Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  Then Kevin, rubbing his eyes with one hand, stuck the book in my hand and said he wanted us to start reading. So I read. And they hugged me before they went to bed.

  By the next morning I had to admit that, on balance, the week had gone well, but I was still glad for Friday. Paul was due back that afternoon, and I’d have four days to spend at the cabin with Tuah before the Koffords needed me again. I anticipated the ease of waking and sleeping on my own schedule, of being free of needs and questions, and felt a general sense of well-being as I squatted on my heels with the morning sun on my back, idly pulling weeds from the bed around the front door.

  Kevin threw and fielded a tennis ball against the side of the shed as I half listened to Sarah, sitting on the step, telling me stories from the lives of her stuffed animals. The elephant’s best friend was the blue cat. The blue cat loved pretzels because they were her favorite because she liked them. But the elephant liked peanuts, so sometimes they had fights. But the doll could stop them because they were afraid of her because she was the ghost.

  “She’s a ghost?” I said without looking, wiggling at a long-rooted finger of grass between the stones.

  “You know, the miner’s daughter. The one who got killed.”

  I dropped back onto my heels. A miner’s daughter? “No, I don’t know about that ghost.”

  “She has blue ribbons,” Sarah said, holding the doll out for me to see. It was a child doll, upright and stiff, with cloth Mary Jane shoes and a pink dress, and blue bows in her hair. “The ghost is looking for her dog, and if you’re alone in the woods at night she might get you.”

  “Who told you this story?”

  “Cindy’s brother. It’s true.”

  I hated this kid, who must have thought it was fun to frighten little girls. And at the same time, I needed to hear the rest of the story. A miner’s daughter, killed in the mountains? Was it crazy to wonder whether there was a connection? Would a more complete telling make it any clearer? But I had the wrong storyteller to extract anything close to a clear version.

  “Are you scared about the ghost?”

  Sarah tilted her head back, face to the sun, closing her eyes with a wide smile. She shook her head. “Nope. I’m not scared at all.”

  “Really?”

  “Miss Poppy told me when people die, and you love them, they’re angels that wrap love all around you, like my mom. Not ghosts. Ghosts come from bad thoughts, so she said I won’t ever see one.”

  My own ghosts, made of smoke and regret, shimmered silently from their usual place at the edge of my field of vision. A mother, a baby, and a little girl. I refocused on Sarah.

  “Who’s Miss Poppy?”

  Sarah pointed her arm straight ahead, over my shoulder. “She has Bella.”

  Good God. Every answer this child gave was wrapped in another question. I tried to pull her back.

  “Does she know about the miner’s daughter, too?”

  But Sarah was looking past me now. I heard a car and turned to look over my shoulder.

  “Katy!” shrieked Sarah, dropping the doll into the dirt.

  A little girl launched herself, feet first, out the back door of a gold sedan as a wire-thin teenager emerged from the driver’s door. Another woman, with round cheeks and curly hair, got out of the passenger door and set a dungareed toddler on the ground. Sarah threw her arms around the little girl, and they both started shrieking with laughter, at what I didn’t know. I eased my knees and back straight as I stood.

  “You’re Elena, right?” the round-cheeked one asked, giving a tug to the toddler’s overall straps. The child lifted his arms to right himself, then took a tentative step toward the little girls.

  “Yeah. Hi.”

  “I’m Joan. That’s Mindy.” She tipped her head back to the far side of the car, where the teenager slammed the back door, a baby on her hip. “We were just on our way back from the park. Thought we’d come see how you were doing.”

  I had a sudden picture of Mr. Fousek, at the end of the street, flagging down passersby and sending one to check on me because I hadn’t been past his house since yesterday. Sarah grabbed the other girl’s wrist and started pulling her toward the front door.

  “Good to meet you,” I said.

  The screen door swung open beside me. “—and we got pizza, and Fritos, and some cheese. I’ll show you,” Sarah said. The two girls disappeared and the door slammed behind them.

