Daughters Unto Devils

by Amy Lukavics

  The eyes belong to a baby. A baby, standing upright in the grass, staring at me without a motion or a sound. My spine feels alive, like there are ants crawling over it deep beneath the muscle, and my breath catches in my throat.

  The baby still hasn’t moved by the time I start walking, backward, toward the front of the cabin. Even after the figure fades from my view into the shadows, I don’t turn my back in fear that it will get me. Once the front door is in sight, I bolt for it.

  I climb back into bed, my blood uneasy and my heart pounding in my ears, and that’s when the crying starts up again, just outside the wall near the well pump. Nobody stirs, and this time I am not surprised. They are not the ones being haunted.

  Haunted.

  I am being haunted by the ghost of my unborn child.

  Hannah was blue when she was born. Emily, Joanna and Charles had all been a grayish pink color, but when Hannah tore her way into this world I knew instantly that something was very wrong. There was no weak or startled cry from the still, blue baby, just a horrible wet slapping sound as she slipped out, feet first, from Ma’s torn womanhood and into Pa’s arms.

  There was no midwife, like there had been for all my other siblings and myself. The snow had been too deep to reach the village on the other side of the mountain for close to four months straight, and our tiny home in the sky was transformed into an icy prison.

  By then, we were all a little strange.

  When the baby finally came out, Ma’s guttural howls were silenced for the first time in hours.

  Emily covered her mouth and began to cry at the sight of Hannah. I stood in dumb shock, still holding Ma’s right leg up in a sort of daze. How long had it been? It felt like years since the labor had started, and I had no inkling if it was early or late. Ma’s face and hair were soaked with perspiration. There was a heavy stink in the air.

  “Please, Lord,” Pa begged under his breath, hitting the slimy, blue baby on the back with one hand while Emily and I watched. “Please, Lord.”

  Once Ma had gotten the illness four months earlier, it wouldn’t stop for anything, not desperate prayers, not a pregnancy and certainly not a snowstorm that kept us stranded without any help or extra supplies. Nobody else ever caught it; Pa said it was because her body was especially prone when with child.

  “Amanda,” Pa snapped, accusatory, as if he could sense that I hated Hannah already for what she’d done to my mother. “Help me.”

  I gently set Ma’s trembling leg down on the bed, the sheets and mattress clotted with blood and birth fluid and stinking waste. Joanna and Charles were still sitting in the opposite corner of our family’s log cabin, facing the wall and playing a game of jacks with each other like we’d told them to do when things started looking bad. They never turned, as commanded. They had no idea what was behind them. And at six and five, they shouldn’t have had to know.

  I only just got to Pa when Hannah started moving. Her tiny arms and legs flailed around like those of an overturned mountain beetle. She took sharp, violent little breaths for a few moments, and her color warmed a shade. She wasn’t crying.

  “Is my baby all right?” Ma slurred from the soaking bed as Emily wiped her face. “What’s happening?”

  “I think she’s all right,” Pa said, his voice deep and breaking apart under the stress, and that’s how Ma found out the baby was a girl.

  But I could see Pa’s face as he looked down at Hannah, whose eyelids were pulled into half-open slits as she took in those noisy little breaths. Soon, the breaths turned into weak, off-key yelps. She pawed at his hands as if fighting them away.

  Pa sliced the cord away from her navel with his knife, and I wondered if I would vomit before the night was through. Emily whimpered.

  “Why isn’t she crying?” Ma demanded again.

  I went to her side and felt her face. Still hot, searingly hot, just as it had been for hours now and for most of this winter. I wondered if Ma would ever be able to remember anything from the past four months, if she didn’t end up dying first.

  “She’s perfectly fine, Ma,” I whispered gently, and Emily looked at me in shock. Hush, I wanted to say.

  I motioned for Emily to help me clean up the bed and the area around it. We gathered the excess blankets, heavy with thickened blood, and shoved them through the freezing window, little by little, out into the snow. As I pulled the crudely cut glass panel back in, I could have sworn I heard someone call my name from outside.

  Pa had warned us that our minds might turn funny from being trapped in here all together for so long. I needed to ignore it.

  Without a word, I swiped the large tin cooking pot from the corner of the cabin and made my way to the front door. The door was still mostly jammed shut, but after beating at it for a few minutes I was able to create an opening just wide enough to scoop some snow into the pot. After wrestling the door shut again, I set the pot over the fire and waited as its contents melted away.

  There is nobody outside, I thought. I didn’t hear a thing.

  Joanna and Charles had both placed their hands over their ears by now. Hannah’s yelps continued, growing louder by the minute. None of my other siblings had sounded like this. Wasn’t it supposed to be a small bout of crying followed by calm and quiet? Or was I misremembering?

  Emily was waiting for me and the pot of hot water at the bedside, with a small pile of clothing and linen scraps in her arms. They were the last clean ones, set aside especially for the birth weeks beforehand, and we would need to use them well.

  Nobody asked about Hannah. We were too scared to. Instead, Emily and I silently dunked the fabric pieces into the water and began to clean Ma’s body of all the blood and fluids.

