I reach the stables. The thick smoke inside is keeping most of the bees away, but a few still hover lazily.
A woman rushes past me, carrying a bundle in her arm, a baby. In her other hand is a pitchfork. This is what she thinks she needs right now. This is how her brain is working.
“Ortiz!” I cry out.
I don’t wait for a response before I run over to his cot and flip it over. James has come up beside me and together we search through a pile of old magazines and scattered playing cards until we find my envelope. I snatch it and straighten up, covering my mouth and nose with the sleeve of my shirt to shield myself from the smoke.
I turn to the doorway and stop. Farrah’s there, gripping Leo’s old shotgun. Her copper hair is undone, puffed as if she’s been swatting at it. Her dark pants are coated in dust, and her sweat-soaked shirt clings to her skin; it’s the most savage I’ve ever seen her. The hand not holding the shotgun is gripping Bell by the shoulder, keeping her steady. The little girl seems to see me but not really. She mumbles my name, her head lolling.
“Did you do this, Bell?” I run toward her. “Did you bring the bees?”
The little girl is too out of it to answer. I look to Farrah and see her eyes locked on a spot behind me, where James is standing. I know the expression in her eyes: betrayal laced with confusion. I saw it in Odette, on the night of the traveling show, when she watched James lean in and say something that made Farrah light up with laughter. I saw it in Lane, when the headmistress at the girls’ home was whipping her butt with a paddle and I just stood by. I saw it in Raoul, in the stables, when I walked in on him and Leo. And I saw it in Bell, when I left her in the desert to die.
She wants to know, but is too proud to ask, why, when all hell was breaking loose, did James help me and not her?
James offers no explanation. There isn’t time for one anyway. He darts in the direction of the horses. He opens their pens and smacks their sides to get them moving.
“Let’s go,” James commands. “Everyone. Now.”
“Her foot,” Farrah says, motioning to Bell.
I look down and see that Bell’s foot is a mangled mess, crushed and bleeding, as if it’s been trampled. James scoops her up with one hand and throws her over his shoulder. He leans in to Farrah and says something I can’t hear. Farrah doesn’t respond; she pretends he’s not even there.
“Go!” James shouts. “To the trucks.”
We follow his command and run. Outside, the noise is awful: the low symphonic hum of the bees, the screaming of horses and humans, the screeches and pops of fire.
Camp burns. The buildings are on fire. People are on fire. Bodies—puffed from stings or slashed by coas—litter the ground. The white horses thunder past me, on their way to run wild in the desert. Where will they go? How long will they last?
James races past me, a limp Bell still slung over his shoulder. Most of the trucks are already gone, and another is in the process of pulling away.
I’ve lost sight of Farrah, so I look over my shoulder. She’s several yards back, doubled over and gasping for breath.
“Farrah, run!” I shout.
She ignores me, and instead straightens up to better scan the camp. She must be searching for her father. He might be on one of the trucks already, but with his bad leg it’s more likely he didn’t make it.
I watch as bees land on Farrah’s face and the exposed skin of her arms. She shrieks, stumbles forward a few feet, drops her rifle, and falls to the ground.
“Get up!” I cry out.
“Sarah!” James shouts from up ahead. “Sarah, move!”
I stop, bracing my hands on my knees, and try to catch my breath. I can see James at the truck, placing Bell in the cab and then working to hot-wire the engine. A group of jimadors advances toward him. They’re covered in blood. They’re holding coas covered in blood. James sees them and stops working for just as long as it takes to get his knife out from his boot and clamp it between his teeth. Then he shifts his focus back on the engine.
At the back of the pack of advancing jimadors is Odette. She notices Farrah, stalled and helpless, and breaks off in her direction. A couple of bees wander across Odette’s nearly bare skull, but her attention is fixed. She’s gripping the handle of a coa just as she would to strike maguey. She’s limping because of her bad foot.
“Farrah!” I shout, bolting in her direction.
Farrah turns and sees Odette. She digs her fingers into the dirt, clutching the earth as if it will keep her steady.
I hear the truck roar to life behind me.
I’m fast, but Odette had too much of a lead on me. She advances, lifting her coa, readying for a strike that she knows will land true. Her face is . . . radiant, lit with pride and happiness. She is finally doing something. She is finally making things right.
I’m closer now, just a few yards away. Farrah cranes her neck to look up at Odette. Her hair, even now, glitters in the sun. She blinks at the crescent of metal that hovers over her face. She says nothing, doesn’t even open her mouth. Her head shifts to the side a little; her brows crease, as if she’s silently asking a question. Without answering that question and without mercy, Odette drives the blade into Farrah’s neck.
I watch it all: Farrah, lifting her hand to her throat, as if she could knit the skin there back together; Odette, raising the coa again; Farrah, collapsing, her blood soaking into the strands of her hair. I scream. Over the sound of my scream comes the blare of a horn. I turn my head, and there, almost a hundred yards out, is the truck, headed toward the horizon without me.
