Blood of the Earth

by Faith Hunter

  In the yard, I extended my senses to discover that the land’s boundaries were empty of churchmen. For the moment, the destruction of the deer stand had been successful. But that wouldn’t last.

  Remembering my hat, which I’d left in the truck, I went across the damp grass and opened the passenger door. It squealed, old metal on old metal. I lifted my hat. Beneath it was a folded piece of paper. Like something torn out of a notebook, spiraled side ragged. My heart did something strange, a painful beat, as if it knew what was there. I reached in, my hand pale in the cab light. Took the note. Opened it.

  In a blocky print, the note read,

  I HAVE SMELLED YOUR SISTERS.

  COME HOME OR THEY ARE MINE.

  It wasn’t signed. But it was Jackie. It had to be.

  SEVEN

  The vegetable stand was at the base of the hills, in a crossroads where cars backed up to drop off kids at a school, where commuters slowed on the drive into Knoxville, and where the through traffic was heavy in mornings and evenings. The building was nothing more than a kid’s playhouse that had outlived that job and been repurposed to more profitable ends. I was the first to arrive, and I keyed open the dead bolt and turned off the alarm, one that went straight up to Old Lady Stevens’ house, alerting her that someone was here who was supposed to be here.

  I swept out the night’s spiders and a blacksnake that had chosen to winter here. I didn’t mind the snake—it kept out the rats—but some customers got a bit riled at the thought of snakes. I rearranged the canned goods, placed my offerings on the shelves (with prices clearly visible on the tops), and the veggies in baskets on the porch railing. My vegetables were large, sweet, unblemished, and firm, the best veggies anywhere in the Knoxville area. I never took any home.

  In the rafters, strapped to the collar ties, stirrups hanging, there was a Western saddle, an Australian saddle, and a jumping saddle, along with half a dozen sets of reins, a set of well-used saddlebags, a hackamore, and other horsey stuff. Quilts weren’t kept in the little house, but brought each day by the women who made them, along with handmade baby clothes, and leather-worked pocketbooks and belts. Some of the pottery from the potter in Oliver Springs stayed here overnight; so did the canned goods. Most everything was priced with a business card so lookers could contact the people later via e-mail, go to Web sites, and see more offerings. I didn’t have a Web page, but I was thinking about making one. If I could figure out how it was done, I could do it all through the library. And maybe even open a PayPal account, dealing with the establishment and the government.

  The shop was small, but it held a lot, and had three small handmade rocking chairs on the front porch—for sale, of course. There was also a bulletin board with business cards advertising such things as hay, split wood, well diggers, septic system installers, antiques stores, farms, horseback-riding lessons, gunsmiths, and much more, with little spaces on the shelf below where visitors could find extra cards to take with them. My cards were there too, with my e-mail address on them, even though I could only access it through the library system. I neatened up the business cards and threw away some that had become sun-bleached or moisture-wrinkled.

  When I was done, I unchained the rocking chairs and sat down in one to wait on Sister Erasmus, my mother’s friend and the church’s winemaker. Not that there would be any wine sold here, not with the laws on alcohol and the taxation problems. It was just too much trouble for the small bottler to deal with, but lots of horse trading and bottle swapping went on under the table. The rest of us pretended not to see.

  Sister Erasmus drove up at six thirty, gave me a stern nod, and started unloading her truck. She brought many of the same kind of items the church sold at the market, but at lower prices, since none of us had to pay for booth rent. I helped her carry hand-stitched quilts and dough bowls and set them up along the railing and banisters of the low porch. When most of the toting was done, she looked me over with severe eyes and pinched lips. “I heard tell you was caught by the churchmen wearing them overalls. It’s good to see you in a skirt; proper clothing for a woman. I like your hair bunned up. You look like your maw-maw when she was a young’un.” She took her accustomed place in a rocking chair, and I sat in another one, tipped back with my toes, and rocked, the runners thumping on the uneven porch boards.

