by Lissa Bryan
They should have settled in an area where there was a large Amish community, Carly thought. Then they would have had all the horse-drawn farm equipment they could ever need. Carly had rigged up a hay rake of sorts, bending metal rods and attaching them to a central axle. Storm pulled it around the field for her, though she still wasn’t quite comfortable with a harness yet. Carly walked along beside her, soothing her as they went. The rake was a very light load, and Carly thought it was a good idea to get the filly used to work as soon as possible so she’d be prepared to pull a plow and wagon when she was older.
The rake collected the dried hay into piles, which Carly piled on a tarp and dragged to the stacks. Sam loped along beside her, and Carly envisioned making some sort of harness so he could function as a sled dog. She wondered if he’d do it and decided it was worth consideration. She tucked it away in that corner of her mind of things to do and figure out. It was a spot that was overflowing.
They didn’t have a baler, so Carly was making haystacks, using the memory of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books as her guide. She could remember seeing the Garth Williams charcoal drawings of Laura stamping down the hay in the circular pattern while Pa forked out more to her.
It was hot, miserable work, and Carly was soon soaked with sweat. At some point during the afternoon, Miz Marson sent little Madison Laker to bring Carly a homemade sports drink. She still wasn’t fond of the taste, but it made her feel better. As she drank, Madison told her how she and Veronica had a plan to move a deer stand to a tree by the swamp and fish, safe from the alligators. She and Veronica were becoming fast friends, something that made Carly happy. The kids needed some sense of normalcy, some relationships within the community. Carly wished they could have a school set up for them, but right now they needed everyone to work, gather food, wash clothing. The list went on and on.
By the time the sun set, she hadn’t stacked as much hay as she had hoped, but Carly felt pleased with her first day’s progress. Her haystacks weren’t nice and uniform, but she supposed it took practice. She intended to put tarps over the tops to keep water out because she doubted if she had packed it tight enough to shed rain on its own.
She’d laughed at first when Miz Marson told her damp hay would catch fire if stacked or put into the barn. It seemed so counter-intuitive that wet grass would be a fire hazard. But Miz Marson reminded her of the compost pile and how it steamed in the chilly winter months. As a result, Carly had left the hay to dry a day more than was necessary, just to be certain.
At sundown, Stan and Carly headed back to town, both of them exhausted, their shoes scuffing against the pavement as they trudged along. Even Storm seemed tired as she plodded along beside them.
“You coming for dinner?” Stan asked. He and Mindy always offered when Justin wasn’t home, and Carly often took them up on it.
“No, I have way too much to do at home. I’ll just have some leftover stew.” The leftovers had to be kept on the stove, or else they’d go bad, so the stew was probably more like a mush at this point, unappetizing but edible. And they weren’t at a point they could afford to waste food.
Their pace quickened a little when they reached the bridge and the thin neck of land beyond where the gators liked to sun themselves. Carly could feel it as they passed, that the gators were sizing them up, wondering if it was possible to drag one of them into the water. None of them moved, but their pitiless eyes followed. Storm tossed her head and her steps became snappy, her hooves clicking sharply on the pavement as if to say, Just you try it, buddy! Carly smiled and patted her.
The Watchers pulled up the gate as they approached. Carly and Stan paused after they passed through before they went their separate ways down the street.
“Stan, I want to thank you. You didn’t have to—”
Stan shook his head. “I love those horses, too, Carly.”
She smiled. “Thank you.”
Home. She fantasized about sinking down into a hot tub and reading a novel as she sipped a glass of wine. Not going to happen, but it was nice to dream.
She stopped by Reverend Davis’s house to pick up Dagny and found the baby’s hair bound up in dozens of little braids with plastic barrettes at the end. She laughed as she scooped her out of the playpen. At least the girls had fun this afternoon.
Dagny let out a squeal of delight when she saw her mother and held up her arms. “Ma-ma!”