I feel a warm, slick hand grasp mine. It belongs to Odette. I know that without even having to look. She tightens her grip and tries to pull me with her back to camp, as if that’s where she and I and all the other cursed souls belong. I don’t want to look down at Farrah again, but I can hear her: gurgling, gasping, her legs kicking helplessly against the dirt. I smell the fresh blood, earthy and bright, and I gag.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “We never meant for this to happen.”
Odette tilts her head and gazes at me, confused. Her expression is just like Farrah’s was when she saw the coa blade raised above her head. I pull my hand away and take off in the direction of the truck.
James isn’t slowing for me. I dodge the other jimadors and then break into open ground. When I’ve made up half the distance, I see James lean across the cab and throw open the passenger door. I push harder, get as close as I can, and lunge forward. My fingers miss the door by inches, and I crash to the ground, landing on my knees in a creosote bush. I spit into the dirt and squint up toward the truck. James still hasn’t slowed. He knows how fast I can run and that I can make it.
I haul myself up and take off again, my right knee bursting with pain. The passenger door is still open. I hear the rush of blood behind my ears, a rush of wind, and the sound of my boots hitting the ground. It’s just like being on a horse. Britain. My Britain.
Something in my brain switches, and I feel no pain. I reach the open door, get a solid hold on the frame with both my hands, and launch myself into the cab. I slam the door shut behind me, and the cab is quiet. The engine is loud, yes, but at least the screams from camp are drowned out.
I straighten up in the seat and notice Bell flopped against James, her eyes barely open. She’s been stung, but not too many times from what I can see. I’m dizzy. I lean forward and put my head between my knees. I can still smell the blood—Farrah’s blood—on my shirt. It’s sticky between my fingers. I’m certain I’ll throw up, but after a few moments, the nausea passes.
I sit back and look to James. There’s a large welt underneath his ear. His face is flushed, and he’s sweating like he’s fevered.
“She brought the bees,” I gasp. “She wanted the Real Marvelous to disappear. She told me. She put a curse on you. Your finger.”
James says nothing. He just stares straight ahead. I can see the tight cords of muscle in his neck. He’s hurting, and I’m not sure I c
an ever fix him.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I tried.”
That’s not good enough, and we know it. We killed Farrah, the both of us, together. James shakes his head, just slightly, indicating that he doesn’t want to talk about it.
TWENTY-EIGHT
It’s easy to lie.
Like this: My name is Sofia Hale. My husband’s name is John. We have an adopted, copper-haired daughter named Frances. We’re from Chicago, where John worked as a mechanic in the rail yards and I worked as a waitress until we’d saved enough money to move south and buy this cheap parcel of land. We live in a modest ranch house we call the Lone Crow in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua.
That last part isn’t a lie. Neither is all this: We bought the land we live on from our friend Leo Sanchez and hope to expand upon it soon. Our principal crop is maguey, which, after harvesting, we send off to be distilled into mescal.
We’ve heard from others about what happened up north, at the Real Marvelous, about how, after suffering one too many indignities, the jimadors staged an uprising. They set fire to the crops and killed the men in charge. They burned the camp to the ground. Whoever was left after that, fled—disappeared like dust. The land is empty, but no one wants it now. People say it’s cursed.
We do not kid ourselves in the desert: life is hard here, even in the best of circumstances. We still work all day in the sun, harvesting our own crops.
JAMES AND I sleep in the same bed at night. We have for a long time. It’s only when we’re lying side by side together under layers of wool blankets that I call him James and he calls me Sarah. Our real names have become our gifts to each other. When James says my name, he runs his hands through my chestnut brown hair—I’ve come to like it shaggy and short—and he studies me with his moss-green eyes. Sometimes he says my full name, Sarah Jacqueline, and drags it out long. But he doesn’t do that as much as he used to.
“Are you happy?” he asks.
“Yes,” I reply. This is sometimes a lie, sometimes not. It’s hard to be happy when guilt and memories come and crush me with a force that nearly cracks my spine. But sometimes we lie for the people we love.
Also, sometimes James thinks things he doesn’t say. I can tell when he does this. He didn’t do it before he took the job at the house at the Real Marvelous. I’ve accepted it, but I don’t like it. A part of him has been chipped off and is lost to me. Maybe not forever. I hope not forever.
I believe that James really did love Farrah. I want to think that’s because he’s always loved people with imperfections, people that my grandmother used to refer to as crooked timber, but I don’t know if it’s fair to describe Farrah this way.
James didn’t save Farrah, though. He saved me. This means something.
Only once did I ask him why he chose me, and he didn’t answer.
James tells me he loves me, and I wonder if the spell he was under is wearing off. He says it when he runs his hands through my hair at night and calls me Sarah. But there’s something between us, like we haven’t forgiven each other completely. I sometimes catch James staring at me, like he’s just remembering I’m here. His hands still don’t always feel like his hands, even with fresh callouses. This worries me. But we’ve started to laugh again.
