by Alex Bledsoe
She turned toward movement in the shadows off to her right. Something was on the couch, moving slowly, the fabric creaking as it did. Bronwyn stared, trying to resolve it into a shape she could recognize.
Then a head popped up, tossing black hair back from a face shiny with sweat and effort. A face she recognized as her own.
The face turned to her. It wasn’t her, of course; it was her mother, naked and astride her father. They moved together as silently as they could, since Aiden and Kell were asleep in the house. Apparently her father had not heard Bronwyn enter, because he continued to nuzzle Chloe’s breasts as his hands roamed over her skin.
Chloe’s eyelids fluttered, and she gasped. Bronwyn wanted to look away, but couldn’t. She watched her mother have an orgasm, silent except for a sharp exhalation, and then curl around Deacon like she was molding her limbs to him. She looked again at Bronwyn, and their eyes locked for a moment. I am alive, her mother’s defiant gaze seemed to say. See? I’m not dead by a damn sight yet.
Bronwyn ran into her room, the first time in months she’d moved that quickly. She fell halfway onto the bed and began sobbing, clenching her teeth against the sound. She didn’t want to wake either of her brothers, and she sure didn’t want her father to know she’d seen anything. My God, what were they thinking, carrying on like teenagers? They were both in their forties.
She crawled onto the bed and curled up clutching her Dollywood souvenir pillow. Everything she’d counted on was changing into something else. The First Daughters, until now mainly a ceremonial thing that meant nothing, actually expected something from her. Her parents, those solid, reliable figures she’d always counted on even as a wild-child teenager, were humping in the front room. Even Aiden was on the verge of turning from a boy into a young man, and Kell would soon have to decide if his song led him away from Cloud County or back to it. And then there was Craig the minister, and Terry-Joe, and Dwayne. There was nothing left to hold on to, she thought grimly, except this stupid pillow with Dolly Parton’s face embroidered on it.
Finally, long past midnight, she fell asleep.
* * *
Bronwyn’s eyes snapped open. A sound had awakened her. She blinked into the darkness, and listened intently, hoping it wasn’t more noises from the living room. It came again: a light tapping at her window. Her dream-fuddled brain’s first thought was, Dwayne? Then she turned and saw the face beyond the glass.
The haint.
She blinked, and suddenly the ghost was in her room. She sat up and snapped, “This is a really bad night, Sally.”
“It’s time to remember,” the haint said. “You can’t avoid this.”
Bronwyn started to fire something back, but instead she sat up, crawled to the edge of the bed, and without her cane, stood up to face the haint. “So what, then, is so goddamned important that I need to remember?”
“What happened to you.”
Bronwyn’s bad leg trembled with fury. “You think I didn’t read what happened to me? I know what all those words mean, honey, especially the really good ones like ‘sodomize.’ I don’t need to remember what that felt like.”
“You’ll face more challenges soon. Your strength will come from knowing you’ve endured these things.”
“I do know it!” Bronwyn bellowed. She no longer cared who heard her. “I know that I was blown up, cut up, ass-fucked, and stitched back together. I know I took down nearly a dozen of those bastards before they got me. I know that if it wasn’t for being a Tufa, I’d be dead by now, okay? I know all that! What I’m real fucking tired of is people, alive or dead, telling me what the fuck I need!”
She turned her back on the haint. “Go away, Sally. There’s nothing for you here. I don’t hear you anymore, and when I turn around I won’t see you.”
Before she could say anything, her bedroom door opened and Chloe entered. She was wrapped in a bathrobe, and her black hair was disheveled. “Are you all right? I heard shouting.”
“Is there anyone behind me?”
“No.”
“Then I’m fine,” she said, and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Then she scowled up at her mother. “And how are you?”
“You could’ve … I don’t know, knocked or something.”
“At my own front door? You could’ve stopped.”
“Not at that moment, I couldn’t.”
Brownyn shook her head. “Man, that is so much more than I need to know.”
Chloe closed the door and sat down beside her daughter. “I recall walking in on you and Dwayne once. Believe me, I had no desire to see that, either.”
Bronwyn couldn’t repress a smile. “Yeah, and he got stuck going out the window.” She looked over at the glass, expecting to see Sally outside it, but there was nothing but darkness. “Everyone’s telling me what I have to do. Not asking me, even, telling me. I’m not in the army anymore, I don’t have to take orders.”
“They want things to be safe if something happens to me.”
“Things. They want a song to be safe. A stupid song.”
“A song that’s ours. That we brought across the water on the night wind. That’s been kept as a treasure ever since.”
“Just because something’s old doesn’t mean it’s valuable.”
“Spoken by the young.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” She fell back on the bed. “I’ll learn your damn song, Mom. I promised I would. But I won’t have a damn baby just because people want me to, and I won’t dig up things out of my own head just so a ghost can feel useful.” She put the Dollywood pillow over her face.
“You’ll do what you want, like you always have,” Chloe said sadly. She stopped as she opened the door. “You should probably try to figure out why that is. You didn’t get it from me, and I’m pretty sure your father’s not like that. But there’s a word for people who only care about what they want themselves.”