Carly pecked kisses on her soft little cheeks. Dagny’s eyes sparkled as she looked up at her. Those eyes were almost as dark as her father’s. They were the eyes Carly had imagined their child would have when she had pictured the baby in those first scary days after she’d discovered she was pregnant. As she looked down into those eyes, she hoped her daughter would never have to face that kind of uncertainty about the future of the world.
“What is it, Carly?” the Reverend asked. Carly turned her head to give him a small smile. She wondered if it was a generational thing, because Miz Marson had that eerie perceptiveness, too.
“I was remembering something,” she said. “After you performed my wedding, we all had dinner together.”
“I remember,” the Reverend said. “Tuna casserole, if I recall. You forgot to salt it.”
Carly laughed. “Sounds like me. Anyway, you said something at dinner that stuck with me. You said that you were confident God would take care of you until you had completed your mission.”
“I remember that, too,” Mrs. Davis said from the sofa. She was mending a pair of pants, another of the ways she supported her family.
“But you never said what you thought that mission was,” Carly said.
The Reverend smiled. “I’m sure I’ll find out when I need to know.”
Carly looked down into her baby’s dark eyes, crinkled with her innocent laughter, and wondered if this was her mission. This and the town that would shelter her daughter and give her a chance at a normal life—at least as normal as could be, these days. She had been sure something was leading her and Justin toward this fate. Would she ever be able to attain the Reverend’s quiet confidence in her path?
Carly worked a squirming Dagny into her baby carrier. “Bye go!” Dagny said in approval, though her thrashing legs made it difficult. Carly shrugged it onto her shoulders.
“Carly?”
Reverend Davis put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to have faith in your mission. Have faith in yourself. Try to choose the path of goodness, and your feet will lead you where you need to go.”
Carly gave him a smile and said her good-nights. She felt better, and it wasn’t his words so much as his demeanor. She headed out into the warm night and felt a smile on her face.
Storm snuffled at Dagny in greeting, and Dagny giggled as she patted Storm’s large nose. Sam stayed back. Dagny had pulled his ear this morning when he got too close, and he didn’t seem eager to give her another chance. Carly rubbed his head. The animals had so far been very tolerant of the baby, but Carly knew she had to be careful around them.
They set off together toward the house, and Dagny told Carly about her day. Carly picked out a few words she could recognize here and there from her narrative and made appreciative sounds.
Carly’s heart lifted a little at the idea she was almost done for the day. She thought back to when she used to work at the souvenir store in Juneau and how a day had sometimes seemed endless. She had to laugh now, that she’d ever been tired after a day of dusting knickknacks and ringing up sales.
After she brushed Storm down, Carly mucked out Hamburgers’s and Storm’s stalls and gave Storm a scoop of the diminishing store of horse feed. “Good night, Storm.” She gave the horse a hug, and the filly rubbed her velvety nose against Carly’s neck.
Sam stood, bracing his paws on the stall door, and Storm snuffled at him. She must have decided she wasn’t too tired to play, because she trotted to the door to the pasture, glancing back over her shoulder, but Sam simply dropped back down to his feet. He wasn’t interested in their chasing games anym
ore. Carly had hoped he might, but it seemed he wasn’t going to go back to the playful creature he’d been before Tigger’s death. She mourned both the cat and the changes its death had wrought on Sam. It was as though the last vestiges of puppyhood had been burned out of him.
Carly looked out behind Storm at the pasture. It was getting too cropped to provide the horses with much in the way of food. The villagers saved their edible vegetable waste, such as peels and stems, but it wasn’t much. She glanced over at the canvas sacks of corn stacked up in the corner. It was their seed for their next, and last, planting. It scared her, how close they were getting to needing it, and the struggle she’d have in justifying its use for the horses. She wasn’t certain she could even convince herself.
Faith, she reminded herself. She had to have faith. She wasn’t as sure as the Reverend that she would be taken care of, but so far, they had managed. They would just have to keep on managing.
Carly went over to give Hamburgers a pat. She’d always heard bulls were ill-tempered, but he seemed to be a placid creature. He butted his head against her shoulder, and she petted him but avoided the slimy tongue he aimed at her arm.