  “Can I use the bathroom?” the teenager asked as she approached.

  “Ah, sure.”

  “Here.” She held the baby out to me.

  My hands closed automatically on the baby, and the teenager disappeared into the house. The other woman took the hands of the toddler over his head and directed his walking toward me, falling into step with his rolling gait. “Boy, we sure came in here like a freight train, huh?” She squinted up at me, smiling.

  “I—it’s fine. I wasn’t really doing anything.”

  I lowered myself onto the step and perched the baby on my knee. He stared back at me. He was heavier than I expected, solid and dense. I had scarcely ever handled a baby. Should I be supporting his head? I saw no sign of wobbling. His neck seemed thick, though the head above it was so large the ears were almost as far apart as the shoulders. Could he sit alone or crawl? What did he eat? How much did he sleep? The round, steely eyes offered no answers.

  The walking baby continued to teeter toward me. Should I hold out a hand to encourage him? Or would that constitute neglect of the one on my knee? His mother spun him around and dropped onto the step beside me, sparing me the decision.

  “How are you?” she said. “How’s it been?”

  “Uh, good, I guess.”

  The toddler twisted sideways and plunged his head into Joan’s lap, laughing. Mindy came out of the house wiping her hands on the seat of her jeans.

  “I’m gonna air dry,” she said. “The towels looked a little—” She tipped one hand from side to side.

  “Oh,” I said. “Those are the kids’ bath towels. I haven’t found more.”

  Joan craned her neck toward me. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. Looked everywhere I can think.”

  “No, the week. It’s been good?”

  “It’s fine,” Mindy said before I could answer. She sat on my other side and held her hands open to the baby, twiddling her fingers. A wide smile broke across his face and he dove toward her.

  “What?” Joan and I said together.

  “The towels. It’s fine. I’m just trying to be polite and not use somebody else’s towel.”

  Too many people all at once, too many conversations. Me, pressed on both sides by them. “How old is he?” I asked, gesturing toward the baby I’d just been holding.

  “Seven months, but he’s huge. I can’t wait for him to walk ’cause right now the idea of carrying him much longer makes my back hurt.”

  I blinked at Mindy. “He’s yours?”

  She laughed. “I know. I look like the babysitter, right? Yes, he’s mine—Alex. And Katy, too, inside. She’s friends with Sarah, and we’ve been pretty close to the family through, you know, everything.” She nodded toward Joan. “I’m married to Joan’s brother.”

  “Ah.” I looked back and forth between them.

  “I’ve got an older one, too,” Joan said. “A boy, eight. He’s with a friend. He’s a little young for Kevin but they get along okay.”

  This avalanche of children and relationships was more than I could capture at once.

  “I’m the one who gave your Gran my phone number,” Mindy said. “At the market. Do you still have it?”

  “Oh! Right. I, ah, think so.”

  “You should’ve called. I can help anytime. Just a sanity break. It’s rough, I bet. Being new here, nobody to talk to but the children.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’d make me crazy.”

  “We get it,” Joan said. The toddler gave a sudden squeal and yanked free of her hands, then dropped onto his hands and knees in the stubbly
grass.

  Mindy nodded. “Completely. Carrie always wanted more kids, but I guess it’s probably just as well now she never had them.”

  “She lost one, you know, between the other two,” Joan said.

  “No. Wow. I didn’t.”

  “Just a couple of months old. Perfect baby. She woke up one morning, surprised he’d slept through the night, and found him just gone in his bed.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I had no idea. Was Kevin old enough to remember?”

  “Not really. Less than three.”

  “Oh.” I picked some soil from under my thumbnail.