“Sociopath?” Bronwyn said sarcastically.
“I was thinking ‘asshole.’ But whatever works for you.”
* * *
Don Swayback found himself walking through a graveyard in the middle of the day. He knew it was a dream, but he couldn’t help but admire the vision his subconscious presented. The cemetery was on a mountainside, and below it stretched a beautiful valley bisected by a meandering river. Except for the headstones, there was no sign of civilization. The valley was covered in unnaturally green grass, and the sky was wincingly blue. He leaned on one of the headstones and slowly took in the view.
“What you really want to see,” a voice said, “is this way.”
He turned. A beautiful young woman in desert-themed military clothes stood in the shade of a tree. Something about her was odd, and in a moment he spotted it: a gaping space in her side, as if her flesh had been scooped out with a giant ice cream dipper. She carried her helmet under the opposite arm, and her bangs fell into her eyes. Her skin was pale with death.
Before Don could respond, she nodded to one side. He turned and saw an old woman seated in a folding lawn chair, a guitar across her lap. Sun dappled across her as the branch shading her waved in the wind. She was heavyset, with black hair starting to turn gray. She said to him, “That’s your cousin, Sally Olds. Died in Iraq back in the first Gulf War. She was my great-grandniece.”
“Hi,” Don said. He knew who she had to be. “So you’re Grandma Benji.”
She strummed the guitar. “Darn tootin’. You’re close to the line on some things, and you and I need to talk before you step over it.” She looked up at Sally. “Y’all go on, I know you got things to do. Me and Don just need to chew the fat for a tic.”
Sally leaned down and kissed Grandma Benji on the cheek. The tatters of flesh and organs swayed with her movements. Then she was gone, although Don had not seen her actually leave. He said, “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“You know this is a dream, right?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But you think you’re really meeting me?”
&
nbsp; He looked at her closely. There was a fixed quality to her that seemed at odds with the mutable details of everything else around him. “I figure it can’t hurt to be polite either way.”
She chortled. “Anyway, we need to talk about blood. You got more Tufa in you than you realize. It ain’t always about quantity: you can have a man ninety-five percent pureblood, but if that missing five percent is the part that lets him ride the wind, he ain’t a true Tufa. You know about riding the night wind?”
Don shook his head.
“You will, I reckon. I hope. One night you’ll go outside, look up at the sky, and either hear the hum or feel the shiver. If it’s the shiver … well, you’re still kin and I love you, but it means you’ll never be a real Tufa. If it’s the hum, though, you’ll feel the stirrin’ of your wings.”
“That sounds … dramatic.”
She ran a riff down the guitar neck, her fingers nimble and sure. “That ain’t what I want to straighten you out about, though. It’s which side you’re gonna be on.”
“Which side of what?”
“Most folks think the Tufa are one big family. We ain’t; we’re two. One’s no better than the other, and one can’t go on without the other; like you can’t have light without dark for it to show up against. Make sense?”
“Sure.”
“Rockhouse Hicks runs one side. Mandalay Harris runs the other. You know either of them?”
“Nope.”
“You will. I was one of Rockhouse’s family. I was with him since the night wind first blew us here. But he turned sour. He’s a mean, bitter fella, closing in on bein’ evil. I’d hate to see you get involved with him.”
“Then I’ll join up with the other one. Mandalay, you said his name was?”
“Her name. But it ain’t that easy. You should have someone to guide you in this, but this is the best I can do. I hope you remember all this when you wake up.”
“I usually do.”
“I know.” She smiled. “Now, enough of this grim business. Let’s play a little.”
He was about to say he didn’t have his guitar, when he noticed it propped beside him. Smiling, he took it out and followed his dead grandmother as she counted them into “Wicked Polly.”
* * *
In the little frame house that counted as the church’s parsonage, Craig Chess tossed in the big bed. Normally he slept peacefully, but tonight nothing was peaceful. His mind seethed with things that seemed to come from some other subconscious, presenting him with images that he’d never even considered.
The visions were intense, brutal, and terrifying. Soldiers dying in the desert, limbs and organs blown apart. Something wet and meaty lay beside a fallen gun, coated with sand and already attracting flies. A man held the stump of his right hand with his left, while blood oozed between his fingers. Another man stood with his arms wrapped around his abdomen to keep inside what seemed determined to fall out.
Craig felt the concussion of each explosion, his teeth rattling despite his attempts to clench them. The scent of burning fuel and meat filled the air. He looked wildly around, uncertain which way to run, unable to tell where the attack originated.
Suddenly a hand took his. He turned and saw a soldier, a young woman, looking at him in sympathy. “It’s quieter this way,” she said, and he heard her clearly despite the roaring chaos. He followed her around the end of a shredded troop carrier, and suddenly they stood beside the old catfish pond on his uncle’s farm. As in most dreams, this transition was seamless and felt entirely reasonable.
“That’s better,” the woman said. She took off her helmet and shook her head. She had short black hair. “I have to tell you something.”
“Okay,” Craig said. He noticed that there was a huge chunk of flesh and bone missing from the woman’s side; the ends of ribs poked through the tattered edges of her uniform. “You’re hurt.”