Today, before she’d left to work in the hayfield, she’d led him to an overgrown, fenced-in yard behind one of the houses not far from the potato field. He’d munched all day long and must have filled his four stomachs before Pete brought him home earlier this evening. Carly made a mental note to thank Pete for taking care of that for her.
Sam followed her into the house and settled down under Dagny’s crib. The baby was sound asleep as soon as Carly put her down, so Carly decided to take a quick shower. She ducked inside the bathroom and stripped, tossing her underclothes into the basket but folding her work clothes for another wear.
They had hot water now—well, warm would be more accurate. They had a small tank, painted black, into which the water collected, brought up by the ram pump and piped all over town, then powered into the houses by handmade windmills. The sun warmed it all day, and sometimes, by evening, it was almost like having a hot shower.
Dagny was still asleep when Carly was finished. She woke her, and the baby sleepily nursed for the last time that evening. Carly wondered again if it was time to wean her. Dagny had turned one a few months ago. She was eating solid foods and could stuff them in her mouth, although a spoon was still used more as a catapult than a utensil. She gave a little smile as she thought Dagny might be ready, but Carly wasn’t. She needed the closeness with her baby, to know she was providing for her in this uncertain world.
Carly laid Dagny back into the crib and tucked the mosquito netting around it carefully before climbing into her own lonely bed. She remembered she hadn’t taken the alligator hide out of the brine it was soaking in, but she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to let it stay until morning. Tomorrow, she needed to boil some bark strips for tannin. She was still making a mental note of what she needed to do next when she drifted off to sleep.
She dreamed of the first time she’d seen Justin, sitting in front of her apartment building tending a small fire on the sidewalk in front of his tent. At the time, he’d been scruffy and intimidating, his jaw covered by a beard. She’d called him the Biker Guy in her mind, and he’d scared her, waiting as he was for her to emerge from her illusion of safety.
She smiled in her sleep as she remembered his poster board signs. He’d held them up so she could see them from the window. And just a couple of days later, she’d joined him for breakfast. The dream was so real, she could hear Sam’s whine and smell the smoke of Justin’s campfire. Sam bumped his head against her arm, and she frowned because she didn’t remember him doing that. His whining was insistent, and that didn’t fit in with the memories, either. The smell of smoke got stronger.
Smoke! Carly bolted up in bed and choked when she took in a lungful. She flattened herself back down and rolled to the floor, pressing an end of the sheet over her nose as she coughed. Sam whined and paced, unsure of what to do but certain something was wrong.
Carly crawled over to the door and touched it. The wood was warm and the metal knob was almost hot. She sat down for a moment, her thoughts scattering like startled birds. Panic clawed at the edges of her mind, but she forced it back.
She had to get to her baby. Without thinking, she tried to surge to her feet and fell back down, choking and gagging from the smoke. Breathe. She had to center herself and breathe. Carly closed her eyes for just a moment. She reminded herself she could panic later, as she had done that horrible time when Justin was shot and she was the only one who could take care of him. Do what had to be done first, and then she could let her emotions have free rein. Almost as though her body had shifted to autopilot, she took a deep breath and calmed. Her mind cleared, the fog burned away by clear sunlight.
She crawled over to Dagny’s crib and took a deep breath before darting up to snatch the baby out before she sank back down to the floor. Dagny gave a startled little cry and writhed, but Carly gripped her tight, pulling up her shirt to cover Dagny’s nose and mouth.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Carly whispered, maybe more for the herself than the baby.
She made her way over to the window and pushed it open. The airflow would feed the fire, but she had no other way out. Carly craned her neck around and could see the orange light of flames on the lower floor but couldn’t see the fire itself. The window below was leaking smoke, but not flames.
This side of the house had no porch roof to cut the distance to the ground. It was a straight drop. She would have to tie off a sheet and climb down. In their old house, they used to have a ladder stored within reach. Why hadn’t they done that here? She couldn’t remember.