  In my experience, tragedy was never evenly distributed. Its concentration in this family didn’t seem unnatural to me. And maybe it explained some of their odd behaviors. But Joan and Mindy gave me no time to think. They chattered on together, back and forth, painting Kofford family backstory for me the same way Sarah had been doing for her animals. Kevin broke his arm at school in the fourth grade sliding on the ice at recess and was laughed at for crying. Sarah had been slow to take to potty training. Contrary to what the children had told me about their father forbidding a puppy, I learned that Paul once had gotten the family a dog—a big one, which he declared a necessity with him being gone so much—but Carrie said the dog was judgmental and got rid of it.

  I didn’t ask for an explanation of that puzzling little detail, having already discovered that I wasn’t really needed for the conversation to go on. I closed my eyes and turned my face to the sun. Joan would get up and knock a dirt clod out of her son’s hand from time to time, still talking, while Mindy elaborated now and then and bounced the baby up and down, up and down on her knee. My back eased into the cradle of conversation that spanned the space behind me, and I let my mind wander.

  I heard a shriek of girlish laugher. The thwak, thwak of Kevin throwing a ball against the shed wall. I had survived my first week and wasn’t afraid of the next. Thwak. What had life been like for Carrie? Had she been blamed for the baby’s death, then distrusted and policed in every small thing to ensure no other accidents? Thwak. The dog had been judgmental? Thwak. Had Benencia lived on in folklore, a face for the universal fear of what lurks in the dark around us? How long would it be before Carrie joined her—a ghost car, perhaps, on icy nights, or a frozen woman at the side of the road waving for help?

  “—but Carrie wouldn’t hear anything bad about that old crank, no matter what.”

  My wandering thoughts snagged at the mention of the woman whose place I was so scantily filling. I opened my eyes and looked at Joan.

  “Who?” I said.

  “I’m sorry—Paul’s dad. He was just plain mean.”

  “But Carrie wouldn’t say a word against him,” Mindy said. “Never. She was always up to something but she’d never hurt a soul.”

  Ghosts come from bad thoughts.

  Carrie would never be a ghost to Sarah or to these women gilding her memory. Only to those who never knew her, who were afraid of the icy dark, who wanted to shape and focus on their fear.

  Thwak.

  My ghosts were different. No matter what Tuah said, no matter what this Poppy said, they weren’t made from fear. They were real and they deserved to be. I owed it to them, in fact, to think about them every day, to let them follow me and watch me and take some meager satisfaction in my failures.

  “Here,” Mindy said, pushing a piece of paper into my hand. “In case you can’t find it. I mean it—call me. You do not have to do this by yourself.”

  “Now I’m the princess!” Sarah’s voice from inside.

  A squeal from Mindy’s baby, frustrated that she wasn’t giving the paper to him. My hand, closing around it. The ghosts wavered.

  Thwak.

  9

  You got the paint?” Tuah called as she rummaged in the bed of her pickup. Mac sat on the passenger seat, waiting.

  The sun hadn’t topped the mountains, and birds fretted from their perches without yet leaving them, so I thought she ought to keep her voice down and be a little more careful about the clanging as she threw metal and wood and plastic into the truck this early on a Saturday morning. This was town, after all. She had neighbors. But the truck was years past anyone caring about additional scratches or dents, and Tuah felt no need to inconvenience herself for the benefit of people staying in bed longer than they should. I jounced on the balls of my feet beside the tailgate, wearing a sweatshirt and the boxer shorts I’d been sleeping in, my legs as pale and bumpy as chicken skin, my arms folded tight against my chest.

  “Right here in the back,” I said.

  “Thinner?”

  “You said you had it.”

  “Oh.” More screeching and clattering. “There it is. And I’ve got the brushes. You got the cooler?”

  “It’s on the front seat. With the grocery bags.”

  She straightened and looked at me with her hands on her hips. “So that’s it, then?”

  “I hope so. Can I go back inside?”

  “Haven’t you learned by now to leave your shorts in California?”

  “Nope. I haven’t.”

  She leaned against the truck panel on one forearm. “You’re not going to wear those riding, are you? Or are your jeans getting tight?”

  “No.” God, did she not notice how loud she was being, or how many open windows were around us? “I’ll see you up there.” I waved and ducked back into the house.

