The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  I’m sorry. I’m getting abstract.

  I was talking about Violet. And talking about Violet makes me angry. It makes me give speeches instead of telling stories. Isn’t that right, dear? You don’t have to listen to all of this again, my love. You can go find Vic, if you want. Tell her she can take away the dinner things. If everyone’s done, that is. Are you? All done?

  There’ll be a big feast tonight. Your bellies won’t be empty so long as you’re here. I promise you that much.

  OK. Good, then. Well. Where was I?

  Violet. Of course.

  I gave her that name. It’s been suggested to me a few times over the years that the name is an unkindness, a mockery of her. I think that says more about the people doing the suggesting than it does me, that they can’t imagine a tormented child would be deserving of a sweet name. At any rate, I called her Violet because the first time I saw her—found her is what it really was—she was sleeping in a bed of purple flowers. She couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, though I thought her younger at first, because she was small for her age. I was young myself. Not yet twenty. My parents and I were traveling west along what had been Highway 176, just wandering, gathering plant samples for my father’s work and seeing what there was to see. It was the only life I’d ever known, but even so I’d call it a strange time, a quiet time. People lay low then. You didn’t see many on the road, and the ones you saw were wary, they weren’t looking to take you in or be your friend. Big groups drew the wrong kind of attention from in-zone, unless you had some special arrangement. And those special arrangements came with their own cost.

  I can speak to that now firsthand.

  My parents and I were camped near Saluda. I was both old and young for my age. I hadn’t known other children, other teenagers. I didn’t have friends. Where could I have made them? I was wholly dependent on my parents. And I was their equal. But that’s its own story, as I said, and anyway, what you need to know now is that Mama and Daddy were working, setting up the mobile lab, and I’d promised to go do some foraging but what I really wanted—and I think they always knew this—was a breather from them. A couple of hours on my own, time enough to imagine a life occupied by the kinds of characters I’d always read about in books. So I’d go on my walks and I’d pretend myself a boyfriend or a best friend or a loyal dog. I’d pretend myself a purpose—a job, an act of heroism. You can be lonely without ever having known anything but being alone.

  I went south. It was hot and sunny, sunny enough to set your eyes to aching. The air wasn’t moving. I was thinking after twenty minutes that I might just turn around and go back, that I’d be better off napping through the heat of the day, but that’s when I spotted the child in the flowers. You could see that the sun had moved as she slept and she was baking in a patch of bright light. What I remember about that first glimpse of her is the sight of her bare arm, how hot and red it was, and by instinct I rushed over to block the sun with my body. It didn’t occur to me that she might be dead, and I’ve wondered about that since, why that thought never crossed my mind. I think it was the sleeping posture. She was on her side. She had her head resting on her crooked elbow, her thumb in her mouth, and her face was hidden by this scraggly blond hair that went down almost to her waist. Her knees were drawn to her chest. The fetal position, you’d call it. I must have stood there at least two full minutes, just staring at her. I hadn’t seen a child in real life since I’d been one and looked in the mirror. Oh, I’d seen photos in old books, and my mother had some movies stored on a drive that I was allowed to watch on special days, and there were children in some of them. The Sound of Music was one. Have you seen it? There’s this part where the children are singing farewell at the end of a party, they’re ascending this glorious staircase, and the youngest one, Gretl, curls up and falls asleep. It’s very sweet. I saw this child in the purple flowers and I thought of Gretl. What happened next is that I crouched down and very softly drew back that curtain of long blond hair, thinking I’d see beneath it a face like Gretl’s, plump and rosy and smooth, and what I saw instead—

  Well, you know what I saw.

  I made some sound, some startled sound, and her eye popped open. I fell back, and my heart was just skittering away. That blue, blue eye. The color of the sky. It is lovely, and I bet none among you has been able to see that yet. Its beauty. But I tell you it’s there. This suffering child fixed her one blue eye on me, and now, I look back, and I think of all the things a regular child would have done. She’d have jumped up, or screamed, or cried, or maybe she’d have clung to me and begged for water or help. But not Violet. She lay there and she stared, she didn’t move, and I didn’t see fear in that eye, but I didn’t see hope, either. What I saw was resignation. It was an old look, an ancient look, and I won’t lie to you now: I almost fled. I looked in Violet’s eye and I thought, This’ll be my burden to bear. And I wasn’t wrong, but what I couldn’t see then is that a burden can also be a gift.

  For whatever reason, I didn’t run. Maybe my legs just didn’t work. I said something my mother always used to say to me. I said, “Honey, are you all right?”

  She didn’t respond. She didn’t move. She just kept that level blue gaze fixed on me, her one eye on my two.

  I said, “What’s your name?” I said, “I’m June, honey.”

  She said nothing back.

  I put my hand out slowly, like this, I was shaking like a leaf, and I touched her hot little arm. She trembled just a little. But that was it.

  I said, “Honey, you’re going to burn up in this sun.”