Carly looked for her baby carrier, but it was downstairs. She had no idea how she was going to climb down one-handed, while holding on to the baby. And Sam! What was she going to do about Sam? But her first priority was the baby. She had to get Dagny out first.
The answer came to her in a flash. She yanked the sheet from the bed and laid Dagny on one end of it. She scrambled over to the dresser beside the window and fumbled inside to find the slim velvet box. Her mother’s pearls. She pressed a kiss to her daughter’s forehead and tucked the box down beside her.
Dagny wriggled and made the short, sharp cries that usually preceded a full-fledged wail. This had to be awful for her, yanked from her peaceful bed and then dragged around by her panicked mother. Carly forced herself to smile.
“We’re going on a ride!” she said as gathered the sheet up around her. “Dagny’s going to go ‘whee!’ ”
“Whee?” Dagny said, doubt making her frown.
“Yes, whee.” Carly smiled, though tears stung her eyes. She pressed more kisses over Dagny’s cheeks and forehead. “Dagny’s going to hide now.”
She tickled the baby’s neck to make her giggle, then tied the bundle closed over her, pulling the knot as tight as the thick fabric would allow. She wished desperately that her hands were stronger as she tied the sheet from Dagny’s bed to the bundle to make a rope. She yanked as hard as she could on the knots and prayed they would hold.
Giving the wriggling bundle one last hug, Carly began to lower Dagny outside the window. The air was getting thicker with smoke, and the heat was making her face bead with sweat. If the fire had started in the kitchen, it was burning the floor away from under them right now. Panic later, she reminded herself.
The sheet wasn’t long enough to reach all the way to the ground, and she winced when she was forced to let go, swinging her daughter as gently as possible out away from the house. It was still a drop of a few feet, so all she could do was pray an inarticulate prayer that her baby would be safe. Dagny landed with an indignant squall but, thankfully, not a cry of pain.
She pulled the bottom sheet off the bed and laid it on the floor. “Down, Sam.”
He gave her a doubtful look but obeyed, lying on the sheet. He tucked his tail around his feet but thumped it on the floor a few times as Carly began to tie him up in th
e sheet, just as she had done with the baby. Carly realized with her stern demeanor, he must have thought she was mad at him, but she didn’t have the time to reassure him, not with the heat getting more intense by the moment. She pulled hard at the knots, as hard as the thick material would allow her fumbling hands. He was much larger than Dagny, and it took most of the material to bundle him.
Carly had no idea how much Sam weighed, but he was at his full adult size now, somewhere between seventy and a hundred pounds according to her book on wolves. Maybe even larger than his wild brethren. Groaning and straining, she struggled to lift him. It might be impossible, but she wasn’t giving up. Perhaps it was adrenaline, or the power of her sheer stubborn will, but she managed to lift him over the window sill. The sheet zipped through her hands. All she could do was slow it a little. He landed hard, with a sharp yelp of pain, his bundle a couple of feet away from Dagny, who was yelling at the top of her little lungs.
Carly had to get herself out now. There were no sheets left—they were stored in the hall linen closet—but there was a blanket folded on the chest at the foot of the bed, and it would have to do. She just had to tie the blanket to something—the bed frame seemed like it would work.
Grabbing onto the wood frame, she dragged it, grunting from the strain. The bed was made of oak and heavy … so very heavy, and her arms were trembling from exhaustion. Tears of frustration ran down Carly’s cheeks as she heaved, pulling with all her might until the thing started to slide across the floor.
“Carly!”
Had she heard that, or had it been in her head? For a moment, she wasn’t sure. She craned her neck out the window and saw Grady below, his hands cupped around his mouth.
“I’m here!” she called.
“Jump, girl!” he shouted.
She looked down at the blanket in her hand.
“Jump, goddammit!”
She’d never heard Grady swear. That’s what did it. She swung her leg outside the window and held on to the frame for a moment as she pulled the other one out, and then she pushed off.