  “How’s Mama and Maw-maw?” I asked after a polite spell.

  “They’re fine. Or as fine as they can be with you gone. Living aside from the church, in sin.”

  “I’m not sinning,” I said, my tone impassive.

  “Your daddy would like to see you settled and safe. Back in the arms of the church, as a good and proper woman should be.”

  My daddy. Who had colluded with the colonel to marry me off to the old pervert. And who would collude with someone else to marry me off. Except that Priss had said he had refused to allow my sisters to go with Jackie as concubines. Maybe Daddy had learned something new. But Priss was right. I wasn’t strong enough to protect my family, not alone. I touched the note through the cloth of my pocket.

  I have smelled your sisters.

  Come home or they are mine.

  Jackie hadn’t signed the note. He hadn’t needed to. He hadn’t been on my land, so he had put the note in my truck in town somewhere. The library, most likely.

  I had joined PsyLED to make some spending money, to help with the investigation, an investigation that had gone sideways to include a kidnapping. But there might be a way to use PsyLED, and my position with them, to help protect my sisters, if I got the chance.

  If they were willing to leave, I’d need help. Lots of help. People with special abilities like T. Laine with her magic, and stealth abilities like werecats, and a badge, like Rick, to save my sisters. And a safe house, like PsyLED might provide. My fingers traced the note through my pocket. But I’d need to lay the foundation for that. Come up with a strategy. A plan.

  I opened my mouth and said the words I’d never thought I would. “Iffen I thought I could get on and back off the compound, I might come visit. Might even bring a few friends who need to see how the Lord’s people live.” The words tasted like char on my tongue. I’d never bring a friend into the compound. And my worst enemies were there already. But that was what I might have to do someday—bring people into the compound to get my sisters out.

  Sister Erasmus shot me a calculating look. “You’d come back onto the church grounds?”

  “Maybe. For a visit. If my right to leave was assured.”

  “Your right to leave is always . . .” She stopped, the sentence unfinished.

  “In danger. My right to leave is always in danger,” I said, still without emotion, “and you know that’s the good Lord’s honest truth.” The rocking chairs thumped softly, the day brightened, and traffic picked up. We both glowered into the day, not liking our thoughts or the worst memories of the compound of God’s Cloud of Glory Church.

  “I’ll allow, there’s some truth in your statement,” the sister said, grudgingly. “’Specially now.”

  I blinked in shock. Not one member of the church had ever agreed with me on anything, and certainly not about my danger from the church leadership. Cautiously I nodded, a single bob of my head, church-style. “Why ’specially now?” I asked, easing into the questions Rick wanted answered.

  “Jackson and his cronies driving around at night, vehicles coming and going through the compound at all hours, some of the men meeting up in small groups to talk. Secrets.” I managed to keep my mouth from hanging open, and Sister Erasmus clasped her hands in her lap, staring out into the day, her mouth tight with disapproval. “We had three whole families up and move away in the last year. In the dead of night. That ain’t never happened, or not in such numbers.

  “Some of our own menfolk reading secret papers, talking about doing wrong in the name of right. Speaking against one another in secret. Saying things like ‘The end justifies the mea
ns.’ Niccolò Machiavelli espoused that and he got it wrong. The end only matters because of the means.”

  My head dropped and my eyes went wide. I couldn’t have been any more surprised if Sister Erasmus had stripped naked and danced across the front porch. Her pinched mouth didn’t smile, but the corners of her eyes wrinkled up in amusement. “You think you the only one a us churchwomen to get an education? I got books that would a caused Preacher Jackson—the old one, not the new upstart whippersnapper—to bust a blood vessel in his brain box. You come on the church grounds. I’ll give you a basket of bread or some such to take home, and you can hide some of my books in the bottom.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “Things might be getting better. I seen two backsliders with my own eyes, wearing city clothes, talking to Jackson Jr. They thinking about coming back to the Lord, so that’s good.”

