The circumstances fell into place as Molly pulled him quickly across the marbled entry way, lit in the sheen of a few lamps. They were in the Malvern’s mansion. Garret had come here to check on Molly. How had they ended up in bed together? Yelling and stomping were spreading all directions above them.
“Molly,” he hissed, following her quickly across a lavish study. “What’s going on?”
Molly was sobbing as if her heart was breaking. “There’s no time now, Garret. Hurry.”
Her crying was no longer frightened, or even desperate. It was despairing. The sound of it raised the hair on Garret’s neck. He tugged her to a stop in the middle of the galley, beside the huge twelve-burner-plate stove.
“Molly, what hap—” With a sickening rush, he remembered grabbing Mr. Malvern’s wrist, possibly breaking it. He remembered a frosty trek through the forest. He remembered—
Molly tugged him quickly aside, pulling them both into a walk-in pantry. She hurried them both to the back, then squeezed in behind a couple large wooden bins. He knelt with her, his bare thighs touching hers in the cramped space. He took her hands. She laid a finger on his lips to silence him, and waited. The earthy acridity of onions and a trickle of light around the pantry door filled the silence between them.
The stomping and yelling broke at the bottom of the staircase, diverging into two search groups, one sweeping the mansion clockwise, the other counterclockwise. More servants, probably all of them, had joined the fray. The first group entered the galley. Garret and Molly rested their heads against each other and waited.
Mr. Malvern was cursing gods, people, and especially blacksmith’s sons. The pantry door opened. Garret and Molly held their breath. It closed again, and the party moved on, but not before Garret heard the sound of a rifle lever being worked. Garret’s throat closed up. He actually means to kill me.
Garret felt his blood run cold. He heard me yelling as I woke up. He heard Molly trying to quiet me. She was crying. Garret swallowed a stone.
He thinks I raped her.
The stone grew bigger.
And now he thinks I’ve kidnapped her.
A terrible voice rose somewhere in the house. It was so cold, so devoid of anything human, that Garret did not at first recognize it as belonging to Mr. Malvern.
“Boy, when I find you, I will cut you apart. Slowly. Then I will feed you to my dogs.”
Molly started shivering uncontrollably.
“Molly,” Garret whispered, but she laid a finger on his lips again.
“Garret,” she replied, so low he almost missed it. “We can’t see each other anymore.”
Everything stopped. The search. The fear. The turning of the world. Garret’s heart. Everything.
“What… what do you mean?”
She dropped her hand away from his mouth, and for a split-second, it seemed like she was going to lay it on his bare heart, but instead she took it away entirely.
“I can’t see you anymore, Garret.” All the tone faded from her words. They became flat, toneless. “It’s over, you and I.”
It would be easy to say Garret’s heart broke. Far too easy. His everything broke. His heart ripped down the middle, slowly with an audible tearing sound, like a screaming animal, being ripped limb from limb. Everything in the world just walked away and left him.
He tried to take her face between his hands.
She pulled away. “I mean it,” she said, her face crumpling.
Without another word, she stood. “Garret, I’m going to distract them. When I do, you go down into the cellar, take some of the gardener’s clothes and go home. I don’t want to see you again.”
Garret was five years old. Panicked. Hoarse. “No, don’t leave me. Please don’t go.”
“Run, Garret,” she whispered. Then she was out of the pantry and gone.
It was stupid. It was irrational. It wasn’t Molly at all. Garret slumped against the wall for a second, then fumbled after her, crying. He caught her as she was about to leave the galley. He pulled their naked bodies together and kissed her for everything he was worth, which wasn’t much since he was crying. She pulled away. She pulled back her hand to slap him. She didn’t want to, but she was trying to do it anyway. It bewildered and terrified him.
Footsteps approached through the house. One of the search parties was coming back around. She pointed across the galley towards the cellar door. “Go Garret,” she bawled, frustrated, angry, despairing. “Go!”