  Pa used one of the scraps to clean Hannah off properly, then wrapped her in the many layers of cotton and wool that Emily and I had gathered when Ma’s labor started. I held the gasping baby for a moment while Pa went over to Ma.

  Hannah’s eyes were a stunning but strange gray color, and I wondered even then why they weren’t moving to look into mine. Despite her tiny size, her cheeks were soft and puffy, and she had several thick wisps of dark hair that curled around the top and sides of her face.

  “Hello, baby,” I whispered into her ear to try and calm her, but the attempt to soothe only failed. Hannah clawed at my face, grabbed at my hair, made horrible yelling sounds. The amount of strength she had for what she had just gone through astounded me. Even healthy babies were slow and weak at first.

  The thought occurred to me that perhaps Ma’s fever had spawned a demon.

  Pa pulled a newly cleaned Ma up and propped her against the headboard. Her breaths were long and steady, and he announced that the fever was finally starting to go down, thank the Lord. Pa wriggled her soaking nightshirt up around her shoulders and took Hannah back from me. The baby fed eagerly while Ma talked nonsense in her sleep. While Hannah nourished herself, Pa pulled the nightshirt off around the top of Ma’s head and replaced it with a clean one from Emily.

  Outside, the snow was still never-ending, causing the cabin to take on a dull, blue tone, which only made Hannah’s color look all the worse. The air was frigid. Emily and I dumped the bloody water out the window and immediately began working on relighting the fire. Pa hummed an old hymn in his deep voice, and told Joanna and Charles to come meet their new baby sister.

  The children approached the bed with slow caution, the fear all too evident in their large brown eyes and flushed skin.

  “Is she all right, Pa?” Charles asked in a weak voice. My brother looked around the bed with wide eyes, at the blood on the floor and the soiled rags piled nearby, before turning to the baby.

  “The Lord spared the lives of both Hannah and your ma,” Pa said firmly. “And that is the greatest gift we could ever ask for. Everything is fine.”

  “But her eyes—” Joanna broke her
silence for the first time in hours. She leaned closer to the baby with a twisted face. “I think there’s something wrong with them!”

  The back of Pa’s hand flew into Joanna’s face with such a swift and sudden force that all of us jumped. He had never hit one of us before, had never even come close. The sound of the baby suckling on Ma became deafening, nearly unbearable.

  “There is nothing wrong with her,” Pa snapped, his voice rising. “This is your kin, do you understand me? This is your baby sister from God.”

  Poor little Jo’s hand flew to her cheek, where an angry red mark was already beginning to bloom. Her lips failed to hold the barrier and quick, pitiful sobs began to escape. Pa raised his hand again, as if daring her to continue. Joanna fell silent.

  The snow is eating away at us, I thought. It is turning our hearts into ice.

  “Everybody get some sleep while you can,” Pa said, breaking the silence, and went to lie down next to Ma and Hannah, who were both still. They looked like corpses, tinged strange colors, positioned like grotesque dolls over each other on the bed. Pa checked to make sure they were both breathing, and everybody lay down.

  The baby started crying again within the hour, and she didn’t stop for a long, long time. Was it three days? Four? Six? However long it was, it felt like years.

  Years of only opening my eyes when Pa commanded me to move out of the way so that he could get one thing or the other for Ma or the baby, or when my assistance was needed to turn over the mattress or re-cover it with a crudely washed sheet. The children cried on and off over the deafening sound of the baby, and Emily re-braided her hair dozens of times a day to keep her fingers busy and her eyes downward. Pa stuffed strips of cloth into his ears.

  Hannah kept screaming.

  Ma kept coughing.

  The walls of the cabin began to move inward, making the space even smaller, taking more air away, suffocating us all, slowly, slowly.

  For the first time, I prayed that the baby had not survived the delivery.

  Why us?

  Pa begged the Lord for mercy.

  How cruel.

  Ma’s cough kept on.

  The walls moved in closer.

  For the first time, I wondered if God was real.

  Once the tiny cabin was finally still and quiet, I arose in the dim light of what could have been either early morning or evening, and went to stand in front of the window once again. Everybody in the family was sleeping heavily, or perhaps they were dead; I neither knew nor cared as I stepped over their bodies and made my way to the tiny square of glass that mocked me with the promise of outside.

  All I wanted was to look out into the open space of the earth and remind myself that freedom was still awaiting me, that the world included much more than the inside of this matchbox, that I hadn’t died and gone to Hell. After wiping the condensation from the freezing window with the sleeve of my dress, I leaned close enough for the glass to touch the tip of my nose.

  And that is when I saw the devil.

  It was the strangest thing, but I swear he heard me looking at him from all the way across the forest, through the trees and trees and trees that seemed to go on forever, surrounding me, smothering me, trapping me there on that mountain.

  I saw him and he knew, he heard, he stopped dead in his prowl and cocked his head toward me with a viciousness that caused me to jump. I squinted through the glass, unable to believe what I was seeing, and wondered if I was dying and if he had come into this hellish storm just to collect me.

  While the creature stood peering at me, motionless now, his lips parted to reveal gnarled black fangs, and I could hear his whisper as if he was standing right next to me.