  She had nothing to say to that, either. And why would she? What was a little sunburn to what she’d been through already? She looked like she’d been set torch to. But still, I’d fixated on it, I’d convinced myself that getting her out of the sun was the right first step, and so what I did was scoot back on my bottom until I’d gotten to the shade under a tree, and I beckoned to her, I said, “Why don’t you come over here, honey?” and when that didn’t work I took out my canteen. I said, “Come and get some water, at least.”

  This went on for what seemed like a long time. Me waving the canteen at her, beckoning. Violet still lying there on her side, that blue eye on me, thumb in her mouth. She had on this cotton slip thing and nothing else. It had been white once—the hem came almost to her knees, and her legs poking out from under it were scratched and Stamped and scarred and skeeter-bit, and the bottoms of her feet were blacker than owl gravy. I was thinking through my options. I was wondering if I should try to leave the canteen and walk out of sight, to trick her, or try to pick her up and carry her to camp by force, or if I should run and get my parents and hope Violet would still be there when we returned. I was just about decided that I’d leave the canteen and run when she sat up—all at once, as if she was spring-loaded. Still with that just-about-unblinking eye on me. She got to her feet, took small steps my way. Stopped. Two more steps, so she was just within my reach. Then her hand popped out. Like, gimme. So I did, I put the canteen in her hand, and she tilted her head back, gulping until it was empty, and when she finished and looked at me again so still and solemn, I could see in her blue eye that she was mine now and I was hers, and I thought, God help us.

  She clutched the canteen. She gave no indication she planned to hand it back to me.

  I said, “You want to come with me, honey? Do you want to come to where I live?”

  I don’t know what I expected her to do, but it wasn’t what she did. Which was to put her hands up toward me, one of them still gripping that canteen. And I hadn’t seen another child before, but I guess that’s a universal gesture, isn’t it? Pick me up. So I picked her up. I hitched her up by her armpits and sat her on my hip, and she slung her sunburned little arm around my neck and with the other cradled the empty canteen like it was a teddy bear. She was skin and bones. I don’t think she weighed two stones. I carried her the half mile or so back to my parents,
and by the time our camp was in sight she’d fallen asleep again, her poor face nuzzled into my collarbone, hot breath on my neck. I called, “Y’all need to come out here right now.” They did. My mother and father. They saw me with the child and they froze.

  I said, “I found her in the woods.”

  And my father said: “You take her back right this goddamn minute.”

  Thank you, Vic. You read my mind. It hits the spot on a fall day, doesn’t it? Go ahead, send it around. Have a swallow, all of you. This recipe came over with Vic’s family on the boat. It goes down smooth. Too smooth. See how that swallow treats you before you have more.

  My stories have a tendency to spring leaks. I’ll think I’ve found a pretty clear way forward, and then I realize that I’m going to have to stop and explain something else first, and then it seems that explanation requires its own explanation, and pretty soon I don’t know if I’m coming or going. Or what metaphor I started with. Leaks, right? I’m not so good at plugging the leaks.

  Like now, I’m remembering that moment with my father and this dark fury he had on his face as he looked at Violet, and how I was shocked by that, because my father wasn’t an angry sort of man, but not shocked, too. And to explain that contradiction, I’m tempted to explain my father to you. Of all the things I could say about him, for now, I’ll tell you this: my father was a fastidious man and a brilliant man, a scientist, and he laid the groundwork for everything we’ve managed to do here, but he had a cowardly streak. Or maybe that’s not fair. A coward wouldn’t have given up an in-zone vestment to do the work he was doing. But he knew the kind of good that was within his powers, and it wasn’t playing the hero. The loneliness of our lives out here was almost entirely his doing. When we saw people, we hid. We turned around and went the way we’d come. Always. Daddy saw it as his life’s mission to save the world, and he was never once struck by the irony that he trusted almost no one in that world he was so bent on saving. If I’d have asked him about that—and I never did, I never had the courage to—he’d probably have said that saving the world was the only way to make people trustworthy again. And there may be some truth in that.

  Either way, it meant nothing to him that Violet was a child, that she’d suffered terrific hurts, that she had no one else. “Take her back,” he told me again, because I was standing there with her in my arms and I wasn’t moving, I hadn’t responded. It couldn’t have been long, but it felt like a long time. I remember my back was aching, and I wanted so much to put her down on my pallet in the big tent, but I had this sense that if I let her go Daddy would snatch her up and throw her away.

  “Take her back,” he said again. I looked from him to my mother. She had an expression on her face that I could have drawn, I knew it so well. The eyebrows tilted up, like this, and her lips tight, and she was turning her hands in one another. She was the peacekeeper. She was the deciding vote, but she just about always cast her vote with my father, and in that way his word with us was as good as law. So when I said no—and that’s what I said, simple and flat as that—her eyes got big and unbelieving, and she said my name, but I just shook my head, hard.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t. And if you won’t have her, you won’t have me, either. We’ll leave.”