“I’m dead,” she said easily. “But that’s not the important thing. You need to know about Bronwyn.”
“Bronwyn Hyatt?”
The woman nodded. “She’s going to face the biggest challenge of her life soon.”
“Worse than what happened in Iraq?”
“That was no challenge. She was a soldier, she was trained, and it was life or death. Decisions come easy that way. She survived, which was her purpose. What’s next will be much harder, and much more important.”
“Okay. What do I need to do?”
The woman tossed a stone across the water. It skipped several times. “To help her, you’ll have to question everything you believe, and find a way to resolve it. Contradictions will appear where you never saw them, and it’ll be easy to lose faith. But you can’t.”
“Never have,” he assured her.
“It’s never mattered this much. Bronwyn will need your help and, more important, your love.”
“My love?”
The woman nodded. “It may seem far-fetched now. It won’t before long.”
“Okay,” he said again. Truthfully, in the dream it didn’t seem that far-fetched. He’d thought about her more than any other woman he’d ever known.
The woman stepped close. He could see the veins in her eyes, exploded with the impact of whatever killed her. “Be strong. Be honest. Be fearless.”
“No one is really fearless.”
“Sure they are. When they know they’re right. Be right.”
“That attitude tends to get preachers into trouble.”
“You are more than your job. The preacher doesn’t have to be right. Craig does.”
He was about to say okay again when he opened his eyes and saw his bedroom ceiling in the gray dawn light.
He dressed quickly and went outside, across the still-damp lawn and up the concrete steps to the church’s front door. The sanctuary first thing in the morning was the quietest, most relaxing place he knew, one of the few places he felt he could hear the whisper of God’s voice. He reached for the handle, then realized he’d forgotten the key. He sat on the porch rail and watched the sky lighten in the east, pondering the dream.
24
Bronwyn opened her eyes and smiled.
She stretched on the bed, feeling the sheets slide against her body. There was no pain now, just stiffness from muscles not yet restored to full strength. She sat up with a yawn and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She went to the dresser and dug out an overlarge T-shirt. She pulled it on and suddenly realized she had not even thought of grabbing her cane.
She looked down at her leg. It was still considerably thinner than its mate, but that pasty hospital color was gone. The pink scars remained, but they no longer itched. She wiggled her toes and felt no numbness or tingling.
“You,” she said to her leg, “are getting shaved today. Yes, you are.”
She looked at herself in the mirror over her dresser. Something had changed in her face as well; the hard set of her eyes, the way her jaw cut a sharp line when she clenched her teeth, seemed to be gone. She looked younger than when she’d joined the army, she thought suddenly. Her sleep-tousled hair only added to the effect.
She pulled on some shorts and went into the bathroom. Later, following her shower, she sat on her bed combing her wet hair when there was a soft knock at the door. “Y’all decent?” a male voice said.
It was not her father or either of her brothers, so she quickly pulled on cut-offs and a tank top. “No, but now I’m dressed. Come on in.”
Terry-Joe Gitterman opened the door. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and looked handsome as the sunrise. He smiled when he saw her. “You look like a million bucks.”
“That’s a lot of deer,” she said, and winked. She put her comb aside and sat back on the bed, deliberately crossing her newly shorn bad leg over her good. “What do you think? Not bad for two weeks, is it?”
“Not bad at all,” he said appreciatively, and propped his mandolin case against the wall. “Hope you don’t mind me stopping by unannounced like this. Your daddy said it was okay to come o
n back.”
“Heck, yeah. What brings you by this early?”
He tapped his mandolin case. “I figure you’re doing pretty well with your playing now, so I thought we might jam out a little. If you feel up to it. I just want to hear you cut loose.”
Bronwyn’s eyes playfully narrowed. “Did Bliss Overbay send you to check on me?”
“She might’ve suggested it. But I wasn’t hard to convince. What do you say?”
She grinned. “I say skin that song iron.”
In a few moments she’d retrieved Magda and held the instrument ready against her chest. Terry-Joe sat on her desk chair, his own instrument across his lap. His foot eagerly tapped the floor. “What do you feel like playing today?”
“Hm. You know ‘The White Cockade’?”
He nodded. They decided on a key, and he said, “You lead us off.”
Bronwyn tapped her finger on the mandolin’s body four times, then began to play.
After the first verse, Terry-Joe said, “Now sing.”
“Oh, I can’t really sing,” she said with a shy smile.
“Sure you can.”
She cleared her throat and began the verse.
My love was born in Aberdeen,
The prettiest lad that ever was seen,
But now he makes our hearts so sad,
He takes the Field with his White Cockade.
Terry-Joe leaned closer to harmonize on the chorus. She could feel his breath, warm and alive, on her cheek.
Oh, he’s a ranting, roving lad,
He is a brisk and a bonny lad,
Come what may, I will be wed,
And follow the boy with the White Cockade.
He looked up, and their eyes met. She stopped playing. He continued, his shoulder muscles moving beneath his shirt. He gazed at her with unabashed desire. “You’re the most beautiful girl I personally know,” he said finally.