He did, nearly blind, but he found the door and went down into the dark. He stumbled down the steps, a shell of a sixteen year old. A scraped out place where perhaps things would come to die. Nothing else would want to be inside him.
His hands worked without his command now. They didn’t find any clothing, but they did find yet another horse blanket, this one old and threadbare. His hands wrapped him up in it. He was turning the cellar door knob when the piercing scream came from the far side of the mansion.
“Daddy, help me!”
Every pair of feet in the house ran towards the scream, directly away from the cellar. Garret coughed out some tears and went out into the early morning.
* * *
The trek home was a long one. It would have been lengthy at any time, but in Garret’s state, it might as well have been an age. The trees passed slowly on either side of his plodding steps. His shivers came and went. The pain in his body was constant, but irrelevant. His bare feet complained about the rutted rocky road for a while, but eventually they fell to numb silence and he treaded across dirt and frozen puddles without feeling a difference between them. He was hollowed out. Ripped out.
Mile after mile the twisting roads fell behind him, winding around the sides of the hills, guiding him through dark stands of trees which opened into foggy glades, their air thin with late autumn cold. When his house at last arrived through the scenery, it came as an unwelcome sight. Frost clung to the low roof. Fog lay in tatters in the yard. All was frigid and uninviting, save for the single lamp in his and Sarn’s bedroom. The front door hinges were frozen, and they crackled in protest as he entered.
The house was as cold and lifeless on the inside as it was on the out. The entryway was dark and so was the kitchen. He was starving. A partial loaf of bread lay on the counter. He took it and began eating mechanically. Down the hall, his parents’ bedroom door was closed and dark. Only the door to his and Sarn’s room was open, a warm glow falling out of it. Lamplight, a single flame. The only warm, simple thing he’d seen in a long time. When he dragged himself through the facing, Sarn was asleep in his bed, but he’d lit a lamp and left it burning on Garret’s side of the nightstand.
He sank to his bed and the pillow pulled him down stronger than gravity. Lying on top of the covers, still wrapped in the horse blanket, Garret dropped into an exhausted sleep. His last sight was of the partially eaten loaf falling from his fingers, and his brother’s sleeping back beyond.
* * *
Garret slept so deeply that when he awoke, he had no idea how much time had passed. He had no memory of dreams, only of his frozen feet awakening him at some point, burning like fire. His body hurt him cruelly, that much was certain. Almost as bad as his heart. Out the window, evening was settling to night. He’d slept the whole day, then. The smell of ham and eggs and biscuits filled the air. Ma had made dinner. She never made dinner. Garret had no idea when he’d last eaten, but the smell of food didn’t stir any life in him. Sweet Jesus, it hurt to stand.
Beaten, bloody, and still wrapped in a reeking horse blanket, he trailed into the kitchen.
He expected his parents to rise and run to him, demanding to know where he had been, checking his injuries, demanding he sit down and eat. He wondered dully why they had not done so already. According to the clock, he’d slept for fifteen hours. Even his mother would fret over him at this late juncture, if for no other reason than to make sure everyone knew what a good mother she was.
But instead they did nothing. Sarn was absent. Only Ma and Pa
were at the table. It was stacked with fried ham, more than five people could eat. Biscuits steamed in a cloth-covered basket. Pa was slathering butter on one. So it was breakfast for dinner then.
Where’s Sarn?
Ma kept eating slowly. Her eyes on Garret. One of her inscrutable expressions on her face. Despite his own mental and emotional wreckage, Garret picked up on the tension in the air. There was always tension of varying degrees in the house, but it was usually tension of strife, discord, and dysfunction. This was the tension of a hangman’s noose, stretched taut by the weight of a dead body.
Garret slumped against the door frame, eyeing the food.
“Garret, your father and I need to talk to you.” She said it as she said most things: a curt demand. Garret knew that tone. The food wasn’t worth it. They would go to bed before long, and he could come back and eat leftovers then. He turned to go back to his bedroom.
“Garret!”