  “Oh.”

  “Them backsliders, that family was shunned, ostracized a generation or so ago, and they up and moved, the whole kit and caboodle of ’em. They been in and out of the church half a dozen times. Word is they been looking around, thinking about coming back again, repenting and being baptized. Though that’s just talk. Ain’t no new house going up, no new stores being used. But I’m ever hopeful.”

  I thought about her statements. Backsliders on church grounds wasn’t an anomaly. It also wasn’t the multiple men who would be required to stage a kidnapping. Three men and a white van had been involved. Some of the churchmen are bad enough. New people, especially backsliders, people who were driven out for who knows what sin, might be worse. But then, I was a backslider. Glass houses and all that. I gave a mighty sigh.

  But Sister Erasmus wasn’t finished. “Now, I’m not saying everything is fine as frog’s fur. And I am not one to gossip,” she said.

  I hid a reflexive smile at the barefaced lie.

  “But iffen you wanna talk about trouble”—her rocking sped before evening out again—“we can talk about the new boy. He ain’t nothing but trouble with a capital T.”

  “Oh?” I asked, encouraging her in the sin of gossip.

  “Him and his newfangled gun, shooting at everything in the holler. Gunshots rattling the windows. Chasing off deer we need for winter stores. Wasting ammo that we need against the coming evil times.” Erasmus was a firm believer in the end of the world, a postmillennialist, believing that the end was nigh and the downfall of humanity imminent. Believing that resources needed to be kept for such times as the sun went scarlet and the seas boiled.

  I remembered the sound of gunfire at night, echoing up and down the hills, target practice at a much greater volume than ever before. Yes. Wasteful. And expensive.

  I wasn’t sure what I believed about the end-times, but I nodded earnestly, remembering the boy with the assault rifle, standing in my backyard. Not a church boy.

  “Menfolk acting like fools. Keeping good churchwomen from getting in to take care of our own stores. Winter’s coming on, we need access to the hay and the feed stored in the winter cave to do an inventory and change out the rat traps or we’ll have a starve-off of livestock like back after the flood of 1937.” She made a sound that was part grump and part snort, and that I couldn’t have duplicated if I’d tried all day. But then I didn’t have the nose Sister Erasmus had, not by half. And I’d learned something interesting, without asking.

  “Who’s got the caves blocked off?” I asked, trying to sound incredulous, as if I’d heard wrong. “All of them or just the winter stores cave?”

  “Jackson Jr. and his playmates. They got the smallest cave all to themselves, keeping the womenfolk from our fall inventory. That’s where them menfolk are studying some secret papers like they’re the King James Bible.”

  I said, “Keeping secrets to themselves? That does sound divisive and contentious.” I should have felt guilty for encouraging the sister to gossip, and I should have felt guilty for not feeling guilty. But I didn’t. I felt stronger. Like a real PsyLED investigator.

  “Exactly,” Sister Erasmus said. “I see all them years away from the church didn’t ruin your understanding of Scripture. What’s worse, though, is none of us women got a lick of an idea what kinda books and papers they’re studying on, and none of the men with access are sharing, even in pillow talk. It’s vexing, it is.”

  “Oh. I can see how that would be frustrating.” But I wasn’t interested in some new conspiracy theory. Those went on all the time. “Sister Erasmus, can I tell you something and ask you a question? Private-like? Not to tell no one, not even your husband?”

  “Only if it don’t involve sin, child. I won’t keep no secrets that put your soul at risk.”

  “No sin, Sister,” I said. She nodded and I went on, my voice quiet, the way a secret and a semiconfession should be. “I was in town for market day. And I overheard some people talking. I won’t say who. They said a group called the Human Speakers of Truth were on church property. That they brought in a young girl kidnapped from town.” I lowered my voice even more. “According to what I heard, the sheriff seems to think the churchmen might be involved.”