  The original plan had been for me to drive up behind her in my own car, but Leo the cowboy had called me Tuesday with some confusing tale about needing to bring new horses up to the ranch, asking if I would want to come on a daylong horseback ride Saturday. My exits were all closed: he’d called Tuah first to learn how to reach me, and she’d not only told him but said yes, it would be fine for me to arrive later on Saturday, and yes, she could drive me back down to Leadville on Tuesday before I was needed again at the Koffords’. Plus he’d caught me at the right moment. The kids had been arguing, the house was dark, the sun was shining outside, and I loved riding as a kid. So I said yes.

  Now with Tuah’s early start, I had plenty of time to shower, cook myself some oatmeal and eggs and the last of the sausage, clean up, and still get to the meeting spot a few minutes early.

  Nevertheless, Leo was already waiting for me. Or I presumed it was him. At a picnic table beside the Mother Lode Motel on Highway 91 sat someone in a cowboy hat hunched over a newspaper. Two horses were tethered to a parking barricade, one brown and the other a black-and-white pinto, saddled and ready, heads down, swishing tails at their flanks. I parked nearby and heard boots crunching across the gravel as I reached to get my backpack from the passenger side floor.

  “A backpack?” he said as I got out. “You know we’re only going for the day, right?”

  Wow. Condescension was a pretty bad place to start for anyone interested in being liked. I took a slow blink. “Well, it’s where my driver’s license goes. You know, for the driving I had to do to get here. And my keys, because I have to put them somewhere. Toilet paper. Some snacks. Not my first day in the mountains.”

  He didn’t seem to pick up on my tone. “Good for you. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t set your expectations too high.”

  “Nope. Pretty much figured I’d just be watching a horse’s ass the whole way up.”

  He laughed. Genuinely laughed. Completely unoffended. Delighted, even. “Then maybe you’d better ride in front.”

  “Deal.” I hitched the backpack onto my shoulder, and we walked toward the horses. “Which one’s mine?”

  “Whichever you want. Although”—he glanced back over his shoulder toward my car—“the pinto seems logical.”

  “Works for me.” I tied my backpack to the back of the saddle, then we mounted up. I scratched the horse’s neck, black under a coarse white mane, warm against my fingers. I felt a little foolish now about my snippy start. It really had been a pretty innocent comment. “Honestly, you go first. I have no clue where to go. And no offense meant to
your horse’s ass.”

  “None taken, I’m sure,” he said with a grin, shifting in his saddle. “He’s pretty confident.” He bent the horse’s head away from me, starting forward toward a path that dipped from the parking lot into a wide meadow separating the motel from the river. “We’ll cross the river over there,” he said, pointing to his right. “It’s just a little upstream of where Hat Creek comes in.”

  “You’re the tour guide.” I hoisted my leg and lifted a flap on the saddle to shorten one stirrup. “So how is it we can make this trip in one day when the drive takes so long?”

  “We’re following the creek. The road goes the long way around over Trapper Pass.”

  My horse shook his head, flopping the scraggly mane back and forth.

  “What are their names, anyway?”

  “The horses? Brownie.” He glanced back at me. “And Spot.”

  “You just made that up.”

  “Maybe. But when I hand them off to the wrangler they’ll be whoever I say they are. You don’t know it yet, but I’m a very important person.”

  I allowed myself a smile. The day would be fine, and just what I needed after all. I’d gone to sleep last night pressed under the weight of all I still didn’t know about the children. I had asked my accumulated questions when Paul got home yesterday afternoon, but the conversation had been frustrating and disjointed, with him going off on tangents rather than answering my questions, so that it ended with me wondering not just whether this or that was allowed but whether a family made of such disconnected people could ever be all right. Now, though, I felt my hips relax into place and the weight slide off my shoulders. I’d lost track of how enjoyable it was to be on a horse. It had been years since I’d ridden—certainly not during college and probably not in high school, either.