Garret halted and faced the table. Maybe this would work better. Ma would berate him, or do whatever. All he had to do was stand there until she was done, then he could collect some food and go back to bed. He didn’t have to say anything. From the center of the table, Ma snatched a letter Garret hadn’t noticed.
“Mr. Malvern’s butler delivered this not an hour ago,” she said.
“You read it to him, Garrett,” she spat out, thrusting the letter at Pa.
Pa took the letter as if it was a handkerchief contaminated with scarlet fever. He donned his spectacles, and began reading in a defeated tone of voice.
Of course he’s defeated, Garret thought dully. When has he ever not been?
Pa’s voice broke after the salutation. He laid the letter down, dropped his spectacles atop it, and pressed his hands together around the bridge of his nose as if he was trying not to cry. Garret was feeling sick again. In addition to hurting inside and out.
“Garret, did you do it?” His Pa asked at length. “Did you take his daughter’s innocence?”
His Ma stared at him, all haughty accusation.
“No,” Garret said dumbly, shaking his head.
“Then why does he say you did!” Ma demanded, gesturing to the letter. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us, Garret? Your father and I work ourselves to death building a home and a life for you, and this is how you repay us! You spit on our name and ruin our family? We’re ruined Garret! Malvern can do anything he wants! You did this to us. You!”
“I didn’t,” Garret said weakly.
“Garret!” His Ma screeched, slapping the table. “Where are your clothes?!”
“I…” Garret trailed off. Absolute horror crept over him, but not for the thought of ruining his family. What if he had done something to Molly? He didn’t remember much other than awakening in bed with her, naked. He was out of his head and she was crying and trying to shush him.
Oh Christ, why was she crying?
She had told him she didn’t want to see him again. She had tried to make herself slap him. She would never do something like that. Yet she had. She was so beautiful, and sometimes he wanted to make love to her so badly he couldn’t stand it, but not like this. If he had forced her to do something. If he had hurt her…
“Oh Jesus,” Garret whimpered. He sank to his knees. He curled up on the floor and thought about killing himself.
“Garret!” It was his Ma. Nothing could block her out.
“What did you do? Tell me!”
Why did she care? What difference did it make now?
“Garret!” She was going wild, the pitch of her voice rising to the hysteria it sometimes had only before things got really bad. “Answer me right now, young man!”
Garret crawled away from her. He saw the hallway through his blurry vision and went for it.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me!”
She stepped on the end of the blanket. He let her pull it free, though it embarrassed him for his mother to see him undressed more than anyone else. He didn’t know why, but he would rather have stood naked in the town’s square than let her see him without clothes. Nonetheless, he let go of the blanket and crawled away. Anything to escape her. I hurt Molly, he thought. I hurt her. I deserve to die.
His Ma hastened around him and stood in his bedroom door, blocking the way. He stopped, still on all fours. He hung his head while she screamed and screamed. Eventually she stopped. She was waiting for an answer. Or something. God, he didn’t know what she wanted. He’d never understood what she wanted from him. Where was Pa in all this? Oh there he was, still sitting at the table with his head in his hands.
Out of her blither, a single sentence came through to him. And it was the wrong one.
“How dare you tell Sarn he’s your brother! My loins would never give birth to someone as stupid and banal as that! I’ll run him out on the rails! I’ll make your father beat him like the bastard child he is! Then you’ll finally learn to stay here and do as I—”
Garret rose and stood on his frost burned feet. His vision was blasted clean of color, his hearing sharpened until he could hear the wind whispering through the cracks in the walls and the feet of a mouse in the dirt below, his sense of smell so intense that he knew what the pigs had been eating before they’d become the ham on the table.
“Don’t ever say that again!” Garret roared in her face.
She cowered, changing instantly from an angry woman to a frightened little girl. She backed away, but Garret stayed right with her, in her face.
“If you ever touch him like you touched me, I’ll kill you! Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!” Strength surged through his battered limbs and poured out his mouth like boiling water. The sleep and bread must have done more for him than he’d thought. “Stay away from him!”