  “Gossip. Pure gossip. No girls or mysterious people on the property, excepting the backsliders, and I know them. One of them hellion Dawson boys and his father. And besides, the church wouldn’t condone kidnapping girls. Who ever said that was misinformed or lying outright.”

  I looked down at my hands for a moment, not meeting her eyes. Softly I said, “You know as well as me, that some a them churchmen is evil incarnate. They’d get away with anything they could, everything they could. They’d hurt women. You know it’s so. Just like you know some a them would burn me at the stake if they could, for me being a witch.”

  “You ain’t no witch,” the sister said smartly. “Never was one. Just good with the soil and the gardens and independent like some other Nicholsons I can name.” Instantly I thought of Mindy, my full sib. I have smelled your sisters. Come home or they are mine. “Perhaps a mite ornery and wild. But not a witch.” She looked at me from the corner of her eye and then back at the road, the way church folk always held private conversations. Not looking, preserving privacy. “Your maw-maw had you tested when you come of age and whispers reached us that the colonel might want you. You was not and are not a witch.”

  My throat closed up in disbelief and confusion.

  “You don’t think Maude and Cora would let the girl children go to him so easily or so early, did you? Not without a fight. Maude wanted you proven a witch so we could expel you and send you to live with her people down the mountain.”

  Maude was my maw-maw; Cora was her daughter, and my mother. She had me tested? Before the colonel had declared for me? “Her people?” The words were a whisper of bewilderment.

  “The Hamiltons. They was downhill, city people, townies, the Hamiltons was. I reckon you got cousins and second cousins in town. Not that they ever tried to speak to Maude once she married into the church. Disowned her right fast-like. Anyways your maw-maw was wanting to get you declared a witch so she could get you away, but the townie witch said you wasn’t. Then you made a mess a things, calling the colonel a horse’s ass in front of the whole church. Maude had to act fast-like to get you safe. Her and your mama hatched that plan with John and Leah, and the rest is history.”

  I felt something slow and glacial flow through me and settle in my belly and limbs, heavy and poignant. Sister Erasmus sounded so normal. So ordinary. As if she were speaking commonly known information. As if she hadn’t just turned my world upside down. The women in my family had been working to keep me free of the colonel? The women had set up my proposal from John and Leah?

  Disbelief raced through me and tightened my flesh. My breath expelled in a rush and then came too fast. I blinked my eyes as hot tears gathered and dissipated, dried out by shock. The women of the church had always seemed so weak. But maybe there was more to them than I had seen. “You know, w
ell, you should know, that I never heard that tale till now.”

  Seen from the corner of my eye, Sister Erasmus scowled. “John told you. Him and Leah.”

  I felt light, as if a cavern had just opened up beneath me and I was falling into the dark. “No. No, I never heard this. Never.”

  Sister Erasmus slanted another look my way, surprise in her quick glance, the expression scarcely caught from the corner of my eye. “That ain’t right. He said he told you.” The last two words were inflexible, laced with underlying anger and disbelief.

  I shook my head, the motions jerky. My eyes hot and dry. My world falling away from beneath me. My hands and feet tingling, my breath too fast.

  Erasmus stared out at the traffic, her lips working as if her front teeth hurt. A chewing motion. “Your maw-maw . . . She would a told you when you married John in the church, proper-like, with your family all around and your daddy to give you away. But you and the Ingrams did it so fast-like, standing up in church and stating your intentions and then just leaving.

  “You kept to yourselves, kept private-like, even after you come of age and he took you to wife according to church law. John said you didn’t want your family around, ’cause you was still scared of the colonel.” The flow of words stopped abruptly. Out on the road, the traffic increased. The light of morning began to reveal the day.

  I blinked, and my eyes felt hot. I’d been staring straight ahead, focused on nothing for too long. When I tried to speak, my throat felt hot and dry, and it ached as I forced words out. “I never spoke to my family after John and I married, except at market. He said you’uns wanted me back, to sell to the colonel. He kept me safe from my family. That what he said. Safe.”