  Daddy said, “June, you don’t know what this means. You’ve got no idea what you’re doing.”

  And I said, “Maybe not, but I know what I won’t do. I won’t leave her for dead.” I was crying at this point, and I didn’t even know why. Because a part of me wanted to be unburdened of her. I guess it was scary, how tempted I was to leave her sleeping where I’d found her and run. I was disgusted with myself. But also, I was disgusted with her. She terrified me. The sight of her ruined face on my collarbone terrified me. And so I dug in my heels, as if I weren’t terrified and disgusted. I said, “I will not.” I said it as though I didn’t doubt it, so as to make it true.

  My father continued to argue with me. Telling me how close he was to a breakthrough in his work, how much there was at risk. I seem to remember Violet sleeping through it, or pretending to. And next I recall, the child was on my pallet, and my mother had brought me a cool soaked rag to put on her forehead. The two of us stood there together, looking down at her, and Mama said, “She’s going to break your heart.”

  Truer words were never spoke.

  In the evening, as the sun hid behind the mountains and the skeeters were nipping, Daddy came into my tent with a lantern, and he set it on the floor near Violet’s head. The child’s head. She was only “the child” to me then. “She’s still asleep?” he asked me. His voice was mild. All the rage had gone out of it.

  I told him she’d been up for a little bit, long enough to have some water and a hoecake. Then she’d drifted off again.

  He pointed at her little arms with his thick, blunt forefinger. “Stamp,” he said. He pointed again, and a third time, a fourth. “Stamp, Stamp, Stamp,” he repeated, and I said, “Yeah, so what?” I had a couple Stamps of my own, from long back. Both near my ankles. They glowed like white coins on my sun-brown skin. Daddy’s arms were dotted with them.

  So he pointed to a couple of other scars—funny-shaped ones—on her arm again, and on the calf of her leg. “Those are from infestations,” he said. “You can tell from the scar pattern. They cinched her back together like a feed sack.”

  And again, I was thinking, “So?” That wasn’t unheard of, either. Daddy’d had an infestation before I was born, though I sometimes forgot, because the scar was on his inner thigh and so I never had cause to look at it.

  But I didn’t say anything out loud. I just waited for him to make his point. I knew he had one.

  “All of these”—he motioned at her body—“all this I can account for,” he said. “She lived with folks. Folks with Stamps, so there’s some Zoner connection. And they used ’em liberally,” he said. He shook his head. He was exasperated. I only had a couple of scars because Daddy had insisted on throwing the Stamps out long ago. Even before his experiments had advanced. He always said that a Stamp was a fool’s cure. More harm than help. We kept our legs and arms covered, wore hats, and did regular body checks. We used a smelly salve Daddy concocted. And for the most part, that did the trick. I’d had some bites, but none of them led to infestations.

  “But her face,” Daddy said. “There’s no accounting for it. The rest of her isn’t burned this way.” Then he drew more invisible lines with his big finger, this time along a curve on her forearm, then a knob along her shinbone. “Her arm’s been broken,” he said. “And her leg, too. That’s just what I see at a glance.” I saw then what he’d seen. How the parts of her had been roughly rejoined.

  “Some kind of accident,” I said.

  And my father said, “No.” He said, “No, whatever it was that happened to her happened on purpose.”

  I was trying to fit my mind around that level of awfulness when he said, “I want you to come with me. There’s something I need to show you.” He motioned for me to follow him outside, and I saw that he’d unpacked our trail bikes. They were leaning on their kickstands in the moonlight.

  “It’s a bit of a ways from here,” he said.

  Maybe fifteen, sixteen kilometers, as it turned out, westward, with lots of hard bends and uphill climbs. A swift night ride, the air cool and fresh. It was rare that we moved at such a pace.

  We approached an old green highway sign that said “Village of Flat Rock,” and my father braked and coasted to a stop. I joined him, and we paused to drink some water.

  “You caught your breath?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Stow your bike,” he said. “We walk from here.”

  We scrambled along on what had been the highway’s shoulder. I realized that the road fronted a lake; the water flickered with moonlight through what had been, in another life, a chain-link fence and a line of ornamental trees, all of them now unpruned and unwie
ldy. The air was thick with the smell of honeysuckle. I loved the scent before that night, and I can hardly stand it now.

  We could see light ahead. Not just a light, mind you. A haze of lights, many bleeding together, and it wasn’t long after we saw them that the noise reached us, first a uniform murmur, like the ocean; then, as we drew closer, the noises expanded, separated, became distinct. Engine noise. Human noise—their shouts, their laughs. Music. Acoustic guitars, harmonica, drums.

  When the trees on the lakeside ran out, Daddy stopped me by putting his hand on my arm. He looked up and down the road, and we both listened, but all I could hear was the noise ahead. “Let’s cross,” Daddy said, “and then we’re going to get up into the woods and out of sight. Got it?”