-goatee, all mesmerized. “We were all saying so.”
“And the nights do get long.”
“So long.” The moron’s voice, his whole body, quivered.
“And you think it’s time for a Party?”
Under her skirt, Caribou’s hands tightened on her thighs. Then they started sliding up. He couldn’t help it, poor boy. He was so utterly hers, always had been. He gazed up at her from way down deep in his hypnotized deer-eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Aunt Sally, let’s. It has been so long.”
“It has,” she said, and closed her legs. She shoved Caribou back, hard, on his haunches, and grabbed the gaze of the goateed one, held it until he started to sway. “A Party. We’ll need some guests.”
“Guests. Yes,” said the goateed one.
Once more, Aunt Sally thought of Mother. She wondered if she could get word to her, somehow. Invite her to a celebration, in honor of her return home. Preferably without her Whistling fool, though she could bring him, too, if she had to. Either way, maybe Mother would come. Maybe she would stay this time.
Aunt Sally smiled. Thought she smiled. “Good. Well, then. In that case.” She stretched out her own beautiful long-fingered hands, nodded at Wasp-goatee. “Come here, son. Tell Aunt Sally what you’ve dreamed.”
2
“Rebecca, come on,” Jack said, leaping free of his spinning chair in mid-spin to alight in front of her. He spread his arms, grinned, and the suction-cup dart sticking out of his forehead waggled like an antenna. “Do the thing.”
Beside Rebecca in the next cubicle over, Kaylene’s stream of muttering intensified. “Come here, little Pookas. Come here, little Pookas, comeherecomeherecomehere…” Her fingers punched repeatedly at her keyboard, and out of the tiny computer speakers came the twinkling music and popping sounds that accompanied so many of Rebecca’s nights working the Crisis Center, as Kaylene’s Dig Dug inflated and exploded her enemies.
“Comeherecomeherecomehere SHIT!” Kaylene, too, leapt to her feet, joined Jack in front of Rebecca’s desk. Her beautiful black hair had overrun its clip, as usual, and poured over her face and shoulders.
“Tell Rebecca to do the thing,” said Jack, grabbing Kaylene around the waist and glancing over his shoulder. “Marlene, put the book down, get over here.”
“Rebecca, do the thing,” Kaylene said. “MarlenePooka, don’t make me come over there.”
In the far corner of the room, where she always set up so she could study but never stayed, Marlene sighed. She stood, straightened her glasses, put a hand through her red-orange, leaves-in-autumn hair. Not for the first time, Rebecca felt a flicker of jealousy about Marlene: too much work ethic and hair color for any one person. Especially a person who could barely be bothered to comb all that hair, let alone care about it, and who also knew when it was time to put the Advanced Calculus and Cryptography textbook down and come help her closest friends bug her other closest friend.
Then, as always, Rebecca’s jealousy melted away as Marlene took up her position, linked arms with Jack, and grinned down at Rebecca, still seated at her desk with the Campus Lifeline Crisis Center manual she knew by heart tucked right where it belonged against the special blue Campus Lifeline phone, complete with idiotic life-preserver logo. Rebecca watched them beam down at her. Jack and the ’Lenes.
For an awful, ridiculous second, she thought she was going to burst into tears. Happy tears.
“Rebeccccaaaaa,” Jack chanted, and the suction-cup dart on his forehead bobbed, whisked the tears away. “Read our minds…”
“Okay, okay, okay, stop waggling that thing at me.” Controlling her smile, Rebecca glanced across their faces. Her eyes caught Kaylene’s.
“Do. Your. Thing,” Kaylene said.
“Fine. Stop thinking about her,” said Rebecca. “She’s safe now. Mrs. Groch’s looking after her. And she’s got you, now. She’ll figure it out.”
“Fuck you, Rebecca,” Kaylene said, and burst out laughing. “How do you do that? I haven’t said one word about the Shelter tonight. I don’t think I’ve said a word about it this whole week. I don’t remember saying one thing to you about—”
“She’s a witch,” Marlene said, through her perpetually exhausted Marlene-smile. “Do me.”
It took Rebecca a second, only because she wanted to check
herself, make sure. Then she shrugged, nudged a strand of her own mousy brown bangs out of her eyes. “Too easy.”
“Oh my God, you bitch, you’ve got Twinkies,” Kaylene said, broke free of Jack’s arm, and dove for Marlene’s backpack. Marlene started to whirl, give chase, but there was no point. Kaylene was already elbows deep in Marlene’s backpack, shoveling aside organic chem textbooks, notebooks, calculator, tissues, until she came up with the crumpled pack in her fist. Strawberry flavor, tonight.
“Really?” Kaylene said, straightening. “You weren’t going to share these?”
“Actually, I wasn’t even going to open them, I don’t think. They just … called to me out the PopShop window.”
“Well, now they’re calling me.” Kaylene tore open the package and offered Marlene a piece of her own late-night snack. Marlene’s perpetual and permanent late-night snack. The secret, she claimed, of all-night cramming.
“My turn,” said Jack, putting his hands behind his back, standing at a sort of parade rest in his baggy shorts and blue bowling-team button-up shirt, with the dart sticking straight out from his head.
“You look like a unicorn,” she said, and Jack’s green eyes blinked, then flashed in his cookie-dough face. That was what he actually looked like, Rebecca thought. Not a unicorn, but a cookie. Purple-frosted, with spearmint leaves for eyes.
Over his shoulder, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, she could see the black gum trees melting into their moonshadows along Campus Walk. The light from this room was practically the only light in the quad, which didn’t seem particularly strange at 1 a.m. in East Dunham, New Hampshire, in early August, with the great majority of UNH-D students still elsewhere for another few weeks. And yet, tonight, the dark looked deeper out there, for some reason.
Because I am so aware of this island in it, Rebecca thought, and felt herself fighting back tears again, grateful tears. Because I am so happy I washed up here. She glanced into the corner, saw Marlene’s hair spilling into Kaylene’s, red into black, as they elbowed each other and fought over strawberry Twinkie crumbs. Then they were up, laughing, Kaylene making biting-mouth motions over her fingers like a Ms. Pac-Man, burbling like a Dig Dug.
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