He has this scar on the side of his mouth. When he smiles it tugs up, like a needle pulling thread through fabric.
I believe him when he tells me he thought he was doing the right thing by marrying Farrah, the right thing for both of us. He was wrong, but he thought he was right.
Late one night, as we’re sitting around a campfire with Leo, James tells me something I’d suspected when we were at the Real Marvelous. Farrah knew about Truth or Consequences. James let her in on this secret the night before they were married in El Paso. Farrah never held it over our heads, James said, but still he had to think of a way to protect me. He had to come up with a plan.
“You should never have made a plan without me,” I said. “That never works. We have to do things together.”
“We have to do things together,” he echoed.
Leo had been looking off into the dark distance, but he turned his head, and his eyes locked onto mine. They shone in the firelight. I knew he was going to tell me something about lies and liars, and how they’re both inescapable because they’re part of the fabric of this earth. Lies built empires here and have destroyed things much bigger than the Real Marvelous.
Instead, he smiled and said, “I’m glad you finally made it here, Sarah Jac.”
JAMES AND I have never gone back to Chicago to get Lane her proper grave marker, and I’ve let go of that plan. But there’s a canyon out here, a big, deep one with the thinnest trickling river at the bottom. I’ve named it Lane, which was actually James’ idea, and sometimes I go and sit on the edge and tell Lane about my life. Or I lie on my back and watch the stars with Lane right there next to me. I’ve always had these little things of hers, a lock of hair or a necklace, but now I’ve given her something ancient and big, and that’s better, I think.
Bell and I still go out riding together. She’s now on her own horse. I’ve taught her how to tell time from the angle of shadows and how to use a knife to shave the spines off a nopal cactus so that she can eat one if she ever finds herself lost or her canteen runs out of water. At the house, I’ve shown her how to catch yeast in a clean jar and eventually make bread from it.
She’s a quick learner, and I’m proud of her. Sometimes, though, she has nightmares. She wakes up screaming, but can never remember what it was she was dreaming about. She doesn’t say much about her sister, but maybe she will as time goes on. Or maybe she won’t. I won’t press her on it. I know it’s good to have secrets about a sister, so that she’ll live brightly in the heart and no one else will ever be able to claim her.
Bell likes it when James tells her stories, the ones he says aren’t true but really are, the ones about two orphan girls who run away from a boardinghouse and have adventures in a big city. She will, at random times, smell smoke when there’s nothing on fire. She claims, on some mornings, that the birds are talking to her, trying to give her a message. I’ve caught her before, standing outside as the sun rises, whispering to the wind. And just once, as she was doing this, I watched as a dust devil whipped by.
By mistake, we have made a family, and I hope it won’t break. I hope I don’t break it.
After Bell and I go out riding, I usually drop her off at the house and take off by myself. My new horse is a red roan. I haven’t given her a name yet. She’s strong and fast. We go far together. I often wonder, when we’re tearing across the desert, what would happen if we just kept going, if I never turned her back. Would she take me all the way to the ocean?
THE END
Acknowledgments
Please allow me to thank . . .
My teachers; my students; my family; my friends, particularly the hags in the bog, particularly Stephanie Kuehn, for reading an early version of this novel and giving it its name, and Kate Hart, for reading an early version of this novel and demanding, More Eva; April Genevieve Tucholke, for her humbling words that grace the back of the book; all the readers, teachers, librarians, and writers I’ve met in my travels, for their kindness, their support, and for allowing me to bend their ears; my dream team at Algonquin Young Readers, including Krestyna Lypen, Elise Howard, Eileen Lawrence, Trevor Ingerson, Jacquelynn Burke, and one of the earliest true fans of this novel, Sarah Alpert; my agent, Claire Anderson-Wheeler at Regal Hoffman, for loving this novel in the blink of an eye; Michelle Andelman, for loving it first; the town and people of Marfa, Texas; and, lastly, my dear Jeff, who loves the West more than anyone I know.
There are many works of art that influenced All the Wind in the World, and I’d like to mention some of them here, including the novels Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins; Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel; Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi; and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The character of Sarah Jacqueline was inspired in
part by the character of Mia in Andrea Arnold’s film Fish Tank, and there is no way my novel would exist without the extraordinary influence of Terrence Malick’s film Days of Heaven. Thank you to these artists for their art.
Samantha Mabry grew up in Texas playing bass guitar along to vinyl records, writing fan letters to rock stars, and reading big, big books, and credits her tendency toward magical thinking to her Grandmother Garcia, who would wash money in the kitchen sink to rinse off any bad spirits. She teaches writing and Latino literature at a community college in Dallas, Texas, where she lives with her husband, a historian, and her pets, including a cat named Mouse. She is the author of the novels A Fierce and Subtle Poison and All the Wind in the World. Visit her online at samanthamabry.com or on Twitter: @samanthamabry.
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