  “Sinner.”

  Then he was coming for me, all black and shining with horns and claws and those gleaming gnarled fangs. He stepped through the falling snowflakes, leaving steaming footsteps of blood that bloomed into the ice.

  “I’ve come to devour your soul,” the whisper inside my ear said, and I began to scream. His voice wavered like notes played on a fiddle, it sounded familiar, it sounded like mine.

  I fell back from the window, still screaming, throwing my hands in front of me to keep the creature away, while my family cried out in confusion from their beds.

  I only remember little bits for a while after that—the silence, the crying, the scratches I kept reopening on my face and arms with my fingernails. I don’t remember when Ma got better, or when she started reading to me from the Bible every night until the snow melted, or when Emily went anywhere except by my side with her hand in mine.

  I do remember hearing them argue about me. Ma blamed herself for Hannah, and for me, as well. Pa was angry that she wasn’t more thankful for the baby’s life, or her own, for that matter. He told her over and over again that it was the isolation that had turned me strange, that as soon as the spring came everything would straighten out. It was a miracle the entire family survived at all, he bellowed. Amanda will get better soon.

  When my tongue found itself capable of allowing me to speak once again, I told Emily that I didn’t know what I saw out the window that had set me off. I kept it from her until after we were out, after it was spring and the snow was only slush gathered around the bottom of the tree trunks and the sounds of animals could be heard once again in the air of the mountain. I told her then, but only because I couldn’t lie about it anymore.

  I couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t seen him, calling for me, wanting to eat my soul, for every time I heard a snapping branch or scatter of animal feet in the forest, I was certain he had returned for me, his sinner.

  Your mind wasn’t right, Emily pleaded with me, finally understanding my ever-wide eyes and jumpy demeanor. You should have told me, sister. No more lies. You should have let me protect you and tell you that it wasn’t real. The winter made you strange. Your mind made a mistake, that’s all.

  No.

  There are no mistakes, no matter how cruel. There is only God’s plan, sung over and over again like some lovely children’s rhyme told on rainy days. Smitten lies and bloody thighs and a prairie home reeking of evil!

  What is happening on this prairie? Is there evil within it, like the place in Henry’s story, torturing me from afar until the time comes to claim its prey? Is my whole family doomed to death after all?

  Or is it, all of it...just...me?

  The morning after I see the baby standing amidst the tall grass, I wake up with a tearstained face and a dull but engulfing headache. I tell Ma that I’m ill and need to rest through breakfast, and after checking my temperature with a concerned face, she sighs in relief at the absence of a fever.

  “You have such dark circles under your eyes, Amanda,” Ma says, while Emily looks on from where she is lacing up her boots. “Have you been sleeping all right? You’re not too used to lying on the ground now, are you?”

  “No, Ma,” I croak, keeping my eyes closed. “The mattress is wonderful. I just need a little bit more sleep, that’s all.”

  But I don’t sleep. I lie in bed, under the quilt even though it’s late enough in the morning for the heat to be stifling again, and sweat myself into the sheets and feathers while I listen to the sound of the children arguing over a toy and Emily making breakfast and Ma comforting an especially irritable Hannah.

  After they’ve finished eating, Pa goes outside to work on the table set he’s been carving up, and the children follow. I hear Joanna ask Emily if I might feel like playing tag when I wake up, and Emily says she doesn’t know. Soon I hear them screaming and whooping from outside, and I know that I’m finally alone.

  A hand takes my wrist and squeezes. I snap upright in bed with a scream, only to startle Emily enough to drain all the color from her face.

  “It’s just me!” she cries, her free hand over her heart. “You gave me a fright, sister! Were y
ou having a nightmare?”

  Embarrassed and at my wit’s end, I begin to cry. “I’m in a nightmare all the time, Emily,” I manage, trying to make her understand even though she never will. “I just want to wake up.”

  I am not even a mother, yet at the same time I am the worst one who has ever lived.

  “You’re suffering through one of the most horrid types of loss there is,” she whispers, and pulls me close so she can stroke my hair while I weep. “It’s only natural for you to feel this way right now.”

  I want to ask her if it’s natural for my child’s soul to be so unsettled that it lingers around to haunt me. I want to ask her if it’s natural for me not to be fully certain which parts of my life are real and which are not. I want to ask her if she’ll take Pa’s rifle and end things for me.

  “I’m fine,” I whisper, and Emily squeezes my hand again. “Or I will be, anyway.”

  My sister offers to stay with me inside for the remainder of the day, but suddenly all I want to do is get out of these dampened sheets and go outside, where I can breathe in the endlessness of the open sky. I get dressed quickly, and we go out together, and Emily looks surprised when I suggest we play a game with Joanna and Charles.

  It feels good to have an excuse to avoid Hannah for a little longer, even if I am still pinching with cramps and tired enough to sleep for a week. I make sure not to look back at the stretch of prairie that rests behind the cabin, where I saw the baby in the dark. I don’t want to see anything else. I must regain control.

  Later that afternoon, Emily and I are sitting on the fence with the children when I see her face change as she looks toward the forest.