He had her backed against the opposite wall of the bedroom. Without moving out of her way, he pointed around himself at the door. “Get out.”
Cringing and whimpering, she ducked around him and went.
* * *
Garret slogged to the top of the hill and exhaled a long breath. It plumed white in front of him. His frost burned feet were killing him, but his rage was in control, so the pain was almost exhilarating. His shotgun was in his right hand, his knapsack loaded with biscuits and ham over his right shoulder. He’d chowed down earlier, and he’d do it again in a minute. It was making him a new man. Babe clung close to his side. Garret felt great. Raging and seeing and hearing and feeling more clearly than ever before.
Now he understood. His Ma was to blame. She was the one responsible for the hell in which they all lived. It was her fault Sarn was a mess. It was her fault Molly had thrown Garret out. It was all her fault. Babe whined and pressed herself against Garret’s leg. She rolled her eyes up at her master in abject fear. He smiled at his beloved dog and ruffled her behind the ears. It probably wasn’t a very sane smile but he laughed with it anyway.
“What’s wrong girl? Are you hungry?” He reached into his sack and pulled out a biscuit for her.
She ignored it, pressed tighter to his leg and stared up at him.
Garret ate it instead, shoved the whole thing in his mouth and chomped on it, not because he wanted it, but just because he could. Ma hadn’t offered him anything to eat, even though he did more work than she and Pa combined. So he’d taken a bunch of the food with him when he went just because he felt like it.
He was clothed too, which was good, though he only vaguely remembered ripping clothes out of his bureau and grabbing his raccoon hunting rifle. He didn’t remember untying Babe at all. Ah well.
The biscuit felt amazingly good in his stomach. So he ate another one, and after offering Babe a slice of ham, which she ignored with plaintive whine, he ate that too.
Garret descended from the crown of the hill, following a deer path down through the trees. Babe stayed as close to him as she could. Through the shadows, he caught sight of a rocky outcropping, jutting from the side of the hill. He detoured, emerging from the trees onto the prominence. Moonlight coa
ted the frozen valley below him. The old trees covered the hillsides, ascending from deciduous hardwoods down low, to dark evergreens up high. Whether bare branches or dark needles, everything wore the sparkling sharpness of frost.
Babe pressed herself against his leg.
“Go find me a raccoon, girl.”
She stared up at him, her tail curled.
“Go!”
She scurried away, searching for scent.
Garret sighed. They’d have to get off the mountain top before they’d find anything. Most of the raccoons were already holed-up for the winter anyway. God it’s gonna feel good to shoot something. Babe was wandering down over the side of the hill. Garret rejoined the deer trail, and followed it in the general downward direction Babe had gone.
What did Molly think she was doing anyhow, throwing him out like that? Garret hadn’t hurt her. Surely. He’d never hurt her. So why had she? In the back of his mind, he knew he wasn’t thinking right. It didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right. He’d lost everything he held dear, except Sarn, who was nowhere to be found. I can’t think about this anymore. He wanted to laugh and scream and run and sleep and drop dead all at the same time. Maybe I’m going crazy.
Babe sounded off. It was the bark and howl she used when she’d found a trail fresh enough to pursue. Garret left the path to follow his instincts. His head still hurt, and his feet were bothering him fiercely, but the pain meant none of the flesh was actually dead, so again, the pain was almost exhilarating.
Babe howled, warming to the chase. Garret picked up his pace. As she barked, he sent an encouraging whistle winging after her. He used it frequently with her: a long note that rose at the end like a bobwhite’s call, letting her know she was doing well. He descended the hill to a cleft where it joined the next, crossed a trickling stream between them and started the climb up the other hill. His feet made the going even slower than usual. Babe’s barking, meanwhile, made a long loop from the right-hand incline, over the top, back around the crown on the hill and down into the valley to the north, so Garret turned north along the slope.
Brimstone Page 21
